Representative Greg Landsman, a Democrat from Ohio, has introduced a resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives urging formal recognition of atrocities carried out against Bengali Hindus on March 25, 1971, by the Pakistani military and allied groups including Jamaat-e-Islami. The measure was filed on Friday and referred to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. The resolution recounts how, on the night of March 25, 1971, Pakistani authorities detained Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and launched “Operation Searchlight,” a sweeping military crackdown across East Pakistan that involved large-scale killings of civilians. It documents contemporary U.S. diplomatic reports, including a March 28, 1971 telegram from U.S. Consul General in Dacca Archer Blood titled “Selective Genocide,” which warned that with military support non-Bengali Muslims were attacking poor neighborhoods and murdering Bengalis and Hindus. Landsman’s resolution also cites the April 6, 1971 “Blood Telegram,” in which Consul General Blood and 20 members of the Dacca consulate protested official U.S. silence and warned that the term genocide was applicable even as Washington treated the violence as an internal matter. The telegram included the objection: “But we have chosen not to intervene, even morally, on the grounds that the Awami conflict, in which unfortunately the overworked term genocide is applicable, is purely an internal matter of a sovereign state.” The resolution urges the House to condemn the actions of the Pakistani armed forces on March 25, 1971, and recognizes that the military and allied Islamist groups carried out indiscriminate mass killings of ethnic Bengalis, executed political leaders, intellectuals, professionals and students, and subjected tens of thousands of women to sexual slavery. It states that religious minority Hindus were specifically targeted for extermination through mass killings, gang rape, forced conversion, and expulsion. While noting that entire ethnic or religious communities should not be held responsible for crimes of individuals, the resolution calls on the President of the United States to formally recognize the crimes committed against ethnic Bengali Hindus in 1971 by the Pakistani armed forces and their allies in Jamaat-e-Islami as crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide.
