Niazi planned rape of Bangalee women for ethnic cleansing

Gen Niazi, left, and the cover of Khadim Hussain Raja's book “A stranger in my own country: East Pakistan 1969-1971”.

In 1971, General AAK Niazi threatened that he would let loose his soldiers on the women of East Pakistan till the lineage or ethnicity of the Bangalees was changed, according to a new book.

Maj Gen (retd) Khadim Hussain Raja, who was general officer commanding of 14 Division in the then East Pakistan, gave the account in his book titled A Stranger in My Own Country: East Pakistan, 1969-1971, published by Oxford University Press this year.

The book is posthumously published probably because it was a hot potato in the times it was actually written, reports Pakistan based The Express Tribune on July 8.

Page 98 of the book reads, “[Enter] Commander East Pakistan General Niazi, wearing a pistol holster on his web belt. Niazi became abusive and started raving. Breaking into Urdu, he said: Main iss haramzadi qaum ki nasal badal doon ga. Yeh mujhe kiya samajhtey hain. He threatened that he would let his soldiers loose on their womenfolk. There was pin drop silence at these remarks. The next morning, we were given the sad news. A Bengali officer Major Mushtaq went into a bathroom at the Command Headquarters and shot himself in the head.”

General Tikka Khan disagreed with Raja that Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman be secretly dispatched to West Pakistan. He wanted to “publicly try Sheikh Mujib in Dhaka and hang him”, it also said.

The Express Tribune report opens with, “Pakistan's name has been blackened by just one man: General AAK 'Tiger' Niazi.”

It adds, "Niazi surrendered to Indian General JFR Jacob in 1971. Niazi handed over his personal pistol at the famous Race Course ceremony. Jacob examined the weapon: the lanyard was greasy and frayed, and the pistol was full of muck as if it hadn't been cleaned in a long while." (Surrender at Dacca: Birth of a Nation; by Lt Gen JFR Jacob; Manohar Publishers 1997).

General Ayub Khan, whose decade of rule caused the jurisprudence of separatism to evolve, gets the treatment he deserved through the testimony of another not-too-civilised general named Gul Hassan.

“Gul Hassan openly criticised Field Marshal Ayub Khan's sons who, according to him, were letting their father down by amassing wealth by unfair means. Gul Hassan blurted out that 'I have told the old cock that this time we will impose Martial Law and take control ourselves but not protect Ayub and his henchmen'. The reference [old cock] was to General Yahya Khan, commander-in-chief of the Pakistan Army” (Page 8).

The only leadership criterion was brutality riding on low IQ. The exception was General Yaqub Khan, the commander who insisted that General Yahya not postpone the session of the National Assembly elected after the 1970 election.

The author writes: “All of a sudden, General Yaqub Khan was bundled off as a student on the Imperial Defence College course. This clumsy and unceremonious action was obviously taken to get him out of the way” (Page 7).

Major General Rahim Khan was the other officer Pakistan can't be proud of: “Rahim started to criticise the senior commanders in Dhaka, especially me, although I happened to be a friend of his. He was of the opinion that the Bengalis were timid people and should have been subdued long ago. The reader can judge for himself the ignorance and lack of understanding of the East Pakistan situation among the hawks in the armed forces” (Page 97).

Rahim ran away from East Pakistan when things became too hot.

Niazi also asked Raja for phone numbers of his Bangalee girlfriends: “Abhi tau mujhey Bengali girlfriends kay phone number day do” (Page 99).