No lessons learnt in forty years

Letter December 17, 2011
Until we read the truth and hold trials for war crimes, we will never be absolved of our collective acts.

PENNSYLVANNIA: This is with reference to Yaqoob Bangash’s article “No lessons learnt in forty years” published December 16. In the end of the 1970s, I arrived in the US as a student and was shown the New York library. I had never seen anything remotely similar in Pakistan where libraries were nonexistent. I went through newspaper archives in New York and began to search the Pakistan surrender and lo and behold, every word of history I had learnt in Pakistan was an outright lie. I read the history from several perspectives and found what happened in the 1960s in our first major war. Later on in the US, I met Bangladeshi academics and students who shared their stories. None of them held me responsible for the acts of the Pakistan Army.

Until we read the truth and hold trials for war crimes, we will never be absolved of our collective acts. Indeed, those who committed war crimes may be dead, but their trials must take place.

Dr Haider Abbas

Published in The Express Tribune, December 17th, 2011.