"The historian branch of the State Department held a two-day conference on June 28 and 29 on US policy in South Asia between 1961 and 1972, inviting scholars from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh to express their views on the declassified documents.
During the seminar,
Bangladeshi scholars acknowledged that their official figure of more than 3 million killed during and after the military action was not authentic.
They said that the
original figure was close to 300,000, which was wrongly translated from Bengali into English as three million.
Shamsher M. Chowdhury, the Bangladesh ambassador in Washington who was commissioned in the Pakistan Army in 1969 but had joined his country�s war of liberation in 1971,
acknowledged that Bangladesh alone cannot correct this mistake. Instead, he suggested that Pakistan and Bangladesh form a joint commission to investigate the 1971 disaster and prepare a report.
Almost all scholars agreed that the real figure was somewhere between 26,000, as reported by the Hamoodur Rahman Commission, and
not three million, the official figure put forward by Bangladesh and India.
Prof Sarmila Bose, an Indian academic, told the seminar that
allegations of Pakistani army personnel raping Bengali women were grossly exaggerated.
Based on her extensive interviews with eyewitnesses, the study also determines the pattern of conflict as three-layered: West Pakistan versus East Pakistan, East Pakistanis (pro-Independence) versus East Pakistanis (pro-Union) and the fateful war between India and Pakistan.
Prof Bose noted that
no neutral study of the conflict has been done and reports that are passed on as part of history are narratives that strengthen one point of view by rubbishing the other. The Bangladeshi narratives, for instance, focus on the rape issue and use that not only to demonize the Pakistan army but also
exploit it as a symbol of why it was important to break away from (West) Pakistan.
Prof Bose, a Bengali herself and belonging to the family of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose,
emphasized the need for conducting
independent studies of the 1971 conflict to bring out the facts.
She also spoke about the violence generated by all sides. �T
he civil war of 1971 was fought between those who believed they were fighting for a united Pakistan and those who believed their chance for justice and progress lay in an independent Bangladesh. Both were legitimate political positions. All parties in this conflict embraced violence as a means to the end, all committed acts of brutality outside accepted norms of warfare, and all had their share of humanity. These attributes make the 1971 conflict particularly suitable for efforts towards reconciliation, rather than recrimination,� says Prof Bose."
http://www.dawn.com/2005/07/07/nat3.htm