Human Rights as History

During the struggle for autonomy in East Pakistan (afterwards Bangladesh), the West Pakistan army in 1971 committed atrocities on a large scale. Seeking to crush the movement in the eastern province, the troops targeted members of the Bengali nationalist Awami League, students, intellectuals and professionals as well as the Hindu minority. Estimates of the numbers massacred range from 300,000 upwards. The language in which the Western press described the conflict switched early on from ‘civil war’ to ‘genocide’ or ‘selective genocide’. A Pakistani correspondent for the Sunday Times employed phrases such as ‘final solution’, ‘pogroms’, and ‘annihilation’ – all purposefully evocative of the Holocaust. A report from the International Commission of Jurists, a non-governmental human-rights organization with Cold War origins founded in 1952, confirmed the killing of many Bengalis but concluded that only Hindus would seem to fall within the definition of a national, ethnical, racial or religious group and thus to be a case within the terms of the Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide which the United Nations General Assembly had passed in 1948. Calls for the initiation of international court procedures, however, got no response from the United Nations. Some help was forthcoming to the millions of Bangladeshi who had fled to India to escape the war and killings. The Indian government received international humanitarian aid to cope with these refugees. But India also supported the recruitment of the Mukti Bahini (the Bengali ‘Liberation Army’) in the refugee camps, and finally intervened massively with its own military forces in December 1971, quickly defeating the Pakistan army. Now that the hostilities had ended, the Pakistan Government managed skilfully to turn the tables on the Indian and Bangladeshi Governments by protesting against plans by Sheikh Mujib, the Bangladeshi leader, to put war criminals on trial. It pointed towards roughly 90,000 soldiers held by India and Bangladesh and claimed a breach of the Geneva Convention of 1949 pertaining to the treatment of POWs. It was only in 1974 that the last 200 Pakistani prisoners still held in India were returned to Pakistan, without trial, after a tripartite agreement had been concluded between Pakistan, India and Bangladesh in return for Pakistan’s recognition of the new state in the East. The repatriation overlapped with the onset of a severe famine in 1974. In 1970, before the war of independence, a cyclone which hit East Pakistan had caused severe flooding and the death of up to half a million people. Now, in 1974, as a consequence of the disruptive effects of war, internal mismanagement and the withholding of external aid by India and the United States (which pressed for the release of the Pakistani prisoners), famine broke out. The situation was aggravated by renewed flooding along the Brahmaputra River. As a result, an estimated one million people died of famine and disease.

The disaster experienced by Bangladesh between 1970 and 1975 is one of the worst in recent times and a prime example of a complex emergency. For the history of humanitarianism, the case is particularly illuminating, encompassing most of the elements that comprise modern humanitarian endeavour, including human-rights violations and humanitarian intervention and aid as well as the involvement of national governments, international organizations and non-governmental groups. Above all, the Bangladeshi case highlights one of the main themes of the volume under review: the use of human-rights language, by both national and transnational actors, as moral and political leverage against political opponents; or, in short, as Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann puts it in the book’s introduction, human rights ‘as a history of political contestations’. In contrast to recent histories of human rights which tell a triumphalist story about the steady progress of rights from the French Revolution up to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, the contributors to this book provide in-depth accounts of a chequered history. Much of the literature on human rights since the 1990s has focused on the normative and legal foundations of human rights in...