Army generals blamed for East Pakistan debacle

The Hamoodur Rehman commission report (HRCR), a long-secret judicial report about Pakistan's 1971 war with arch-rival India over Bangladesh that blames Pakistan's defeat on the army leadership of the time and recommends they be put on trial, was declassified yesterday.

Published after a quarter of a century of being kept under wraps, the present government has not given any indication whether it will take any action against surviving former Pakistani generals for alleged crimes committed in Bangladesh.

The 452-page document has been placed in the national documentation centre of the Cabinet Division, Islamabad, for consultation and reference like other declassified official records.

In October this year, Pakistan's Chief Executive General Pervez Musharraf had constituted a committee to decide whether or not to make it public. But before that the parts of the report had already become known when it was leaked to an English language weekly published in India.

The commission of inquiry on the 1971 war was appointed by the government on December 26, 1971, under the Pakistan Commissions of inquiry Act, 1956. It was required to inquire into the circumstances in which the commander of the eastern command surrendered and the members of the armed forces of Pakistan under his command laid down their arms and a ceasefire was ordered along the borders of West Pakistan and India and along the ceasefire line in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, the APP said.

The commission comprised Justice Hamoodur Rahman, the chief justice Supreme Court of Pakistan as president, and Justice Anwarul Haq, chief justice, Lahore High Court, and Justice Tufail Abdur Rahman, chief justice, High Court of Sindh, and Balochistan as members.

The commission submitted its main report to the president of Pakistan on July 12, 1972. The commission recorded additional evidence of 72 people and its supplementary report was submitted to the prime minister of Pakistan on November 25 1974.

In view of the sensitivity of the material pertaining to Pakistan's relations with other countries, certain portions of the main report are not being declassified. The report accused the generals of what it called a premature and shameful surrender in Dhaka, the capital of then East Pakistan which later became independent Bangladesh.

"Dacca (Dhaka) could have been held for several days more. Things had not yet come to such a pass in East Pakistan as to warrant an immediate surrender," the Hamoodur Rahman commission report said.

It said then military ruler General Yayha Khan, who stepped down after Pakistan's defeat in December 1971, "permitted and even instigated" the surrender and recommended that he should be publicly tried along with some other senior military colleagues. Yayha Khan died some years after the war but some of his key colleagues are still alive and living in retirement on pensions.

The report said the surrender of more than 90,000 Pakistani military and paramilitary personnel, who were made prisoners of war, was "due to the cumulative effect of a number of factors namely, political, moral, psychological and military".

The prisoners were released under a 1972 peace accord signed by then Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi and Pakistan president Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The report also blamed Bhutto for showing "a lack of political foresight" in opposing a parliamentary session in Dhaka – a move that provoked the Bangladeshi leaders.

The report said the military's continued involvement in running the government by martial law was cited by witnesses as a reason for corruption among senior military officers. "This moral degeneration and inefficiency of senior army commanders had been attributed by and large by all concerned to their prolonged and continued involvement in martial law duties since 1958," it said.

"Even responsible service officers have asserted before us that due to corruption resulting from such involvement, the lust for wine and women and greed for lands and houses, a large number of senior army officers, particularly those occupying the highest positions, had lost not only their will to fight but also their professional competence for taking vital and critical decisions."

The commission blamed the start of the 1971 violence on the Awami League party of Bangladesh, but said excesses were also committed against the people by the military and recommended the setting up of a high powered court to look into the allegations of atrocities committed by the Pakistani army.