This date’s observance marks the systematic execution by (West) Pakistani forces of the intellectual class of East Pakistan at the end of the civil war which would detach the east as the independent nation Bangladesh — an unavenged war crime as cynical as it was brutal.
Executed intellectuals in the Dhaka Rayerbazar, 1971.
This was not a single discrete massacre, but a continuing policy during the March-December 1971 war. December 14, just two days before the Pakistani army surrendered, was the peak date of a dreadful endgame paroxysm that saw hundreds of scholars, teachers, lawyers, doctors, artists, writers, engineers, and the like rounded up and summarily executed in a bid to decapitate the new Bengali state’s intelligentsia.
Though the martyrs were subsequently venerated in Bangladesh, the higher-stakes regional geopolitics have always made effective redress a nonstarter.
On this day..
- 1981: Gheorghe Stefanescu, the Walter White of wine - 2019
- 1931: Fatma Demir, the first woman hanged in Turkey - 2018
- 1650: Not Anne Greene, miraculously delivered - 2017
- 1661: Murad Bakhsh, son of the Taj Mahal builder - 2016
- 1556: A canon's servant - 2015
- 1793: A Lyon mitraillade - 2014
- 1759: William Davis, St. Croix slave revolt suicide - 2013
- 1761: Jacinto Canek, Mayan revolutionary - 2012
- 1417: The Falstaffian John Oldcastle - 2011
- 1930: Captains Fermin Galan and Angel Garcia Hernandez - 2010
- 10 executions that defined the 2000s - 2009
- 1903: William Ennis, wife-murdering cop - 2008
- 1974: Charles Dean and Neal Sharman - 2007