Casualties
The number of civilians that died in the Bangladesh War is not accurately known. There is a great disparity in the casualty figures put forth by Pakistan on one hand (25,000, as reported in the Hamoodur Rahman Commission) and India and Bangladesh on the other hand. (From 1972 to 1975 the first post-war prime minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, claimed on several occasions that at least three million died). The international media and reference books in English have also published figures which vary greatly: varying from 5,000–35,000 in Dhaka, and 200,000–3,000,000 for Bangladesh as a whole. It is believed in certain quarters that the figure of three million has its origins in comments made by Yahya Khan to the journalist Robert Payne on 22 February 1971: "Kill three million of them, and the rest will eat out of our hands."
Matthew J. White, in his 2012 book The Great Big Book of Horrible Things, estimates the total Bengali civilian death toll at 1.5 million.
In October 1997 R. J. Rummel published a book, which is available online, titled Statistics of Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900. In Chapter 8, Statistics Of Pakistan's Democide - Estimates, Calculations, And Sources, he states:
| “ | In East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) also planned to murder its Bengali intellectual, cultural, and political elite. They also planned to indiscriminately murder hundreds of thousands of its Hindus and drive the rest into India. And they planned to destroy its economic base to insure that it would be subordinate to West Pakistan for at least a generation to come. This despicable and cutthroat plan was outright genocide. | ” |
Rummel goes on to collate what he considers the most credible estimates published by others into what he calls democide. He writes that "Consolidating both ranges, I give a final estimate of Pakistan's democide to be 300,000 to 3,000,000, or a prudent 1,500,000."
The Office of the Historian of the United States Department of State held a two-day conference in late June 2005 on U.S. policy in South Asia between 1961 and 1972. According to a newspaper report published in both Pakistani and Bangladeshi newspapers, Bangladeshi speakers at the conference stated that the official Bangladeshi figure of civilian deaths was close to 300,000, which was wrongly translated from Bengali into English as three million. Ambassador Shamsher M. Chowdhury acknowledged that Bangladesh alone cannot correct this mistake and suggested that Pakistan and Bangladesh should form a joint commission to investigate the 1971 disaster and prepare a report.
Read more about this topic: 1971 Bangladesh Atrocities