The first time I visited Bangladesh, after moving to the US as a toddler, my parents took me to the Mukhtijuddho Jadughar, the Liberation War Museum. At the time, maybe 15 years ago, the museum was a cramped space with winding lanes that drew you, step by creaky step, into one of the most horrific acts of mass violence of the last century. Stepping into the museum, my parents stories of the war seemed distant and abstract. They had nothing to do with me. Stepping out of the museum, I could not stop the tears because somehow, this dingy little museum — soon to be replaced by a massive, sterile concrete monument to the war dead — had shown me how truly, absurdly, inconceivably evil human beings could be.
A little context
When the British withdrew from India after World War II, they helped decide what kind of administrative state would take their place. Initially, there were thoughts of making three states: Pakistan, India, and East Bengal. Pakistan and East Bengal, though culturally distinct, were Muslim-majority while India, also culturally heterogeneous, had a Hindu majority. The final partition agreement created two states, a Muslim one that included Pakistan and East Bengal and a Hindu one in India. This led to violence as Muslims and Hindus tried migrate into their designated states. (Fun fact: Hindu nationalism is source of ongoing and increasing violence in India today under President Modi.)
It became clear pretty quickly that West Pakistan intended to control and economically exploit East Bengal, renamed East Pakistan, rather than sharing power. First, West Pakistan declared Urdu the official language of the country and removed the Bengali script from currency and state documents. This caused a backlash in East Pakistan called the Language Movement, which marks the beginning of the Bengali movement for democratic self-determination in 1948. (Fun fact: the first South Asian Nobel prize winner was poet and polymath Rabindranath Tagore, who wrote in Bengali.) Still, for decades, the goal of Bengali politicians and activists was to negotiate a power-sharing agreement while remaining a unified country.
In 1970, the Awami League, East Pakistan’s largest political party, won a landslide election that gave them the constitutional right to form a government for the entire nation, East and West. Pakistan, led by military-dictator-slash-president Yahya Khan and former PM Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was like, “Nah, bro.” In early March 1971, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the leader of the Awami League and guy-who-should-have-been-prime-minister, gave a speech outlining East Pakistan’s demands. “ Our struggle is for our freedom. Our struggle is for our independence,” Rahman said.
Meanwhile, Pakistan was shipping soldiers and weapons into East Bengal. Yahya Khan and friends had no intention of sharing power with a democratically elected leader. They had every intention of murdering the shit out of uppity East Bengalis until the survivors fell in line. “ “Kill three million of them and the rest will eat out of our hands,” Khan said. Out loud and on the record.
On March 25, 1971, Pakistan launched Operation Searchlight, a swift and secret military operation to pacify the Bengali independence movement through systematic violence on a scale that can only be described as genocide. The plan was clearly targeted at civilians: Awami league supporters, intellectuals at universities, and Hindus. Clerics in Pakistan approved the indiscriminate rape of Bengali women. That is how you break the will of a people.
(Correction: the result was indiscriminate rape, but the plan was targeted rape of middle-class daughters because the middle class represents a shared hope for safety and security through education and respectable work.)
Within hours of the initial assault, the capital city of Dhaka was subdued. Dhaka University was raided, the residential halls destroyed, and hundreds of unarmed students murdered. That was just the beginning. Over nine months, somewhere between 300,000 and 3 million people were killed. Roughly 300,000 women were raped. Millions were displaced from their homes. In planning the assault, Pakistani military officials assumed that Bengali resistance would quickly collapse under the weight of such stunning violence.
They were wrong.
Operation Searchlight catalyzed resistance against Pakistan and, with Indian military support and humanitarian aid, the Mukti Bahini eventually defeated the Pakistani occupying force. The new state of Bangladesh was quickly recognized by the majority of United Nations members.
A bigger picture
My mother was there. She was in Dhaka during Operation Searchlight. She occasionally mentions the time my grandfather was taken in for questioning. Or the time she saw an unburied body in the middle of a busy street. She describes the rate of slaughter — one of the swiftest in modern history— with a perverse hint of pride, as if to say, “We Bengalis are tough motherfuckers. They couldn’t keep us down.”
A close family friend was arrested and brutally tortured. He is now Bangladesh’s foremost scholar on the genocide, something of a national celebrity. My uncle — my mother’s sister’s husband — carried his grandmother on his back as they fled to safety. He struggled when, 35 years later, my cousin decided to marry a Pakistani man from London. He now dotes on their two adorable children.
The people I know who were there, who were directly affected, carried on with their lives. A whole nation — hundreds of millions of people — carried on with their lives. The world kept turning. I was born in Bangladesh at the start of an economic boom that has rapidly transformed the country, away from its past oppression and into a technology-driven future. I was raised in the US, growing up a typical American millennial, suburban youth and all. This history of violence is distant for me.
But sometimes it does not feel distant at all. As a woman of color in the US, I am familiar with the constant, back-of-the-brain, tickling threat of violence. Not because of my personal experience, but because of the embodied knowledge of generations of women across the world. Violence happens, not infrequently, and sometimes it happens through the attempted annihilation of an entire people and erasure of their culture from the face of the earth. It happened to people who look a lot like me, not that long ago. This history of violence lives in my bones.
How is this possible?
Since I first learned about the Bangladeshi Liberation War, I’ve had a morbid fascination with genocide. In high school, around the time the movie Hotel Rwanda came out, I read Romeo Dallaire’s book Shake Hands with the Devil. Dallaire was the commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda before genocide broke out. 800,000 people were massacred in 100 days. Between 250,000 and 500,000 women were raped. (My parents used to believe that Bangladesh was the fastest rate of killing in a modern conflict. When I told them about Rwanda, and the fact that the killers used machetes, they were stunned. They could accept the idea of soldiers using guns to murder civilians, as they did in Dhaka, but machetes struck them as an entirely different level of horror.)
Reading about Rwanda, particularly from Dallaire’s perspective, reinforced a sense of cognitive dissonance between my everyday American reality and the reality of genocide. (Dallaire experienced the most potent form of this dissonance as post-traumatic stress disorder, which he describes in his second memoir, Waiting for First Light.) Why does this happen, ever?
In many ways, we are living at the peak of human civilization, enjoying the fruits of hundreds of years of science and art. Modern engineers regular build technologies that ancient people would have attributed to gods. We have laws and treaties and grand international organizations that touch on every aspect of our lives. How can something like genocide exist in our world? More importantly, how the hell do we stop it?
Probably the best account I’ve read that tries to explain why and how genocide occurs is A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by former UN ambassador Samantha Power. It is one of the best researched and most powerful books I have ever read. Power starts with the question, “Why do we keep saying ‘never again,’ and then, with barely a whimper, we let it happen again?” What’s stopping us from doing the right thing? She tackles this question by analyzing the American response to the several of the greatest genocides of the 20th.
Specifically, she covers the Armenian genocide in Turkey, the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, violence against Kurds in Iraq, and the Balkans. In each case, she highlights the work of Americans who tried to fight the good fight by raising the alarm, directing aid to affected populations, and advocating for strong international response to violence deemed an “internal conflict.” Her thesis is basically the geopolitical equivalent of Mr. Rogers exhortation to “always look for the helpers.”
Another major point Power makes in the book is that these genocides, though they seem shocking to the uninformed observer, were never really a surprise. There is usually a long build up of propaganda and cultural warfare against the target group. For example, Pakistan tried to undermine Bengali culture by banning the Bengali language, 20 years before the war started. Then there is a military build-up, a planning phase that foreign service workers report to their superiors in the hopes of triggering a response. In Rwanda, Gen. Dallaire specifically requested permission to raid a known Hutu weapons cache before violence broke out.
You cannot convince an entire nation of people to murder their neighbors overnight. You certainly cannot do so without someone noticing. But, if you’re careful, you can — over time — convince decent people, at home and abroad, not to interfere when the murdering starts. There is a playbook for this kind of violence, and it is still being used all over the world.
Genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar
The first time I read about the Rohingya crisis was in a January 2017 New York Times story. The topic fell off my radar until September 2017. Rohingya militants, after months of state-sponsored violence, attacked a police outpost and killed several officers. The response from the army was swift and brutal: beatings, gang rapes, village burnings. Hundreds of thousands of refugees fled to Bangladesh. Though the government prevented journalists from reporting on the ongoing humanitarian crisis, satellite images of razed villages and cell phone videos of mass graves supported the refugees’ accounts.
Even a casual observer could see that the regularly scheduled program of abuse and neglect had escalated into one of immediate expulsion and extermination. Finally, people — official types with diplomatic credentials — were using the word genocide. This was happening in real-time, and I wondered if there was anything I could do to help.
At this point, we knew that Facebook and its CEO, reluctant android and sad-face-emoji model Mark Zuckerberg, were in deep trouble for the Cambridge Analytica privacy breach, among other things. What fewer people knew was that Facebook has struggled to regulate hate speech in Myanmar for years, and there was credible evidence that failure to police their platform led to real-world violence.
The problem was two-fold (at least). First, Facebook is the internet in Myanmar, the country’s main source of news. From 2014 to 2017, Facebook grew from 2 million to 30 million users in Myanmar. Increasingly affordable smartphones came pre-installed with the app. Second, the government of Myanmar was already adept at spreading anti-Rohingya propaganda. The medium is new, about the flavors of hate speech are old: the Muslims are dogs; the Rohingya are illegal immigrants; they burn down their own homes and flee back to their native Bangladesh.
Around the same time I learned about the Rohingya genocide, I met Prof. Saiph Savage, director the Human-Computer Interaction lab at West Virginia University. Her lab has worked extensively on the spread of propaganda and hate speech on social media. Not long after, I read an article in the New York Times that talked about Myanmar’s military ties to Russia. All this while, Robert Mueller was investigating Russian interference, through social media, in the 2016 US presidential election.
It begged the question: Did Myanmar use a coordinated social media strategy to spread hate and build public support for acts of genocide against the Rohingya? If so, did Russia help? Maybe if we can understand how genocidal hate speech spreads on social media platforms, we can catch it before violence occurs.
This was all well outside of my academic wheelhouse, but I felt like I had to at least try to understand the implications of this hypothesis. I spoke with Prof. Savage, Ethan Zuckerman at MIT’s Center for Civic Media, and Susan Benesch of the Dangerous Speech Project. The general consensus was that it would be almost impossible to prove causation, even if the relevant data were available, which it is not — Facebook would never share something so sensitive. Even if they did share it, it would be extremely dangerous for topic experts in Myanmar to help with this kind of work, and they were already in enough danger.
In this case, there was little I could do, except donate money to build bamboo shelters in refugee camps.
What next?
At this point, I had to ask myself if genocide prevention was a viable career path for me. Was this the most important thing I could work on? As a follow-up, what specific careers address this problem?
Targeted genocide is not an existential risk to humanity in the way pandemic, worldwide crop failure due to climate change, or nuclear war would be. But I think genocide, in addition to inflicting great suffering on a group of people, is its own kind of existential danger because it feeds our imagination for violence. A world in which one genocide can happen is a world in which five or ten genocides can happen. It’s kind of like gun violence in America. Once mass shootings entered the realm of possibility, and cries to prevent future shootings fell on deaf politicians’ ears, the shootings just kept happening.
If human rights mean anything in our supposedly civilized global society, we must make it impossible for genocide to happen. This is the great project that international organizations have undertaken since the Nuremberg trials.
There were five professions I interacted with or read about while researching genocides. First, and the easiest to rule out as a career option, were military officers responsible for boots-on-the-ground peacekeeping operations. Though Romeo Dallaire is one of my great heroes, I have no desire to do the kind work he did as an officer in the Canadian Armed Forces.
Second were computer scientists who can parse the volume of data that will come from any modern attempt at genocide, from social media posts to smartphone metadata of victims and perpetrators. This would require extensive retraining on my part. At this point, I don’t think switching to computer science for this oddly specific goal is my best bet.
Third were human rights lawyers. This category includes a couple of my personal heroes: Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer who fought tirelessly to have genocide recognized as a violation of international law, and Samantha Power. Reading Zen Under Fire by UN human rights lawyer Marianne Elliott about her time stationed in Afghanistan also fueled my interest in this path. Despite the enormity of the problem, these three individuals demonstrated, in different times and places, that highly motivated individuals can have an impact.
If I chose this field, I would need to go back to school for law (which I’ve wanted to do for years anyway) and also formally study international relations. I might also want to pick up a second or third language, most likely French and Bengali. This would be a huge professional pivot. I decided that I wanted to at least get a few years of work experience at a non-profit or government agency before going to law school.
The fourth category were journalists. Right before I left my research position at Northwestern, I spent a lot of time hanging out in the Knight Lab, the university’s collaborative space for multimedia journalism. The Fourth Estate is one of the most important and most threatened parts of our democracy. I love the idea of being a journalist, particularly the opportunity to work on a wide range of topics. I did actively pursue this path. I applied for data journalism roles at ProPublica, my favorite newsroom, and City Bureau, a community-centered non-profit news outlet in Chicago.
ProPublica told me that they are actively looking for people outside of traditional journalism, and I am doing the right things, but I need a larger body of work before they can consider me for a position. This is something I’m continuing to work on, writing articles (mostly for Curious Witch) and developing my data analysis and visualization skills through online coursework.
That said, I’m not entirely sure I want to be a full-time journalist working in a newsroom. There are a lot of highly motivated people with degrees in journalism and communication trying to work in the field for low pay with few benefits and limited job security. I think it might be best for me to leave the full-time work to the people who really want it. I can contribute to the modern news media in other ways, like exploring government open data portals and sharing any newsworthy findings with journalists.
Fifth, and last on my list, are research and various administrative roles for organizations working on human rights, refugee issues, and related problems. This is such a wide category of roles that I wasn’t sure where to start, but I have signed up for volunteer opportunities with the UN HCR and Romeo Dallaire’s Child Soldier Initiative. Unfortunately, as a chemist by training, my skills do not align with their current needs. But who knows.
Maybe in the future there will be more opportunities for me to contribute to an issue that has fascinated and repulsed me from a young age.
