Forty years ago on Dec. 16, in front of massed throngs in Dhaka,
the commander of the eastern wing of the Pakistani army tendered
his country’s unconditional surrender to an Indian counterpart.
That act signaled the end of a brief war between the bitter foes
and the liberation of East Pakistan, a territory ruled from
Islamabad but separated by 1,000 miles of India, and its
transformation into the independent state of Bangladesh. But
while triumphant cries of “Jai Bangla” echoed across the new
capital, they were shouted by a shell-shocked, war-ravaged
people. An official in the then nascent country’s government
told a TIME reporter: “It is a dream come true, but you must
also remember that we went through a nightmare.” That nightmare
— more than half a year of brutal, arguably genocidal repression
by the West Pakistani military against a Bengali populace
seeking self-determination — claimed anywhere between one and
three million lives, led to some half a million rapes and
roughly ten million refugees fleeing a