ABSTRACT
Two small boys, one naked, the other wearing only a tee-shirt, stand amidst the detritus of war; rocket bomb casings are strewn around their feet. Together they stare at ravaged fields, homes, crops and a solitary bomb-scarred tree. This is in Jessore, Bangladesh in the final month of the war of independence, when state terror was unleashed by the Pakistani government to the point of genocide. Hundreds of thousands of citizens left their homes and fled to neighbouring states between March and December 1971. Reportedly, about two million Hindu, Christian, Muslim and Buddhist civilians were killed and an estimated three hundred thousand women were raped by the military.
