BD misses chance to get it declared by UN

Bangladesh missed the chance to place properly the proposal before the UN body to declare Bangladesh Genocide as the World's longest one which the country witnessed from March 25 to December in 1971.
"A delegation led by the Foreign Ministry was also sent to the UN in 2015 but the plea was wrongly placed and that's why we missed the train," Ghatak Dalal Nirmul Committee leader Shahriar Kabir told the Daily Observer on Wednesday.
On this night in 1971, the Pakistani Army launched 'Operation Searchlight', the beginning of the nine-month-long war during which over three million people were killed, over 200,000 women raped and many properties were looted and destroyed by the Pakistani occupation forces and their local collaborators.
More than 20 million people were forced to take refuge in India because of the onslaught. All these things happened in nine months. "We started our move in 1990s with this demand, later other people joined us," Shahriar said.
"To adopt such a regulation by the UN committee, the member country (Bangladesh) required a unanimous resolution by the parliament over the issue and accordingly our parliament unanimously adopted such a resolution in March 2015.     "Unfortunately our Parliament issued a wrong statement to the UN which did not match with the UN norms and thus our move failed," Kabir said.
Following long-standing demands from different organisations including Ghatak Dalal Nirmul Committee, Antorjatik Juddaporadh o Gonobichar Andolan, and the AL-led 14-party alliance, Jatiya Sangsad (Bangladesh Parliament) adopted the resolution in 2015.
"Yes, in 2015 Jatiya Sangsad unanimously adopted a resolution to observe March 25 as the Genocide Day, marking the brutality carried out by Pakistani Army on the unarmed Bengalis on the black night of March 25, 1971, which was our first step. Later we started the international move," he said.
Since 1948, the United Nations General Assembly announced December 9 as the 'International Day of Commemoration and Dignity of the Victims of the Crime of Genocide and of the Prevention of this Crime' in Armenia and it has been observed across the globe, he added.
"We urged our political parties to support our move to pick up the issue to the UN to declare Bangladesh's genocide as the World's longest genocide as the UN had already declared the 'Genocide Day'. It is not so easy task for any country to get the previous declaration of UN cancelled and so we started our move to declare Bangladesh's genocide as the World's longest genocide that happened from March 25 to December 1971," the Ghatak Dalal Nirmul Committee leader said.
Eminent journalist Simon Dring writes in the Daily Telegraph on March 29 under the caption 'Dateline Dacca' in the Daily Telegraph on March 29 that 200 students of Iqbal Hall (now Shaheed Sergeant Zahurul Haq Hall), and 12 teachers and their family members in Dhaka University residential area had been killed on March 25. In Old Dhaka, around 700 people were burnt to death.