Mofidul Hoque, acclaimed scholar and founder of the Liberation War Museum, came to Eastern Connecticut State University on Nov. 7 to give a presentation titled “The Forgotten Genocide of Bangladesh in 1971: Lessons for the Future.” Hoque spoke on the atrocities committed in 1971 by the Pakistani government, which resulted in the death of some three million Bangladeshi people, and how his activism efforts have culminated in the Liberation War Museum in Bangladesh.

“The more we talk about it, the more it enters the public domain,” said Hoque of the genocide. “And we must talk about it, because if we are to say ‘never again,’ we need to know how it began.”

His presentation detailed how the people of Bangladesh became liberated after long struggling to obtain democratic and national rights, but at the expense of millions of lives. Initially many western countries were outraged at these acts of violence, however, interest in Bangladesh quickly faded. Now, Hoque says, it is considered the forgotten, or “lost,” genocide.

From 1975 to 1996, information regarding the Bangladesh genocide was suppressed, in a period academics refer to as “The Dark Era.” Hoque and other activists have taken steps to correct the misinformation and propaganda spread during this period.

Hoque and seven trustees established the Liberation War Museum in 1996 to commemorate the heroism of the Bangladeshi people as well as reestablish the facts and reality of the Bangladesh genocide. The Liberation War Museum, with its team of researchers, has collected more than 50,000 stories of recorded oral history.

Once a mobile museum contained within a bus, the Liberation War Museum now has a permanent location in Bangladesh. Hoque hopes to partner with other researchers and scholars who are interested in the historical events surrounding the Bangladeshi genocide, as well as other genocides which go largely ignored or unreported, such as the Rohingya persecution in 2016. In 2017, the Liberation War Museum sent researchers to interview Rohingya refugees to add to their oral history collections, and published a paper titled “The Rohingya Genocide: Compilation and Analysis of Survivor’s Testimonies.”

Although the museum collects artifacts from some of the worst atrocities in humanity’s history, Hoque still has a message of inspiration: “When we tell this story, it is not a story of victimization,” he said. “We talk about the struggle and the resilience of our people. That is what we wish to commemorate in this museum.”

This event was organized by the Office of Equity and Diversity and the Departments of Computer Science; History; and Political Science, Philosophy and Geography.