Word: bangladesh
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...knows the exact number killed during Bangladesh's bloody struggle for independence in 1971 when the territory of East Pakistan severed its unnatural bonds with then West Pakistan, a thousand miles away on the other side of India. At the close of the Liberation War, as it's called by Bangladeshis, TIME reporters suggested the death toll was above a million. Ask people in Dhaka today and they'll tell you the true figure of Bengali civilians murdered by West Pakistani troops and death squads guided by collaborators was three times that. Bangladesh sits atop an alluvial plain, so those...
...today there's growing momentum in Dhaka for some sort of restitution. Since its traumatic birth, Bangladesh has weathered coups, assassinations and a legacy of largely corrupt and ineffectual leadership. Now war veterans such as Safiullah and other members of civil society are urging Bangladesh's current government, a caretaker administration of technocrats propped up by the military, to establish a fact-finding commission that could go about the long-overdue work of collecting testimony and starting prosecutions. In recent weeks, they've called for the banning of suspected war criminals and collaborators from the polls due to be held...
...Pulitzer Prize for his reporting five years later on Cambodia's killing fields.) Passing through the charred husks of villages razed by West Pakistani troops, he heard whispered story after story of mass executions of Hindus, college students and anybody suspected of Bengali nationalism. Neighborhoods were gutted as Bangladesh's main cities fell to a fifth of their existing population; 10 million refugees fled west to India. Almost every Bangladeshi household has a tale of loss and suffering. Around 400,000 women, by some estimates, were raped...
...Jalladkhana, Hoque fights simply to keep the memory of those days alive. He reckons that there are thousands of other sites like this dotting Bangladesh's lush countryside. By one such spot north of the capital, he recalls, a stone epitaph erected there is inscribed with a bare message: "Passerby," it reads, "please stand here a moment...
...Africa offers plenty of encouragement. The continent's mobile market has expanded faster than that of any other region over the past five years, averaging annual growth of almost 65%. Revenue generated by each of Africa's almost 300 million cell-phone users is three times higher than in Bangladesh, India or Pakistan. And users have been quick to exploit devices for commercial gain. Ghana-based TradeNet matches buyers and sellers of crops by circulating details via SMS of what each is offering to trade; many poor farmers in Tanzania rely on cell phones to gather real-time market prices...