A two-day international conference on genocide that concluded in Dhaka July 31 exhorted the UN to recognise the mass killings and rape that the Pakistan Army had unleashed in the torturous and tumultuous events that preceded the birth of Bangladesh in December 1971.

Legal experts from Germany, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Britain and Canada joined their Bangladeshi counterparts in issuing a declaration that noted: 'The conference calls upon the media and the civil society at home and abroad to focus on the (1971) genocide in Bangladesh, and launch a campaign so that this is recognized in the UN as Genocide.'

Furthermore, the conference urged the Bangladesh government to begin the process of trying the perpetrators as war criminals and to seek international support in this regard.

But the sad truth is that as in the past 37 years, this earnest plea is unlikely to elicit any meaningful response from the powers that be at the global table.

The US, with Richard Nixon in the White House and his ace assistant Henry Kissinger actually calling the shots in 1971, was culpable by turning a blind eye to the genocide and mass rape that enveloped then East Pakistan. To their credit, the US mission in Dhaka tried to report the carnage to the DC Beltway and the US media, including some mainstream papers reported the events as accurately as possible. But in vain. And in keeping with the dictum that major powers shape the historical narrative in a selective manner by engaging in astute exclusion, this enormity has since been successfully relegated to the distant back-burner of the global record.

Four decades later, except for the victims and their traumatized families, recall of the genocide in Bangladesh outside of that country is hazy. The Pakistan Army, which was the principal institution engaged in attacking and butchering its own citizens - albeit of Bengali ethnicity, has since sought to play down the scale of the bloodshed and rape.

The official Pakistani version refers to 26,000 killed over a year but this is at considerable variance with other estimates which range from 300,000 to a staggering three million killed and between 200,000 to 400,000 women raped.

Two other estimates are illustrative of the disparity that exists about these gory figures. 'Statistics of Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900' by R.J. Rummel places the deaths at 1.5 million and other literature on the subject avers that East Pakistan of 1971 ranks as having the highest concentration or density of genocide by way of the numbers killed, the time involved and the geographical area in question. Yet another book, 'Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape' by Susan Brownmiller estimates that the total number of women raped by Pakistan Army personnel along with their local support base - the 'razakars' - varies from 200,000 to 400,000. The majority of them were Muslim girls and women ranging from age eight to 70 plus.

These are appalling statistics by any yardstick and in a normative context, even one death or rape of a civilian non-combatant by any uniformed person is cause for the gravest concern.