I have often asked scholars from Pakistan about their perspective on 1971. Usually I hear profound apologies, personal gestures meant to compensate for the official failure of their government to come to terms with the tragedy.

Last February, when I asked that question at a conference at Tufts University, a Pakistani historian took the podium. "Let me tell you what history classes teach in Pakistan," he said. "I went to the best university in Lahore. In my master's course, the professor stopped the lecture around 1970 and picked up the story again from 1973.”

"They didn't cover 1971 in a masters-level history class?" I asked, astonished.

"No. And when I pressed my professor for details, he said, you don't need to worry about 1971; they'll never ask questions about that in your exams."

The room fell silent. "You see," explained my colleague, "there is no way for a regular Pakistani to know about the genocide unless he studies it on his own. "

Although the war crimes trials will be the most significant event for us in the coming months, we must recognise, painful though it is, that much of the world has forgotten about 1971. One may understand why it does not appear in Pakistani curriculum. But the genocide, one of the worst in history, does not feature prominently even in western research. And that absence is the fault of Bangladesh's own home-grown politics.

War crimes were ubiquitous in 1971 — that much is fact. This fact is established by mass graves discovered all over the country; Pakistani documents and the written hit lists of local collaborators; reports, photographs and video footage by journalists; and most significandy, eye-witness accounts of the survivors.

But what is remarkable is that those crimes still remain to be "proven" after forty years. The perpetrators remain to be unmasked, and the

national politics of protecting them remains distressingly obscure even to us, let alone the outside world. Who did it? Who committed the specific massacres? Who protected them afterwards? Why is the story of the genocide still elusive?

At the age of eighteen, I left Bangladesh for higher study in America. At our university, all first-year students had to take a course called "The Human Condition." We began with two books: Night, a memoir by Elie Wiesel of his time in concentration camp, and Approaches to Auschwitz, a collection of essays on understanding the Holocaust, the Nazi extermination of Jews in the 1930s and 1940s. Our study of life thus began with no rose-tinted recollection of humanity's achievements, but with an expose of a most disturbing question: why do humans, unlike any other animal species, take to killing others of their kind en masse?

Of course, they don't simply kill; they construct grand phobias and ideologies — nationalism, fundamentalism, racism, and the like — to justify their acts. And when those acts contradict their own moral schemes, they devise elaborate ploys to hide their role. They find collaborators at all levels, from suppliers happy to arm them, to mercenaries ready to butcher their targets, statesmen to protect them and intellectuals to validate their causes. The blood trail extends far.

In that trail, other tragedies follow when the hunted regroups and becomes the hunter. Israel, which was created after six million Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis and their collaborators, later committed war crimes of its own, from the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon to the 2008-09 wanton killings in Gaza. The Bengalis, who suffered genocide under the bayonet of the Pakistani army and its allies, also slaughtered Bihari non-combatants in turn. The extent was less, but these too were war crimes.

The Rwandan genocide of 1994, which killed 800,000 in a hundred days, spawned afterwards a deadlier spiral of organised revenge, paranoia, and extremism in neighbouring Congo, in which eventually another 5 million perished.

This Great War of Africa, as some call it, was expanding while the UN-sanctioned international tribunal was putting Rwandan genocidaires on trial.

Clearly, trials offer no deterrent to future atrocities, whether committed by the original perpetrators or by the victims. The basis of international trials is also questioned at times, because such trials have never been held without impunity for big powers.

In that category, the worst were the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials after the Second World War. They were simply victors' justice, for allied war crimes were ignored. Even the erstwhile chief justice of the US Supreme Court criticised the validity of the Nuremberg trials.

The Tokyo trials, which sentenced Japanese ministers and generals for war crimes, were more egregious. It left out of consideration the largest instantaneous massacre of civilians in history,which had occurred just months before the trials were set up. This, of course, was the American atomic bomb attacks that pulverised Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing 220,000 civilians directly and many more in the years to come.

For the full version of this article please read this month's Forum, available free with The Daily Star on June 7.

Jalal Alamgir is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston and a Fellow at the South Asia Initiative. Harvard University. Helsa member of the DrishtipatWriters Collective.