Word: jalladkhana
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...sleepy neighborhood on the outskirts of Dhaka stands an empty lot called the Jalladkhana - Bengali for "Butcher's Den." A courtyard, flanked by a red brick wall and lined with potted plants and marble plaques, leads to a small two-room building. Inside, it is quiet and tranquil; a few candles flicker. Kept there are tiny traces of an untold horror that took place nearly 40 years ago: a pair of broken spectacles, a sandal with its straps torn, human skulls and bones. "They speak," says Mofidul Hoque, a trustee of the museum that preserves the site, "of an immeasurable...
...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 bent on genocide needed only to dump bodies in rivers or, as at the Jalladkhana, down the wells and conduits of local water-pumping stations, where corpses were literally flushed away into the sea. "These are crimes so horrible that even God wouldn't forgive you," says K.M. Safiullah, a retired general who led the independence war effort. "There cannot be unity without this being...
...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...
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