Anthony mascarenhas biography
•
Anthony Mascarenhas
Pakistani journalist and author
Neville Anthony Mascarenhas (10 July 1928 – 3 December 1986) was a Pakistani journalist and author. His works include exposés on the brutality of Pakistan's military during the 1971 independence movement of Bangladesh, The Rape of Bangla Desh (1971) and Bangladesh: A Legacy of Blood (1986). In 1971, he wrote the article titled Genocide, published by the Sunday Times, which has been dubbed as an article that "changed history",[1] and recognized as "one of the most influential pieces of South Asian journalism of the past half century"[2]
Personal life
[edit]Mascarenhas was born into a Goan Catholic family in Belgaum (then part of the Bombay Presidency), just over 100 kilometres away from Portuguese-ruled Goa, and educated in Karachi.[3] He and his wife Yvonne Mascarenhas together had five children. He died in 1986.[4]
Career
[edit]Mascarenhas was a journalist who was the ass
•
Mascarenhas was a journalist who was the assistant editor at The Morning News (Karachi).[5]
Genocide
In March 1971, a civil war erupted in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) between Bengali nationalists and the Pakistani military government. Anthony Mascarenhas was a respected Pakistani journalist based in Karachi. When the conflict began, the Pakistani military brought a group of journalists on a 10-day guided tour of East Pakistan to show them how they had successfully quelled the 'freedom fighters.'[2]
Mascarenhas was one of the eight Pakistani reporters given permission to report from the war zone in East Pakistan. This was likely due to his good reputation and contacts within Pakistan's ruling elite. Foreign journalists had already been banned from the region. The military aimed to use the reporters to publish propaganda that promoted their narrative of events.[2]
However, Mascarenhas was horrified by what he witnessed during the tightly controlled tour in 1971. He sa
•
Bangladesh war: The article that changed history
Evans remembers him in that meeting as having "the bearing of a military man, square-set and moustached, but appealing, almost soulful eyes and an air of profound melancholy".
"He'd been shocked bygd the Bengali outrages in March, but he maintained that what the army was doing was altogether worse and on a grander scale," Evans wrote.
Mascarenhas told him he had been an eyewitness to a huge, systematic killing spree, and had heard army officers describe the killings as a "final solution".
Evans promised to run the story, but first Yvonne and the children had to escape Karachi.
They had agreed that the meddelande for them to uppstart preparing for this was a telegram from Mascarenhas saying that "Ann's operation was successful".
Yvonne remembers receiving the meddelande at three the next morning. "I heard the telegram man bang at my öppning and inom woke up my sons and inom was: 'Oh my go