How public pressure led Australia to become the first developed country to recognise Bangladesh

At 11.30 pm on March 25, 1971, Pakistani Army tanks rolled out of Dhaka Cantonment. The British Council Library was commandeered as a fire base. By dawn, 200 students lay dead at Dhaka University. Awami League leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had been arrested at 1.10 am. In the nine months that followed, a genocide followed – the precise toll is still contested but the fact of the slaughter no longer in doubt.

Pakistan had expelled most foreign correspondents before the crackdown began. One stayed behind: Simon Dring of The Daily Telegraph hid on the roof of the Hotel Intercontinental and watched the city burn. His dispatch, published on March 30, 1971 headlined “Tanks Crush Revolt in Pakistan: 7,000 Slaughtered” was the first eyewitness account to reach the Western world.

But Australia did not need Dring’s dispatch to know what was happening in East Pakistan. It had its own man there.

JL Allen, Australia’s Deputy High Commissioner in Dacca, was an eyewitness to the events of March 25-26. Within days, he filed two graphic memoranda to the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra. They are preserved in the National Archives of Australia.

In a memorandum dated March 30, 1971, Allen wrote: “They had one purpose and one purpose only – to strike terror as widely and deeply as possible. This was to be done by killing as many Bengalis as they could find. In Iqbal Hall the Military burst in and machine-gunned 14 students plus 9 Professors and their families. What the Pakistan Army did in Dacca during the long night of 25/26th March was absolutely monstrous.”

Three days later, in another memorandum, he added: “It is not possible to find words adequate to express one’s horror and shock at the enormity of the Pakistan Army’s crimes.” He described Hindus being “singled out for special treatment” and lorry-loads of bodies being carted away, presumably to mass graves. A stray tracer bullet had entered the window of the Australian Chancery itself.

The file in the Australian archive contains no record of any response from Canberra to either memorandum. No diplomatic protest was lodged. No condemnation was issued. Full diplomatic and trade relations with Pakistan were maintained throughout the nine months of killing.

A public campaign

While Canberra was silent, ordinary Australians were not. The events that followed were the subject of a 2024 book by Rachel Stevens, a Research Fellow at Australian Catholic University. In Citizen-Driven Humanitarianism and the Bangladesh Liberation War, Stevens documents how students, trade unionists, and church groups mounted one of the most sustained citizen-driven foreign policy campaigns in Australian history.

More than 2,500 letters were sent to politicians. Hunger strikes were held on the steps of Parliament. Speaking tours traversed the country. Two activists were arrested on October 1, 1971, after a public demonstration demanding more aid. Prime Minister William McMahon wrote personally to President Yahya Khan. Australia’s foreign minister publicly described the deployment of the USS Enterprise to the Bay of Bengal as “deplorable.”

“Australia’s position was unusual in that it was not entirely focused on self-interest,” Stevens writes, drawing on declassified cables from the National Archives. Australian diplomats believed early recognition of Bangladesh was vital to show, in their own words, “that the communists are not Bangladesh’s only friends”.

On January 31, 1972, Australia became the first developed nation to formally recognise Bangladesh – weeks ahead of the United States, which delayed until April partly to protect its secret back-channel to China through Pakistan, and months ahead of the United Kingdom, preoccupied with joining the European Community.

On April 14, 1972, Australia accredited Bangladesh’s first High Commissioner – the first member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to open a diplomatic mission in Dhaka.

Calling for accountability

None of it appears in the Australian national school curriculum. Australia has never formally named what its own diplomat – in his own words, preserved in its own archives – called the monstrous atrocity: a genocide.

Australia is home to a growing Bangladeshi-Australian community across New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland. Many carry the intergenerational weight of 1971. Diaspora organisations and the International Crimes Strategy Forum have for years lobbied Australian parliamentarians to act. The Criminal Code Amendment (Genocide, Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes) Bill 2024 was debated in the Australian Senate on in March 2025, demonstrating that Parliament is already engaged with genocide accountability.

The US Consul General in Dhaka, Archer Blood, cabled Washington in 1971 calling the events “selective genocide”. He stated: “Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy.” Australia’s own diplomat said something remarkably similar.

The archives are open. The cables are there. The question is whether Australia, 55 years on, is prepared to read them aloud.

March 26 is Bangladesh Independence Day.

Raymond Salomonn is a Sydney-based legal researcher of Bangladeshi origin who has spent years reading declassified archival records relating to the 1971 Bangladesh genocide. He is a human rights advocate at Visa Help Australia.