Featured prominently among the attendees are "revisionists," those who deny that the Holocaust happened. Hard-line Iranians are claiming that this is a test of tolerance and free speech that Western statesmen champion. What's more, the Iranians are partly right. In France, Germany, and Austria, it is illegal to deny the Holocaust.

After I read about this, my mind raced to imagine a future in Bangladesh in which the extent of the genocide in 1971 was questioned, and eventually estimated. Our terms for local war collaborators, Razakar, Al-Badr, and Al-Shams, became words that no longer carried any substance. The effort to seek justice for war crimes was equated with treason. A conference was organised to encourage revisionists who claimed that the genocide was essentially propaganda spread by India to tarnish Pakistan's image.

I couldn't reject my thoughts simply as paranoia. A quiet, yet significant, transformation has been taking place toward revising the history of the independence of Bangladesh. It began in the late seventies and the eighties when known collaborators, who had fled the country, began to creep back in under protection of the erstwhile military rulers. Some of these collaborators went on record saying that independence was a mistake. That type of free speech was allowed, but when Jahanara Imam led a large civil-society movement in the 1990s to expose and try war criminals, it was persecuted by the BNP government and charged with treason.

In the past few years, the second BNP-led government has persistently tried to establish Ziaur Rahman as the person who first declared independence. Over the last two decades, national school curricula have been changed subtly to downplay the role of war collaborators, and to avoid terms like "Pakistani" or "Razakar." School children are learning that freedom fighters had fought a faceless enemy called "Hanadar Bahini," without any other identity, national or religious. The list goes on.

In Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I live, we organised a conference at Harvard University two weeks ago to commemorate the 35th anniversary of Bangladesh's independence. It was attended by academics from many different countries, as well as a large number of Bengali expatriates. Our experience, even within that small universe, reflected the far-reaching success of the revisionism in Bangladesh.

We shuddered to hear from an attendee that when he tried to stage a play about independence in his prominent English-medium school in Dhaka, permission was refused because the play used offensive words like "Razakar." We learnt that it is now anathema in some circles to acknowledge the crucial role that India played in the liberation war. While historians from Pakistan and India paid tribute to the Bengali intellectuals who were systematically killed in 1971, some members of a new generation of Bangladeshis saw, for the first time, documentary evidence of our own Holocaust.

Our two-day conference ended with a dramatic musical, performed by a group called Amra Kojon, recounting the history of independence, which brought tears to the eyes of a packed audience. I didn't foresee that this would also serve to rally some local "Bangladeshis," who rejected our portrayal of independence as one-sided, and went on to denigrate the leader of that troupe. His fault? He is Hindu.

This is where survivors of two of the biggest atrocities in modern history differ. The Jews who endured the Second World War were able to establish the Holocaust as a moral affront to humanity as a whole, a crime worthy of universal condemnation, and something that is simply beyond the narrow confines of party or even national politics. Supported by the victors, they were able to bring to justice many perpetrators in the first international trial for war crimes in 1945-46. Those who profited from the Holocaust are still being tracked down and prosecuted. Evidence of the extent of this genocide has been gathered painstakingly worldwide, and will easily hold ground against assertions made at this conference in Iran.

Can we confidently say the same for ourselves? The history of the genocide in 1971 has been thoroughly politicized, thanks to revisions sponsored first by military juntas, and then by parties that grew out of those regimes. It is understandable that thirty-five years is not a long time, and that a lot remains to be written and documented about the war. But the genocide is one aspect of our struggle for independence that cannot be denied. We cannot allow it to be further reduced by political or religious affiliation. The movement to try the war criminals of 1971 must be revived, and we must insist that doing so is not an Awami League agenda, a Hindu conspiracy, or anti-Islam propaganda.

The genocide in '71 is a universal outrage, a clear-cut case of a crime against humanity by all internationally accepted definitions. However incomplete, documentation already exists about both the human cost and the role and identity of war collaborators who helped to perpetrate this heinous act and are now living comfortably in Bangladesh. The more we shirk away from naming them, and from trying to bring them to justice for their war crimes, the more vulnerable we become to having this fundamental aspect of our history threatened, and perhaps erased quietly and unceremoniously.

Dr. Jalal Alamgir is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, USA.