Once upon a time here in Dhaka, Bangladesh, this teeming city on the Buriganga River, the bells of the Holy Resurrection Church echoed for miles. Armenians built their house of Orthodox Christian worship amid the palm groves in 1781, almost two centuries after Persian Shah Abbas the Great conquered eastern Armenia and thousands of them migrated to Bengal. They and their progeny prospered as traders in jute, silk and leather. In 1880, the church clock stopped ticking, perhaps because of rust from the tropical damp, and the bells rang no more. Despite that ill omen, the Armenians of Dhaka were among the lucky few of their compatriots spared the Ottoman Turks' genocide during World War I.
Yet genocide is no stranger to Bangladesh, known from 1947 to 1971 as East Pakistan. More than a million Bangladeshis died during the India-Pakistan War of 1971, when West Pakistani soldiers raped tens of thousands of Bangladeshi women and sent millions of refugees fleeing to India for safety. After Pakistan conceded Bangladesh's independence, the Bangladeshis themselves proved susceptible to the genocidal urge, slaughtering Muslim Biharis and Buddhist Chakmas.
Now, nearly 50 years later, genocide haunts the country again. This time, the Bangladeshis are neither victims nor perpetrators. They are witnesses who have provided haven to more than 620,000 survivors of the mass executions, expulsions and rapes that Myanmar's army and Buddhist paramilitaries have committed since last August. What baffles people here in Dhaka is that the United Nations, the United States, the European Union and other preachers of international morality refrain from labeling the killings and expulsions as genocide. Important visitors to Myanmar, including Pope Francis just this week, shy away from so much as referring to the victims by the name they use to describe themselves — Rohingyas — lest they upset the country's military and jeopardize its fragile transition to democracy. The Burmese ruling class denies the Rohingyas' existence as a people.