Ageing is often a phase in life which takes one to a landscape of memories. And when those memories are related to history, memories that could also be described as a person’s lived experience, it becomes important enough to let others know about the times that have been.

For me, September has had a powerful hold on the memory. It was in boyhood, even before teenage came to me, that the month took hold of my thoughts and, you might say, my imagination. Those thoughts and that imagination have then created in me, in that unobtrusive way, a sense of history. Since the age of nine, I might add, a preoccupation with history has been part of life.

As another September dawns today, or in the concept of western tradition it is autumn which sets in, the mind in me goes back to September 1965 when India and Pakistan went to war against each other. In the years that followed, I have often wondered, and still wonder, whether that war was necessary at all. For seventeen days the two countries fought on the western sector, with neither of them able to claim anything remotely close to victory. The war commenced on 6 September and ended in a ceasefire on 23 September.

It was a pointless war and those who decided to impose it on the subcontinent --- think here of Field Marshal Ayub Khan and his brash young Foreign Minister Z.A. Bhutto --- were never able to explain why that cataclysm had to happen. The result was the Tashkent Declaration of January 1966. But that declaration really resolved nothing. The bitterness between the two countries was to linger. It persists to this day.  The two countries are now nuclear-armed states.

September 1965 was catastrophic for Indonesia. On the last day of the month, six generals of the Indonesian army lay murdered, a crime General Suharto and the soldiers quickly charged the communists with. It was the beginning of the decline of President Sukarno and the country’s veering off into closer ties with the capitalist world. Anywhere between a million and two million Indonesians were murdered in the pogrom that followed. Close to three decades later, I was surprised to hear Tan Sri Ghazalie Shafi, a leading Malaysian politician, tell a South Asian media conference in Kathmandu that the government of Tunku Abdul Rahman in Kuala Lumpur had maintained regular contact with Suharto all through 1964.

Indonesia needs to come clear with the truth of 30 September 1965. There are ageing Indonesians who, having been victimised between 1965 and 1967, have maintained absolute silence on the trauma they have gone through. Trauma has also assailed thousands of Chileans who saw their country and its democratic system put to the torch by the military in September 1973. My generation was in college when General Pinochet’s coup, undertaken with the active assistance of the CIA, led to the collapse of the elected socialist government of President Salvador Allende. As in Indonesia, post-11 September 1973 circumstances saw Chile swiftly pass into the western camp.

We remember too that other 11 September, in 2001, when the twin towers in New York were brought down in a frightening demonstration of terrorism. And, yes, there is a third 11 September as well. On that day in 1948, an ailing Mohammad Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan, died in Karachi. It was a pitiful scene. The vehicle carrying Jinnah and his sister Fatima --- they had arrived back from Ziarat, where Pakistan’s leader had been convalescing --- broke down on the road, beside a camp housing refugees who had arrived in the country following the 1947 Partition. We were not born at the time, but our later reading of history has made us wonder if, had Jinnah not died when he did, Pakistan would graduate to liberal democracy despite its Muslim foundations. None of his successors were able to exude the authority and charisma that defined the Jinnah personality.

In September 1969, we read of the coup which overthrew King Idris in Libya. Muammar Gaddafi, a colonel in the army, seized power and swiftly launched the country on the road to a republican future. Gaddafi, an admirer of Gamal Abdel Nasser, projected himself as an Arab nationalist in line with the ideals of the Egyptian President. Under Gaddafi, Libya made a tremendous degree of progress. But it was his authoritarian streak which in the end allowed his enemies --- read the West and NATO here --- to foment the conspiracy that would lead to his ouster and death in 2011. Gaddafi’s alleged links with global terrorism and his providing refuge to Bangabandhu’s assassins marred the original vision of a happy Libya he shaped in the early stages of his leadership.

For us in Bangladesh, September has a particular resonance. In September 1971, as the War of Liberation went on, Prime Minister Tajuddin Ahmad made the wise move, based on credible reasons, of preventing Khondokar Moshtaq, the Foreign Minister in the Mujibnagar government, from travelling to the United Nations to speak for Bangladesh. We in occupied Bangladesh were happy that it would be Justice Abu Sayeed Chowdhury who would represent the nation. In China in September 1971, Mao Zedong’s designated successor Lin Biao and his family perished in a plane crash. Lin, allegedly having planned a coup against Mao and failed to carry it out, was trying to flee to Mongolia. A sad story.

Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, a much diminished man since the military defeat inflicted on his country as well as Syria and Jordan by Israel in 1967, died in September 1970. The newspapers we read spoke of Vice President Anwar Sadat tearfully informing Egyptians of what surely was a calamity for them. We remember too Black September 1970, when Palestinian fedayeen hijacked three aircraft and blew them up in Jordan. The ramifications were terrible.

Pitched battles between King Hussein’s forces and the PLO led by Yasser Arafat eventually forced the latter out of the kingdom and to Tunisia. We would learn years later that one man instrumental in the military campaign against the PLO was Ziaul Haq, a colonel in the Pakistan army then on secondment to the Jordanian military. In September 1977, Zia, by then a general and Pakistan’s third military ruler, had his benefactor and former Prime Minister Bhutto arrested on murder conspiracy charges. Bhutto was never to come out of prison alive; and Zia died in a plane crash in August 1988.

Ho Chi Minh, the legendary Vietnamese leader, died in September 1969, more than five years before his forces could achieve a battlefield victory against American forces and reunify North and South Vietnam in April 1975. In China, Mao Zedong breathed his last in September 1976, leaving behind a country yet roiled by the Cultural Revolution he unleashed in 1966.

For the people of Bangladesh, a moment of national pride was Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s address before the United Nations General Assembly in September 1974, a few days after Bangladesh became a member of the world body. Our sense of patriotism was in full play hearing Bangabandhu speak at the UN in Bengali, the language we had struggled to uphold in 1952, the language around which was forged our nationalism.

It has been many Septembers I have experienced, much history I have lived through. I have lived in interesting times. 

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Syed Badrul Ahsan writes on politics, diplomacy and history