Category Archives: Newspaper/Magazine Articles

Genocide in East Pakistan

Saturday Review May 22, 1971; p. 20-21

The most fundamental of all rights the right of a man to come to the aid of a fellow human being is now being denied with a degree of official arrogance seldom displayed in recent history.

The people of East Pakistan, who are still suffering from homelessness and hunger caused by the tidal waves of less than a year ago, are now caught up in a man-made disaster. Their land has become a locked-in arena of authorized slaughter. Communications with the outside world have been reduced almost to the vanishing point. Those who have offered emergency medical aid or other help have been told to stay out.

The present situation has its remote origins in the division of the Indian subcontinent into two nations in 1947. The movement for independence from Great Britain had been complicated and imperiled by the existence of Hindu and Moslem blocs. Great Britain had fostered the concept of a partitioned subcontinent in which India would be predominantly Hindu and Pakistan would be predominantly Moslem. For a long time, Gandhi and Nehru had opposed partition, believing it imperative fat both religious orders to be accommodated within a single large national design. Gandhi and Nehru withdrew their opposition to partition, however, when it appeared certain that national independence might otherwise be indefinitely delayed.

The design for partition called for two nations. Actually, three nations emerged. For Pakistan was partitioned within itself, into East and West. The Western part was larger geographically and became the capital. The Eastern part was more populous and richer in resources. The units lay more than 1,000 miles apart.

In order to comprehend the geographical anomaly this physical separation represented, one has only to imagine what would have happened if Maine and Georgia had decided to form a separate nation, Maorgia, with practically the whole of the United States lying in between. Let us further suppose that the capital of the new nation would have been Augusta, Northern Maorgia, while most of the people and resources would have been in Southern Maorgia. The result would have been an administrative, political, and economic shambles. What has happened in Pakistan roughly fits that description. Further compounding the situation are the severe cultural and historic differences between Punjabi (West) and Bengali (East) societies.

For a time, the peoples of East and West Pakistan were held together by the spiritual and political exhilaration of a new nationalism. But the underlying difficulties grew more pronounced and visible year by year. The people of East Pakistan chafed under what they felt was West Pakistan’s latter-day version of British colonialism. They claimed they were not being represented in proportion to their numbers in either high posts or policies of government. They charged they were being exploited economically, furnishing labor and resources without sharing fairly in the profits from production. They pointed to the sharp disparity in wages and living conditions between East and West.

It was inevitable that the disaffection should reach an eruptive stage. There is no point here in detailing the facts attending the emergence of political movements seeking self-rule for East Pakistan. All that need be said that the central government at Islamabad finally did agree to submit self-rule propositions to the East Pakistan electorate. The result of the general election was an overwhelming vote in favor of self-rule. The central government at Islamabad not only failed to respect this popular decision, but ordered in armed troops to forestall implementation. The official slaughter began on March 26th.

A few documented episodes:

1) Tanks and soldiers with submachine guns and grenades seized Dacca University early in the morning on March 26. All students residing in Iqbal Hall, the dormitory center, were put to death. The building was gutted by shells from tanks.

2) One hundred and three Hindu students residing in Jagannath Hall of Dacca University were shot to death. Six Hindu students were forced at gunpoint to dig graves for the others and then were shot themselves.

3) Professor C. C. Dev, widely respected head of the Department of Philosophy, was marched out of his home to an adjacent field and shot.

4) The last names of other faculty members who were killed or seriously wounded: Minirussaman, Guhathakurta, Munim, Naqui, Huda, Innasali, Ali.

5) Central government troops forced their way into Flat D of Building 34 at the university, seized Professor Muniru Zaman, his son, his brother (employed by the East Pakistan High Court), and his nephew, and marched the group to the first-floor foyer, where they were machine-gunned.

6) A machine gun was installed on the roof of the terminal building at Sadarghat, the dock area of Old Dacca. On March 26, all civilians within range were fired upon. After the massacre, the bodies were dragged into buses. Some were burned. Some were dumped into the Buriganga River, adjacent to the terminal.

7) On the morning of March 28, machine guns were placed at opposite ends of Shandari Bazar, a Hindu artisan center in old Dacca. Central government forces suddenly opened fire on civilians trapped in the bazaar. The corpses were strewn on the street.

8) On the evening of March 28, soldiers invaded Ramna Kalibari, an ancient small Hindu settlement, killing all the occupants (estimated at 200). On March 29, about one hundred corpses were put on display in the village.

9) The flight of civilians from Dacca was blocked at gunpoint.

10) On the morning of April 2, forty soldiers entered a village named Barda, rounded up the male population (approximately 600) and marched them at gunpoint to Gulshan Park; where they were interrogated. Ten members of the group were then taken off; their fate is unknown.

The foregoing represents a small fraction of the authenticated accounts that in the aggregate tell of widespread killings; especially of youth and educated people. It is futile to attempt to estimate the number of dead or wounded. Each city and village has its own tales of horror. It is significant that the government at Islamabad, until only last week, enforced vigorous measures to keep out reporters.

The U.S. State Department is in possession of authenticated descriptions not just of the incidents mentioned above but of countless others. Such reports have been sent to Washington by the American Consul General in Dacca and by American physicians attached to AID. For some reason, the State Department has issued no report covering the information at its disposal.

American guns, ammunition, and other weapons sent to Pakistan were used in the attack on Bengali people.

So were weapons from the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. The United Nations has been helpless in the present situation. The Central government in Pakistan claims it is dealing with an internal situation beyond the jurisdiction of the U.N. the nation.

This may help to explain why the U.N. has so far been unable under its Charter to take action against what appears to be a provable case of genocide. But it doesn’t explain why men of conscience have not stood up in the United Nations to split the sky with their indignation.

The central government at Islamabad has forestalled efforts to send food, medicine, and medical personnel into the devastated zones. It seems inconceivable that this decision can be allowed to stand. The Bengalis may not possess political sovereignty, but they do possess human sovereignty under the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

The United States has not hesitated to speak sharply and effectively wherever its national interests were involved. Americans have every right to expect the United States to speak sharply when the human interest is involved. If the United States can find it within its means and its morality to send guns to Pakistan, it can also find it within its means and its morality to send food and first aid.

The President has said that events in Vietnam represent a test of American manhood. The proposition is dubious. What is certain, however, is that events in Pakistan are a test of American compassion and conscience.

The Agony of East Pakistan

Readers Digest, November 1971; pp.66-71

David Reed and John E. Frazer

Invaded and devastated by the army of its own government, this tortured land cries out for relief and for justice. If both are not granted still greater horrors may lie ahead

They come out of East Pakistan in endless columns, along trails stained with tears and blood. They are dressed in rags, robbed of everything they owned, the women raped, the children gaunt from hunger. They have been on the move for up to a month, hiding from Pakistan soldiers by day, slogging through flooded rice paddies at night. A vengeful army pursues them to the very border of India. Rifle and machine-gun fire crackles. The bedraggled columns scatter for cover. But soon they are moving again, streaming into India.

Sobbing violently, a middle-aged man says, “The soldiers took my two nephews. They kicked them with their boots, ducked them in an open sewer, then machine-gunned them. After that they took 50 to 60 young men of our village into a field and killed them with bayonets.” A woman who was shot in the leg clutches her daughter and says, “We were just about to cross the border when they started shooting at us. I don’t know what happened to my husband.” A ten-year-old boy, who lost an eye when an army patrol threw a grenade at him as he was tending cattle in a field, says, “Can anyone tell me what happened to my parents?”

Since late last March, when the Pakistan army launched this genocidal attack on the defenseless population of East Pakistan, more than eight million people have been driven from their native land. Millions more will surely follow. Moreover, the refugees have put grave strains on India, pushing India and West Pakistan to the brink of a war that could involve the two arch rivals of the communist world, the Soviet Union and China.

Return to Normal? While the horrors of the refugees are bad enough, something even more ghastIy is going on inside East Pakistan, also known as East Bengal. That land, scene of a devastating cyclone that claimed half a million lives last year,* is now being systematically ravaged by the Pakistan army. Diplomats and other foreigners in Dacca, East Pakistan’s capital, estimate that between a quarter- and a half-million civilians have been slaughtered since March. An American missionary in Dacca grits his teeth and says, “It’s murder-mass murder.”

The military junta that rules Pakistan has tried to cover up the atrocities, and maintains that East Bengal has largely returned to normal. But one of the authors of this article, who spent two weeks there last August, found evidence to the contrary on every hand. Touring three districts of East Bengal by car, he found not a single village or town that had not suffered at the hands of the troops. Many towns were half-empty, homes and shops looted’ and bummed, peopIe either dead, driven into exile or hiding in the countryside.

Perhaps a third of Dacca’s population is gone; its economy is crippled and its people are so terrified that no one ventures outdoors at night. Not far from Dacca, a missionary said, “The soldiers killed 249 people in our village. Fortunately for the wounded, high-powered bullets right through them, so the doctors didn’t have to probe.”

A farmer in a refugee camp along the Indian side of the border (?): “The headmaster of our school sitting on the veranda of his home, grading examination papers, when the soldiers dragged him out on the road and cut his throat.” Told (?) another refugee, “The soldiers found the doctor in our village to dig his own grave; then they shot him. The doctor in a border hospital pointed to a woman who had been raped repeatedly by the troops in the presence of her four children after the soldier had killed her husband.

Rule by Minority. The roo(?) disaster in Pakistan reach back (? Britain’s withdrawal from its Indian empire in 1947. Because India’s Muslim minority feared domination of the Hindu majority, a new IsIamic state called Pakistan was carved out of predominantly Muslim areas of Indian subcontinent. Muslims in the northwest became West Pakistan. Although East Bengal separated from West Pakistan by more than 1000 miles of Indian territory, it was included in the state, as East Pakistan, because people were mostly Muslims, there are profound differences between the two Pakistans. They have different languages. The people of the west, mostly Punjabis, are tall, light-skinned. Their land is (?) arid. East Pakistan, by contrast in tropical, peopled mostly by Bengalis, a small, dark-skinned people.

The Bengalis have long complained bitterly that the Punjabis in the west have treated them as colonial subjects. East Pakistan’s population before the massacres stood at 70 million, as compared with 58 million in the west, but the capital, Islamabad, is in West Pakistan. East Pakistan has accounted for 50 percent or more of Pakistan’s export earnings, chiefly from the production of jute, but the Bengalis claim that the west kept most of the money for its own development. West Pakistanis, moreover, took 80 percent of the jobs in the civil service, 90 percent of the posts in the armed forces.

Although efforts were made in the post-I947 years, democratic institutions never really took root in Pakistan, and in 1958 the military seized power .Then, last year, in a notable effort to return the country to civilian rule, Pakistan’s president, Gen. Yahya Khan, scheduled an election for December. Voters would select a national assembly that would frame a constitution and then assume the role of a parliament. That election set in motion the train of events leading to the present tragedy.

In the election campaign in East Pakistan, the Bengalis were electrified by the message of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, a 51-year-old political moderate who was leader of the Awami, or People’s League. Mujib, as he was popularly known, had spent nearly ten years as a political prisoner of the West Pakistan authorities. Now he campaigned on a program of autonomy for East Bengal which, he told cheering crowds, would shake off the hated domination of Islamabad. The central government could continue to control foreign affairs and defense for all Pakistan, but East Pakistan would govern itself internally and the bulk of its money as it saw fit.

Mujib’s People’s League won a landslide victory, capturing a clear majority in the 313-seat assembly. It not only would play the key role in the drafting of the constitution, but would form the next government for all of Pakistan. Elation swept East Pakistan. Neighboring India rejoiced, too. Mujib was known to be friendly to India. If he took over as Prime Minister of all Pakistan, relations with India would, it was hoped, improve.

“Bomber of Baluchistan.” But on March 1, Yahya, under mounting pressure from politicians in West Pakistan, postponed the opening of the national assembly, which had been set for two days later. The Bengalis, feeling that they were being robbed of their legitimate victory, exploded in riots and demonstrations. Mujib calmed his people, cautioned them against violence; and though he still held out for autonomy, something like a parallel government now existed. On March 23-Pakistan’s Independence Day-Mujib flew a new flag, the green, red and yellow banner of Bangla Desh (the Bengal nation) from his home. The West Pakistanis feared that the East was about to secede, and warned that no government could tolerate such a move.

At this point, a cold-eyed general named Tikka Khan arrived in Dacca to take command of West Pakistan troops stationed there. Tikka had won for himself the nick name “Bomber of Baluchistan” for having suppressed a tribal revolt in Baluchistan province by indiscriminate air and artillery strikes against civilians. Shortly after Tikka’s arrival, Yahya flew to Dacca for talks with Mujib. All the while, West Pakistan soldiers in civilian clothing were being flown into Dacca. On the afternoon of March 25, Yahya, having broken off the talks with Mujib, returned to West Pakistan. At II o’clock that evening, Tikka Khan was unleashed.

Suddenly, all of Dacca rocked with explosions. Troops opened fire with artillery on the city; tanks rumbled through the streets, gunning down anything that moved. The dormitories of the university, a stronghold of Bengali nationalism, were riddled by machine-gun fire. The invading soldiers went on a rampage in the old city, a particular political stronghold of Mujib, breaking down doors, dragging people into the street and shooting them. Shops were looted and burned. The barracks of the pro-Mujib Bengali police were gutted by tank cannon Troops burst into a telephone exchange and killed 40 persons on duty.

Special West Pakistan army squads had lists of people-professors, doctors, businessmen and other community leaders-whom they dragged off to army headquarters. Most have never been seen again. Although Mujib’s follower urged him to go into hiding, Mujib refused. Tikka’s troops took him off to imprisonment and an uncertain fate in West Pakistan.

With Dacca in ruins, Tikka sent his troops into the countryside, in each town the ghastly pattern was repeated. Anyone associated with the People’s League was killed. Young men, Muslim and Hindu alike, were rounded up and murdered. In almost every town, refugees report, women were raped.

The Bengalis Strike Back. Meanwhile, from Islamabad, Yahya whipped off decrees banning the People’s League and postponing the national assembly indefinitely. The new constitution, he declared, would be drafted not by the assembly, but rather by a committee that would handpicked by him. Autonomy for East Bengal was rejected; Islamabad’s rule would continue.

Yahya also imposed strict censor ship on the press: even today the people of West Pakistan have little idea of what is going on in the East. Tikka Khan was appointed governor of East Pakistan, which he ruled with the grace of a Nazi gauleiter in Occupied Europe until he was replaced in August.

Bangla Desh, however, has not been crushed. Surviving Bengali troops and police have formed the nucleus of the Mukti Bahini, or Liberation Army. There is no dearth of volunteers, and it is an open secret that India, which surrounds East Pakistan on three sides, is giving arms, training and encouragement to the Mukti Bahini guerrillas. Operating all along the 1350-mile border, these irregulars stab deeply into East Pakistan. Bombs explode nightly in the capital, and West Pakistan army and patrols are ambushed on country roads. The railway that links Chittagong, the main port, with Dacca has been severed.

Bangla Desh is paying a fearsome price for resistance. After each Mukti Bahini raid, the West Pakistan army, now bolstered to around 70,000 men, levels surrounding villages as “collective punishment.” And each retaliation sets off another column of refugees for India.

The Indian government is making every effort to care for these piteous people, but the influx is so staggering that new miseries await them there. For instance, in one of more than a thousand squalid refugee camps in India, 150,000 people live in straw hovels surrounded by mud and *****. There are few latrines, and the stench is such that people cover their faces with cloth. Because of the vast numbers, refugees have to wait in line for as long as ten hours for their food rations – ¾ pound of rice a day per adult, plus some lentils, vegetables when available, and a little salt and cooking oil.

The children suffer the most. Many are beginning to look like the starving children of Biafra, their ribs protruding, their stomachs distended. Almost all suffer from malnutrition or dysentery. Life-giving milk and other protein foods are available in some of the camps, but the crush is so great that many children never get any. A doctor at a border hospital says, “The children die so quickly that we don’t have time to treat them.”

Anger in India. India, itself one of the poorest and most overcrowded countries on earth, groans – under the burden. Although she has made some important gains in population control in the past six years, her population has now increased enormously. The United States and other foreign governments have responded generously with cash and food (America has given $40 million in food, $30.5 million in cash); yet the cost of supporting the Pakistanis may run to more than a billion dollars a year-nearly a seventh of the annual budget of India’s central government. India cannot give the refugees jobs, because millions of her own people are unemployed. Even the meager rations of the refugees, which cost 13 cents a day, are a point of friction: some 50 million Indians subsist on substantially less.

Many Indians angrily point out that they are being forced to pick up the bill for Pakistan’s atrocities against its own people. Some are urging that India take East Pakistan by military force so as to enable the refugees to return. India’s Prime Minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, so far has resisted these pressures-yet danger of war runs high. Such a war might well assume beyond-the-borders proportions. India has a new alliance with the Soviet Union; the Pakistan government has grown increasingly close to China.

Within East Bengal itself, a new horror looms: an acute threat of mass starvation, Even in normal times, the area must import part of its rice supply. Now it will be difficult, if not impossible, to move the rice from the small river ports to all of the outlying areas. In 1943, two to three million Bengalis died in a famine. There is every reason to fear it will be worse this time.

What can be done about this festering disaster ? Many Bengalis see a solution in independence won by guerrilla warfare. There is a chance of success, but also the certainty of much more bloodshed. It would be far better for the United States and other nations to bring pressure to bear on Islamabad to work out a political solution acceptable to the Bengalis and thus to defuse the present explosive situation and stave off a major war in the subcontinent. This done, the refugee columns would be set in motion once more-on a peaceful journey back to their homeland.

Pakistan: Reign of Terror

Newsweek April 19, 1971; p. 52-54

Blealy-eyed from lack of sleep and emotionally drained by what they called their “ten days of terror,” hundreds of Americans who had been trapped in war-ravaged East Pakistan finally got out to safety last week. Nearly 500 of them were evacuated by air from the East Pakistani capital of Dacca. Another 119 foreign nationals, including 37 Americans, were brought out by a British freighter from the battered East Pakistani port city of Chittagong. Most of them begged off from interviews, fearful that anything they said might endanger some 200 Americans-consular officials, businessmen and missionaries-who chose to remain behind in East Pakistan. But a few, unable to contain their outrage at the wanton slaughter they had witnessed, talked guardedly to newsmen. And their harrowing accounts tended to confirm earlier reports of savage repressions by the Punjabi-Ied Pakistani Army in its attempt to stamp out the Bengali rebellion in East Pakistan.

The Americans evacuated from Chittagong told NEWSWEEK’S Tony Clifton that the bitter fighting there had reduced East Pakistan’s largest port to a ghost town. “In the first few days,” recalled Neil O’Toole, a New Yorker working for a private charitable organization, “I actually saw Awami League people [supporters of Bengali nationalist leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman] patrolling the streets with bows and arrows, and I wondered how they could possibly hold off the army with things like that.” Four days later, the reinforced Pakistani Army gained full control of the city and launched a reign of terror. “Some Punjabi soldiers called a kid over and hit him around the head and in the groin and then forced him to his knees,” said Fritz Blankenship, a crane operator who had been employed by an American construction firm. “The kid was crying, begging and the soldiers just watched him for a minute.” Finally, according to Blankenship, “they just shot him out of hand and walked on.”

A similar wave of atrocities was reported by the Americans who had been in Dacca. As soon as the curfew was lifted, they said, at least a half-dozen Americans were met by nearly hysterical Bengali friends who told of a massacre at Dacca University. When three young Americans agreed to investigate the story, they found a staircase in a faculty building splattered with the bloodshed when five teachers were dragged out and coldly mowed down by gunfire. Still more shattering was the experience of Victor Chen, who had been visiting Dacca as a tourist when the war broke out and was led by a group of excited Bengalis to a shantytown set in the middle of Dacca’s sprawling racetrack. “The houses were burned down, and some were still smoldering,” he told NEWSWEEK’S Milan J. Kubic. “Literally dozens of dead bodies were strewn all over the place, many of them small kids, all of them riddled by bullets.” And another young American said in obvious disgust: “We just don’t see why the U.S. should go on supporting a regime that behaves in this fashion.”

Cautious: Indeed, Washington’s policy of calculated ambiguity on Pakistan has left the U.S. open to charges that official silence is tantamount to support for the martial-Iaw regime of President Mohammed Yahya Khan. Even touchier was the charge that U .S.-supplied Patton and Sabre jets were being used Pakistani Army to slaughter Bengalis. But State Department officials argued that the unsettled circumstances dictated a cautious policy. They also pointed out that no American weapons have been Delivered to the Pakistani Army since 1965. And last week, the department’s spokesman, Charles Bray 3rd, expressed “sympathy” to the “victims” and hoped that “it will be possible soon to alleviate the suffering caused by recent events” in East Pakistan. Though U .S. officials denied any implications beyond humanitarian concern, Bray’s use of the word “victims..struck some Pakistani Government officials as a slap at the Yahya Khan regime, which has never conceded that there was much suffering going on in East Pakistan.

Washington, of course, was hardly alone in this dilemma. Both the Soviet Union and Communist China, the principal purveyors of arms to Pakistan since 1965, have only begun to choose their rhetorical stance-with Moscow urging Yahya to find a way to end the fighting and Peking edging toward Yahya’s side. But by far the most difficult position was that facing the government of India, where popular sentiments remained overwhelmingly pro-Bengali and where pressures mounted for direct action. “It is neither proper nor possible for India to keep quiet [over the Pakistani situation),” said Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

The watch-and-wait policy assumed by most foreign governments stemmed from a widely held belief that the Pakistani Army will ultimately fail in its attempt to subjugate 75 million East Pakistanis. Still, fears increased that the army was fully prepared to wreak bloody havoc even in a futile try. An American businessman who was evacuated from Dacca last week recalled asking a Punjabi major why the army was killing so many people. “There are millions of them, and only thousands of us,” the major replied. “The only way we can control these people is by making them scared stiff.” And from what he saw, the American said, “it looked as if the army went berserk. I can’t help feeling sorry about the poor Bengalis in that hell.”

Pakistan: Vultures and Wild Dogs

Newsweek April 26, 1971; pp. 35-36

For more than two weeks, the Pakistani Army of President Mohammed Yahya Khan had played a curious waiting game, Sitting tight in their well-fortified cantonments in the rebellious eastern wing of their divided country, the federal troops virtually ignored the taunts of the secessionist “liberation forces.” But then early last week, the lull came to a sudden end, Springing from their strongholds, the Punjabi regulars simultaneously staged more than a dozen devastating attacks from one end of beleaguered East Pakistan to the other, And when the blitzkrieg was over, it was clear that the less-than-one-month-old Republic of Bangla Desh (Bengal nation) had been delivered a stunning blow.

In a civil war already marked by brutality, the lightning attacks were notable for their savagery, In the port city of Chittagong, Pakistani troops reportedly forced Bengali prisoners to ride on the front of a truck, shouting “Victory for Bengal” – an independence slogan. When other Bengalis emerged from their hiding places, the Pakistanis opened fire with machine guns. And in the cities of Sylhet and Comilla along the eastern border, West Pakistani firepower routed the folIowers of nationalist leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and left the bodies of scores of dead peasants to be picked apart by vultures and wild dogs.

All in all, the bitter campaign seemed to suggest that the West Pakistanis had more than purely military objectives in mind. In city after city, in fact, the soldiers were apparently determined to shatter the economic base of East Pakistan in order to crush the independence movement. On orders from the Islamabad high command, troops systematically gunned down students, engineers, doctors and any other persons with a potential for leadership, whether they were nationalists or not. “They want to push us back to the eighteenth century,” said one Bengali soldier,” so that there will be famine and we will be reduced to eating grass. They want to make sure that no head will ever be raised against them again.”

Despite the devastating offensive, the Bengalis showed little inclination to throw in the towel. A group of Mujib’s Awami League colleagues announced the formation of a Bangla Desh war Cabinet, promising “freedom as long as there is sun over Bengal.” Beyond the rhetoric, the rebels were hoping that the approaching monsoon season would sever the West Pakistanis’ already strained logistical lifeline. “The supply lines are Yahya Khan’s Achilles’ heel,” said one pro-Bengali analyst. “By our calculations, the Pakistani Army is facing the monsoons without a supply margin. The commanders cannot be happy.”

Locked Up: Happy or not, the West Pakistani leaders had, most observers said, good reason for confidence. The Westerners claimed to have Mujib locked up and awaiting trial on charges of treason. And with the dynamic, 51-year-old symbol of the rebel movement seemingly out of the way, the new government appeared to be more shadow than substance. In the field, the Bengalis have suffered staggering casualties, losing as many as 25,000 men.

More important, the fighting disposition of the Bengalis was increasingly open to question. “I met a steady stream of refugees carrying their belongings in big bundles on their heads and driving small Hocks of scrawny goats or cattle,” cabled NEWSWEEK’S Milan I. Kubic after a trip into East Pakistan last week. “But I saw only one Toyota jeep of the ‘Mukti fouj,’ Bengal’s liberation army. Its unarmed driver, a young Bengali from Jhingergacha, had an idea that the enemy was just up the road, but neither he nor the two other soldiers with him seemed anxious to seek battle. ‘What would we fight with?’ he asked with a grin. ‘We haven’t got anything’.”

Neighbors: That let-someone-else-do-it attitude, combined with the absence of effective central leadership, did not augur well for Bangla Desh. But one big question mark remained: the reaction of the neighboring big powers-China and India. Almost from the beginning of the conflict, the West Pakistanis have charged that arch-rival India was an active participant on the side of East Pakistan. And last week Islamabad officials claimed to have wiped out two companies of Indian border-security forces allegedly operating within the eastern province.

For its part, New Delhi stoutly denied any direct involvement. And most observers on the scene supported that contention. Moreover, it seemed certain that President Yahya Khan was trumpeting the charges at least in part to unite his own people-many of whom had gotten queasy about the reports of full-scale slaughter in the east. But it was equally apparent that New Delhi had indeed gone out of its way to make friendly noises toward the rebel Bengalis-and to take a slap at Islamabad. Throughout the week, Indian newspapers gleefully carried accounts of purported Pakistani atrocities. And the Indian Cabinet met in a well-publicized but closed session to discuss recognition of Bangla Desh.

Chou’s Cable: In response, Peking seemed more than willing to weigh in with a tough statement in support of the West Pakistanis. In the most specific declaration since the fighting broke out late last month, Premier Chou En-Iai sent a cable to Yahya blasting “Indian expansionists” and adding that the Chinese would firmly back the Pakistanis “in their just struggle to safeguard their -state sovereignty and national independence.” On top of that, there were rumors throughout Asia last week that the West Pakistanis only instituted the military crackdown after extensive consultations with Peking.

Yet for all the ominous signs of a brewing confrontation on the subcontinent, most analysts doubted that the rhetoric would escalate to action, at least not in the near future. For one thing, China’s support for Islamabad-Peking’s ally in its long-haul competition with India-seemed to have been something of a pro-forma necessity. For another, the Indians are currently more than preoccupied with their own domestic problems. Still, the volatile brinkmanship of Yahya Khan and the highly emotional Indian response carried with them the threat of a major explosion. “If the fighting and the bloodshed simmer on,” said one observer, “then there’s always the possibility that any tiny spark may send the entire region up in flames-eventually engulfing all of Pakistan, India and maybe even China as well.”

The Terrible Blood Bath of Tikka Khan

Newsweek June 28, 1971; pp. 43-44

Ever since the Pakistani civil war broke out last March, President Mohammad Yahya Khan has done his utmost to prevent reports on the ruthless behavior Pakistani Army in putting down the Bengali fight for independence from reaching the outside world. Most foreign journalists have been barred from East Pakistan, and only those West Pakistani newsmen who might be expected to produce “friendly” accounts have been invited to tour East Pakistan and tell their countrymen about the rebellion. In at least one instance, however, that policy backfired. Anthony Mascarenhas, a Karachi newsman who also writes for London Sunday Times, was so horrified by that he and his family fled to London to publish the full story. Last week, in the Times, Mascarenhas wrote -that he was told repeatedly by Pakistani military and civil authorities in Dacca that the government intends “to cleanse East Pakistan once and for all of the threat of secession, even if it means killing off 2 million people.” And the federal army, concluded Mascarenhas, is doing exactly that with a terrifying thoroughness.”

That the Pakistan Army is visiting a dreadful blood bath upon the people of East Pakistan is also affirmed by newsmen and others who have witnessed the flight of 6 million terrified refugees into neighboring India. NEWSWEEK’s Tony Clifton recently visited India’s refugee-dogged border regions and cabled the following report:

Anyone who goes to the camps and hospitals along India’s border with Pakstan comes away believing the Punjabi Army capable of any atrocity. I have seen babies who’ve been shot, men who have had their backs whipped raw. I’ve seen people literally struck **** by the horror of seeing their children murdered in front of them or their daughters dragged off into sexual slavery. I have no doubt at all that there have been a hundred My Lais and Lidices in East Pakistan-and I think there will be more. My personal reaction is one of wonder more than anything else. I’ve seen too many bodies to be horrified by anything much any more. But I find myself standing still again and again, wondering how any man can work himself into such a murderous frenzy.

Slaughter: The story of one shy little girl in a torn pink dress with red and green Bowers has a peculiar horror. She could not have been a danger to anyone. Yet I met her in a hospital at Krishnanagar, hanging nervously back among the other patients, her hand covering the livid scar on her neck where a Pakistani soldier had cut her throat with his bayonet. “I am Ismatar, the daughter of the late Ishague Ali,” she told me formally. “My father was a businessman in Khustia.

About two months ago he left our house and went to his shop and I never saw him again. That same night after I went to bed I heard shouts and screaming, and when I went to see what was happening, the Punjabi soldiers were there. My four sisters were lying dead on the floor, and I saw that they had killed my mother. While I was there they shot my brother-he was a bachelor of science. Then a soldier saw me and stabbed me with his knife. I fell to the floor and played dead. When the soldiers left I ran and a man picked me up on his bicycle and I was brought here.”

Suddenly, as if she could no longer bear to think about her ordeal, the girl left the room. The hospital doctor was explaining to me that she was brought to the hospital literally soaked in her own blood, when she pushed her way back through the patients and stood directly in front of me. “What am I to do?” she asked. “Once I had five sisters and a brother and a father and a mother. Now I have no family. I am an orphan. Where can I go? What will happen to me?”

Victims: “You’ll be all right,” I said stupidly. “You’re safe here.” But what will happen to her and to the thousands of boys and girls and men and women who have managed to drag themselves away from the burning villages whose flames I saw lighting up the East Pakistani sky each night? The hospital in Agartala, the capital city of Tripura, is just half a mile from the border, and it is already overcrowded with the victims of the rampaging Pakistani Army. There is a boy of 4 who survived a bullet through his stomach, and a woman who listlessly relates how the soldiers murdered two of her children in front of her eyes, and then shot her as she held her youngest child in her alms. “The bullet passed through the baby’s buttocks and then through her left arm,” Dr. R. Datta, the medical superintendent, explains. “But she regained consciousness and dragged herself and the baby to the border.” Another woman, the bones in her upper leg shattered by bullets, cradles an infant in her arms. She had given birth prematurely in a paddy field alter she was shot. Yet, holding her newborn child in one hand and pulling herlelf along with the other, she finally reached the border.

“Although I know these people, I am continually amazed at how tough they are,” says Datta. Still, there are some who cannot cope. I step over two small boys lying on the floor, clinging to each other like monkeys. ..Refugees say their village was burned about a week ago and everyone in it was killed except these two,” the doctor says. “We have had them for three days and we don’t know who they are. They are so terrified— by what they saw they are unable to speak. They just lie there holding onto each other. It is almost impossible to get them apart even long enough to feed them. It is hard to say when they will regain their speech or be able to live normal lives again.”

New Jersey Congressman Cornelius Gallagher, who visited the Agartala hospital, says he came to india thinking the atrocity stories were exaggerated. But when he actually saw the wounded he began to believe that; if anything, the reports had been toned down. A much-decorated officer with Patton in Europe during World War II, Gallagher told me: “In the war, I saw the worst areas of France-the killing grounds in Normandy-but I never saw anything like that. It took all of my strength to keep from breaking down and crying.”

Rape: Other foreigners, too, were dubious about the atrocities at first, but the endless repetition of stories from different sources convinced them. “I am certain that troops have thrown babies into the air and caught them on their bayonets,” says Briton, John Hastings, a Methodist missionary who has lived in Bengal for twenty years. “I am certain that troops have raped girls repeatedly, then killed them by pushing their bayonets up between their legs.”

All this savagery suggests that the Pakistani Army is either crazed by blood or, more likely, is carrying out a calculated policy of terror amounting to genocide against the whole Bengali population.

The architect appears to be Lt. Gen. Tikka Khan, the military governor of East Pakistan. Presumably, Pakistan’s President knows something about what is going on, but he may not realize that babies are being burned alive, girls sold into virtual slavery and whole families murdered. He told the military governor to put down a rebellion, and Tikka Khan has done it efficiently and ruthlessly. As a result, East Pakistan is still nominally part of Pakistan. But the brutality inflicted by West on East in the last three months has made it certain that it will only be a matter of time before Pakistan becomes two countries. And those two countries will be irreparably split-at least until the last of today’s maimed and brutalized children grow old and die with their memories of what happened when Yahya Khan decided to preserve their country.

Mujibnagar Day: A milestone in our liberation war

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Mujibnagar, April 17, 1971: C-in-C Col. Osmany, Acting President Syed Nazrul Islam, and Prime Minister Tajuddin Ahmed at the swearing in ceremony of the first Bangladesh government.

The Daily Star: Point-Counterpoint
Vol. 5 Num 316 – Sun. April 17, 2005

By Zahid Hossain

Today is April 17 — Mujibnagar Day. On this day in 1971, the Mujibnagar government was formed by the elected leaders of Bangladesh as the rightful constitutional, logical, and realistic step forward towards the full realization of our dream of an independent country of our own.

The observance of Mujibnagar Day in a befitting manner now warrants a special significance, specially in the backdrop of a sinister and ominous move by a certain quarter to distort our history of the war of independence. On this day the country and the people of Bangladesh should always gratefully cherish the memories of the freedom fighters and those political leaders who led them with deep affection and profound regard as well as with their firm determination and conviction.

The formation of the Mujibnagar government and its pronouncement to the world at large on April 17, 1971 is really a red-letter event in our national history, specially after the thumping victory of the Awami League in the elections of 1970 under the leadership of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

The 167 MNAs and 293 MPs who composed the Constituent Assembly fulfilling their constitutional obligation to the electors, gave a true shape and constitutional perspective on this day, making the dream of an independent Bangladesh a reality. From this point of view, Mujibnagar day (April 17) is a landmark in our struggle for independence as well as in our national history.

The Mujibnagar government was formed at the Baidyanathtala mango grove of Meherpur, a former Subdivision of Kustia district following the April 10 proclamation of independence order of Bangladesh. The oath taking was witnessed by hundreds of foreign journalists who had assembled there to hail the birth of a new nation.

The president of the new nation was Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman; Syed Nazrul Islam became the acting president in the absence of Bangabandhu; Tajuddin Ahmed, the Prime Minister; M. Mansur Ali, the Finance Minister; M. Quamruz Zaman, the Home, Relief and Rehabilitation Minister; and Khandakar Mustaque Ahmed, Foreign Affairs and Law Minister. General M. A. G. Osmani who was then a retired colonel and MNA elected from Awami League was made the C-in-C of the Bangladesh armed forces.

Herculean task
It was a Herculean task. Organizing civil administration and the freedom fighters, securing arms for the latter and training them, mobilizing international support for the liberation war through intense diplomatic action, ensuring speedy communication and effective coordination of various activities at hundred different levels, above all, keeping the morale of the freedom fighters high throughout the dark, difficult, and strenuous days of the war, called for extraordinary wisdom, dedication, patience, foresight, courage, and tenacity on the part of the Mujibnagar government and all those connected with it.

The formation of the Mujibnagar government had great significance for the fact that the great men who gave leadership to this great event in the absence of our supreme leader and continued the armed struggle for the following eight months, having allowed no breach in the unity of their people, which was one of the cornerstones of our total liberation war, fought valiantly involving everyone, and above all kept our leader alive in the minds of every freedom fighters as if he was fighting side by side with them.

The creation of April 17 in fact, gave the total war effort a fuller meaning. It cemented the unity of the people, brought the world closer to the existence of freedom fighters, made the war efforts bloom in its full focus, and realized the presence of Bangladesh in the comity of nations. It was in effect a formal introduction to the rest of the world of the nature of the political leadership that was set to guide the nation into a concerted and organized war of national independence.

That Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was the paramount leader of the country, both in its struggle for constitutional legitimacy and military triumph, was given political and moral sanction by everything that happened on April 17, 1971 in a spot of territory that was to be forever transformed in the annals of politics.

Bangabandhu never preached revolution
Bangabandhu had never preached revolution and political terrorism had never been part of his platform. Therefore, when the assault of the Pakistani military machine came, it remained for him to inform his associates that a long and hard struggle on the battlefield had become necessary. The declaration of independence he made moments before his arrest by the Pakistani military forces forced upon his associates the need for armed struggle. And that was proof that while he awaited uncertain and terrible incarceration, he had briefed his associates on what needed to be done. The dispersal of the leadership out of Dhaka as the army went into action was a sign that there was to be no turning back from the course Bengalis had set for themselves. And thus the formation of Mujibnagar government was undoubtedly a rightful constitutional as well as logical and realistic step by the trusted and capable associates of the great leader.

The establishment of the Mujibnagar government was an absolute necessity for another reason. Had it not been put in place, it is reasonably certain that diffuse guerilla movements would have spawned all over the country without any form of central control. The danger inherent in such politics lies in an absence of legitimacy. And in Bangladesh’s politics at that point in time, the absence of the Mujibnagar government would only have given the freedom struggle a clearly secessionist hue, to the immense delight of the Pakistanis and to the consternation of a Bengali population directly in the military’s line of fire. Seen in such light, the presence of Acting President Syed Nazrul Islam and Prime Minister Tajuddin Ahmed with their colleagues deep in Meherpur in April 1971 was a clear, unequivocal statement of intent: that the elected representatives of the people of Bangladesh had taken it upon themselves to give shape and substance to an independent statehood for them.

It was thus that the global community was left with hardly a choice. The initiation of the war of national liberation, given the fact that it was being waged by a leadership privy to the electorally acknowledged support of the nation, could not be dismissed as an insurrection or a secessionist enterprise. Moreover, the military’s misadventure (swooping upon Bengali political aspirations through an exercise of brazenness) assisted the cause not a little.

Flight to India
The killing of unarmed civilians, the razing of villages and townships, and the atrocities against women only strengthened the cause of the provisional government. In the months between March and December 1971, the flight of ten million to India convinced the global community of the necessity and the righteousness of the Bengali cause, and helped the Mujibnagar government to inform the world that there was no alternative to an independent Bangladesh.

The provisional government undertook the onerous responsibility of moulding international opinion in Bangladesh’s favour: the effort was assisted a great deal by the momentum of declaration of allegiance to the national struggle by Bengali diplomats stationed in Pakistani missions abroad. Placing the entire diplomatic efforts in the hands of a well-respected personality like Justice Abu Sayeed Chowdhury was yet another factor for the success of the efforts of Mujibnagar government in mobilizing world opinion in our favour.

The speeches and statements made by the Acting President, late Syed Nazrul Islam, Prime Minister late Tajuddin Ahmed and other leaders of the exiled Mujibnagar government at the formal oath taking ceremony and other subsequent occasions were widely appreciated world over as those reflected really democratic and progressive principles of the new government. The guiding principles and the state policies announced time to time by the exiled government were all fully democratic based on universal human rights principles and other widely accepted international norms and protocols.

Finally, the formation of the Mujibnagar government was the real birth of a new nation — a nation imbued with the spirit of democratic values, nationalism, secularism, and socialism, obtained from the call of a man whose stature as a statesman had surpassed any of his time and most of his predecessors, who united the Bengali speaking people of a piece of land to one man and raised a nation of indomitable courage and splendour, so powerful and splendid in its commitment that it went head on to face a fiercely equipped army of Pakistan, bare-handed bred with the courage of conviction and valour and strength of insurmountable will of head, heart and unity to be independent and ready to shed the last drop of blood of every individual born on this soil then called East Pakistan.

Dr. Tawfiq-e-Elahi Chowdhury BB who as the Sub-Divisional officer (SDO) of the then Meherpur Sub-Division, under Kustia district played the most critical role in organizing the Mujibnagar Ceremony has termed it as a “Milestone of our national history” saying that it gave “life and legitimacy” to the national liberation movement both internally and internationally.

Talking to me recently Dr. Chowdhury expressed his extreme annoyance at the recent trend of distorting the history of the our liberation war aiming to divide and confuse the new generation: “I am sure the new generation will go back to the sources of history and find out the real history and the truth shall prevail,” he expressed his firm conviction.

Almost similar sentiment has been expressed by Mr. Mahbubuddin Ahmed, BB who led the guard of honour given to the members of the Mujibnagar Cabinet on that auspicious day. Mr. Mahbub who was Sub-Division Police office of Jhenaidah (SDPO) at that time talking to me recently was very critical of the recent move by a section of our so-called intellectuals to distort the history of our liberation war.

However, the nation should gratefully remember the heroic courage, conviction, and determination of the politicians, the freedom fighters, and the people in general who sacrificed their everything for the cause of an independent country of our own. Equally firm determination, selfless sacrifice, and deep sense of patriotism are now also needed for the protection and proper implementation of the spirit of our liberation war against the designs of a section of our people who are engaged in doing everything possible to reestablish the so-called nationalism based on religion. Reaffirmation of strong conviction and united endeavour, as in 1971, are possibly the real need of the hour.
Zahid Hossain served with the Mujibnagar Government as Chief of Psychological Warfare, Ministry of Defense. The above article appeared in the Daily Star on Mujibnagar Dibash (Apr 17), 2005.