THE BALTIMORE SUN, TUESDAY, MARCH 30. 1971
YAHYA PLANNED ATTACK
ON EAST PAKISTAN A Technicality Does Not Disguise
His Efforts to Snare Mujib
By John E. Woodruff
(Sun Staff Correspondent)
New Delhi, March 29-President A. M. Yahya Khan’s West Pakistan military regime is offering the world a legal technicality as the reason for its Army’s carefully co-coordinated surprise attack on East Pakistan.
Both President Yahya and key West Pakistani politicians have offered the same reason for their abrupt cancellation of the two weeks of political talks that preceded the Army’s crackdown on East Bengal’s nonviolent movement.
The reason, as expressed by President Yahya in his radio speech to the nation Friday night, was that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the Bengali leader of East Pakistan, demanded that power be turned over to elected civilians by proclamation before the proposed National Assembly met.
Same Explanation
Omar Kasoury, a member of the West Pakistan-based Pakistan Peoples party’s delegation to the negotiations, offered an identical explanation to reporters who spoke with him Friday morning as he left Dacca Intercontinental Hotel under heavy guard with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, head of the Peoples party.
Such a proclamation. General Yahya told the nation Friday night, “would not have been worth the paper it was written on, and he (Sheikh Mujib) could have done anything with impunity.”
He did not explain how much a proclamation would have differed from the “legal-framework order”-a presidential proclamation with a longer title and the sole authority for last December’s election and for the National Assembly that the Army never permitted to meet.
Instead, he said he had tentatively accepted the plan despite reservations-but on condition that all West Pakistani politicians give their “unequivocal agreement” to a plan that effectively would have put Sheikh Mujib’s Bengali majority in charge of the country.
“Yahya has shown some surprising political naiveté before,” one of Pakistan’s best- informed foreign newsmen remarked after listening to Friday’s radio broadcast in an Army truck that was preparing to take all foreign correspondents in Dacca to the airport for expulsion.
“But that condition is not naive, it’s disingenuous. It will make the whole purpose of the talks look like a delaying action while they flew in more troops from West Pakistan.”
Plan To Deceive Recalled
The comment was not the first serious suggestion that the talks were a delaying action. One well connected traveler arriving in Dacca from Karachi shocked newsmen a week before the conflagration by reporting that two generals he regarded as highly reliable had told him that the Army’s plan was to lull the Bengali leadership into believing the talks could succeed, then to crack down without warning.
No one wrote anything about it at the time, because there was no other equally reliable source to back the suggestion, and no one really wanted to entertain the idea that President Yahya would accept such a course after staking his reputation for two years on a plan to turn the government over to elected civilians.
There still is no way of having ironclad certainty as to the military regime’s motives, but no one who witnessed the sequence of last Thursday’s events can say with confidence today that it was not all planned in advance.
By the time Sheikh Mujib’s statement calling for a general strike on Saturday to protest clashes between troops and civilians in outlying areas was read to the press Thursday night. President Yahya had already left his heavily fortified house. There hardly had been time for him to pack his bags between the end of the last meetings of his and Mr. Bhutto’s advisers and the time a Bengali newsman said he saw the president leave.
By 7 P. M., soldiers were going up and down the elevator at the Intercontinental Hotel-to the 11th floor, which Mr. Bhutto had turned into a fortress complete with half a dozen automatic rifles in the lobby-at the rate of two a minute.
This activity continued for almost an hour until a large group of soldiers came down carrying a battered black cardboard suitcase, which was entrusted to a platoon of 20 or so troops who marched from the hotel to the president’s house where a few guards were still on duty. What was in the black suitcase remains unknown?
An Inauspicious Time
Asked the whereabouts of the president’s press aid, who had always been at the gate to greet correspondents, the guard said: “He is gone somewhere I don’t know when he is coming back.’ Please go ahead now. You come back 10 o’clock tomorrow.”
Back at the hotel, only two blocks from the president’s house, the guard appealed to be double its number on any previous night. None of the face that had become familiar since the guard was thrown up Sunday to protect Mr. Bhutto were on duty that night.
The familiar faces were a contingent of East Pakistan Rifles, the Bengali home guard that technically was under Army command but believed sympathetic to the Awami League. The new troops wore uniforms with neither unit, nor other identifying badges-only rank, insignia and battle ribbons. They were tall, like Punjabis, not short, like Bengalis.
Unfamiliar Faces
In front of the hotel a captain said: “My orders for tonight are that if anyone tries to leave the hotel after 11 P.M. we are to shoot them. Please-go inside, I don’t want to do anything to you.”
Inside the lobby, a sign had been posted saying “Please don’t go outside. After a few attempts to talk the captain out of, it, no one went outside.
Then The Firing Began
Within minutes, sporadic automatic weapons fire could be heard all over town. By 1 A. M. heavy machine guns and artillery had opened up, and the first fires were visible. The first night of shooting and burning had begun.
The events could be described only as a cheerfully co-coordinated, premeditated attack on a defenseless population in an attempt to crush a movement whose main tactic had been non-violent non-co-operation.
The attack was launched with no broadcast or published warning, although officers claimed the next day they had used loud-speakers to warn civilian crowds to clear the streets.
The first radio broadcast announcing a curfew was made in mid-morning, eight hours after foreign newsmen watched soldiers turn a jeep-mounted machine gun without warning on 15 empty-handed youths who walked toward them slowly, shouting defiantly.
Ten Hours Later
It was 10 hours after that curfew announcement that President Yahya read his radio speech giving the legal technicality over which the talks broke down and denouncing the man with whom he had been negotiating the previous day for the “treason” of trying to separate East Pakistan from the West.
President Yahya’s outline of Sheikh Mujib’s bargaining position makes a plausible argument that the Awami League leader had pushed at the end for a degree of autonomy that would virtually have amounted to independence.
Given the pressures put on Sheikh Mujib by student nationalists and other more radical elements, it is possible that he had demanded as much as President Yahya said, though the president carefully avoided listing this as the obstacle that finally stopped the talks.
Not Always So Extreme
Whatever his demands were at the end, they had not always been so extravagant as the president now claims they had become
For five years, the Awami League had put forth only one program: a constitution giving East Pakistan control of its own foreign aid, foreign trade and taxes. That program and the romantic tales of Sheikh Mujib’s six imprisonments for his resistance to the country’s succession of military dictatorships gave the Awami League enormous popularity throughout East Bengal.
For the appeal fell on political ground fertilized by two decades in which 55 million West Pakistanis had consistently used their control of the Army to dominate the 75 million Bengalis.
Most of the taxes, most of the foreign-exchange earnings, and most of the people came from East Pakistan.
Most of the taxes, most of the foreign-exchange earnings, and most of the foreign aid went into West Pakistan.
60 Percent of Budget
The Army is now trying to bring Bengalis to heel consumes more than 60 per cent of a national budget that is supported mainly with Bengali tax money. It is a point that Bengalis never cease to stress.
Less than 10 per cent of the soldiers-and even fewer officers-are Bengalis, another point the Bengalis make repeatedly.
But the differences between Pakistan’s two wings are not altogether economic. The West is dominated by tall Punjabis; who share their wing of the country with many other racial and language groups. The East is almost entirely Bengali in both language and racial stock.
The two ethnic groups have not only different languages but also different foods, different clothing, and strikingly different ways of practicing Islam, the national religion which reason Pakistan was carved out of the British Indian Empire at independence.
Known For His Swagger
A typical Punjabi soldier noticeable on the streets of Dacca by the swaggering way his arms swing as he walks among the shorter, dirtier and less erect Bengalis.
Despite these differences, and despite the racial unity of the Bengalis compared to the racial diversity in the West, the Army seems to have started its cautious moves toward elected civilian rule on the assumption that a united Western electorate could prevail over the multitude of parties with which the East has often been plagued.
“We believed that the old-line politicians in the West would easily carry the day and, whatever their local differences, prevail in the Assembly over a divided East,” one key Western politician said two weeks ago.
“Instead, Bhutto, came out of nowhere with a Socialist appeal and beat us all, and Mujib rode that damned cyclone in for a complete sweep in the East.”
With the election imminent, not one major figure from the Islamabad government ever showed serious concern the survivors of the cyclone and tidal wave late last fall that killed hundreds of thousands of Bengalis just before the election.
When other nations came flooding in with aid while West Pakistan kept its helicopters at home-in case of war with India, the government said a major political turning point grew out of what might have been just another, though bigger, disaster in an area where disasters are a predictable part of the yearly cycle.
“Mujib had been a power, but the disaster made him unstoppable,” an American analyst says. “That was what changed the course.”
It Became Clear
When Sheikh Mujib won an absolute majority of the Assembly’s seats, while Mr. Bhutto won a majority of the West’s seats, the extent of the miscalculation became clear.
It was an understandable miscalculation: Pakistan had never before had a really free election on which to base predictions.
But it left the West in an impossible predicament, for West Pakistan’s economy was based largely on its ability to drain profits from the East by various means, and the Awami League program would have put a dead stop to that.
Blamed the Sheikh
Mr. Bhutto threatened to boycott the Assembly and to call a general strike if Sheikh Mujib did not forswear in advance the Awami League’s insistence on local control of foreign aid and foreign trade, but the Bengali leader vowed to use his majority to enact the program that helped-elect him.
Faced with a sure fiasco, President Yahya revoked the March 3 date he had set for the Assembly’s opening and went on radio March 6 to blame Sheikh Mujib for violence that broke out when the postponement was announced.
There was no evidence in East Bengal to back that charge, though the president, who came to East Pakistan only after nine more days, may have had no way of knowing the truth.
What actually took place in most areas was that police left the streets to the mobs, but Awami League volunteers, armed only with bamboo canes, brought the mobs under control in less than two days with the help of a widely publicized appeal by the Sheikh for nonviolence.
At A Standstill By March 9, the Sheikh’s non-co-operation call-issued in a speech during a massive rally two days earlier-had brought government and other public institutions to a standstill and thus deprived-West Pakistan for the first time in years of its power to govern the East.
Gradually, the Sheikh began to open those offices and institutions that the Awami League high command felt it could control, adequately.
The Awami League’s control of many institutions was impressive, but there were those which it never felt sufficiently confident of to open. Schools and courts were among them.
Other basically civilian services-such as immigration and customs-never were seriously threatened, the Awami League never questioned the Army’s gunpoint control of the checkpoints.
But Awami League access to closely relate services road and rail transport and stevedores at Chittagong, for example-made the government’s control of these customs and immigration checkpoints almost irrelevant:
After a week, the Awami League even started collecting many taxes, although it never got the income tax back into operation.
By the time President Yahya arrived in Dacca for negotiations with Sheikh Mujib- after first spending long hours with Mr. Bhutto in West Pakistan-the government’s control was so, thoroughly dissolved that even the new military governor had not been able to find anyone to swear him into office.
The new governor, It. Gen. Tikka Khan, was regarded by Bengalis as a toughminded hawk. They called him “the butcher of Baluchistan,” a reference to his alleged role in suppressing a rebellion by Baluchi citizens of West Pakistan in the 1960’s.
The Bengali clandestine radio is now gloating daily over reports, a mob somehow go to General Tikka’s house and killed him, but there is no way to know if the report is true unless a replacement is named without further explanation.
Left without a Word
General Tikka’s predecessor, a man known among Bengalis for his understanding of their movement, left Dacca and returned to West Pakistan with no public explanation. Bengalis who knew him say he resigned when he was ordered to make preparations for a military crackdown soon after the initial Assembly postponement was announced March 1. None of his assistants was replaced, as would have been done routinely in a normal transfer.
The president himself fared badly when he arrived in Dacca March 15. The normal delegation of top civil servants failed to go to the airport to greet him.
Faster Even Than Mujib
But the movement had also created a force that what was running faster than Sheikh Mujib himself-a true Bengali nationalism such as no movement had ever produced before in East Pakistan.
Bengalis started telling each other to kill the “foreign” soldiers from West Pakistan and even burned the Pakistani flag and the picture of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the” father of Pakistan,” in the streets of Dacca.
On Pakistan Day, they raised the new flag of “Bangladesh” -the Nation of Bengal-everywhere and tore down the Pakistan flag from the pole at the Chinese consulate general.
Even Then, Peace Possible
Yet most Bengalis agreed that Sheikh Mujib would still have been abic to lead the movement back to the broad autonomy he had always demanded-and thus prevent a final split of Pakistan into two countries-if he could get the West to buy his formula.
Whether he could-whether a settlement could be reached on the basic political issues-became an academic question when the Army and Mr. Bhutto decided that the technicality of how power was to be transferred was more important than the substantive political questions.
Now the Army has provided a final answer to the question of how many Pakistan’s.
After the carnage of the last few days, there can be no hope left of ever achieving a truly united Pakistan again.
For the current fighting has only two possible outcomes: One is an independent nation of 75 million East Bengalis. The other is a totally subjected and sullen colony that would be East Pakistan only on maps.