NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, APRIL 4, 1971
PAKISTAN: ‘ALL PART OF A GAME’ –
A GRIM AND DEADLY ONE
New Delhi-“All of it’s necessary, absolutely necessary,” a West Pakistani stewardess lectured some expelled foreign newsmen about the Pakistani Army’s offensive to crush the independence movement in East Pakistan. “If this happened in your country, you’d do the same thing. It’s all part of the game.”
A game? To foreign newsmen in Dacca, it looked like a surprise attack with tanks, artillery and heavy machine guns against a virtually unarmed population-a population using tactics of nonviolence, mostly strikes and other forms of noncooperation, to claim the political majority it had won in last December’s selections. And by this weekend enough credible reports of indiscriminate killings had filtered out to leave little doubt, even ill the minds of many dispassionate Indian officials and Western diplomats, that the. Army of West Pakistan was under few restraints in putting down East Pakistani thoughts of autonomy.
The attack began on the night of March 25, after 10 days of political negotiations in which the army and the rest of the West Pakistani power establishment had lulled the East Pakistani nationalists into thinking their demands for greater self-rule would be granted.
It is clear now that the West Pakistanis never meant the talks to succeed, that they dragged them out only to buy time to get enough troop reinforcements over from West Pakistan to launch the attack. But while the talks went on, nearly every observer, from newsmen to diplomats, resisted the ugly thought that this might be true. The signs were all there-troops coming in by air and sea, the dismissal of a martial-law administrator who was too lenient and the uncharacteristic silence of the army while the East Pakistanis boycotted the military regime and followed instead the directives of their leader. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
The newsmen reported these signs but when talk of “some progress” came out of the negotiations, they grasped upon that, because it was what should happen. They were wrong. Instead, the military mind prevailed.
But in turning to force, die West Pakistani leaders apparently misjudged both its limitations and the depth of feeling of 75 million East Pakistanis.
“They thought that a few bullets would scare the people off,” said Ranjit Gupta, the police commissioner in Calcutta, just across the border in India. “It is silly-it shows you how little the West Pakistanis know about East Pakistanis.”
Instead of the first shooting spree terrorizing the population into submission, it now seems apparent that while the army may be able initially to establish a hold on the cities and major towns, it will face widespread guerrilla activity in the primitive reverie countryside. This could so undermine the supply lines and mobility of the West Pakistani troops that the independence movement would succeed.
In India, many sympathizers with the East Pakistani cause were quick to compare “rest Pakistani’s military actions in East Pakistan with those of Hitler. “Pak Army’s Inhuman Torture.” was the headline in one Calcutta newspaper. “Butchery,” said another, adding: “The vandalism unleashed by the occupying Pakistani army in Bangladesh (Bengal Nation) is darker than even the darkest chapter of Nazi terror.” The Indian Parliament has called it “a massacre of defenseless people which amounts to genocide.”
Governments Silent
Most of the other governments of the world have remained silent. “Why doesn’t your country condemn this outrage?” one official in Calcutta asked an American. “This is no tidal wave, this is no act of nature-it is people slaughtering people.”
The Bengalis, as the people of East Pakistan are called, have stepped across a crucial line-a line that separated grumbling about their exploitation to fighting against the exploiters. The line may have been crossed on March 25, the night of the attack. Or perhaps it was crossed earlier, on March 1, when President Yahya Khan. Army Commander in Chief postponed a session of the National Assembly that was to have convened two days later to begin drafting a Constitution returning the nation to civilian rule. That Assembly, elected in December, was dominated by Sheikh Mujib’s Awami League party, which wanted a large measure of provincial autonomy-leaving the Central Government with power only over defense and foreign trade and foreign aid.
These terms were anathema to the West Pakistani power establishment-the army, the big-business interests and the politicians. In the political negotiations over the crisis, they started off by making conciliatory sounds and then brought in the monkey wrench, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the dominant political leader of West Pakistan. When he objected that the Awami League wanted too much autonomy-‘bordering on sovereignty” —the talks began to stall. Then, suddenly, came the army attack.
The morning after the attack, Mr. Bhutto and his aides, under heavy military protection, were flown back to friendly territory in West Pakistan, where the political leader promptly announced. “Pakistan has been saved by the grace of the Almighty.”
But it will take more than religious oratory to save Pakistan as a united Moslem country. Religion was the social glue that was supposed to have held the two wings together, but it was never enough.
It may take a long time, but none of the witnesses to the recent-surge of Bengali nationalism and to the barbarism of the army attack doubts that it will happen. In the meantime, as Sheikh Mujib was fond of chanting with the adoring crowds that thronged to his now razed house: “Sangram, Sangram. Cholbey, Cholbey.” “The fight will go on. The fight will go on.”
-Sydney H. Schanberg