THE ATI ANTIC MAGAZINE, (U.S A) DECEMBER, 1971
EAST PAKISTAN: A RECONQUERED COLONY
A villager along the roadside, desperately anxious that two foreigners should see the full reality of army devastation, whispers through the car window: “Go to Jamalpur and you will understand everything.”
Jamalpur is a town without children on the streets, without commerce in its remaining shops, almost without noise in a land where conversation is loud cherished. Men retreat at a foreigner’s approach, a shopkeeper’s hands tremble as he rises to greet unwanted foreign guests, and a teen-age boy says quietly “The people are ashamed because they dare not tell you what is in their hearts.” The boy, after ten minutes of furtive conversation, is afraid and walks away. Before March, Jamalpur had 50,000 people (5000 of them Hindu), large marketplace, and a small army headquarters. By now- most people have fled, no Hindus are left, the market has been destroyed, and the army headquarters are swollen with the garrison that subdued Jamalpur. The Hindu crematorium on the banks of the Brahmaputra is the army’s killing ground. The bodies are thrown into the river, and now the remaining residents of Jamalpur refuse to eat river fish.
-Peter R. Kami And Lee Lescaze