THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, JULY 9, 1971
WAR SPIRIT GROWS ON TRIGGER-HAPPY PAKISTAN BORDER
By Clare Hollingworth in Bendpole, East Pakistan
Pakistani and Indian soldiers now confront one another dangerously across from five to 50 yards of no-man’s-land at every main road crossing along the 1,500-mile frontier between East Pakistan and India.,
The daily sporadic firing of small arms two-inch mortars, with the occasional round of artillery, has caused a marked escalation in tension on the borders during the past few weeks. The West Pakistan soldiers are obviously enjoying the near-war situation.
They are digging themselves bunkers, defensive position and generally preparing to hold a far larger section of the border then they could defend for five minutes against a small but determined assault force.
Frequent alerts-some real but others false—when everyone is forced into waterlogged dugouts, add flavor to this dangerous war game which an unexpected incident could so easily turn into the real thing.
For fingers are increasingly trigger-happy and the hatred for “the enemy” is fed each day by the press and radio of both sides.
At many points on the Pakistani side the Army has already fought, hard, to take over defended permanent frontier posts which were occupied by the East Pakistan Rifles when they defected to Bangladesh as the West Pakistan Army took over on March 25.
This former frontier force then turned their guns and their permanently constructed positions round to fight their former comrades in arms.
Tension kept up
They are still operating on the Indian side of the frontier, where they can be seen through field glasses occupying forward positions. From time to time they open fire to keep their spirits up and maintain the tension, thus ensuring that the Pakistani Army cannot withdraw troops from the border.
Members of the East Pakistan Rifles and the East Bengal Regt, too, are training the Bangladesh guerrillas in camps just inside India.
Six weeks ago, just a few hundred yards further down this three-lane main truck road inside India I witnessed six or seven mortar bombs land from the Pakistan side and noted the Indian army had constructed will camouflaged bunkers and defensive positions.
Bangladesh guerrillas cross the frontier every night to lay mines, leave time bombs in deserted villages which the army patrols, and throw hand grenades into outposts. The guerrillas are becoming an increasing menace to communication in the border areas, where almost all telephone wires and electric cables have now been cut.
Brisk smuggling
Naturally each side knows what the other is doing, as scores of agents cross each day and there is still a brisk smuggling business.
While the Indian side is packed with refugees and it is not easy for the Army to move around the Pakistani forces operate in a completely deserted countryside, passing through villages, even towns, in which one or two old cripples or a blind man have been left behind
It is hardly surprising refugees are not returning in any appreciable numbers to the reception centers the Pakistan authorities have prepared for them. A few familiesfive or six-cross by “unauthorized routes” here each night and they are generally picked up by the Army.
They are taken to transit camps where they are fed, given anti-cholera shots and questioned to substantiate their claim to be “from Pakistan”.
The civil authorities, and indeed senior officers on both sides, are genuinely anxious to defuse border.
The presence of a United Nations peace-keeping force would be the best solution, in view of the ever-rising tempers and bellicose attitudes of battalion and company commanders.
INDIAN STATE SWAMPED BY REFUGEES
By Peter Gill in Tripura
As fresh waves of East Pakistani refugees break on the tiny Indian state of Tripura, anxious officials are fighting a “do or die” battle to preserve their desperately tenuous supply routes with the outside world
Bengali peasants, most of them Moslems and some with hideous shell and mortar- bomb wounds, are now fleeing into Tripura at a rate of at least 10,000 a day.
With a resident population of 1,600,000 to feed through the lean monsoon period, the Tripura authorities now have an additional, and entirely unproductive, Im refugee.
During visits to border areas along Tripura’s 560-mile frontier with East Pakistan over the past few days, I have seen Indian villages swollen in a matter of hours by hordes of tearful, uprooted Pakistani peasants.
Killing crossfire
They have been caught in a murderous crossfire between the Pakistan Army and the Mukti Fouj guerrillas fighting for an independent East Bengal. One young farmer who crossed near the Indian border post at Debipur showed me fragments of four mortar bombs which he had collected that day from his village.
A girl of 12 was pushed towards our Jeep as we drove through another border village. Shivering with shock, she held out a limp and roughly bandaged hand that had been hit by a shell splinter earlier in the day. Blood was still oozing from the wound.
These developments have made Government officials in Tripura openly sceptical of the chances of a return to normality in East Pakistan.
Now the Pakistan Army is involved in a full-scale war against its guerrilla enemies. And massive reprisals against villages suspected of harbouring guerrillas are driving out both Hindus and Moslems.
Refugee accounts of the scale of the fighting in East Pakistan are amply corroborated by senior officers in the Indian Border Security Force, Long range artillery, using “air burst” shells as anti-personnel weapons, mortar bombs and machine guns have all been deployed by the Pakistan Army against villages.
Once on Indian soil, the refugees admit their involvement with the guerrillas, “We’re all Mukti Fouj now,” said one villager in a refugee camp at Bazalghat, near Agartala.
The supply situation here will soon become critical, with everything having to come over 1,000 miles from Calcutta round the entire East Pakistan border.
Privately, Tripura officials are critical of what they regard as the uncaring attitude of the Indian Central Government towards the State. Direct mercy fights from the Australian. Air Force with food and shelter, they complain, have been inexplicably rerouted to Calcutta.
8m Homeless: E. Pakistan problem
Our Staff Correspondent in Dacca cables: There are even more “refugees” inside East Pakistan than in India. Indeed large groups of people, Moslem as well as Hindu, are wandering round the country, always frightened, sometimes completely lost, but ready to bed down in an unoccupied village,
Major-General Farman Ali, in charge of civil affairs in East Pakistan, admitted that these seven or eight million displaced people were extremely difficult to handle.
Many smaller groups are attempting to take over shops, petrol pumps, market stalls, and other shacks on the main roads and this is creating even bigger problems.