THE HINDUSTAN STANDARD, APRIL 12, 1971
EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT OF RAJSHAHI BATTLE
By Robert Kaylor
Rajshahi. April. 11. From indications that reach the outside world, the struggle for survival going on here is a good example of the battles being waged elsc-where throughout East Pakistan.
In the city, once a busy trading centre of 100,000 persons about 190 miles northwest of Dacca are the “Liberation Forces” of Bangladesh. They are strong on determination to free their homeland, but weak on organization, weapons, communications and just about everything else that it takes to fight a war.
Held up in a military base on the northern edge of the city is the remaining part of the garrison of the armed forces of West Pakistan. They are part of an organized fighting machine with modern weapons and air support. Now, however, they are surrounded by a hostile population and cut off from supplies.
Fighting broke out here as it did almost everywhere else in East Pakistan on March 25 and 26 when the Army moved to seize control from the supporters of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League.
Since that time, no one knows for certain how many persons have died. Leaders of the Liberation Forces in Rajshahi believe that between 3,000 and 4,000 East Pakistanis have been killed. Most of the deaths have been in sumwnding villages where troops from the garrison made raids and where air strikes have been flown.
On the other side, liberation leaders say that somewhere around 200 soldiers from West Pakistan have been killed, many of them overwhelmed by sheer numbers of villagers who had no weapons except clubs, bricks and stones.
“They were defenseless peoples but they were very much tortured and they jumped upon the soldiers without concern for their lives and killed them”, said Tasaddaque Hossain, a local Awami League leader.
Liberation Forces took over Rajshahi last Wednesday, apparently when troops who remained in the city pulled out to consolidate their position with soldiers at the cantonment one mile north of the city.
It is a ghost city, with its shops shuttered and padlocked. Virtually all of the population has gone, most of them to outlying villages and about 10,000 to seek refuge across the nearby border with India.
Armed liberation patrols in jeeps are the only motor vehicles seen in the streets. Some bicycle powered rickshaws remain but their drivers gather listlessly at street corners for lack of riders.
As elsewhere, many stores and businesses were owned by West Pakistanis, all of whom have disappeared from sight. A liberation leader told me that West Pakistanis were being held in confinement, but one of the “freedom-fighters” in the streets put it differently.
“We have destroyed the “Salaamers” who supported the Army and supplied them,” he said. It is not known how many West Pakistanis were in Rajshahi when the fighting started.
Liberation leaders believe there are about 300 troops holding positions in the centre of the two-mile square cantonment, an area of buildings surrounded with barbed wire. Freedom fighters are ranged in position around the camp.
Resistance
They are wary of venturing inside two days before the city itself fell a mob of resistance fighters, ran forward with a group of soldiers emerged from the cantonment carrying a white flag. Some of them were carrying weapons, but the freedom fighters apparently did not expect that the Pakistanis would to use them.
When they got into the open machine guns opened up. Liberation leaders said they did not have the exact figure of casualties in the incident, but described the losses as heavy.
Liberation leaders say the troops have three-inch mortars and other heavy weapons in the cantonment. They have not been firing them, however, apparently to save their ammunition. The soldiers have been reported to be digging in bunkers. The Liberation forces have cut off utility and water lines leading into the camps.
There were no Pakistan Air Force planes in the sky above Rajshahi when I visited the area, but the evidence of their strikes could be seen in areas surrounding it.
On the highway leading into the city a truck lay across the shoulder of the road, tires shot out and riddled with holes from the 50 caliber cannon carried by US-built F86 sabre jets that the Air Force has based in Dacca. Villagers said the driver escaped but that an old woman on the road was killed in the attack.
In another nearby village a mud-walled mosque was hit by what appeared to be napalm. The walls were blackened but still standing and its wooden doors and everything inside including its copy of the Koran, were charred crisps. One person was killed and three wounded at the mosque.
Jet Attack
Liberation leaders said the jets had strafed a market in one village and also along the banks of the Ganges where civilians congregate to cross into India. The riverbed is several miles across. Resistance members said the planes come sometimes as often as twice a day in troops of two or four. Often they are preceded by a helicopter which appears to be spotting targets, they said.
The Sabre jets have not hit inside the city, but strike targets outside it, most of which are located in villages that would not seem to have any military significance.
Although there was no sign of planes on Saturday, the rifle-toting resistance member who drove me into the town in a green sedan displacing a black flag, took no chances.
A week’s growth of beard covered his cheeks and his eyes were bloodshot. “I can’t even keep track of what day it is any more”, he said when I asked him about when an air strike had taken place. “There has been so much to do day and night both.”-UPI