Time is running out in Bengal
By Our Special Correspondent in East Pakistan
The Economist, 31st July 1971
A first small step to getting Bengali refugees back home has been achieved in Pakistan’s acceptance of United Nations observers in East Pakistan. India rejected this week the suggestion that there should be observers on its side of the border too. But the main obstacle to the refugees’ return remains the situation deep inside East Pakistan.
This is not helped by the fact that the Pakistani army has had nothing but praise from President Yahya, when it is obvious to anyone who travels around East Pakistan that it has used excessive force. The damage done throughout the province has been colossal, and there was a methodical-ness about it that belies the official story that the soldiers only fired when fired upon. Worst hit are the bazaar areas, where they could wreck the maximum damage with the minimum firepower.
The province’s main roads are lined with burnt-out huts, and most areas around crossroads and bridges have been more or less cleared of human habitation. The army claimed that only eight soldiers, none of them officers, have been punished for excesses is hardly reassuring. There are reports that there are at least one brigadier has been relieved of his command. It might impress foreign aid donors and the refugees if the authorities made this sort of disciplinary action public. But West Pakistanis are terribly touchy about any criticism of the army, which has played a central part in their lives since the creation of Pakistan.
Most of the refugees are Hindus- nearly 6 million out of a total of nearly 7 million. The reassurances which the President has offered the Hindus have been offset by his insistence that the nr=ew constitution will be more Islamic than ever; and it is still unclear how far the army has stopped the Hindu-bashing in which it clearly indulged earlier. On June 21st, two days after one of the president’s speech of reassurance, Dacca’s most famous Hindu Temple was pulled down. And since then the villages have been sacked for “harbouring miscreants” have been mainly Hindu ones.
Hindu refugees are still pouring out of East Pakistan. Those interviewed on the border all say they are leaving because it has been made clear to them that they will have no place in the future Pakistan. Apart from the army, the people they complain of are the Bengali members of the right wing religious parties, Jamaat Islam and the Moslem League, which were crushed in last December’s elections, and the Biharis who came as Moslem refugees from India in 1947.
It is from these two groups that the new “peace committees” have been formed. Until now these committees have been busy providing the army with information about Awami League members and Hindus. But now that so many people have fled they play an important part in the forming of allotment committees that appoint “caretakers” for abandoned property. Officially, half of the income from this property should go into a relief fund, and the property should be handed back intact to any refugees who return. Since so few have returned, it is impossible to establish whether this will happen in practice. Returning refugees will probably have difficulty in recovering their property from the hands of Biharis and Moslem fanatics who are now high in the favour of the military authorities.
Under the peace committees come the razakars, Home Guard-type volunteers who are paid a small wage and armed to help the police in preventing sabotage by the Mukti Fauj. Many of them are simply local thugs. There are cases of criminal charges being dropped if the accused men join the razakars, and one case of a man who, although legally disqualified for life from carrying a weapon, is now using a Lee Enfield.
It is the peace committees and razakars, a mixture of opportunist bigots and toughs, whom the Mukti Fauj gurrillas have chosen as their prime target. They have killed a fair amount of them. The military authorities in Dacca are conscious of the need to attract more respectable civilian support. Indeed, General Farhan Ali, who is in charge of civil affairs in East Pakistan, has publicly admitted that there are some bad characters on the peace committee.
But time is not on the military government’s side. The Mukti Fauj has shown that it can operate even in Dacca, and its actions are already a powerful deterrent to those Bengalis who might be willing to play along with the authorities. And so long as the Mukti Fauj continues to operate, however sporadically, the government will find it difficult to trust any Bengali in any position of authority. Apart from the 60,000 troops and 5,000 West Pakistani police it has brought in, the government seems to have tried to keep its “colonial profile” as low as possible. But West Pakistani civil servants have been brought in to head the home department and information ministry and as district commissioners for Dacca and Chittagong; and there has been a purge of Pakistan International Airlines, where some 850 flight and ground stuff have been dismissed since March. Security is essential in PIA because it is the only link between the country’s two wings.
Nor is time on the president’s side if the Mukti Fauj continue to make the economy another of their prime targets. Quite apart from their sabotaging of bridges and communications, which is largely aimed at hamstringing army movements, they have started a concerted campaign against East Pakistan’s main foreign exchange earner- is reaching the mills, because growers and dealers have received anonymous letters from Mukti Fauj telling them not to move it. Many of the letters bear smudged postmarks, indicating that postal workers are helping the gurrillas in their own way. And little of the jute that gets in the mills is being balded because of labor troubles between Bengalis and Biharis. Tea, which is grown near Sylhet in the north east, has been shelled from across Indian border, and the Mukti Fauj has blown up eight processing factories.
But so far there seems to be little pressure on President Yahya from West Pakistan. News about East Pakistan is heavily censored, and the only way West Pakistanis learn about army casualties is from Indian broadcast. And although the economic squeeze already on, the business lobby is too timid to make representation to the president. Only Mr. Bhutto makes occasional complaints about continues martial law, and that simply because he wants to use his electoral majority in West Pakistan.
UNicoded by Tushar Mondal