THE BALTIMORE SUN-MARCH 28, 1971
TROOPS TAKE OVER
By John E. Woodruff
In two days of shooting and burning, the West Pakistan Army has abruptly arrested East Pakistan’s slide toward independence by turning Dacca into a city of gunfire and flame.
By the time President A. M. Yahya Khan announced last night the end of his cautious, two-year-old experiment in democracy, the Army already had shot its way into control of the East Pakistan capital, leaving huge fires visible in all directions, and reportedly clapped Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, elected leader of East Pakistan’s 75 million people, in jail.
In all the rounds of automatic weapons fire only a few shots were heard that seemed clearly to suggest that anyone was returning the army’s fire.
In the few incidents witnessed by newsmen, soldiers fired heavy machine guns at empty-handed civilians without warning. Deaths or other casualties could not be confirmed.
The first sign that something more than a breakdown of the talks was taking place came with a report that President Yahya had left the heavily fortified Presidential House in Dacca about 5:45 p.m. An inquiry at the gate about two hours later produced, from the civilian guard in charge of the reduced troop detachments still there, the reply: “This is a very bad time to ask that question (about the President’s whereabouts)”
At 11 p.m. soldiers began to round up newsmen on the ground of the Intercontinental Hotel and order them inside with threats to shoot. Automatic weapons fire began in various parts of the city. A telephone call to Sheikh Mujib’s house at 12:20 a.m. yesterday was answered by a calm voice that said the Sheikh was in bed.
This morning Karachi radio spoke specifically of the Sheikh’s whereabouts for the first time, claiming that he and five of his lieutenants were arrested about an hour and e10 minutes after that phone call. The telephones at the hotel went dead about 10 minutes after the call.
Meanwhile, troops at the hotel tore down the green, red and gold flags of Bangladesh that had been flying nearby and burned piles of them on the lawn.
The first artillery rounds were heard and seen about 1 a. m. Friday, in the direction of the new camps of Dacca University where Bengal student leaders long have been active.
Between 25 and 30 truckloads of troops drove past the hotel towards the campus, about a mile and a half away. Prolonged reports of automatic weapons fire resounded from the campus direction soon after.
A few more artillery rounds landed in that direction around 2 a. m. and by 2:30, two large buildings were in flames, the first huge blaze of the night. Bengali journalists at the hotel identified them from a 10th floor window as Iqbal and Mohsin Halls, regarded as hotbeds of Awami League student activity.
About 2:15 troops from the hotel guard moved across the street to an alley leading to the office of an impecunious but popular English language newspaper. The People, which had been outspoken and often totally irresponsible in its vilification of the government.
Two wrecked cars from a wrecking garage in the alley previously had been dragged into an impromptu barricade, and the troops fired hundreds of rounds into the cars before they moved into remove them. At one point, voices from the seconds floor of the garage shouted “Bengalis unite,” and the troops responded with hundreds of rounds of rifle and machinegun fire.
At this point a group of about 15 empty handed students came down the boulevard beside the hotel shouting defiantly.
The soldiers turned the jeep mounted machinegun toward the youths and opened fire. The students scattered and ran away, pursued by several jeep loads of soldiers.
Then the troops returned to the garage from which the unity slogan had come. They tore off the doors and sent a few men inside. When they emerged a few seconds late a small fire was burning near the door. It quickly spread and consumed the garage and all its contents.
The soldiers moved down the alley toward the newspaper office firing all the way. When they reached the entrance, they shouted warnings but they were spoken in Urdu, the language of west Pakistan, which is not widely understood in East Bengal. No one emerged, and the soldiers fired a rocket into building, poured hundreds of rounds into it with automatic weapons and the machine guns.
Tearing off the door they entered for a few seconds then left the office and one next to it in flames. On their way back to the hotel grounds, they shouted “narai takbir” a Muslim shout meaning “Victory for God” that is associated with the Pakistan movement.
They also shouted “We have won the war” in Urdu. Two of them then came inside the hotel about 4 a.m. and got a jug of tea to take out.
By this time, half a dozen large fires blazed in every direction and at about 4:15 a.m. the largest fire of the night broke out in the direction of the cantonment of the East Pakistan Riffles.
This fire burned for hours, and for the first half hour it was punctuated by dozens of large bright flashes and explosions similar to those made by an exploding ammunition dump. At its height, it appeared to cover two acres or more. It sent flamelicking high into the sky for hours, and a column of smoke rose hundreds of feet into the air.
About 5:20 a. m. six Chinese made T-54 tanks rumbled up to the hotel, where they stayed for about 20 minutes. One had its cannon aimed directly at a corner of the hotel the whole time. Soon afterward, a large truck passed, its bed piled several feet deep with American-made carbines and Communist-bloc AK-model automatic rifles.
The heavy weighting of old fashioned American made weapons, from the decade of heavy American military backing for Pakistan that began in 1955, strongly suggested that some less trusted unit such as the ones with heavy Bengali enrollment had been either disarmed or relieved of its spare weapons.
Sporadic firing continued throughout the day, and at dawn, trucks with loudspeakers went through the neighborhoods shouting toward the houses. The occupants hastily scrambled onto their rooftops and hauled down the Bangladesh flags and the black mourning flags they had been displaying for the dead of earlier clashes.
The first broadcast warning of the holocaust was issued by Dacca radio in midmorning yesterday, in a terse announcement that a curfew would be in effect until further notice. An officer said later in the day that loudspeakers had been used throughout the city to warn people to stay in their houses. The night before, no such warning was witnessed during the firing near the hotel.
Mr. Bhutto and his party left the hotel about 8:30 a.m. under their accustomed heavy guard of soldiers and Punjabi civilians carrying Communist-bloc automatic rifles. Mr. Bhutto wore a gray suit and a stern countenance and said twice “I have no comment to make.”
A lieutenant colonel came to the hotel in the morning, afternoon and evening and identified himself as commander of a 2 square mile area including the hotel grounds. In the after noon, he told the hotel’s managements it would be permitted to have foreigners he repeated that word three times before completing the sentence swim in the pool.
About 6 p.m. correspondents in the hotel started receiving telephone calls advising that Lt. Gen. Tikka Khan, the martial law administrator, suggested that leave. Major Siddiq Salik, the military government’s public relations man, told a reporter who inquired about the advisory’ nature of the calls: “Some advice is obligatory.”
The lieutenant colonel was asked repeatedly why the newsmen had to leave and said, after dodging the question several times: “We want you to leave because it would be too dangerous for you. It will be too bloody.”
By 8 p.m. the last newsman of the more than 30 staying at the hotel was loaded into one of the four waiting Dodge army trucks but the procession waited so that the newsmen could listen to President Yahya’s speech in which he announced that the Awami League had been banned and accused Sheikh Mujib of treason.
General Yahya praised………..West Pakistani soldiers in East Pakistan and said: “I am proud of them.”
Then the trucks, led and followed by truckloads of rifle-bearing soldiers, moved toward the airport, past overturned barricades of trees clay pipes, and junk, past several burning alleys of squatter shacks, where Sheikh Mujib’s picture had been on virtually every wall, and past three truckloads of armed soldiers who sat watching the fires at one village.