NEWSWEEK, APRIL 5, 1971
PAKISTAN PLUNGES INTO CIVIL WAR
The man and his parry are enemies of Pakistan. This crime will not go unpunished. We will not allow some power-hungry and unpatriotic people to destroy this country and play with the destiny of 120 million people.
-President Mohammed Yahya Khan
Coyne out of your houses with whatever weapons you have. Resist the enemy forces at any cost until the last enemy soldier is vanquished, and save the country from the ruthless dictatorship of West Pakistanis.
-Sheikh Mujibur Rahman
Until the very last moment, it looked as if the two proud men entrusted with Pakistan’s destiny might still be able to avert a head-on clash. Prom the East Pakistani capital of Dacca came optimistic reports that President Mohammed Yahya Khan and Mujib as the leader of secessionist-minded East Pakistan is known were about to reach a compromise. But then, with stunning suddenness, the pieces of Pakistan’s complicated political puzzle flew apart. In the East Pakistan cities of Rangpur and Chittagong, federal troops poured machine-gun fire into mobs of demonstrating Bengali nationalists. Swiftly. Yahya issued orders to his army to “crush the movement and restore the full authority of the government”. In his turn, Mujib proclaimed East Pakistan the “sovereign, independent People’s Republic of Bangladesh (Bengali Nation).” And with that. Pakistan was plunged into civil war.
Thus, in the 24th year of Pakistan’s existence the bond that had held the eastern and western sectors of the country in tenuous union snapped. Because Pakistan’s central government immediately imposed strict censorship on communications in and out of East Pakistan, early reports were sketchy. Still, even the fragmentary dispatches from neighboring India provided a dismal picture of bloody fighting that pitted a modem, professional army against rebels who were often armed with little more than passion and pitchforks. Hopelessly outgunned, the East Pakistani guerrillas reportedly suffered thousands of casualties. But although by the end of the week it appeared that the federal army-largely composed of fierce Punjabis-had dealt its Bengali adversary a devastating blow, few people thought that the widely separated wings of Pakistan could ever be effectively reunited again.
What made the Pakistani upheaval so unexpected was that it occurred even as Yahya and Mujib were in the midst of private negotiations. On hearing the reports of “massacres” in Rangpur and Chittagong, an enraged Mujib accused the army of unleashing a reign of terror. Yahya’s response was to quiet the talks in a huff and leave Dacca unannounced to return to West Pakistan. Back in his home region, the President took to national radio to ban Mujib’s Awami League, East Pakistan’s dominant political organization. Sheikh Mujib’s action of starling his non-cooperation movement is “an act of treason” the President declared.
Shortly after Yahya left Dacca the army’s tough martial law administrator Lt.-Gen. Tikka Khan slapped tight censorship over East Pakistan. All foreign correspondents were restricted to their hotels and then, after federal troops seized their notes and films, the reporters were expelled from the country. Among the correspondents forced to leave was NEWSWEEK’S Loren Jenkins, who filed this report:
From our windows in Dacca’s modern Intercontinental Hotel, we watched a jeep full of soldiers roll up to a shopping centre and taking aim with a heavy machine-gun open fire on a crowd. While the firing was still going on some fifteen young Bengalis appeared in the street about 200 yards away and shouted defiantly at the soldiers. The youths seemed to, be empty-handed, but the soldiers turned the machine-gun on them anyway. Then, the federal soldiers moved down an adjacent alley leading to the office of a pro- Mujib daily newspaper that had strongly denounced the army. The troops shouted in Urdu, a language which few Bengalis understand-warning anyone inside to surrender or be shot. No one emerged. So they blasted the building and set it afire. And when they emerged, they waved their hands in triumph and shouted ‘Pakistan Zindabad” (Long Live Pakistan”).
By late in the week, firing throughout the city was heavy and flashes of 105-mm. howitzers in the night preceded the heavy crump of incoming shells which seemed to be landing Oil the new campus of Dacca University. I woke up one morning to the sound of six Chinese-made T-54 light tanks clanging down Airport Road. A grey pall of smoke hung low over the muggy sky. Soon new artillery blasts were heard and new fires were seen in the region of old Dacca, a warren of narrow, open-sewered streets where most of the capital’s population lives in cramped one room homes.
The West Pakistani troops in Dacca showed all the signs of having the jitters. Many shot off random bursts of automatic weapons fire at the slightest noise. And when some of the reporters in the Intercontinental Hotel ventured outside and asked to tour the city, an army captain stationed in front of the hotel threatened to shoot us. Ordering us back inside, he shouted angrily: “If I can kill my own people, 1 can kill you”
At the outset of the crackdown, the army ordered striking government workers either to return to work or face military trial, and imposed a 24-hour curfew. Meanwhile, a truckload of soldiers moved through the city, stopping in front of any house flying the new green, red and yellow banner of Bangladesh. At every such building, the troops ordered to pull down the flags. In the area around the hotel, their first stop was a three- storey brick house-where a woman in a sari slowly mounted to the roof and. under the menacing gaze of the soldiers, reluctantly lowered the flag.
With Jenkins and other foreign reporters expelled from East Pakistan, the world was left to the mercy of conflicting radio reports for its information. The official government radio in Karachi announced that the army had arrested Mujib. But a clandestine radio in Dacca, identifying itself as the Voice of Independent Bangladesh, proclaimed that Mujib was still safe in his underground headquarters. Under his leadership, said a rebel radio announcer: “The people of Bangladesh will shed more blood….”
If Pakistan was disintegrating in division and violence, it had, in a sense, only moved full circle in its quarter-century history. For Pakistan emerged as a nation in 1947 out of divisions and strife. Propelled by Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s driving vision of a Moslem homeland in South Asia, Pakistan was assembled from the predominantly Moslem areas of British India. But the partitioning of India touched off a six-month bloodbath between Hindus and Moslems in which an estimated half million people perished. And it created a Pakistan with two distant wings separated by 1.100 miles of Indian Territory.
This geographical handicap was serious enough. But to further complicate matters, their shared devotion to Islam is virtually all that the two sectors of Pakistan have in common. West Pakistan is a land of desert and mountains and a generally and climate: the far more densely populated eastern wing is a humid land of jungles and alluvial plains. And the differences in racial personality between the Punjabis of West Pakistan and the Bengalis of the East are extreme. Proud, martial person, the Punjab is look down upon the Bengalis and over the years have consistently exploited their countrymen in the east.
Clean Sweep
Ironically, President Yahya was the first West Pakistani leader to openly admit that East Pakistan had never received its fair share of political power and economic resources in the Pakistani union. To rectify matters, Yahya provided Pakistan with its first national elections conducted strictly on a one-man, one-vote basis. But the results of last December’s voting turned out to be something of a shocker. In the east, Mujib’s Awami League all but swept the boards clean. And because the more populous east had a larger allotment of seats in the National Assembly, Mujib’s forces came up with a clear parliamentary majority as well.
During the campaign, Mujib proclaimed a six-point programme aimed at diminishing the powers of Pakistan’s central government while granting virtual autonomy to each province. Not surprisingly, it was a plan that the top vote-getting politician in West Pakistan, the mercurial, left leaning ex-Foreign Minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, found totally unacceptable. When Bhutto’s supporters refused to take part in the new National Assembly, Yahya was forced to postpone its opening. This, in turn, prompted Mujib to launch a civil- disobedience campaign which virtually destroyed federal authority in East Pakistan and made him the region’s effective ruler. And in the end that left Yahya no choice but to grant the Bengali demands or to resort to force.
In branding Mujib an outlaw, Yahya slammed shut the door to further negotiations and opted instead for a military solution to his dilemma. But although the federal force in East Pakistan (whose size is variously estimated at anywhere from 20,000 to 70,000 men) was far superior in training and equipment to its enemy, it faced some severe problems. Lacking direct land links between West and East Pakistan, and banned from flying over India, federal army commanders had to move their men the long way around the southern tip of India by way of Ceylon. “For the short term,” said a U.S. Analyst “Pakistan’s army should be able to tear hell out of the Bengali landscape. But for the long term, they have terrible logistic problems.”
Guerrilla Haven
Against the federal forces, the Bengalis could muster barely 15,000 troops, most of them militiamen armed with obsolete World War II weapons. But while the Bengalis were no match for the federal army in the cities, military observers noted that the surrounding countryside, where 90 per cent of East Pakistan’s population lives, is a virtual haven for guerrilla warfare. A maze of sunken rice fields, tea plantations, jute fields and banana groves, it is an ideal ambush country reminiscent of South Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. As a result, most foreign military analysts believe that prolonged military occupation of the east would put an intolerable strain on the Pakistani Army.
Nonetheless if Yahya chose to indulge in wholesale slaughter, it was probable that he could stamp out the rebellion in East Pakistan, at least for the time being. And if the reports of Mujib’s capture proved true, that would surely be a severe blow to the cause of Bangladesh. But no matter how harsh the federal crackdown. Bengali resistance whether in the form of civil disobedience or a Viet Cong-style guerrilla struggle appeared likely to continue. Yahya, in fact, was seemingly faced with the ugly prospect of being a colonial ruler in his own country. For when the federal army opened up with tanks and automatic weapons in Dacca last week, it mortally wounded any remaining chance that the two disparate wings of Pakistan could ever live in harmony again.
A People Apart: The Complex Bengalis
To anyone acquainted with the character of the Bengalis, it seemed almost inevitable that some day they would try to form their own independent nation. Despite their incorporation into India and Pakistan when the British Raj left the subcontinent in 1947, some 120 million Bengalis (70 millions of whom live in East Pakistan and most of the rest in India’s West Bengal) still consider themselves a race apart from and above their neighbors. Emotional and talkative the dark-skinned Bengalis have more in common with each other than with their co-religionists, Hindu or Moslem, or with their compatriots, Indian or Pakistani. Says one Western expert: “They consider themselves to be Bengalis first, Moslems or Hindus second, and Pakistanis or Indians a poor third.”
Culturally, ethnically, linguistically and spiritually, the Bengalis are different from their countrymen in Pakistan and India. For one thing, as Bengali scholars will inform all who pause to listen, the name Bengal is derived from the ancient kingdom of Bangla, which goes back at least to the third century B.C. One of the oldest literary streams in Asia also flows in Bengal, whose Indo-Aryan language and recorded history date back at least a thousand years. Boastful of this long literary heritage, intellectual Bengalis were most eloquent on the subject of Rabindranath Tagore, their greatest modern literary figure. In his combination of mysticism and lyricism, Tagore may have been the quintessential Bengali poet, novelist and dramatist; he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.
Talk
If the written language is one of the Bengali’s glories, the spoken one is one of its burdens. In the cafes of Calcutta and Dacca, Bengalis palaver endlessly, spinning out airy intellectual concepts and political schemes. An Indian joke goes like this: “Every committee must have four members: a Mukherjee, Bannerjee, a Chatterjee (all Bengali names) and a Singh.” Singh is a Sikh name. The Sikhs, unlike the Bengalis, are noted for their action, and the implication is that alone Sikh is the fellow who will execute the programme.
A people who have suffered hundreds of invasions and conquests, including that of the British in the eighteenth century, the Bengalis long ago learnt to cultivate the arts of accommodation. Unlike the proud Punjabis his opponent in the current strife, the Bengali knew how to bow and scrape. Dressed in his dhoti, spouting flowery language, armed only with an umbrella, the Bengali was regarded by all as a reliable, efficient clerk. Fighting was best left to more martial people.
The other main cliche about the Bengalis portrays them as crafty fellows ready to outsmart you if given half a chance. “Watch it”, a merchant might say. “He’s a Bengali.” The message is that the person in question is not only clever but possibly also capable of a little sharp practice.
And yet, despite their reputation as a guileful, docile people, the Bengalis have more than once demonstrated a dark, explosive side. The most ruthless, dedicated terrorists during the fighting against the British came from Bengal. And since partition the Bengali regions of both India and Pakistan have been the scene of constant political turmoil and near revolution. “They may seem docile.” says one American scholar”. But they are capable of violence when sparked the wrong way.” And then in words that may prove to be all too perceptive, he adds: “There is a side to the Bengali mentality that thrives on chaos.”
Poet or Politics
When Sheikh Mujibur Rahman proclaimed the independence of Bangladesh last week some of his critics declared that he was merely yielding to the pressure of his extremist supporters, seeking to ride the crest of a wave in order to avoid being engulfed by it. But in a sense Mujib’s emergence as the embattled leader of a new Bengali “nation” is the logical outcome of a lifetime spent fighting for Bengali nationalism. Although Mujib may be riding the crest of a wave, his presence there is no accident. Born just 51 years ago to well-to-do landowner in a village near Dacca, Mujib went through his early schooling without distinguishing himself by intellectual accomplishment. He was outgoing and popular as a boy, fond of talk and people and sports-and by the time he went to Calcutta’s Islamic College for a liberal Arts degree he had come to the attention of his elders as a Muslim League activist. His mentor then was H. S. Suhrawardy, Prime Minister of Bengal under British Raj, who, later, served one year as Prime Minister of Pakistan. Mujib studied law, but unlike Suhrawardy, a moderate, he soon developed a penchant for direct action. In the late ’40s both men realized that their native state of Bengal was getting less than its due in the new nation of Pakistan. Suhrawardy, in 1949, founded a new party, the Awami League, dedicated to a united ‘Bengal for the Bengalis.” Mujib look to the streets and was twice arrested and jailed for leading illegal strike s and demonstrations.
Out of prison, Mujib became Suhrawardy’s right-hand man within the Awami League, but then destroyed his leader’s efforts to compromise and form a coalition with other parties. Mujib’s success enabled the Awami League to form a new East Pakistan Provincial Government in 1956, and he served in it for seven months as a Minister of Commerce and Industry. After Suhrawardy died in 1963, Mujib apparently felt less hampered by the older man’s principles of moderation. He revived the Awami League, pursued his “instinctive” style of politics, and demanded internal self-rule. When Mohammed Ayub Khan had him arrested again in 1966, on charges of plotting to make F.ast Pakistan independent. East Pakistan came close to open rebellion, and the turmoil forced Ayub to release Mujib and resign. Mujib emerged as a hero to his people.
Tall for a Bengali (he stands 5 feet 11 inches), with a shock of graying hair, a bushy mustache and alert black eyes, Mujib can attract a crowd of a million people to his rallies and hold them spell-bound with great rolling waves of emotional rhetoric. “Even when you are talking alone with him,” says a diplomat, “he talks like he’s addressing 60,000 people.” Eloquent in Urdu, Bengali and English, three languages of Pakistan. Mujib does not pretend to be an original thinker. He is a poet of politics, not an engineer, but the Bengalis tend to be more artistic than technical, anyhow, and so his style may be just what was needed to unite all the classes and ideologies of the region.
A month ago. at a time when he was still publicly refraining from proclaiming independence Mujib privately told NEWS Week’s Loren Jenkins that “there is no hope of salvaging the situation. The country, as we know it, is finished.” But he waited for President Mohammad Yahya Khan to make the break. “We are the majority, so we cannot secede. They, the Westerners, are the minority, and it is up to them to secede.”
Two weeks later as the crisis deepened, hundreds of Bengalis crowded the yard and hallways of Mujib’s home in suburban Dacca, and puffing on a pipe (“the only foreign thing I use”), he cheerfully spoke to them all. After addressing one enthusiastic gathering Sheikh Mujibur Rahman turned to Western newsmen and said: “I have this sort of thing from 5 a.m. on. Do you think anyone can suppress this spirit with machine guns?” A few- days later someone was trying.