THESUN, BALTIMORE SUN DA Y, APRIL 4. 1971
PAKISTAN IS EXTERMINATING THE BENGALIS
By John E. Woodruff
Less than four months ago, the West Pakistan Army said it could not send soldiers and helicopters to East Bengal to save survivors of the cyclone that took hundreds of thousands of lives in the mouth of the Ganges. If troops and helicopters were moved from West Pakistan, India might attack, the Army said. By the time the Army Statement was issued, India was increasing its offers of relief aid for the cyclone victims.
Today, that same West Pakistan Army shows every sign of being prepared to send its last soldier to more populous East Bengal, if necessary, in an all-out effort to shoot to death the results of last December’s elections.
No room remains for doubt as to the Punjabi-dominated Army’s determination to go the whole distance.
For the only justification that could ever emerge for the grisly scenes of a week ago Thursday and Friday would be a total victory of bullets over the nonviolent attempts of the Bengalis to put in power the men they had elected in polling sanctioned by the Army.
Newsmen toured Carnage
Correspondents interned last week at the plush Dacca Intercontinental Hotel could see only fragments of what was talking place outside-a few soldiers shooting into civilian buildings, a machine-gun opening up on a dozen empty handed youths, the Army setting fire to civilian business places.
But two European newsmen evaded the Army and stayed behind a few extra days and they managed to tour some of the carnage before they were found out and expelled.
Their reports have confirmed the worst fears of those who were only able to surmise the meaning of cannon reports and prolonged bursts of machinegun and automatic-rifle fire coming from the new campus of Dacca University, where two burning buildings lighted the sky for hours with their flames.
Slum Residents Killed
Hundreds of students were burned up in their beds and hundreds more were buried in a mass grave, according to reports filed by the two newsmen who said they toured the scene.
They also confirmed previous reliable diplomatic reports that large stretches of bamboo slums were surrounded and set afire, their residents shot when they tried to flee.
The only bond between West Pakistan and East Bengal-other than the West Pakistan Army itself-is the Muslim faith, for which the divided country was created as a haven against Hindu-Muslim religious murders when India was partitioned.
Even today, the Army exercises its authority in the name of “the Islamic state of Pakistan.” Yet burning a human being, alive or dead, is unequivocally forbidden by the Mohammedan faith. It is also a favorite crime charged to Hindus by West Pakistani Muslims.
Such attacks upon fellow Muslims in the name of an Islamic slate can be vindicated. even in the eyes of other Mohammedan countries from which West Pakistan is apparently already seeking aid, only by a total military victory. And any military victory will require growing, not diminishing, bloodshed as the Bengalisunified to a man for the first time in decades-struggle to resist.
Clues as to how coolly the West Pakistanis had calculated their plan to shoot and burn the Bengalis into submission are provided by the personal actions of some West Pakistani politicians at the Hotel Intercontinental on the night the holocaust started.