WALL STREET JOURNAL, APRIL 21, 1971
A FLICKERING CAUSE
East Pakistanis Pledge To Fight To The Death
But Mostly They Don’t
They Lack Arms, Leadership To Prolong Their Revolt;
No Aid By Other Nations
Too Many Patrick Henrys?
By Peter R. Kann
(Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal)
Near Meherpur, East Pakistan-By ox-cart and by rickshaw, on bicycles and an occasional truck, but mostly by foot, people and soldiers of Bangladesh-the Bengal Nation are retreating towards the Indian border.
From Meherpur, half a mile further back, come the thump of the West Pakistan army’s mortars and the crackle of its small-arms fire.
“Punjabis (West Pakistanis) Bombs, cannon at Meherpur,” shouts a group of Bengalis clinging to an India-bound truck that stops only long enough to let the last armed man at this village crossroad climb abroad.
The four-mile trip back to the Indian border is a tour of largely deserted villages. The richer residents of Meherpur had evacuated their town a day before. This day it is mostly villagers who are fleeing; a barefoot, ragged woman leading six children, all with bundles of belongings balanced atop their heads; two men carrying a dismantled bed; an old blind men being led along by what seems to be a seeing-eye-cow.
Waging A Weak War
Back at the Indian border, in and around an Indian military compound, sit 100 or more sullen members of the Bangladesh army, their insignia ripped off. Also on the Indian side are more than a dozen Bangladesh jeeps and two recoilless rifles perhaps the only ones in the Bangladesh army. A few miles further to the rear in the nearest Indian border town, are clusters of babbling politicians, civil servants and professional men who talk about fighting and dying to the very last man.
Many Bengalis, of course, have been dying since the Pakistan civil war began in March. But, for a variety of reasons not nearly enough have been fighting. As a result, Bangladesh appears, at this stage, to have waged one of the weakest-and perhaps shortest-revolutionary wars on record.
In less than one month, with fewer than 50,000 men and limited firepower and air support, the army has been able largely to subdue, for the time being, 75 million hostile Bengali people.
The Long Road To Liberation
This isn’t to say the cause of Bangladesh is finished. But if East Pakistan is ever to be independent, it won’t happen through the kind of spontaneous-combustion revolution of the past four weeks. Liberation will be won over years, not weeks; by more action and less rhetoric; with guerrilla tactics, not conventional combat; and perhaps by militant leftists rather than idealistic moderates.
Much will also depend on India-whether it will provide arms and border sanctuaries for a protracted liberation war.
In any case, West Pakistan faces serious problems. How to deploy its army of occupation across a large, predominantly rural area, particularly with monsoons coming. How to administer what amounts to a bitter re-conquered colony. How to piece together East Pakistan’s shattered economy and how to keep East Pakistan from becoming a crippling drain on limited West Pakistani resources. How to deal with India should it decides to become more heavily involved in supporting Bengali resistance.
Pakistan’s problems will be compounded if unrest develops among ethnic minorities within West Pakistan or if rival generals and politicians in the West cannot stand together in this crisis.
A Clear-Cut Struggle
In an age of confusing liberation struggles and fuzzy moral causes, the issues at stake in this war seem relatively clear-cut. When England granted its Indian empire independence in 1947, the subcontinent was divided along religious lines rather than by any ethnic or geographic logic. The new Moslem nation of Pakistan was split into two halves, separated by 1,200 miles of Hindu India. The Pakistani nation came to be dominated-politically, economically and militarily-by the Punjabis of West Pakistan, and the more populous Bengalis have felt exploited.
In elections last December for a National Assembly the East Pakistanis blocvoted overwhelmingly for the Bengali nationalist Awami League of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. The League won an absolute majority in the Assembly, meaning power would have swung to Bengali East Pakistan under a democratic regime. Sheikh Mujibur, a somewhat pro-Western moderate socialist, demanded autonomy for the East except in defense and foreign affairs. The politicians and generals of West Pakistan balked, for economic and other reasons.
Under cover of negotiations, West Pakistani troops and military supplies were slipped into East Pakistan. The night of March 25, these troops struck swiftly and savagely in Dacca, the East Pakistan capital, brutally suppressing Bengali demonstrators. The army took over in Dacca and the port of Chittagong, and the war was on.
In other towns the Bengalis rose in defiance and proclaimed independence. It was a story-book sort of revolution, with thousands of Patrick Henrys issuing courageous calls to arms and thousands of Betsy Rosses sewing little red, green and yellow Bangladesh flags. The civil service, and East Pakistan EPR (a Bengali military attached to the
Pakistan array) joined the liberation, as indeed did Bengalis of every social class and political persuasion. The Bangladesh flag flew from primitive mud huts as well from city offices, from ox-carts as well as from jeep. The revolutionary slogan, “Joi Bangla” (“Victory to Bangla”), was shouted by peasant children as well as partly politicians.
An Army Without Arms
But there were things Bengalis didn’t have and didn’t do. Except for the militiamen of the East Pakistan Rifles, the liberation army was almost entirely lacking in arms and training. Even the Rifles had only light, old fashioned weapons. In many areas the Bengalis did little to supplement these arms with homemade weapons like Molotov cocktails or primitive mines.
The Bengalis were surprisingly unprepared for a war that many of them had deemed possible, even likely, for years. They had no effective communication and liaison system-not even by runners-and thus Bangladesh fortunes differed, and suffered district by district village by village. The leadership has been composed largely of Awami League functionaries and civil servants. They have tended to sit in the towns, first emotionally celebration of their people and later emotionally bewailing their lack of airplanes, artillery and foreign support. Sheikh Mujibur, now believed to be a captive of the Pakistani army, is typically Bengali. Says one critic, who is also Bengali: “An impossible man. Whenever you ask him a question, he answers with a quotation from Tagore.” Tagore was Bengali’s greatest writer.
The West Pakistan army, perhaps cowed by the thought of 75 million hostile Bengalis spread across 55,000 square miles (East Pakistan is roughly the size of Arkansas), spent most of the first two weeks of the war holed up in urban military cantonment. But when the army finally began to move, behind air artillery cover, Bangladesh offered little opposition.
An Unopposed Army
By late last week Bangladesh forces were evacuating the towns, and the Pakistani army was rolling down the roads generally unopposed. In some areas there were reports of Bangladesh leaders and soldiers moving out into the villages to prepare for guerrilla war. But in other places-like Meherpur and additional towns near the border with Indian West Bengal-Bangladesh forces were simply fleeing into India.
At the Indian border town of Gede, a Bengali school principal who a week before had been welcoming journalists to the Bangladesh provisional capital, is taking up residence in an Indian guesthouse. “We will fight to the last of our 75 million people, to the last man,” he says.
Another refugee at Gede is perhaps over defeatist but sincere: “The Punjabis are trigger-happy men bent to rule us at whatever the cost. They are killing thousands of our people, but what can we do? We have no arms. The Indians gave us a few gunsduck guns. But the Punjabis aren’t sitting ducks. Yesterday we were tilling our land, and today we must be a guerrilla army. How can it be? Some say the monsoon will help us. But how? We have penknives and staves, and we will go through the watersplash, splash, splash. They have planes and cannons and carbines. What can we do?”
Three miles across the border, at the East Pakistan town of Darsana, several score Bangladesh supporters are sitting in a former police post, worrying each other with conflicting reports about the imminent fall of the provisional capital, Chuadanga, which lies another 10 miles down the road. “Two Pakistani planes have bombed Chuadanga… More than one Bengali has been killed…Punjabi troops are only three miles from the city. . . There are no Bangladesh troops near the town, they have all left already.”
“We Will Die”
One politician gives a solemn and sincere speech about the failure of the outside world to come to the aid of Bangladesh. A small knot of men is watching a medic operate on a pudgy compatriot-a dab of iodine is being applied to a small cut on his left palm. Another local leader is asked what the Bangladesh forces plan as the opposing army advances. “We will die,” he says, and the others grimly nod. But the next day the Pakistan army walked into Chuadanga unopposed.
A constant sad refrain these days from Bangladesh people is the failure of the outside world to aid them. The expectations of Bangladesh may have been naive, but even far more practical-minded men would have been disappointed at the world response. No great power has helped the Bengalis, who represent a majority of the Pakistani population and are fighting for independence after having been attacked.
Russia has given Bangladesh a bit of verbal support-in the form of a call to West Pakistan to stop the killing. On the other hand, Red China, a proponent of civil wars, has given strong verbal backing to West Pakistan.
Only India, Pakistan’s neighbor and enemy, has given Bangladesh firm verbal support. India has permitted limited unofficial aid to flow across its borders into East Pakistan and has let Bangladesh forces and followers take refuge, at least temporarily. But even India has stopped well short of diplomatic recognition or organized military assistance.
The Threat of Chaos
So far, both India and Pakistan, despite bitter charges and countercharges, seem anxious to avoid a real confrontation. But if either drops its current caution, the chaos of East Pakistan could engulf the whole subcontinent.
Only yards from the Indian border, Bangladesh held a ceremony in a mango grove at a village called Mujibnagar last Saturday. The provisional government of Bangladesh was officially presented to the press, a proclamation of Independence, was read, and speakers made patriotic addresses.
But glory fades quickly for Bangladesh. The day after the ceremony, the village is deserted except for a few dozen residents. The reviewing stand still sits under a spreading mango tree, but only several ducks and a goose strut around it.
The memory of glory lives on, however, Back on the Indian side of the border, a Bangladesh official is still dreaming about the previous day. “It was a wonderful day,” he declares. “Seven ministers and 27 eminences. Very good speeches. A fine ceremony.”