TIME, MAY 24, 1971
PAKISTAN POLISHING A TARNISHED IMAGE
“We have been maligned,” declared the Pakistani armed forces intelligence chief. Major General Mohammad Akbar Khan. The general’s complaint, delivered to half a. dozen foreign journalists in Karachi, concerned the widespread reports of army brutality in the effort to crush the seven-week-old Bengali rebellion in East Pakistan. Incensed by what it describes as “concocted items put out by foreign press and radio,” the government staged a series of briefings and a fast four-day helicopter tour of the East to get the “correct” story across.
Peace Committee. The West Pakistani government has good reason to fret about its image. Since the crackdown on the breakaway state of Bangladesh began late in March, at least 200,000 have died-almost all of them Bengalis. In addition, more than 1,500,000 Bengalis have fled to India and those who have stayed behind are threatened with an approaching famine that the government does not seem anxious to combat. Most outside observers have laid the responsibility for the East Pakistan tragedy to the hobnail-tough martial law imposed by Lieut. General Tikka (meaning “red hot”) Khan. The West Pakistani-dominated government insists that the army has’ ‘saved the country.” Not destroyed it. The new official line: Bengali rebels, acting “in high conspiracy with India”, were tearing through East Pakistan with “tactics reminiscent of Nazi storm troopers,” and the army was forced to step in to prevent a bloodbath.
The journalist’s tour was carefully staged to make the government’s improbable tale at least look convincing. Army escorts for the six newsmen spared no effort to clean up screen off or simply avoid shell-pockcd buildings, burned out Bengali settlements left by Tikka Khan’s jets and tanks. On the other hand, the Pakistanis lost opportunity to show off evidence of brutality by the Bengalis. At Natore, a town northwest of Dacca, the reporters were greeted by a “peace committee,” as the army organized pacification teams are known. The committee led the way to a nearby village where, they said, 700 of the 1,300 residents had been slaughtered by rampaging Bengalis. The feature attraction was a well that was choked with human skeletons and reeked of decomposing flesh. Said one peace committeeman: “You have never seen such atrocities!”
The army was not at all eager, however, to let the journalists look around on their own. While walking through Natore, Time Correspondent Louis Kraar reported last week, “a bearded peace committeeman kept interrupting every time anyone spoke to me. Finally, I escaped him-and found myself in the Hindu section of town. It was totally destroyed, a pile of rubble and ashes. As I walked, a young Bengali pressed close and explained that he was a student. “We are living in terror of the army,” he told me. “Until today, when you came, they have been killing people.”
Perfect Order. Just about everywhere, Kraar found, the killing had followed a typical pattern: government troops would try to “liberate” a rebel-held town in a deliberately provoking manner. The Bengali townspeople would wreak revenge on the non-Bengalis (in the process killing perhaps 20,000, or about 10% of the total dead), and then the army would pounce with everything it had. At Mymensingh, a town north of Dacca, that meant an air strike by Pakistani jets and a five hour shelling by two American-made M-34 tanks. Many of Mymensingh’s Bengali sectors are in ruins, and about 90% of its pre-civil war population has fled or been killed. That is evidently the kind of record that pleases Tikka Khan, who likes to say: “We want perfect law and order.”