THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH, APRIL 16, 1971
SLAUGHTER GOES ON AS E.PAKISTAN FIGHTS FOR LIFE
By David Loshak in Sylhet, East Pakistan
Savage fighting for control of this key town, the capital of East Pakistan’s most remote and isolated district, yesterday reached a crucial stage as central Government forces struggled to wrest control from the “Bangladesh liberation army.”
The West Pakistan Army is making a determined effort to wide out resistance before the onset of the monsoon in two weeks’ time, but it is meeting stiff opposition, and both sides have suffered severe losses
Last night the West Pakistanis belonging to the 31st Punjab Regiment seemed to have the upper hand, but persistent mortaring, which I observed for the second day running made it clear that the battle was far from over.
Members of the “Mukti Fouz,” the untrained and barely organized “liberation army” of East Pakistan, were fighting a last-ditch stand for the town, now a ruined, empty shell. They ‘have killed about 200 of the Punjab unit’s 800 complement.
Their own losses have been far heavier, but Bengalis in their thousands are continuing the fight and constantly replacing the dead I found their morale consistently high despite their desperate situation and there is no doubt of their readiness to fight to the death.
Control of countryside
The Mukti Fouz now control almost the entire countryside. They have confined the Army to the area around Salutigar Airport, five miles north of Sylhet. after capturing Khadimnagar cantonment to the east of the town.
The victory brought the Mukti Fouz urgently-needed supplies of arms and ammunition.
I reached Khadimnagar yesterday after a four-day journey through the hills and jungles of Assam in India, and of northern Sylhet Province, then down through fertile plain and tea gardens and paddy fields.
Despite West Pakistani claims, the Indian border is closed, and crossing into Bangladesh is forbidden. In blinding, saturating rain I slipped across the frontier at a point about 40 miles north-west of Sylhet.
The route lay first down winding trails through forests and undergrowth, beneath trees heavy with ripening jackfruit and laced with green cordons of tropical weeds.
Then stumbling along a dried-up river bed thick with longs torn out of the mountains by the surge of monsoon cataracts, and finally through a stretch of reeds and coarse grasses I came to an almost deserted settlement in a jungle clearing.
There I made first contact in this region with the Mukti Fouz. Quite unlike their counterpart in the west of Bangladesh along the West of Bengal border of India, these men were already battle-hardened’.
Danger ahead
No one in Bangladesh gives his real name, and I am not reporting most place names, to avoid reprisals. The local commander, who called himself Capt. Dudu Mia, said it was dangerous to go further that day.
He confirmed what I had seen from the heights of Assam earlier. There, looking down on to the Sylhet Plain, I saw fires burning across a wide landscape and a layer of smoke settled below the cloud.
Capt. Mia said heavy fighting was going on in Sylhet. The area was under constant three-inch mortar and six-inch artillery attack, as well as aerial bombardment from Chinese MIGs and American Sabre jets of the West Pakistan Air Force.
In addition West Pakistan soldiers were making repeated forays from Salutigur Airport, burning villages and tea plantations.
Travel during darkness would be suicide, so I slept in the settlement, a typical “Punji” village consisting of “chang,” houses simple thatched dwellings on raised bamboo platforms.
The night was deathly silent, broken only by the baying of piedogs and the buzzing of the local, steely-jawed mosquitoes.
In the morning, I drove with an armed escort towards Sylhet. The communications of the Bangladesh forces are tenuous, and there was no knowing what we might meet.
After the bamboo stockade surrounding the village, my jeep passed through thick woods to British owned tea estates. They were largely deserted, the lush green bushes untended and unpicked.
Plantation workers, looking cowed and bewildered, gazed vacantly from their homes.
While the spirits of the “liberation fighters” are high despite heavy losses, the morale of the peasants seemed at low ebb.
Their situation is appalling. They have no food other than one pound of rice daily. Not much rice can be harvested in the present circumstances.
Stocks cannot last more than two weeks. The Army has burnt and looted many ware houses. There is no money to buy vital supplies such as salt and kerosene, even if these can be obtained from across the border, which is difficult.
Small pox and cholera
Epidemic illness has set in. A village doctor told me there were 10 confirmed smallpox cases and four of cholera. Supplies of scrum had run out.
I drove on by jeep to Sylhet. Despite their enthusiasm, the men of the Mukti Fouz are militarily naive. They did not observe even the most elementary defensive precautions against a sudden aerial strafing along the open road, and were not prepared for ambush.
They are pitifully equipped. They have only an assortment of outdated small arms, possibly one or two captured mortars. But otherwise nothing better than spears, bows and arrows and the local, dao knife, like a Gurkha “kukrt”.
Like the civilian population, they are short of food and equally vital supplies such as petrol. I visited their one storage depot, near Sylhet, which was unsuccessfully bombed by the West Pakistanis. Supplies arc down to the last few hundred gallons.
It is significant that despite such handicaps, the Mukti Fouz has managed to hold back the Army, which has far superior firepower and expertise and is continually reequipped by air.
Civilians slaughtered
Mukti Fouz leaders say this is because they are fighting for a cause.
The Army’s strategy appears to be solely one of causing maximum distress to the civilian population and lasting damage to the region. Signs of this have been the way soldiers have, on orders, fired blindly into occupied houses, burnt down entire villages and slaughtered the occupants as they fled.
They have also destroyed larger installations such as the light industries of Chhatak and the 10 main jute factories of East Pakistan, the mainstay of the economy not only of East but of West Pakistan.
The Army’s aim was clearly to break the morale of the people within 48 hours of launching its first attacks, aborting resistance before it took life.
This failed, but the Government has persisted with the same sterile strategy. This has turned Sylhet, like many other major centers of East Pakistan, into a ghost city.
Almost the entire population of 700,000 has fled into the surrounding countryside, leaving the streets to the helpless old and crippled the corpses, wild dogs and vultures.
Bloated corpses float in the Surma River which flows through Sylhet. They arc testimony to the night of March 26, when West Pakistan troops burst into the city and launched a campaign of looting and slaughter.
Special units were assigned to the killing of doctors, advocates, journalists, teachers and other professional people.
Resistance link
Fighting now cenres on the King Bridge, connecting Sylhet’s two halves. If the Army succeeds in destroying the bridge, it will cut a main link of the Bangladesh resistance.
Yet such a victory would be of small value to the central Government, whose forces are and seem likely to remain, not less hard pressed than the Mukti Fouz.
The Army has no hope of gaining control of the countryside. Heavy pre-monsoon rains are already making movement difficult and the population is hostile to a man.
When the monsoon begins in earnest, late this month, bringing some of the heaviest rainfall in the world for weeks on end, the Army will be completely bogged down.