THE GUARDIAN WEEKLY, APRIL 4, 1971
A CRY FOR HELP
By Martin Woollacott
The, situation in Bangladesh is worsening day by day, and it is a pathetic and heartrending spectacle, for there is hardly a liberation movement of the twentiethcentury that can claim such unanimous support from people of all classes, nor one that was ever so ill-prepared and ill-equipped to fight for its rights.
After a 200-mile journey into East Bengal, reaching to Faridpur on the banks of the Ganges, some 90 miles from the Indian border, the main impression is of a people who with every justification but sadly with limited chances of success, are crying out for international help before it is too late. And that, at least as far as the short-term prospects of the liberation movement are concerned, could be very soon indeed.
The Pakistani Army, estimated at strength of over five divisions, is now moving swiftly to take the towns held by the Bangladesh forces before the rainy season begins, and it will probably succeed in doing so.
Everywhere I went in Bangladesh during a three-day trip, I heard the same appeal-in the squares of the towns, in the offices of administrators, in barracks, in roadside pharmacies and shops; “Why doesn’t the world help us?”
In Magura, between Jessore and Faridpur, a middle-aged lawyer, Mr. Nasir-ulIslam, who has become effective chief civil administrator, insisted on writing out a lengthy “appeal to the freedom loving humanity” in fine copperplate hand, which began “we appeal to humanity to come to our help in this period of greatest calamity when we, the entire nation of Bangladesh are forced to take up arms against the occupation army of the Punjabis who are up to anything to destroy the last point of civilization.”
Watched by a crowd of several hundred people, and feeling something of a charlatan, I placed this ceremoniously in my bag.
One soon forgets one’s initial amusement at the flowery Indian English of educated Bengalis when one sees the tragic situation they are in. Crossing the bridge outside Magura we meet a marching column of young men in civilian clothes, armed with 303 rifles. They halt, visibly swelling with pride, their backs stiffened in the approved British military fashion, and their sandalled feet hitting the ground in a manoeuvre designed for soldiers wearing heavy boots, so that the Danish journalist with me can take a photograph.
At least at Magura they have enough rifles for a half company or so. Further on at one river crossing town, the former Pakistani airman in charge of defences tells me that they have four Lee Enfield rifles and two dummy rifles.
At Jhenida and Jessore is a force probably as large as any in the Liberation “army”. It consists of perhaps 750 men of whom only about 200 are trained soldiers from the East Pakistan Rifles and the East Bengal Regiment. The rest are militia and freedom fighters. The patchwork administration of Bangladesh shows endless variety. Everywhere the existing administrative cadre went over as one man to the liberation movement, and in some towns they are still running affairs.
In others respected local citizens have been brought in or Awami League assembly members are in charge. In Jhenida, at an irrigation project headquarters, a former police superintendent is military commander.
A tall, handsome man wearing a striped shirt, a webbing belt and with a pistol on a lanyard, he arrived full of euphoria from the Jessore “front” the day I was there. “We
have surrounded them and we will wait till they try to come out We ought to be able to handle a battalion ” he reported.
In the cool of evening, a duplicating machine thumps on, turning out directives banning hoarding, ordering Government and other officials to return to their posts, asking all students to report to the command headquarters for military training and other tasks. Grouped round a lantern on the lawn. Captain Mahbubuddin Ahmed and his aides talk of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh.
“We must have freedom, even socialist freedom but not the Chinese type of freedom where everybody cannot speak and is regimented”. Another says: “We just forgot our Bengali identity when we became part of Pakistan You know, they even banned Tagore, the backbone of Bengali literature, just because he was Hindu.”
Atrocity stories circulate continually, and some of them are undoubtedly true. In Faridpur District Sports club, which has become the town’s military headquarters, a young magistrate from Khulna told me he witnessed the machine-gunning of a protest procession “without any provocation.”
Thinking it a dreadful case of some army officer losing his head, he rushed to military headquarters in his jeep and confronted the Punjabi colonel. “The colonel said my complaint was nonsense, and that the next time people were shot. I the magistrate would be one of the first to die.”
A young man is led in to recount the story of the death of a Catholic missionary in Jessore because Bengali have a sad conviction that such a death counts higher in our scales than the deaths of many Moslems. Excitedly, he explains that the priest was shot down in his mission, together with some native Christians, and that afterwards a Punjabi brigadier came and apologized, Saying it was an accident.
“The other priest told him how could such a thing be an accident when there is a Red-Cross mark on the roof of the mission,” The story has the ring of truth.
Without accepting the inflated stories of the number of deaths, it is more than clear (hat many people will die as the Pakistani Army moves on, and probably not just the young, men manning the roadblocks, or crouched with their Lee Enfield’s in the bushes near ditches they have dug across the roads.
And even were the war to stop tomorrow other deaths may be in prospect beside those from fighting. Food, petrol and other essential commodities are in the shortest of supply, and the disruption of water and power services has brought a public health risk.
Returning from Faridpur to Chuadanga with a group of young men with mysterious mission in Calcutta, to do with the setting up of a provisional government, we had a too graphic illustration of the superiority of the Pakistan forces. Crossing the river Gorai by small boat we were strafed by Sabre jets of the Pakistani Air Force. Leaping into the river to take cover among stacks of bricks on the bank, one felt very strongly that Lee Enfield rifles are no match for this sort of thing. Incidentally, a country boat crossing the river is hardly a military target.
Many of the towns are half empty, and the capture of Pabna yesterday put more refugees on the roads out of Kushtia and Kumarkhali. Faridpur itself only a few miles from the main ferry crossing to Dacca is a town populated largely by young men Partly as a matter of policy, and partly because they could not stop it anyway, women, children and the old have dispersed to their home villages from the towns. Whether they will be safe there is another matter.
The more realistic among the leaders of the liberation zones put their main hopes in the collapse of the West Pakistan economy. A young accountant in Faridpur who has achieved recent renown for devising a plan to stop planting jute and replacing it with rice told me: “Their economy con not sustain this scale of effort for more than six months or a year. They have forgotten that 10 days of fighting in the IndoPakistani war shattered the economy.”
But in order for this to work. Western nations must cease giving aid to West Pakistan, and one is begged as if one were an ambassador or plenipotentiary of some kind to ensure that Britain at least stops aid.
Most widespread of all is the feeling that Bengal made a tragic mistake in 1947 when it decided to cast its lot with Pakistan. “We were swept by the passion if communalism,” says Mr. Nasir-ul-Islam in Magura. “1 too made that mistake. We all made it: now we are paying the price.” The price paid has already been high, and unless the Bengalis are saved by international intervention, or by some other miracle, it will be higher still in the months to come.