THE OBSERVER, DECEMBER 12. 1971
DACCA DAIRY
Gavin Young, who has reported many wars for ‘The Observer,’ has been in Dacca since the Indo-Pakistan war erupted. During the week the following messages have reached us from him; he was able to transmit only single short cables at any one time.
Tuesday: I have had series of the closest views of the undersides of Indian MiG jets that I could ever wish for. I had gone with other journalists to Dacca Airport to view a shot down Indian plane. And while there we were trapped by a new attack.
I was recumbent under an inadequate palm tree, feeling like the lady surprised in her bath wit h only a sponge to wear.
They came back and back, wheeling in from different directions, very low-say. 20 to 30 feet directly overhead-banking away after releasing their rockets.
The noise was shattering, but the Pakistani anti-aircraft guns-a wide variety-outshattered them. Bits of shrapnel fell around. A United Nations plane went up in smoke; rockets ploughed through a hangar. It was an exhilarating show. If the Indians had bombs under their wings, or napalm, few journalists would be left alive.
Wednesday: Today I drove to Narayanganj, the big river port 12 miles from Dacca. I had heard of devastation there, but saw little. Barbed wire and guns were everywhere.
Bombing at night, Indian pilots had hit the sleeping heart of a pauper residential area half a mile from a power station. Four or five hundred civilians were killed and 150 were in hospital; the dead were buried in the mud as they slept.
Other things, remind us that all is not black and white-some hamlets demolished by fire on the roadside, not by bombs but by the Pakistan Army.
God knows what editors in London are making of the news they get about Dacca. Correspondents of daily newspapers and agencies here are still receiving much delayed cables from London demanding to know why they have received no daily file on events and details of life, smells and sounds. Don’t they know we can’t get out! And that cables have massive delays? One newsman was asked why he could not fly out by Pakistan International Airlines if others were suspended. Does his editors really think that any airline at all has been coming here since last Friday?
Thursday: The worst of it till now is the horror of the Islamic orphanage, hit by Indian bombs at 4 o’clock this morning.
Three hundred boys and girls were sleeping there. I saw the place soon after dawn. Bombs had ploughed everyone into a vast and hideous mud-cake, most of them dead. Some under the head were breathing, no doubt, but how far down, how badly injured, no one could tell.
Bombing at night is a deadly thing, and unnecessary here. These bombs were aimed at the airport runway, but the Indians had been attacking it for five days by daylight. Only at midday today did a jet pilot finally put a bomb right on it.
But up to then we had all agreed with an Australian correspondent here who muttered on the first day: The Indians couldn’t bit a bull in the bum with a banjo.’ That was when we saw the Indian jets careening out of the sky, shot down one by one, seven or nine of them, probably more. The big Sukhoi- 7 Russian bombers are the most spectacular in their fall, slow and graceful, like a sad ballet. That seems a month ago.
After the bombing we emerge into the streets and I look at my fellow covertakers. We make a grotesque miscellany.
Dapper clerks in white shirts and trousers and black shoes and with glistening hair; clouds of impassive, lean rickshaw men careering in packs through the dogs and crows picking at offal in the roads; strange groups of tattered people, dark-skinned, wild eyes in bony faces, crouching under a huge banyan tree-the ultimate poor.
What do they make of the sirens, the earth-shaking noise of bombs? The old man striding nowhere through the city, his dirty white locks flying, with a bundle and a long stick, like a mad prophet possessed by the belief that he would see his strangest prophecy come true if he can only get there, somewhere, in time.
Friday Morning: The sirens drowned out the muazzin’s early call to prayer.
And now we hear the guns. The front can’t be far away. The propeller-driven Indian aircraft drop huge bombs. The tall steel structure of the Intercontinental Hotel quivers like a sapling.
Again the mercy flights scheduled for the umpteenth time by the UN and today by the RAF in Singapore, have been cancelled. The women and children are stranded.
Who, we ask here with increasing indignation, is preventing these innocents from leaving-the Indian Government? The Pakistanis have no reason to do so.
One thing international opinion could do is to urge the Indians to stop night bombing, at which they are as inept as most other air forces. Another is to try to have Dacca declared an open city. I believe the Pakistanis would agree to this under certain conditions designed solely to prevent massacres and a civilian uprising and shoot-out in these teeming streets where two rickshaws abreast can cause a traffic block.
There has been a calmness in the city, despite the raids. Banks and shops go on as before. People shelter under doorways and walls when the Indian jets go over or the shrapnel from the Pakistani anti-aircraft guns falls. Slit trenches are everywhere: the hotel lawns have been cut into neatly and in straight lines like a sliced cake. Is there to be a heroic last stand, a miniature…for East Pakistan? Impossible to say.
We listen to the BBC and learn that the Indian Army has armored personnel carriers and can throw a bridge across the waterways hereabouts with air speed. But the armies are probably about on the line of the real rivers, the Ganges on the west and its biggest tributary to the east. These are huge stretches of water, as big as lakes. It is not easy to throw an army across them if they are defended. Besides, the ground is too wet and cut across with canals which are natural tank traps. All this could help the Pakistanis, provided they still have supplies, communications and ammunition. But do they?
Friday Evening A United Nations attempt to make Dacca an open city failed today. The Indians would not agree, I understand, fearing some tactical disadvantage for themselves. The UN (U Thant in person at the behest of Paul Marc Henri, the UN representative here) urged the Plan on humanitarian ground. Henri, a bustling figure of almost Falstaffian proportions who might easily have made an outstanding Gaullist Minister, has now decked out the UN compound with blue and white signs on neutrality. He is in daily conference with consular representatives, to arrange flights out for the women and children.
One objection after another arises and has to be eradicated the Indians insist on relief planes flying into Dacca through Calcutta, to emphasize the existence of a ‘Bangladesh’ government there. So we are now nearly a week without those flights. An Indian bomb fell not far from the UN complex this morning. But there, later, was Henti and his group, shooting off messages to New York surrounded by papers and files and half empty whisky glasses.
Rumors abound, some spreading from radio sets which pick up snippets and stories from Delhi. One strong rumor two days ago was that the Pakistani commander. General Niazi had skipped but of Dacca in a small propeller driven plane at night. The story was heard on the news from Delhi. But the rumor was proved also today when Niazi appeared in the Dacca streets, large as life (which is very large) in the middle jeep of three surrounded by his escort. Niazi has never been faulted for his courage. He wears the ribbon of a Military Cross won in the Second World War fighting the Japanese.
Second to him. Major-General Farman Ali Khan has once or twice in the past week appeared to journalists, but he too. like all the small in-group of top administrators here, has been working relentlessly round the clock. And there was nothing much they cared to say. Their lot is not a happy one.