WORKER PRESS, DECEMBER 11, 1971
RETREATING PAKISTANIS TAKE THEIR
REVENGE ON BENGALIS
By A foreign reporter
Retreating Pakistani soldiers in E. Bengal arc taking a terrible revenge on the local population for their defeats at the hands of the Indian army and the Mukti Bahini liberation forces.
Reports from Chittagong still in the hands of Yahya Khans forces, indicate that workers in the town are being massacred in hundreds by the Pakistan troops.
Army units are believed to be ma king for Chittagong to prepare a sea-borne break-out as Indian troops advance.
A centre of militant trade unionism with a concentrated working class Chittagong was one of the most active centers of Bengali resistance to Khan’s forces in the first days of repression in Bangladesh.
Unable to hold onto E. Bengal, the Pakistan military seems bent on killing as many Bengali workers as it can in a last malevolent burst of hatred against Bangladesh.
When Indian troops entered Jessore earlier this week they found systematic destruction of houses and livestock in the surrounding villages.
In the city itself, Italian Catholic priests who lived through the Pakistan occupation told correspondents that the last weeks before liberation had been very severe.
The repression, they said, became more and more brutal, with shootings and pillaging in the very heart of the Jessore cantonment.
On Tuesday afternoon, as India troops were approaching the town’s outskirts, the Pakistani troops were still executing ‘hostages.’
Leaders of the Awami League, which heads the Indian-backed provisional government of Bangladesh, are appealing for restraint in dealing with razakars who collaborated in these repressions.
These leaders now face the problem of imposing their authority over the many areas of Bangladesh, where committees of liberation have already set up locally-based administrations.
With 150,000 Bengali irregulars under arms, the Awami League leaders are trying to ensure that the popular movement does not get out of their control.
This explains the reactionary suggestion made earlier this week by the New Delhi representative Humayun Choudhury that Mukti Bahini forces should be sent to India’s western frontier to take part in the fight against W. Pakistan.
But the workers and Peasants of Bangladesh have no interest in assisting India to annexe Kashmir which is the main aim of India’s war in the West.
Choudhury’s proposal is the first step towards disarming the Bengali resistance fighters in order to ensure that bourgeois rule continues in Bangladesh in collaboration with the Indian ruling class.
Pravda yesterday distinctly indicated that the Soviet Union is net planning at present to join India in recognizing Bangladesh. Veteran commentator Yuri Zhukov once again stressed Moscow’s call on the Pakistan government to take steps towards a political settlement in E. Pakistan.