Beyond the Killing Fields – War Writings Sydney Schanberg

Beyond the Killing Fields – War Writings Sydney Schanberg

Beyond the Killing Fields – War Writings Sydney Schanberg

PREFACE

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HOW I CAME TO KNOW WAR AND WHY THIS BOOK
I knew nothing about war when I came out of college, or even after two years as an army draftee, stationed in Germany. It was that no-shooting era—the Cold War with Russia. Then I offered my services to The New York Times, where they hired me as a clerk at $49.50 a week, running errands and copy for the editorial writers on the tenth floor.
Ten years later, in 1969-after having covered the police beat, city government, and state government, I was awarded a foreign assignment as the bureau chief in New Delhi, responsible for South Asia (India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, etc.). War didn’t seem imminent in my new surroundings either. That didn’t last very long.
In April 1970 President Richard Nixon, on Henry Kissinger’s advice, ordered a major military “incursion” into Cambodia, a small, weak country that had been trying to stay neutral. The American push engulfed Cambodia in the Vietnam War. Extra correspondents were needed at this time to bolster the Saigon bureau and I was one of those sent in.
Later that year, back in South Asia, Pakistani elections gave rise to an autonomy movement in East Pakistan, and in March 1971, the Pakistani army was sent in to crush it. India got involved on behalf of the freedom movement and in December, war was declared and I covered it alongside the Indian advance. The Pakistanis surrendered within two weeks.
My life, essentially, had turned into a war assignment. In 1972, I was sent again to Vietnam when the Communists launched an offensive that lasted about six months.

I also kept returning regularly to Cambodia for long periods. The country was sinking steadily, and I stayed to report the final days as it fell to the genocidal Khmer Rouge guerrillas supported by China.
Why put together a collection of old war stories? What useful purpose does it serve? My answer is simple. To me, now a septuagenarian, it seems that our planet-and maybe Washington in particular-has become almost comfortable with regular wars. President Eisenhower’s warning to America to beware of “the military-industrial complex” has been brushed aside.
We Americans are notoriously deficient about taking lessons from our own history. So perhaps this book will remind people what war is really like. Slaughter is no less bestial now than it has been through recorded history.
Armed with this knowledge, the next time a politician says we must invade and destroy evildoers who are being well contained by other means, maybe we’ll think twice.
And, then, maybe we won’t.
SYDNEY SCHANBERG New Paltz, NEW YORK
SEPTEMBER 2009

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
No book gets created by one person alone. This one wouldn’t have come into being if not for two good friends—Robert Miraldi, journalism professor and author, and his wife, investigative reporter Mary Beth Pfeiffer—who came to me with the idea, urged me to take it on, and offered to help. Rob agreed to be the overall editor. Mary Beth, among other things, did the archaeology, plowing through boxfuls of my work in search of the wheat.
Other helpers, who did research and detail work, were Dave Savercool, Kelsey Van Norman, Emily Atkin, and Jesse Ordansky. Jeanmarie Evelly handled a special research assignment.
Our agent, Robert Wilson, worked tirelessly in the hunt for a publisher in poor economic times. Our editor at Potomac Books, Hilary Claggett, guided us well throughout.
My thoughts, though, ranged into the past, fixing on people who had shaped my path to becoming a reporter-all the way back to Helen Bachose, my high school Latin teacher, and Robert Murphy, the debate coach. And to John Ligon, my army drill sergeant, out of Harlem and the Korean War.
I also owe a great deal to my editors at The New York Times, Newsday, and the Village Voice (the late Sheldon Binn, Tony Marro, and Don Forst), who gave me the freedom to operate independently. I must especially thank Jim Greenfield, Gerry Gold, Allan Siegal, and others on The Times’s foreign desk for how they looked after me and my copy during the 1970s, when I was covering wars. I also am indebted to the omnipresent Arthur Gelb for proposing and assigning me to write “The Death and Life of Dith Pran” when Pran escaped to freedom in 1979.

Finally, thanks will never be enough for all the foreign aides who guide correspondents overseas-translating, explaining, and saving us from harm with their sharper sense of imminent danger and their bravery. We couldn’t do our jobs without them. Yet seldom are they acknowledged by the news organizations that benefit from their work. I salute the men who made my work better: P. J. Anthony, Kasturi Rangan, Barun Roy, Chan Vo, Koy Sarun, Put Sophan, Mean Leang, Junnosuke Ofusa-and, of course, Dith Pran.

East Pakistan Fights to Become
Independent Bangladesh
All articles in this chapter were published in The New York Times.
PAKISTAN’S MILITARY CRACKS DOWN ON EAST PAKISTAN FREEDOM MOVEMENT March 21, 1971
DACCA, Pakistan—”If you are united, there is no power on earth which can prevent you from getting Pakistan.”
These words were spoken to a Bengali crowd in East Pakistan 25 years ago by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, head of the Muslim League and father of the unlikely two-part country known as Pakistan, whose east and west wings are separated not only by 1,000 miles of Indian territory but also by their different cultures and languages.
Pakistan came into being in 1947, a year after the late Mr. Jinnah’s speech. But if the East Pakistanis ever shared any of his feelings of unity, that day is long past. The two wings are now confronting each other like two enemy countries.
In this recent escalation of animosity, the 75 million Bengalis of East Pakistan, led by Sheik Mujibur Rahman, have taken de facto control of their province, defying the martial-law regime imposed here by the central government in West Pakistan and obeying only the directive of the Sheik and his Awami League party.
The armed forces, an instrument of West Pakistan, have reinforced their garrisons in the East; tension is high and many Bengalis fear an army bloodbath to prevent them from gaining independence, or even a large measure of self-rule. Clashes between civilians and West Pakistani soldiers erupt occasionally.

Gen. Yahya Khan-Army Commander-In-Chief and the President of Pakistan since he took over as martial law ruler after the fall of the Ayub Khan Government amid bloody riots two years ago–has flown here from the West to try to resolve the crisis through talks with Sheik Mujibur.
The talks are really moving now, after several days of little discernible progress. But few details are known, and it is difficult to tell what formula of self-rule will emerge to satisfy East Pakistan’s determination to end the long domination and economic exploitation by West Pakistan.
The Sheik’s student and worker followers have been screaming for total independence since early this month, when West Pakistani troops killed scores of Bengali civilians.
The Bengalis had been staging protest demonstrations against President Yahya’s last-minute postponement of the National Assembly, in which more populous East Pakistan had won a clear majority in national elections last December.
Sheik Mujibur would settle for something just short of independenceperhaps for two largely self-ruling regions and a central government with powers restricted to defense and some foreign policy matters.
The present speculation-and in this mercurial situation it could change overnight—is that the talks will produce some temporary arrangement for transferring power from the military to civilians. This could mean the establishment of interim governments in each of the five provinces (the four provinces of West Pakistan, plus East Pakistan) until the National Assembly, now re-scheduled to convene on Thursday, adopts a new constitutional structure for the country.
After the Army killings early this month, the Sheik made some new demands, including immediate transfer of power to the people’s representatives and the lifting of martial law. It is expected that martial law will be softened, if not lifted, during the interim period.
The confrontation across the bargaining table in Dacca is ironic in that Sheik Mujibur and President Yahya are not enemies. General Yahya was the first Pakistani President to acknowledge the West’s exploitation of the East and to try to do something to end it by holding elections according to the one-man, one-vote procedure, which gave East Pakistan the dominant voice.
That comprehension of East Pakistan’s grievances is one reason for hope for a break in the deadlock.
PAKISTANI ARMY SETS DACCA ABLAZE March 28, 1971
Editor’s Note, March 27, 1971-Mr. Schanberg was one of 35 foreign newsmen

expelled Saturday morning from East Pakistan. He cabled this dispatch from Bombay, India.
DACCA, Pakistan-The Pakistani Army is using artillery and heavy machine guns against unarmed East Pakistani civilians to crush the movement for autonomy in this province of 75 million people.
The attack began late Thursday night without warning. West Pakistani soldiers, who predominate in the Army, moved into the streets of Dacca, the provincial capital, to besiege the strongholds of the independence movement, such as the university.
There was no way of knowing how many civilians had been killed or wounded. Neither was any information available on what was happening in the rest of the province although there had been reports before the Dacca attack of clashes between civilians and West Pakistani soldiers in the interior.
The firing here was at first sporadic, but by 1 A.M. yesterday it had become heavy and nearly continuous and it remained that way for three hours. Scores of artillery bursts were seen and heard by foreign newsmen confined to the Intercontinental Hotel on threat of death.
From the hotel, which is in North Dacca, huge fires could be seen in various parts of the city, including the university area and the barracks of the East Pakistan Rifles, a paramilitary force made up of Bengalis, the predominant people of East Pakistan
Some fires were still burning and sporadic shooting was continuing early this morning when the 35 foreign newsmen were expelled from Dacca.
“My God, my God,” said a Pakistani student watching from a hotel window, trying to keep back tears, “they’re killing them. They’re slaughtering them.”
On the ride to the airport in a guarded convoy of military trucks, the newsmen saw troops setting fire to the thatched-roof houses of poor Bengalis who live along the road and who are some of the staunchest supporters of the self-rule movement.
“Bangla Desh is finished, many people are killed,” a West Pakistani soldier at the airport said in a matter-of-fact tone. Bangla Desh, or Bengal Nation, was the name adopted by leaders of the autonomy movement in East Pakistan.
When the military action began on Thursday night, soldiers, shouting victory slogans, set ablaze large areas in many parts of Dacca after first shooting into the buildings with automatic rifles, machine guns and recoilless rifles.
The firing started at about 11 P.M., but at first it was intermittent and it was not clear that a full-scale military operation had started.

When the foreign newsmen, all of whom were staying at the Intercontinental Hotel, tried to go outside to find out what was happening, they were forced back in by a heavily reinforced army guard and told they would be shot if they tried to step out of the building.
Telephone calls to friends and news sources in the city brought reports of scattered shooting and civilians putting up barricades in the streets. At 12:20 A.M., a call to the home of Sheik Mujibur Rahman, leader of the independent movement, was answered by a man who said he was an official of the Awami League, Sheik Mujib’s political party.
“The situation is very bad,” he said, and he added that Sheik Mujib was in his bedroom. The Pakistan radio reported later that Sheik Mujib was arrested at 1:30 A.M. The report said that five of his colleagues were also arrested.
The firing began to increase in the vicinity of the hotel and at 1 A.M. it seemed to become very heavy all over the city. Artillery opened up, but it was difficult to tell where the shells were landing. Some, however, seemed to be falling in the areas of the university and the East Pakistan Rifles headquarters.
At 1:25 A.M., the phones at the hotel went dead, shut down by order of the military guard outside. The lights on the telegraph office tower went out at about the same time. Heavy automatic-weapons fire could be heard in the university area and other districts.
Occasionally there would be an answering report, perhaps from one of the old rifles that some of the militant students were reported to have been collecting. But at no time was there any significant answering fire.
At about 2:15 A.M. a jeep with a mounted machine gun drove by the front of the hotel, turned left on Mymensingh Road and stopped in front of a shopping bazaar, with its gun trained on the second floor windows. A dozen soldiers on foot joined those on the jeep, one group carrying some kind of rocket piece.
From the second floor suddenly came cries of “Bengalis, unite!” and the soldiers opened fire with the machine gun, spraying the building indiscriminately. The soldiers then started moving down an alley adjacent to the bazaar, firing into, and then overturning cars that were blocking the alley. The scene was lit by the soldiers’ flashlights, and to the newsmen watching from the 10th floor of the Intercontinental, it was an incredible drama.
As the soldiers were firing down the alley, a group of about 15 or 20 young Bengalis started along the road toward them, from about 200 yards off. They were shouting in defiance at the soldiers, but they seemed unarmed and their hands appeared empty.

The machine gun on the jeep swung around toward them and opened fire. Soldiers with automatic rifles joined in. The Bengali youths scattered into the shadows on both sides of the road. It was impossible to tell whether any had been wounded or killed.
The soldiers then turned their attention back to the alley. They set a spareparts garage on fire and then moved on to what was apparently their main objective, the office and press of The People, an English-language daily paper that had strongly supported Sheik Mujib and ridiculed the army.
Shouting in Urdu, the language of West Pakistan, the soldiers warned any persons inside that unless they surrendered they would be shot. There was no answer and no one emerged. The troops then fired a rocket into the building and followed this with small-arms fire and machine-gun bursts. Then they set fire to the building and began smashing the press and other equipment.
Moving farther along, they set ablaze all the shops and shacks behind the bazaar and soon the flames were climbing high above the two-story building. Then they came back down the alley toward the street, waving their hands in the air and shouting war cries.
They were shouting “Narai Takbir,” a Moslem cry meaning “victory for God.” and “Pakistan Zindabad!”—“Long Live Pakistan!”
In the distance, fire that looked as though it extended over at least an acre lighted the sky. Pakistani journalists in the hotel said two dormitories at the university appeared to be on fire.
Shortly after 4 A.M. the shouting eased somewhat, but artillery rounds and machine-gun bursts could be heard occasionally. Tracer bullets from a long way off flew by the hotel.
At 4:45 A.M., another big fire blazed, in the direction of the East Pakistan Rifles headquarters.
At 5:45, in the hazy light of dawn, six Chinese-made T-54 light tanks with soldiers riding on them rumbled into the city and began patrolling main thoroughfares.
The intermittent firing and occasional artillery bursts continued through yesterday and early today, right up to the time the newsmen were expelled.
Helicopters flew overhead yesterday morning, apparently on reconnaissance. Four helicopters given to Pakistan by Saudi Arabia for relief work after last November’s cyclone and tidal wave in East Pakistan were reported being used for the military operation in the province.
At 7 A.M. the Dacca radio, which had been taken over by the army, announced

that President Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan had arrived back in West Pakistan and would address the nation at 8 P.M.
A West Pakistan brigadier who came into the hotel was asked by newsmen what the military operation was all about. “We’ve taken over, it’s as simple as that.” he said.
A military vehicle with a loudspeaker went through the streets issuing a warning. People immediately went to their roofs to remove the black flags that had been one of the symbols of the non-cooperation movement.
Shortly after 8 A.M., a black 1959 Chevrolet with an armed escort of troops in jeeps and trucks pulled up in front of the hotel. This convoy was to take Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and his party to the airport to fly back to West Pakistan.
Mr. Bhutto, the dominant political leader of West Pakistan, opposed Sheik Mujib’s demands for East Pakistan autonomy.
It is generally accepted that his opposition, supported or engineered by the army and business establishment in West Pakistan, was what forced the crisis. Mr. Bhutto, who is aware that the Bengalis largely blame him for their present troubles, came into the lobby flanked by civilian and army bodyguards with automatic weapons. He looked frightened and brushed off all newsmen’s questions with, “I have no comment to make.”
Just before he left the hotel, the Dacca radio said that anyone who violated the curfew would be shot. It then went off the air for an hour and a half, signing off with the Pakistan national anthem sung in Urdu. One of the clerks at the hotel desk leaned on the counter, his hands clasped and shaking in front of him, his eyes brimming with tears.
At 10 A.M. the radio announced the new martial orders that were said to be necessary because “unbridled political activity had assumed an alarming proportion beyond the normal control of the civil administration.”
Every time newsmen in the hotel asked officers for information, they were rebuffed. All attempts to reach diplomatic missions failed. In one confrontation, a captain grew enraged at a group of newsmen who had walked out the front door to talk to him. He ordered them back into the building and, to their retreating backs, he shouted, “I can handle you. If I can kill my own people, I can kill you!
No information was available on what role was played by the East Pakistan Rifles, the Bengali paramilitary force, and the East Bengal Regiment, a heavily Bengali army unit stationed 25 miles north of Dacca.
The Bengali population considered these units potentially sympathetic but the army insisted that they were loyal to the Government.

Shortly after noon, as artillery bursts and automatic fire could be heard in the city, the Dacca radio announced: “The general situation in the province has been brought under control”
The British Broadcasting Corporation reported at 5 P.M. Friday that Calcutta had monitored a clandestine broadcast saying that Sheik Mujib was calling on his people to carry on the fight against the “enemy forces.”
Shortly afterward, the military Government sent word to the hotel that foreign newsmen must be ready to leave by 6:15 P.M. The newsmen packed and paid their bills, but it was 8:20, just after President Yahya’s speech, before their convoy of five trucks with soldiers in front and in back, left for the airport.
Just before leaving, the lieutenant colonel in charge was asked by a newsman why the foreign press had to leave. “We want you to leave because it would be too dangerous for you,” he said. “It will be too bloody.” All the hotel employees and other foreigners in the hotel believed that once the newsmen left, carnage would begin.
“This isn’t going to be a hotel said a hotel official, “it’s going to be a bloody hospital.”
At the airport, with firing going on in the distance, the newsmen’s luggage was rigidly checked and some television firm, particularly that of the British Broadcasting Corporation, was confiscated.
REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK: STICKS AND OLD RIFLES AGAINST TANKS March 29, 1971
NEW DELHI — The people of East Pakistan, armed with sticks, spears and homemade rifles, are mounting a resistance movement against a military force from West Pakistan that is armed with planes, bombs, tanks and heavy artillery.
The resistance, which began after a surprise attack on the civilian population by the Government force three nights ago, sprang from a nonviolent drive for provincial autonomy.
The East Pakistanis tried to claim the majority political power they had won in the elections last December, and the army moved to prevent this.
Earlier this month, Maj. Saddiqui Salik, public relations officer for the martial-law administration in East Pakistan, was telling foreign newsmen about the role of the Pakistani Army in dealing with disobedient civilians.
“When you call in the army,” said the tall West Pakistani officer, “it’s a last resort. The army would shoot to kill.”

The remark was prophetic. Two weeks later, starting last Thursday night, the Pakistani Army apparently began killing anybody who moved in the streets of Dacca or who shouted defiance from a window. The troops used artillery, machine guns, recoilless rifles and rockets against East Pakistani civilians to crush the Bengali movement for self-rule.
East Pakistan and West Pakistan are divided by the northern breadth of India. Their peoples have different languages, cultures, physical appearances. Ever since the country was carved out of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, on the basis of the Moslem religion shared by the two regions, the West has dominated the East.
The army comes from the West. Big business is concentrated there; the per capita income is higher; prices are lower. Everything is better for the 55 million West Pakistanis than for the 75 million East Pakistanis.
Many Bengalis, as the people of East Pakistan are known, had fled the city in the last few weeks for home villages in the interior.
Foreign newsmen, including this correspondent, were expelled from East Pakistan on Saturday. Their film and notebooks were confiscated in thorough body and luggage searches.
Most of the East’s foreign exchange earnings and taxes went for development projects in the West and for the support of the army, which consumes more than 60 percent of the national budget. Fewer than 10 percent of the troops are Bengalis.
The army has acquired most of its weapons from the United States, the Soviet bloc and Communist China. So far, none of the major powers have criticized the army’s action in East Pakistan.
Heavy secrecy surrounded the political talks in Dacca, whose breakdown was followed by the army’s surprise attack. But the bits and pieces that have come to light make it clear that the power establishment in the West never intended to let Sheik Mujib win a significant measure of autonomy for East Pakistan.
Many observers believe that the dominant political leader of West Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was used by the army and major West Pakistan business families to sabotage the talks so that they could keep control of East Pakistan.
President Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan-whose image as a potentially decent general, sympathetic to the Bengalis’ grievances, has changed drastically -said that the talks had broken down because Sheik Mujib refused to let an agreement be negotiated at a session of the newly elected National Assembly. But Sheik Mujib knew that he had to get an agreement in writing before the Assembly met.

The talks dragged on for 10 days and the Bengali “bush telegraph” said that they were taking too long, that something was wrong.
During this time, Sheik Mujib and his Awami League defied the martial-law administration by leading a nonviolent movement of noncooperation with the virtually unanimous support of the population.
Sheik Mujib’s followers took over certain Government agencies, closed others and ignored directives, such as the one that ordered civilian defense employees to report to work or face 10 years “rigorous imprisonment.”
The green, red and gold flag of Bangla Desh-Bengali for Bengal Nationwas unveiled and militant students and workers began demanding complete independence, not simply semi-autonomy.
But those buoyant days for the Bengalis ended quickly. After initial reports of progress the talks slowed and fears of an army crackdown revived.
Troops were flown in daily from West Pakistan, and many Bengalis began to believe that the negotiations were being deliberately prolonged to give the Government in West Pakistan time to get heavy reinforcements to the East.
Clashes between civilians erupted in several towns and a number of deaths were reported. Sheik Mujib denounced what he called “a reign of terror” in a statement distributed last Thursday just before 7 P.M. Four hours later the troops moved into the streets and began firing.
No one knows whether the 51-year-old Sheik Mujib is alive and free, as the clandestine radio of Bangla Desh asserts, or under arrest, as the army insists. But alive or dead, he is the symbol of resistance in East Pakistan.
In addition to the unconfirmed reports of organized operations against the West Pakistani troops, there are some clearer clues that there is resistance.
On Friday morning, 15 rigid new regulations were issued, including one aimed at the noncooperation movement. All Government employees were ordered to report to work by 10 A.M. Saturday or face trial in a military court.
At 12 noon Saturday, Radio Pakistan announced that all department heads had to submit the names of absentees to martial-law headquarters. There seemed no reason for this order unless large numbers of Bengalis were still staying away from their Government jobs.
The exact number of West Pakistani troops in East Pakistan is unknown. Some diplomatic sources estimate that there were 25,000 before the crisis. Since

then, troop ships have been dispatched from Karachi and one report said that some had reached Chittagong. Daily flights also carry troops from the West.
Fresh estimates place the troop strength at over 30,000 and some reports put it as high as 60,000, though this seems high.
Another problem for the West Pakistanis is the fact that all flights must take the long 2,800-mile route by way of Ceylon. India banned Pakistani flights over her territory in early February after two Kashmiris hijacked an Indian Airlines plane to Pakistan and blew it up there.
If Ceylon were to change her mind and deny Pakistan landing and refueling rights, the military offensive would be badly hurt. The Pakistanis are already low on airplane fuel and one recent report said they had asked Burma for supplies.
Yet in the end, the terrain may be the decisive factor, for while the army may keep a grip for some time on the cities–Dacca, Chittagong, Khulna and Rajshahi-it seems doubtful it could move effectively in the primitive interior.
BENGALI OFFICER FEIGNS DEATH AND ESCAPES EXECUTION April 17, 1971
AGARTALA, India, April 13-On the night of March 25, Dabir recalls, he and the two other East Pakistani officers in the 53d Field Artillery Regiment were standing outside when they heard their commander tell the West Pakistani officers he had summoned to his office:
“All of you go now to the city, and by morning I want to see the whole of Comilla filled with corpses. If any officer hesitates to do so, I’ll have no mercy on him.”
Late in the afternoon of March 30, Dabir says, after five days of house arrest for himself and the two other Bengali officers, the West Pakistanis sent an officer to their room to execute them-but Dabir, wounded, escaped by feigning death.
He has now joined the forces fighting for the independence of Bangla Desh, or Bengal Nation, as the Bengali population has named East Pakistan.
Dabir’s experience was apparently no exception. All over East Pakistan–according to Western evacuees, and Bengali soldiers and refugees-West Pakistanis, who dominate the armed forces, were killing their East Pakistani comrades in uniform to deny the independence movement a cadre of military leaders. The sources report that the families of many Bengali officers were also rounded up and killed.
The breakdown of the code of the soldier-officers and troops killing men

with whom they had fought-perhaps depicts as well as any other facet of this conflict the depth of the racial hatred felt by the West Pakistanis, who are Punjabis and Pathans, for the 75 million Bengalis of East Pakistan.
The killing of Bengali soldiers began on the night that the army launched its effort to try to crush the independence movement.
Dabir, a slightly built second lieutenant who is 20 years old and unmarried, told his story of that night and the days that followed to this correspondent at a post in the eastern sector of East Pakistan.
Dabir is not his real name; he asked that a pseudonym be used on the chance that some members of his family-his parents, a brother and three sisters-might still be alive.
Talking in a soft, almost unemotional voice, he gave this account:
After the West Pakistani officers left the commander’s office and headed for the armory to get their weapons, the three unarmed Bengali officers were called in and placed under what amounted to house arrest, although the commander said they were being given office duties.
That night, which they were made to spend in the room next to the commander’s, Dabir could not sleep. At 1 A.M. seven or eight shots were fired somewhere in the compound.
During the next three days, as Dabir and the two others, both captains, answered telephones and shuffled papers under the watch of sentries, they heard the sounds of machine gun, small-arms and artillery fire in the distance.
Through a window they saw the 60 Bengali soldiers of the regiment being taken off behind a building, their hands in the air, by West Pakistani troops. Then the three heard a sustained burst of firing and assumed that the Bengalis had been killed.
All pretense was dropped on March 29 and the three officers were locked in a room together. They passed the night in fear.
On the afternoon of the 30th a West Pakistani officer walked up to the door and broke the glass with the barrel of a submachine gun.
One Bengali captain fell to his knees and begged for mercy. The answer was a burst of fire. The West Pakistani then fired a second burst into the other captain.
Dabir pressed himself against the wall next to the door. The West Pakistani tried the locked door, cursed and went away for the key.
Dabir threw himself under his cot and covered his head with his hands. The man returned. “I shrieked,” Dabir said. “He fired. I felt a bullet hit me. I made a noise as if I was dying. He stopped firing, thinking I was dead, and went away.”

One bullet had struck Dabir’s right wrist, another had grazed his cheek and a third had ripped his shirt up the back. He rubbed blood from his wrist over his face and held his breath when other officers returned to make sure all three were dead.
The West Pakistanis poked and prodded until they were satisfied. For the next two and a half hours soldiers kept coming into the room to view the spectacle. A Punjabi sergeant kicked the bodies of the two captains. Each time Dabir desperately held his breath.
“Time passed.” Dabir continued. “The blood dried and flies gathered on my wound. The smell was bad.”
After seven hours Dabir left by the window and dropped four feet to the ground. A sentry heard him and began firing, but it was dark and the shots went wild. Other soldiers in the compound also opened fire, but Dabir made it past the last sentry post, crawled through a rice paddy, swam across a small river and escaped. The next day a country doctor removed the bullet from his wrist and bandaged him.
Dabir looks like a boy-he weighs only 120 pounds–but his manner leaves no doubt that he is fully grown now, only three months after graduating fourth in his class from the military academy at Kakul, in West Pakistan.
His hatred for the West Pakistanis is intense but controlled. “Without any reason they have killed us,” he said. “They have compelled us to stand against them.”
CHOLERA, HUNGER AND DEATH AS REFUGEES FLEE TO INDIA June 9, 1971
KARIMPUR, India—Sickness, hunger and death are common scenes now along India’s 1,350-mile border with East Pakistan. Millions of Bengalis—unofficial figures put the number over five million-have fled East Pakistan to escape the Pakistani Army, which since late March has been trying to crush the movement for autonomy, and later independence, in East Pakistan.
The Bengalis have brought cholera with them. Official figures put the death toll here in West Bengal state at 3,600, but reports indicate that it is much higher-probably well over 5,000. A thousand or more others have died in the three other border states where the Bengalis have taken refuge.
Here, in this Indian town near the border, a mother had died of cholera an hour before but the infant, less than a year old, continued to nurse until a doctor came upon the scene and pulled him gently away.

A few feet away on the cold cement porch of the health center another person had just died-a 70-year-old grandfather, Abinash Malakar.
His son sat crumpled and crying beside the stiffening emaciated body. Flies had begun to gather. A granddaughter hung, wailing, in the arms of an aunt. This family, from the Jessore district in East Pakistan, had walked for 13 days to reach India.
The toll rises steadily and, with new waves of refugees pouring into India daily, there is no way to predict when the epidemic will end.
Along the roadsides lie the bodies left by those too frightened of the disease themselves to take the time for burial.
Vultures, dogs and crows fight. Skeletons already picked clean bleach in the sun. A few bodies have been buried in shallow graves but the vultures have torn the graves open.
The roads leading from the border are a trail of clothes and bones. A body floats in a marsh or stream. The stench is acrid and villagers cover their faces as they hurry past.
In some towns, attempts have been made to bury the bodies in mass graves. Here in Karimpur, 120 miles north of Calcutta by road, five relief workers buried several hundred in a 24-hour period. But even at these sites, packs of stray dogs dig in the earth.
In many ways the scene is a repetition of the horror of the cyclone that killed hundreds of thousands in the Delta area of East Pakistan last November-leaving bodies for days in marshes, streams and bays.
The tiny, jammed health center at Karimpur-it has 20 beds and over 100 cholera patients—is typical of the overworked health stations along the border.
The sounds of the epidemic-coughing, vomiting, groaning and weepingecho through the small brick building and across the lawn, also crowded with victims.
Shatish Matabbar—the father of the infant who had gone on nursing after his mother died-stood on the porch in tattered clothes, sobbing out his tale.
“No words can describe what has happened to me,” the 45-year old rice farmer wailed. “My wife is dead. Three of my children are dead. What else can happen?”
The infant and an 8-year-old have survived, although the older almost died of cholera. He sat on the floor near his father-naked, staring blankly, underfed.
The family came to India a month ago from their farm in the Faridpur district of East Pakistan.
Why had he left East Pakistan? a visitor asked.

“Why, you ask?” he said, crying again. “Because the Pakistani soldiers burned down my house.”
In the last day or two, the death rate in some areas declined a little. This is apparently because foreign medical and relief supplies have begun arriving in sufficient quantities-saline solution to treat the victims and syringes for mass inoculations. Hundreds of thousands have been vaccinated.
But doctors are reluctant to say that the epidemic will be under control soon. For one thing, though India’s army medical corps has been called in, medical facilities and personnel are inadequate.
The epidemic is apparently much worse in East Pakistan than in India. Medical facilities in East Pakistan, even in normal times, are meager. In an average year, 150,000 die here of cholera, most of them because they never get any treatment. In a bad year, the toll sometimes runs as high as 300,000.
Dr. M. A. Majid, the chief medical officer of the Nadia district, the worst-hit area, said today that he expected the death rate to start climbing again. The cholera vaccine, he said, gives only 30- to 90-percent protection.
The weakened condition of the refugees helps explain the virulence of the epidemic. Many are on the verge of death when they arrive.
In addition, living conditions are little short of desperate. Though the Indian Government has marshaled all available resources to provide shelter and food, it is impossible to keep up with the influx.
Relief camps-even just tents made by throwing tarpaulins over bamboo frames-cannot be erected fast enough. It is estimated that 3.5 million refugees are either living in the open or in crude thatch lean-tos of their own making. The monsoon rains have arrived and many refugee towns are mud holes.
There are water shortages and sanitation facilities have virtually broken down. The main streets of border towns are avenues of garbage and flies.
Food lines stretch for hundreds of yards and it sometimes takes hours for a refugee to get his ration.
More refugees are moving toward Calcutta as the other camps become choked. New camps are springing up on the edges of the city-just past the airport and in the Salt Lake area.
About 50,000 to 60,000 refugees have entered the fringes of the city, and at least 60 deaths have been recorded in this group.
A few thousand refugees have moved into the heart of Calcutta and are camping in the Sealdah Railway Station.
Indian officials are worried that the refugee epidemic may spread to the

people of Calcutta-an overcrowded, tense city of eight million that has its own fairly serious periodic cholera problem.
A BRUTAL OCCUPATION: ETHNIC CLEANSING, THOUSANDS MASSACRED July 4, 1971
DACCA, India—“Doesn’t the world realize that they’re nothing but butchers?” asked a foreigner who has lived in East Pakistan for many years. “That they killed and are still killing Bengalis just to intimidate them, to make slaves out of them? That they wiped out whole villages, opening fire at first light and stopping only when they got tired?”
The foreigner, normally a calm man, was talking about the Pakistani Army and the bloodbath it has inflicted on East Pakistan in its effort to crush the Bengali independence movement.
Most of the foreign residents-diplomats, missionaries, businessmen-also talk the way this man does now. They are bursting with three months of pent-up anger and outrage. And they are very eager to tell what they know to those foreign newsmen who were permitted to reenter East Pakistan in the past fortnight and travel around unescorted for the first time since March 25, when the army began its suppression campaign.
Pakistan’s military regime considers the foreign press implacably hostile, but it is desperate to prove to the world its claim that order has been restored, that the army is in control and that normality is fast returning to East Pakistan.
The army is, indeed, in control, except for a few areas near the border with India, where the Mukti Fouj, or “Liberation Army,” is active and growing more so-with aid from India.
Yet, East Pakistan is anything but normal. For this is clearly and simply military occupation by an alien army.
Bengali police have been replaced by police from West Pakistan. West Pakistanis are also being flown in to replace officials in every Government department, in some cases even down to the level of typists.
Houses and shops of those Bengalis who were killed or fled to villages in the countryside have been turned over to Moslem non-Bengali residents of East Pakistan, who are collaborating with the army. The temples of the minority Hindus–the army’s special scapegoats-are being demolished for no other reason than to demonstrate that those who are not part of the army’s design of “Islamic integrity” are not true Pakistanis and will not be tolerated.

Bengali youths, who just over three months ago were exultantly marching through the streets and shouting their slogans of defiance at the military regime, now talk in whispers, slipping up to foreign newsmen for a few seconds to murmur some information about a massacre, the murder of a family member or the destruction of a village. Anonymous letters containing such details find their way every day into newsmen’s mailboxes at the Hotel Inter-Continental.
The effluvia of fear is overwhelming. But there is also a new spirit. Many of the Bengalis-a naive and romantic people-realize now that no other country is going to save them, that they will have to do it all themselves and that it will take a long time.
Significant numbers of young men are slipping off to join the Liberation Army, which operates from border areas and from sanctuaries just across the border in India. Bengali guerrilla terrorism is increasing. A number of army collaborators have been executed, and more and more homemade bombs explode in Dacca. The resistance is still sporadic, peripheral and disorganized, but it is growing.
With each terrorist act, the army takes revenge, conducting reprisals against the nearest Bengali civilians. Several hundred were reported to have been rounded up and mowed down by the Army in Noakhali District recently after the Mukti Fouj executed a member of one of the army’s “Peace Committees” and his wife and children.
The once widely held theory that the cost of the occupation would prove prohibitive and compel Pakistan to pull the army out fairly quickly has been discarded. Even without the World Bank consortium’s massive annual aid, which has been suspended in censure of the repression, the Islamabad regime seems determined to keep its grip on East Pakistan.
President Yahya Khan’s speech to the nation last Monday was supposed to have unveiled his long-awaited plan for returning Pakistan-East and West-to civilian rule. It turned out to be exactly the opposite-a declaration that the military dictatorship would continue, with a handpicked civilian government as camouflage.
In his speech, which Western diplomats here described as “a disaster,” the President, who is also army chief, heaped praise on the army for rescuing the country from the brink of disintegration … by the grace of Allah.” He also extended his “fullest sympathy” to the six million Bengalis, mostly minority Hindus, who have fled to India because of “false propaganda by rebels,” he said. He appealed to them to “return to their homes and hearths for speedy rehabilitation.”

Just the day before President Yahya’s speech, an army platoon stormed into several predominantly Hindu villages 30 miles from Dacca, killing men and looting and burning homes. Reports of similar pogroms come from other parts of the province. No one knows exactly how many Bengalis the army has killed, but reliable foreign sources here put the figure somewhere over 100,000—and possibly much higher.
The East Pakistani economy, which used to provide the national treasury not only with half its exports and foreign exchange but also with a captive market for West Pakistan’s manufactured goods, has been badly crippled by the upheaval. However, the military regime seems willing-at least for the present-to pay the severe economic price of holding East Pakistan as a colony, no matter how sullen or resistant the population.
“It’s a medieval army operating as if against serfs,” said one Westerner here. “It will use any method just to own East Pakistan and keep milking it dry. Even if the Bengalis are serious about the resistance, it will take five to 10 years to make a dent.”
HINDUS BECOME SPECIAL TARGETS OF PAKISTANI TERROR July 4, 1971
FARIDPUR, Pakistan, June 29— The Pakistani Army has painted big yellow “H’s” on the Hindu shops still standing in this town to identify the property of the minority eighth of the population that it has made its special targets. Members of the Moslem majority-who, though not exempt from the army’s terror, feel safer than the Hindus-have painted on their homes and shops such signs as “All Moslem House.”
The small community of Christians, mostly Baptists, have put crosses on their doors and stitched crosses in red thread on their clothes.
Compared with some towns in East Pakistan, Faridpur-which sits 85 miles by road and ferry west of the capital Dacca-suffered only moderate physical damage when the army struck here in April. The attack was part of the offensive begun March 25 to crush the Bengali autonomy movement.
Though a number of shops, most of them belonging to Hindus, have been razed in Faridpur, most of it is physically intact. But every other aspect of life has been shattered, and the hate and terror and fear that wrack the town make it typical of virtually every community in this conquered province of 75 million people.
Only about half of Faridpur’s 35,000 people have returned, although the flow

has been growing. Recently the army eased up on its executions and burning of villages in an attempt to demonstrate that normality has returned. The change in tactics began in mid-June, just before the central Government announced that it was allowing foreign newsmen back into the region.
An undetermined number of Faridpur’s 10,000 Hindus have been killed and others have fled across the border to predominantly Hindu India.
Some Hindus are returning to Faridpur, but it is not out of faith in a change of heart by the army but rather out of despair. They do not want to live as displaced persons in India and they feel that nowhere in East Pakistan is really safe for them, so they would rather be unsafe in their own town.
A Hindu barber said that he was still in hiding but that he sneaked into Faridpur every day to do a few hours work to earn enough to eat. “I come into town like a thief and leave like a thief,” he said.
Those Hindus who have slipped into town keep guards posted at night. “None of us sleep very soundly,’ a young carpenter said. “The daylight gives us a little courage.”
A 70-year-old Hindu woman who was shot through the neck said that as bad as conditions were and as frightened as she was, “this is our home-we want to stay in golden Bengal.”
On April 21, when the army rolled into Faridpur, the old woman and her 84-year-old husband ran to seek refuge in a Hindu village, Bodidangi, about three miles away. The next day the army hit Bodidangi and, reliable local reports say, as many as 300 Hindus were massacred.
The old woman stumbled and fell as she tried to flee, she related, and two soldiers caught her. She said they beat her, ripped off her jewelry, fired a shot at point-blank range into her neck and left her for dead.
She and her husband had owned a small piece of property on which they rented out a few flimsy huts. Only the dirt floors are left, she said.
The campaign against the Hindus was—and in some cases still is-systematic. Soldiers fanned through virtually every village asking where the Hindus lived. Hindu property has been confiscated and either sold or given to “loyal” citizens. Many of the beneficiaries have been Biharis, non-Bengali Moslem migrants from India, most of whom are working with the army now. The army has given weapons to large numbers of the Biharis, and it is they who have often continued the killing of Hindus in areas where the army has eased off.
Hindu bank accounts are frozen. Almost no Hindu students or teachers have returned to the schools.

President Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan has appealed to the Hindus to return from their hiding places and from India-possibly four million of the six million Bengalis who have fled to India are Hindus–and has assured them of an equal role in East Pakistani life. However, army commanders in the field in East Pakistan privately admit to a policy of stamping out Bengali culture, both Moslem and Hindu-but particularly Hindu.
Although thousands of “anti-state” Bengali Moslems have been killed by the army, the Hindus became particular scapegoats as the martial-law regime tried to blame Hindu India and her agents in East Pakistan for the autonomy movement.
In Faridpur-and the situation was much the same throughout East Pakistan-there was no friction to speak of between Hindu and Moslem before the army came.
The army tried to drive a wedge between them. In April, as a public example, two Hindus were beheaded in a central square in Faridpur and their bodies were soaked in kerosene and burned. When some Hindus, trying to save their lives, begged to convert to Islam, they were shot as unworthy nonbelievers (in some cases, however, converts are being accepted).
The army also forced Moslems friendly to Hindus to loot and burn Hindu houses; the Moslems were told that if they did not attack Hindus they themselves would be killed. Most of the Hindu houses in the region around Faridpursome say 90 percent-were burned as a result.
Still, there is no sign of a hate-Hindu psychology among the Bengali Moslems. Many have taken grave risks to shelter and defend Hindus; others express shock and horror at what is happening to the Hindus but confess that they are too frightened to help.
Many Bengalis, in fact, feel that the army has only succeeded in forging a tighter bond between Hindu and Moslem in East Pakistan.
INDIAN GENERAL: “WE WILL LET LOOSE THE HOUNDS OF WAR”
Author’s Note: On November 23, 1971, I managed to talk my way from Calcutta to a checkpoint within a few miles of India’s tense border with East Pakistan, where things were heating up. I watched as large Indian military convoys carrying ammunition, supplies, and soldiers armed for battle roared by-heading directly for the border. The Indian government had consistently denied that its troops had entered Pakistani territory. Officers at the checkpoint barred me from proceeding any farther, but they made no effort to hide or deny the evidence that these troops were

indeed crossing the border to support the Bengali insurgents. “My men have been waiting to move forward for a month,” one smiling officer at the staging area said. “Their spirits are high.” My story ran the next day on page 1, raising a hullabaloo at the United Nations, where Pakistan accused India of invading its sovereign territory. Embarrassed, India considered expelling me but, in its democratic tradition, didn’t. Ten days later-see the story below-war was officially declared.
December 4, 1971
CALCUTTA, India-The forces of India’s eastern command are poised for an allout drive into East Pakistan against the Pakistani troops there.
“We will take necessary action; we will take whatever action an army is supposed to take,” a military source said here last night after the Government had reported that planes from West Pakistan had attacked Indian airfields in the west and that the Pakistanis were shelling Indian units on the western border.
Pakistan insisted that India had attacked first with ground troops all along the western border. “That’s a bloody lie!” said the Indian military source.
“I give you my word there was no attack.”
However Indian units here in the east, supported by tanks and artillery, have been jabbing and probing at the Pakistani troops in East Pakistan for several weeks.
The Indian operation was designed to help the Bengali insurgents oust the West Pakistani troops who have occupied East Pakistan since March, when they moved to crush the Bengali autonomy movement.
“As far as I’m concerned, it’s a war,” said the Indian military source. “We now have to take certain steps, which will be apparent in the morning.”
“We will set the machine in motion” another military source said angrily. “We will let loose the hounds of war.”
Many diplomatic observers believe that the main war will be fought on the eastern front. Their view is that with the reported Pakistani attack in the west, the Indians will push directly into East Pakistan to accomplish their objectivethe creation of a friendly, independent East Pakistan that will take back the nearly 10 million Bengali refugees who India says have fled to her soil during the eight months of strife and who pose a threat to her stability.
The observers believe that Pakistan, by her military actions in the west, may be trying to bring about international intervention as a means of freezing the situation and holding on, however tenuously, to East Pakistan.

“The United Nations may be able to stop the fighting in the west,” said a Western diplomat, “but no one on this side is going to stop to listen to the U.N. bray. They’re going to push right in.”
Even without the United Nations intervention, independent observers think the major action may be in the east.
A key objective is the city of Jessore and its cantonment, which are only about 20 miles from the border with West Bengal State, in India.
It was clear last night that, at least to officers of the eastern command, the Pakistani move came as a surprise. “We were not expecting war so soon,” a military source said.
Calcutta, the overcrowded capital of West Bengal that sits less than 50 miles from the border, was calm last night. Diplomats attended their usual parties, the brightly lit Park Street nightclubs were humming and the movie theaters were full.
The diplomatic mission of the insurgent government-which calls itself Bangla Desh (Bengal Nation)—was quiet, its iron gate locked.
The only sign of crisis was a blackout at the airport, where large sandbag fortifications have been erected in the last week to protect military aircraft. No seats were being booked on domestic flights in anticipation of the suspension of all flights.
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi addressed a political rally in Calcutta before the crisis broke, speaking from 5 P.M. to nearly 6. The Pakistani air attacks were said to have begun shortly after 5:30 P.M. Mrs. Gandhi was not told the news until after her speech.
“Pakistan is talking about war,” she told a crowd of about 500,000 on the Brigade Parade Ground. “We do not want to fight. I hope they will not follow up their talk, but if they do we are prepared.”
The Prime Minister flew back to New Delhi after her speech. Shortly after midnight, in a nationwide radio broadcast, she told her people that Pakistan had launched a “full-scale war” on India and declared a state of national emergency.
INDIAN VICTORY AND PAKISTAN SURRENDER December 17, 1971
DACCA, Pakistan-On a broad grassy field in central Dacca known as the Race Course, the Pakistani forces formally surrendered today, 13 days after the Indian Army began its drive into East Pakistan.
It was at the Race Course on March 7 that Sheik Mujibur Rahman, in a speech to thousands of Bengalis, called for the end of martial law and the transfer

of power to his autonomy-minded Awami League, which had won a majority in national elections.
Today there were no speeches—just two men sitting at a single table on the grass-Lieut. Gen. Jagjit Singh Aurora, chief of India’s Eastern Command, and Lieut. Gen. A. A. K. Niazi, commander of the 70,000 Pakistani troops in East Pakistan—who signed the formal papers of Pakistani surrender.
The final hours of the Indian drive, which ended with the ceremony at the Race Course, were punctuated by artillery and machine-gun fire as the troops pushed across the Lakhya River, just outside Dacca proper.
Seven Western journalists, including this correspondent, were the only newsmen and only foreigners to ride into Dacca with the Indian troops.
The population turned out in quiet droves to sit and watch the Indians rain artillery shells on the Pakistanis. Such was the case this morning in a field of rice paddies at Barpa, about nine miles from Dacca, where a battery of six 75 mm. mountain guns was firing on Pakistani positions across the river.
A few hundred villagers sat 100 yards back as the guns roared for an hour.
“Good shooting!” an officer from the command post yelled across after getting a report from the forward observer. “We got some vehicles.”
The gun crews applauded. So did the villagers.
It was 10 A.M. A cease-fire was in effect but the Indian officers said it applied only to firing on Dacca City and they were firing short of it. Besides, no one in this brigade advancing on Dacca from the northeast knew anything about the Pakistan surrender that was being arranged at that very time.
The Pakistanis opposite them were also in the dark, for soon afterward a tank, artillery and infantry battle was raging a few miles farther down the road to the regional capital.
Two light Indian tanks captured from the Pakistanis in an earlier fight moved into position, one in a mango grove and the other 200 yards to the left by an embankment.
As the tanks were getting set, Indian artillery shells whistled overhead on their way to an enemy position in Demra, a couple of miles to the northwest. Columns of smoke rose from burning buildings there.
Then the tanks opened up, pummeling the eardrums of those nearby and much more devastatingly pummeling the factory complex in the distance across the Lakhya River, where some Pakistani troops were impeding the Indian advance. Smoke columns began to mushroom from the factory buildings, too.
After 20 minutes of pounding the area with shells, the tanks also opened up

with machine guns, peppering the area in front of the buildings where the Pakistanis were dug into bunkers.
A column of Indian infantry then began making its way forward along the bottom of the embankment and then turned right and began crossing a marsh toward the river.
At about 12:30 P.M., under the bright sun, the officers with the Indian units decided to take the press party forward to watch the infantry in action.
Now there was no answering fire from the Pakistanis. We climbed up the embankment to the road, and silhouetted against the azure sky, we walked confidently forward. For about one minute.
A Pakistani machine gun began spitting and bullets whizzed by. We flew unsmartly down the opposite embankment, sending up gravel and dust in the wake of our slide. An Indian major, to assure us, said the bullets had passed 10 to 15 yards away.
Carefully tucked below the ridge of the road, we walked forward as the Pakistanis kept firing. They hit a baby goat gamboling in a culvert and the animal crumpled. In 10 minutes we reached an Indian platoon lying at the top of the embankment, their rifles and machine guns pointing at the Pakistanis, who then began firing at them instead of us.
The Indians opened fire. As the staccato continued, the major with us got a message over the field radio that the Pakistanis had surrendered. The Pakistanis opposite had obviously not been told. Some Pakistani units had lost communications with their headquarters.
That was 12:40. For an hour more the Pakistanis kept the Indians pinned down. Then at 1:45, a Pakistani soldier-apparently an officer-came into the open on the opposite bank waving what looked like a big handkerchief.
The Indian major, M. S. Dhillon, climbed over the embankment and moved toward the river, stopping behind a wall. He then began shouting at the Pakistanis to surrender immediately.
“Are you moving or not?” the major yelled. “I want you to move in just one minute! Before I lose my patience, I want you to get a move on. Get your men round you and move to that little boat and start crossing. Put your weapons down. Put your damn bastard Sten gun down. Don’t compel me to plaster you with artillery. I’m telling you again. Start moving, start moving!”
The newsmen had followed the major to the wall but were crouched behind it and could not see what was happening. The major obliged with a narrative: “There’s an officer standing there. He’s got four chaps. He’s waving his white hankie. They have surrendered now. There seem to be about 15 chaps.”

The rest of the Pakistanis, however many there were, had apparently fled.
This scene-ending what may have been the last battle of the war in the East-took about 20 minutes to unfold, during which a wounded Indian soldier was groaning where he lay in a shallow lily pond. As the major was preparing to gather in the surrendering platoon, a cloud of dust on the road signaled that the brigade was suddenly moving up toward Dacca.
Though small-arms fire could be heard far off, serious resistance had ended. Indian infantry columns-happiness writ on the face of every soldier-were advancing on the regional capital. Bengalis joined the column, pulling artillery pieces. This correspondent hitched a ride on one of the tanks that had been blasting the Pakistanis only a few minutes before.
The road was filled with jubilant Bengalis and troops heading for Dacca on tank, truck, scooter, bicycle, rickshaw and foot. Everyone was hitching rides to get to the liberated capital-it was more of a circus parade than a military convoy.
All along the army’s route fathers held their infants up in the air and waved the infants’ hands at the Indian soldiers.
At the Lakhya River, the tank, an amphibious vehicle, had to jettison some passengers to be able to motor across. I caught a country boat and, when we got across, joined 17 other people-officers, soldiers and newsmen—who clambered onto a jeep driven by the brigade commander, Brig. R. N. Misra.
As the mustached commander drove slowly toward Dacca, trying to see the road through the mass of passengers on the hood, we passed through a countryside only slightly scarred by the war. It has been the same all over. A burnedout vehicle here and there on the road hit by artillery or mortar fire. A blown-up Pakistani bunker. And in those towns where the Pakistanis made a stand, a lot of blackened and razed buildings and huts.
By and large, except for the road and rail bridges the Pakistanis blew up as they retreated, the territory has not been severely damaged. In some areas, as kingfishers dive for minnows in the streams along the paddy fields and cows graze near lush coconut and banana groves, it is difficult to tell-except for the silence of the dead and of those who have not yet trekked back-that war has touched this country.
Yet there was one clear sign of the war-the Pakistani troops at the roadside who had surrendered. There had not been enough time to take away their weapons or move them near surrender areas, and they came near the road carrying their arms-a slightly chilling sight for those of the passersby who had seen them use them on unarmed civilians last March 25, when the army began to try to crush the Bengali autonomy movement.

The Pakistanis looked slightly dazed and seemed demoralized. They badly needed a word of reassurance, which they are not likely to get from a people that had suffered so under their rule by bullet. When a passerby raised a hand in greeting, they waved feebly back and smiled just as feebly.
Brigadier Misra stopped his jeep outside a Pakistani barracks to tell the officer in charge to keep his men inside until Indian troops arrived to take them to surrender areas. “Don’t go on the road,” he warned. “The Mukti Bahini might be there.”
Many members of the Mukti Bahini, or Liberation Forces—the Bengali insurgents who had been fighting alone for independence-are eager for revenge. Their potential targets are not only the Pakistani troops but the razakars, or home guards, trained by the troops and the civilian collaborators, most of them nonBengalis who did a lot of the dirty work for the army.
“If we don’t protect the Pakistanis and their collaborators,” said an officer in the brigadier’s jeep, “the Mukti Bahini will butcher them nicely and properly.”
As the jeep proceeded directly into Dacca, a throng of several hundred Bengalis suddenly materialized and-in the throes of happiness-started walking fast toward the approaching Indian troops, shouting welcome slogans.
But a Pakistani jeep with a .50-caliber machine gun was also moving toward the crowd. The uneasy Pakistani crew, thinking the crowd was coming at them, fired a few bursts. Two people fell and the crowd carried off these wounded as it melted away.
Brigadier Misra and other Indian officers, in a rage, stripped the four Pakistanis of their weapons and shouted vilification at them until they looked so frightened they probably thought they were going to be shot. They were taken off to be placed under guard to face courts-martial.
Near the scene was a bus overflowing with Pakistani troops and their families, some sitting on the roof. The women and children huddled next to their men like terrified refugees.
Because the Pakistanis surrendered before the Indians had to storm Dacca, the capital did not suffer any major damage except for the scars from heavy bombing of the airfield and the military cantonment.
The road to the airport is still full of craters. The airfield runways have been repaired, but off to one side are the charred heaps that used to be fighter planes. The windows of the terminal building have been blasted out by the raids.
Many houses and shops are still shuttered, awaiting the return of their occupants. Still, the crowds gathered quickly, as if from nowhere. They swarmed over

our vehicle-shouting greetings, calling us “brother” and trying to touch and hold another human being.
Near sundown, 10 Indian helicopters in formation descended on the airport. They carried General Aurora, other Indian officers and newsmen from Calcuttaall flying in for the surrender ceremony. General Niazi, his face a mask of determined dignity, was waiting on the tarmac wearing a black beret and carrying a collapsible hunting seat, though he never opened it to sit down.
Beside him stood General Aurora’s chief of staff, Maj. Gen. J. F. R. Jacob, who just a few minutes before had been embarrassed by the frenzied embraces of Bengalis who had come to the airport.
The two walked out to greet General Aurora’s helicopter and after being surrounded by microphones and cameras, they drove off to the race course field for the signing of the surrender documents.
After signing, the two generals rose and shook hands. General Niazi rode off in a jeep and General Aurora in a staff car.
Sporadic small-arms fire was still crackling in the city when the Indian military party drove back to the airport, as darkness fell, to fly back to Calcutta. There had been sporadic street fighting throughout the day in Dacca, including a gun battle between Mukti Bahini guerrillas and Pakistani soldiers outside the InterContinental Hotel, which had been declared a neutral zone for the war.
At the airport tonight, long lines of West Pakistani troops seemed eager and relieved as they marched off to surrender areas where they will be protected by Indian soldiers from Bengali crowds.
REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK: WITH THE INDIAN ARMY ON ITS PUSH TO FREE BANGLADESH December 21, 1971
CALCUTTA, India – Jottings from the notebook of one correspondent who covered the Indian Army in the 15 days of the war with Pakistan:
Dec. 5
The army public relations office arranges a trip in East Pakistan for some newsmen. It takes five hours to drive to the war over bad roads. We arrive in Uthali, a small, dusty village about three miles inside, which was taken by the army on the first night of the war.
Nothing to see except empty Pakistani bunkers and discarded ammunition

boxes until an Indian soldier standing about a hundred yards away starts yelling “Hands up!” at us.
We think he’s joking but put our hands up anyway. He keeps yelling and walking forward and pointing his Sten gun at us. I grow uneasy. He looks drunk. Some photographers start taking pictures of him and this enrages him. He walks faster toward us, gets within 25 yards and cocks the Sten gun. Our escort officer, a major, yells, “Stop, stop!”
The soldier drops to one knee and aims the gun at us. We scatter and hit the dirt. The major, screaming at the soldier, rushes forward and pulls the barrel down. The crisis is over and the soldier is led away. This is not the action we came for.
We go to another liberated town nearby, Darsana. Lieut. Col. Bhupal Singh tells us about the battle there and shows us his battle scar—a graze at the base of his spine. As the television cameras grind, he turns his back, bends over and pulls up his shirt. He stays in that position until the television people tell him they’ve got enough film of his back.
At the deserted railway depot the last entry in the stationmaster’s book is for the morning of March 26—the morning after the Pakistani reign of terror began.
A crippled old man, Mazzam Hussein Mia, hobbles onto the station platform. He says he has been in hiding for nine months near the town because, unlike the other residents, he could not flee fast enough to get to India when the Pakistani soldiers came.
We return to Colonel Singh’s headquarters for further briefing. He gets fed up with newsmen asking questions and wandering around on their own, so he orders the troops in some nearby emplacements to fire a few rounds to scare us and make us leave. They start firing. The television crews swarm to the emplacements to take pictures of the firing.
“Please control these fellows!” the colonel yells at our escort officer. The officer is equally exasperated. “I told you not to let them go there,” he replied. “You let them go and now you tell me to control them!’
As we leave the escort officer is mumbling to himself: “Fighting the press is worse than fighting the war.”
We head for a village about 15 miles away, Suadih, where a battle has just ended. It is still burning when we get there, the mud huts knocked down and the thatch roofs set ablaze when Indian artillery tried to flush out the Pakistanis who

had retreated there. Grimly, silent villagers carry water from the village pond and pour it on the flames. An old man weeps uncontrollably.
In a field a few hundred yards away, 22 Pakistani soldiers lie dead in their bunkers-some in positions of repose, others broken and twisted grotesquely by the artillery bursts. One bunker is caved in-a burial mound with two booted feet protruding
In Calcutta, when we get back that night, Firpo’s Restaurant is holding An Evening With Miss Calcutta 1971.” She was chosen in a contest the night before.
Calcutta is disturbed only superficially by the war. The blackout annoys some people and buses bear placards with slogans such as: “Don’t Panic or Listen to Rumors” and “Be United Against the Enemy.” But the crowds of Sunday strollers are of normal size as are the armies of beggars.
Dec. 8
A trip to Jessore, whose people are celebrating their first full day of liberation. On the 80-mile jeep drive from Calcutta, village crowds come out to cheer us and touch our hands.
Almost no young women can be seen, for they have been the objects of Pakistani sexual brutality and will be the last to return from their hiding places and refugee camps in India.
Some fields are unsown; others overgrown with uncut sugarcane. The big road bridge at Jhikargacha, over the Kabathaki River, is blown up-the Pakistanis’ last act before retreating to Jessore.
We cross the river on small boats as the army goes about building a pontoon bridge with hundreds of villagers eager to help. On the other side small, newly made Bangladesh flags are selling for 75 paise in Indian money, or about 10 cents. On our arrival the price goes up to a rupee, or about 13 cents.
The countryside is not badly scarred by the war, except where set battles took place, and even there the debris does not remain for long. Villagers strip the Pakistani bunkers for building materials-wooden beams and corrugated metal sheets. They also strip the occasional burned-out Pakistani vehicles. The next rains will blur any remaining scars.
Squads of guerrillas of the Mukti Bahini march or bicycle down the road, their faces serious. They are not being used much in the front lines, but it was they who harassed and demoralized the Pakistani troops and they are determined not to let their dignity or morale slip.

We enter Jessore and drive to the military cantonment. No sign of fighting here. The big battle was fought north of the city. Maj. Gen. Dalbir Singh, commander of the Ninth Division and a very round and hefty man, gives a briefing at which he says the Jessore troops are retreating down the road to Khulna. “They’ll surrender or otherwise we’ll destroy them. I’m endowed with a gentle nature.”
Asked to reconcile his capture of Jessore with the statements made by officials in New Delhi that the plan was to bypass it, he replied, “Some are destined to die for their country and some are destined to lie for their country!”
With the general’s permission, we go down the road toward where Indian forces are attacking the retreating Pakistanis. Pakistani bedding and belongings are scattered at the roadside, left behind in the pell-mell retreat. A letter from a boy in West Pakistan to his soldier-father tells him to “crush India.”
The bodies of two Bengali civilians are in a field nearby-being gnawed on by dogs. Villagers say the retreating Pakistanis killed them. Another Bengali lies not far away, his left arm cut off and the flesh of his chest torn away.
We start back. Driving through Jessore again we see enraptured crowds of Bengalis hail an incoming column of Indian troops. The Bengalis cheer and embrace and kiss their liberators. A bus drives by, full of jubilant Mukti Bahini, some of them dancing on the roof. Their guns poke out of every window, so the bus looks like a rolling pincushion.
Dec. 9
The evidence is growing that the Pakistanis are slaughtering Bengalis as they retreat and that the Mukti Bahini and other Bengalis are, in turn, taking vengeance on the Pakistanis and their civilian collaborators. The Indian Army issues strict orders against reprisal executions by the Bengalis in the hope of avoiding massacres.
An army captain says he has seen several mutilated bodies of Pakistani soldiers along the route, their fingers and nipples chopped off and their throats slit.
Dec. 13
I take a drive with another reporter toward Khulna to see how that battle is going. My driver, Mr. Singh, gets nervous as we approach the booming artillery guns. We are still a few miles away, but his speed drops to almost zero. “If you don’t want to drive, Mr. Singh,” I tell him, “I’ll drive.” “You drive, Sahib,” he says as he gets out, smiling and relieved.
“Welcome to Khulna.” says the road sign. Long columns of infantry carrying everything from cooking pots to bazookas are walking down the road.

We walk too. My colleague inquires about the possibility of mines. “No bloody mines, sir,” says a soldier in a foxhole, laughing.
A medium tank rolls by toward the front; the commander waves. It’s a friendly war. The Indians at least are happy and friendly and brimming with confidence.
A jeep carrying Indian wounded comes back from the fighting. In the back a man’s legs are sticking up in the air, as though he’d been tossed in head first.
It’s tough slogging for the Indians. The Pakistanis are dug in well and fighting bitterly. As the brigade commander, Sandhu Singh, spoke, a couple of incoming artillery shells exploded about 200 yards away. Heavy Pakistani machine-gun fire offers a pizzicato in the background.
On the way back people who fled the shooting are returning to their homes. The Bengalis are never more than a mile or two behind, filling the vacuum the army leaves in its wake. Some of the returnees are from the refugee camps in India, carrying their pathetic sacks of belongings. They look uncertain, nervous.
Dec. 14
The Indian Army has picked 11 newsmen, including me, to accompany the troops on their final push into Dacca.
We leave Calcutta for Agartala, an Indian border city on the eastern side of East Pakistan, in an Indian Air Force DC-3 with no door.
We are flying across the breadth of East Pakistan, the first Indian military plane to do it since 1947, when India and Pakistan were born in mutual hatred. There seems no danger, for Pakistan’s entire air force in the East has been shot down and the only antiaircraft guns left are in Dacca, and we are flying north of the capital.
As we land, a work crew is repairing runway damage inflicted by the Pakistanis at the start of the war.
Dec. 15
Our riverboat leaves Brahmanbaria, pushing a pontoon raft carrying two 5.5-inch artillery pieces. The Indian troops on the riverbank clown and pose for pictures.
After a long-delayed trip by road to brigade headquarters at Bhulta, about nine miles from Dacca, we spend the night in a prosperous farming village of 300 called Bhaila. The mosquitoes are large.
Dec. 16 The artillery fire grows heavy at 5:15 A.M. With the guns as a leitmotif, the

villagers serve us-on china and glassware that must have been dug out of someone’s trunk-a superior breakfast of flat wheat bread, beef and chicken curry, hard-boiled eggs and tea. The village gathers to watch us eat.
We are greeted at the headquarters of the Fourth Battalion, Brigade of Guards, by the commander, Lieut. Col. Himmeth Singh. Sitting in a haystack, a map on his lap, he orders tea for us and then lays out the battle plan. He hasn’t shaved since the war began and says that, as a lucky charm, he won’t until it’s over.
After the chaotic surrender ceremony in Dacca, small-arms fire punctuates the night. People are taking revenge on the collaborators and some of the collaborators are firing back.
We hitch our final rides—first on a helicopter to Agartala and from there on a plane. The helicopters whirring behind us in the night look like giant fireflies.
In Calcutta, on our return, Indian Bengalis are celebrating the birth of Bangladesh with fireworks and brass bands. The blackout has been lifted. Mr. Singh can drive again without squinting.
THE PRICE OF BENGALI INDEPENDENCE-GRAVEYARDS, ONE AFTER ANOTHER January 24, 1972
DACCA, Pakistan- “On this graveyard, we shall build our golden Bengal.” So reads a cardboard sign hung on a flagpole in the city of Khulna.
Not far from the flagpole, human bones, picked clean by vultures and dogs, still litter the roadside at various execution sites where the Pakistani Army and its collaborators killed Bengalis.
Bloodstained clothing and tufts of human hair cling to the brush on these killing grounds. Children too young to understand play grotesque games with the skulls and other bones.
This correspondent found on a recent tour of the countryside, that almost every town in East Pakistan had one or more of these graveyards, where the Pakistanis killed hundreds of thousands of Bengalis, apparently often on a daily basis, throughout their nine months of military occupation. The killing ended last month when the Pakistani forces, all from West Pakistan, were defeated by the Indian Army and Bengali guerrillas in a 14-day war.
Sheik Mujibur Rahman, the Bengali leader who was recently freed from Pakistani imprisonment and came to Dacca to become Prime Minister in the Gov

ernment of Bangladesh, has estimated that the Pakistanis killed three million of his people. While foreign diplomats and other independent observers do not generally put the figure this high, all say it was at least several hundred thousand and many put it at more than one million. The Bengali leader has ordered a house-tohouse census to get a precise figure.
In Khulna, one of the Pakistani execution sites was a road on the edge of town that leads west to Satkhira. Though truckloads of skeletons have recently been carried away for proper burial, bones are still scattered along the gray roadside for over a mile. Both Bengalis and foreigners who live in Khulna say that at least 10,000 people were killed at this site alone.
The execution area was off limits to the public, but the Khulna radio station is less than 100 yards from the road, and Bengali employees at the station, who say they were kept working at gunpoint throughout the occupation, witnessed most of the killings either through the windows or from the front steps of the station.
“They killed some people every day,” said Mokhlesur Rahman, a 26-year-old technician. “Sometimes five or six. Sometimes 20. On one day, they killed 500.
“On Sept. 3, they killed the most—1,000 people. They fired with machine guns almost continuously for three hours. Then they threw many of the bodies into the river, and they were carried out to sea.”
Their voices were choked and their fists clenched as the radio station employees recalled the murders and told of victims begging for mercy and screaming in pain before they died.
One engineer said that sometimes the Pakistanis had put seven or eight Bengali prisoners in a tight queue and then, to save ammunition, fired one bullet through all of them. Sometimes, he said, they killed the Bengalis with bayonet charges.
Another engineer, Mazedul Haque, 25, vividly remembered the day the Pakistanis killed 500 people— July 25—“by shooting and by cutting their throats with long knives and bayonets.
“First the soldiers came and told us to come out and watch,” he said. “They said, ‘Come and see how we kill your people. They were sharpening their knives on the stones. It was their way of torturing us mentally.”
“All those months,” Mr. Haque went on, “thousands of vultures were flying overhead here. Now they are gone.”
It almost seems, as one goes from place to place, that each story of the killings is more gruesome than the one before.
In Jessore, a 12-year-old boy, Habib Ramatullah, said he had seen Pakistani soldiers beat a man to death after hanging him upside down from a tree in front of

the district courthouse. The boy said one of the judges had died of a heart attack as he watched.
All the evidence now indicates that the killings were on a wider scale and more sadistic than foreign newsmen and other independent observers had earlier thought
According to confirmed reports, the Pakistani troops in nearly every sector kept Bengali women as sexual slaves, often making them remain naked continuously in their bunkers. After the Pakistanis surrendered on Dec. 16, the mutilated bodies of many of these women were found.
Other independent reports established that the Pakistanis also killed many, if not most, of the Indian soldiers they took prisoner. In these cases, too, bodies were mutilated.
Maj. Gen. M. S. Brar, commander of India’s Fourth Infantry Division, lost some of his men this way at Kushtia. He says that at the time of the surrender, the opposing Pakistani commander, a Maj. Gen. Ansari, said he was unaware of the killing of any Indian prisoners. “I told him,” General Brar declared, “Either you lost complete control of your troops or you are a bloody liar.” It seemed obvious that General Brar believed the latter.
A Baptist missionary from the Mymensingh district, Ian Hawley, reported that the Pakistani troops, as they retreated before the Indian forces and the guerrilla fighters, killed their own wounded in a hospital there. Other missionaries in the same district say the Pakistani troops also killed several hundred razakarsthe home-guard collaborators they had trained and armed-by locking them in a building, throwing kerosene on the building and then setting it on fire.
In a few areas, the local Pakistani commanders were apparently not in accord with the mass-killing policy and tried to keep down the amount of slaughter. In Faridpur, for example, residents say that the officer who was in charge of the district for the last two months of the occupation, Maj. Ata Mohammed, “was a comparatively good man.”
But the officers who preceded him were evidently different.
At a Hindu temple on the outskirts of Faridpur, which the Pakistanis had half destroyed with dynamite, almost the entire stone floor around the altar bears a dull red stain. The stain is from blood, for this was one of the places of execution.
In the weeks since the fighting ended, local Hindus and their Moslem friends have tried many times, without success, to scrub out the stain.
The minority Hindu community was a special target of the Moslem Pakistani Army.

“Many times during those months,” said Jagodish Guha, a Hindu gas station manager who fled from Faridpur to hide in the interior, “my mind was disturbed. What is the answer? Only that they were animals. There were no religious troubles here. The Moslems and Hindus and Christians were brothers.”
An old Moslem laborer was helping clean up the debris at the Hindu temple compound. Asked about relations between Hindus and Moslems in Faridpur, he said softly, “I watched the Hindu priests at this temple feed the poor of all faiths for 40 years. And then the Moslem soldiers came and killed them. How can they call themselves Moslems? That is why I am helping now.”
The yellow “H’s” that the Pakistanis painted on the doors of Hindu homes and shops are still there, but the Hindus are slowly returning to Faridpur and other towns—the men first to survey the situation.
In every village and town, shuttered shops and houses and fields lying fallow are testimony to the number of people who were killed or who fled and have not yet returned.
Many of the elite were murdered, some in the last few days before surrender, apparently as part of official Pakistani policy to try to decimate the Bengali leadership
Professors, students, political activists, journalists, engineers and railway technicians were all targets.
Every day, new mass graves are discovered. Every day, the newspapers run long lists of notices asking for information about missing persons
In the capital, Dacca, many execution grounds have been found-particu larly in sections like Mirpur and Mohammedpur, which are populated largely by non-Bengalis who collaborated with the Pakistanis.
One corner of the zoo in Mirpur is strewn with skeletons with hands tied behind backs. Many of the animals were also killed.
In the Sialbari neighborhood of Mirpur, skeletons seem to lie behind every bush and down every well. On the floor of a Bengali peasant’s ruined house stands a large pile of bones crushed, apparently, to prevent identification. A well 60 feet deep is filled to within two feet of the top with human bones.
Zebed Ali, a 35-year-old father of seven who fled Sialbari in the early days of the occupation, has come back to try to revive his small firewood business. His hut no longer exists, and he and his family are sleeping under a tree-but they have picked a tree some distance outside Sialbari. “It is too frightening to sleep there,” Mr. Ali says.
A nine-year-old, Nazrul Islam, guided an American visitor to a field in

Sialbari and said he thought his father was buried there, but he did not know just where.
His family fled Sialbari when the army came, he said, but his father returned later to try to harvest their rice, and that was when the Pakistani soldiers shot him.
As dusk descended, the boy wandered through the field, pointing out clumps of bones with scraps of clothing and hair clinging to them. His eyes grew larger and his behavior was nervous and odd as he seemed to look for his father.
“Dig anywhere here,” he whispered, you will find more bodies.”
U.S. PROLONGED THE WAR BY DELAYING PAKISTANI SURRENDER MESSAGE
Author’s Note: The slaughter in East Pakistan and the Indian military victory that ended it carried elements of the long Cold War between Moscow and Washington that was still intact.
India and Pakistan were enemies who had already fought two wars. In the Cold War, India-a democracy-generally leaned toward Moscow, while Pakistanessentially a military autocracy-lined up with Washington. Pakistan, for example, had been the covert link used by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to restore relations with China.
Washington gave Pakistan substantial military aid, including arms and equipment used in the killing spree in East Pakistan.
During the December 1971 war, the United States sent a large naval armada ominously into the Bay of Bengal, on East Pakistan’s southern border. Washington said this was merely a precaution, in case Americans, missionaries, and others needed to be evacuated from the war zone. India saw it as a threat to its security.
In elaboration, here is an excerpt from a story of mine published on December 19, 1971:
The United States has called for the withdrawal of the Indian Army from Bangladesh-which the Nixon Administration insists on still calling East Pakistan-but the unfortunate truth is that if the army pulled out right now, the sporadic executions would become full-blown massacres.
President Nixon also continues to enrage the Indians by keeping a task force of the Seventh Fleet in the Bay of Bengal, apparently as a form of pressure on India because of her alliance with the Soviet Union.
Anti-American sentiment is running high here. The American consulate in Calcutta, under heavy police protection, has been besieged by angry

demonstrations. “If he doesn’t get that fleet out of here,” said one American working in Calcutta, “he’ll have to use it to evacuate us from India.”
The final hostile act by Washington is described in the story below, about the White House decision to delay turning over to Pakistan a surrender message to India. The Pakistani commander in Dacca, his communications broken, sent the message through the American consulate to be passed immediately to India. We will never know how many needless casualties were caused by that unexplained one-day delay.
January 26, 1972
DACCA, Pakistan-The brief war between India and Pakistan last month was prolonged by a day because the Pakistani message of surrender, conveyed to India through the United Stales, was held up in Washington, according to authoritative reports.
The reason is not known, but authoritative sources in New Delhi and Calcutta–and informed visitors to Dacca-confirm that there was a gap of more than 20 hours between the time the message was sent by the Pakistanis and the time it was given to the Indians by the Nixon Administration.
These sources report that the message was sent by radio from the United States Consulate in Dacca to Washington-where all messages from the consulate have to go-shortly before 7 P.M. Dacca time on the night of Dec. 14. This was shortly before 6:30 P.M. Indian time.
The message was received at the State Department almost instantaneously and was acknowledged.
But, the sources added, it was not given to the Indian Government until 2:30 P.M. Indian time the next day, Dec. 15, when the United States Embassy in New Delhi-which had apparently just received it from Washington-passed it to Gen. S. H. F. J. Manekshaw, the Commander in Chief of the Indian Army.
The message was from Lieut. Gen. A. A. K. Niazi, commander of the Pakistani forces in East Pakistan. According to the sources, it said that he was ready to surrender and wanted to discuss the terms and arrangements.
General Manekshaw, on receiving this message, is said to have consulted with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and other top Indian officials. Less than nine hours later, at 11 P.M. Indian time on Dec. 15, the sources said, he communicated the terms to General Niazi, by way of the United States Embassy in New Delhi. The embassy transmitted the message immediately to the consulate in Dacca, which telephoned it to General Niazi.

The surrender negotiations then began, and were completed the following morning, Dec. 16. The formal surrender documents were signed that afternoon in a brief ceremony in Dacca.
The war, which lasted 15 days, ended totally on the next day, Dec. 17, when Pakistan accepted a cease-fire on the western front—the border between West Pakistan and India.
American diplomats on the subcontinent-in New Delhi, Calcutta and Dacca-will not comment on this episode, but the details have become known, for one reason, because General Niazi, now a prisoner of war of the Indians, has related the story to others.
On the evening of Dec. 14, General Niazi rode from the military cantonment a few miles away to the downtown office of the United States Consul General, Herbert D. Spivack. With him, the sources said, was Maj. Gen. Rao Farman Ali Khan, the No. 2 man in his headquarters.
According to the sources, the general said he wanted to surrender and asked Mr. Spivack if he had “quick communications” to reach the Indians. The Consul General said yes, and General Niazi and he then sat down to work out the message, in which the Pakistani commander asked the United States to use its “good offices” to bring about a cease-fire.
The message was transmitted by the consulate radio on a “flash” basis, the fastest message category. It was acknowledged by Washington within 20 minutes, the sources said.
Several pieces of the puzzle are still not in place, for example, why General Niazi chose the Americans to act as his messengers.
Another unanswered question, and the most crucial one, is why Washington reportedly held the message for more than 20 hours before passing it to the Indians.
Some sources say it may have been because the Americans were trying to clarify their own position in the complex situation, to keep from being drawn into the surrender negotiations as a participant.
Indian officials, including some key generals, have complained privately that whatever the reason for the delay of the message, it prolonged the war by a day and caused unnecessary loss of life on both sides.