Dacca Murders Exposed Bengal’s
Elite Dead in a Ditch
Before they surrendered at Dacca on Thursday, the Pakistani Army arrested and then shot more than 50 of the city’s surviving intellectuals, scientists and businessmen. It was a closely planned elimination of elite Bengali citizens, carried out as a sudden military operation. It must therefore have been done with the full knowledge of the Pakistan high command, including the commanding officer, General Niazi.
The discovery of the bodies can only increase tension in Dacca, make revenge killings and riots more likely, and possibly even cause friction between the Mukti Bahini guerrillas and the Indian Army.
If the occupying forces have to clamp down on the liberated Bengalis, they could come to resent. even Indian occupation; and there are small signs of this ominous development already in Dacca.
The murdered intellectuals were discovered in some isolated clay pits on the outskirts of the town at a place called Rayar Bazar. I actually saw 35 bodies there, in a decomposed condition which indicates they were killed four or five days ago. There are probably many more, and from kidnap reports, some in Dacca are putting the number of killed as high as 150.
UPI reports that among the victims were Dr. F. Rabbi, chief cardiologist of Dacca Medical College, and Dr. Munier Chowdhury, head of the Department of Bengali Language at Dacca University.
The killing ground is a brick field beyond the middle-class Dacca district of Dhanmondi It is an oddly desolate place, despite the water hyacinths which float on the blucy-white clay pools.
Hundreds of Dacca citizens came here today, walking along the mud dykes to view the bodies, many of them looking for their own relatives.
The kidnapping was apparently done early in the morning last Tuesday, when squads of Punjabi soldiers drove to selected addresses, and took away men and women under armed guard. Probably they were taken to the Rayar Bazar’s brick fields and immediately shot, lined up along the mud dykes so as to fall into the pools.
There they still lie, with clay dust on them, beginning to decompose. There is one skeleton on a dyke picked dramatically bare by the Dacca dogs.
The Bengali crowds are circulating among these pools in a strange, gentle fashion. They don’t seem angry here. Elsewhere they are wild. But here they were walking, talking in a gentle murmur, like tourists in a cathedral.
At one pool there was a particularly large crowd, and the biggest pile of corpses. Here a Moslem, his mouth wrapped in his wool scarf, was howling and keening. It sounded like the Muezzin call to prayer.
We asked the man his name. He said he was Abdul Malik, a Dacca businessman. In the water before him he had recognised the bodies of his three brothers Badruzzaman, Shahjahan and Mulluk Jahan. They lay side by side. They too were Dacca businessmen. It was a family firm. He had no other brothers.
“The Pak army came for them at seven o’clock in the morning on Tuesday, “he said. “Just by chance. I went out early”.
At this moment my companion began to cry. He was a Dacea student, named Najiur Rahman, who brought me to the brickfields. He was looking for his brother-in-law, a Dr. Amuniadinh, who is one of Dacca’s most eminent citizens.
He is head of the Bengal Research Laboratories, with an Oxford Ph D, and he was last seen at 7 o’clock on Tuesday morning when the Pakistan army took him away.
“I’m sorry, I must leave you, and look”, said Rahman. His woolen scarf was now also around his face.
I was in Dacca for only three hours yesterday and during that time the news had scarcely spread. The crowds were excited but quite good- natured, still waving to Indian troops and racing up and down in cars.
But there has been a great deal of shooting, particularly at night. Correspondents at the Intercontinental Hotel confirm that the atmosphere is explosive. The Bengalis allege that the hated Biharis, those “foreigners” from across the border who long ago came to settle here because they were Muslims, have been helping the Pakistani troops to murder Bengalis.
This was precisely what led to a riot and massacre of Bihari civilians in Jessore when I was there eight months ago.
The murder of Dacca intellectuals is infinitely worse than anything that happened at Jessore. Therefore some kind of retribution is almost inevitable.
Apart from swiftly gathered hearsay in Dacca, and the evidence. of other journalists in Dacca that such killings have been taking place, I can offer only the evidence of the two boys who drove me back to Dacca airport.
Both were Mukti Bahini. One, Parvez Mamasalek, told me proudly he had been Bihari-hunting the day before.
“We heard shooting”, he said. “We knew it was those Bihari bastards killing our boys. We closed in on them in a circle. Two of us with stens rushed into their house. The Biharis had climbed a tree in the garden.”
The other boy was Masin Dinmohammad Mintu. He is 23, a student of social welfare at Dacca University. “We are freedom fighters”, he said. “We now really know how to kill for freedom.”
I asked him what he would do if the Indian army stopped him fighting Biharis, or carrying his gun, or if they imposed a curfew. “They cannot do that,” he said. “They will not. They will leave very soon and we shall be masters.”
But then he thought about it and I asked him what might happen if the Indian army stayed-and never went?
“Then we shall fight them just as we fight all oppressors, all occupiers. We are freedom fighters.”
Meanwhile the actual Pakistani army. now, under close Indian guard at the cantonment, is still fully armed. just in case. As and when Dacca fully learns about the massacre, and how carefully and deliberately the Pakistani army must have done it, there must be real trouble.
Whatever is to happen, it becomes increasingly difficult to feel any sympathy for the defeated Pakistani army. That an officially disciplined military force should commit murder in this childish, useless, mad fashion is incredible. If the wholesale random killing this newspaper has called genocide is appalling, there is something even more obscene about “elitocido”. the deliberate selection of a nation’s finest. cleverest, most distinguished men and women to be killed, just to ruin that nation’s future.
Pakistan was finished in Bangladesh long before last Tuesday. The staff officers who planned this murder must have known that. Therefore the massacre was an attempt to bring down Bangladesh with Pakistan. It has long been suspected that the bluff soldiers of the Punjabi desert harbor rcc fierce racial hatred for Bengalis. It seems they harbour intellectual Jealousy as well, and have expressed it with mass murder.
Reference: The Sunday Times, 19 December, 1971