Rebel Commander Admits ‘Odds Are Against Us’
Michael Hornsby Calcutta, April 18. The “Democratic Republic of Bangladesh” was proclaimed in the dappled sunlight of a mango grove on Saturday less than a mile inside the East Pakistan border. The choice of a site so close to the Indian frontier-ostensibly to protect the assembled foreign journalists from the danger of attack by the Pakistan Air-Force-seemed somewhat to vitiate the claim by Mr. Tajuddin Ahmed, the Bangladesh prime minister, that his government’s writ ran in 90 per cent of the territory of East Bengal. The prime minister appealed to the “Nations of the world” for arms with which to fight the well-equipped Punjabi-dominated Army of President Yahya Khan.
He also asked the world to recognize that Bangladesh was “a reality, sustained by the indestructible will and courage of 75 million Bengalis who were daily nurturing the roots of this new nationhood with their blood.” More than oratory, however, will be needed to secure the future of Bangladesh. Colonel A. G. Osmani, the recently appointed Commander-in-Chief of the resistance forces, later gave journalists a more sober assessment of the situation. “If odds are against us but we will fight on,” he said, “the present generation may disappear, but the next will live in freedom.” The picture of large-scale stories in East Pakistan, the epic of heroic resistance against impossible odds, always owed a good deal to the fertile imagination of Indian journalists.
Many of the “liberated” areas were not liberated from anything; the army had simply not yet arrived. Nonetheless, in towns such as Dinajpur, Kushtia, Rajshahi and Sylhet there was some quite stubborn fighting. This phase is now coming to an end. An estimated 100,000 refugees have crossed into West Bengal state in the past 10 days. The army holds all the main towns, roads and waterways. The countryside, except for those villages lying beside the Army’s line of supply, some of which have been razed by fire, belongs to the Mukti Fauj (liberation forces). Hence, Mr Ahmed’s claim to 90 per cent of East Bengal.
The claim, though true in a strictly literal sense, will not mean much unless the Mukti Fouj proves capable of using the rural areas as a base from which to conduct some form of guerrilla warfare. This in turn, is inconceivable without strong leadership and an adequate supply of arms. No group people, however willing, can hope to prevail against a mechanized Army with bamboo spears, shot-guns, old rifles and a few dozen machine-gun The Ganges-Brahmaputra delta is by no means ideally suited to guerrilla warfare (pace the theorists who have drawn some rather facile parallels with the Mekong delta region in South Vietnam). It is wet, alluvial, rice growing land, offering scant protection against aerial attack.
However, the Chittagong hill tract in the south-east, and, though less satisfactory the Sylhet areas in the north-east, could serve as bases for resistance activity and the training of guerrillas. Leadership is another matter. Officials of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League did not always distinguish themselves in the fighting. Hard-pressed officers of the East Pakistan Rifles and the Bengal Regiment, the mainstay of the liberat forces, complained of indecisiveness and lack of cooperation from local Awami Leaders- whose first instinct was to get themselves and their families to safety when the going began to get rough.
Without political and intellectual leaders of obvious stature, the Resistance movement could become the playground of extremist groups. Fifth columnists and informers-not necessarily non-Bengalis-have also grown in number as the Army has consolidated its position in the country. The Art of political accommodation is an ancient one in Bengal. An even more fundamental question is whether the Bengalis as a people have the stomach for a protracted resistance. Some see them as a race of feckless poets, spouters of perfervid political oratory, who tend to melt away at the first sound of gunfire. This is an uncharitable view, but not wholly without trust.
The Bengalis certainly allowed themselves to be deluded by their own rhetoric into believing that they had only to proclaim the existence of Bangladesh for all men of good will to rally to the defense. In a more perfect world, this might have worked, for there is no real doubt that their cause, in spite of chauvinist, even racialist blemishes, is just. At then samtime, it should not be forgotten that the Bengalis provided some of the most dedicated terrorists in the struggle for independence from the British. There is a tradition of political consciousness, and Bengali nationalism has bees aroused to a new pitch by the savagery-and who can now dispute that is the right word? of the Pakistan Army. The Army has won a war, such as it was, but destroyed a country.
A committee designed to help restore peace and justice in East Bengal we formed in London yesterday. It is called Justice for East Bengal. Its chairman, Mr. Bruce Douglas-Mann, Labour M.P. for Kensington North, to leave today for Delhi and Calcutta to meet representatives from East Bengal and to visit refugee camps. Mr. John Stonehouse, former Labor Minister of Posts, left for India on Saturday to investigate the Pakistan situation.
Reference: The Times, 19 April, 1971.