Dacca Vice-Chancellor on Massacre of his students
The Vice-Chancellor of Dacca University has now been in London for a little over three weeks. An unremarkable enough fact, until the dreadful realization dawns that last month tanks of the Pakistan army moved against his campus and slaughtered his students in their beds.
Abu Sayeed Chowdhury is also a senior Judge of the Dacca High Court, the highest court in East Pakistan-”I should really say East Bengal now.” So far during his stay here, he has spoken only to friends among British lawyers and academics about the university he left behind him. Last week, he gave Mandrake his first Press interview.
Mr. Justice Chowdhury left Dacca on February 18 to lead Pakistan’s delegation to the Human Rights Commission in Geneva. He acknowledges the irony. “We spoke about self-determination in Zambia and South Africa. Now I find that the people of East Bengal have suffered in a manner that has no parallel in human history-simply for claiming that they should rule themselves and should not be ruled by West Pakistan.”
With him, he brought his family. “Not that I had any idea that something like this would happen. My wife wanted to see our son who is studying for his G.C.E here, and so our young children came, as well.”
The Human Rights Commission finished its deliberations as the tanks rolled in East Pakistan. Chowdhury learned as much when he touched down at Heathrow, but four days passed before Simon Dring reported in The Daily Telegraph that his university had been shelled and that his students and teachers had been gunned down.
“For all that time I was stunned, and I felt pain here.” He touched his chest. “Then, when confirmation came, the suffocating atmosphere was lifted. Immediately. I passed into tears, and wept like a child. I told my wife, and she wept.”
Dacca University is the largest in Pakistan, with a teaching staff of 600, and 10,000 students, Fewer than 5,000 of them, he says, play any active role in politics and in his experience they do so peacefully. Many of the rest are “poor children from the countryside.” who are obliged to live in the University halls of residence and who offered the army a sleeping target on the night of March 25.
Mr. Justice Chowdhury does not even know the fate of one hall for 500 women students which was to have been opened on March 1. “I appointed the Provost, and gave strict orders that its opening date was not to be postponed for my return. Accommodation, you see, was desperately short. But then the National Assembly was postponed and the whole of life in Dacca closed down.”
He is, however, quite certain about the part that the British Government must now play, and he will be putting his case before a group of conservative back benches this week. His argument is taut.
“To pursue the ideal of a united Pakistan after all this is to pursue a mirage. There are two alternatives. The first is to persuade President Yahya Khan to withdraw the army, to release Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and to allow him to frame a constitution for East Bengal. The second is to allow the President to eliminate the intelligentsia along with Sheikh Mujib, and then anarchy and confusion will continue to reign. This situation cannot be seen as an internal affair when people have been bombed continuously for two weeks.”
He is equally certain that he cannot return to Dacca until the regime has changed. As a judge, it would be impossible. “How can anyone now go to the High Court with a petition to set aside a Government order? There is no rule of law now; there is a Government of might.”
As a Vice-Chancellor, it would be too harrowing. “When they killed my students, I had no face to return. You see, my students loved me and I loved my students. If I can’t remedy the wrong that’s been done to them, how could I go and show my face?” And having told all this to the British Press, he would be very welcome, too.
Reference: The Sunday Telegraph, April 18, 1972