BanglaDesh leaders setting up
courts to try collaborators
From Henry Stanhope Defense Correspondent Calcutta, Dec 12
The BanglaDesh Government entered East Bengal yesterday and established itself in Jessore only four days after the town’s liberation by the Indian Army. One of its first acts was to announce war tribunals to mete out justice to “collaborators and quislings.”
While T-55 tanks supporting the Indians 9th Division were rambling 5 miles away down the Khulna road towards the sound of gunfire, in Jessore some 2,000 people squatted on the town hall meadow shouting” Jai Bangla” and sucking oranges in the sunshine.
A Pakistani soldier, beaten up by liberated townsfolk was being cared for in the mission hospital 200 yards away and a father of the mission, bearded and chuckling, was telling reporters for the fiftieth time how he had hidden behind a banana tree when the Pakistani troops sprayed it with machine gun bullets last April. “By the grace of God they hit the bananas instead….
Confidence in their future is total. Three days ago I entered this dusty, pleasant town with its anglican church and Baptist mission to find people, however joyful, talking only of the past.
Now, with Dacca still to fall, half a world away beyond the Padma river, they are planning the future. Already women and children are filtering back to a community which shrank from 60,000 to 28,000 when West Pakistani soldiers descended on it like locusts last spring.
The acting President of Bangla Desh, Mr Syed Nazrul Islam – “acting” in deference to the imprisoned Shaikh Mujibur Rahman – and Mr Tajuddin Ahmed, his Prime Minister travelled today through their liberated lands in a Chevrolet, with police sirens screaming. Along the bleached roads their electorate laughed and danced. Many had waited three hours to see them.
A roadside meeting was held at the village of Jhikargacha, where 60 captured razakars (locally recruited Pakistani irregulars) were crowded into an upstairs room at the police station 50 yards away. Here an Army pontoon already replaces the road bridge, shattered by the retreating Pakistan Army.
About 18 Pakistanis also within the jail at Jessore all arrested by the Mukti Bahini guerrillas who, together with 100 local police, are helping to maintain civil order.
For many of the collaborators the future looks grim. “Those who are found guilty at a properly conducted tribunal of killing five people will not, for instance, be spared,” a Bangla Desh spokesman said.
And for most of the ordinary people in BanglaDesh the future must be severe. The message from the acting President and Prime Minister yesterday was one of blood sweat and tears, and austerity-but mixed with some socialism and welfare plans.
“The battle for liberation”, it declared, “will be fully won only when we work unitedly and set up a country where the poor and needy will be assisted and where peasants will be able to work freely without interference and everyone will live in peace and security.
Villagers are also returning to their homes along the Indian border, which they fled earlier this year to safer areas either in India or deeper inside BanglaDeshi.
But some I spoke to on the road near Benapole, pushing their families and worldly goods on bullock carts, said that many refugees have no transport to help them to return. Most had their blocks and cars impounded by the Pakistanis.
The tales of atrocities are endless. In one village two women were taken away and raped. In another hundreds died. In yet another a woman was raped before her husband and three-year-old son. A priest described the death of two men, one Muslim, one Christian, lined up and shot outside their homes.
Indian commanders are careful to ensure that their soldiers’ behavior is impeccable. Certainly there have been no complaints heard against them. And only 22 to 24 civilians died in the fall of Jessore.
The result is that the will to survive, not only as individuals but as a nation, is now very strong in BanglaDesh. The acting President announced yesterday that four political parties, the Muslim league, the Jamaet-e-Islami, the Nizami Islam and the People’s Democratic Party ate to be banned For the moment, at least he can depend upon unity of purpose.
Reference: The Guardian 13 December 1971