Bengali Guerrillas Step Up Bombing
Dacca, 3 July: As Secretary of Dacca’s Council Muslim League, Mr. Abdul Matin, a Bengali and a lawyer, is a firm believer in the unity of the two Pakistans. He is also a lucky man.
At 1.55 one morning this week, he escaped unhurt when a bomb went off in his home. It woke the city and blew a hole the size of a football in a thick brick wall. The bomb was the Mukti Fouj’s (Freedom Fighters’) way of reminding people that nowadays it pays to be a Bengali first and a Muslim second.
There is at the moment no indication here of any cogent political solution that will wash away the bloodshed by both the Bengali and the Urdu-speaking people in East Pakistan these last three months.
Instead, West Pakistan seems to be moving more and more into a nineteenth century colonialist role, consumed by the righteousness of its cause and determined to sit down hard on anybody who opposes them. The only trouble is they don’t have the ships, they don’t have the men and they don’t have the money.
Meanwhile, organized resistance is on the increase, particularly eastern border with India. The military say the bridges blown along the Pakistan Esatern Railway line, which runs from Dacca to the port of Chittagong could have been done only by experts, and they claim the Indian sappers must be coming in over the border though they haven’t been able to catch any.
Professionally, their Army is probably one of the best in the world. But it is thin on the ground-perhaps no more than 2.5 divisions including auxiliaries-and it has the border against India to guard as well as looking after internal security Nor do its senior officers seem to realize what it has taken on.
For if Dacca’s Bengalis-and the city is probably still less than half full at the moment-are a fair reflection of the spirit throughout the country, then about 70 million of them want to live in a fully independent State called Bangladesh. ‘Of Course, it would be a shambles’, said a diplomat, but it would be their shambles.
President Yahya Khan’s broadcast to the nation in which he proposed a transfer of power from military to civil rule in four months time disappointed the few moderates-and moderates on both sides seem desperately few-who had hoped for a peaceful settlement.
It is thought that the President’s list of banned Awami League members of the National Assembly who would not be allowed to sit in any future Government would not need to be dramatically long.
With the members already in custody another 20 to 25 names would be enough to ensure that the Awami League, already banned as a party, would lose its majority. Rule would be from a party or coalition of parties belonging to West Pakistan. Nor is there the feeling that a genuine handover of power is intended simply that a tame National Assembly will elect Yahya as President.
A Bengali writer told me that he welcomed the President’s speech because it was so uncompromising. “If he had offered concessions, some people might have wavered, ” he said.
Certainly the President’s glowing references to the ‘valiant armed forces’ who put an end to the activities of the miscreants’ did not do much to restore the confidence of the people who had seen those same forces in action.
The peasants are really the people who hold the key to what’s going to happen in East Pakistan. They have suffered more in the fighting than anybody else-homes destroyed, crops wrecked or left to rot in the paddies because the entire village has fled. The question is whether these country people, who constitute the bulk of the population, will accept Punjabi rulers with the same resignation that they accept the cyclones and the floods that affect them year after year and about which they can do nothing.
Reference: Colin Smith, The Observer, July 4, 1971