MASSACRE AND DEVASTATION IN EAST PAKISTAN
by : MORT ROSENBLUM (Editor’s Note : Six correspondents allowed into East Pakistan after a six-week news blackout found human calamity far beyond what was known. This eyewitness report was filed from Bangkok)
Dacca, East Pakistan, May 11 (delayed) (AP)- Vultures too full to fly perch along the Ganges river in grim contentment. They have had perhaps more than half a million murdered Pakistanis to feed upon since March.
Civil War flamed through Pakistan’s eastern wing from March 25, pushing the
bankrupt nation to the edge of ruin. Aside from calamitous economic losses, the killing and devastation defy belief.
From a well at Natore, field gases bubbled up around bones and rotting flesh. ‘A tiny child gazes at a break in the lavender carpert of water hyacinths in a nearby pond where his parents’ bodies were dumped.
No one really knows how many Bengali families the army machinegunned or how many migrant settlers, Bengali secessionists slashed to death. But responsible estimates of all deaths in start six figures and range over a million.
In the port city of Chittagong, a blood-spattered doll lies in a heap of clothing and excrement in a jute mill recreation club where 180 women and children were butchered by Bengalis.
Along the road to it, entire blocks of Bengali homes and shops were blasted and burned to the ground as a revenging Pakistan army settled the score.
Reporters were banned from East Pakistan from March 26, 40 newsmen were bundled and stripped of their notes and film, until the government escorted in a party of six on a conducted tour from May 6-11.
Working independently and together, from evidence and eyewitnesses questioned out of official earshot, the following account emerged :
Throughout March, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Bengali dominated Awami League harass the military government with a noncooperation campaign to push for autonomy and more benefits from West Pakistan.
Bengalis killed some West Pakistanis in flurries of chauvinism.
Mujib’s party had won 167 of national assembly seats in recent elections and he was Pakistan’s major political figure. But negotiations in Dacca with President A.M. Yahya Khan on restoring civilian rule broke down.
Yahya few back to the West 25. That night the army swept in and East Pakistan was afflame.
Soldiers assaulted two dormitories at Dacca University where radical Bengali students made their headquarters. They used recoilless rifles, then automatic weapons and bayonetes.
They broke into selected professors and students quarters, executing some 14 Faculty members, at least one by mistake. Altogether, more than 200 students were killed.
Army units shelled and setfire to two newspaper offices, then set upon the Bengali population in general. More than a dozen markets were set afire and at least 25 blocks were devastated in Dacca.
Hindu Bengali jewelry shops in the Shakari Pathe (patti] quarter were blown apart and two traditional Hindu villages inside Dacca racecourse were attacked with almost holy war fury by moslem troops.
Reasoned accounts, projected from body counts at mass graves, say about 10,000 persons were shot dead or burned to death the first few nights in Dacca.
Official spokesmen explained they moved to stop a rebellion planned for 3 a.m. the next morning and insisted no one was killed unless he fired at the army.
But unbriefed officers revealed the rebellion plot was only an assumption. Eyewitnesses said at least hundreds of victims were women, and thousands were unarmed civilians, gunned down indiscriminately.
“I took firm actions,” said Governor Lt. Gen. Tikka Kwan, “to prevent heavy casualties later.”
Dacca was quickly under army control but systemtic killing and looting continued. On May 2 soldiers went to a suburb and shot every person in sight-20 people-to avenge a train sabotaged two miles (3.2 kilometers) away.
Word flashed quickly through the province of 58,000 square miles and 75 million inhabitants, one of the worlds’ most densely populated areas, and thousands of Bengali troops in the army, police, militia and border forces revolted.
Under the banner of the Independent Bangla Desh (Bengal State), Eastern deserters and armed volunteers fought back, seizing wide areas of the provinces which the 11,000 W. Pakistan regulars did not occupy.
Some towns show charred areas which foreign observers say were caused when the army, seeking to flush out or punish rebels, dropped containers of gasoline from the air and set them fire with tracer rounds.
Authorities ordered demolished a strip of homes along the railroad from Dacca to Mymensingh, about 90 miles (144 kilometers), turning out some 30,000 families to feed for themselves.
Security is tense in some areas mostly along the Indian border, where remnants of the ‘Mukhti Fauj’ (Liberation Force) hide.
But little serious threat remains, even of guerrilla activity.
The problem now is sullen inactivity. Bengalis wrap Pakistani flags on their clothing and fly them on homes and shops, but their loyalty to the state is far from deep.
Offices now speak of Phase Two selective elimination of person considered dangerous. Informed sources told reporters Hindus were still being sought out and shot. One Natore Bengali said:
‘They stopped today because you are here.’
The army clearly made attempts to cover the facts. Bamboo screens were erected along some roads.Careful repairs-designed not to look like repairings.
Reporters had to fight to slip away to see the worst damage.
In the South, it is difficult to distinguish hellicopter war damage from that of the Killer cyclone that struck last November.
Foreign relief experts have now estimated some 400,000 persons died in the cyclone. As a frame of reference, one expert who maintained 200,00 were killed in the storm figures one million died in the war.
Staggering food problems caused by the war mean at least another famine in the coming months. There is already a cholera outbreak.
Pakistanis injured to yearly cyclones and floods were stunned when the cyclone hit. Then ethnic brothers were suffering in limited parts of the province off the Bay of Bengal.
The civil war came as a crushing blow. This time, hardly a family emerged without a personal tragedy, a memory of death terror and deep loss.
The vultures, again were the only winners. But unlike the last time, bitterness could not be directed at nature, and the lingering wounds will remain open for a long time.
Reference : Indonesian Observer, 14.05.1971