Washington Star/Evening Star

Dacca, East Pakistan - Kondukar Mahaburbur Rahman does not sleep at home any more. It is unsafe.
he moves about warily during the daytime. At night he hides in the home of one friend or another. He is afraid of being murdered.
Rahman is a member of the peace committee in Jhikargacha, a small town near the Indian border on the road to Calcutta. Peace committees have been established all over East Pakistan since the army crackdown to collaborate with martial law authorities.
Rahman said he had received a threatening letter signed by the East Pakistan Communist part warning against collaboration.
Two peace committee chairmen in nearby villages have been killed, he said. He's worried.

Letter of Warning

To the south, at Khulna, the top civil official for the southwestern part of East Pakistan, Commissioner Hasan Zaman has received an unsigned letter warning him to quit working for the martial law regime or he would be killed. The chief police official for the area also was threatened. Both live behind armed guards.
The clandestine radio of the "Bangla Desh government" now -exiled opponents of rule from West Pakistan, frequently reports "executions" of peace committee members as well as the army.

Accusation Made

The peace committee members are accused of using their positions to even old political scores and for common gangsterism.
According to some prominent Bengali leaders, the most discredited and disreputable men came forward after the initial bloodshed in march and April to offer the services to the army. "They are people who would do anything for money or a plane ticket to Geneva", one leader said.
Many members are politicians who were wiped out when Mujibur Rahman's Awami League got 72 percent of the vote in last December's elections in East Pakistan. The League is now banned and Rahman is awaiting trial for treason.
President A. M. Yahya Khan has said by-elections will be held to fill the national Assembly seats of Awami League members whom the government thinks guilty of crimes.

Government Gains

So far the government is known to have won over only about 20 of 160 Awami League members of the National Assembly. It hopes to pressure more into denouncing Mujibur Rahman, thus reducing its embarrassment at the lack of local support and limiting the number of by-elections.
Peace committee members apparently hope to win the by-elections and resume the political roles from which the voters dumped them in the free election Dec. 7.
The organizer of the peace committees was Khwaja Khairuddin, an old politician who only got 20 eprcent of the vote against "Sheikh Mujib" in Khairuddin's old Dacca constituency in December.
Khairuddin explained that the peace committees are supposed to provide communication between the people and the government.

Forming Auxiliaries

They are raising their own armed auxiliaries, he said.
Khairuddin estimated the number of peace committee members killed in the last two months at between 300 and 400.
He has been threatened and goes around Dacca with a carload of armed men.
The officer directing civil affairs in East Pakistan, Maj. Gen. Rao Farman Ali Khan said that the number of peace committee members killed was only about 100 and only 20 of them were important leaders.
But both a sampling of several areas and impressions of observers here suggest Khairuddin is right and the general was trying to play down the problem. .
In Jessore district, where Jhikargacha is located, 421 committee members were reported killed in recent weeks. In Khulna district 33 reportedly were killed.
These districts probably have higher than average tolls, but still the province-wide total seems high.

Little meaning Seen

Gen. Farman said almost every Bengali working for or with the government in a prominent position has received a threatening letter. Therefore, he contended, the letters have little meaning - they would be more frightening if more selective.
This did not sound like the kind of reasoning which Kondukar Mahaburbur Rahman would agree, but there was no chance to go back and try it out on him.
Unable to spread its forces around enough to protect all peace committee members, as well as bridges and other important points in the province, the army has tried to protect them with terror.
There have been reports of retaliatory killings of villagers where peace committee members have been murdered. Although this could not be directly confirmed, it followed logistically from the announced policy of holding an area collectively responsible for anything that goes wrong in it.

Reminiscent of Vietnam

The pattern of local representatives of the central authority having to sleep away from home in order to escape assassination is reminiscent of Vietnam.
The tests of security there is whether the village headmen or foreign advisers can sleep in their own residences.
But for all the atrocities of Vietnam, the Saigon government has never followed the practice of retaliating against the villagers when the headman gets murdered. There the assumption is that the villagers are likely to be as much in fear of and opposed to Viet Cong terror bands as the government agents are.
Here, however, martial law authorities from West Pakistan seem to assume that underground assassins represent the feelings of the common people and the way to stop them is to bring pressure on the people.