Washington Star/Evening Star

HONG KONG.—The army from West Pakistan has created conditions in the smoking ruins of East Pakistan which will benefit Communist extremists.
But it will be some time before it becomes clear which of the various factions of Communists in East Pakistan will grow strongest in the guerrilla warfare there.
Moscow has endorsed one faction by letting it use the Soviet Communist party newspaper, Pravda, to denounce the president of Pakistan, General M. A. Yahya Khan.

Maoist element ignored

Another faction which has espoused Maoist ideas has been publicly ignored by Peking. The Chinese are backing Yahya Khan's use of the army to suppress the eastern region of Pakistan.
It seems premature to observers here to suspect secret Chinese support for East Pakistani guerrillas. But if the struggle goes on as long as many expect, China
might decide to take out private insurance against a guerrilla victory by giving p. The army, representing the minority of Pakistan's people in its western section, has been trying to crush the effort of the eastern majority to escape the west's domination. The army is reportedly winning the towns, but these can be illusory victories.
Much of the middle-class leadership of East Pakistan reportedly has been shot by the army. Some leaders, including Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, whose Awami League won 72.6 percent of the province's vote last December, are under arrest.
This has created a vacuum for Communist leaders to move into.
Tougher, harder men then Rahman's band of lawyers, the communist leaders have been conditioned by years of illegal activity for the kind of violent life now forced on East Pakistani nationalists.

Test of fitness

So the government's terrorism has given the Communists a chance to prove they can survive as the fittest for guerrilla warfare.
Bengal, the region divided in 1947 between East Pakistan and the Indian state of West Bengal, has a strong Communist tradition. At the time of partition an estimated 10,000 Communists were in the eastern part.
Their party was banned, however, and some 3,000 of them were jailed in the first five years. Others went to India when Moslem-Hindu riots broke out in 1950. Some estimates are that only 3,000 Communists remained in East Pakistan, operating underground.
The public home for some of them became the National Awami party, headed by a radical peasant leader, Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani. Bhashani, now 87 years old, sympathized with Mao Tse-tung's ideas of rural revolution, although not himself a Communist.

Communists divided

His Communist associates splintered into three or four factions. The main ones identifiable today are headed by Mohammed Toaha and Abdul Matin.
Toaha, a well-educated man in his 40s, appears at the moment to be the main Communist guerrilla leader. He was general secretary of the National Awami League until last May 30, when he broke with Bhashani. His chief aide, Abdul Huq, was general secretary of Bhashani's peasant movement, the Krishak Samiti.
An unidentified spokesman for the pro-Moscow Communist party of East Pakistan criticized these "Peking-ites" last year in the "World Marxist Review," a Soviet-controlled journal. There is no love lost among the various Communist factions.
Toaha seems, however, to have the support of the Naxalities, the Maoist-inspired Communist revolutionaries operating in the West Bengal state of India. They could provide a channel for weapons and knowledge of how to use them.
The Naxalites have been praised in the past by Peking. But the situation now in East Pakistan is awkward for the Chinese. They have strongly hacked Yahya Khan's government, which is their most important diplomatic friend in Asia.
The Soviets, on the other hand, have been critical of the bloodshed in East Pakistan. They have showed more concern about cementing a future friendship with the East Pakistanis than protecting their present ties to Yahya Khan.
Soviet President Nikolai V. Podgorny announced that the East Pakistani Communist party—which is illegal at home—was attending the recent party congress in Moscow. Then Pravda published the speech of the unidentified delegation head.
After praising the Soviet Union, the speaker thanked his hosts for their concern over "the massacre of thousands of unarmed, innocent people by the reactionary military government" of Pakistan.
The speech was stronger than anything the Soviet government had said, but not much stronger, and by publishing it in the newspaper of the party which controls that government the speech was officially endorsed.
The Kremlin might well hope that its supporters among East Pakistan's splintered Communists will assume leadership of the leftist forces fighting the army.
This seems doubtful, however. The Maoists are stronger at the moment. And they can get help across the Indian border, whereas pro-Moscow Indian Communists have little strength in West Bengal.