East Pakistan border, West Bengal, June 14.—Sixteen young men, most of them students, crowded into a small, bare room to sign up for the Bangla Desh Mukti Fouj—the so-called Bengali Nation Liberation Army.

Behind a small, wooden table, sat a man in his early thirties, a former history lecturer at an East Pakistan college. He is now running a recruiting centre for guerrillas to fight in East Pakistan.

He declined to give his name and asked that the location of the recruiting office, ostensibly an office to register refugees crossing into West Bengal from East Pakistan, should not be revealed.

As each of the waiting youths stepped forward to the table, the recruiting officer interrogated him as to his name, age. what organizations he had belonged to in East Pakistan, his political affiliations. his home and why he wanted to join the underground army.

“Most of the people who come here for recruitment are students and youngsters, although the age group ranges from 18 to 35”, the Bangla Desh officer said in an interview yesterday.

“This as a preliminary recruiting centre. From here we send them to transit camps (known as youth camps (to conform to Indian law), and from those camps to the main army camps where they will be trained somewhere in Bangla Desh—it is a military secret where these camps are located.

“All the training camps are in Bangla Desh. We are recruiting those who have crossed the border, but we also have about 200 recruiting centres in Bangla Desh itself”, the former lecturer said.

There were probably about 100 such centres in West Bengal.

Since this particular centre was set up six weeks ago, he had processed between 20 and 30 people a day. “The students are very eager to join and to fight for the liberation of Bangla Desh and achieve their rights there”. he said.

A number of people who came to join, were personally known to him and he screened them carefully. They were further screened and their political ideas were tested at the transit camp before they moved on for training.

As each young man stopped in front of his desk, he warned them that once they had joined the Mukti Fouj they could not leave. If they tried to defect, they would be shot.

The interviews were conducted in a bare, concrete, second-storey room with a wooden door and iron bars on the two windows.

At the official’s side sat a young man, dressed in a dark blue shirt with a cap pulled jauntily over one eye, who copied down answers into an exercise book.

One of the people being recruited was a commerce student, aged 21, who had crossed the border specifically to join because there were no equivalent centres in his area across the border.

Asked if he expected the guerrilla movement to succeed, one recruit said: “Yes, why not ? No liberation movement in the world, according to my knowledge, has failed.”

The Mukti Fouj is certainly active in areas of East Pakistan, but there is some doubt among observers as to its success so far.

Sources said that the young civilian recruits were replacing as front line troops members of the regular East Pakistan Rifles who had borne the brunt of earlier fighting with the rest of the Pakistan Army. These were now being given administrative tasks.

The movement is known to possess old rifles, light machineguns, some rocket launchers and mortars.—Reuter.