Baltimore Sun

NEW DELHI--Less than four months ago. the West Pakistan Army said it could not send soldiers and helicopters to East Bengal to save survivors of the cyclone that took hundreds of thousands of lives in the mouth of the Ganges. If troops and helicopters were moved from West Pakistan, India might attack, the Army said. By the time the Army statement was issued, India was increasing its offers of relief aid for the cyclone victims.

Today, that same West Pakistan Army shows every sign of being prepared to send its last soldier to more populous East Bengal, if necessary, in an all-out effort to shoot to death the results of last December's elections.

No room remains for doubt as to the Punjabi-dominated Army's determination to go the whole distance.

For the only justification that could ever emerge for the grisly scenes of a week ago Thursday and Friday would be a total victory of bullets over the nonviolent attempts of the Bengalis to put in power the men they had elected in polling sanctioned by the Army.

NEWSMEN TOURED CARNAGE

Correspondents interned last week at the plush Dacca Intercontinental Hotel could see only fragments of what was taking place outside-a few soldiers shooting into civilian buildings, a machine-gun opening up on a dozen empty-handed youths, the Army setting fire to civilian business places.

But two European newsmen evaded the Army and stayed behind a few extra days and they managed to tour some of the carnage before they were found out and expelled.

Their reports have confirmed the worst fears of those who were only able to surmise the meaning of cannon reports and prolonged bursts of machine-gun and automatic-rifle fire coming from the new campus of Dacca University, where two burning buildings lighted the sky for hours with their flames.

SLUM RESIDENTS KILLED

Hundreds of students were burned up in their beds and hundreds more were buried in a mass grave, according to reports filed by the two newsmen who said they toured the scene.

They also confirmed previous reliable diplomatic reports that large stretches or bamboo slums were surrounded and set afire, their residents shot when they tried to flee

The only bond between West Pakistan and East Bengal- other than the West Pakistan Army itself-is the Muslim faith, for which the divided country was created as a haven against Hindu-Muslim religious murders when India was partitioned.

Even today, the Army exercises its authority in the name of "the Islamic state of Pakistan." Yet burning a human being, alive or dead, is unequivocally forbidden by the Mohammedan faith. it is also a favorite crime charged to Hindus by West Pakistani Muslims.

Such attacks upon fellow Muslims in the name or an Islamic state can be vindicated even in the eyes of other Mohammedan countries from which West Pakistan is apparently already seeking aid, only by a total military victory. And any military victory will require growing, not diminishing, bloodshed as the Bengalis-unified to a man for the first time in decades-struggle to resist.

Clues as to how cooly the West Pakistanis had calculated their plan to shoot and burn the Bengalis into submission are provided by the personal actions or some West Pakistani politicians at the Hotel Intercontinental on the night the holocaust started.

Zulfikar All Bhutto, the former foreign minister who won a majority or West Pakistan¹s seats in the Constituent Assembly in last December's election but had only a minority nationally, substantially increased the guard on his llth-floor fortress and had his gunmen put their Communist-bloc automatic rifles on slings around their necks for the first time hours before the shooting started-

LOST THEIR COOL

He was seen, awake, by a newsman well after the shooting started. But he was so unshocked by what was going on directly under his hotel window that he soon went to bed and, according to his aides, slept the night until 7:30 A.M. when he was awakened according to prior instructions.

But his aides and his Punjabi-hired guards-some of who had encountered problems when they couldn't work the self-service elevators in the hotel when they arrived- lost their cooly professional demeanor twice before they could get past the crowd of inquisitive newsmen in the lobby the next morning.

At one point, a Bhutto aide started screaming at a newsman who asked a question the aide apparently thought impertinent.

At another, one of the toughest-looking guards tripped up when he discovered that the hotel's main doors were locked and he would have to use the revolving door. After several attempts to push open the curved glass panels that formed the door's outer cylinder, he somehow wound up stuck in the same quarter of the door with S. A. Kasoury, a top Bhutto aide who was already crowded there by his own bulk and his own bags which he had to personally carry to the waiting Army bus. Mr. Kasoury spoke some sharp words in Urdu when he found the gunman's automatic rifle pressed against his head, but the two finally managed to take enough steps in tandem to get outside the building.

DEMOLISHED BY SAVAGERY

When Mr. Bhutto arrived in Karachi, he told newsmen that Pakistan had been saved "by the grace of almighty Allah."

In fact, Pakistan as it existed for 23 years was not saved but demolished by the savagery of the West Pakistan Army's sudden attack without warning against dozens of civilian and military objectives throughout East Bengal.

The attack has without doubt brought a bloody and flaming halt to the holiday spirit that filled the air for 15 days as demonstrators paraded in series to the house of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, head of the Awami League and leader of the noncooperation movement that deprived West Pakistan of all but nominal governmental control over East Bengal.

WHO DO YOU TRUST

A lot more blood is likely to flow before Bengali crowds can gather again in public squares by the tens of thousands to raise their fists and shout independence slogans.

Whether you believe Sheikh Mujib will be with them, his mustache twitching and his lips in a grim smile as he leads them in shouts of "Joi Bangla" (Long Live Bengal) depends on whether you believe the Army, which said it arrested him and five aides early the morning after the crackdown began, or the clandestine Radio Free Bangla Desh, which broadcasts statements by a voice that claims to be Mr. Mujib¹s.

THE UNIFYING FORCE

But Mr. Mujib will surely remain the movement's unifying force no matter what his fate.

The Sheikh in jail will be, to Bengalis, the same victimized Bengali leader he was the last slx tlmes the Army tried to lock him up.

The Sheikh free will be, as he has been whenever he has been out of jail, an audience-rouser and an instinctive capitalizer upon the military¹s inability to understand the people they are trying to crush.

The Sheikh dead-no one has suggested it yet-would be the most powerful force of all, the first universally recognized martyr to Bengali nationalism.

Sheikh Mujib has never feared either prison or death in three decades of a totally political life in a country where political activism always means both prison and death are near at hand.

All six times he was previously thrown in jail by the Army, he waited in predictable places for his arrest, though he considered the cellblock a waste of valuable organizing time. There is no way to know yet whether he followed this pattern again or decided to escape to go on leading a movement that was no longer merely an obstreperous opposition party but the country's duly elected majority.

NOW A FLAME

In the weeks before the Army moved, Sheikh Mujib told newsmen over and over again that his own fate no longer mattered, that the idea of ending West Pakistan's economic domination of East Bengal was now a flame insider every Bengali head.

"They don¹t have enough bullets to kill 75 million Bengalis," he said, "and that is what they will have to do to crush us. You can't shoot down this kind of spirit with just bullets, and bullets is all they have."

Mr. Bhutto thought otherwise.

Before coming to Dacca to join the last futile round of negotiations with Sheikh Mujib and President A, M. Yahya Khan, he told newsmen in West Pakistan the Army could win any showdown because the Bengali movement existed only in the cities. If the Army also had to put down the countryside, where 90 per cent of East Bengalis live, the job could not be done, he acknowledged. But he insisted that the countryside would not back the Bengali cause, despite the overwhelming votes Sheikh Mujib rolled up there.

MARXIST COMPETITOR

Anyone who has been to East Bengal has learned that the only serious competitor Sheikh Mujib had in the countryside last December was Maulana Bhashani, an elderly, white-bearded Marxist orator whose peasant movement demanded outright independence from the start, rather than the regional autonomy sought by the Awami League. Mr. Bhashani refused to contest the election last December, but his independence movement had a strength among peasants that suggests that Mr. Bhutto's views of the East Bengal countryside were uninformed.

Which man better understood Bengal will be known in the end, after the ashes of the civil war that is getting under way in East Bengal have settled.