Northern Echo

I was bundled out of Dacca aboard an Army truck packed with other Western journalists last night at half an hour’s notice after being penned in a hotel since Thursday when the Army moved to crush the breakaway bid by East Pakistan leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
After throwing our belongings into suitcases we were trundled along the deserted airport road in an armed convoy past blazing shops and home¬made barricades. Everyone was rigorously searched at the airport and films, tapes and even shorthand notes were seized by troops.

Until now, because of total censorship in Dacca, I have been unable to tell of the crackdown on Sheikh Mujibur’s non-cooperation movement which paralysed the Government, education and commerce for over three weeks. On Friday, menacing plumes of black smoke curled above Dacca and sporadic bursts of automatic fire crackled in the silent night, 18 hours after the Army rolled in to crackdown on Sheikh Mujibur’s followers.

PHONES DEAD

The first sign that the military regime had lost patience with wrangling with the politicians sudden cox or interrogetion at Hotel Intercontinental where journalists were staying. A captain ordered nobody to move outside on pain of being shot. Troops then hauled down and burned a giant Bangladesh flag the hotel staff had made and hoisted 12 hours earlier. By then rumours spread that President Yahya Khan, who had spend 11 days here trying to solve the crisis, had left.

Soon the whole phone and cable system went dead and dimly lit Army convoys trekked past the hotel. At one a.m. a phone call to Sheikh Mujibur’s home established he was there but half an hour later the line was dead.

HEARD SCREAMS

The action grew and isolated pistol shots were followed by the boom of recoilless rifles. Fire began to light up the horizon. The militant Bengali nationalist paper, The People was blazing near the hotel and even bigger fires in the University residence hall and on the airport road could be seen. Patton tanks clattered along the roads and tracer bullets flecked the sky as truckloads of troops shuttled back and forth. When the guns fell silent we heard rasped words of command and further off agonized screams from crowds punctuated the eerie quiet.

On Saturday morning, I asked the forces Press Liaison Officer, Major Saliq Siddiqui, about casualties. “Operations are continuing and so far there is no count of the casualties on either side,” he replied. Asked about rocket launchers he said they were used to break roadblocks and barricades. About the University fires, he said the Army moved on prior information on resistance centres and he believed stores of explosives were found. The whole operation was to reassert authority over an illegal de facto regime, he said.