Newsweek

They were long on defiance and short on firepower, a scraggly band of impoverished Bengali peasants armed mainly with picks, clubs and bamboo sticks. But they claimed that they had trapped a force of more than 1,000 government troops in a cantonment 2 miles north-west of the East Pakistani city of Jessore. And now, the Bengalis swore that they would continue to besiege the encircled federal garrison until the Punjabi soldiers from West Pakistan died from starvation. “We have the soldiers surrounded, and they cannot get out to get food,” one rebel told NEWSWEEK’S Tony Clifton excitedly. “Those bloody buggers are starving and will surely die. They must die:”

That glimpse of the continuing fury and hatred that is racking East Pakistan came last week when Clifton slipped across the Indian border into East Pakistan for a day’s tour of some nearby villages. Otherwise, with East Pakistan clamped under tight censorship and with all foreign correspondents banned, the news blackout on Pakistan’s civil war was almost totally effective. And a flood of conflicting and unconfirmed rumours poured into neighbouring India to add to the communications confusion.

From all indications, foreign governments were experiencing similar problems in obtaining solid information on the East Pakistan situation. In Washington Sen. Edward Kennedy said that reports received by his refugee subcommittee told of “indiscriminate killing, the execution of dissident political leaders and students and thousands of civilians suffering and dying every hour of the day”. While Kennedy did not identify his source, State Department spokesman Robert J. McCloskey promptly denied that the Nixon Administration was suppressing reports from Dacca and declared that it was “impossible to estimate a reliable set of facts regarding recent events and to assess their consequences”. Nonetheless, at the end of the week, the U.S. arranged with Pakistan International Airlines to evacuate dependents of American diplomatic officials in East Pakistan.

PROTEST

While the U.S. remained cautiously noncommittal on the events in Pakistan no such restraints were observed in India. There, Prime Minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi condemned the Pakistani army assault on East Bengal as “the systematic decimation of people which amounts to genocide”. Day after day Indian newspapers splashed lurid headlines across their front pages describing fierce battles and bloody atrocities in East Bengal. In turn, the Islamabad government in West Pakistan accused the Indian Government and press of spreading false and baseless news reports. And with officials of the two governments exchanging protest notes all last week, the long-standing enmity between India and Pakistan was in no danger of moderating.

If Indian reports that 7,00,000 people may have perished in the East Pakistani fighting seemed wildly exaggerated, the Pakistani Government claim that order and calm prevailed throughout East Pakistan seemed equally improbable. From fragmentary reports it appeared that the federal army was, in fact, in command of most major cities, but control of the countryside remained in doubt. “The troops can make sallies from cantonments and they occasionally do because they have concentrated firepower”, correspondent Clifton reported. ‘‘However, they dare not spend much time away from base for fear of ambush and must return before dark. Their policy seems to be to go on short terror raids to cow the population into surrender. The question is whether the rebels can hold out until the monsoon comes in a month or so when the weather will make the roads impassable”.

BROODING

The civil strife in East Pakistan meanwhile, seems hardly to have touched the consciousness of Pakistanis in the western sector more than 1,000 miles away across Indian territory. On the surface at least NEWSWEEK’S Milan J. Kubic found that life in West Pakistan moved along at a business as usual pace. But Kubic also discovered a deep sense of brooding among intellectuals and politicians who saw the end of the ideals upon which Pakistan was founded 23 years ago. “When we were building this country, the only argument we had for dismembering the Indian subcontinent was our desire to build a home where all of its Moslems would feel free and equal,” an elder statesman in Lahore remarked sadly. “That ideal is now dead, and the Pakistan which we conceived has gone out of existence”.

THE AWAKENING OF A PEOPLE

Early last month, when riots erupted in East Pakistan, NEWSWEEK correspondent Loren Jenkins flew to Dacca to cover the Bengali struggle for national autonomy. When civil war flared up and the Pakistani Army put the region under total censorship, Jenkins, along with all other foreign newsmen, was expelled from the country. On his return to Beirut last week, Jenkins filed this personal report on East Pakistan’s tragic ordeal:

He stood under a hot noon sun, beads of sweat clinging to his forehead around the edge of his slicked-back grey hair. His eyes were red from fatigue, but his face glowed with pride and hope. Only minutes before, a mob of students from the Dacca Medical School had swirled through the green iron gates into the garden of his modest home in the Dacca suburb of Dhanmondi. The impassioned young people shouted “Joi Bangla” (Victory to Bengal”) to demonstrate their support for Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, 51 year old leader of East Pakistan’s 75 million people. His spirits soaring, Mujib (as he is called by everyone in East Pakistan) turned to our group of foreign correspondents in his garden and spoke with excitement: “My people are united, they cannot be stopped. Do you think machine guns can really extinguish the spirit and the soul of my people?”

Only 36 hours after Mujib uttered those words, Pakistan’s army dominated by the Punjabis of West Pakistan, suddenly weighed in with its own ruthless answer, with bloody and sometimes indiscriminate use of its massive firepower the army won the first round. And with Mujib’s fate in doubt (he was variously reported to be under army arrest or safe in hiding), East Pakistan’s brief fighting for independence was smashed for the moment at least But the memory of that experience, the amazing unity of purpose that it forged among Bengalis, will linger on, growing apace with the bitter resentment that must inevitably flow from the federal army’s outright occupation of East Pakistan. For last month in Bangla Desh the “Bengal Nation” as Mujib’s supporters renamed East Pakistan, there occurred a strange and powerful awakening of a people who have been exploited, reviled, humiliated and cheated by the Punjabi minority since Pakistan was founded more than 23 years ago.

In a sense, credit for this awakening must go to President Mohammed Yahya Khan, who forced the showdown by cancelling last month’s scheduled opening of the newly elected National Assembly, in which Mujib’s Awami League had won a majority. Seeing Yahya’s sudden action as yet another Punjabi maneuver to deny East Pakistan’s aspirations for greater autonomy, Bengali nationalists clashed with federal troops in the trappings of an independent state. Overnight, the green and white flag of Pakistan seemed to disappear in Dacca, in its place rose a new Bengali flag, designed by Dacca University students, a bottle-green banner bearing a red circle and, within the circle a yellow map of East Pakistan.

COMPROMISE

The nerve centre of East Pakistan’s ad hoc government was Mujib’s home where the pipe-smoking leader met with all comers in his sparsely furnished saloon. Ironically, as independence fever mounted throughout Bangla Desh, it was Mujib who sought to moderate the passions. Aware that any unilateral declaration of independence would bring down the wrath of the army, Mujib desperately sought a compromise that would give Bengal the autonomy his people demanded while preserving at least a semblance of Pakistani national unity as the army demanded. Though few people said so openly, Mujib was the last hope that Pakistan’s two distant and disparate wings might achieve some kind of accommodation.

What finally undid Mujib’s efforts was the supercilious attitudes of the West Pakistanis, especially the Punjabis and Pathans who dominate the army and who have been nurtured on impassioned patriotism and cliches about the inferiority of Bengalis. To the West Pakistanis Mujib and the Awami League were in open rebellion, even though Mujib was, in fact, the leader of the nation’s majority political party. What mattered above all to the westerners was the preservation of Pakistan’s unity and integrity. There are, of course, valid arguments for keeping a nation united; it usually makes economic, diplomatic and military sense. But the enmity between Pakistan’s two wings, separated by more than 1,000 miles of Indian territory, had become so virulent as to reduce such notions of unity to mere fiction.

TERROR

When the army decided to strike, it attacked without warning. Truckloads of troops spread out through Dacca under the cover of darkness with orders to use maximum force to stamp out all resistance. Houses were machine- gunned at random; tanks firing on the apparent whim of their commanders, clanged through the streets. It was a blatant exercise in terror and vengeance. There can never be any excuse for the sort of firepower we saw and heard being directed against unarmed civilians. There can be no excuse for the merciless burning of the shanty homes of some of the world’s most impoverished people.

And we had already seen too much to suit the Pakistani Army. ‘‘You must pack and be ready to go in a half hour” Major Saddiq, the army’s uninformative Public Relations Officer, told all the foreign correspondents in Dacca. “Are we being expelled?” I asked, “I would not use that words”, he replied ‘‘But you are all leaving.”

Two hours later, we were herded into four army trucks and taken under guard to Dacca’s airport, where we were searched and most of our notes and films confiscated. A Pakistan civilian jetliner flew us to Karachi in West Pakistan, where we were searched again. My type-writer and radio were dismantled and two rolls of film I had hidden in the radio’s battery compartment were seized. I was then taken into another room and stripped and a packet of film that I was carrying in my underwear was taken. “You will have only your memory left”, a police official chortled cheerfully.

UNITY

That I do have I can still recall the sight of men, women and children hacking down trees and tearing up construction sites to build barricades to hamper the army's movements. Bullets fired into darkened homes were answered with cries of “Bengalis Unite!” And earlier, before the army crackdown, I had visited a village where volunteers, directed by ex-noncoms from the old British Indian Army, were training for guerrilla resistance. “We will cut roads, stop ferries, destroy bridges.” One resistance leader told me, “and we will get guns from our enemy.” Perhaps his prophecy will not come true. But if a guerrilla war does engulf the East Pakistan countryside, the struggle for Bangla Desh promises to be long and bloody. Whatever happens to Mujib himself, such a conflict will be the final test of his contention that machine- guns cannot kill the spirit of his people.