Chicago Sun-Times

Special from the Washington Post.

Anthony Mascarenhas is a Goan who was until recently a correspondent for the Dacca Morning News, a member of a newspaper group under Pakistani government control. he wrote the following article for the London Sunday Times following a 10-day tour of the East Bengal country side with an army escort; it was filed from outside Pakistan, and is reprinted by permission.

It was Friday the 16th, not quite Black Friday but still unlucky enough for Abdul Bari. Like thousands of people in East Bengal, he had made the mistake of running within the sight of a West Pakistani army patrol. Now he was about to be shot.

"Normally we would have killed him as he ran," I was chattily informed by Maj. Rathore, the paunchy operations officer of the 9th Division, as we stood on the outskirts of a tiny village near Mudafarganj, 20 miles south of Comilla. "But we are checking him out for your sake. You are new here and I see you have a squeamish stomach."

"Why kill him?" I asked with mounting concern.

"Because he might be a Hindu or he might be a rebel, perhaps a student or an Awami Leaguer. They know we are sorting them out, and they betray themselves by running."

"But why are you killing them? And why pick on the Hindus?" I persisted.

"Must I remind you," Rathore said severely, "how they have tried to destroy Pakistan? Now with the cover of the fighting we have an excellent opportunity of finishing them off. Of course, we are only killing the Hindu men. We are soldiers, not cowards like the rebels. They kill our women and children."

Army wages genocide campaign

I was getting my first glimpse of the campaign of genocide that has spread like a red stain of blood over the otherwise verdant land of East Bengal. First it was the massacre of the non-Bengalis in a savage outburst of Bengali hatred. Now it was deliberate genocide, carried out by the West Pakistan army.

The pogrom's victims are not only Hindus of East Bengal, who constitute about 12 per cent of the 70 million population, but also thousands of Bengali Moslems. These include university and college students, teachers, Awami League and left-wing political cadres and everyone the army can catch of the 17,600 Bengali soldiers and police who mutinied March 26, in a spectacular though untimely and ill-started bid to create the independent Republic of Bangla Desh.

What I saw and heard with unbelieving eyes and ears during my 10 days in East Bengal during April made it terribly clear that the killings are not the isolated acts of military commanders in the field. They are the result of deliberate, vengeful orders from the top.

Unnerved by the almost successful breakaway of the province, which has more than half of the country's population, Gen. Yahya Khan's military government is engaged in its own "final solution" of the East Bengal problem.

Driving through the countryside one could see bodies of both Hindus and Moslems twisted grotesquely beside the charred remains of huts and between the coconut palms.

Hindus tracked down and shot

For six spine-chilling days as I traveled with the officers of the 9th division headquarters at Comilla, I witnessed at close quarters the terrifying extent of the genocide. I saw Hindus, hunted from village to village and door to door, shot off-hand after a cursory inspection showed they were uncircumcised. I have heard the screams of men bludgeoned to death in the compound of the circuit house (civil administrative headquarters) in Comilla. I have seen truckloads of other human targets and those who had the humanity to try to help them hauled off "for disposal" under the cover of darkness and curfew.

I have witnessed the screaming brutality of "kill-and-burn missions" as the army units, after clearing out the rebels, relentlessly pursued the pogrom in the towns and the villages. I have seen whole villages devastated by "punitive action."

And in the officers mess at night I have listened incredulously as otherwise brave and honorable men proudly talked over the day's kill: "How many did you get?"

All this being done, as any West Pakistani officer will tell you, for the "preservation of the unity, the integrity and the ideology of Pakistan." It is, of course too late for that. The very military action that is designed to hold together the two wings of the country, separated by a thousand miles of India, has confirmed the ideological and emotional break. East Bengal can only be kept in Pakistan by the heavy hand of the Punjab-dominated army.

Cleansing and rehabilitation

The bone-crushing military operation has two distinctive features. One is what the authorities like to call the "cleansing process," a euphemism for genocide. The other is the "rehabilitation effort." This is another way of describing the blatant moves to turn East Bengal into a docile colony of West Pakistan. These commonly used expressions and repeated official references to "miscreants" and "infiltrators" are part of the charade which is being enacted for the benefit of the world. Strip away the propaganda, and the reality is colonization--and killing.

The justification for the annihilation of the Hindus was paraphrased by Lt. Gen. Tikka Khan, the military governor of East Pakistan, in a radio broadcast on April 18. He said: "The Moslems of East Pakistan, who had played a leading role in the creation of Pakistan, are determined to keep it alive. However, the voice of the vast majority had been suppressed through coercion, threats to life and property by a vocal violent and aggressive minority, which forced the Awami League to adopt the destructive course."

Others, speaking privately were more blunt in seeking justification.

"The Hindus had completely undermined the Moslem masses with their money," Col. Naim, of 9th Division headquarters said. "They bled the province white. Money, food and produce flowed across the borders to India. In some cases they made up more than half the teaching staff in the colleges and schools, and sent their own children to be educated in Calcutta. It had reached the point where Bengali culture was in fact Hindu culture, and East Pakistan was virtually under the control of the Marwari businessmen in Calcutta. We have to sort them out to restore the land to the people, and the people to their faith."

War between pure and impure

Maj. Bashir, who came up from the ranks, boasts of a personal body count of 28. He had his own reasons for what has happened.

"This is a war between the pure and the impure," he informed me over a cup of tea. "The people here may have Moslem names and call themselves Moslems. But they are Hindus at heart. you won't believe that the head of the cantonment mosque here issued an edict during Friday prayers that the people would attain janat (paradise) if they killed West Pakistanis. We sorted the bastards out and we are now sorting out the others. Those who are left will be real Muslims. We will even teach them Urdu."

Everywhere I found officers and men fashioning imaginative garments of justification from the arbitrary fabric of their own prejudices. Scapegoats had to be found even for their own consciences, the dreadful nazi-style solution to what in essence was a political problem: The Bengalis won the election and wanted to rule. The Punjabis, whose ambitions and interest have dominated governmental policies since the founding of Pakistan in 1947, would brook no erosion of their power. And they ad the army to back them up.

It is clear that Lt. Gen. Tikka Khan played a pivotal role in the program. I was privately informed that Tikka Khan began planning the "sort-out" when he took over the governorship from the gentle, self-effacing Adm. Ahsan, and the military command from he scholarly Lt. Gen. Sahibzada Khan.

That was at the beginning of March, when Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's civil disobedience movement was gathering momentum. President Yahya Khan, it is said, went along with Tikka Khan rather than buck the tide of resentment caused in the top echelons of the military establishment by the increasing humiliation of the West Pakistani troops stationed in East Bengal.

Liquidation Lists

When the army units fanned out in Dacca in pre-emptive strikes against the rebels on the evening of March 25, many of them carried lists of people to be liquidated. These included the Hindus and large numbers of Moslems, students, Awami Leaguers, professors, journalists and those who have been prominent in Sheik Mujib's movement.

The charge, now publicly made, that the army was subjected to mortar attack from Jagannath hall, were the Hindu university students live, hardly justifies the obliteration of two Hindu colonies in the heart of the old city. Nor does it explain why the sizable Hindu populations of Dacca and the neighboring industrial town of Narayanganj should have vanished so completely during the round-the-clock curfew on March 26-27. There is similarly no trace of scores of Moslems who were rounded up during the curfew hours.

Touring Dacca on April 15, I found the heads of four students rotting on the roof of the Iqbal Hall Hostel. The caretaker said they had been killed on the night of March 25. I also found heavy traces of blood on the two staircases and in four of the rooms.

Behind Iqbal Hall a large residential building seemed to have been singled out for special attention by the army. The walls were pitted with bullet holes and a foul smell still lingered on the staircase, although it had been heavily powdered with DDT. Neighbors said the bodies of 23 women and children had been carted away only hours before. They had been decomposing on the roof since March 25. It was only after much questioning that I was able to ascertain that the victims belonged to the nearby hindu shanties. They had sought shelter in the building as the army closed in.

Sitting in the office of Maj. Agha, martial law administrator of Comilla City, on the morning of April 19, I saw the off-hand manner in which sentences were meted out. A bihari sub-inspector of police had walked in with a list of prisoners being held in the police lockup. Agha looked it over. With a flick of his pencil, he casually ticked off four names on the list.

"Bring these four to me this evening for disposal," he said. he looked at the list again. The pencil flicked once more. "..And bring this thief along with them."

It is hard to imagine so much brutality in the midst of so much beauty. Comilla was blooming when I went there towards the end of April.

Only man was missing. In on of the most crowded areas of the World--Comilla district has a population density of 1,900 to the square mile--people were eerily nowhere to be seen.

"Where are the Bengalis?" I asked my escorts in the strangely uncrowded streets of Dacca a few days earlier. "They have gone to the villages," was the stock reply. Now in the countryside, there were still no Bengalis. Comilla city, like Dacca, was heavily shuttered. And in 10 miles on the road to Laksham, past curiously silent villages, the peasants I saw could be counted on the fingers of both hands.

There were of course soldiers -- hundreds of unsmiling men in khaki, each with an automatic rifle. But there were no Bengalis.

The Bengalis have good reason to be afraid. The roads are constantly patrolled by tough, trigger-happy men during the daylight hours. Wherever the army is, you won't find bengalis.

Martial law orders, constantly repeated on the radio and in the press, proclaim the death penalty for anyone caught in the act of sabotage. If a road is obstructed or a bridge damaged or destroyed, all houses within 100 yards of the spot are liable to be demolished and their inhabitants rounded up. "Punitive action" is something that the Bengalis have come to dread.

Grim evidence of this were available when we were approaching Hajiganj, which straddles the road to Chandpur, on the morning of April 17th. A few miles before Hajiganj, a 15-foot bridge had been damaged the previous night by rebels who were still active in the area. According to Maj.. Rathore, an army unit had been sent out to take punitive action. Long spirals of smoke could be seen on all sides up to a distance of a quarter of a mile from the damaged bridge. And as we drove over a bed of boards, with which it had been hastily repaired, we could see houses in the villages on the right beginning to catch fire.

We turned a corner and found a convoy of trucks parked outside the mosque. I counted seven, all filled with jawans in battledress. At the had of the column was a jeep. Across the road two men, supervised by a third, were trying to batter down the door of one of more than a hundred shuttered shops lining the road.

We are on kill and burn

"What the hell are you doing?" Rathore roared.

The tallest of the trio, who was supervising the break-in, turned and peered at us. "Mota" (fatty), he shouted, "what the Hell do you think we are doing?"

Recognizing the voice, Rathore grew a watermelon smile. It was, he informed me, his old friend "Ifty" -- Maj. Iftikhar of the 12th Frontier Force Rifles.

Rathore: "I thought someone was looting."

Iftikhar: "Looting? No. We are on kill and burn." Waving his hand to take in the shops, he said he was going to destroy the lot.

When I chanced to meet Iftikhar the next day, he ruefully told me: "I burn only 60 houses. If it hadn't rained, I would have got them all."

The agony of East Bengal is not over. The army is determined to go on until the "cleanup" is complete.

There is also the grim prospect of famine, because of the breakdown of the distribution system. Seventeen of the 23 districts of East Pakistan are normally short of food and have to be supplied by massive imports of rice and wheat. This will not be possible because of the ravages of civil war. Six major bridges and thousands of smaller one have been destroyed, making the roads impassable in may places. The railway system has been similarly disrupted.

Grain hoarded in fear of famine

Two other factors must be added. One is large scale hoarding of grain by people who have begun to anticipate the famine. The other is the Government of Pakistan's refusal to acknowledge the danger of famine publicly.

The entire government machinery has been used to suppress the fact of the food shortage. The reason is that a famine, like the cyclone before it, could result in a massive outpouring of foreign aid -- and with it the prospect of external inspection of distribution methods. This would bring the "foreign interference" that the government does not want.

The crucial question now is, will the killing stop?

I was given the answer by Maj. Gen. Shaukat Raza commanding officer of the 9th Division.

"You must be absolutely sure that we have not undertaken such a drastic and expensive operation, expensive both in men and money, for nothing. We've undertaken a job. We are going to finish it, not hand it over half done to the politicians o that they can mess it up again. The army can't keep coming back like this every three or four years. It has a more important task. I assure you that when we have got through with what we are doing, there will never be need again for such an operation.