PAKISTAN A REPORTER PUTS THE WAR IN PERSPECTIVE

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32660, 16 July 1971, Page 8

PAKISTAN A REPORTER PUTS THE WAR IN PERSPECTIVE

(By

MARTIN WOOLLACOTT,

"T, in the "Guardian." Manchester)

(Reprinted by arrangement)

The Pakistani Government has, since March 25, built up an elaborate scenario justifying military action in East Bengal and presenting this action as comparatively restrained. The scenario was basically intended for home consumption in West Pakistan, where it has been swallowed whole by most people. But it was also intended for the Western public, and it is a cause of great bitterness to West Pakistanis that this “case” has received not even perfunctory examination outside Pakistan, except in other Muslim countries.

The scenario has been adjusted several times, most recently, and significantly, to put a degree of blame for What happened on Mr Bhutto. Options on Sheikh Mujibur Rahman are kept open by a certain wavering between presenting him as a dyed-in-the-wool secessionist from the start, or portraying him as a weak man pushed into secession by Awami League extremists. Certain parts of the scenario which has been learned pat by most army officers and civil servants in East Pakistan are easily rejected. One of these is the claim that Awami League, besides running a parallel government in East Pakistan from at least the beginning of March, also allowed and encouraged the terrorisation of non-Bengaiis in the weeks before March 25. All the evidence is against this. Reality not touched But the scenario does touch reality in its claim that the intransigence and unwillingness to compromise of the League leadership was a basic cause of the civil war. It makes the most of the Sheikh’s several refusals to go to West Pakistan and of his complete failure to realise the need for some concessions to the West Pakistan military establishment over the key issues of the financing of the armed forces and confrontation with India.

The truth of this part of the case was summed up by one pro-Bengali Western diplomat who finished a briefing on the situation by saying in anguished tones: “Why the hell couldn’t Mujib * have taken two bites at the cherry?” It is a valid question whether you consider that the Sheikh’s hope was simply for independence or near independence, or whether you believe that he was ready to try to take the whole of Pakistan in a new direction.

Certainly the Awami League has been convicted by events of ineptitude on an almost heroic scale. In the euphoria of their smashing election victory they seem to have quite simply forgotten the realities of power in Pakistan. Either they should have trimmed their demands to make them acceptable to the army, to Bhutto and to the Pakistani upper class, or they should have made serious preparations to fight They did neither, and on the night of March 25, League aides were happily distributing an idealistic and complicated document on future ' economic arrangements.

Great exaggeration Turning to the military action itself, the Pakistani claim that the troops throughout behaved with exemplary restraint is clearly nonsense. However, although no final arithmetic on the killing in East Bengal is, of course, possible, it can be taken as obvious that in every category there has been great exaggeration. Take the tales on both sides about military units killing their officers. It now emerges that at least some battalions of the East Bengal regiment did not do so, instead carrying off their West Pakistani officers to India when they retreated. As to Bengali officers with West Pakistani units, they seem to have been largely unharmed. One colonel I met trotted out all three of his battalion’s Bengali officers to prove his point. They didn’t look very happy, but on the other hand they weren’t dead. As to combat losses proper, one reasonably good source gives West Pakistani dead as about 800, including about 40 officers. Because of their poorer firepower and organisation, Bengali units presumably suffered worse than this. But, for combat casualties, a figure in the low thousands is probably right. The killing of Biharis by Bengalis seem to have taken place mainly in four towns— Chittagong, Barisal, Khulna and Mymensingh. From other areas there are eye-witness accounts of the killing of Biharis in ones and twos, but it is only from. those four towns that one gets accounts claiming deaths in the thousands. The Biharis themselves have made claims up to half a million and a million. Those without an axe to grind settle on a figure well below 20,000.

A distinction As regards army killing of unarmed Bengalis, here a distinction has to be made between those killed by indiscriminate firepower in conventional army descents on villages and towns, whether Hindu or Moslem, those arrested and executed, and those who died as a result of deliberate atrocities. In the first stages of the war, the army would blast any village or section of a town from- which it received even light fire, or which was situated near a damaged installation. From the start, it is obvious tiiey had a preference for Hindu targets. Once the situation in any area was under control, units would continue to make descents on any community

which, from their ludicrously inadequate "intelligence,” they believed was harbouring “miscreants.” Again, the mentality of most army officers is such that Hindu communities were automatically suspect.

It is probably that most Bengalis who died were killed in these viciously heavy-handed responses to real or imagined opposition. The point here, in explanation, not in defence, is that unlike some Western armies, the Pakistani Army cannot be “pre-set” to use only limited force. Further, the line between individual and communal guilt is one they find difficult to perceive in practice. Both atrocities and executions undoubtedly took place, particularly in the early stages of the war in areas where the army was in control from the start, and then later in those border regions which were the last to be taken by the army. In intermediate areas units were moving too fast to have the time for such activities. Estimates of killing

Putting a figure on these kinds of killings is extraordinarily difficult. But it is some kind of guide that in one large town which I visited, the verified disappearances, presumed dead, totalled about 20, and killings which could best be described as atrocities rape then murder, shootings in the street and the like—were fewer than 10, The most conservative estimates of Bengali dead are around the 50,000 mark. This would require virtually every soldier in the Pakistani Army in East Bengal to have killed at least one Bengali during the war, either in combat or in "pacification.” This is inherently improbable, partly because the army used only infantry weapons throughout, and partly because in most situations there were escape routes for *the population coming under fire. The typical eye-witness

story is of an army attack which ended with five, six, or seven dead in a village, or somewhat larger numbers in urban areas. The largest death total in one attack that I heard from a reliable source was 50, and this in a town. On this sort of evidence, the figure for Bengali civilian dead should probably be adjusted down to around 30,000. Pacification standard The Pakistani Army High Command has made a number of attempts to curb the ferocity of units. According to some good sources, Genera! Abdul Hamid, the Chief of Staff, made a point of asking units to lay-off on both his recent visits to the province. This has had some results. .It has got to be understood, too, that the standard by which West Pakistani officers measure “pacification” is not that of some terribly disciplined British internal security operation. The standard is that of Vietnam, and American journalists, in particular, have found themselves in tight moral comers when arguing with Pakistani officers.

This much has got to be conceded to the Pakistanis: that the Sheikh and the League bear considerable responsibility for the war, and that the military action itself, while horrible and bloody, no doubt killed far fewer than the propagandists of the other side claimed.

But what those who urge this case on the West fail to understand is that it has become largely irrelevant to the situation in East Pakistan now. Comparatively cool Western observers may be ready to do soma fresh arithmetic on the number of dead, and to blame the Awami League for its shortsightedness and its naivete. Bengalis are not. They know only that the Bengali people seemed about to begin a new and hopeful life when the army of West Pakistan moved in to kill, bum, arid repress.

Martin Woollacott, of the “Guardian,” Manchester, one of the first reporters to move freely around East Pakistan since March’s military take-over, moved back to Britain last week. In this article he puts the civil war In perspective, assessing claim and counter-claim ot Bangle Desh nationalists and the Pakistan Army.