Non-Bengalis won't easily forget how husbands, mothers and children were killed by Bengalis espousing and independent East Bengal. Bengalis will long recall army terror and destruction.
The economy of the eastern wing of Pakistan lies shattered. Reconstruction must come from the West, 1,000 miles across India but six hours away by jet because India refuses over flights.
East Pakistan's economic infra-structure depended heavily on a 12 per cent minority of Hindu Bengalis who stayed on when India and Pakistan were formed from British India.
There are also millions Biharis, Moslem migrants who came to Pakistan at partition from several parts of India, mostly Bihar. And there were key West Pakistani businessmen and managers.
The Hindus suffered many dead in army reprisals. Thousands have fled to India or
remote parts of the province. Dacca's once picturesque Hindu sections elsewhere were razed.
Biharis and West Pakistanis were massacred by Bengalis across East Pakistan, and may survivors left in panic.
Significantly, much of the killing took no heed of religious lines. Eyewitnesses say Moslem Biharis were slaughtered in Mosques by Moslem Bengalis, despite the teachings of the prophet Mohammed.
As moslem Punjabi and Pathan soldiers moved to settle the score, they took no time to determine a man's faith.
The founder of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, advocated the theory that Pakistan would stand as a nation, despite geography and wide ethnic differences because of its faith in Islam.
Portraits of Jinnah still gave down from every official wall in West, and East Pakistan, but dispassionate leaders now find that his idea needs reinforcing. The problem is that no one knows how.
“For 23 years the West has enriched itself at our expense” thundered Major M. A. Osman of the Bengali Liberation Forces when Bangladesh or Bengal State was in its brief heyday.
Foreign economists add that 60-70 per cent of the foreign aid went to West Pakistan while the East provided 65 per cent and more of the country's foreign exchange.
Tariffs and policies tended to favor the West, which depend heavily on the Eastern inhabitants-two-thirds of the total population to consume its industrial and agricultural products.
Some Westerners want to gradually easy away from the East and cut all ties. This is considered unlikely, though, with a military government apparently determined to enforce a single Pakistan at any cost.
