Bengali youths, who just over three months ago were exultantly marching through the streets and shouting their slogans of defiance at the military regime, now talk in whispers, slipping up to foreign newsmen for a few seconds to murmur some information about a massacre, the murder of a family member or the destruction of a village. Anonymous letters containing such details find their way every day into newsmen's mailboxes at the IIotel Inter-Continental.
The effluvia of fear are over-whelming. But there is also a new spirit. Many of the Bengalis-a naive and romantic people-realize now that no other country is going to save them, that they will have to do it all themselves and that will lake a long time.
Significant numbers of young men are slipping off to join the Liberation Army, which operates from border areas and from sanctuaries just across the border in India. Bengali guerrilla terrorism is increasing. A number of army collaborators have been executed, and more and more homemade bombs explode in Dacca. The resistance is still sporadic peripheral and disorganized, but it is growing.
With each terrorist act, the army takes revenge, conducting reprisals against the nearest Bengali civilians. Several hundred civilians were reported to have been rounded up and mowed down by the Army in Noakhali District recently after the Mukti Fouj executed a member of one of the army's “Peace Committees” and his wife and children.
The once widely held theory that the cost of the occupation would prove prohibitive and compel Pakistan to pull the army out fairly quickly has been discarded. Even without the World Bank consortium's massive annual aid, which has been suspended in censure of the repression the Islamabad regime seems determined to keep its grip on Last Pakistan.
President Yahya Khan's speech to the nation last Monday was supposed to have unveiled his long-awaited plan for returning Pakistan -East and West-to civilian rule. It turned out to be exactly the opposite-a declaration that the military dictatorship would continue, with a hand picked civilian government as camouflage.
In his speech, which Western diplomats here described as “a disaster,” the President, who is also Army chief, heaped praise on the Army for rescuing the country from “the brink of disintegration... by the grace of Allah.” He also extended his “fullest sympathy” to the six million Bengalis, most minority Hindus, who have fled-to India-"because of false propaganda by rebels,” he said. He appealed to them to “return to their homes and hearths” for “speedy rehabilitation."
Just the day before President Yahya's speech, an army platoon stormed into several predominantly Hindu villages 30 miles from Dacca, killing men and looting and burning homes. Reports of similar pogroms come from other parts of the province. No one knows exactly how many Bengalis the army has killed, but reliable foreign sources here put the figure somewhere over 100,000-and possibly much higher.
