At one such meeting in a town not far from Dacca, a merchant related that a soldier arrested him one day for no reason, confiscated his money and watch and took him to the police station, where he was jailed for a night before being-miraculously, he felt-released.
The merchant said he had spent the night praying and leading the messages that covered the walls of his cell-scrawled there-by previous prisoners. The messages, he said, were nearly all alike giving the name and address of the prisoner and the date of his arrest and saying: “1 may not live. Please tell my family what happened to me." Not one of them has been heard from since, the merchant added.
Property damage heavy
The killings have been matched by the property damage the army has inflicted everywhere. In the countryside-for miles at a stretch sometimes-villages have been burned to the ground on both sides of the road, in the cities and towns large areas have been reduced to rubble by heavy gunfire.
The Bengalis say the troops were simply bent on Wanton destruction. The army says that it never fired unless fired upon, but field commanders boast that in most towns there was little or no resistance.
Why all the devastation? They are asked. It was all done by “miscreants,” is the stock answer.
Though some Bengalis are trickling back to population centers, most towns still have only half or less of their original numbers, and parts of some areas, like the northwest region, are virtually deserted.
Fields of untended rice are choked with weeds. On Jut_ plots where dozens of farm laborers once toiled only a few bent backs can be seen. Last Pakistan's jute, the tough fiber for gunny sacks, is the mainstay of the national economy, being the biggest single export and earner of foreign exchange. All signs indicate that the coming crop- will be a poor one.
Even if the crop were good, the jute factories, with much of their skilled labor gone, could not handle it. They are operating far below capacity.
River traffic harassed
The insurgents continue to harass river traffic trying to disrupt military movements and prevent harvested jute from reaching the factories. They have already sunk several jute barges in the Jessore-Khulna region, a rice-jute area.
The East Pakistani tea industry has been even more badly crippled, and the Government has reportedly had to order two million pounds from foreign sources for West Pakistani consumers.
West Pakistan's economy is one of the roots of the bloodshed. Another is the wide ethnic gap between the light-skinned, Middle Eastern Punjabis who dominate in the western wing and the dark-skinned. Southeast Asian Bengalis of the east. Except for their common religion, Islam, the two peoples are as different as can be.
