পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (চতুর্দশ খণ্ড).pdf/২০৮

এই পাতাটির মুদ্রণ সংশোধন করা হয়েছে, কিন্তু বৈধকরণ করা হয়নি।
বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খণ্ড
176

 Known as “the bomber of Baluchistan” for his indiscriminate use of air and artillery strikes in crushing a local tribal revolt in 1965, Tikka Khan, apparently persuaded Yahya to buy time for the army to build up its strength in Bengal. Accordingly, Yahya made his bid for discussions with Mujib. And while the two leaders talked-and Bengalis as well as the world at large looked for a compromise (hat might save Pakistan-the army pulled of I a logistics coup. Flying the long over-water route around southern India with Boeing- 707s commandeered from Pakistan International Airlines, the army doubled its troops strength in Bengal to 60,000 men. When Tikka gave the word that all was ready. Yahya flew out of Dacca. And that very night, the bomber of Baluchistan unleashed his troops.

 Under instructions to strike brutally on the theory that a savage surprise attack would snuff out resistance quickly, the army obeyed its orders with a vengeance. Tanks crashed through the streets of East Pakistan's capital of Dacca, blasting indiscriminately at men and buildings. With cold ferocity. Punjabi soldiers machinegunned clusters of citizens, while others set fire to slum 'busthes' throughout the city. Soon, the city was littered with bodies and the campus of Dacca University-a hot-bed of secessionism-was a bloody shambles.

 Throughout that blood-drenched night and in the days and weeks that followed, the carnage continued. And the massacres were not limited to Dacca but were carried on throughout the country-side as well. After a desperate visit to his native village on the Indian border, a sobbing Bengali journalist told how the land had been devastated: “I passed through a dozen villages which had been burned and deserted, with bodies everywhere being eaten by crows. The smell! The horror! I kept praying it would not be like that at my village. But it was. The village was just a mass of charred rubble and corpses. My wife and child were missing. There was just one old lady alive and she could no longer talk. She just sat on the ground, shaking and moaning."

 With the passing of time, the magnitude of the slaughter has diminished, but there has been no lessening in the brutality of the Pakistani army. Last week, Newsweek's Loren Jenkins, who was in Dacca the night that Gen. Tikka Khan's troops launched their campaign of murder, cabled the following report on conditions in East Pakistan now:

 Four months after the first flush of bloodletting, East Pakistan still lives in fear. But instead of being the cowering, groveling fear that the army sought to instill, it is a sullen fear tinged with quiet defiance and hate. It is a fear based on the appreciation of a very harsh reality, not a fear that marks people of broken spirit. Walking along a Dacca street recently, I met a journalist I had known before. Our eyes met and he nodded, but he appeared embarrassed. Glancing nervously all around, he muttered, “My God, my God, civilized man cannot describe the horror that has been done". An hour later another friend explained: “We have been ordered not to talk to foreign journalists. We are scared. We live in terror of the mid-night knock 011 the door. So many people have been killed. So many more have disappeared. And more vanish every night".

 One who vanished in the night was Mujib, who is now reportedly held in prison in the western garrison town of Mianwali. A hero before. Mujib has now become a martyr. For all his conspicuous faults, he has become the symbol of Bengali patriotism. Yet