পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (চতুর্দশ খণ্ড).pdf/২১৬

এই পাতাটির মুদ্রণ সংশোধন করা হয়েছে, কিন্তু বৈধকরণ করা হয়নি।
বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খণ্ড
184

known. For one thing, countless corpses have been dumped in rivers, wells and mass graves. For another, statistics from East Pakistan are even more unreliable than statistics from most other places. That is inevitable in a place where before the refugee exodus began, 78 million people. 80% of them illiterate, were packed into an area no larger than Florida.

Harsh Reprisals

 The Hindus, who account for three-fourths of the refugees and a majority of the dead, have borne the brunt of the Moslem military's hatred. Even now. Moslem soldiers in East Pakistan will snatch away a man's lungi (sarong) to see if he is circumcised, obligatory for Moslems: if he is not, it usually means death. Others are simply rounded up and shot. Commented one high U.S. official last week: “It is the most incredible, calculated thing since the days of the Nazis in Poland".

 In recent weeks, resistance has steadily mounted. The army response has been a pattern of harsh reprisals for guerrilla hit-and-run forays, sabotage and assassination of collaborators. But the Mukti Bahini. the Bengali liberation forces, have blasted hundreds of bridges and culverts, paralyzing road and rail traffic. The main thrust of the guerrilla movement is coming from across the Indian border, where the Bangladesh (Bengal Nation) provisional government has undertaken a massive recruitment and training program. Pakistani President Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan last week charged that there were 24 such camps within India, and India no longer even bothers to deny the fact that locals and some border units are giving assistance to the rebels.

 Half of the Mukti Bahini's reported 50.000 fighters came from the East Bengal Regiment, the paramilitary East Pakistan Riffles, and the Bengali Police, who defected in the early days of the fighting. Young recruits, many of them students, are being trained to blend in with the peasants, who feed them, and serve as lookouts, scouts and hit-and-run saboteurs. Twice the guerrillas have knocked out power in Dacca, and they have kept the Dacca-Chittagong railway line severed for weeks. Whatever possible they raise the green, red and gold Bangladesh flag. They claim to have killed 25,000 Pakistani troops, though the figure may well be closer to 2,500 plus 10,000 wounded (according to a reliable Western estimate). Resistance fighters already control the countryside at night and much of it in the daytime.

 Only time and the test of fire will show whether or not the Mukti Bahini's leaders can forge them into a disciplined guerrilla force. The present commander-in-chief is a retired colonel named A.G. Osmani, a member of the East Pakistan Awami League. But many feel that before the conflict is over, the present moderate leadership will give way to more radical men. So far the conflict is non-ideological. But that could change “if the democracies do not put pressure on the Pakistanis to resolve this question in the near future", says a Bangladesh official, “I fear for the consequences. If the fight for liberation is prolonged too long, the democratic elements will be eliminated and the Communists will prevail. Up till now the Communists do not have a strong position. But if we fail to deliver the goods to our people, they will sweep up away".