পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (চতুর্দশ খণ্ড).pdf/৩৯৪

বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড Now that the fighting is over in the capital. West Pakistani soldiers have taken to entering houses after dark to rape, loot and murder. Girls are sometimes spared if they can recite Muslim' prayers. Proof of circumcision is demanded from the men. A European who took us to his bungalow for a drink pointed to a house across the road and said that in there were the bodies of four Hindus including two children, who had been shot 'the night befo()00re. We started our journey to Dacca from the Indian border town of Krishnanagar. Here we met some Indian West Bengali supporters of the Mukti Fauj, the Liberation Army. They were taking drums of petrol up to the border in pre-war three-wheeler German pick-up vans flying the red, green and gold banner of Bangladesh. From the trucks the fuel was transferred to Some bamboo ox-carts which trekked off with their load to the East Pakistan village of Kusumpur. We went with them. There were no border checks and only a conical border stone indicated that we had crossed the Radcliffe Line. There are stories of Indian ammunition going over in bottles of plasma and of companies of the Indian Border Security Force going across disguised as East Pakistan Rifles personnel-not difficult, because they both were old British-style uniforms and would need only to change their shoulder flashes. I asked the West Bengalis we went in with, what they were going to do, and they said they had just come to show their support. Sure enough, after an hour they left us and turned back towards India. Crossing the border at all is a tremendously emotional thing for a, Bengali of either side, because since the 1965 war it has been sealed off. . Our first night we spent at police station where they had posted perimeter guards and thrown camouflage nets over their vehicles. After the confusion we had witnessed during the fighting at Jessore the week before, it all looked very promising. Later we were to learn that the efficiency of the Liberation Army usually depended on the distance it was away from any actual fighting. In this case Jessore was about 20 miles down the road. All the way to Dacca our progress was impeded by Bengali hospitality. As any Sangbadik (news carrier) who has been in the area these past weeks will testify, the villagers rarely let the stranger escape without giving him food and drink and a few speeches about fighting to the last drop of their blood. Even a Baluchi prisoner in village near Kushtia was offered juice from a Dab (green coconut) before they killed him. He said that he had a small son and that President Yahya had made him come and fight. But one man said that he had a small son, too, and now he was dead. They told him to pray and he made his peace with Allah. Then he opened his shirt and bared his chest and the villagers dug their spears in here, here and here." For a while, we followed the route taken by a West Pakistan motorized column 48 hours before: there were burnt huts on either side of the road, and in the glass booth of a filling station office near the village of Kaliganj we counted 32 bullet holes.