পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (চতুর্দশ খণ্ড).pdf/৫৭

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25 বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড শিরোনাম সূত্র তারিখ ১২। পাকিস্তানের ভয়ঙ্কর খেলা নিউইয়র্ক টাইমস ৪ এপ্রিল, ১৯৭১ NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, APRIL 4, 1971 PAKISTAN: “ALL PART OF A GAME?— A GRIM AND DEADLY ONE New Delhi-"All of it's necessary, absolutely necessary," a West Pakistani stewardess lectured some expelled foreign newsmen about the Pakistani Army's offensive to crush the independence movement in East Pakistan. "If this happened in your country, you'd do the same thing. It's all part of the game." A game? To foreign newsmen in Dacca, it looked like a surprise attack with tanks, artillery and heavy machine guns against a virtually unarmed population-a population using tactics of nonviolence, mostly strikes and other forms of noncooperation, to claim the political majority it had won in last December's selections. And by this weekend enough credible reports of indiscriminate killings had filtered out to leave little doubt, even ill the minds of many dispassionate Indian officials and Western diplomats, that the. Army of West Pakistan was under few restraints in putting down East Pakistani thoughts of autonomy. The attack began on the night of March 25, after 10 days of political negotiations in which the army and the rest of the West Pakistani power establishment had lulled the East Pakistani nationalists into thinking their demands for greater self-rule would be granted. It is clear now that the West Pakistanis never meant the talks to succeed, that they dragged them out only to buy time to get enough troop reinforcements over from West Pakistan to launch the attack. But while the talks went on, nearly every observer, from newsmen to diplomats, resisted the ugly thought that this might be true. The signs were all there-troops coming in by air and Sea, the dismissal of a martial-law administrator who was too lenient and the uncharacteristic silence of the army while the East Pakistanis boycotted the military regime and followed instead the directives of their leader. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. The newsmen reported these signs but when talk of "some progress" came out of the negotiations, they grasped upon that, because it was what should happen. They were wrong. Instead, the military mind prevailed. But in turning to force, die West Pakistani leaders apparently misjudged both its limitations and the depth of feeling of 75 million East Pakistanis. "They thought that a few bullets would scare the people off," said Ranjit Gupta, the police commissioner in Calcutta, just across the border in India. "It is silly-it shows you how little the West Pakistanis know about East Pakistanis."