A tiny child gazes at a break in the lavender carpet of water hyacinths in a nearby pond where his parents' bodies were dumped.
TOLL COULD BE MILLION
No one knows how many Bengali families the army machine gunned or how many migrant settlers Bengali secessionists slashed to death. But estimates of the total dead start at six figures and range to over a million.
In the port city of Chittagong, a blood splattered doll lies in a heap of clothing and excrement in a jute mill recreation club where Bengalis butchered 180 women and children.
Along the road to the mill, entire blocks of Bengali homes and shops were blasted and burned to the ground by the revenging Pakistani army.
Reporters were banned from East Pakistan from March 26, when 40 newsmen were bundled out and stripped of their notes and film, until the government escorted in a party of six on a conducted tour may 6-11.
From visible evidence and eyewitnesses questioned out of official earshot the following account emerged:
Throughout March, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's Bengali dominated Awami League harassed the military government with a non-cooperation campaign demanding autonomy and more benefits from West Pakistan.
Bengalis killed some West Pakistanis in flurries of chauvinism.
Mujib's party had won a majority in the National Assembly elections and he was Pakistan's major political figure. But negotiations in Dacca with President Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan broke dean and Yahya flow back to West Pakistan March 25. That night the army roared out of its barracks, and East Pakistan was aflame.
PROFESSORS EXECUTED
Soldiers assaulted two dormitories at Dacca University where radical Bangali students made their headquarters. They used recoilless rifles, then automatic weapons and bayonets.
They broke into selected professors' and students' quarters. They executed some 14 faculty members, at least one by mistake. Altogether, more than 200 students were killed.
Army units shelled and set fire to two newspaper offices, then set upon the Bangali population in general. More than a dozen markets were set afire and at least 25- blocks were devastated in Dacca.
Hindu Bengali jewellery shops in the Shakari patti quarter were blown apart. Two Hindu villages inside the Dacca race course were attacked with almost holy war fury by the Moslem troops.
Accounts, projected from body counts at mass graves indicate above 10,000 persons were shot to death or burned to death the first few nights in Dacca.
