Pakistan: Toppling Over the Brink – Monday, 05 April 1971 – Time Magazine
Pakistan: Toppling Over the Brink
Monday, 05 April 1971
Time Magazine
MuktiJuddho e-Archive Collection
WITH the awesome fury of a cyclone off the Bay of Bengal, civil war swept across East Pakistan last week. In city after crowded, dusty city the army turned its guns on mobs of rioting civilians. Casualties mounted into the thousands. Though the full toll remained uncertain because of censorship and disorganization in the world’s most densely populated corner (1,400 people per sq. mi.), at week’s end some estimates had 2,000 dead. Even if President Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan is prepared to accept casualties of a geometrically greater magnitude, the outcome is likely to be the final breakup of East and West Pakistan and the painful birth of a new nation named Bangla Desh (Bengal State).
The indistinct battle lines reflected the ethnic and cultural divisions that have beset Pakistan since its creation as a Moslem homeland when British India was partitioned in 1947. Two predominantly Moslem areas that used to be part of India became a new country, the two parts separated by 1,000 miles of Indian territory. Thus, though 80,000 West Pakistani soldiers were on hand to keep order in East Pakistan last week, their supply bases were 1,000 miles away and most food and ammunition had to be carried 3,000 miles around the coast of India. The troops —mostly tall, fierce Punjabis and Pa-thans—were surrounded in East Pakistan by a hostile population of 78 million Bengalis. The civil war—and it could be called no less—promised to be long and bloody. The Bengalis, armed with a few looted guns, spears and often just bamboo staves, were ill-trained for a guerrilla war. But a resistance movement, once organized, might eventually force the West Pakistanis to depart. In a way, the struggle evoked haunting memories of the Nigerian civil war of 1967-70, when the federal regime sought justification in the name of national unity and the Biafrans in the name of self-determination.
First Shot. Until last week, Pakistan’s political leaders seemed on the verge of settling their differences. Then, in rapid order, three events carried the nation over the brink of violence. In Chittagong, a mob surrounded West Pakistani troops unloading supply ships. Where the first shots came from is unclear, but when the troops opened fire, 35 Bengalis were killed. Their political leader, Sheik Mujibur Rahman, called a general strike to protest. Then, Yahya Khan outlawed Mujib and his Awami League Party as “enemies of Pakistan” and ordered the armed forces to “do their duty.”
In Dacca, army tanks and truckloads of troops with fixed bayonets came clattering out of their suburban base, shouting “Victory to Allah,” and “Victory to Pakistan.” TIME Correspondent Dan Coggin, who, along with other newsmen, was subsequently expelled from Pakistan, reported: “Before long, howitzer, tank artillery and rocket blasts rocked half a dozen scattered sections of Dacca. Tracers arced over the darkened city. The staccato chatter of automatic weapons was punctuated with grenade explosions, and tall columns of black smoke towered over the city. In the night came the occasional cry of ‘Joi Bangla [Victory to Bengal],’ followed by a burst of machine-gun fire.”
The army ordered a strict 24-hour curfew in Dacca, with violators shot on sight. But soon the Free Bengal Revolutionary Radio Center, probably somewhere in Chittagong, crackled into life. Over the clandestine station. Mujib proclaimed the creation of the “sovereign independent Bengali nation,” and called on its people to “resist the enemy forces at all costs in every corner of Bangla Desh.” The defiant words, however, lacked military substance. At 1:30 a.m. the following day, soldiers seized the sheik in his home. Meanwhile, scattered rioting broke out in West Pakistan to protest the prospect of prolonged military rule.
The rupture in Pakistan stemmed from the country’s first experiment with true democracy. After it was founded in 1947, Pakistan was ruled on the basis of a hand-picked electorate; martial law was imposed after an outbreak of rioting in 1969. During those years, Pakistan was divided by more than geography. Physically and psychologically, the 58 million tall, light-skinned people of the west identified with the Islamic peoples who inhabit the arc of land stretching as far as Turkey. The smaller, darker East Pakistanis seemed to belong more to the world of South and Southeast Asia. More divisive yet was the fact that the westerners monopolized the government and the army and dominated the nation’s commercial life. The East Pakistanis have, over the years, earned the bulk of the country’s foreign exchange with their jute exports, yet the majority of schools, roads, new factories and modern government buildings went up in the west.
Eager to relinquish power and return the country to civilian rule, Yahya called elections last December for a National Assembly to write a new constitution. East Pakistanis gave Sheik Mujib’s Awami League 167 of the region’s 169 seats—and an overall majority in the combined nation’s 313-seat assembly chamber. Mujib’s platform called for a virtual dismantling of the central government, leaving it in charge of defense and diplomacy and giving the provinces total control of taxes, trade and foreign aid.
Determined to hold the country together, Yahya resisted Mujib’s demands for autonomy. Postponing the Constitutional Assembly, he flew to Dacca and in eleven days of meetings with Mujib came almost within sight of a compromise agreement. Yahya, however, demanded that the leader of West Pakistan’s majority party, ex-Foreign Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, also be a party to the agreement. Bhutto insisted on heading the foreign ministry while Mujib maintained that, with an overall majority, he had the right to form a government without Bhutto.
Mendicant Among Nations. If East Pakistan eventually takes its place in the world community as Bangla Desh, it will have the world’s eighth largest population and lowest per capita income ($50 a year). It will, inevitably, become a mendicant among nations, and the U.S. will face the need to increase the $250 million a year in foreign aid that it now gives to the combined wings of the country. East Pakistan has little industry to speak of, and the world demand for jute is gradually dropping. West Pakistan will also be left smaller and poorer, though it now has the beginnings of an industrial base, consisting primarily of textile mills.
If anyone gains from the sorry split, it will be India, which would face a greatly weakened adversary. Mujib has indicated that he would like to establish friendly relations with New Delhi and, particularly, with the Hindu Bengalis just across the border. He does not share West Pakistan’s hostility toward India over the disputed territory of Kashmir. West Pakistan, left with a smaller economic base and without the east’s foreign-exchange earnings, could not easily maintain as strong an army as the one that went to war with India in 1965. But thoughtful Indians could not regard their neighbors’ troubles with too much satisfaction. India itself is by no means immune to the centrifugal forces of tribalism, and many of its people remember all too well Nehru’s recurring nightmare: a subcontinent alternating between periods of political unity and bloody interludes of division and strife.
