Simon Dring [Simon Dring, Daily Telegraph reporter, flew into Dhaka on March 6,1971 as the political tension built up in East Pakistan. Dring, aged 26, describes how he eluded search parties that expelled foreign correspondents and stayed on to bring this first-hand account of the fighting out of the stricken state. He left Dhaka at the weekend and filed this report from Bangkok :] There was still heavy shelling in some areas but the fighting was noticeably beginning to slacken. opposite the Intercontinental Hotel, a platoon of troops, stormed the empty offices of Dhaka’s ‘People’ newspaper, burning it down along with most houses in the area and killing a lone night-watchman. Shortly before dawn most firing had stopped and as the sun came up an eerie silence settled over the city, deserted and completely dead except for the noise of the crows and the occasional convoy of troops. But the worst was yet to come. At midday, again without any warning, columns of troops poured into the old section of the city where more than a million people live in a sprawling maze of narrow, winding streets. For the next 11 hours they proceeded systematically to devastate large areas of the old town, where Sheikh Mujib had some of his strongest support among the people in Dhaka. English Road, French Road, Naya Bazaar, City Bazaar meaningless names but home to thousand of people were burnt to the ground. “They suddenly appeared at the end of the street” said one old man living in the French Road-Naya Bazaar area. “Then they drove down it firing into all the houses.” The leading unit was followed by soldiers carrying cans of petrol. Those who tried to escape were shot. Those who stayed were burnt alive. About 700 men, women and children died there that day between midday and two o’clock. The same was repeated in at least three other areas, all of them covering anything up to half a square mile or more. As they left the soldiers took those dead they could away with them in trucks and moved on to their next target. Police station in the old town were also attacked. “I am looking for my constables,” a Police Inspector said on Saturday morning as he wandered through the ruins of one of the bazaar. ‘I have 240 in my district and so far I have found only 30 of themall dead.” One of the biggest massacres of the entire operation in Dhaka took place in the Hindu area of the old town. There the soldiers made the people come out of their houses and then just shot them in groups. This area, too, was eventually razed. The troops stayed on in the old city in force until about 11 p.m. on the 36th driving about with local Bengali informers. The soldiers would fire a flare and the informer would point out the houses of staunch Awami League supporters. the house would then be destroyedeither with direct tank or recoilless rifle fire or with a can of petrol. Meanwhile, troops of the East Bengal Regiment were being sued in the suburbs, to start moving out towards the industrial areas of the cityTongi and Narayanganjagainst centres of Leftist support for the Sheikh. Firing continued in these areas until early on Sunday morning but the main bulk of the operation in the city was completed by the night of the 26thalmost exactly 34 hours after it began. One of the last targets was the Bengali language daily newspaper ‘Ittefaq’. Over 400 people had taken shelter in its offices when the fighting started. At 4 o’clock on the afternoon of the 26th four tanks appeared in the road outside. By 4.30 p.m. the building was an inferno. By Saturday morning only the charred remains of corpses were left. As quickly as they appeared the troops disappeared off the streets. On Saturday morning the radio announced the curfew would be lifted from 7 a.m. until 4 p.m. It then repeated the Martial Law Regulation banning all political activity, announcing Press censorship and ordering all Government employees to report back for work and for all privately-owned weapons to be handed in. Thousands Flee Magically the city returned to life and panic set in. By 10 a.m., with palls of black smoke still hanging over large areas of the old town and out in the distance towards the industrial areas, the streets were packed with fleeing people. By car, in rickshaw but mostly on foot carrying their possession with them the people of Dhaka were leaving. By midday they were on the move in their tens of thousands. “Please give me a lift, I’m an old man.” “In the name of Allah help me.” “Take my children with you,” came the pleas. Silent and unsmiling they passed and saw what the Army had done. It had been a thorough job, carefully planned and meticulously executed and they looked the other way and kept on walking. Down near one of the markets a shot was heard. Within second 2,000 people were running, but it had only been some-one going to join the queues already forming to hand in their weapons. The Government offices remained almost empty. Most employees were leaving for their villages. Those who were not fleeing wandered aimlessly around the smoking debris of what were once their homes, lifting the blackened, twisted sheets of corrugated iron used in most shanty areas as roofing materials to save what they could from the ashes. Nearly every other car, if it was not taking people out into the countryside, was flying a Red Cross and convoying dead and wounded to the hospitals. And in the middle of it all occasional convoys of troops would appear, the soldiers peering unsmiling down the muzzles of their guns at the silent crowds. On the Friday night as they pulled back to their barracks they shouted “Narai Tukbir”, an old Arabic war cry meaning “We have won the war.” On Saturday when they spoke it was to shout “Pakistan Zindabad”, “Long live Pakistan.” Most People took the hint. Before the curfew was reimposed the national flag of Pakistan, apart from petrol, was the hottest selling item on the market. As if to protect their property in their absence, the last thing a family would do before they locked up their house would be to raise the flag. At four o’clock the streets emptied again, the troops reappeared and silence fell once more over Dhaka. But firing broke out again almost immediately. “Anybody out of doors after four will be shot,” the radio had announced. A small boy running across the street outside the Intercontinental two minutes after curfew was stopped, slapped four times in the face by an officer and taken away in a jeep. Another unfortunate night-watchman, this time at the Dhaka Club, a leftover bar from the colonial days, was shot when he went to shut the gate of the club. A group of Hindu Pakistanis living around a temple in the middle of the racecourse were all killed, apparently for no reason at all except they were out in the open. And refugees who came back into the city when they found roads leading out were blocked by the Army told how many had been killed as they tried to walk across country to avoid the troops. Beyond those roadblocks is more or less a no man’s land, where the clearing operations are still going on. What is happening out there is anybody’s guessexcept the Army’s. Many people took to the river to try to escape the crowds on the roads. But they ran the risk of being left stranded waiting for a boat when curfew fell. Where one such group was sitting on Saturday afternoon, there were only bloodstains next morning. “Traitors” Charge Hardly anywhere was there evidence of organised resistance to the troops in Dhaka or anywhere else in the province. Even the West Pakistani Officers scoffed at the idea of anybody putting up a fight. “These men,” said one Punjabi lieutenant, “could not kills us if they tried.” “Things are much better now,” said another officer. “Nobody can speak out or come out. If they do we will kill them. They have spoken enough. They are traitors and we are not. We are fighting in the name of God and a united Pakistan.” The operation, apparently planned and led by Gen. Tikka Khan, The West Pakistani military governor of the East, has succeeded in driving every last drop of resistance out of the people of Bengal. Only the propaganda machine of the Indian Government is keeping the fight going apart from a Leftist underground group operating a clandestine “Bangladesh” radio somewhere outside Dhaka. Even if time erases the scars that marks the end of the dream that the people of East Pakistan thought was democratically theirs, it will take more than a generation before they live down the fear instilled in their minds by the tragic and horrifying massacres of last week. If anything is to e salvaged from the ruins of Sheikh Mujib’s movement, it is the realisation that the Army is not to be under-estimated again and that for all the speech-making of President Yahya about the returning of power to the people, the regime did not really ever intend to abide by the results of any election-fairly won or not. -SAN-Feature Service [Concluding part of journalist Simon Dring’s historic report appeared in The Telegraph (৩০ মারচ ১৯৭১) of London]