The Indian Army's T-55 tanks on their way to Dhaka
Pakistan's Lt. Gen A. A. K. Niazi signs the instrument of surrender on December 16, surrendering his forces to Lt. Gen Jagjit Singh Aurora
Pakistani issued stamp
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| India-Pakistan |
| Arrogant blunders |
| 2007-09-23 |
| By Ahmad Faruqui I discussed the military mind during President Ayub Khan’s period last week. Let us now turn to the succeeding period, by relying upon Brig A R Siddiqi’s recollections, ‘East Pakistan: The Endgame, An Onlooker’s Journal: 1969-71’; Siddiqi served as the president’s press advisor. Siddiqi’s narrative begins when Ayub, fatigued by nationwide protests over his ten year rule, asked the army chief to “fulfil his constitutional duties” and declare martial law. General Yahya Khan, in his first address to the nation on March 25, 1969 said that only the armed forces “can restore sanity and put the country back on the road to progress in a civil and constitutional manner.” Thus unfolded an oxymoronic drama that continues to this day. The landslide victory of the Awami League caught the military off-guard. In February, in connivance with Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s PPP, the generals delayed the convening of the National Assembly, triggering large scale protests in East Pakistan. Bhutto fatuously suggested Pakistan needed two prime ministers and threatened to break the legs of anyone who went to Dhaka. Behind the scenes, the GHQ put Plan B into place, envisioning military action. It spelled the death knell, not just for democracy, but for Jinnah’s Pakistan. On March 6, 1971, as events spun out of control, Yahya said that the armed forces were honour-bound to “ensure the integrity, solidarity and security of Pakistan—a duty in which they have never failed.” Operation Searchlight was launched on March 25, 1971, which was also the second anniversary of the second martial law. Mujibur Rehman, the only Awami League leader to be captured, was brought to West Pakistan. By imprisoning him, the generals thought they had routed the enemy. In the months to come, they denied that a civil war was taking place. By this time, writes Siddiqi, “The army had ... gone berserk. Young officers had become trigger-happy.” The army began conducting murderous “sweeps” in which whole villages were targeted. The “whiff of grapeshot” had turned into a fusillade of death. General Niazi did not deny that rapes were being carried out and opined, in a Freudian tone, “You cannot expect a man to live, fight, and die in East Pakistan and go to Jhelum for sex, can you?” In the midst of bedlam, there appeared “a macabre joke”, a government documentary called, “The Great Betrayal”. It was intended to show the evils carried out by the “miscreants”. But the footage of human skulls even irked Yahya’s sensitivities. He asked, “How could you differentiate between the two skulls — Bengalis and non-Bengalis? I am damned if I can tell one from the other.” As the insurgency expanded, black protest flags replaced the national flag everywhere except in the cantonments. A furious general told Siddiqi, “No national army in the world has ever been subjected to such public humiliation”, but never wondered why matters had come to such a sorry pass. In June, Yahya told the nation, “No government worth its name could allow the country to be destroyed by open and armed rebellion against the State.” The army’s onslaught continued to no avail. Finally, in November 1971, Mujib was sentenced to death. A “Crush India” campaign was initiated in West Pakistan, since that was how the army intended to defend the Eastern wing. An effete top brass boasted of taking on India and defeating it. On December 3, Siddiqi was given a coded signal, “The balloon has gone up” i.e. Pakistan Air Force had launched sorties into India. When he asked Air Marshal Rahim to justify the raids, he retorted, “Success is the biggest justification. My birds should be right over Agra by now, knocking the hell out of them.” At GHQ, thinking they had won the war, the generals ordered a round of drinks “in an unbroken chain”. Imagining himself in a bar-room brawl, one gloated, “We will give the enemy a broken nose”. Even a teetotaller colonel who worked with Siddiqi “had a couple of stiff ones and downed them straight”. An army thrust was directed at Indian forces in Ramgarh, from where Delhi was going to be an easy target. It suffered a serious setback. Even Chamb, the prize of the 1965 war, was not taken. The much awaited counter-offensive under General Tikka never took off. It did not take the Chinese military attaché in Islamabad long to conclude that the war had come to an end, “The Indians are holding you on, waiting to get it over with in East Pakistan.” As the denouement loomed, Gul Hassan asked Siddiqi to do his “usual PR stuff”. When the latter said he was at a loss for words, he was scripted, “The army was out-numbered, out-gunned but not out-classed. Cut off from its main base, it did what could be expected from the best of armies”. On December 16, 1971, a terse statement was read on Radio Pakistan: “Under an arrangement between the commanders of India and Pakistan in the eastern theatre, Indian troops have entered Dhaka and fighting has ceased in East Pakistan.” Siddiqi says that the endgame was the inevitable consequence of military mismanagement. There was some poetic justice. Yahya was dismissed and put under house arrest. The Supreme Court ruled that he was a usurper who treated the country like chattel. He developed paralysis and died in August 1979 after a prolonged illness. Hamid outlived Yahya by a number of years but died “unsung and un-mourned”. But Siddiqi fails to note that there was no real justice. The independent commission report that had looked into the debacle recommended that Yahya and eleven generals who had caused the dismemberment of the country be court-martialled, saying it was not enough to retire them. The military suppressed the report for thirty years. One day, it suddenly popped up on “the other side of the hill”. Ahmad Faruqui, an American economist, is the author of “Rethinking the National Security of Pakistan,” Ashgate Publishing, UK |
| Posted by:john frum |
| #11 The Pakistanis have never gotten over the fact that a Hindu Brahmin woman PM, a Dalit ('untouchable') defence minister, a Zoroastrian Army Chief, A Jewish theatre commander and a Sikh spearhead commander dismembered their country. How supremely appropriate. It puts paid to the much vaunted advantages of being "Islamically pure". May India continue to break free from the archaic chains that burden her worthy progress into modern times. It is simply tragic how India must struggle forward with a vicious Pakistani monkey on her back that the entire world should have throttled long ago. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2007-09-23 15:05 |
| #10 Benazir Bhutto recalls being taught at school in West Pakistan that "East Pakistanis are short, dark and eat rice, whilst West Pakistanis are tall, fair and eat wheat" Said Pakistan General Niazi, "It was a low lying land of low lying people". Having dehumanized the Bengalis, the majority being fellow Muslims, it was easy for the Pakistanis to kill their fellow countrymen. |
| Posted by: john frum 2007-09-23 09:22 |
| #9 The Pak brag at the time was that one Pak soldier was worth seven Indians. That worked well. |
| Posted by: Fred 2007-09-23 08:55 |
| #8 No wonder so many tigers turned man-eater. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2007-09-23 08:29 |
| #7 The Jewish general who beat Pakistan The Pakistanis have never gotten over the fact that a Hindu Brahmin woman PM, a Dalit ('untouchable') defence minister, a Zoroastrian Army Chief, A Jewish theatre commander and a Sikh spearhead commander dismembered their country. |
| Posted by: john frum 2007-09-23 07:35 |
| #6 The Indian Army's T-55 tanks on their way to Dhaka Pakistan's Lt. Gen A. A. K. Niazi signs the instrument of surrender on December 16, surrendering his forces to Lt. Gen Jagjit Singh Aurora Pakistani issued stamp |
| Posted by: john frum 2007-09-23 07:29 |
| #5 "Kill three million of them," said President Yahya Khan at the February conference, "and the rest will eat out of our hands." (Robert Payne, Massacre [1972] In the dead region surrounding Dacca, the military authorities conducted experiments in mass extermination in places unlikely to be seen by journalists. At Hariharpara, a once thriving village on the banks of the Buriganga River near Dacca, they found the three elements necessary for killing people in large numbers: a prison in which to hold the victims, a place for executing the prisoners, and a method for disposing of the bodies. The prison was a large riverside warehouse, or godown, belonging to the Pakistan National Oil Company, the place of execution was the river edge, or the shallows near the shore, and the bodies were disposed of by the simple means of permitting them to float downstream. The killing took place night after night. Usually the prisoners were roped together and made to wade out into the river. They were in batches of six or eight, and in the light of a powerful electric arc lamp, they were easy targets, black against the silvery water. The executioners stood on the pier, shooting down at the compact bunches of prisoners wading in the water. There were screams in the hot night air, and then silence. The prisoners fell on their sides and their bodies lapped against the shore. Then a new bunch of prisoners was brought out, and the process was repeated. In the morning the village boatmen hauled the bodies into midstream and the ropes binding the bodies were cut so that each body drifted separately downstream. R.J. Rummel writes, The human death toll over only 267 days was incredible. Just to give for five out of the eighteen districts some incomplete statistics published in Bangladesh newspapers or by an Inquiry Committee, the Pakistani army killed 100,000 Bengalis in Dacca, 150,000 in Khulna, 75,000 in Jessore, 95,000 in Comilla, and 100,000 in Chittagong. For eighteen districts the total is 1,247,000 killed. This was an incomplete toll, and to this day no one really knows the final toll. Some estimates of the democide [Rummel's "death by government"] are much lower -- one is of 300,000 dead -- but most range from 1 million to 3 million. ... The Pakistani army and allied paramilitary groups killed about one out of every sixty-one people in Pakistan overall; one out of every twenty-five Bengalis, Hindus, and others in East Pakistan. If the rate of killing for all of Pakistan is annualized over the years the Yahya martial law regime was in power (March 1969 to December 1971), then this one regime was more lethal than that of the Soviet Union, China under the communists, or Japan under the military (even through World War II). (Rummel, Death By Government, p. 331.) |
| Posted by: john frum 2007-09-23 07:10 |
| #4 1971 photo - A Pakistani soldier checks a man to see if he is circumcised photo Bengali man and boys massacred photo - the body of a small child with limbs hacked off, is devoured by dogs photo death at the river bank photo Chuknagar mass grave |
| Posted by: john frum 2007-09-23 07:04 |
| #3 Genocide in Bangladesh, 1971 "In what became province-wide acts of genocide, Hindus were sought out and killed on the spot. As a matter of course, soldiers would check males for the obligated circumcision among Moslems. If circumcised, they might live; if not, sure death." |
| Posted by: john frum 2007-09-23 06:42 |
| #2 Cheeze. Like we need even one more reason to blot Pakistan from the face of this earth. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2007-09-23 06:41 |
| #1 “You cannot expect a man to live, fight, and die in East Pakistan and go to Jhelum for sex, can you?” News that hundreds of thousands of Bengali women and girls had been raped by Pakistani soldiers reached Lahore. The society ladies were heard to say "Well at least the babies will be fair complexioned" The “whiff of grapeshot” had turned into a fusillade of death Fusillade hardly describes it. The Pakistani Army would tie together victims near a river bank, so close together that one bullet would kill several people. The entire 'raft' of people would then be dumped into the river. In this manner more than one million Benaglis perished. |
| Posted by: john frum 2007-09-23 06:33 |
