বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড Small pox and cholera Epidemic illness has set in. A village doctor told me there were 10 confirmed smallpox cases and four of cholera. Supplies of scrum had run out. I drove on by jeep to Sylhet. Despite their enthusiasm, the men of the Mukti Fouz are militarily naive. They did not observe even the most elementary defensive precautions against a sudden aerial strafing along the open road, and were not prepared for ambush. They are pitifully equipped. They have only an assortment of outdated small arms, possibly one or two captured mortars. But otherwise nothing better than spears, bows and arrows and the local, dao knife, like a Gurkha "kukrt". Like the civilian population, they are short of food and equally vital supplies such as petrol. I visited their one storage depot, near Sylhet, which was unsuccessfully bombed by the West Pakistanis. Supplies arc down to the last few hundred gallons. It is significant that despite such handicaps, the Mukti Fouz has managed to hold back the Army, which has far superior firepower and expertise and is continually reequipped by air, Civilians slaughtered Mukti Fouz leaders say this is because they are fighting for a cause. The Army's strategy appears to be solely one of causing maximum distress to the civilian population and lasting damage to the region. Signs of this have been the way soldiers have, on orders, fired blindly into occupied houses, burnt down entire villages and slaughtered the occupants as they fled. They have also destroyed larger installations such as the light industries of Chhatak and the 10 main jute factories of East Pakistan, the mainstay of the economy not only of East but of West Pakistan. The Army's aim was clearly to break the morale of the people within 48 hours of launching its first attacks, aborting resistance before it took life. This failed, but the Government has persisted with the same sterile strategy. This has turned Sylhet, like many other major centers of East Pakistan, into a ghost city. Almost the entire population of 700,000 has fled into the surrounding countryside, leaving the streets to the helpless old and crippled the corpses, wild dogs and vultures. Bloated corpses float in the Surma River which flows through Sylhet. They arc testimony to the night of March 26, when West Pakistan troops burst into the city and launched a campaign of looting and slaughter. Special units were assigned to the killing of doctors, advocates, journalists, teachers and other professional people.
