359 বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড Certainly the bourgeois Awami League-whose stock is already low in some areas foil it’s sad inability to defend the people-will be the first to suffer. Some villages are already planning to cache arms and the Indian police say that there have been virtually no Naxalite incidents in West Bengal these past two weeks because all the Indian Maoist extremists are fighting across the border in East Bengal. One of our first calls in Dacca was to the British Council, the driver of our baby taxi- a sort of rickshaw pulled by a motor scooter-having mistaken this for the British High Commission. There was a large Union Jack on the door which, we learnt later, had not stopped the four police guards in the building from getting shot. When we reached the High Commission itself, some tempers were on edge. A senior British official in dark glasses shouted that our arrival would get them all killed and probably ourselves as well. Another man said that it wasn't in their interests for people in Britain to know what was going on. They knew what was going on and that was all that was necessary. All telex and telephone communications between Dacca and the outside world are cut and the Commission's staff, most of whom had evacuated their families, had just received their first mail for six weeks. The only civilian aircraft landing at Dacca, the Boeings belonging to Pakistan International Airlines. Each carries 175 young men who travel in white shirts and khaki trousers, but put on the rest of their uniform when they land. Passengers trying to book PIA flights to Dacca from Karachi are told the aircraft are full of officials, At the American Consulate, things were a little more relaxed and cold beers and a wall map were produced. Like most of the diplomats we spoke to the Americans were generally agreed that the West Pakistan troops had killed about 6,000 men, women and children, among them 300 to 500 students. Some of the West Pakistan units seem to have been possessed by bloodlust directed against the Hindus of East Pakistan, recalling the massacres of 1947, at the time of Partition. The bodies of uncircumcised Hindu men have been found with their penis cut off. Dacca is an old city of corrugated iron, bamboo, mud and stone. Some parts are so tumbledown that they could probably be shelled for half an hour without making much noticeable difference. One phosphorous grenade or incendiary bullet into one of its bamboo slums and you've burned down a neighborhood. Twenty-five blocks, perhaps more, were destroyed in this way. The day after the slaughter, the city's population of crows-dirty, fat, grey birdsseemed to double, and though the bodies were quickly removed the birds have stayed on flapping and cawing above the deserted streets.
