377 বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড He made it plain that he understood that if he wrote his story there could be no going back to Karachi for him. He said he had made up his mind to leave Pakistan: to give up his house, most of his possessions and his job as one of the most respected journalists in the country. There was only one condition we must not publish his story until he had gone back into Pakistan and brought out his wife and five children. The Sunday Times agreed, and Mascarenhas went back to Karachi. After a wait of ten days an overseas cable arrived at the private address of a Sunday Times executive. "Export formalities completed," it read, "Shipment begins Monday." Mascarenhas had succeeded in getting permission for his wife and family to leave the country. He himself had been forbidden to leave. He found a way of leaving anyway. On the last leg of his journey inside Pakistan, he found himself silting in a plane across the aisle from a senior Ministry of Information official whom he knew well. A phone call from the airport could have led to his arrest. There was no phone call, however, and last Tuesday he arrived back in London. Mascarenhas writes about what he saw in East Pakistan with special authority and objectivity. As a Goan Christian by descent, he is neither a Hindu nor a Muslim. Having lived most of his life in what is now Pakistan, having held a Pakistani passport since the State was created in 1947, and having enjoyed the confidence of many of the leaders of Pakistan since that time, he wrote his report with real personal regret. "We were told by the Ministry of Information officials to show in a patriotic way the great job the army was doing," he told us, There was no question of his reporting what he saw for his own paper. He was allowed to file a story, which was published in The Sunday Times on May 2, which reported only the events of March 25/26, when the Bengali troops mutinied and atrocities were committed against non-Bengalis. Even references to the danger of famine were deleted by the censor. That increased his crisis of conscience. After some days' hesitation, he decided, in his own words, that "either I would write the full story of what 1 had seen, or I would have to stop writing; I would never again be able to write with any integrity." And so he got on a plane and came to London. We have been able to check his story in great detail with other refugees in a position to have had a wide knowledge of events in East Bengal as a whole, and with objective diplomatic sources. GENOCIDE: FULL REPORT Abdul Bari had run out of luck. Lilk thousands of other people in East Bengal, he had made the mistake-the fatal mistake-of running within sight of a Pakistani army patrol. He was 24 years old, a slight man surrounded by soldiers. He was trembling, because he was about to be shot.
