394 বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড Many professors have fled. Some have been shot. They will be replaced by fresh recruitment from West Pakistan. Bengali officers are also being weeded out of sensitive positions in the Civil and Foreign Services. All are currently being subjected to the most exhaustive screening. This colonization process quite obviously does not work even half as efficiently as the administration wishes. I was given vivid evidence of this by Major Agha, martial law administrator of Comilla. He had been having a problem getting the local Bengali executive engineers to go out and repair the bridges and roads that had been destroyed or damaged by the rebels. This task kept getting snarled in red tape, and the bridges remained unrepaired. Agha, of course, knew the reason. "You can't expect them to work," he told me, "when you have been killing them and destroying their country. That at least is their point of view, and we are paying for it." Captain Durrani of the Baluch Regiment, who was in charge of the company guarding the Comilla airport, had his own methods of dealing with the problem. "I have told them," he said with reference to the Bengalis maintaining the control tower, "that I will shoot anyone who even looks like he is doing something suspicious." Durrani had made good his word. A Bengali who had approached the airport a few nights earlier was shot. "Could have been a rebel," I was told. Durrani had another claim to fame. He had personally accounted for "more than 60 men" while clearing the villages surrounding the airport. The harsh reality of colonization in the East is being concealed by shameless window dressing. For several weeks President Yahya Khan and Lt.-Gen. Tikka Khan have been trying to get political support in East Pakistan for what they are doing. The results have not exactly been satisfying. The support forthcoming so far has been from people like Moulvi Farid Ahmad, a Bengali lawyer in Dacca, Fazlul Quadeer Chaudhury and Professor Ghulam Azam of the Jamat Islami. All of whom were soundly beaten in the General Elections last December. The only prominent personality to emerge for this purpose has been Mr. Nurul Amin, an old Muslim Leaguer and former Chief Minister of the Province who was one of only two non Awami Leaguers to be elected to the National Assembly. He is now in his seventies. But even Nurul Amin has been careful not to be too effusive. His two public statements to date have been concerned only with the "Indian interference." Bengalis look with scorn on the few who "collaborate." Farid Ahmad and Fazlul Quadeer Chaudhury are painfully aware of this. Farid Ahmad makes a point of keeping his windows shuttered and only those who have been scrutinized and recognized through a peephole in the front door are allowed into the house. By singularly blunt methods the Government has been able to get a grudging acquiescence from 31 Awami Leaguers who had been elected to the national and provincial assemblies. They are being kept on ice in Dacca, secluded from all put their immediate families, for the big occasion when "representative government" is to be installed. But clearly they now represent no one but themselves.
