Shortly after Yahya left Dacca the army's tough martial law administrator Lt.-Gen. Tikka Khan slapped tight censorship over East Pakistan. All foreign correspondents were restricted to their hotels and then, after federal troops seized their notes and films, the reporters were expelled from the country. Among the correspondents forced to leave was NEWSWEEK'S Loren Jenkins, who filed this report:
From our windows in Dacca's modern Intercontinental Hotel, we watched a jeep full of soldiers roll up to a shopping centre and taking aim with a heavy machine-gun open fire on a crowd. While the firing was still going on some fifteen young Bengalis appeared in the street about 200 yards away and shouted defiantly at the soldiers. The youths seemed to, be empty-handed, but the soldiers turned the machine-gun on them anyway. Then, the federal soldiers moved down an adjacent alley leading to the office of a pro- Mujib daily newspaper that had strongly denounced the army. The troops shouted in Urdu, a language which few Bengalis understand-warning anyone inside to surrender or be shot. No one emerged. So they blasted the building and set it afire. And when they emerged, they waved their hands in triumph and shouted 'Pakistan Zindabad” (Long Live Pakistan").
By late in the week, firing throughout the city was heavy and flashes of 105-mm. howitzers in the night preceded the heavy crump of incoming shells which seemed to be landing Oil the new campus of Dacca University. I woke up one morning to the sound of six Chinese-made T-54 light tanks clanging down Airport Road. A grey pall of smoke hung low over the muggy sky. Soon new artillery blasts were heard and new fires were seen in the region of old Dacca, a warren of narrow, open-sewered streets where most of the capital's population lives in cramped one room homes.
The West Pakistani troops in Dacca showed all the signs of having the jitters. Many shot off random bursts of automatic weapons fire at the slightest noise. And when some of the reporters in the Intercontinental Hotel ventured outside and asked to tour the city, an army captain stationed in front of the hotel threatened to shoot us. Ordering us back inside, he shouted angrily: “If I can kill my own people, 1 can kill you"
At the outset of the crackdown, the army ordered striking government workers cither to return to work or face military trial, and imposed a 24-hour curfew. Meanwhile, a truckload of soldiers moved through the city, stopping in front of any house flying the new green, red and yellow banner of Bangladesh. At every such building, the troops ordered to pull down the flags. In the area around the hotel, their first stop was a three-storey brick house-where a woman in a sari slowly mounted to the roof and. under the menacing gaze of the soldiers, reluctantly lowered the flag.
With Jenkins and other foreign reporters expelled from East Pakistan, the world was left to the mercy of conflicting radio reports for its information. The official government radio in Karachi announced that the army had arrested Mujib. But a clandestine radio in Dacca, identifying itself as the Voice of Independent Bangladesh, proclaimed that Mujib was still safe in his underground headquarters. Under his leadership, said a rebel radio announcer: “The people of Bangladesh will shed more blood...."
