The Pakistani Army has reportedly looted banks and shops.
“Their targets are mostly civilian,” said Col. M. A. G. Osmany, the commander of the resistance forces, at this base in an eastern border area. “They are trying to terrorise and starve the population."
There are shortages of salt, lentils, mustard oil for cooking, kerosene for lamps and fuel for machines such as those that run village flour mills.
Rice and fish are the staple foods of the Bengalis-the 75 million people of Hast Pakistan-but with rice stocks dwindling they are turning to jackfruit as a new staple. Jackfruit, which can be cooked as a vegetable before it is ripe or eaten as a fruit when it matures, grows plentifully on trees everywhere in East Pakistan, but it has always been a minor part of the Bengals diet.
With nothing moving through East Pakistan's major port, Chittagong, except for the army's military supplies, the Bengalis for now will have to survive on what they can scratch from their own countryside, after centuries of floods, storms disease and the deepest poverty, they have become experts at survival.
Though the war has not touched West Pakistan physically, nearly every economic dislocation it has caused in the East will have an impact in the West.
Jute from the East was the country's largest single export product and foreignexchange earner. Most of the foreign earnings were spent in West Pakistan to pay for the army and to finance big industries and public works.
This kind of exploitation East Pakistan, which has been going on since the two parts of the country were carved out of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, was the fuel that fired first the East's drive for equal treatment and regional autonomy and finally the movement for independence.
With the East's jute mills shut, West Pakistan's economy is in difficulty.
East Pakistan has always been the major market for West Pakistani manufactured goods, particularly cotton materials for clothing and now this trade has stopped.
The cotton is of such cheap quality that it has no market anywhere in the world; it was sold in the East at a Government fixed inflated price to support the West's textile industry.
With imposition of censorship on all news reports from West Pakistan, it is difficult to tell what stresses the economy there is showing.
How long the Pakistani Government can wage its war against the independence forces in East Pakistan is unsure.
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