from General Peerzada for a final session where the draft could be finalized. No such call materialized and instead it was learnt that Mr. M. M Ahmed, who was central to the negotiations, had suddenly left for Karachi on the 25th morning without any warning to the Awami League team.
By 11 P.M. of the 25th all preparations were ready and the troops began to take up their positions in the city. In an act of treachery unparalleled in contemporary history a programme of calculated genocide was unleashed on the peaceful and unsuspecting population of Dacca by midnight of 25th March No ultimatum was given to the Awami League by Yahya, no curfew order was even issued when the machine gun, artillery and cannon on the tanks, unleashed their reign of death and destruction. By the time first Martial Law proclamations issued by Lt. General Tikka Khan were broadcast the next morning some 50,000 people, most of them without offering any resistance, and many women and children, had been butchered. Dacca had been turned in to an inferno with fires raging in most corners of die city. Sleeping inhabitant who had been drawn from their homes by the fires started by the military, were machine-gunned as they ran to escape the flames.
Whilst the Police, EPR and armed volunteers put up a heroic resistance the main 'victims remained the weak, the innocent and the unsuspecting, who were killed atrandom in their thousands. We are compiling a firsthand account of the details of genocide committed by the Pakistan Army on the orders of the President of Pakistan which we will publish shortly. The scale and brutality of the action exceeds anything perpetrated in the civilized world.
Yahya himself left Dacca on the night of 25th March after having unleashed the Pakistan Army, with an open license to commit genocide on all Bengalis. His own justification for this act of barbarism was not forthcoming till 8 P.M. the next day when the world was given its first explanation for the unleashing of this holocaust. The statement was self-contradictory and laced with positive lines. His branding of a part as traitors and outlaws, with whom, be had only 48 hours ago been negotiating for a peaceful transfer of power; bore no relationship to the situation in Bangladesh or the course of the negotiations. His promise to hand over power to the elected representatives of the people after banning “the Awami league which was the sole representative of Bangladesh and held a majority of seats, in the National Assembly was mockery of the freely recorded voice of 75 million Bengalis. The crudity of the statement was clear evidence that Yahya was no longer interested in taking shelter behind either logic or morality and had reverted to the law of the jungle in his bid to crush the people of Bangladesh.
Pakistan is now dead and buried under a mountain of corpses. The hundreds and thousands of people murdered by the army in Bangladesh will act as an impenetrable barrier between West Pakistan and the people of Bangladesh. By resorting to preplanned genocide Yahya must have known that he was himself digging Pakistan's grave. The subsequent massacres perpetrated on his orders by his licensed killers on the people were not designed to preserve the unity of a nation. They were acts of racial hatred and sadism devoid of even the elements of humanity. Professional Soldiers, on orders, violated their
