were getting news that one members of the Awami league high command had been getting across the border. Tajuddin Ahmed was anxious to fly immediate to the border to meet with his colleagues and them constitute the government of an independent Bangladesh to give leadership to the liberation war.
In order to proclaim such a government we felt that a formal proclamation of independence should be drafted. The declaration of independence Authorized by Bangabadhu which had been transmitted over the radio at Chittagong, first by abdul Hannan of the Awami league and then by Major Ziaur Rahman, now had to be incorporated into a formal proclamation of independence.
I was entrusted by Tajuddin Ahmed with the task of drafting the independence proclamation along with a separate statement setting out the background to the proclamation and the genocide launched by the Pakistani army on the people of Bangladesh. This task I undertook with some trepidation as these were likely to be historic documents. The proclamations of independence drafted by me incorporated the theme of the original declaration as well as Khaled Mosharaf's request that the Bengalis who had originally been with the armed services of Pakistan and had now decided to fight for Bangladesh after March 25, 1971 should be decommissioned into the newly formed army of the people's Republic of Bangladesh.
As I learnt later my original draft of the proclamation was amended to make it more in conformity with the juridical parlance of such documents but some elements of my original draft constituted the core of the proclamation. However my draft on the background to the events was kept intact and presented to the world by Tajuddin Ahmed as Prime Minister of independent Bangladesh on 14 April, after the government of Bangladesh officially came into being at the swearing ceremony in a grove in Kushtia which is now known as Mujibnagar. One of the phrases which has since been frequently quoted, Pakistan lies dead and buried under a mountain of corpses, reflected concisely my sentiments at that time and constituted the basis of all my subsequent actions'.
Whilst I was with Tajuddin and Islam we heard over the BBC that M. M. Ahmed. Economic Adviser to Yahya Khan, was flying to Washington on an emergency mission to seek renewed aid from the consortium of aid donors to Pakistan. Tajuddin felt that any attempt to finance Pakistan's war machine through aid must be resisted with all the political resources at our disposal. I was commissioned by Tajuddin to proceed to London and Washington as fast as I could to initiate a campaign on behalf of the Bangladesh government to seek the stoppage of aid to Pakistan by its principal donors. My second brief was to persuade all Bengal officers serving in the diplomatic missions of Pakistan to defect and proclaim allegiance to the government of Bangladesh. My particular target was the mission in the United States, where some of the most able of the Bengali service holders were located. Their defection would be of tremendous propaganda valuc as well as service to the Bangladesh cause.
I managed to get to London by mid-April. When I got to London I learnt that my wife and three sons had managed to get out of Pakistan and that they were now in Jordan with her sister. This knowledge gave me a feeling of complete freedom to speak out
