They have Raised their Fawna Again.
Where is our Chobol?

Chintito

There was our ancestry.
There were the Sultans.
There were the Moguls.
There were the Europeans and then the British.
They all ruled this rich delta as a colony and looted it of its wealth.
Bangalee Muslims opted for a separate 'state'; they got a weird country despite the Lahore Resolution.
There was Pakistan and worse, there were Pakistani rulers and army.
They ruled and looted and deprived, would you believe, their Muslim brethren.
The Father of the Nation came up with the six-point programme. The students redoubled the movement against Pakistani autocracy and military junta with an 11-point programme.
The nation's enemies rose from within, albeit only a handful of them.

THE DAWN, Karachi: 8 June 1970
The Sheikh [Sheikh Mujibur Rahman] censured the Jamaat-i-Islami for what he called their anti-East Pakistan role and for trying to deprive the people of this province of their legitimate rights by creating confusion in the name of Islam. He alleged that Maulana Maudoodi's partymen in East Pakistan were paid workers serving the case of those who made money by exploiting. (Dhaka 7 June)

Then there were elections for the Pakistan National Assembly. Bangabandhu and his party won a landslide victory in the East, and a majority in the two wings.

Power was not transferred to Awami League by gaddar Yahya. Incidentally he was the president, who even hours before the surrender at the Race Course Maidan in Dhaka wondered loudly that his fouj was advancing heroically. How much intoxicated can one be!

Then there was the naïve conspiracy of the collaborators who made each other believe that Bangalee's determination for self-emancipation was a flash in the pan

SUNDAY TIMES, London: 13 June 1971
The harsh reality of colonisation in the East (Pakistan) 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 been exactly satisfying. The support forthcoming so far has been from people like Moulvi Farid Ahmed, a Bengali lawyer in Dacca, Fazlul Quadeer Chaudhary and Professor Ghulam Azam, of the Jamat Islami, all of whom were soundly beaten in the General Elections last December.

The fight inside occupied Bangladesh intensified as the Mukti Joddha and the Bangladeshi forces gained ground. The betrayers raised their fawna, but tasted the chobol.

PAKISTAN TIMES, Lahore: 30 August 1971
Maulana Mufti Mahmood, Secretary-General of Jamiat-e-Islami said at Lahore (29 August) that it was in Pakistan's own interest to have direct armed confrontation to teach her neighbour the lesson which she seemed to have forgotten so soon after the 1965 war.

REUTER, Karachi: 11 October 1971
A leading People's Party official dropped out of a party delegation hours before it left for East Bengal, alleging that power in the eastern wing had been handed over to reactionary and anti-people parties who had massacred political opponents.

Meiraj Mohammad Khan, the party's Karachi Secretary, said yesterday that he felt it was “futile for me to go”.

Meiraj alleged that in East Bengal “power in effect has been transferred to those reactionary and anti-people political parties defeated in the elections and rejected by the people”.

He named one party the Muslim Jammaat-e-Islami group of indulging in wholesale massacre of political opponents for which they are using their Razakars.

The death toll of unarmed civilians mounted. This was a gruesome genocide.

TIME Magazine, USA: 25 October 1971
No one knows how many have died in the seven-month-old civil war. But in Karachi, a source with close connections to Yahya's military regime concedes: “The generals say the figure is at least 1,000,000”.

SUMMA Magazine, Caracas: October, 1971
The extermination of the Jewish people by the Nazi regime, the atomic crime of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the massacres of Biafra, the napalm of Vietnam, all the great genocides of humanity have found a new equivalent: East Pakistan.

The scheme of the few nawro-pichash who shook hands with the occupation Pakistan forces backfired. They were all enemies of the freedom-hungry Bangalee.

HELSINGIN SAROMAT, Helsinki: 23 November 1971
The cruelty of the “razakars” has turned the majority of the villagers into supporters of Bangla Desh. When people are asked whether they wish to remain citizens of Pakistan or form a state of their own, almost all reply that they are for Bangla Desh. Although the green flag of Pakistan can be seen flying even on top of the most wretched hut, people work for Bangla Desh in secrecy. Like Americans in South Vietnam, the leaders of the Pakistani army seem to be totally unaware of the true feelings and loyalty of the local population.

You don't need to drink anything to be drunk.

PAKISTAN TIMES, Lahore: 28 November 1971
Professor Ghulam Azam, Amir, Jamaat-e-Islami, East Pakistan, has made three proposals to meet the present situation in the country striking India from West Pakistan, proper arming of patriotic elements in East Pakistan and full trust in genuine elements of that Wing.

The murder plot was out in the open.

THE HINDUSTAN TIMES, New Delhi: 21 December 1971
Ten senior Pakistani army officers were responsible for organising the recent murders of a large number of people, especially intellectuals, in Dacca, Mr. John Stonehouse, British Labour M.P., told PTI in an interview here this morning. (New Delhi, 20 December).

He said during his visit to Dacca yesterday (19 December), he got the names of these Pakistani army officers who organised the murders, and members of 'Al Badar', an extremist Muslim group, who carried out these heinous crimes just before the surrender of Pakistani forces in Dacca.

How much proof does one need?

THE NEW YORK TIMES, January 3, 1972
According to one captured member now being held in the Dacca jail, the reporter, Mr. [Choudhury] Mueenuddin, had been the master-mind of the organisation. A diary belonging to Mr. Mueenuddin's room-mate has been found. It listed the names of Al Badar members and how much money they contributed to the group.

The two men lived next door to the Dacca headquarters of Jamaat-e-Islami, a right-wing Moslem political party that ran in the last elections for the National Assembly last year but won less than one per cent of the vote.

Al Badar is believed to have been the action section of Jamaat-e-Islami, carefully organised after the Pakistani crackdown last March.

Mr. Mueenuddin was last seen on 13 December after having an argument with a fellow reporter at their paper, Purbodesh. That reporter was kidnapped from his house by Al Badar a few hours later.

There are so many more; so many chilling accounts of torture, rape, disappearance and murder.

How many more years shall we have to spend in arguing amongst ourselves as to who should have done what and when as regards the trial and punishment of the perpetrators of the worst crime in history? Let it not be even one.

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