Dacca was still burning when I and other foreign journalist left nearly 24 hours after the army began its military assault on an almost unarmed population. During the day, the smoke of early morning fires had been replaced by thick, rising column of dark smoke from two areas south of the civic buildings. A Bengali estimated that it came from the area close to old Dacca where slum dwellers huddle and from where Sheikh Mujib’s banned Awami League drew some of its hard-core support. As we drove to the airport, we saw further evidence of burning - glowing embers of what had been a collection of bamboo shacks on waste ground and a rectangle of market stalls which had recently been set alight.

SPORADIC FIRE

Throughout the day, sporadic bursts of automatic fire could be heard, sometimes interspersed with something heavier, even though the army had claimed that the operation was completed successfully. On the way, we saw the pitiful attempts people had made to barricade the road, which is also the principal route between the town and the military cantonment area. A few trees had been cut down and from marks on them apparently pushed aside easily by tanks or bulldozers.

One can say with certainty that the army used vastly more force than was necessary to occupy the city, that it chose certain targets such as the “People” newspaper for specific vindictive treatment, and that it decided to shoot first and ask few questions later. Judging by the demeanour of troops we saw in one apparently innocent alley, heavy firing in the direction in which they were headed was regarded as a useful safety measure. It was also true that certain buildings were set on fire deliberately and I suspect that the large fires on Friday midday while the army curfew continued were encouraged, if not started by the army. An official spokesman’s claim that many had begun because people had stored kerosene next to the barricades for use against the troops sounds unconvincing.

INDISCRIMINATE

That was not the case at the “People” - front page motto “You cannot fool all of the people all the time,” - nor do I believe it was the case with the market stalls near which nobody appeared to live and which had been deserted. How the army dealt with the civilian population is difficult to assess. A Russian journalist driving back to our hotel said he saw some jeep loads of troops firing machine-guns indiscriminately through people’s windows. A brigadier, when asked if the army was shooting everybody in the streets, replied: “Not the women and the children.”

Together with about thirty other non-Pakistani journalists I was requested to leave Dacca by the martial law authorities at 5:30 p.m. East Pakistan time on Friday, as two columns of smoke were rising over Dacca and some shooting was still continuing. “There are some requests which are requirements,” said Major Saliq, the army’s public relations officer, when we asked for clarification. At last I think that is what he said, because every note I have taken in India and Pakistan in the last six weeks, several books and pamphlets, the addresses of a number of friends, and a cutting from the “Daily Mirror” which, I think, says, “Immigrants posed as skin divers” or something equally bizarre, are now in the possession of the martial-law authority of Pakistan in whose representatives’ company I have spent about 13 of the last 48 hours.

I cannot say for sure why we were expelled from Dacca. It may be that the authorities were anxious about our safety. On one or two occasions cameramen who put the noses of their equipment out of the window were threatened with being shot at by the army. But an army which claimed the situation was under control should not have been afraid for us, although I fear it was because it does not want the world to know what is going on in East Pakistan today.

At 8:15 we were taken in army trucks to the airport, where we waited until 4 am together with a number of non-Bengali families who, in far more frightening condition than us, were waiting to leave the wing of their country where they feared their lives were in danger simply because they were not Bengalis. The water ran out about 1 am and we were given two biscuits by a sweeper who bought them out of his own money. We each spent about half an hour while a captain of artillery went through all our papers, confiscating from me my notebook of the day’s events, a roll of film, and a paper on capital development in Bengal.

At 11:30 in Karachi, after a six-hour flight by way of Colombo where six of us tried unsuccessfully to leave the aircraft, we lined up for customs inspection again. At 3 p.m. I was allowed out after turning my pockets out and losing every note I had anywhere in my luggage and almost everything that referred to Pakistan. I did, however, manage to rescue a statement on the size of the Indian Army which the customs official seized with a cry of “Ah, the man behind the machine-gun.” The same happened to all my colleagues. The wife of one was stripped to see if she was carrying any documents. French television lost $ 8,000 worth of unexposed film which they were taking to Cambodia; ABC lost $ 2,000 worth.