Listener (UK)

Somewhere in Burma, locked away in a government safe or collecting dust on an office shelf, sit 15,000 feet of some of the most exciting war film shot by television news crews. The Burmese being what they are, it will probably stay there : a permanent reminder for those broadcasting journalists who spent the Indian-Pakistan war in Dacca of the immense frustrations of those 14 days. We were frustrated not in the sense that our colleagues in New Delhi, Rawalpindi or Calcutta were frustrated : local bureaucracy prevented most of them from getting within sight or sound of a battle, far less to the front itself. In our case, the war came to us but we were powerless for so long to report it.

Shipping film and filing copy is a tiresome, complicated business, but seldom more than a minor part of the operation. This time it was the problem. All the usual channels had broken down. It was impossible to make a telephone call out of Dacca. Despite the handsome tips which changed hands between journalist and messenger, cables usually got no further than the telegraph office in the city centre and never if they contained any news worth telling beyond Karachi. No airlines were operating and there was no land transport. The road network is hardly sophisticated at the best of times and on this occasion there was not only the advancing Indian Army to contend with but the terrorists as well. Each night we would count the cans of film, tapes and reports piling up, with the growing feeling that the war would be over before they could be released or, worse still, that they would be confiscated by the Indians when they arrived in the capital. We became so desperate that our news co-ordinator arranged to hire a boat and try sailing through the rivers to Cox’s Bazar in the south¬east corner of the Bay of Bengal, and from there to Thailand. It was a crazy idea, but there seemed no alternative.

Then two other correspondents suggested the Burma run. A light aircraft left Dacca airfield in the small hours every night carrying government dispatches and maybe the odd fleeing official. It stopped to refuel at Akyab in Burma. The deal was that we should leave our film at the airfield on the understanding that when the plane left it would be loaded on and dropped off at Akyab : there officials from the American Consulate would retrieve it arid hand it over to one of the US television networks for eventual distribution. The first night the aircraft left Dacca - we could hear it flying low over the hotel between air raids - but the film stayed behind. The second night, the plane and the film went. It reached Akyab and the worst happened. The Burmese - true to their reputation for the utmost intransigence in their dealings with foreign powers - decided that it was ‘controversial material’ and that, since they were neutral, they would impound it.

What makes the loss so great from a purely professional point of view is that we had been able to film the first air attacks on Dacca in a way which can never have been done before in a news operation. If Cecil B. deMille himself had directed the battle for the benefit of our cameras it couldn’t have been better. We had two cameras on the roof of the Intercontinental Hotel and another crew literally on the spot at which the attack was being aimed the airstrip. It was with this crew on the airstrip viewing the wreckage of an Indian MiG when the air-raid warning sounded. It was early days and we were unfamiliar with the sound : our Pakistani Air Force guide assured us it was the ‘all clear’. We believed him - until the attack began. For about forty minutes we were pinned down as wave after wave of jet fighters swept very low across the area, strafing it with cannon and rocket fire.

We also had film - exclusive to the BBC of another attack on the airfield, with the difference that on this occasion it was women and children who were diving for cover in the ditches and trenches : women and children who would not have been there but for some official bungling. When arrangements were made for the evacuation of foreign nationals from the city, the women and children were given priority, but - in view of the pounding the airfield had received - they were not to be taken out to the strip until the planes were ready to save them from being exposed to any unnecessary risk. But the arrangements were fouled up by an over-zealous official; they were taken too early to the airfield and while they stood waiting it came under attack. The same people who had left so hopefully returned in tears.

Those film stories were lost. There were other events which one chose not to film. These illustrate the difference between the responsibilities confronting the newspaper correspondent and the film crew, and between their methods of operation. The best example was the celebrated ‘slaughter in the stadium’. It had begun as a routine celebration following the surrender and ended with the killing of four Razakars in the most gruesome and sadistic manner. It was a story which newspapers could, quite properly, exploit to the full, with the justification that they were exposing the savagery of the situation and the possibility of a blood-bath unless something was done to control the violence. For a television crew it was less simple. In fact, each of the crews pulled out before the final execution There were two dangers : the organisers might well be staging the whole thing for the benefit of the cameras, and, if that was not the case, the presence of the cameras might serve to add to the hysteria and encourage the violence. Whatever the motives behind them, the killings - and others like them - demonstrated the sharp contrast in their approach to the media between the military authorities from the West and the new power, the Mukti Bahini, in the East. When the military authorities embarked on their campaign of genocide at the end of March, they made quite sure there were no journalists around to see it. One enterprising reporter hid himself on the roof of the Intercontinental and filed a story which later helped bring some much deserved condemnation on former President Yayha Khan for permitting such horrors. Others managed to sneak across the border for a quick look at what was happening. But none was allowed to stay: all were unceremoniously bundled out. Some were relieved of all film and of notes, diaries, even bus tickets - anything on which notes might be written. Most of the reports, therefore, came from sources which could not clearly be seen to be objective, and it was some time before the world realised the extent of the horror. By contrast, the Mukti lacked the guile of their former political masters. They invited you to their killings.

On the day the bodies of the intellectuals were discovered in the brick-fields at Mohamedpur, a fellow correspondent and his cameraman were persuaded to give a lift to two Mukti, both armed. As they drove along the road one of them fired his sten gun in the air. A few minutes later he pointed it at a small boy and riddled his back with bullets. The boy fell dead and the two continued their celebrations. For days after the surrender Dacca was full of youngsters often small boys-brandishing loaded automatics and spraying the air with bullets. It was hard to escape the feeling that justice had been done in a small way when one of the guerrillas was brought into the Intercontinental Hotel, with blood streaming down his face. He had shot himself in the head, but, was not badly hurt.

To live in the hotel itself was to live plumb in the centre of the story - rather like booking a seat on an Apollo flight or sharing the Bunker with Hitler in 1945. From our bedroom windows we could watch the air raids, which were often, too close for comfort. If a bomb hit a metal road the shock wave would make the upper storeys sway like a tuning-fork. After one series of raids we dragged a bucket of shrapnel from the swimming-pool. Because it was the city’s only non-medical neutral zone, everything came to the hotel. The top generals came, Niazi and Farman Ali: Niazi to boast that he would never surrender, Farman Ali to talk over the surrender terms with the ex-Governor, Mr. Malik, who had resigned.

Representatives of the Red Cross made an impressive start on organising the neutral zone. All hotel residents were assembled before a great line-up of officials and an elaborate plan was outlined including arrangements for security, the surrendering of fire-arms, an internal news service, air-raid precautions - even recreational activities for the young people. All most impressive - until the evacuation flights finally took off. Most of the officials took off with them, and the grand design collapsed.

One of the men who left had been responsible for security. Before leaving he had performed one brave, if slightly curious act. Seven bombs made up of plastic explosives and TNT had been planted in the hotel but removed to the garden by the hotel security-men. The Red Cross official decided they weren’t safe where they were. So he put them in the slit trenches, which had dug at the bottom of the garden for guests to shelter in during an attack. It must have been the only slit trench in the country with the warning sign ‘Keep off! Danger.’ The Red Cross officials who stayed made up for the lapses. One worked, sometimes throughout the night, registering refugees and settling the many problems. Another on the night of the surrender, spent hours crouched in a trench protecting a group of children from the crossfire of a battle between the Mukti and the Razakars. But there were too few of them and so press and television representatives took charge of security. We mounted guard at the gates and patrolled the hotel and grounds at night, made searches for arms and checked each person who applied to come into the zone in case he or she were carrying weapons. I found searching other people’s personal baggage a curiously degrading business. Most refugees were non-Bengalis or so-called ‘collaborators’ who were moving in into the zone because they were sure that if they stayed out they would be slaughtered. We reached the point at which we could receive no more men - only women and children. It was heartbreaking to admit a woman with her children and have to turn away the father.
Another sad spectacle was that of the UN official who was so anxious to board one of the first evacuation flights that he refused to get out of his car at the Airport and let in a group of children bound for the waiting RAF Hercules. He was not the only one in a hurry to get away. A German television crew abandoned all their equipment - worth $20,000, we reckoned - and there was a certain irony in the circumstances of their departure. The journalists who stayed behind volunteered to help sweep the run-way clear of rubble so that the planes carrying the Germans, among others, could take off. While we were doing so, somebody was stealing thousands of pounds’ worth of our equipment which we’d had to leave outside the Airport building.