GOEBELS REVISITED: 1971 Pakistani Army and Censorship

Anthony Mascarenhas: The Rape of Bangladesh

GOEBELS REVISITED

… The people of West Pakistan are silent spectators to the genocide….

TAJUDDIN AHMAD, 17 April 1971

No one from West Pakistan can meet a Bengali or for that any informed foreigner

without being confronted by complaints such as the one made by Tajuddin, Prime

Minister of the free Bangla Desh government, or by the inevitable question: didn’t you

know what was happening? This has been my own experience prior to the middle of

April 1971, and the experience of several others from the western wing, including some

top flight politicians, who have travelled abroad since the military horror was let loose

in East Bengal on 25 March 1971.

The answer, paradoxically, is both yes and no, But it is hardly a paradox. Things

happen that way in Pakistan, thanks to the inventive, imaginative efforts of the

Information Ministry which could more appropriately be called the propaganda

department.

The answer is no because for many months, at least till the end of July 1971, the people

of West Pakistan had no real knowledge of what was happening in East Bengal. The

military regime clamped, down a tight censorship on 25 March. From that moment till

the end of July when censorship was formally lifted, no newspaper in Pakistan, and this

includes Bengali dailies published in East Bengal, carried a single report on anything

even remotely near the truth. The government decreed it that way. For the first two

months, up to the end of May, press reports from Dacca and elsewhere in East Bengal

were only carefully tailored press releases by military and civilian information officers.

They emphasized the quick return of “normalcy” in the eastern wing following Sheikh

Mujib’s civil disobedience campaign, and made out that the army was engaged in a

patriotic action against scores of “Indian infiltrators” and assorted groups of

“miscreants,” The last named, were spotty reports so even if one carefully read between

the lines it was impossible to get anything like the real picture of what was happening.

There was no mention of the brutal army operation in Dacca and Chittagong which by

then had taken over 50,000 lives. Nor was there any mention of the fact that the central

government’s writ was then being observed only in these two places while the rest of

the province was under the control of the Bengali resistance. West Pakistanis did not

know that the Pakistan Air Force was making regular sorties every day against the

Bengali resistance fighters. Nor did they know that the entire East Bengal military units,

such as the East Bengal Regiment and the East Pakistan Rifles, the paramilitary Ansars.