Thank you! Romaisha, who was repatriated to Pakistan from Chittagong along with her three children in December 1973, sobbed out her woeful story in these words: “The Bengali rebels had made a murderous attack on our locality on March 3. A posse of Pakistani troops exchanged fire with the rebel gunmen in the mob. The Awami Leaguers had red-marked our houses in the middle of the month. They had spent nearly two and a quarter years in a Red Cross Relief Camp in Chittagong. Their uncensored despatches from East Pakistan spoke of the widespread killing of the Biharis by the Bengali rebels in March-April 1971 and gave harrowing accounts of the rebels’ brutality narrated by eye-witnesses and victims of the pogrom. The killer gang burnt every house in this colony of about 2,000 non-Bengalis. UAE: Abu Dhabi to Reopen Cinemas, Dubai Bans Cafes Serving Drinks in Baby Bottles Nicholas Cage Ties The Knot For The 5th Time When they were grappling with my husband in order to tie him up with ropes, I tried to snatch a gun from one of the killers. RANGAMATIRangamati is a picturesque town situated in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Those who tried to escape were shot. Read 4 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. We were told that any one found escaping would be shot. They have suffered because they and their parents or children were devoted to the ideology of Pakistan and many shed their blood for it. He was a courageous young man and he resisted the attackers. Wajihunnissa, 35, whose husband was employed in the Central Excise Department and was posted at Chandraghona, gave this account of the March 1971 slaughter of non-Bengalis in her township: “In the second week of March 1971, Awami League gangs visited the non-Bengalis in our locality and assured them that no harm would touch them if they surrendered their weapons. 78/K in the Sagoon Bagan locality in Chittagong, said that her eldest son died of a heart attack when a killer gang attacked their house and looted it on March 3, 1971. In the period of the Awami League’s insurgency in Dacca, kidnapping non-Bengalis for ransom and then slaying them was the favourite modus operandi of the Awami League rebels. Many, who escaped from their blazing houses, were shot in their tracks by the rebel gunmen. More arms shops in Dacca were looted by the Awami League terrorists. I thought of writing a book based on their testimony but I did not have eye-witnesses from all of the many scores of towns in East Pakistan where non-Bengali communities were wholly or partially exterminated. In the evening, I was stunned when some Civil Defence workers brought me his battered dead body. When our house was reduced to a rubble, my husband, Mohamed Mustafa, my little daughter and I sought refuge in a Mosque. Weeks passed and there was no news of him. Ability comes from hard work, practice, education, blood, sweat and tears. A riotous mob ambushed an Army jeep in Dacca and hijacked the six soldiers riding in it. Subsequently, the thugs changed their mind and carted us away to a big building where many hundreds of hapless non-Bengali women and children were herded. He was killed when Indian aircraft bombed the building where he worked………… “I was benumbed by the loss of my son. He asked his storm troopers to set up road blocks against military movements and to prevent the military from making use of railways and ports. The non-Bengali employees were known by the generic name of Biharis. Reports of a forest-fire of loot, arson and murder in almost every town of East Pakistan worried the federal government and the Army’s Eastern Command in Dacca. Guns were looted from the Police armoury in the town. Pakistan’s rejoinder to the flood of anti-Pakistan literature which has gushed from India’s propaganda mills since the Ides of March 1971 has been tragically weak and inadequate. They tied up my husband with ropes and took him away in a truck. He thinks that nearly 75 per cent of the non-Bengali male population in the Ispahani Jute Mills perished in the March 1971 massacre. The Arab World: Blood, Sweat and Tears! 4.0 (29 ratings) Read Add to Library . They were tortured in jails and killed. On April 9, after the Pakistan Army had re-established its control over Chittagong and our locality, we returned to our home. My conclusion is that we did the same crime what Pakistanis and Biharis did. There were many other terrorised non-Bengali families sheltered in the Mosque. When he saw some thugs coming towards it he locked it up, with me in hiding, and stood guard. On May 6, 1971, a group of six foreign correspondents representing the New York Times, Reuters, Associated Press of America, TIME Magazine, the Financial Times of London and the New China News Agency (Xinhua) flew to Dacca and made a fairly comprehensive tour of the rebellion-damaged areas of the province. Under the orders of the Awami League High Command, the Radio and Television stations in Dacca gave up playing Pakistan’s National Anthem and replaced it by the “Bangladesh Anthem”. The vast majority of the adult male non-Bengalis was eliminated by the rebels in a month of ruthless killing…..” Fatema and her children were repatriated to Karachi from Chittagong in February 1974. They told me and the three brothers of my husband that the Deputy Commissioner of Rangamati had instructed that we should be taken to his office to protect us. In Baidya Bazar, the rebel gangs wiped out a dozen non-Bengali families and looted their property. It showed the rubble of homes and shopping blocks shot up or put to the torch by the rebels but it gave very little evidence of the infernal slaughter-houses and torture chambers set up by the rebels in March 1971 to liquidate many thousands of their non-Bengali victims. It was then that I decided that the full story of this horrifying pogrom and the atrocities committed on the hapless non-Bengalis and other patriotic Pakistanis in East Pakistan (breakaway Bangladesh) should be unravelled before the world. Zaibunnissa Haq, 30, whose journalist husband, Izhar-ul Haque, worked as a columnist in the Daily Watan in Dacca, gave this account of her travail in 1971: “We lived in our own house on Razia Sultana Road in Mohammedpur in Dacca. They trucked the looted weapons to the Dacca University Campus where student storm troopers practised shooting on an improvised firing range.Frenzied mobs, armed with guns, knives, iron rods and staves, roamed at will and looted business houses, shops and cinemas owned by non-Bengalis. For months, before the Ides of March 1971, the hardcore leadership of the Awami League had primed its terror machine for confrontation with the authority of the federal government. There was a agenda to separate Pakistan to make Indian market therein Bangladesh. For many thousands of non-Bengalis, it was “the night of long knives and blazing guns”. In the third week of March, the terror regime of the rebels in Chittagong was so firmly established that they challenged even the military personnel in the area. The killer gang lined up the non-Bengali passengers on the bank of the river and gunned them to death. After the federal army took over Chittagong, I searched every nook and corner of Chittagong to locate my missing sisters-in-law but there was no trace of them. The civic fire fighting unit, manned mostly by Bengalis, had lapsed into a coma; fire engines which tried to reach the burning shanties were wrecked by the rebels. At least 75 per cent of the male non-Bengali population in Halishahar was wiped out by the rebels in March 1971…….”Mosharaf Hussain, 35, who owned a Jute Baling Press in Chittagong and lived in the Agrabad locality, gave this account of the grisly events in March 1971:“I had migrated from India to East Pakistan in 1950. The Red Cross Officials tried their best to trace out my missing husband but he was not found. In the fight that ensued, three of the raiders were killed and the others escaped. Slavery of Indian’s agencies like awami league. While her husband writhed in pain, she dug a shallow grave and buried her child. Gunrunning from India proceeded at a frenzied pace and many Indian agents infiltrated into East Pakistan for sabotage. Many of those innocents who were tortured and killed in the seventeen slaughter-houses set up by the Bengali rebels in the city and its vicinity were incinerated in houses put to the torch. Many of the American journalists in this motley crowd of foreign reporters (whose souls were saturated with compassion for the Bengali victims of the November 1970 cyclone tragedy) were so charmed by the public relations operatives of the Awami League that they were just not prepared to believe that their darlings in this fascist organization could commit or instigate the murder of the non-Bengalis. We lived there in abject poverty for many months. Even in some suburbs of Dacca, armed hotheads of the Awami League murdered non-Bengalis by the hundreds in the night of March 25/26, 1971. Fifty non-Bengali huts in a shanty suburban locality were put to the torch and many of their inmates were roasted alive. The goondas (thugs) went on the rampage. Stray survivors of this wanton massacre described the gory spectacle of fire and destruction as “hell on earth”. So we were known as Biharis. We were later on lodged in a Relief Camp……………” Batoolan and her daughter were repatriated to Karachi in February 1974. I have also pored over mounds of records, documents and foreign and Pakistani press clippings of that period. Life has been a torment for me since then………….” Saira Khatoon, 35, who lived in Mirpur in Dacca, gave this account of the murder of her husband, Abdul Hamid, in the March 1971 carnage of non-Bengalis in Dacca: “My husband left our home in Mirpur on March 25 to go to a meeting in the city. Awami League toughs who controlled all the access routes to the Hotel prevented their meeting. “In the forenoon of March 24, 1971, fifty Bengali gunmen, riding in trucks and jeeps, stormed the Mosque with blazing guns. To my horror, the skulls and bones of many children lay in heaps inside the locked room. But God was merciful and late in the night of March 25, the Army went into action against the rebels in Dacca and they were routed in the Jagannath Hall encounter. After the March 3 nocturnal baptism of fire, the rebels felt emboldened to attack other non-Bengali habitations in the city. My escape was nothing short of a miracle……….. “The Awami League militants had guns and plenty of ammunition. Repatriated to Karachi in January 1974, she said: “On March 5, a killer gang stole into our house. Even as the victims of a catastrophe, not of their own making, they are entitled to the fullest measure of our sympathy, empathy and support in restoring the splintered planks of their tragedy-stricken lives. When I visited Rangamati again, there was hardly any non-Bengali left”, he added. They trussed me up with ropes and said that they would slaughter my children before me. When I emerged from hiding, I saw many hundreds of burnt houses in our locality. At night, women whose husbands or sons had been slaughtered before them would shriek and wail as the memory of their dear ones haunted them”. A British press correspondent, who was in Dacca in March 1971, told me that a Bengali telephone operator cut off his long-distance conversation with his newspaper colleague in New Delhi in the third week of the month the moment he made mention of the blood-chilling massacre of non-Bengalis all over the province. “After the Indian victory in December 1971, the Mukti Bahini went on the rampage against non-Bengalis, looting and killing. Non-Bengali men, kidnapped from their houses, were taken by the rebels to slaughter-houses and done to death. My 16-year-old son had climbed an umbrageous tree and the raiders did not detect him………. As we prepared to go, the killers asked me at gunpoint to stay back. But in December 1971, Kulsoom’s little world was shattered: “It was December 12. But on December 17, 1971, when the Indian Army and the Mukti Bahini seized Dacca, hell burst upon the non-Bengalis again and hundreds of thousands of innocent people were butchered by the Mukti Bahini victors and their trigger-happy supporters”. As they had set up a Peace Committee, in whose meetings they solemnly pledged that they would not harm the non-Bengalis, we were not unduly alarmed. He said that I should not shelter any non-Bengali friends otherwise I and my children would be done to death. The men kissed their children and said goodbye to their wives, mothers and sisters. I hid myself behind a big machine at the far end of the Hall. Many of the non-Bengalis slaughtered in the Mill area were buried in mass graves hours before the federal army drove out the rebels. All of a sudden and in spite of my shouts in anger, he drove the vehicle into the compound of the Jagannath Hall where six armed students grabbed me. In a mosque, near the office of the Chittagong Fire Brigade, half a dozen non-Bengalis, who had been kidnapped from their homes by killer gangs, were murdered. Repatriated to Karachi in November 1973, Gulzar Hussain reported: “I was engaged in the Jute Trade in Narayanganj and I lived in a rented house not far from the commercial hub of the town. She massaged the child’s head and heart but tile baby died on the road. We spread a bed sheet and my wounded father lay on it. I fainted when I saw my husband, Nizamuddin, slump to the ground in a pool of blood”, said Hamida, 30, who lived in the vicinity of the Ferozeshah Colony in Chittagong. We held the raiders at bay for some time but they had more ammunition than we had. Wailing in anguish, we sought shelter in the mosque nearby. The number of non-Bengali employees and their families, most of whom lived in the Mill area, was close to 3,000. No one was sure that he would be alive the next morning. The killers followed a set pattern in their “Operation Loot, Burn and Kill” in Chittagong. There were no survivors. A foreign Red Cross team was passing our way in a jeep and they motioned us to stop. As a people, I hold the Bengalis in high esteem. Nasim Ahmed, 22, who lived with his father, a prominent Muslim League activist, in their own house in Pahartali area of Chittagong, gave this narrative of his father’s murder by the rebels:“My father, Mr. Wasim Ahmed, was a well-known and thriving businessman in Chittagong. He said he escaped death by climbing a tree in the darkness of the night. They shot my brother-in-law who died on the spot. “On March 26, an armed group of Awami Leaguers called at our house and ordered my husband to go with them to his office, I knew that it was a ruse and that they were after the blood of my husband…. Late in September 1973, the exchange of Bengalis in Pakistan with Pakistanis in Bangladesh and the repatriation of the Pakistani prisoners of war and civilian internees from India was commenced under the previous month’s New Delhi Agreement. Blood, Sweat & Tears is a jazz-rock music group, founded in New York City in 1967. The federal Army’s crackdown on the Bengali insurgents in Dacca showed that the Awami Leaguers, while engaged in talks with General Yahya, were collecting guns and ammunition and making explosives for the anticipated showdown with the federal army. I buried my dead husband in a shallow pit and covered it with mud. Killer gangs were again on the loose in our locality all through the next day. They burnt and looted a number of houses owned by non-Bengalis and kidnapped a number of non-Bengali menfolk……..”“On March 25, a gang of armed rebels smashed the front door of our flat and overpowered my husband. Thus one of the bloodiest slaughters of modern times went largely unreported in the international press. When I told them of our plight, they took us to the Red Cross Relief Camp in Mohammedpur where we lived for more than two years”. “In the third week of December 1971, when the Indian Army and the Mukti Bahini ruled Dacca, he went to his office and did not return home. Aside from the wholesale abridgement of the male element in the non-Bengali population in Chittagong, several thousands of non-Bengali girls and young women (14 to 30 years of age) were kidnapped by the rebels and ravished, some in mass sex assault chambers in guarded houses in the vicinity of the operational bases of the Bengali rebels. My brother was dead. I begged them to spare his life and even fell at their feet. “My only daughter has been insane since she was forced by her savage tormentors to watch the brutal murder of her husband”, said Mukhtar Ahmed Khan, 43, while giving an account of his suffering during the Ides of March 1971 in Dacca. In the latter locality alone, 700 houses were set ablaze and most of their inmates—men, women and children—were burnt to death. Mahila lived in a shack in the Wireless Colony in Chittagong. In the slaughter in the Amin Jute Mills at Bibirhat, some 2000 non-Bengalis—members of the staff and their families— were slaughtered. Full two years have passed and I have no news of him. They tied my hands with strong ropes and marched me to a large hall where many roped non-Bengali captives squatted on the ground………… “The student jingo who had asked me to write the ransom letter paced towards a hapless victim at the far end of the hall. Although they hail from 55 towns of East Pakistan, their narratives and the published dispatches of foreign newsmen quoted in this book, cover 110 places where the slaughter of the innocents took place. The killers swarmed into my unit and attacked the non-Bengal employees. They had plenty of arms and ammunition…………” After the federal troops secured Chittagong, Sami Ahmed lived for some months in his partly burnt house in Block No. He escaped the slaughter of non-Bengalis in the crowded New Market locality of Dacca on March 23, 1971 and was sheltered by a God-fearing Bengali in his shop. They burnt hundreds of houses. They tied up my son-in-law and my daughter with ropes and they forced her to watch as they slit the throat of her husband and ripped his stomach open in the style of butchers. All other press services and news¬papers in West Pakistan were given similar instruction. “As I did not see his dead body, I appealed to the federal Army to help me in locating my husband, dead or alive. Tikka Khan said the Army did not attack anyone unless first fired on and even dissidents in two Dacca University strongpoints, who were armed with automatic weapons and crude bombs, were given the chance to leave the building. Even before the bus could come to a halt, I jumped from it and ran towards a side lane. They turned two dormitory blocks of the Dacca University, the Iqbal Hall and the Jagannath Hall, into operational bases for their regime of terror. I learnt that some Bihari patients had died in the hospital for want of proper attention and care.” Hasina lived in a Red Cross Camp in Chittagong for two years and was repatriated to Pakistan in February, 1974. They also burnt the jute stocks and my shop which was located in the commercial hub of Chittagong…….. “For more than two years, I lived in abject poverty. Repatriated to Karachi in January 1974, Mobina Khatoon said:“On January 8, 1972, my husband was ill. Definition of blood, sweat and tears in the Idioms Dictionary. On May 2, 1971, the Sunday Times published, though belatedly, his write-up on the Awami League’s March-April, 1971 revolt and the trail of devastation it left behind. I was the sole occupant of my quarter and I slipped into the house of a very dear Bengali friend when the Awami League’s raid began. On April 13, our captors learnt that the Pakistani troops were marching towards Chandraghona. They had dumped the bodies, she said, into a hastily dug pit at the back of the office building……………..“My orphaned children and I lived for two years in the Red Cross Camp.

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