Word: bengal
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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WITH the awesome fury of a cyclone off the Bay of Bengal, civil war swept across East Pakistan last week. In city after crowded, dusty city the army turned its guns on mobs of rioting civilians. Casualties mounted into the thousands. Though the full toll remained uncertain because of censorship and disorganization in the world's most densely populated corner (1,400 people per sq. mi.), at week's end some estimates had 2,000 dead. Even if President Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan is prepared to accept casualties of a geometrically greater magnitude, the outcome is likely...
...blasts rocked half a dozen scattered sections of Dacca. Tracers arced over the darkened city. The staccato chatter of automatic weapons was punctuated with grenade explosions, and tall columns of black smoke towered over the city. In the night came the occasional cry of 'Joi Bangla [Victory to Bengal],' followed by a burst of machine-gun fire...
...army ordered a strict 24-hour curfew in Dacca, with violators shot on sight. But soon the Free Bengal Revolutionary Radio Center, probably somewhere in Chittagong, crackled into life. Over the clandestine station. Mujib proclaimed the creation of the "sovereign independent Bengali nation," and called on its people to "resist the enemy forces at all costs in every corner of Bangla Desh." The defiant words, however, lacked military substance. At 1:30 a.m. the following day, soldiers seized the sheik in his home. Meanwhile, scattered rioting broke out in West Pakistan to protest the prospect of prolonged military rule...
Gray-haired, stocky and tall for a Bengali (6 ft.), the bespectacled Mujib always wears a loose white shirt with a black, sleeveless, vestlike jacket. A moody man, he tends to scold Bengalis like so many children. He was born in the East Bengal village of Tongipara 51 years ago to a middle-class landowner (his landlord status accounts for the title of sheik). Mujib studied liberal arts at Calcutta's Islamia College and law at Dacca University. He lives with his wife Fazil-itunessa, three sons and two daughters in a modest two-story house in Dacca...
...government must find a way to cut through the legal red tape that has effectively hamstrung land reform. The zamindars, a breed of feudal aristocrats and absentee landlords whose estates often consisted of as many as 50 or more entire villages, have got around the law in West Bengal by parceling out property to relatives, who often number in the hundreds. Though land reform is a state problem, Indira is expected to draft model legislation and then urge state legislatures to implement it. If they do not, land-grabbing revolts could spread across the country...