Word: bengalis
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Fierce fighting raged last week in East Pakistan as Bengali townspeople and peasants resisted the "occupation army" of 80,000 West Pakistani soldiers. Reports have indicated that as many as 200,000 civilians have been killed by the heavily armed West Pakistani troopers. But soldiers have also suffered severe casualties at the hands of irate peasants. The army controlled the capital of Dacca, the vital ports of Chittagong and Khulna, and several other towns. But a ragtag resistance movement called the Bangla Desh Mukti Fauj (Bengal State Liberation Forces) was reportedly already in control of at least one-third...
...halt outside Kushtia's police station. It was 10:30 on the night the war broke out. Delta Company of the 27th Baluch Regiment had arrived from its base at Jessore cantonment 60 miles to the south. The 147 men of the company quickly disarmed some 500 Bengali policemen without meeting any resistance and then occupied four additional key points: the district police headquarters, the government office building, the VHP radio transmitter and the Zilla school for boys. Most of the sleeping townspeople did not realize what had happened until 5:30 a.m., when Jeeploads of soldiers with bullhorns...
Mass Graves. Opposed only by bands of Bengali peasants armed with stones and bamboo sticks, tanks rolled through Dacca, the East's capital, blowing houses to bits. At the university, soldiers slaughtered students inside the British Council building. "It was like Genghis Khan," said a shocked Western official who witnessed the scene. Near Dacca's marketplace, Urdu-speaking government soldiers ordered Bengali-speaking townspeople to surrender, then gunned them down when they failed to comply. Bodies lay in mass graves at the university, in the Old City, and near the municipal dump...
During rebel attacks on Chittagong, Pakistani naval vessels shelled the port, setting fire to harbor installations. At Jessore, in the southwest, angry Bengalis were said to have hacked alleged government spies to death with staves and spears. Journalists at the Petrapole checkpoint on the Indian border found five bodies and a human head near the frontier post-the remains, apparently, of a group of West Pakistanis who had tried to escape. At week's end there were reports that East Bengali rebels were maintaining a precarious hold on Jessore and perhaps Chittagong. But in Dacca and most other cities...
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...