![]() ![]() All other press services and news¬papers in West Pakistan were given similar instruction. In the first week of March 1971, when the Awami League had fired the first salvo of revolt in East Pakistan and it triggered off a forest fire of lawlessness, arson, loot and wanton murder all over the province, a senior official of the federal Information Ministry instructed me that my news service should not put out any story about the atrocities that were being committed on non-Bengalis by the rebels in the eastern half of the country. The book highlights the courage and heroism of many Bengalis who saved their non-Bengali friends from the fire and fury of the bloodthirsty insurgents. While the focus in “Blood and Tears” is on the rebels’ atrocities in the infernal March-April, 1971, period, the brutality of the Indian-trained Bengali guerrilla force, the Mukti Bahini, after India’s armed grab of East Pakistan on December 17th 1971, is also recounted, though in less detail. ![]() The majority of eyewitnesses consist of the parents who saw their children slam, the wives who were forced by the rebels to witness the murder of their husbands, the girls who were ravished and the rare escapees from the rebel-operated human slaughterhouses. 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 170 eye-witnesses, whose tragic accounts of their splintered and trauma-stricken lives are contained in this book, were picked from amongst nearly 5000 families repatriated to Pakistan from Bangladesh between the autumn of 1973 and the spring of 1974. The danger of such a reprisal has now been eliminated by the repatriation to Bangladesh from Pakistan of all the Bengalis who wished to go there. ![]() The details of the genocide waged by the rebels in those murderous months were concealed from the people of West Pakistan by the then federal government to prevent reprisals against the local Bengalis and also not to wreck the prospects of a negotiated settlement with the Awami League.
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