Epic tales of our Freedom Fighters

It is time once again to recall the epic War of Liberation we waged fifty-two years ago. It is that moment when history comes alive, shines again, to remind us of the dark times we passed through before emerging on to the landscape of liberty in all its splendour.

Beginning in April 1971, the Bangali resistance to the Pakistan occupation army would be swelled by increasing numbers of Bangali deserters from the Pakistan armed forces as well as the police and East Pakistan Rifles. But the bulk of Mukti Bahini strength throughout the weeks and months to liberation would come from Bangali youths in the villages and district towns of the occupied country.

Among the officers who would take charge of the eleven sectors of war were Major KM Safiullah, Major Ziaur Rahman, Major Khaled Musharraf, Major MA Manzoor, Lt Col Abu Taher, Major Nuruzzaman, and Major Rafiqul Islam. Of the group, Manzoor and Taher would escape from cantonments in West Pakistan they were posted in and make their way to Mujibnagar. From the air force, there were AK Khondokar and Khademul Bashar. Over a period of time, other military officers would turn up and join the war effort. There were many others who, while trying to cross over to India from West Pakistan, were detected by Pakistan's border forces and placed under arrest. 

In August of the year, Flight Lieutenant Matiur Rahman, a Bangali based at the air force base in Karachi, took off on what was to be a training flight for the Pakistani junior officer in his care, Rashed Minhaz. Once in the air, Rahman tried to seize the jet fighter from his pupil and steer it towards the border with India, his obvious objective being to go over to Bangladesh. An apparent struggle between the two men led to the plane crashing in the deserts of Sind.

Apart from the operations launched by the Mukti Bahini against the Pakistani forces in various parts of Bangladesh, other guerrilla groups such as Abdul Kader Siddiqui's Kaderia Bahini operated inside Bangladesh and never crossed the border into India. The ferocity of the Kaderia Bahini in time became the stuff of legend and even had Pakistan's soldiers encamped in Kader Siddiqui's native Tangail district fearing for their safety.

Sheikh Fazlul Haq Moni and the younger elements in the resistance formed a new group of freedom fighters they called the Bangladesh Liberation Force (BLF), also known as Mujib Bahini. Broadly speaking, it was the Mukti Bahini that provided the thrust of the movement against the Pakistani forces. The guerrillas, coming from middle class Bangali families in the country's rural regions, quickly gained a reputation for swiftness of movement and precision attacks on the soldiers.

Old, often grainy images of Bangladesh's War of Liberation show carrion feeding on the bloated bodies of murdered Bangali civilians along the rivers and marshes of the country. And among these pictures is the odd spectacle of grinning Bangali villagers holding up the severed head of a Pakistani soldier killed by the Mukti Bahini. Those members of the Mukti Bahini caught by the army were subjected to medieval forms of torture before the life went out of them. Many were the tales of Bangali civil and military officers being picked up by the soldiers and carted off to death or prolonged torture.

Colonel AF Ziaur Rahman, a Bangali officer in the Pakistan army medical corps and principal of Sylhet Medical College, was picked up in April and never seen again. Alamgir Rahman, representative of Burmah Shell, was confined to the cantonment and tortured for the entire duration of the war. He survived, just, but the torture had clearly taken its toll. 

The husband and son of Jahanara Imam were picked up by the Pakistan army. The son never came back. A few days after his release, her badly tortured husband died. In the early stages of the War of Liberation, a young lieutenant in the army, Shamsher Mobin Chowdhury, was captured by the soldiers and tortured throughout the nine months of the war. He miraculously survived and emerged free once Pakistan surrendered.

The War of Liberation turned out to be an inclusive affair that united Bangalis across the spectrum and beyond the confines of the occupied country. Justice Abu Sayeed Chowdhury, Vice Chancellor of Dhaka University and representing Pakistan at a human rights conference in Geneva at the time of the crackdown, denounced the military action and switched his allegiance to the Bangladesh cause. He was later deputed to take charge of the Bangladesh mission in London, where he played an instrumental role in organising overseas Bangalis for the specific purpose of disseminating information about the national cause in Europe. 

Bangali diplomats in Pakistani embassies abroad began to defect to the independence cause within days of the crackdown and the declaration of independence. The earliest move was made, even before the Mujibnagar government came into existence, by KM Shehabuddin and Amjadul Haq, stationed in the Pakistani consulate in Bombay, through a public statement condemning the atrocities committed by the army and switching their loyalty to the Bangali cause. In Calcutta, the Bangali deputy high commissioner for Pakistan, M Hossain Ali, hoisted the Bangladesh flag atop the building housing the mission and claimed it for his occupied country. When the Pakistan government, despite its efforts, was unable to reclaim the building, it simply closed down the mission.

The office then became one of the focal points of the Bangali struggle. Abroad, AFM Abul Fateh, the senior-most Bangali in an ambassadorial position, declared his rejection of Pakistan. Infuriated, the Islamabad authorities tried to have him recalled to Islamabad and failed in trying to do so. Shah AMS Kibria, Humayun Rashid Chowdhury, Abul Maal Abdul Muhith, AH Mahmood Ali, MM Rezaul Karim, Waliur Rahman and Mohiuddin Ahmed, among a number of others, opted to serve the government-in-exile through public condemnation of Pakistan's actions in occupied Bangladesh. 

The sinister nature of Pakistan's genocide was not lost on a senior West Pakistani diplomat, Iqbal Athar. In a move that amazed not only his own country but also Bangalis, he defected to the Bangladesh cause. In independent Bangladesh, he was to serve as ambassador in a number of important countries until his death. 

In China, Khwaja Mohammad Kaiser, who belonged to the Nawab family of old Dhaka, faced a particular dilemma. He was Pakistan's trusted envoy in Beijing and highly regarded by the Chinese authorities. Clearly inclined to identify with the Bangali cause, he was unable to find the means to do it, given particularly the vocal support China was giving Pakistan over the Bangladesh crisis. 

It was for Premier Zhou En-lai to advise Kaiser to carry on as best he could, a job he fulfilled till the end. In later years, Kaiser was to go back to Beijing, this time to serve as Bangladesh's ambassador in a country where he had for a long time upheld the interests of Pakistan.

Within West Pakistan, a very large number of Bangali military as well as civilian officers were stranded as a result of the war. In the case of the military personnel, the authorities exercised particular measures to prevent them from escaping or acting in a way that could recreate the sense of crisis caused by the Matiur Rahman affair. 

One of the most senior officers in the army was again a man with roots in East Pakistan. Khwaja Wasiuddin, a son of Ayub Khan's minister for information Khwaja Shahabuddin and nephew of the late governor general and prime minister Khwaja Nazimuddin, served as a lieutenant general in the Pakistan army. Respected by his Pakistani colleagues, nevertheless during the entire duration of the war, he remained deprived of any specific responsibility. 

Khwaja Wasiuddin was repatriated to Bangladesh after the war and honourably retired from the army. The government sent him off to Kuwait as the new country's ambassador.

Sketch: TBS

Syed Badrul Ahsan writes on politics, history and literature.