...The people of West Pakistan are silent spectators to the genocide...

—TAJUDDIN AHMAD, 17 April 1971

No one from West Pakistan can meet a Bengali or for that any informed foreigner without being confronted by complaints such as the one made by Tajuddin, Prime Minister of the free Bangla Desh government, or by the inevitable question: didn't you know what was happening? This has been my own experience prior to the middle of April 1971, and the experience of several others from the western wing, including some top flight politicians, who have travelled abroad since the military horror was let loose in East Bengal on 25 March 1971.

The answer, paradoxically, is both yes and no, But it is hardly a paradox. Things happen that way in Pakistan, thanks to the inventive, imaginative efforts of the Information Ministry which could more appropriately be called the propaganda department.

The answer is no because for many months, at least till the end of July 1971, the people of West Pakistan had no real knowledge of what was happening in East Bengal. The military regime clamped, down a tight censorship on 25 March. From that moment till the end of July when censorship was formally lifted, no newspaper in Pakistan, and this includes Bengali dailies published in East Bengal, carried a single report on anything even remotely near the truth. The government decreed it that way. For the first two months, up to the end of May, press reports from Dacca and elsewhere in East Bengal were only carefully tailored press releases by military and civilian information officers. They emphasized the quick return of "normalcy" in the eastern wing following Sheikh Mujib's civil disobedience campaign, and made out that the army was engaged in a patriotic action against scores of "Indian infiltrators" and assorted groups of "miscreants," The last named, were spotty reports so even if one carefully read between the lines it was impossible to get anything like the real picture of what was happening. There was no mention of the brutal army operation in Dacca and Chittagong which by then had taken over 50,000 lives. Nor was there any mention of the fact that the central government's writ was then being observed only in these two places while the rest of the province was under the control of the Bengali resistance. West Pakistanis did not know that the Pakistan Air Force was making regular sorties every day against the Bengali resistance fighters. Nor did they know that the entire East Bengal military units, such as the East Bengal Regiment and the East Pakistan Rifles, the paramilitary Ansars and Mujahids, were in revolt and bravely fighting the West Pakistan army. West Pakistani refugees from East Bengal indeed brought with them stories of Bengali "atrocities" but they gave no information about atrocities being committed by the Pakistan army in its deli berate campaign of genocide. Even otherwise well-informed newspaper men were not taken into confidence about the real situation. We were told by