The Rape of Bangladesh

Mascarenhas says Yahya Khan and the supporters of the military junta never really wanted a settlement with the Awami League on honorable terms. The talks were only a smokescreen devised to put the Bengali leaders off their guard while preparations went on feverishly for a military crackdown. The Rape of Bangla Desh is current history come alive, written competently and objectively, but nevertheless devastating in its exposure of the enormities of a military junta hellbent on smothering democracy and the basic decencies of human society. on 18 May 1971 a Pakistani journalist turned up at the office of the Sunday Times in London. He said he wanted to write the true story of the happenings in East bengal, and the atrocities committed by the military rulers of Pakistan against a whole people in revolt for their democratic rights. He laid down one condition. The Sunday Times must not publish his report until he went back to Pakistan and got his wife and five children out of the country. He went back to Karachi and got permission to send his family to England, but only if he stayed behind. He managed to smuggle himself out as well, and his report appeared in the Sunday Times in june 1971. This journalist was Anthony Mascarenhas, the author of this authentiv, spine-chilling, eyr-witness account of the large-scale massacre perpetrated by Pakistani militarists on the people of East Bengal. Mascarenhas was one of the eight West Pakistani journalists whom the military administration took on a conducted tour of the eastern province so that they could could go back and tell the people of West Pakistan about "the great job the army was doing." Mascarenhas's conscience would not permit him to be an accomplice to this fraud. He decided that "either I would write the full story of what I had seen or I would have to stop writing."