Let's talk about the other story: the women raped and killed. I don't believe it. Certainly there was no lack of excesses, but General Tikka Khan says that in those months he often invited the population to report abuses to him directly.
Do you know that Yahya Khan's first victim was not to have been Mujib [ Rahman] but myself? Many people in my party were in prison, and at the end of 1970, November 5, 1970, to be exact, he had said to Mujib, "Should I arrest Bhutto or not?" Look, the only reason why he reversed his schedule was that in West Pakistan he couldn't control the situation as in East Pakistan. Besides Mujib has never been intelligent - he let himself be backed into a corner.
Mujib [Rahman], as you've seen, is a congenital liar. He can't help telling lies - it's something stronger than he.
That Mujib [Rahiman] had been arrested I found out at eight in the morning, when I left. How did I take it? I was glad he was alive and I thought they might have maltreated him a little. Then I thought that his arrest might help to reach a compromise. They wouldn't keep him in prison more than a month or two, and in the meantime we'd be able to bring back law and order.
Lets build a monument for the veto. Lets build a monument for impotence and incapacity.
A dreaded society is not a civilized society. The most progressive and powerful society in the civilized sense, is a society which has recognized its ethos, and come to terms with the past and the present, with religion and science. With modernism and mysticism, with materialism and spirituality; a society free of tension, a society rich in culture. Such a society cannot come with hocus-pocus formulas and with fraud. It has to flow from the depth of a divine search.
Tikka Khan was a soldier doing a soldier's job.
We know who left the country. And many were Bengalis from West Bengal, sent from Calcutta. It was she who sent them - Mrs.[Indira] Gandhi.
[Tikka Khan] went to East Pakistan with precise orders and came back by precise orders. He did what he was ordered to do, though he wasn't always in agreement, and I picked him because I know he'll follow my orders with the same discipline.
If things do not change, there will be nothing left to change. Either power must pass to the people or everything will perish.
I tried to explain that there was a great difference between me and Mujib [Rahiman]: he was a secessionist and I wasn't.
Even to get Yahya Khan to reason was an impossible task - it only made you lose your temper.
The sanction of force stands behind the medley of personal orders and regulations of Martial Law. The sanction of the people's consent stands behind the hierarchy of laws. In one situation, the population is regimented into acquiescence. In the other, the population voluntarily establishes a contract with Parliament.
Mrs. [Indira] Gandhi can rightly boast of having won a war, but if she won it, she should first of all thank Yahya Khan and his gang of illiterate psychopaths.
I am guiding you to seek truth from the facts of the historical conditions of our society and to identify the problems. The correct solutions will come with the correct identification of the problems.
In March [1972] the unity of Pakistan depended on the suppression of the secessionists. But to carry it out with such brutality on the people instead of on those responsible wasn't necessary. That's not the way to convince poor people who've been told that with the Six Points there'll be no more hurricanes, no more floods, no more hunger. I spoke out against such methods more emphatically than anyone else, and when no one dared do so.
There's only one man really responsible for those events - Yahya Khan. Both he and his advisers were so drunk with power and corruption they'd even forgotten the honor of the army.
Tear gas, rubber bullets, and I would have arrested all the leaders. Oh, only a disgusting drunkard like ex-President Yahya Khan could have sullied himself with an operation carried out so badly and bloodily.
Yahya Khan wasn't interested in the government of the country, he was interested in power for its own sake and nothing else.
[Mujib Rahman] is mad, mad! And they're all mad, the press included, who repeat after him, "Three million dead, three million dead!" The Indians had let out the figure of one million. He came along and doubled it. Then tripled it. It's a characteristic of the man - he'd done the same for the hurricane.
