BANGLADESH ON THE BRINK OF CIVIL WARP

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may De on hol d of Divouy civl war, accoraing to eye-witnesses who have quit the country for the 'safety of London'.

In the Bangladesh capital, Dacca, dusk falls each day to the accompaniment of rifle and small arms fire which sometimes lasts throughout the night.

In the cities, towns and even villages shops are looted and after daylight corpses are found in their homes or by the roadside shot or battered to death by unknown hands.

With unemployment and poverty raging, the writ of the Awami League government is being increasingly devalued by the actions of minorities taking the law into their own hands.

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman is determined to halt the breakup of his country by obtaining a clear expression of public support at the General Elections sheduled for March 7.

An Awami League splinter group disaffected with Rahman's softness - the Jatiye Shamajtantrik Dal (National Socialist Party) - is making shrill calls for a benevolent dictatorship in Bangladesh.

Rahman's strategy of asking his people to be patient while the new nation is built is in ruins. The right wing is clamouring for force to hold restive elements in check.

Black market and smuggling Lavish foreign aid (at interest rates which in five years time will financially cripple the country) is falling disastrously short of what is required to develop the largely agricultural and war-shattered economy.

Essential goods are scarce and smuggling and black marketeering is flourishing, fanning the already chronic inflation.

With the Pakistanis out of their country, industrial workers expected rapid advances in their wages and living standards.

Instead Rahman has banned strikes. And since independence, he has less than doubled wages while prices have risen eightfold in the same period.

After months of mounting frustration, their anger broke loose last week after Rahman's police shot two students and injured at least six others.

Led by the pro-Moscow faction of the National Awami Party, workers at most factories in Dacca downed tools in a one-day General Strike against the killings.

The students belonged NAP, whose members now control Dacca students' union after Awami Leaguers ousted from power.

Since independence the pro-Moscow NAP has been known as the Awami League's 'B team' and the decision to call a demonstration at the beginning of this month against the US bombing of Vietnam can only be seen as a diversion.

If the NAP leaders intended seriously to oppose the Awami League government which until now they have critically supported, why not base their campaign on urgent home issues like prices, wages and the government's repressive labour code?

The Bengali government had already recognized North Vietnam and individual leaders, including Rahman, had condemned the bombing. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Above: Moulana Bashani, veteran leader of the pro-Peking National Awami Party, addresses a huge rally in Dacca.

The riots in three cities and the General Strike in Dacca which followed . were seen by Rahman and the right wing alike as a serious incipient niminat threat to their rule.

Rahman himself called on loyal peasants and student supporters of the Awami League to 'save Bangladesh from communism'.

In an orgy of violence on January 5 pro-Rahman supporters set fire to the National Awami Party (Moscow wing) offices in Dacca.

Then they • stormed on to set fire to the offices of the pro-Moscow students' union and threw stones at the offices of the pro-Peking Revolutionary Students' Union and the pro-Moscow Communist PAPERBACKS CENTRE 28 Charlotte St London W1 The Awami League is blatantly moulding the political situation into one in which all left groups can be lumped logeiner as saboteurs and taranthra Santataren' and 'trouble makers' The March 7 election is calculated to give Rahman a mandate to take decisive action.

Relying on peasants' vote He is relying on a massive confidence vote from Bangladesh peasants, many of whom benefited from the 25 per cent slashing of land revenues introduced as a popular measure when he came to power.

But this is by no means certain. A rally held by the BOOKS • PERIODICALS & NEWSPAPERS pro-Peking National Awami Party in Dacca last week drew up to 50,000 workers and peasants at a race-course meeting addressed by veteran leader Moulana Bashani.

Now UN secretary-general Kurt Waldheim has warned that Bangladesh will need up to 2 million tons of grain this year if famine is to be averted.

Together with Rahman's failure to redistribute land on any large scale, the effect of black marketeering and drought on food supplies and the general shortage of cash in the countryside, the stage is set for serious upheavals in 1973.

While the Awami League turns to repression in the face of the country's insoluble problems, workers and peasants alike are being thrown into confusion by the absence of a political leadership willing and able to provide an alternative.

The combined effect of shortages and the first taste of power for Awami Leaguers is a government riddled with corruption.

While the right-wing marshals its forces behind Rahman's back, the largely Stalinist opposition is paralysed by its adherence to the perspective of giving the Bangabandhu (Rahman) first one chance, then another and still another to ast tha rauntru on ite fast to get the country on its feet.

The net result is the increasing break-down of law and order and of established political relations.

There are now more guns in Bangladesh than during the war against Pakistan, ranging from pistols to bazookas, and raids are becoming increasingly commonplace as individuals and groups seize what they can get no other way.

In this dog-eat-dog atmosphere of deprivation and terror the ingredients exist for civil war. Businessmen, journalists, doctors and lawyers are said to be making preparations to leave the country.

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