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US media celebrates Mujib’s triumphant return to Bangladesh

• It was a day of high emotion for the East Bengali leader, the designated president of Bangladesh

• Prime Minister Heath, who was out in the country, quickly returned to 10 Downing Street to meet Sheikh Mujib. They, talked for an hour this evening.

• Pakistanis did not want to fly him direct to Dacca or to any place in India, perhaps because this would seem a humiliation to them. President Bhutto was said to have suggested Iran or Turkey instead, but Sheik Mujib reportedly preferred London if he could not go directly home.

• A few hours later after reaching London, Mujib talked by telephone with India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in New Delhi and with the acting President of Bangladesh, Syed Nazrul Islam, in Dacca, and held a press conference in the ballroom of Claridge’s Hotel.

• While scores of jubilant British-Bangladeshis gathered outside the hotel, Mujib called for world recognition of Bangladesh, which he described as “an unchallengeable reality,” and asked that it be admitted to the United Nations.

• Mujib spoke well of Bhutto, however, but emphasized that he had made no promise that Bangladesh and Pakistan would maintain a link that Bhutto anxiously wants to have.

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's return to Bangladesh from a Pakistani jail on January 10, 1972, was a pivotal moment in the country's history. On this day, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, also known as Bangabandhu, returned to Bangladesh after being released from prison. His arrival marked not only the end of his imprisonment but also the start of his leadership in the newly independent nation, fulfilling the dream of independence for the people of Bangladesh.

Mujib's release followed the conclusion of the Bangladesh Liberation War, and his return was celebrated with great enthusiasm. Over half a million people gathered at the Racecourse Ground in Dhaka to welcome him back. His speech on this historic day is remembered as one of his most significant addresses, where he expressed gratitude and shared his vision for the future of Bangladesh.

This day was traditionally celebrated as Bangabandhu's Homecoming Day, honouring his return and the sacrifices made for the country's independence. However, the interim Yunus Government has since eliminated this celebration in an attempt to revise Bangladesh’s history, sparking criticism for distorting the true narrative of the country's struggle for independence.

The global media extensively covered this historic occasion. Two of the most notable reports were published by US leading newspapers Time and The New York Times in January 1972. The reports highlighted the dramatic nature of Mujib's release from prison in Pakistan and the significance of his stopover in London. However, in the article, The New York Times mistakenly spelt "Sheikh" as "Sheik," likely due to a misunderstanding of the pronunciation of the Bengali name. For reference, we have included the full text of the reports below, which stands as a testament to the Times and New York Times' journalism during the important transition of newly independent Bangladesh.

TIME

Mujib’s Road from Prison to Power

January 17, 1972 12:00 AM EST

TO some Western observers, the scene stirred thoughts of Pontius Pilate deciding the fates of Jesus and Barabbas. “Do you want Mujib freed?” cried Pakistan President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, at a rally of more than 100,000 supporters in Karachi. The crowd roared its assent, as audiences often do when subjected to Bhutto’s powerful oratory. Bowing his head, the President answered: “You have relieved me of a great burden.”

Thus last week Bhutto publicly announced what he had previously told TIME Correspondent Dan Coggin: his decision to release his celebrated prisoner, Sheik Mujibur (“Mujib”) Rahman, the undisputed political leader of what was once East Pakistan, and President of what is now the independent country of Bangladesh.

Five days later, after two meetings with Mujib, Bhutto lived up to his promise. He drove to Islamabad Airport to see Mujib off for London aboard a chartered Pakistani jetliner. To maintain the utmost secrecy, the flight left at 3 a.m. The secret departure was not announced to newsmen in Pakistan until ten hours later, just before the arrival of the Shah of Iran at the same airport for a six-hour visit with Bhutto. By that time Mujib had reached London—tired but seemingly in good health. “As you can see, I am very much alive and well,” said Mujib, jauntily puffing on a brier pipe. “At this stage I only want to be seen and not heard.”

A few hours later, however, after talking by telephone with India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in New Delhi and with the acting President of Bangladesh, Syed Nazrul Islam, in Dacca, Mujib held a press conference in the ballroom of Claridge’s Hotel. While scores of jubilant East Bengalis gathered outside the hotel, Mujib called for world recognition of Bangladesh, which he described as “an unchallengeable reality,” and asked that it be admitted to the United Nations.

Clearly seething with rage, Mujib described his life “in a condemned cell in a desert area in the scorching heat,” for nine months without news of his family or the outside world. He was ready to be executed, he said. “And a man who is ready to die, nobody can kill.” He knew of the war, he said, because “army planes were moving, and there was the blackout.” Only after his first meeting with Bhutto did he know that Bangladesh had formed its own government. Of the Pakistani army’s slaughter of East Bengalis, Mujib declared: “If Hitler could have been alive today, he would be ashamed.”

Mujib spoke well of Bhutto, however, but emphasized that he had made no promise that Bangladesh and Pakistan would maintain a link that Bhutto anxiously wants to have. “I told him I could only answer that after I returned to my people,” said the sheik. Why had he flown to London instead of to Dacca or some closer neutral point? “Don’t you know I was a prisoner?” Mujib snapped. “It was the Pakistan government’s will, not mine.” While in London, he said, he hoped to meet with British Prime Minister Edward Heath before leaving for a triumphal return to Bangladesh.

Little Choice. Although Mujib’s flight to London rather than to Dacca was something of a surprise, his release from house arrest was not. In truth, Bhutto had little choice but to set him free. A Mujib imprisoned, Bhutto evidently decided, was of no real benefit to Pakistan; a Mujib dead and martyred would only have deepened the East Bengalis’ hatred of their former countrymen. But a Mujib allowed to return to his rejoicing people might perhaps be used to coax Bangladesh into forming some sort of loose association with Pakistan.

In the light of Mujib’s angry words about Pakistan at the London press conference, Bhutto’s dream of reconciliation with Bangladesh appeared unreal. Yet some form of association may not be entirely beyond hope of achievement. For the time being, Bangladesh will be dependent upon India for financial, military and other aid. Bhutto may well have been reasoning that sooner or later the Bangladesh leaders will tire of the presence of Indian troops and civil servants, and be willing to consider a new relation with their humbled Moslem brothers.

Bangladesh, moreover, may find it profitable and even necessary to reestablish some of the old trade ties with Pakistan. As Bhutto put it:

“The existing realities do not constitute the permanent realities.”

Stupendous Homecoming. One existing reality that Bhutto could hardly ignore was Bangladesh’s euphoric sense of well-being after independence.

When the news reached Bangladesh that Mujib had been freed, Dacca began preparing a stupendous homecoming for its national hero. All week long the capital had been electric with expectation. In the wake of the first reports that his arrival was imminent, Bengalis poured into the streets of Dacca, shouting, dancing, singing, firing rifles into the air and roaring the now-familiar cry of liberation “Joi Bangla.” Many of the rejoicing citizens made a pilgrimage to the small bungalow where Mujib’s wife and children had been held captive by the Pakistani army. The Begum had spent the day fasting. “When I heard the gun fire in March it was to kill the people of Bangladesh,” she tearfully told the well-wishers. “Now it is to demonstrate their joy.”

The people of Bangladesh will need all the joy that they can muster in the next few months. The world’s newest nation is also one of its poorest.

In the aftermath of the Pakistani army’s rampage last March, a special team of inspectors from the World Bank observed that some cities looked “like the morning after a nuclear at tack.” Since then, the destruction has only been magnified. An estimated 6,000,000 homes have been destroyed, and nearly 1,400,000 farm families have been left without tools or animals to work their lands. Transportation and communications systems are totally disrupted. Roads are damaged, bridges out and inland waterways blocked.

The rape of the country continued right up until the Pakistani army surrendered a month ago. In the last days of the war, West Pakistani-owned businesses—which included nearly every commercial enterprise in the country—remitted virtually all their funds to the West. Pakistan International Airlines left exactly 117 rupees ($16) in its account at the port city of Chittagong. The army also destroyed bank notes and coins, so that many areas now suffer from a severe shortage of ready cash. Private cars were picked up off the streets or confiscated from auto dealers and shipped to the West before the ports were closed.

Ruined Gardens. The principal source of foreign exchange in Bangladesh—$207 million in 1969-70—is jute; it cannot be moved from mills to markets until inland transportation is restored. Repairing vital industrial machinery smashed by the Pakistanis will not take nearly as long as making Bangladesh’s ruined tea gardens productive again. Beyond that, the growers, whose poor-quality, lowland tea was sold almost exclusively to West Pakistan, must find alternative markets for their product. Bangladesh must also print its own currency and, more important, find gold reserves to back it up. “We need foreign exchange, that is, hard currency,” says one Dacca banker. “That means moving the jute that is already at the mills. It means selling for cash, not in exchange for Indian rupees or East European machinery. It means getting foreign aid, food relief, and fixing the transportation system, all at the same time. It also means chopping imports.”

The Bangladesh Planning Commission is more precise: it will take $3 billion just to get the country back to its 1969-70 economic level (when the per capita annual income was still an abysmally inadequate $30). In the wake of independence, the government of Bangladesh, headed by Acting President Syed Nazrul Islam and Prime Minister Tajuddin Ahmed, has instituted stringent measures to control inflation, including a devaluation of the rupee in terms of the pound sterling (from 15 to 18), imposing a ceiling of $140 a month on all salaries and limiting the amount of money that Bengalis can draw from banks. Such measures hit hardest at the urban, middle-class base of the dominant Awami League, but there has been little opposition, largely because most Bengalis seem to approve of the moderately socialist course laid out by the government. Last week Nazrul Islam announced that the government will soon nationalize the banking, insurance, foreign trade and basic industries as a step toward creating an “exploitation-free economy.”

Not the least of the new nation’s problems is the repatriation of the 10 million refugees who fled to India. As of last week, Indian officials said that more than 1,000,000 had already returned, most of them from the states of West Bengal and Tripura. To encourage the refugees, camp officials gave each returning family a small gift consisting of a new set of aluminium kitchen utensils, some oil, charcoal, a piece of chocolate, two weeks’ rations of rice and grain and the equivalent of 50¢ in cash.

Within Bangladesh, transit camps have been set up to provide overnight sleeping facilities. The government acknowledges that it will need foreign aid and United Nations assistance.

Some U.N. supplies are already stockpiled in the ports, awaiting restoration of distribution facilities.

Front Windshields. Despite its ravaged past and troubled future, Bangladesh is still a lovely land to behold, according to TIME’S William Stewart. “There is little direct evidence of the fighting along the main highway from Calcutta to Dacca,” he cabled from Dacca last week, “although in some areas there are artillery-shell craters and the blackened skeletons of houses. Local markets do a brisk business in fruit and staple goods, but by Bengali standards many of the villages are all but deserted.

“Dacca has all the friendliness of a provincial town, its streets filled with hundreds of bicycle-driven rickshas, each one painted with flowers and proudly flying the new flag of Bangladesh. In fact every single car in Dacca flies the national flag, and many have Mujib’s photo on the front windshield. The city is dotted with half-completed construction projects, including the new capital buildings designed by U.S. Architect Louis Kahn. Some day, when and if they are completed, Dacca will find itself with a collection of public buildings that might well be the envy of many a richer and more established capital.

“But whether you arrive at Dacca’s war-damaged airport or travel the tree-lined main road from Calcutta, it is the relaxed, peaceful atmosphere that is most noticeable. Even as travel to Bangladesh becomes more difficult, customs and immigration officials are genuinely friendly and polite, smiling broadly, cheerily altering your entry forms so that you conform with the latest regulations. There is no antagonism to individual Americans. Once it is known that you are an American, however, the inevitable question is: How could the Nixon Administration have behaved the way that it did? There is in fact an almost universal belief that the American people are with them.

“That sentiment was echoed by Tajuddin Ahmed, who told me in an interview: The Nixon Administration has inflicted a great wound. Time heals wounds, of course, but there will be a scar. We are grateful to the American press, intellectual leaders and all those who raised their voices against injustice. Pakistan turned this country into a hell. We are very sorry that some administrations of friendly countries were giving support to killers of the Bengali nation. For the people of Bangladesh, any aid from Nixon would be disliked. It would be difficult, but we do not bear any lasting enmity.'”

The New York Times

SHEIK MUJIB, FREE, ARRIVES IN BRITAIN

LONDON, Jan. 8 — Sheik Mujibur Rahman, free after nine months in a Pakistani prison, flew into London today. He said at a news conference that an independent Bengali nation was now “an unchallengeable reality” and appealed to all countries to recognize the new government and provide aid so that “millions of my people may not die.”

It was a day of high emotion for the East Bengali leader, the designated president of Bangladesh, the new nation proclaimed by the separatists in East Pakistan. The excitement surrounding him in London was the greater because his arrival was totally unexpected.

Last night In Islamabad, Pakistan's new President, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, kept his promise to let Sheik Mujib leave. He put Sheik Mujib aboard a Pakistan International Airlines plane that arrived here at 6:36 A.M.

President Bhutto also placed the former Pakistani President, Gen. Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan, and the army's former chief of staff, Gen. Abdul Hamid Khan, under house arrest.

Heath Returns

When the British Foreign Office got word that Sheik Mujib was arriving in London — just shortly before he landed — an official was rushed to the airport in time to greet him and escort him to Claridge's Hotel. By then, Bangladesh representatives had booked a suite.

Prime Minister Heath, who was out in the country, quickly returned to 10 Downing Street to meet Sheik Mujib.

They, talked for an hour this evening. Mr. Heath promised that Britain would do all he could to help in the economic emergency. But he told Sheik Mujib that British recognition would have to wait, possibly until Indian troops had been withdrawn and the Bengalis were visibly in control.

When Shiek Mujib would leave for Dacca is uncertain. [A Bangladesh spokesman announced in New Delhi Sunday that Sheik Mujib would arrive there Monday at 7 A.M., United Press International reported.]

Why Sheik Mujib came to London is something of a mystery. At the news conference he said that the destination was chosen by the Pakistanis, although in Islamabad Mr. Bhutto indicated that it was Sheik Mujib's choice.

One report here was that the Pakistanis did not want to fly him direct to Dacca or to any place in India, perhaps because this would seem a humiliation to them. President Bhutto was said to have suggested Iran or Turkey instead, but Sheik Mujib reportedly preferred London if he could not go directly home.

Under Death Sentence

At the news conference he said that he had been under sentence of death and held in a condemned cell. The intense heat was terrible, he said, and he was in solitary confinement that was hard to bear. He said he had not even known of the war's result until Mr. Bhutto told him.

“Gentlemen of the press,” he began, “today I am free to share the unbounded joy of freedom with my fellow countrymen.

“We have earned our freedom in an epic liberation struggle. The ultimate achievement of the struggle is the creation of the independent, sovereign People's Republic of Bangladesh, of which my people have declared me president while was a prisoner in a condemned cell awaiting the execution of a sentence of hanging.”

He left no doubt of his own determination to keep what was once Pakistan's eastern wing independent. He said that Mr. Bhutto had appealed to him to find “some possible link” with Pakistan — but that he could say nothing about that until he was home.

He spoke bitterly of what, the Yahya Khan regime had done in East Bengal. “They tortured boys and girls,” he said, “mercilessly” killed people, and burned “hundreds of thousands of buildings.”

“I think if Hitler had been alive today,” he said, “even he would be ashamed.”

The way the West Pakistanis had behaved made it impossible “to live together,” he said. But he added that he hoped the present Pakistani Government would hold war crimes trials and that he thought Mr. Bhutto would do so.

In his opening statement he praised those countries that had helped the Bengalis, mentioning India, the Soviet Union, Poland other East European countries, Britain and France.

He added thanks to people elsewhere, including “the people of the United Stales.” Asked later about the pro‐West Pakistani position of the Nixon Administration, he said he knew little of what had happened, was sure the American people favoured Bengali independence but did not know about the Administration.

Asked whether he would accept foreign aid from the United States, he said he would welcome aid from anyone but would not let any country “impose something on us.”