At 5:30 a.m. last Sunday, the city of Dacca resounded with the thunder of a 31-gun salute that marked the beginning of Bangladesh's first independence day. A year and a day earlier, on March 25, 1971, Pakistan had launched its military crackdown against rebellious East Bengal, which led to the brief, bloody war between India and Pakistan, the death of as many as 3,000,000 Bengalis—and the birth of a new nation.
Today, as TIME Correspondent William Stewart reported last week from Dacca, the Bengalis have a homeland, but they do not yet have...
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