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Though everything about the trial is shrouded in secrecy, it was learned last week that the proceedings are being held in a new, one-story red-brick jail in the textile city of Lyallpur, 150 miles south of Rawalpindi. Islamabad sources claim that the strict secrecy is necessary to prevent Bengali rebels from trying to rescue Mujib. More likely it is because Yahya is unwilling to give
Mujib a public platform. When the sheik was tried in 1968, also on charges of treason stemming from his demands for East Pakistan's autonomy, the trial was aborted amid widespread antigovernment protests. But not before Mujib's British lawyer managed to make the government "look utterly silly," as one diplomat recalled.
Second Home. A man of vitality and vehemence, Mujib became the political Gandhi of the Bengalis, symbolizing their hopes and voicing their grievances. Not even Pakistan's founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, drew the million-strong throngs that Mujib has twice attracted in Dacca. Nor, for that matter, has any subcontinent politician since Gandhi's day spent so much time behind bars for his political beliefs—a little over ten years. "Prison is my other home," he once said.
If Mujib's courage and bluntness got him into trouble frequently in the past, at least his family was spared. Now that is not so sure. Last week Mujib's brother, a businessman named Sheik Abu Nasser, turned up in New Delhi with only the tattered clothes on his back. Nasser told how Mujib's aged parents (his father is 95, his mother 80) were driven from their home by Pakistani troops. Their house was burned, their servants shot and they have not been heard from since. Nasser did not know whether his wife and six children were dead or alive. He had hoped, he said, that Senator Edward Kennedy, who last week visited India's refugee camps on a fact-finding mission as chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Refugees, might be able to learn their whereabouts. But the Pakistani government refused Kennedy permission to visit either East or West Pakistan. Kennedy, who trudged through mud and drenching rains, was greeted by refugees carrying hand-painted placards,
KENNEDY, THANK YOU FOR COMING.
He and an M.I.T. nutrition expert with him noted the appalling effects of malnutrition on the children, many already blind from vitamin A deficiencies, others irrevocably mentally retarded.
Though Mujib is accused of advocating secession for East Pakistan, the fact is that he did not want a total split-up of Pakistan and never declared independence until it was done in his name after the bloodbath began. To keep his young militants in line, he spoke of "emancipation" and "freedom." "But there is no question of secession," Mujib often said. "We only want our due share. Besides, East Pakistanis are in a majority, and it is ridiculous to think that the majority would secede from the minority."
Yahya recently told a visitor, "My generals want a trial and execution." Still, there is a feeling that Pakistan's President might spare Mujib's life. With hopes for a united Pakistan all but ended by the civil war, keeping Mujib alive would leave open one last option —negotiating the divorce of East and West in peace rather than war.