1971: A personal account of the year Pakistan broke apart
by Akbar Ahmed

Into 1971, there was one thing I knew for certain in East Pakistan: a tsunami of ethnic violence was heading my way and unless I moved out of its awful path there was no chance of survival. But there was a catch. Moving out of my jurisdiction meant obtaining permissions not easily given. In 1971 all leave was cancelled. I was a young officer fiercely committed to protecting and representing the Pakistan state that my elite cadre of civil servants, the Civil Service of Pakistan, believed we embodied. By the end of the year many of my core beliefs would be challenged as I saw the state that I so proudly represented begin to collapse around me.

Tahir Mehdi

There has been a great deal of commentary and discussion on the 50th anniversary of the creation of Bangladesh which was marked recently. To that considerable outpouring of commentary and discussion, I also wish to offer my first-hand and eye- witness experiences based on my having lived through that historic period. It was a harrowing and traumatizing time that would scar me.

 

The government in its wisdom had decided to send West Pakistani CSP officers to East Pakistan and vice -versa in order to strengthen ties between the two. We were told that we were the last link between the two wings of Pakistan. The idea had merit but by the time it was implemented it was too little too late. I was at the time posted as Assistant Commissioner in charge of Mansehra one of the most beautiful parts of Asia with Swat on one side and Kashmir on the other. I swapped with my batch mate from East Pakistan Shafi Sami who would one day become the foreign secretary of independent Bangladesh. I had recently married Zeenat from Swat and after a brief honeymoon in Bangkok, where my father worked for the United Nations, we flew to Dacca. From there we travelled by train, boat and rickshaw to my posting at Kishoreganj which was a heavily populated remote area in the northern part of the Province with poor communications to the capital city Dacca.

 

In the beginning of the year my aim was to return with Zeenat to my home base in Peshawar. In order for me to arrive back in Peshawar by the end of the year with my posting orders in hand several steps had to take place, one connected to the other and each smoothly following the other. A single missed connection would have derailed and foiled my plans. As the year progressed, the concatenation of events worked meticulously as if an invisible hand was planning them to keep me one step ahead of disaster and in the end to extract me from the jaws of death.

 

I had arrived in East Pakistan to find a discontented and surly population. The crisis in 1971 had been brewing. Perhaps the two most significant developments in the previous year were: the elections in Pakistan that established the victory of the Awami League representing Bengali nationalism against West Pakistan political parties and the apocalyptic cyclone that devastated East Pakistan. All in all, the elections were fair and the results should have been honored by West Pakistan who now saw power slipping from their grasp. The history of neglect and humiliation on the part of Pakistan since the creation of the nation was well known and Bengalis had little faith in finding justice even after the elections. There began to grow a feeling that perhaps the only answer was a complete break from Pakistan, even an independent nation. There is no doubt that this anti- Pakistan emotion was fanned from and found active sympathy in India. The situation was fraught with danger. With every week as the violence increased there was less and less hope of the Bengalis being offered their right to form the national government and the chances for reconciliation became increasingly remote. It was becoming like a Greek tragedy with the ending not difficult to predict. Pakistan, I believed, had to handle the delicate situation with great wisdom and compassion.

 

The second crisis came with the cyclone that destroyed lives and properties and devastated crops and paralyzed communications including railways and roads. I recall attending a meeting with the Governor of the Province on his official yacht one evening as he arrived on his tour to assess the damage. We were desperately short of every kind of resource and the population again felt totally neglected by West Pakistan. That evening the rain and winds lashed the land and after the meeting I decided to head back to my headquarters as I especially did not wish to leave Zeenat alone for the night. The rivers had swollen and become vast lakes at night with the storm and rain and in the darkness no one was prepared to cross the waters and get me to the other side. In the end, I did find a person with a boat which was little more than a couple of planks tied together and resembled a raft. After some persuasion we plunged into the waters. I had to stand in the middle of the boat holding onto the mast which shook as much as the planks under my feet. Through the planks I could see the dark raging waters below me and there were moments when I felt I may not survive the journey. Later even my office chided me for taking such a risk but appreciated the fact that I was determined to return to my headquarters.

 

On arrival as Assistant Commissioner in charge of Kishorganj, I found myself in charge of several million people and by virtue of my post was administrative head of the subdivision. Appreciating the developing political crisis and its ethnic over tones, in due course, I requested the Deputy Commissioner, a senior and brilliant Bengali CSP officer, that I wanted a posting near Dacca. At first he was unsympathetic but later helped me get posted to Manikganj, a subdivision nearer to Dacca. I noted with growing alarm that the Province was wracked by anti- government processions and then a complete lockdown. Atrocities of an unspeakable nature were being reported. My Bengali friends said, only half-jokingly, to memorize the sentence, “I am not a Punjabi” in Bengali, as Punjabis dominated the Pakistan army and government and were being especially targeted as the authors of Bengali misery. There were wild rumors and unconfirmed reports circulating everywhere. Everyone was involved and everyone a potential target. It was like a game of Russian roulette and our lives were in the hands of fate.

 

Everything in Manikganj, my subdivision, came to a stop; shops and offices were closed and life came to a standstill. I was in splendid isolation, but continued my work in the office provided on the grounds of the official residence. My local assistant would still come to my office hoping no one would see him and I could carry on a modicum of official work although no communications were working. I was acutely aware of the stories now circulating of attacks on West Pakistanis where they were isolated or vulnerable. These attacks were being joined by the local police whose job it was to maintain law and order. At this stage of my posting, I was literally cut off from the world. As violence spread, I became aware of the imminent danger to our lives. There were stories of four of my CSP batch mates being brutally butchered in their subdivisions by their own public and police. Wives had not been spared. Zeenat had been remarkably calm, but I knew that I must now get her out of the Province as soon as possible. The desperate situation demanded urgent action. But as normal channels had collapsed, I was not sure what line of action to take.

Dr Akbar Ahmed as Assistant Commissioner, Kishoreganj, lays foundation stone of college

Then out of the blue my chance came. I heard on the radio that General Yaqub Khan had been appointed the Martial Law Administrator, MLA, for East Pakistan, He was a family friend, a sort of uncle, but how do I send him a message? Inundated with urgent matters of state would he even heed my message? Nothing was working and all roads such as they were remained blocked by aggressively marauding groups: it was a complete lockdown or as they called it a pya jam or “jamming the wheel”. I selected one of my guards, a Bengali, and gave him a handwritten personal letter and asked him to deliver it at the house of the MLA. I wondered whether he would be allowed near that highly secure military zone. I wrote my letter in urgent tones; unless we were moved we may well be killed. Next day, there was a radio message for me received at the nearest police station where the wireless was still working. It was orders from the MLA to the civilian government to ask me to immediately relinquish charge at Manikganj and move to Dacca as member of the Governor’s Inspection Team.

 

Early in 1971, desultory attempts were made by Pakistani politicians to keep Pakistan intact. The senior politicians came to Dacca to talk to their counterparts. Mr Bhutto had already made statements suggesting, we are happy here, you will be happy there, meaning effectively that West and East Pakistan respectively should separate. Mr. Kasuri, a senior legal figure, asked me to show him around so he could see for himself what was going on outside official circles. I drove him about in the evenings in my official jeep and he had an idea of the gravity of the situation.

I will always be grateful to the memory of Wali Khan from the Frontier Province as he told the military high command, I want my officer back to my Province; he should not be here. When the talks between the politicians stalled, the military abruptly took action. If 90% of Bengalis were for Pakistan before the military action, after the shooting began 90% were against it. Even then I was acutely aware that unless Pakistan acted with wisdom, we may end up by losing more than just the goodwill of the Bengali people. Bengalis needed balm not bullets.

 

And in the midst of negotiations, General Yaqub was ignominiously sacked when he argued against military action in East Pakistan noting the impossibility of holding the province with only three divisions against the Indian army in the war that would inevitably follow. At his send-off at the airport, I was one of the very few civilians invited to say goodbye.

 

A heavy air of doom hung over the land. As the year progressed the sense of crisis grew exponentially. Political positions hardened and mobs roamed the streets taking the law and order in their own hands. People were divided along ethnic lines. But the majority were still pro Pakistan when in March the military crackdown began. After the violence the majority had had enough of Pakistan and wanted Bangladesh. It was becoming dangerous to be a West Pakistani.

 

My one thought now was to get Zeenat out of the Province. We were staying with Brigadier Ali Al Adroos, Chief of Staff to the Martial Law Administrator and we lived in the Cantonment. But to get a place on the one daily flight to Karachi and then push our way through the thousands who had more or less permanently camped at the airport in the hope of getting a ticket was going to be a struggle. In order to make sure everything went smoothly I asked two friends to escort Zeenat to the airport. Early in the morning both turned up looking dashing in their uniforms. Major Tahseen Mirza in his dark cavalry uniform and Major Sabir Kamal in his Frontier Force khakis. Both were fully armed and had brought along their armed guard. In a procession we set off for the airport and had no problem along the way. My friends escorted Zeenat to her seat on the plane. I will always honor the memory of those wonderful friends, Tahseen and Sabir, both alas no longer with us. It was a pleasure to reconnect decades later with Tahseen’s twin brother Commander Kemal living in London.

 

After Zeenat left things began to move swiftly with stories of violence circulating wildly. Once the plane took off a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders: My wife Zeenat was safe. My fate now was in the hands of God. Yet events moved which would get me to Zeenat in Karachi and both of us to Peshawar by the end of the year.

 

After President Yahya Khan launched a military operation to crush the opposition, Bengalis who resisted were called “miscreants” – this was a time before the word terrorist was popularized. There were stories of Bengalis being picked up and disappearing because a neighbor had given in their name as a possible suspect. As 1971 progressed, the violence spread. Recall the horrific bloodbath in Rwanda and Bosnia was still decades ahead and the world had little idea how to deal with this intense internal violence.

 

An army major recounted how he arrived at a girl’s school with his soldiers and found female breasts piled on the dining tables while the women writhed in agony upstairs. At Santahar railway junction women lay spread out on the railroad tracks the Bangladesh flag jammed into their vaginas. In the midst of this madness the Bihari community proudly and provocatively declared its allegiance to Pakistan and proudly waved the Pakistan flag. The price was enormous and would haunt them to this day. In the end they were rejected by the new country of Bangladesh and Pakistan refused to accept them. Few even know the tragedy of this gifted and neglected people.

 

By now the international press was almost unanimous in condemning Pakistan and supporting the Bengali struggle. Perhaps the cherry on the cake was the famous concert organized by George Harrison of the Beatles along with the legendary Indian musician Ravi Shankar at Madison Square Garden in New York. In addition, albums were sold to raise funds for refugees from Bangladesh – the name being widely used for East Pakistan. Both the Pakistani government and the public simply ignored these developments and their implications for the perception of the country. Pakistan had lost the media war by this time.

 

On the international front while Pakistan had alliances with the United States, India secured treaties with the Soviet Union which insured that any Indian action in East Pakistan would not face censure in for example the Security Council. In the event, the Soviet Union supplied India with arms and gave it full international support in 1971 while the United States’ Sixth Fleet which we presumed would save the day for us never arrived in the Bay of Bengal thus creating the popular belief in Pakistan that Americans are only fair-weather friends. What Pakistanis did not know at the time is that when Indira Gandhi threatened to move Indian troops from East to West Pakistan after the fall of Dacca with the intention of finishing Pakistan it was Nixon who emphatically challenged and dissuaded her.

 

Much of the anger and violence of 1971 came from ethnic ignorance and hatred. The irony was here it was Muslim on Muslim violence, that is an illustration of intra-religious violence based on ethnicity. But there was ample evidence of how outsiders were looking at South Asia through the prism of racial contempt. There are, for example, plenty of quotations from the historical archives in which President Nixon and Secretary Kissinger during this time call Indians, “the most sexless, nothing, people”. They compare “Black Africans” who they admit, “have a little animal like charm,” to Indians, “but God, those Indians, ack, pathetic.” Indira Gandhi is referred to as a “bitch” several times. The two wonder how such a repellant race can “reproduce.” Pakistanis in contrast are “fine people” but still “primitive” “I tell you, the Pakistanis are fine people, but they are primitive in their mental structure. They just don’t have the subtlety of the Indians.” (Kissinger to Nixon in August 1971).

 

Systematically, East Pakistan was being cut off from the world. Indians were constantly sending in their agents to create dissension between the communities. The Indian government put every possible hurdle between the two wings of Pakistan to weaken the links between them, for example, the Pakistan international flights which flew over India were denied permission and had to fly down south to Sri Lanka and then up again adding considerable time and the need to refuel in Colombo. This made flights expensive and infrequent and restricted to once a day. That was just not enough for the volume of passengers who required transport out of Dacca to escape the growing crisis.

 

Following the military operation, as I had little work to do in the office, I asked for a few days leave to go and see Zeenat in West Pakistan. I boarded the flight to Karachi and was seated behind Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. I knew him but was too agitated to go up and say salaam. I knew Pakistan was in deep danger and I felt angry and betrayed. I was in a highly agitated state and my appearance must have been quite disheveled as I had not had a haircut for a long time. On disembarking, Bhutto said something about thanking God that Pakistan had been saved. I wondered whether he believed that.

 

On arrival in Karachi, I tracked down General Yaqub who was living under a cloud and there was talk of court martial. His house was watched but I went straight in and asked to see him. He entered the drawing room and greeted me warmly. His first words were, “How long do we have?” “Six to eight months,” I replied. He sat down as if I had hit him. “What is your reasoning?” he asked. “Mainly because the Pakistan army has been trained to fight conventional battles on the plains of the Punjab not guerrilla warfare in the rain-sodden lowlands and deltas of Bengal,” I replied. He looked somber.

 

In Islamabad, as I was staying with my school friend Tahir Ayub Khan, the son of Ayub Khan, I took the opportunity to call on his father and update him on the unfolding crisis. President Khan was not well but still came to the living room, wearing a dressing gown and carrying a book, as he always did, to see me. His Sandhurst training lingered, and as I was leaving Maaji gently said he wanted me to have my long hair cut. I headed straight for a barbershop.

 

President Ayub Khan was right. Though watching the 1971 crisis from Islamabad, as a field marshal of the Pakistan Army, he had spotted what for me, a junior assistant commissioner in the field in East Pakistan that year, was glaringly obvious: no nation could fight on two fronts and hope to win. After the military action against the Bengalis he saw little hope.

 

Ayub Khan was reflective. He said something that struck me: He didn’t really know the younger officers as he was out of touch. I recalled that he had been away from the army effectively for over a decade. That is why he was able to give a detached picture of the global landscape and was yet unaware of the men running the army. He appeared baffled why they would be making one of the most fundamental strategic miscalculations any army could make of fighting on two fronts.

 

In contrast to Ayub Khan, West Pakistani officials were not appreciating the scale of the crisis. They were in denial. There were even celebrations cheering on the military action, and people were gleeful that the Bengalis were being taught a lesson. The crudest abuse was heaped on the Bengalis. They were called “black bastards” or bingos, the equivalent of the “n-word” for African Americans. For simply arguing for justice and human rights for Bengalis my wife and I were sarcastically referred to as “Bingo-lovers.”

 

 

One of my batch mates who was also an assistant commissioner in the field recounted how he barely escaped after hiding at the bottom of an ordinary boat. He had taken a revolver with him with one bullet in it. The bullet he said was for himself in case he was captured. When we finally met up in Rawalpindi in the Establishment Secretary’s office, he recounted his dramatic tale. Our senior colleague was not impressed. He said get back right now to your posts. He had not shown the slightest interest in our arguments about the situation in the field.

 

 

One day in Dacca as I sat in my large, lonely office in an old colonial building from the British days behind a large desk with little to do I was visited by a friend. It was Major Sabir Kamal. He had a grim look on his face and was in full uniform with his revolver prominently displayed around his waist. As he walked towards me he pulled out his revolver and cocked. Walking round the table he placed the barrel of the revolver against my forehead and said, I want you to write a letter to the Chief Secretary. Annoyed and alarmed, I said, ‘don’t be silly, that damn thing could go off. “Sabir replied I am more concerned for your life. You must ask for long leave and get out of East Pakistan before it is too late. The way things are going, we will all be killed. I explained to him patiently as he appeared distraught that I had no intention of writing that letter. I belonged to the CSP cadre, and we were trained to be in position whatever the circumstance. Besides, I said, if things were so bad how come you are still here. Somewhat grimly, he said he had made arrangement. He had married a general’s daughter and was being posted to the Pakistan foreign service to a European country. The encounter made me think, but there was no way I would leave my post at this critical time. Yet I had a blind faith that somehow it would be alright in the end.

 

It was an irony of fate that my dear sincere, intelligent, and courageous friend Sabir who had cared so much for me was unable to save himself in the end. Just a short while after we met, when war came, he was posted in the northern districts. His Frontier Force regiment was surrounded by Indian troops supported by armor. Infantry men cannot stand against tanks, but Sabir and his men fought like tigers. The Indian commander took the loud-speaker and yelled to Sabir to compliment him on his courage, but said you are now surrounded and there is no way you can escape. He asked Sabir to surrender to avoid further bloodshed. Sabir refused and in the fight that followed lost his life. He was nominated for Pakistan’s highest military award for valor. I wrote a poem in his honor which I sent to his family and regiment. It was called, “Major Sabir Kamal, the last stand.”

 

In the summer when the Bengali uprising had built up wide-spread momentum and the security forces desperately tried to check it, General Tikka Khan, the newly appointed MLA asked for the file with West Pakistanis CSPs available to him. We formed a small group. At random the MLA, who I never met before or after, ticked my name, and I was appointed as Deputy Secretary to the Chief Secretary. As the latter was a Bengali, I suspect I was appointed to counterbalance his ethnicity. It was a position of great power and it allowed me to help those people in distress and seeking justice. For example, the young aristocratic couple from Dacca who were being harassed by a West Pakistani officer demanding access to the wife and threatening to arrest the father of the husband and accuse him of being a “miscreant”. I advised them to go to Karachi to their relatives and got them coveted seats on the next PIA flight against the two seats allocated to my office. Similarly, I diverted a terrible fate that awaited my previous CSP Bengali boss from my time at Kishorganj who was accused of being a possible “miscreant.” 30 years later when I saw him at a White House iftar dinner given by President Bush as the Bangladesh Ambassador, we greeted each other warmly. He invited me several times to his house always giving me the place of honor at the dining table on his right hand. We never spoke of 1971.

 

During that summer I was invited for dinner to the military mess in honor of the new commander General Niazi. I noticed I was the only civilian there. The General was holding forth so I asked him how he would face the Indian attack when it came. Acutely aware of the political situation I listened to his answer intently. The military officers also listened intently but observing protocol agreed with everything they were hearing. I then added what would happen if East Pakistan was cut off from West Pakistan, which would be the primary objective of the Indian army. The general stared at me and asked, “haven’t you heard of the Niazi Corridor Theory?” No, I replied baffled, and muttered something about making a break from the northern districts of East Pakistan towards the Chinese border which was not far. “No, No,” the General replied with a flourish. “I will march my troops from East Pakistan down to Calcutta and then along the Ganges towards West Pakistan and West Pakistani troops will march towards my troops, and we will meet up and establish an open corridor.” Believing this was humor, I smiled only to realize that he was deadly serious as were the nodding officers around us.

 

That night I knew we were in deep trouble. I began to realize that the senior West Pakistani civil servants I met were attempting to make contingency plans in case the entire structure of the state collapsed and before they were captured by Indian troops. I thought of my friend Sabir Kamal.

 

Later in the year, Mr Malik, a civilian Governor, was appointed to head East Pakistan. Gentle and scholarly, he was the father of a school fellow who arranged for me to have dinner at the governor’s house with his father. While I talked about arranging for us to be re-patriated to West Pakistan, the governor argued that he needed officers like me to stay for several years longer. Indeed, after dinner he wrote to the government of Pakistan suggesting that officers like me should be posted for long period to ensure the unity of the nation. My dinner had backfired. This was literally on the eve of the breakup of Pakistan. It was clear that the senior officials of Pakistan had little idea of the existentialist crisis that Pakistan was facing.

 

By now the Bengali chief secretary had been replaced by a West Pakistani CSP officer and I noted that he had started making frequent trips to West Pakistan on the slightest pretext. Unfortunately for him the wheel turned against him and as he returned to Dacca just when the war had started between India and Pakistan and all flights were cancelled. He was captured as an Indian prisoner of war.

 

For me to be posted back to Peshawar, Mr Sufi, the Establishment Secretary, had to visit Bangkok and meet my parents who explained the plight of my batch of civil servants. Sufi had to fly back to Islamabad via Dacca and have time to walk down to my office and chat with me. It gave me the crucial half hour to explain our position. Bless him, on his return he prepared and moved the file to return us to our home provinces. The process to post us back had started and it would wind its leisurely way through the labyrinthine corridors of the bureaucracy until the orders were issued to each one of us. I received the orders in late November just when I arrived in Karachi.

 

Another crucial step in getting me out was to be given leave which I obtained after pleading with the Chief Secretary in Dacca to see my wife and mother. Reluctantly I was allowed leave and I had bought my tickets for the return flight to Dacca. Almost immediately war had begun between India and Pakistan and all flights were cancelled.

 

I was clear to return to Peshawar safe and sound. We took the train from Karachi to Peshawar. Along the way we saw bombed out buildings and railway tracks. There was an air of desolation and uncertainty hanging over everything. But also, one of defiance. The war led to the fall of Dacca and the collapse of Pakistan which lost its majority province. The image of General Niazi surrendering to the Indian General in Dacca along with almost a hundred thousand troops evokes pain and humiliation. That was the darkest day of Pakistan history. The loss of East Pakistan was a devastating blow for Pakistan as it challenged the very basis of its creation.

 

My life quickly settled down in the regular rhythm of my posting in the Peshawar secretariat as the Deputy Secretary, Home and Tribal Affairs Department. It was the typical 9 to 5 monotonous bureaucratic routine. What happened in East Pakistan appeared far away and unreal. No one seemed to be interested in that part of history. Then one early morning, not long after midnight, a poem poured out of me almost whole. I asked Zeenat to write it down. I called it, “They are taking them away to the slaughter houses.” The first lines were:

 

“They are taking them away

sullen shine the stars

the moon in agony aloof

so still stand the palm trees

the seasons are bearing

my dreams away

sanity

suspended

while all the black

horrors of the mind

uncoil

slowly

snakely

settle

over this land

they came by night

they came in shame

they came

to take the weapon and the woman

my throat

was dry

and chilled

my groin, for

they are taking them away

to the slaughter houses……”

 

And the last lines of the poem were:

“….the lords of men

gods of pain

have taken council:

the unholy juggernaut will move

it is decreed

and none to challenge it

what compulsions drive such men

what fear makes them such savages

while reason, so thin on the breast,

deserts so quickly

who was martyr

which one saint

depended only

on the language he spoke;

to such a fine point

is the concept of alienation reduced; for

there is no shame like the shame of

taking them away to the slaughter houses.”

 

 

There has been a highly charged controversy around how many people died and who killed them. There is an equally heated debate around the figure of women raped. There were rumors that West Pakistani officers had ordered their troops to impregnate Bengali women in order to produce “Islamic children “ and “improve the stock.” Pakistanis deny any wrongdoing and dismiss the idea of genocide, while Bengalis assert that as many as 3 million people were killed by West Pakistanis and hundreds of women raped. My own assessment from the field was that such surveys were difficult to conduct and in any case all assessments were distorted by wild rumors and ethnic prejudices. I believe all acts of violence are to be condemned. Each one of those lives lost, whether Bengali or Punjabi, was equally precious. Now looking back half a century later, I am disappointed to note that instead of apologizing, embracing and moving ahead in order to close an unhappy chapter of their mutual history, Pakistanis and Bengalis are still caught up in debates about numbers. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the spirit of Mandela and on the pattern of South Africa, however painful and belated, should be set up to ascertain the facts and clear the air.

 

1971 was a traumatic year that had seen the break-up of Pakistan. We had lived in the midst of great acts of heroism and humanity, but also horrific acts of brutality and ignorance. After 1971 when Pakistan was broken in two and its critics gloated that it was all over for the Muslim nation the idea of Pakistan remained; that idea was difficult to kill. The loss of East Pakistan with it literate, cultured, and lively population was like the amputation of the right hand for Pakistan. But there were lessons too: Pakistan needed to have better relations based in compassion and fairness with its minority provinces and improved understanding with its neighbors. Pakistan needed to create think- tanks and promote public intellectuals in order to guide and enlighten the government of the day and prevent it from living in dangerous isolation. But Pakistan, like most states, was resistant to learning lessons from its past.

 

(Akbar Ahmed is the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies, School of International Service, American University, Washington DC. He is a Wilson Center Global Fellow. He was the former Pakistan High Commissioner to the UK and Ireland and in 1970-71 was Assistant Commissioner in East Pakistan.)