বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ ত্রয়োদশ খণ্ড
centers merely hand the food to the children who return to their families, where by old tradition much of it is taken from them and shared round the ciders. The child therefore is still likely to die by the time this article is published.
May be a million children won't die. They will continue to live, nearly live, without hope or education or function, surrounded by the other seven million, the adults, also with nothing to do and no hope, with only the ferocious rhetoric of Bangladesh revolutionaries to occupy them and the forlorn hope of reinvading their own country, vanquishing Pakistani tanks, to sustain them.
It is a frightful and dangerous prospect. No wonder everyone is neurotic, jittery, depressed, without solutions.
Add to this, impressionistic moments around the camps. The old woman walking through the flood carrying two buckets of rice, the water up to her shoulders, buckets held just above it. Most of the time tiny clusters of tents, all that is left of some camps, reached by narrow bridges made of bamboo. Whole families permanently covered in mud and their own which never finally washes off, having to struggle through the water to feeding centers, cut off from medicine.
There was one camp called Deara, where 30,000 people in their neat tents, all well housed and settled, were overnight submerged in flood water. They lost most of their belongings and all their shelter and gathered on the high ground nearby there. For the third or fourth time they began to try and collect their lives again.
There was the reception centre at Hasnabad Railway station, a night mare throng of desperate people waiting to be registered for their food ration. The old men and women so exhausted they couldn't move, the young with bulging eyes, while flakey stuff like dandruff on their skin from malnutrition, and every imaginable disease, perhaps from simple tiredness. Dead children, their teeth unnaturally prominent in shrunken faces. The stronger adults unable to do anything but crouch in their tents, occasionally haggling with local peasants for special food, spending their last few rupees.
These sights are everywhere: one could list them endlessly. What is more important however is to try and imagine what is going to happen now the floods are receding. The worst prospect is political trouble between the refugees and the displaced Indian peasants who are also starving, and winter in Bengal. This doesn't matter too much, it is always warm, but in the North in Sylhet, in Assam, it is already very chilly. In two months it will be snowing, freezing, continual cold.
The Bengali refugees have no clothes, no blankets, few proper tents. Three million blankets are needed immediately for these people, and clothes and tenting to match.
So these nine million refugees have suffered political injustice, then a cyclone, then a war, then displacement, hunger, disease, and all the ills of refugees in a land which cannot afford them, then flood and now they face the prospect of winter.
It is, as I have said, the worst disaster that has struck the world for 30 years. It is also, as I have tried to describe, a catastrophe so terrible one cannot respond to it in proper
