পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (অষ্টম খণ্ড).pdf/৫৫৩

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৫২৬ বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র : অষ্টম খন্ড “We had no food and no money. She collapsed after six days of walking. I carried her for a long time but she died in my arms. I buried her on the way. I have no one now.” The bewildered farmer said he saw hundreds of other refugees dying on the road. The stronger members of the families would huddle next to the exhausted and dying men, women and children. When they died, they buried them in nearby fields and marched on to India. The tragic stories of many other refugees are similar. Mr. A.Z.B. Raha, a 48-year old supervisor at Chittagong port, fled when Pakistani tanks moved in on his village, four miles from the centre of the city, last month. “We started to walk north towards the Indian border. We saw people dying all along the way. Others were lying on the grounds exhausted. The first to die were the babies, then further along the road the old and children collapse, and then the women,” he said. We found Dr. Choudhury, a medical practitioner form shulteepur village near Chittagong, among the 200,000 homeless migrants who have flocked into the southern districts of Tripura. He was in stupor. Dr. Choudhury claimed that he marched towards India in a daze after the army encircled his village and killed 19 members of his family last months. “There is nothing left,” he said. Dr. Rathin Datta, supervisor of the general hospital in the border town of Agartala, north of Sabrum, has so far treated 300 East Pakistanis who had bulled and shrapnel wounds. “These people were lucky,” he said. “Most of them live near the border and managed to get through to us for treatment. But I fear that thousands have died and are dying from their wounds, starvation and exhaustion on the road from Chittagong. His 267 bed hospital is now overcrowded with an additional 300 wounded refugees. All the refugees claim they were deliberately shot by Pakistani troops. Two sisters, Rohina Begum, aged 16, and Jinat Begum, aged five, have bullet wounds in their legs and arms. Rohina said her entire family was wiped out when Pakistani troops fired on their small boat as they attempted to cross the River Feni into India last week. Dr. Datta asked: “What do I do with these children when I have to discharge them? They have no one.” A railway engineer from the nearby junction of Akhaura had a bullet wound on his head. He cannot believe what has happened. “Why should they shoot me? I am an important government servant. I told them this when they were looting my office and house.” But a soldier said, “Kill the bastard’, and when they shot at me I fell to the ground and pretended to be dead.