পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (চতুর্দশ খণ্ড).pdf/১২৭

95 বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড শিরোনাম সূত্র তারিখ ৪৪। পূর্ব-পাকিস্তানে গণহত্যা সেটারডে রিভিউ ২২ মে, ১৯৭১ THE SATURDAY REVIEW, MAY 22, 1971 GENOCIDE IN EAST PAKISTAN The most fundamental of all rights, the right of a man to come to the aid of a fellow human being is now being denied with a degree of official arrogance seldom displayed in recent history. The people of East Pakistan who are still suffering from homelessness and hunger caused by the tidal waves of less than a year ago, are now caught up in a manmade disaster. Their land has become a locked-in arena of authorized slaughter. Communications with the outside world have been reduced almost to the vanishing point. Those who have offered emergency medical aid or other help have been told to Stay out. The present situation has its remote origins in the division of the Indian subcontinent into two nations in 1947. The movement for independence from Great Britain had been complicated and imperiled by the existence of Hindu and Moslem blocs. Great Britain had fostered the concept of a partitioned subcontinent in which India would be predominantly Hindu and Pakistan would be predominantly Moslem. For a long time Gandhi and Nehru had opposed partition believing it imperative for both religious orders to be accommodated within a single large national design. Gandhi and Nehru withdrew their opposition to partition, however, when it appeared certain that national independence might otherwise be indefinitely delayed. The design for partition called for two nations. Actually, three nations emerged. For Pakistan was partitioned within itself, into East and West. The Western part was larger geographically and became the capital. The Eastern part was more populous and richer in resources. The units lay more than 1,000 miles apart. In order to comprehend the geographical anomaly of this, one has only to imagine what would have happened if Maine and Georgia had decided to from a separate nation. Georgia, with practically the whole of the United States lying in between. Let us further suppose that the capital of the new nation would have been Augusta, Northern Georgia. While most of the people and resources would have been in Southern Georgia. The result would have been an administrative, political and economic shambles. What has happened in Pakistan roughly fits that description. Further compounding the situation are the severe culture and historic differences between Punjabi (West) and Bengali (East) Societies. For a time the people of East and West Pakistan were held together by the spiritual and political exhilaration of a new nationalism. But the underlying difficulties grew more pronounced as East Pakistan chafed under what they felt was West Pakistan's latter day version of British colonialism. They claimed they were not being represented in proportion to their numbers in either the high posts of policies of Government. They charged they were being exploited economically furnishing labor and resources without sharing fairly in the profits from production. They pointed to the sharp disparity in wages and living conditions between East and West.