পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (চতুর্দশ খণ্ড).pdf/১৮৯

বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড শিরোনাম সূত্র তারিখ ৬৯। একটি বিভক্ত দেশ ওয়াল স্ট্রিট জার্নাল ২৩ জুলাই, ১৯৭১ WALL STREET JOURNAL NEW YORK. JULY 23, 1971 A NATION DIVIDED East Pakistan Conflict Is Complicated By Race, Religion And Poverty No Immediate Solution Seen; Residents Barely Subsist: Police State Grips Bengalis 'Problems? There Are None' The doctor sits behind a desk in his street-front office in an East Pakistani town, occasionally glancing out at the road lined with the charred debris and looted shells of shops and homes. A vehicle with UNICEF markings on its doors but with armed West Pakistani soldiers inside cruises by. Otherwise, the street is all but deserted. The doctor sits in his office only because he has been ordered to. His family is hiding in a village somewhere outside of town. He speaks in a whisper because any passerby could be an informer. At night, when the army goes knocking on doors, he lives with the fear that his name may be on one of its lists. He whispers of recent events in this town; the streets littered bloated and decomposing bodies; the burning, looting and raping and the continuing terror. "We are afraid to speak the truth. Those who speak the truth are punished, and the only punishment is death," he says. The doctor is an army veteran, which makes him a special target for his former colleagues. But his real crime is being a land 0 f Bengalis that also happens to be part of the map of Pakistan, It is now a land of death and fear. Causes washed away by blood It is less than four months since the civil fighting in East Pakistan began, but already the causes of the conflict seem almost academic. Its geographical and historical roots, the legalities and moralities-all seems to have been washed away by blood. No one really knows how many people have been killed in East Pakistan since March 25. but Western diplomats say the minimum is 2(X).0(X). The maximum exceeds one million. The events fall into three stages. The first was a Bengali political movement aimed at ending two decades of economic and political exploitation by the West Pakistanis. It culminated, in March elections in national political victory for the Bengali Awami League and its platform of greater East Pakistan autonomy. But on March 25 the Pakistan army (an almost entirely West Pakistani institution), fearing that East Pakistan was moving toward independence, cracked down in Dacca, the East Pakistan capital. Bengali students were massacred, politicians were arrested and the Awami League was outlawed.