পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (চতুর্দশ খণ্ড).pdf/২০৬

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174 বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড শিরোনাম সূত্র তারিখ ৭৫। একটি জাতিকে হত্যা করা হচ্ছে নিউজ উইক ২ আগষ্ট, ১৯৭১ NEWSWEEK, AUGUST 2, 1971 BENGAL: THE MURDER Of A PEOPLE It seemed a routine enough request. Assembling the young men of the village of Haluaghat in East Pakistan, a Pakistan Army major informed them that his wounded soldiers urgently needed blood. Would they be donors? The young men lay down on makeshift cots, needles were inserted in their veins—and then slowly the blood was drained from their bodies until they died. Govinda Chandra Mandal forgets who told him first, but when he heard that an amnesty had been pledged to all refugees, he immediately set off on the long walk home. With his two teenage daughters by his side, Chandra Mandal trudged through monsoon-drenched swamp lands and past burned-out villages. When he neared his scrap of land, soldiers stopped him. As he watched in helpless anguish, his daughters were raped-again and again. He was about 2 years old, and mother was still in her teens. They sat on ground made muddy by the steady drizzle of the summer rains. The baby's stomach was grotesquely distended, his feet swollen, his arm no thicker than a man's finger. His mother tried to coax him to eat some rice and dried fish. Finally, the baby mouthed the food feebly, wheezed and died. Few people seem more alien to Westerners than the Pakistanis. When thousands of them perish in various natural disasters that regularly plague their country, the newspaper accounts of their suffering have a curious unreality. And yet today, no one can escape the nightmare vision of Pakistan's civil war: a quarter of a million Bengalis dead, another 6 million or more driven into desperate exile as the result of a deliberate effort to terrorise an entire people. It is as if a city the size of Bonn (Germany), had been obliterated and the population of London made suddenly homeless. Even in a world jaded by war and atrocity, suffering on that scale still...as a sickening shock. And there is more to it than that. Far more horrifying than the prospect that Pakistan may destroy itself are the signs that its brutal civil war could spark yet another, wider conflict between Moslem Pakistan and its arch enemy Hindu India. Last week, Pakistan's President Mohammed Yahya Khan angrily declared that if India expands its surreptitious support of Bangladesh, as the secessionist Bengal nation is known, "I shall declare a happen, Pakistan's ally. China, and India's ally. Russia, would be hard pressed to avoid involvement. And the United States could be faced with the dangerous necessity to choose sides.