Ringo plan a benefit performance at New York's Madison Square Garden, with all proceeds to go to homeless Bengali children. And theirs is only one of many efforts-by the International Rescue Committee, Catholic Relief Services, UNICEF and Americans for Children Relief among others-designed to stir the U.S. conscience over the genocidal civil war in Pakistan.
Many private citizens now involved in Bengali relief are veterans of similar operations during the Biafran tragedy two years ago. And most are dismayed that, unlike the rescue of Biafran children, which aroused such widespread sympathy, world reaction to the Bengali refugee emergency seems almost apathetic by comparison. Ironically, the sheer magnitude of the suffering in East Pakistan may, in itself, be partly to blame. “Bengali refugees must now form the largest group of displaced persons in the world", said Dr. Daniel L. Weiner, who recently returned from a fact-finding tour for the IRC. “It is a problem that has to be dealt with on an international scale, no private effort can possibly handle this load. Private agencies can only alleviate some aspects of the mess. But the very size of the problem seem to paralyze people-it's not so much a lack of interest as a feeling of helplessness."
Busy
To the extent that any organized international effort has been mounted to alleviate Bengal's misery, the V.S. government can take credit. Washington has committed $ 70.5 million to the aid of East Pakistani refugees in India as compared with $ 11 million from the Soviet Union. More than 360.000 tons of U.S. food-grains are in the transport pipeline to East Pakistan. For the present according to V.S. specialists, the threat of mass starvation in the region is not due to any lack of supplies put to poor distribution. Though the U.S. has given Pakistan $ 2 million to charter relief ships, the Pakistan Army has used most of them so far to transport troops and ammunition. “They are so damned busy trying to re-establish their control over East Pakistan,” snapped a State Department aide, “that haven't looked beyond their own noses."
Such complaints suggest that Washington has had little success in influencing President Mohammed Yahya Khan to moderate his policies. Yet the Nixon Administration has justified its aid to the Yahya regime mainly on the ground that such support will give Washington leverage over Islamabad. In the face of mounting domestic criticisms of that policy, however, the U.S. has recently begun to waffle. In requesting a total of $ 131.5 million in aid to Pakistan next year, the State Department recently promised Congress that the money would be held back until Pakistan begins to minister to its homeless millions. But skeptical observers recalled that the U.S. slapped a similar ban 011 military aid to Pakistan last April-only to have it emerge later on that Pakistani freighters were still hauling V.S. supplied ammunition and spare parts, ordered before the ban took effect, back to Karachi. And last week Senator Stuart Symington charged that the ban was still full of holes. The Administration said Symington, was guilty of “semantics, ambiguous statements on the public records without clarification and no effort to present the actual facts until pressed to do so."
