| শিরোনাম | সূত্র | তারিখ |
| ১৪৫। বাংলাদেশের রক্ত নিউজ | ষ্টেটসম্যান | ১৬ এপ্রিল, ১৯৭১ |
NEW STATESMAN, APRIL 16, 1971
THE BLOOD OF BANGLADESH
If blood is (he price of a people's right to independence. Bangladesh has overpaid Of all the recent struggles to bring down governments and change frontiers in the name of national freedom the war in East Bengal may prove the bloodiest and briefest On this level alone, the East Pakistanis have achieved a record of suffering. But even if their movement is destroyed within a few days or weeks, it may only be a temporary defeat in a war of liberation which will eventually be recognized as just. In all such cases, establishment opinion is heavily weighted in favor of the status quo. The chances of any world power declaring support for Bangladesh are minimal. The Bengalis' case for statehood may be hard to refute, but it is inconvenient lo everyone else. And yet, by an unusual combination of circumstances. Bangladesh has managed to obey all the rules. So this may be the moment to consider what we, and other countries, mean by those splendid words which recur like a chorus in the United Nations charter: 'the right to self- determination of peoples." Objectively or subjectively, in Chinese or English, in capitalist or socialist jargon, it is hard to fault the East Bengalis, or justify their abandonment by all the major powers.
Piously required, as third-world countries always are by the West, to make their demands known through the ballot box-they did so. They won an absolute majority in the all-Pakistan Assembly. It was the first general election the country had held, and the result came as a considerable shock. Given the long history of Bengali separatism, from the language and anti-constitution movements of the early Fifties until today, it should not have been so surprising. Loyally became more important than ideology. A Bengali majority was (he result.
Faced with this, the Islamabad government of Yahya Khan, whose strength is based on an army from which the Bengalis arc excluded, panicked. Islamabad fidgeted The result was carnage, We have glimpsed via television and the newspapers what the West Pakistanis call 'restoring unity': the Easterners, genocide. The truth may lie somewhere in between the two But for the foreseeable future pessimism is in order.
As with Biafra. many emotional left-wingers in the West have averted their eyes from the distasteful possibility that non-white people may be ill-treating each other, and concentrated on the humanitarian side. But beyond the salvage operation, it becomes more complicated. East Pakistan really cannot be called a 'breakaway' state in quite the same way. And the 'exploitation' takes a different form. The East Bengalis claim that they have been systematically used to subsidies West Pakistan ever since partition. It began as long ago as 1948. when President Jinnah made the first of several centralizing moves by withdrawing the provinces rights to raise their own income and sales taxes, and keep the major part of their import and export duties. East Pakistan was particularly hard
