পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (চতুর্দশ খণ্ড).pdf/৪৩১

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399 বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড किल्लाञाम সূত্র তারিখ ১৫৭। ধর্মন্ধি ও পাষন্ডদের রাজত্ব সানডে টাইমস ১১ জুলাই, ১৯৭১ THE SUNDAY TIMES, LONDON, JULY I I, 1971 A REGIME OE THUGS AND BIGOTS An account by Murray Sayle The Pakistan military regime last week repeated its claim that East Pakistan is rapidly returning to "normalcy" after its prolonged military operation against "rebels and miscreants" and that the way was open for refugees to return from India and resume their normal lives. I spent last week touring one of the areas from which many thousands of refugees fled and found that this is untrue: that in fact a repulsive political system is rapidly taking shape which may well make it impossible for them to return. If the refugees do ever go home, it will be to places like Lotapaharpur village, a collection of mud-brick houses with palm-thatched roofs six miles north of Khulna, East Pakistan's biggest river port. Lotapaharpur stands a little way off the main road between Khulna and Jessore which I found busy with military traffic, big shiny American trucks full of soldiers from West Pakistan, armed incongruously with Chinese automatic rifles, and an occasional civilian carrying a 303 Lee Enfield rifle. I drove along a side road perched high on an embankment, across a landscape looking like a green and silver chessboard, lush standing crops alternating with ponds and flooded fields. Here and there a few farmers were ploughing the wide wet prairie with cows and water buffaloes; but there seemed very few people at work for such a crowded country. Then I stumbled on Lotapaharpur. It was just off the road up a muddy track which twisted through the palm trees. The village is like any other in East Pakistan. A score or so of houses stand in a neat circle on an earthen platform a few feet above the flood-plain. But there were no men in loincloth, no women in bright saris, on brown children and ginger dogs playing among the banana trees. I have seen many East Bengal villages which have been burnt, or which was seemingly seem to have strangely few people. This was the first I saw which was Seemingly undamaged and completely deserted. No clue With my interpreter I looked around. A colored picture of the elephant headed God Ganesh, the remover of obstacles, showed that this had been a Hindu village. But why had the villagers gone? There was no clue in the empty houses. Then, timidly, a woman in a tattered sari, with three young children at her heels, came forward. She was a Muslim and a refugee herself. Her husband had been killed and she had run away and found this empty village, as we had by accident. She had been living on some rice the Hindus left behind. But it was finished and she was at her wit's end to feed