পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (চতুর্দশ খণ্ড).pdf/৪৩৮

406 বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড শিরোনাম সূত্র তারিখ ১৫৯। বাঙালীদের দেশ ত্যাগ এখনো সানডে টেলিগ্রাফ ২৫ জুলাই, ১৯৭১ চলছে SUNDA Y TELEGRAPH, LONDON, JULY25, 1971 STILL NO END TO BENGAL FLIGHT By Peter Gill who has spend the last two months reporting on the crisis in East Bengal. After two month with the Bengalis, you become pretty good at sorting out the refugees from the rest, without so much as winding down the car window to the warm monsoon rain, you can tell who's who and quite a bit besides. Sheer numbers are a guide, of course, as a Time magazine correspondent and I drove the 12 miles from Bangaon near Calcutta, over the East Bengal border to Bogra last Wednesday, an endless sodden column tramped silently past the steamy windows. They will still be marching during the British Sunday breakfast, the British Sunday lunch and the Sunday evening snack in front of the television feature film. Hindus and Moslems mingled, their only sin being that they were Bengali Hindus and Bengali Moslems. Moslem men wear lungi, a strip of cloth that is wound round the waist and falls free to the calf. Hindus are more likely to wear the dhoti complicated Gandhian garment that also falls loose and free to the grond. There were both Hindu and Moslem men on the tramp for survival that day. Widows in the column could also be distinguished. Instead of the colored saris worn by pretty girls and married women, they dress in plain white ones manufactured of the cheapest fabric in the markets of East Bengal. Many are old and frail and lame, but they too have to be led through the mud and the rain from East Bengal to the camps in' India. Refugees carry everything and nothing, all tied up in dirty sacking and old saris. One old man in Bogra sat listless on his hunches dabbling his fingers in a stone jar of little fish brought from over the border. A nutritionist from abroad-and there are one or two doing the rounds—could have told him that those fish were the last protein he would be getting. Our route through the refugees led to a comer of East Bengal that had once been Pakistan and is now independent Bangladesh. Two men from the Bangladesh mission in Calcutta were with us. One had a little tape recorder with which he was going to record the sentiments of the liberated peasantry and the other quoted several appropriate lines of Sir. Walter Raleigh on patriotism. The local guerrilla commander came to meet us, "You've already seen how high the morale is of the people here" he said. To be honest, I hadn't. They were not on the march to the refugee camps of India, and