পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (চতুর্দশ খণ্ড).pdf/৯০

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বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড শিরোনাম সূত্র তারিখ ২৫। অর্থনৈতিক দুর্যোগ নিউইয়র্ক টাইমস ১৫ এপ্রিল, ১৯৭১ THE NEW YORK TIMES, APRIL 15, 1971 ECONOMIC HAVOC Peasants in many areas of East Pakistan are not planting their rice because the daily shooting between the Pakistani Army and the Bengali independence forces has made them afraid to come out in the open. In West Pakistan, 1,000 miles away across Indian territory' textile mills are turning out cheap cotton goods that have no market other than East Pakistan, but cannot be sold there unless the Pakistani Army crushes the independence movement and ends the war. These are but marks of the havoc the three-week war has created in the economies of both wings of the country, beyond the loss of life in the East. Although this correspondent saw no outright starvation in East Pakistan, food stocks in the countryside are low and famine seems a possibility m some areas. Even in normal times. East Pakistan might be called a hunger area, for it has an annual food-grain deficit of 25 million tons. With foreign newsmen barred by the Pakistani government from entering East Pakistan, no reports are available from some of the heavily populated islands in East Pakistan's delta on the Bay of Bengal. Several hundred thousand were killed in the delta in November by a cyclone that also destroyed most of last year's rice crop there. Approximately two million survivors have been living ever since on relief supplies. The political crisis that erupted early in March and the Army attack on the civilian population after that have halted shipments of food to the cyclone affected 注fea. Foreign diplomats and others fear that the food problem there could become grave a few weeks, with the coming of the monsoon rains, which each year cut off some of the islands from the rest of the country for nearly five months. Beyond that, it is estimated that 100,000 cyclone survivors are still without houses or shelter. In the monsoon, they will face desperate conditions. War disruptions are compounding the economic crises. The Pakistani armed forces, composed entirely of West Pakistani troops, are destroying food stocks, tea plantations and jute mills. The resistance troops, adopting guerrilla tactics, are tearing up rail lines, blowing up bridges and demolishing roads to restrict the army's movements and cut its supply routes. Tea estate and jute-mill managers, mostly foreigner, are abandoning their plantations, leaving them in the hands of Bengali assistants. There is no money to pay the thousands of tea workers left behind and work has stopped on almost all plantations, most of them in Sylhet district in the northeast. The tea workers are all Hindus and according to the managers who fled, they have already begun migrating across the border to predominantly Hindu India,