পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (তৃতীয় খণ্ড).pdf/৮৩৭

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বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ তৃতীয় পত্র

 Louis Heren of THE TIMES, London writes on April 2 “the Pakistan Army is alleged to have waged a war of genocide in East Pakistan. The objective is said to be the elimination of the political and intellectual leadership, and it might well have been achieved". The conclusion drawn was that “East Pakistan would be without Political and intellectual leadership for at least a decade and perhaps a generation. The Bengali soldiers and officers here in Pakistan Army were being dis-armed by the West Pakistanis weeks before they launched the attack.

 Mervyn Jones wrote in THE NEW STATESMAN on April 2 “President Yahya Khan's thanks have been ordered into destructive action, no holds barred against the people of East Pakistan; and, in grim logic the enemy must be the whole people because they had declared this with rare unanimity for demands of self rule."

 THE EVENING STANDARD of London writes on April 8 “Bengalis were being killed in their thousands. The Army was rounding up people and machinegunning.... them they were shot from behind like dogs".

 Michael Hornsby writes in THE TIMES of July 20 “that the army conducted a systematic persecution of an important segment of the population of East Pakistan there can no longer be any reasonable doubt".

 DAILY TELEGRAPH “in an editorial of April 12 wrote “what is going on is less a civil war or the suppression of a rebellion than a colonial war of conquest. Strict censorship and the expulsion of all foreign correspondents make it impossible to say whether the instances of brutality reported by many eye-witnesses are typical but enough has been to arouse the worst fearst."

 David Loshak reports from Sylhet, Bangladesh in the DAILY TELEGRAPH of April 15 “almost the entire population of 700,000 had fled into the surrounding countryside leaving the streets to the helpless old and crippled, the corpses to wild dogs and Vultures.

 Bloated corpses floated in the Surma river which flows through Sylhet. They were testimony to the night of March 26, 1971 when the West Pakistani troops burst into the city and launched a campaign of looting and slaughter. Special units were assigned to the killing of doctors and advocates, Journalists, teachers and other professional people"

 THE NEW STATESMAN, London writes on April 16 “if blood is the price of a people's right to independence, Bangladesh has over paid..... 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 Faced with this the Islamabad Government of Yahya Khan whose strength is based on an Army from which the Bengalis are excluded, panicked and Islamabad fidgetted. The result was carnage".

 Sydney Schanberg in THE NEW YORK TIMES of April 17, 1971 quoting a wounded 90 year old Second Lieutenant of the Pakistan Army who subsequently escaped, writes, “through a window he saw 60 Bengali soldiers of the Regiment being taken off behind a