বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ ত্রয়োদশ খণ্ড
Agartala in the State of Tripura in the east. I listened to scores of refugees as they crowded into camps, struggling to survive in makeshift shelters in open fields or behind public buildings-or trudging down the roads of West Bengal from days and even weeks of desperate flight. Their faces and their stories etch a saga of shame which should overwhelm the moral sensitivities of people throughout the world.
I found that conditions varied widely from one refugee camp to another. But many defy description. Those refugees who suffer most from the congestion, the lack of adequate supplies and the frightful conditions of sanitation are the very young-the children under five-and the very old. The estimates of their numbers run as high as fifty per cent of all the refugees. Many of these infants and aged already have died. And it is possible-as you pick your steps among others to identify those who will be dead within hours, or whose sufferings surely will end in a matter of days.
You see infants with their skin hanging loosely in folds from their tiny bones lacking the strength even to lift their heads. You see children with legs and feet swollen with edema and malnutrition, limp in the arms of their mothers. You see babies going blind for lack of vitamins, or covered with sores that wiłł not heal. You see in the eyes of their parents the despair of ever having their children well again. And, most difficult of all, you see the corpse of the child who died just the night before.
The story is the same in camp after camp. And it is complicated by the continually growing number of civilian causalities overburdening an already limited hospital system. Most of these casualties have been brought across the border by their fellow refugees. Yet there are also large numbers of Indian whose border villages have been subjected to shelling from Pakistani troops. In addition, there are the untold numbers of victims who remain uncounted and unattended in the rural areas of East Bengal.
The government of India, as it first saw this tide of human misery begin to flow across its borders, cold have cordoned off its land and refused entry, But, to its everlasting credit. India chose-the way of compassion. The Indian Government has made Herculean efforts to assist and accommodate the refugees-efforts which history will record and remember. And while the magnitude of the problem staggers the imagination, the individual accounts of the people who have fled' East Bengal tear at your heart.
A 55-year-old railway employee-he was a Muslim civil servant with 35 years' service-told me of an unexplained noontime attack by the Pakistani army on his railroad station. “I do not know why they shot me,” he said. “I don't belong to any political party, I was just a railway clerk." Now he sits idly in an Indian refugee camp, financially crippled, and with no prospect of returning to receive his long-earned government pension that was to begin next month.
Even more tragic are the experiences of the innocent and uneducated villagers. You can piece together the mosaic of misery from dozens of interviews among new refugees on the Boyra-Bongaon Road north of Calcutta.
On the day we traveled this 20-mile road, at least 7,000 new refugees were streaming along the banks of the border river crossing near Boyra. Nearly all were peasant farmers.
