পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (ত্রয়োদশ খণ্ড).pdf/১৯৬

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বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ ত্রয়োদশ খণ্ড

 This problem is not only India's problem, it is the world's problem. The burden must be carried by the world, the answer must be given by the world.


 For us in India, good has come from the problem because our people have made considerable sacrifices and will continue to make them.


 But the entire world must, I repeat must become concerned. Let us all, wherever we are, realize that we have millions of children suffering from malnutrition and starvation, and there are other difficulties, the enormity of which people find it hard to appreciate. Here again unless the world comes in with food and proteins and those other things the children need just to lead ordinary, healthy lives, these children will die-and the world will have to answer for their death.


 I have been working among the refugees for five or six months. I have seen these children, and the adults, dying. That is why I can assure the world how grave the situation is and how urgently it must help.


 The appeal is to the world-and the world must answer.

NICOLAS TOMALIN
When the newsmen crack up

 ("The rest of us who watch it find it more and more impossible to know what to do as individuals." Nicholas Tomalin of The Sunday Times writes an exclusive report on the worsening plight of the refugees in India.)

 The Pakistan crisis is the worst disaster that has faced the world for the past 30 years. It is also morally the most simple. The villains, those Pakistani generals who ordered a military attack on their own countrymen last March 25th, are more obviously in the wrong than any military aggressors since the Hitler war.

 The victims, nine million refugees in India, sixty-five million Bengalis left behind in East Pakistan, are more innocent, more suffering and more numerous than any we can remember. The circumstances combining war, famine, cyclone, gross injustice and apparent apathy on the part of people and governments elsewhere throughout the world, are terrible in a way that clearly exceeds the horror of Vietnam, Biafra, or any of the bloody African conflicts of the past 15 years. All that this huge melodramatic tragedy lacks is a hero and a solution.

 As the weeks go by and more people die-some say it is two or three thousand a week-the rest of us who watch it going on find it more and more impossible to know what to do as individuals. We are helpless.

 Some of us salve our consciences by sending in cheques to charitable funds, some organise concerts or protest meetings in faraway cities, some campaign for an independent Bangladesh. A few come to India and try to feed or nurse a hundred or so of those nine million.

 Relief agencies like Oxfam can lessen the suffering and delay the final catastrophe but none of them have enough money, people or power to solve the real problem. Only