বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ ত্রয়োদশ খণ্ড
reasonable terms. The journalists in Calcutta all know, as do Oxfam and other relief workers, that this is to big a problem for us. This is no longer a case for simple compassion or simple charity. After all, the world has already responded charitably. We all poured out money in a surge of pity last May when the reports of a cholera epidemic began, so the world has virtually exhausted its effective pity. Therefore the real charity must be shown in ruthless political action, in sanctions that make it absolutely clear to the Pakistani Government, which exists only because of international financial and military aid, that it will be worse off if it continues its present policies than if it abandons them. The political moves should be directed at the Army officers who still bolster Yahya Khan.
If they can be persuaded to discard him, use him as a scapegoat for past mistakes, there is a chance of a new policy of reconciliation. That is the first essential action. What happens afterwards is not so clear. There might be an independent Bangladesh but that would create many problems. There might be a new constitution of Pakistan which allowed the East to be linked federally with the West, or, ultimately, a new racial state of Bengal might come into existence, made up of half Moslems, half Hindus, and sliced out of both India and Pakistan. All of these possibilities are dangerous. None of them is as dangerous as allowing things to go on as they are.
The great powers must inspire themselves with the political will to change things and do it soon. They must also give money, food and equipment on a scale far bigger than anyone has imagined as yet: enough to re-establish the refugees properly in East Pakistan or subsidies them in India.
If they choose to stay, this means hundreds of millions of pounds, channeled probably through United Nations agencies. Unless this happens the luxurious figures round the Grand Hotel swimming-pool will continue to be jittery, neurotic and depressed. The local diplomats and generals will continue to talk apocalyptically and not sleep at night. The million children will die. So will thousands of adults. And the consequences for the hundreds of millions who live in the Indian sub-continent will dwarf even these disasters.
CLARE HOLLINGWORTH
The Long Road to India
(Clare Hollingworth of the Daily Telegraph. There is famine in East Pakistan. 8 million people are homeless refugees in their own land, wandering, looking for India.)
There are today over eight million displaced people inside East Pakistan-men, women and children hungry and homeless, “refugees" in their own country.
Groups of villagers are wandering around looking for India, often going in the wrong direction, in a stunned and vague manner. But there is little doubt that a large proportion of these miserable people will cross the border in the hope of obtaining food and shelter in a refugee camp.
The vast majority left their homes in a blind panic when they heard gunfire or saw the next house or the next village set alight by West Pakistan soldiers as a reprisal for an act to terrorism by the Mukti Fouj-Bangladesh liberation army.
