বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ ত্রয়োদশ খণ্ড
This statement and others have convinced me that food is being used as an instrument of politics.
It is essential that any international relief, to be effective. Must be internationally, supervised to ensure it reaches the right places, otherwise it will be wasted.
Florence Priest, Church Missionary Society
For four months we worked as a medical team serving live camps in North Bengal. Each day we held dispensaries for the sick. We always found a long queue and it was seldom that we were able to reach the end of the queue. It was heartbreaking work as we watched families get smaller as one child after another died, and then came the cholera to take its great toll. Although so much was done and every day there were long queues for rations which were given without fail, conditions were appalling and almost my last glimpse of a camp was of men and women pulling up the bamboos that supported the small tarpaulin which had been “home", as the flood waters reached the camp and once again they were on the move. It was not difficult to move, they had few possessions,
Philip Jackson, Oxfam.
It becomes quickly apparent in West Bengal that all government officials social and relief workers, are totally preoccupied with the refugee" Invasion". Their figures are struck bravely into the dyke and it is incredible that the dyke has not yet burst beyond repair. It is tragic to see how other work so desperately needed in this part of India, has had to be disrupted. How long, one wonders, will the poor of India stand for it?
Marilyn Silverstone, Magnum
At one crossing point in West Bengal, a slippery track through flooded fields, in mud and pouring rain we counted refugees passing at the rate of 70 a minute in a continuous stream. That is over 30,000 a day from this one point alone, day after day. It is difficult for a western mind to conceive the enormity of these numbers, Many had walked for four or more days. Saddest of all are the old people.
David Loshak, Daily Telegraph
Salt Lake Camp, on the edge of Calcutta, is very convenient for visiting VIPs. It's near the airport and near the Grand Hotel, and they can come and tut-tut before swiftly moving on. It's pitiably different for the refugees, more than a quarter of a million souls-a population as large as Leicester's, living, barely existing, in an area the size of St. James Park. They are there not because it's convenient, and it's Certainly no park. There is a life of unremitting material deprivation, sapping physical hardship and, worse by far of all, moral desolation and hopelessness. And Salt Lake is only one of more than 900 camps for the refugees of East Pakistan. However successfully they may be kept from starving, or dying from the ever-present threats of epidemic or exposure, their fate is so desperate that many of the millions still living quite simply envy the dead. Saddest of all are the children, condemned to lives of endless uncertainties except the certainty of despair. Condemned by
