পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (ত্রয়োদশ খণ্ড).pdf/৬০

এই পাতাটির মুদ্রণ সংশোধন করা প্রয়োজন।

ংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ ত্রয়োদশ খন্ড Stewart)-to the question of getting observers of one kind or another into the country. The pressure, the influence and the restraining effect that people who are free to move and witness events can have upon a Government, however insensitive it may be to internal opinion, can be very great. Indeed, the precedent established, as my Right Hon. Friend the Member for Fulham reminded us, in the case of the Nigerian civil war was extremely important and one Which, I hope, will be urged strongly upon the Pakistan Government to adopt. Finally, I come to the question of what we can do and whom we can bring into this to bring, as it were, further pressure to bear in the right direction. The right direction must be a political solution-of that I have no doubt-and a political solution must, in the end, be one that the majority of the people themselves desire, It should not be beyond the possibilities of vigorous diplomacy, looking now not only to the Commonwealth forum, not only to the forum of CENTO, in which we are both strongly based, but thinking also of the known views of so many of the great Powers, including the United States, the Soviet Union and India as an important neighboring country, to find ways and means of bringing international pressure to bear, as diplomatically as any Right Hon. Gentleman wishes, with the purpose and aim of achieving peace, an end of the carnage and the restoration of the rights of the people of that land. 12.12 p.m. Sir Frederic Bennett (Torquay): Having listened to your reminder, Mr. Speaker, that we should try to keep our speeches short. I hope that I may be forgiven if I do not refer to the remarks of the Right Hon. Member for Stepney (Mr. Shore) but revert to the opening speech of the Hon. Member for Kensington, North (Mr. Douglas-Mann), to whom we all owe a debt of gratitude for moving his Motion today. Having listened to the Hon. Member, there are only three points that I wish to make The first-and I can understand how this happened is that when the Motion refers to a cease-fire, although there may well be sporadic fighting, my) information differs from that of the Hon. Member in that I believe that to a large extent the active fighting on any scale has now died down, if it has not ceased altogether, in East Pakistan. My second point is that with a nation of 60 million or more people-I am referring to East Pakistan-however many troops the West Pakistan Government can send, in the last resort it will be impossible to hold that country together by military force alone. Therefore, if it is to survive, as, I am sure, most of us at least would wish, we cannot do anything other than harm by urging that any future rejoining of the two halves is out of the question. The political consequences, which have already been mentioned, are all too clear for anyone who wants to see: namely, that the creation of an impoverished and stricken East Pakistan as a separate nation State today-let us not forget that it has no wish to go to India, even though it may not currently have any wish to go to West Pakistan- would be a sore which had repercussions for outside its borders. We do not need to look far to think of the countries which would immediately take advantage of such a situation. Incidentally, India would be one of the first losers from the