The other main exercise with which I came to be associated at that time was the campaign at the United Nations. The Bangladesh government had nominated a delegation to the United Nations General Assembly session beginning in October 1971. The delegation was to be headed by Justice Abu Sayeed Chowdhury. I was nominated as a member of delegation along with Ambassador K.K. Panni who had defected from Manila, Ambassador A. Fateh who had defected from Iraq, and a number of other delegates such at Dr. A.R. Mallik who had come over to join the delegation. The lobbying exercise at the U.N. was more frustrating, since it aimed to generate support for a resolution in the General Assembly to stop the genocide in Bangladesh. This issue may have given occasion for some speeches in our favour on the floor of the Assembly and in some of the Committees, but not much more came of it largely because most U.N. members were reluctant to raise their voice against anything which appeared to interfere with the sovereignty of a member nation. Since at that stage none of the veto power states had sought to lend their public support to the cause of Bangladesh the lobbying effort in the initial phase of the session tended to yield insubstantial results.
During period I involved myself in a number of speaking engagements on behalf of Bangladesh. These included a well attended meeting at the University of Philadelphia another at the University of Syracuse, another at MIT in company with Justice Abu Sayeed Chowdhury and Dr. Mohiuddin Alamgir, one at Williams College organized for me by Prof. Anisur Rahman who was based there and one at Yale organized by Prof. Nurul Islam. In most of these functions the occasional group of Pakistanis would turn up perhaps to heckle but at the end to put a few plaintive questions more in sorrow than in anger.
I also continued to make some appearances and to write occasionally for periodicals. Two of my most interesting appearances on TV took place towards the end of my stay. The first of these was an appearance on Public Television in Boston. This programme is organized around a court case based on some highly topical public issue where two lawyers act as counsel for the prosecution and the defense. Each is permitted to bring three witnesses to speak in their cause. If I recollect correctly, on this occasion the issue was to discuss the case for the United States government extending support to the Bangladesh cause. I fail to remember the advocate for our cause. But the opposition was led by William Rusher the proprictor of the National Review one of the foremost conservative Weeklies in the United States, edited by the well known right wing figure William F. Buckley Jr. Resher was well to the right of Buckly and possibly to the right of Gengis Khan as well. His view of the subcontinent was frozen around the time of John Foster Dulles. He appeared to have difficulty in distinguishing the India of Indira Gandhi from that of her father in the 1950's and still seemed to think that Krishan Menon was Foreign Minister of India.
The program did not have that a large TV audience but was interesting because it brought to the surface the various arguments for and against Bangladesh. Rusher had for his case sent out a television crew to Pakistan to interview Bhutto. This rather tendentious testimony was produced before us in the studio on a video screen. rusher also lined up Congressman Freylinghausen from New Jersery and a former U.S. Ambassador to the U.S. who was the Pepsi Cola magnate and had been sent out there in compensation for his
