পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (সপ্তম খণ্ড).pdf/৭১

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বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র : সপ্তম খণ্ড
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themselves as was the whole cyclone relief operation. Instead the foreign correspondents blamed the federal administration and repeated only what they picked up in the lobby of a plush Dacca hotel, It was left to responsible AID officials of your country and others through letters to the Editors here to rectify some of the errors.

 You have argues at one point that you “do not know any facts” and later you have stated that “some of the reports that we have heard must be true". I do not think I need to dwell on this point further, but I do protest against your quoting “unconfirmed” reports to the effect that “execution squads led by informers are systematically tracking down and killing East Pakistani intellectual leaders”. The Government of Pakistan has categorically denied that the army sent out any such execution squads. Radio reports emanating from an unfriendly source like New Delhi have spread one melodramatic sensation after another. Kindly see the enclosed photo copy of the front page of New Delhi's leading newspaper Hindustan Times, dated March 31. As the world knows, Dacca did not fall to any so-called liberation force either on that date or on any subsequent date and the Pakistan Government did not shift the provincial capital from Dacca to any other town. Examples of such false reports, unhappily not only by Indian but by foreign correspondents based in India, can be multiplied. Similarly Indian sources started by saying ten thousand East Pakistanis had been killed by our army. This was steadily inflated every day till it has now reached no less than a million as the enclosed extract from the Washington Daily News of 12th April will show.

 You have urged Mr. Senator that the U. S. stops military and economic aid to Pakistan. I am sure that you are aware that American military “aid” was halted in 1965 when in the midst of a life and death conflict forced on us by Indian aggression, the U.S. (our ally by three-not entreaties) decided unilaterally to halt all military supplies even for those we had paid for. This decision which turned the balance in favor of India could have proved fatal for us but for the sacrifices of our people. India as your Government knows had tremendous manufacturing capacity for lethal weapons, at least some of which was set up with U.S. assistance. (India today is already manufacturing fighter planes, tanks and battleships and all ammunition needed by her). Further, India had Russian and West European sources for arms supplies. The 1965 U. S. decision was a cause of sorrow for many of us. You may recall that at one time when Mr. Khrushchev threatened to send his rockets against us. for allowing American U-2 Planes to take off from one of the U.S. bases in our county, we did not flinch.

 Allow me to review the present political problem in East Pakistan. One political party out of many in East Pakistan, the Awami League, fought the elections to a National Assembly on a platform totally different from the one to which it suddenly switched. If had no mandate from the electorate to secede from Pakistan nor did it. contest the elections on that platform. Its top junta, however, had been collecting arms secretly for a long time and as a start to disrupting the nation allowed its followers to start butchery of non-Bengali-speaking fellow Pakistanis. Hundreds of thousands of these had been living peacefully there for over the last twenty-three years after fleeing from India in 1947. To restore law and order the army had thus no alternative but to resort to strong measures. After all, which Government can allow a complete breakdown of law and order and do