ADVANCE. MAURITIUS, SEPTEMBER, 27, 1971
Editorial
EAST BENGAL REFUGEES: A WORLD PROBLEM
No sooner had the embers of hate started dying down in Vietnam than a worse holocaust was let loose in East Bengal. Over eight and a half million human beings have fled from their homes leaving all their possessions behind and crossing swamps to live in over-populated tents, but to stay alive.
Since March this year when the trek started, refugees have kept pouring into India, itself already over-populated. Almost fifty thousand of them have crossed over every day and helped to swell a population as large as that of London or Paris. At first, world opinion was slow to assess the impact of such a change of population on the economy of a country which itself has been, since its independence, struggling to survive yearly floods, drought, a growing birth-rate and wars. Thanks lo visits by personalities belonging to all parts of the world, and wide newspaper coverage of one of the greatest migrations ever within human memory, the immensity of the holocaust hit public’ opinion in the face like a man’s fist. Representatives of religious or benevolent societies have come back with harrowing tales of sufferings and deaths of women and children whose corpses are often seen uncared for on the way to the other side of the border. The presence of such a huge amount of refugees not only tells on the economy and life of these states, but is a danger to peaceful living in the area. It provides the inflammable material conflicts and riots need to flare up.
Unless the countries of the world get together and do something about it. it may well mean the beginning of another Vietnam. The only difference is that the impact will be more deadly and the consequences more dangerous They are no longer a localized problem. They have become a world problem, because the world has allowed them to be uprooted from their homes.
Despite his age, Andre Malraux has offered to go and fight for them. Like him, writers and artists all over the world have called for a humanitarian approach to the problem of those millions dying of hunger and cold. Senator Edward Kennedy broke down in tears when visiting the camps of refugees near Calcutta. The Press in each and every country is calling for more international aid to be sent. Swiss philanthropists have gone on hunger strike to awaken the conscience of the world. And only yesterday, Caritas has appealed to the conscience of all men to live up to the dimensions of the holocaust in Bengal.