The Road From Bangladesh
These are the world’s newest refugees, nearly two million of them, who fled a few miles into India after civil war broke out in East Pakistan last March. This group found a home in a railway station in West Bengal. They are lucky; they left their own country because they feared reprisals by the West Pakistan army. But now, also, they will not starve. India and the relief organizations have so far been able to provide enough food and medical supplies. Those who stayed behind were not so fortunate.
The life of the refugee produces its own particular kind of hopelessness. Isolated in a foreign country, physically weak, surrounded by strangers, these Bengalis swiftly find themselves victims of increasing lethargy, silently awaiting any new blow from an almost universally hostile world. The old men, who in their own country had great dignity, are now reduced to queuing like children for food. If they are ill, like the half-crippled man with his stick and umbrella, they merely sit and wait for someone to help them. No one does. If they are young, or part of a united family, they can at least scavenge for food and fuel to recreate a vagabond imitation of their former life in Pakistan.
Homeless, Stateless, Destitute-But Alive
The refugee settlements stretch all along the border between India and East Pakistan. Some live in odd vacant buildings,some have been given tents by the Indians, some live in primitive grass huts and queue for their food in the open air. At Hasnabad station, some 65 miles from Calcutta, there is room for a hundred; 8000 are camped around the platforms. The politicians talk grandly of a future independent state of Bangladesh. These people have become refugees, they say, because of their belief in a new Bengali nation. But many have fled because they are Hindus, and know that whenever a Moslem army is on the rampage they are slaughtered, whatever their politics. And some are there merely because they are frightened. They don’t know what happened. They only know they are glad to be alive.
An Unfortunate Past, A Terrible Present And A Tragic Future
In the week that Donald Mccullin sent back the pictures of Pakistani refugees there were many well-published appeals for our sympathy. A Trafalgar Square gathering vowed to dramatize world poverty. Half-a- dozen Welshmen screamed swear words in a Swansea courtroom to protest the suppression of their language. A crowd of several hundred Jews attacked the Soviet Embassy and harassed the editor of The Time. because other Jews were suffering in Russia. Almost every other poster seemed to show a dead man, a starving child, or imprisoned intellectual.
It is difficult, in this clamor, to explain why one set of victims deserved more attention, and more help, than any others.
It is even awkward to present the pitiful spectacle of refugees, and expend a consistent and useful compassion in return. There have been so many refugees in recent years. After a while each problem seems to disappear, or at least not to be so interesting.
The refugees from East Pakistan, or from Bangladesh, if you prefer will not disappear. Nor will their problem be solved until world public opinion or some Inconceivable change of heart by the West Pakistan Government, transforms the situation in their country.
Already their sufferings are. far worse than when these photographs were taken. But this time the monsoon rains will be falling heavily. Tents and grass huts are no protection at all against such violent rain; and very few of these refugees even have these temporary shelters to keep them dry and alive.
The Indian authorities have done enough to prevent immediate epidemics. They, and the international relief organizations, are providing food. Three weeks ago, however, the Indian Government said it would cost too much to feed the two million refugees. As far as they are concerned, the only solution is for the refugees to return where they came from.
If things were not so terrible one might say these people were lucky to have escaped from East Pakistan, which by any analysis, is the most unfortunate country in the world. Its climate is penitential, its physical conditions appalling. The standard of living is so low that it is impossible to gather reliable statistics about it. Because the Moslem religion rejects birth control even more implacably than the Roman Catholics, the population grows swiftly. There are 75 million people in East Pakistan. It is more crowded than anywhere else on earth. The cyclone of last year killed two million people. It did nothing to ease the problem of overpopulation, because both agriculture and industry were disrupted.
Last December the East Pakistanis enjoyed what seemed, at the time, to be their first good fortune for decades. In the Pakistani elections their party, the Awami League, gained a majority in the entire country. By rights their leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was Prime Minister of Pakistan.
However, such a result was so unwelcome both to the West Pakistanis and to the army regime in Islamabad that nothing happened. For three months Sheikh Mujib and Yahya Khan, Pakistan’s President, argued in Dacca. As the argument broke down this March. Yahya’s army moved in.
The army attack was designed to crush all resistance in East Pakistan. The soldiers therefore killed indiscriminately Had their massacre succeeded it might have been justified. All it did, however, was to untie East Pakistan against the army, and begin two months of terrible killing.
Yahya’s Government has described the fighting as, first a deliberate plot by Indian spies and traitors and, second a Bengali revolt. Both these explanations are lies and even they are scarcely relevant.
The real reason for the attack was to re-unite Pakistan by destroying all Bengali ambitions of an independent state. It has, however, created such ambition. For years East Pakistan will suffer bloody guerrilla warfare. An independent Bangladesh is inevitable. What no one can predict, or even plan satisfactorily; is how such an independent state can be created.
The refugees from Bangladesh, therefore, have escaped from the most unfortunate past. They suffer the most terrible present, with a tragic future ahead. Nowhere else have people, however dreadful their problems, so much to endure. This is why they deserve more attention, and more help than anyone else in the world.
Reference: The Sunday Times, June 6, 1971