THE HOLOCAUST IN EAST PAKISTAN MUST BE ENDED
Eye-witness reports from foreign residents evacuated from East pakistan paint a more horrible picture of the carnage that has been unleashed by President Yahya’s troops than had been suspected.
What has been happening is nearer to genocide. An army suppressing a revolt is not in a picnic and a certain amount of unnecessary killing, however deplorable and misguided, was to have been expected.
The way the army has acted it is now clear, surpasses anything that could pass for legitimate use of force. It has resorted to wanton murder of civilians, including women and children, in a deliberate plan to achieve submission by stark terror.
And the army is not succeeding. The resistance of the East Pakistanis, though unorganised and largely unaimed, gets more stubborn every day. The army’s writ does not run beyond the major towns.
Given the normal difficulties of communications in East Pakistan, the army will have to be several times its present estimated size of 70,000 before an uprising which has the backing of practically the whole population can be put down. And when the monsoons arrive in six weeks from now, the army’s mobility will be further impaired in a drastic manner.
Official Pakistani reports themselves cannot conceal any longer that the normalcy they have been announcing is very far from being restored. The factories are at a standstill and there is mass absenteeism from government offices.
If it was a misguided decision for President Yahya Khan to have ordered his armies out, to persist in it is an act of irresponsibility of such cruel magnitude that the world’s conscience cannot continue to accept it as a matter that Pakistan only can decide.
The East Pakistan holocaust must stop. Appeals to see reason have been made to Rawalpindi by India, Russia and Britain. More countries must join in this effort to demonstrate that the voice of humanitarianism cannot be stilled by pedantic considerations of internal sovereignty.
(Editorial, THE NEW NATION, Singapore- April 6, 1971)
Source, Bangladesh Document Vol. I, p. 393