Peking Sides With Yahya Khan
SUPPORTS PAK. PROTEST TO INDIA
New Delhi, April 7 (AP)
COMMUNIST CHINA appeared Wednesday to have sided with Pakistan Yahya Khan’s Central Government in the civil war in secessionist East Pakistan.
In a strong protest to the Foreign Ministry here the Chinese supported Yahya’s repeated allegation that India was flagrantly interferring in the internal affairs of Pakistan.
The protest note, released publicly today 24 hours after it was presented, was rejected outright and returned to the Chiness Charge d’Affaires, an Indian Foreign Ministry spokosman said.
Neutural observers attached significance to the note, since it came after a year in which China and India were believed heading toward a slow normalization of their relations, which dipped to their lowest point following their 1962 war.
In the past 12 months, China and India had reduced their public propaganda attacks on each other and Chinese and Indian diplomats had informal contacts in several world capitals.
The immediate cause of the Chinese note was a demonstration on March 29 by several hundred Indian youths protesting the Pakistan army crackdown on the supporters of East Pakistani leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
En route to the Pakistan High Commission, the students first gathered outside the Ceylon High Commission to protest refuelling of Pakistani Planes in Colombo on their flights between Dacca and Karachi.
Next, the students milled outside the Chinese Embassy shouting slogans against the Mao Tse-Tung, Chou En-Lai, Yahya Khan and West Pakistani leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, known of his ProPeking views.
Provocation
The Chinese note accused the Indian Government of a sheer act of provocation’ for allegedy instigating the demonstrators. It also said Indian police watched the demonstration ‘with folded arms and made no efforts to stop them.’
An Indian Foreign Ministary spokesman said that no damage occurred during the demonstration and that the police gave the Chinese the same protection accorded other diplomatic missions.
The operative part of the 300 word note, however, was the phrase saying that India was ‘flagrantly interfering’ in the internal affairs of Pakistan.
Peking itself had not previously commented on the Pakistan civil war, there was no way to judge whether its protest note was a forerunner of more open direct support to Yahya Khan.
Under former Foreign Minister Bhutto, Pakistan’s relations with Peking became very close-at the expense of ties with the United States and Russia.
The Chinese comment accusing India of intervening in Pakistan’s internal affairs came four days after Soviet President Nikolai Podgorany appealed to Yahya Khan ‘to take urgent measures to stop the bloodshed and repression aginst the people of East Pakistan and to change to methods of peaceful plitical settlement…’
Reference : The Indonesian Observer, 08.04.1971