NEW YORK TIMES, APRIL 15, 1971
BULLETS OR BREAD?
Washington’s pretense of non-intervention in Pakistan’s tragic internal conflict has been shattered this week by State Department acknowledgment that the United State has been selling ammunition and other “nonlethal” military equipment to the repressive Pakistani Government and by the Administration’s persisting refusal to impose a ban such sales. As long as these sales continue, the United States places itself alongside China on the side of the military regime in Islamabad and, in effect, makes itself a party to the continuing slaughter of Pakistan’s Bengali majority and to the suppression of the recently elected majority patty in Pakistan’s still uncovered National Assembly.
Three weeks after President Yahya turned loose his army on the mostly unarmed Bengalis, the State Department says it does not know when the last United States arms deliveries were made to Pakistan:, what is now en route or what is being prepared for shipment. Even if this incredible admission of bureaucratic incompetence were true, it would be no excuse for the Administration’s failure to order an immediate embargo on all arms shipments to Pakistan in the face of overwhelming evidence of misuse of earlier aid.
In the cruelest blow of all to the miserable Bengalis, Washington has suspended wheat shipments to Pakistan, having determined with remarkable speed that there are already more shipments on hand than can be landed through devastated East Pakistani ports. This may be temporarily true, but surely the need for food relief in East Pakistan in the coming months will be greatly increased. The focus should be on breaking down the logjam caused by the military actions, the incompetence and the indifference of the western-dominated Pakistani Government. Under on circumstances can neutrality stand as an excuse for failure to make the most vigorous effort to promote humanitarian relief for the victims of conflict regardless of political persuasion?