NEWSDAY, OCTOBER 10,1971
WAR CLOUDS DARKEN PAKISTAN AND INDIA
It has been nearly six months since civil war flared in Pakistan, and the results to date are a pan of history: several hundred thousand Bengali civilians are dead, massive destruction and dislocation has taken place in East Pakistan and some 8 million refugees from that country are posing an economic and physical drain on India. The threat of war between Pakistan and India is real.
Pakistan has taken the matter to the United Nations General Assembly, pleading for the UN to agree to direct negotiations or talks under impartial auspices on the refugee problem, and it appears likely that the United States, the Soviet Union and tran all will play a mediating role if the leaders of the two feuding countries cannot otherwise be brought together.
Mahmud Ali. Pakistan’s chief UN delegate, charged Wednesday that India already has been conducting a clandestine war against his country; India returned the charge accusing Pakistan of shelling Indian border areas;
Indian forces, he charged, had fired “nearly 1000 sheils” into border villages in the Sylhet district, killing 28 persons and wounding 13. And Indian frogmen, he added, have been placing explosive charges on ships carrying food to East Pakistan, where he said 70 million persons were facing famine.
In leveling his charges against India, which is faced now with the problem of Pakistani refugees, Ali did not comment on the role West Pakistan played in the crisis, except to defend the use of force to keep the divided Pakistani nation together.
East and West Pakistan, divided by 1,000 miles of Indian territory, were bound by a common Moslem religion when the country was given independence from Britain in 1947. But East Pakistanis, the majority of whom are Bengali, are ethnically different from West Pakistanis. And although more than half the 137 million population lives in East Pakistan, it is West Pakistan that has dominated the country’s political life. And it is West Pakistan that has been fighting to put down an independence drive by the East’s Awami League.
That civil war, reportedly of staggering butchery, has left Pakistan on the brink of economic and political ruin. And the resultant refugee problem imposed on India has created an incredible burden on that nation, which is troubled enough just caring for its own repressed masses. This is where Iran and possibly the U.S. and the Soviet Union come in.
Pakistani President Yahya Khan made a recent one-day trip to Teheran to seek the good offices of Shah Riza Pahlevi in mediating his dispute with Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi who, Yahya said, has refused to meet with him. Some sources say the U.S. and Russia are already assisting Iran in efforts at mediating the squabble and it is assumed that should Iran fall in its peacemaking role, it will fall to the big powers to try their own mediating efforts.
Meanwhile, Yahya’s government, in seeking to repress the independence struggle of East Pakistan’s 75 million Bengalis, has several options, none of them good.
It can continue its policy of repression, which most foreign observers believe is doomed to fail. It can cause, or be egged into, war with India-a war it almost surely would lose. Or it can about the hopelessness of its quest to refuse Bengali independence, thus discrediting its own army and angering West Pakistan’s ethnic minorities. The only good alternative settling peacefully with the rival forces in East Pakistan-is considered by now impossible; too much blood has been spilled, loo much anger has been exposed.
Observers of the grim scene are speculating that, of all the options, the first is most likely to be followed by Yahya’s government. The third is considered least likely. But the second, a war with India which would inflame the entire Asian subcontinent, is a real threat. Such a conflict could involve not only India and Pakistan, but the world powers lined up behind them.