Bangladesh Newsletter
No. 17
February, 1972
আমার সোনার বাংলা
আমার সোনার বাংলা, আমি তোমায় ভালবাসি।
চিরদিন তোমার আকাশ, তোমার বাতাস, আমার প্রাণে বাজায় বাঁশি।।
ওমা, ফাগুনে তোর আমের বনে ঘ্রানে পাগল করে,
মরি হায়, হায় রে—
ওমা অঘ্রানে তোর ভরা ক্ষেতে কি দেখেছি
আমি কি দেখেছি মধূর হাসি।।
সোনার বাংলা…..
কী শোভা, কী ছায়া গো, কি স্নেহ, কি মায়া গো—
কি আঁচল বিছায়েছ বটে মূলে, নদীর কুলে কুলে।
মা তোর মুখের বানী আমার কানে লাগে সুধার মতো,
মরি হায়, হায়রে—
মা তোর বদন খানি মলিন হলে আমিন নয়ন
ওমা আমি নয়ন জলে ভাসি।।
সোনার বাংলা…..
তোমার এই খেলাঘরে শিশুকাল কাটিল রে,
তোমার ধূলামাটি অঙ্গে মাখি ধন্য জীবন মানি।
তুই দিন ফুরালে সন্ধ্যাকালে কি দ্বীপ জ্বালিস ঘরে,
মরি হায়, হায়রে—
তখন খেলাধূলা সকল ফেলে তোমার কোলে
ওমা তোমার কোলে ছুটে আসি ।।
সোনার বাংলা….
ধেনু-চরা তোমার মাঠে, পারে যাবার খেয়াঘাটে,
সারাদিন পাখী ডাকা, ছায়ায়-ঢাকা তোমার পল্লীবাটে,
তোমার ধানে-ভরা আঙ্গিনাতে জীবনের দিন কাটে,
মরি হায়, হায়রে—
ওমা, আমার যে ভাই তারা সবাই তোমার
ওমা তোমার রাখাল তোমার চাষী ।।
সোনার বাংলা….
ওমা, তোর চরনেতে দিলেম এই মাথা পেতে—
দে গো তোর পায়ের ধূলা সে যে আমার মাথার মানিক হবে।
ওমা, গরীবের ধন যা আছে তাই দিব চরণ তলে,
মরি হায়, হায়রে—
আমি পরের ঘরে কিনব না আর ভূষণ বলে
মা তোর ভূষণ বলে গলায় ফাঁসি ।।
সোনার বাংলা….
—রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর
Bangladesh National Anthem :
MY GOLDEN BENGAL
My golden Bengal, I love you.
Your skies, your breezes, ever with my
breath play the flute.
O mother, in Phalgun the perfume of your
mango groves drives me mad.
Ah mother,
Waht honeyed smile have I seen in your
laden fields in Aghran.
What light, what shade, what boundless
love, what changing bonds,
What sari’s border have you spread round
roots of banyan trees on banks of rivers,
O mother, the flow of words from your lips
strikes my ear like a stream of nectar.
Ah, mother,
when the skin of your face draws tight,
I float in tears.
In this your playroom, infancy passes away ;
because I have smeared our body with your
dust and mud, I consider life fulfilled.
When daylight is exhausted into everning,
what lamps do you light in the house
Ah, we all drop our toys and come running to your lap.
The grazing cows in your pastures, the crossing at the ferry,
all day the call of birds in your villages dappled with shade ;
in your grain-filled courtyard the days of life edge away.
Ah, mother,
all of my brothers are yours cowherds and planters.
O mother, I offer at your feet this my lowered head ;
give me, O mother, the dust of your feet,
to be the jewel upon my head.
O mother, whatever wealth this poor man
has, I place before your feet.
O mother, no more shall I buy in the
houses of others this so-called
finery of yours, a noose around my neck.
Composed by : Tagore Trans. by : E. C. Dimock
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BANGLADESH CONVENTION
In a meeting of the Board of Directors of Bangladesh Defense League a resolution has been adopted to hold a Bangladesh convention on March 26, 1972 to Independence on that day last year. Detailed organizational preparation for the convention is under way.
The convention will be held in Chicago University campus. Accommodation for the participants will be arranged with the Bengali families living in Chicago. All Bangladesh citizens are urged to attend this convention which will be devoted to the formulation of future plans and guidelines to best utilize our resources in a concerted way to help rebuild the war-ravaged Bangladesh. The convention will offer an excellent opportunity to come in personal contact with each other, explore the possibility of coordinating activities in Bangladesh and establishing channels for flow of information and ideas between the returning citizens and the Bangladesh communities in North America.
The convention program is presented below :
Saturday, March 25, 1972
9 A.M.—12 A.M. : Registration
1 :30 P.M.—2 :00 P.M. : Report by the BDL Secretary.
2 :30 P.M.—6 :00 P.M. : Group meetings of various Task Forces.
a) MEDICAL AND HEALTH TASK FORCE
Chairman : Dr. Shamsul Haque M.D.
1615 Hoit Tower
Bloomfield Hill, MI 48013
b) ECONOMIC TASK FORCE
Chairman : Dr. Muhammad Yunus
500 paragon Mills Road # B-7
Nashville, Tenn 37211
c) GOVT. ORGANIZATION TASK FORCE
Chairman : Dr. Zillur Rahman Khan
Dept. of Political Science
Wisconsin State Univ.
Oshkosh, Wis 54901
d) TRANSPORTATION AND HOUSING TASK FORCE
Chairman : Dr. Fazlur Rahman Khan
5201 S. Cornell Ave
Chicago, Il 60615
e) ART AND CULTURE TASK FORCE
Chairman : Dr. Zahurul Haque
Alcorn A & M College
Lorman, Miss 39096
7 :30 P.M.—10 :00 P.M. : Dinner followed by Gono Sangiter Asar
(A session of Patriotic songs and sketches)
Sunday, March 26, 1972
9 A.M. : General Session
10 :00 A.M. : Address by Bangladesh Ambassador
11 :00 A.M. : Address by Prof. Ron Inden
11 :30 A.M. : Report on Bangladesh
(A report by three members of the BDL who will return from Dacca just in time to attend the convention).
12 :30 P.M. : Lunch
1 :30 P.M. : Task Force Reports
2 :30 P.M. : Discussion on BANGLADESH FOUNDATION
4 :00 P.M. : Formation of Coordinating Committee
4 :00 P.M. : Adjournment
All participants are requested to notify in advance by February 25, 1972 to facilitate the arrangements for food and accommodation. Please do this as early as you can. Encourage your friends to attend the convention. If you have an idea or a suggestion please do write to us soon.
Those who plan to present papers in any of the Task Force sessions please contact the appopriate chairman.
For all information concerning the convention contact the Bangladesh Defense League office at 5245 S. Kenwood, Chicago, IL 60615, Phone : (312) 493-4288.
196
Due to 100 per cent increase in postal rate the BANGLADESH NEWSLETTER will be published at longer intervals.
—Editor
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BANGLADESH FOUNDATION
Bengalis abroad have played a significant role in the war of liberation of Bangladesh. Our immediate goal has been reached. Now the task of reconstruction, rehabilitation and development is ahead of us. It is an immense task. Bengalis in North America can again play a significant role.
To this end, a proposal has been submitted and unanimously accepted by the Board of Directors of the Bangladesh Defense League to set up an independent non-profit organization to be called BANGLADESH FOUNDATION. The Foundation will be financed by the monthly contributions of Bengalis residing in North America. These funds will be used in Bangladesh to promote research, provide scholarships, and to aid publications. This is aimed at filling an important gap in our institutions of higher learning where research and publication facilities are lagging behind. Objective of the Foundation will be to encourage to fine solutions to our natinal problems by utilizing our own resources.
The Foundation, among other things, will work as a clearing house for providing information about scholarships, fellowships, assistantships available in various U.S. and Canadian universities to the competent students in Bangladesh and aid and advise them in availing themselves of those opportunities. Foundation’s Dacca office will endeavor to make information, data, publications available to the Bengali students engaged in doctoral and post-doctoral research in North America to encourage them to select their research projects on Bangladesh problems. Dacca ofiice will also arrange contacts between the Bengali professionals working here with students in Bangladesh in corresponding fields of studies to encourage joint research projects and mutual academic cooperation.
The Foundation will also organize summer workshops in Bangladesh in collaboration with the Bengali scholars in North America who will be encouraged to spend their summer in Bangladesh.
In addition, Bangladesh Foundation plans to set up a research library in Dacca with the individual and collective contributions of books, journals and research publications. Friends and sympathizers are welcome to donate subscriptions to professional journals for the Foundation.
The Foundation will publish a quarterly newsletter to keep the Bengali community here informed of the Foundation programs and the progress of various projects in Bangladesh. It will also publish an annual journal containing the research papers produced under its sponsorship.
The scope of the program that the Foundation can actually undertake will obviously be limited by the availability of funds. Please pledge your share today to support the Foundation. Permanent financial support for the Foundation has to be provided by the contribution of one day’s earning every month by each Bangladesh citizen working in North America. Please fill in the pledge coupon and send it back to us.
If you have any suggestion, any plan, any help that you wish to channel through Bangladesh Foundation, or any inquiry about the Foundation write to :
Dr. Muhammad Yunus
500 Paragon Mills Road # B-7
Nashville, TN 37211
Phone : (615) 833-3064
BANGLADESH—A VAST CEMETERY
(The New York Times correspondent Sydney H. Schanberg filed the following report from Dacca. It appeared in the Times on January 24. 1972)
Dacca, January 23 : “On this graveyard, we shall build our golden Bengal”. So reads a cardboard sign hung on a flagpole in the city of Khulna. Not far from the flagpole, human bones, picked clean by vultures and dogs, still litter the roadside at various execution sites where the Pakistani Army and ite collaborators killed Bengalis.
This correspondents found, on a recent tour of the countrysides, that almost every town in Bangladesh had one or more of these graveyards, where the Pakistanis killed hundreds of thousands of Bengalis, apparently often on a daily basis, throughout their months of military occupation.
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman has estimated that the Pakistanis killed three million of his people. While foreign diplomats and others independent observers do not generally put the figure this high, all say it was at least several hundred thousand and many put in at more than one million. Furthermore, these observers say that if one cotents all the deaths that relate to the Pakistani repression…such as the deaths among the nearly 10 million refugees who fled to India and among the millions of others disrupted inside Bangladesh—Sheikh Mujib’s estimate may well be accurate. The Bengali leader has ordered a house-to-house census to get precise figure.
In Khulna, one of the Pakistani execution sites was a road on the edge of town that leads west to Satkhira. Though truckloads of skelotons have recently been carried away for proper burial, bones are still scattered along the gray roadside for over a mile. Both Bengalis and foreigners who live in Khulan say that at least 10,000 people were killed at this site along. The execution area was off limits to the public, but the Khulna radio station is less than 100 yards from the road, and Bengali employee at the station, who say they were kept working at gunpoint throughout the occupation, witnessed most of the killings either through the windows or from the front steps of the station.
“They killed some people every day”, said Mokhlesur Rahman, a 26-years-old technician. “Sometimes 20. On one day, they killed 500. On September 3, they killed the most—1000 people. They fired with machine guns almost continuously for three hours. Then they threw many of the bodies into the river and they were carried out to sea.
Their voices were choked and their fists clenched as the radio station employes recalled the murders and told of victims begging for mercy and screaming in pain before they died.
One engineer said that sometimes the Pakistanis had put seven or eight Bengali prisoners in a tight queue and them, to save ammunitions, fired one bullet through all of them. Sometimes, he said, they killed the Bengalis with bayonet charges. Another engineer, Mazedul Haque, 25, vividly remembered the day the Pakistanis killed 500—“by shooting and by cutting their throats with long knives and bayonets”
A Baptist missionary from the Mymensingh district, Ian Hawley, reported that the Pakistan troops, as they retreated before the Indian forces and the guerrilla fighters, killed their own wounded in a hospital there. Other missionaries in the same district say the Pakistani troops also killed several hundred razakars—the home-guared collaborators they had trained and armed—by locking them in a building, throwing kerosene on the building and then setting it on fire.
At a Hindu temple on the outskirts of Faridpur, which the Pakistanis had half-destroyed with dynamite, almost the entire stone floor around the altar bears a dull red stain. The stain is from blood, for this was one of the places of execution. In the weeks since the fighting ended, local Hindus and their Moslem friends have tried many times, without success, to scrub out the stain.
In the capital Dacca, many execution grounds have been found—particularly in sections like Mirpur and Mohammadpur, which are populated largely by non-Bengalis who collaborated with the Pakistanis. One corner of the zoo in Mirpur is strewn with skeletons with hands tied behind backs. Many of the animals were also killed.
In the Sialbari neighborhood of Mirpur, skeletons seems to lie everywhere. On the floor of a Bengali peasant’s ruined house stands a large pile of crushed bones—crushed, apparently, to prevent identification. A well 60 feet deep is filled to within two feet of the top with human bones.
Zabed Ali, a 35-year-old father of seven who fled Sialbari in the early days of occupation, has come back to try to revive his small firewood business. His hut no longer exists, and he and his family are sleeping under a tree—but they have picked a tree some distance outside Sialbari. “It is too frightening to sleep there”, Mr. Ali says.
A nine-year-old, Nazrul Islam, led an American visitor to a field in Sialbari and said he thought his father was buried there, but did not know just where. His family fled Sialbari when the army came, he said, but his father returned later to try to harvest their rice, and that was when the Pakistani soldiers shot him.
As dusk descended, the boy wandered through the field, pointing out clumps of bones with scraps of clothing and hair clinging to them. His eyes grew larger and his behavior was nervous and odd as he seemed to look for his father.
“If you dig anywhere here”, he whispered, “you will find more bodies”.
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———–cut here———–
BANGLADESH CONVENTION
I plan to attend the convention. I would like to participate in th
o Medical and Health Task Force
o Economic Task Force
o Govt. Organization Task Force
o Transportation and Housing Task Force
o Art and Culture Task Force
Name :
Address :
No. in the party :
———cut here——–
BANGLADESH FOUNDATION
I pledge $……..per month for the Bangladesh Foundation.
Name :
Address :
Occupation :
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AIRLIFT OF UNDERSTANDING
Emergency Relief Fund, Inc., a Michigan based non-profit corporation which allocates its funds through established international voluntary relief agencies, has sponsored a project called “Airlift of Understanding” under which 125 Americans will go on a fact finding tour of Bangladesh and India. to make a first-hand assesment of the needs. The group will be composed of co-chairman of the Fund Hon. Chester Bowles and Dr. Douglas Ensminger and other concerned Americans from various organizations. Warren J. Day, Overseas Director of the Airlift, has already left for Bangladesh to complete the necessary arrangements. The group will leave on February 29 and returen on March 10.
A series of regional meetings of the ERF have been scheduled on February 4 to discuss the immediate urgency of the situation in Bangladesh and to explain regional, state and community plans for ERF’s fund raising program in which ten million Americans will be asked “to care enough to share a little”. The meetings will take place in Washington D.C. Los Angeles, Dallas and Atlanta.
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Ann Arbor, Michigan
RELIEF FUND
A coalition of faculty, students, and community people have joined forces to try to marshall aid for Bangladesh. The Refugee Relief Fund, established for the purpose of raising money for food, medical supplies, clothing and shelter, is being coordinated by The Rev. Paul Dotson, Director of the International Center. Muzammel Huq, a graduate student from Bangladesh, is serving as Chairman. Plans for a campus and community wide fast, scheduled for February 16, are underway. A general fund-raising campaign, entitled “Ten Dollars to Start a Life”, is also projected.
University of Michigan President Dr. Robben W. Fleming issued a statement urging the community to support the fund-drive. He appealed : “Within our community a dedicated, humanitarian group is organizing to bring aid to the people of Bangladesh. Already poor, and now the victim of a tragic war, its leadership has been decimated, its crops destroyed, and its people left homeless. Measured solely in terms of human survival, the months ahead are critical…Those who care can show their concern by supporting this compassionate crusade”.