পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (অষ্টম খণ্ড).pdf/৫৫২

উইকিসংকলন থেকে
এই পাতাটির মুদ্রণ সংশোধন করা প্রয়োজন।

৫২৫ বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র : অষ্টম খন্ড 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 annoSuncing 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. THE TIMES, LONDON ΜΑΥ 19, 1971 Road of Death Peter Hazelhurst SABRUM, May 18 Thousands of terrified and impoverished Bengalis who have attempted to flee to India during the past fortnight have collapsed and died of exhaustion and starvation on the roadside. Many others on the grim 75-mile march from the Chittagong district to the small Indian border state of Tripura are expected to meet with the same fate, refugees told me today. As many as 500,000 Muslim and Hindu refugees have already poured into the state of Tripura, and most of them crossed here at Sabrum, where the river Feni demarcates the Indo-Pakistan border. Permiless, exhausted and in a stupor many of the refugees described the tragic flight from their homes in the Chittagong district, about 60 miles to the south. Shamsuddin Ahmad, a farmer, aged 40, who has lost his wife and five children, fled Chittagong with his youngest daughter three-year old Rohina, when West Pakistani troops fired on his village. He said his wife was killed by a bullet as the family fled. Speaking through a Bengali interpreter, he said; “I was separated from the rest of my family as we fled. I don’t know what has happened to them. After searching for them I started to walk to the Indian border with Rohina.