পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (চতুর্থ খণ্ড).pdf/৩৩৯

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309 বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিল : চতুর্থ খন্ড শিরোনাম সূত্র তারিখ ংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা সংগ্রামের পটভূমি ও | ক্যালিফোরিয়াস্থ প্যাসিফিক ষ্টাডিজ | ---------- বর্তমান পরিস্থিতি সম্পর্কে একটি প্রতিবেদন সেন্টার প্রকাশিত বুলেটিন ՏծԳծ Rebellion in Bangladesh May 7, 1971 By Judith Milgrom Carnoy Member of Pacific Studies Center With heavy fighting at an end and liberation forces in apparent disarray, news from East Pakistan has dropped from the front page. But Pakistan will never be the same. For the second time in a generation, a million Pakistanis have died violent deaths. Yet while the slaughter that followed partition from India in 1947 had a religious base, what today separates West Pakistan from East is primarily the control of the East Bengali economy by the Wrest Pakistani elite. (Before Pakistan achieved independence, East Pakistan was part of British Bengal East Bengal-now proclaimed Bangladesh-is East Pakistan. West Bengali is in India) Largely unarmed, the Bengali people confront a 70,000-man West Pakistani army well-equipped with American, Russian, French and Chinese weapons. With moderate leaders dead, imprisoned, or in exile, their struggle shows signs of developing into a classical "people's war"-a guerrilla conflict on the Vietnamese model with the solid backing of the Bengali masses. As India already faces Maoist guerrillas in its own West Bengal state, and China is East Bengal s near neighbor, the outcome of the war has wide implications. As in Vietnam, its prosecution may spill across the region's formal boundaries. Home of more than half of Pakistan's inhabitants, Bangladesh is one of the world's most densely populated regions-its seventy-five million live in an area the size of Louisiana. British terms of post-war independence for Pakistan united the East Bengalis across a thousand miles of Indian territory with peoples with whom they shared little more than religion not even language. Now, after a generation of simmering hostility between East and West, open war has left a million civilians dead in its first few weeks. THE CURRENT SITUATION Pakistan held its first one-man one-vote elections only last December, held as a concession by President General Yahya Khan to the worker and student movements that had toppled his predecessor, Ayub Khan. The elections brought overwhelming victories for nominally socialist candidates in both East and West. In the west the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) of landlord Zulfikar Ali Bhutto won handily, while control of the national assembly was won by East Bengal's moderate Awami League under the leadership of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. (In Bengali "sheikh," means something similar to the English "squire".)