24 বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিল : চতুর্থ খন্ড passed before Simon Dring reported in The Daily Telegraph that his university had been shelled and that his students and teachers had been gunned down. "For all that time I was stunned, and I felt a pain here". He touched his chest. Then, when confirmation came, the suffocating atmosphere was lifted. Immediately I passed into tears, and wept like a child. I told my wife, and she wept." Dacca University is the largest in Pakistan, with a teaching staff of 600, and 10,000 students. Fewer than 5,000 of them, he says, play any active role in politics, and in his experience they do so peacefully. Many of the rest are "poor children from the countryside" who are obliged to live in the University halls of residence and who offered the army a sleeping target on the night of March 25. Mr. Justice Chowdhury does not even know the fate of one hall for 500 women students which was to have been opened on March 1.."I appointed, the Provost, and gave strict orders that its opening date was not to be postponed for my return. Accommodation, you see, was desperately short. But then the National Assembly was postponed, and the whole of life in Dacca closed down." He is, however, quite certain about the part that the British Government much now play and he will be putting his care before a group of Conservative back benchers this week. His argument is taut. "To pursue the ideal of a united Pakistan after all this is to pursue a mirage. There are two alternatives. The first is to persuade President Yahya Khan to withdraw the army, to release Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and to allow him to frame a constitution for East Bengal. The second is to allow the President to eliminate the intelligentsia along with Sheikh Mujib, and then anarchy and confusion will continue to reign. This situation cannot be seen as an internal affair when people have been bombed continuously for two weeks." He is equally certain that he cannot return to Dacca until the regime has changed. As a judge, it would be impossible. "How can anyone now go to the High Court with a petition to set aside a Government order? There is no rule of law now: there is a. Government of might." As a Vice-Chancellor, it would be too harrowing. "When they killed my students, 1 had no face to return. You sec, my students loved me and I loved my students. If I can't remedy the wrong that's been done to them, how could I go and show my face?" And having told all this to the British Press, be wouldn't he very welcome, either. BANGLADESH ASSOCIATION. From: SCOTLAND Members of staff of the Universities of Dacca, 15 Eldon Street Rajshahi, Chittagong and the affiliated Glasgow. C. 3 Colleges now on higher studies in Scotland 19.4, 1971.
