109 বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড Another teenage girl in a Tripura camp told how she was raped by thirteen West Pakistani soldiers before escaping. Other girls have reportedly taken from fleeing families to be sold as prostitutes to the soldiers particularly if their fathers could not pay a ransom for them. According to an official who has toured the border, Pakistani troops and their anti-Hindu supporters are demanding 140 dollars a person before letting family members leave East Pakistan. Lacking only 25 dollars of the ransom for his wife one man pleaded: "beat me for the rest." They let his wife go after he was beaten on the temple with a bamboo stick until he lost an eye. Those who escaped could be models for Goya's 'Disaster of War'. The lucky ones get into already over-filled tent camps that reek of caustic soda disinfectant, and human excretion and arc ankle deep in filthy water from the first monsoons. Most huddle under trees or bushes trying to avoid the heavy rains. Some find cramped quarters on the verandas of now closed school houses. Others near Calcutta have found large open drainpipes to live in. Around them is always the stench of garbage, polluted water, sickness and death. Token Cremation The polluted drinking water, the lack of sanitation and the official's inability to inoculate the millions of refugees have contributed to the spread of cholera particularly in West Bengal. A bacterial disease, common to India and Pakistan, cholera causes severe vomiting and diarrhea, which bring dehydration and death. Those afflicted can usually be saved by replenishing the body fluids by intravenous injections or drinking large doses of a solution of salts, baking soda and glucose. But the flood of refugees is just too great to be handled by beleaguered, medical teams. The roads the refugees travel are not only littered with clothes and discarded household goods but with bodies of cholera victims left by those too frightened of the disease to bury their own dead. Although Hindus practice cremation, many of the bodies were merely singed with two burning sticks and then left for the hovering vultures or wild dogs to pick apart. Even when the corpses are buried they are often dug up by carrion eaters. Police have their hands full trying to prevent refugees from tossing corpses into the rivers. In the overcrowded hospitals the sick and dying are jammed together on the floor, and the dead continue to lie among the living for hours before the overworked, hospital staffs can cart the bodies off. At one of West Bengal's overflowing health centers a 45 year old rice farmer watched his infant son continue to suckle after his mother had died of cholera. "My wife is dead" the man said numbly. "Three of my children are dead. What else can happen?" With the refugees spreading through the Indian states carrying the disease with them, the epidemic could rapidly afflict hundreds of thousands of Indians. For this reason Indian authorities are trying to prevent the East Pakistanis from entering Calcutta, where uncounted million already live on the streets in squalid conditions that guarantee an annual cholera epidemic there.
