পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (চতুর্দশ খণ্ড).pdf/৩৭৯

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বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র : চতুর্দশ খণ্ড
347
 শিরোনাম  সূত্র   তারিখ
১৪৪। বাগাড়ম্বর ও বাস্তব গার্ডিয়ান ১৪ এপ্রিল, ১৯৭১

GUARDIAN, LONDON, APRIL 14, 1971
Editorial
RHETORIC AND REALITY

 "Where, after three weeks of messy bloodshed, do the military rulers of Pakistan now stand? Superficially they prosper, Bangladesh's roving bands of “liberation fighters" have never and will never cope with the Pakistani Army in force. That force is being deployed to flatten urban resistance. Yahya Khan will soon have most cities and towns on a tight rein. He will also have all the Chinese spare parts over flying rights, and hire purchase rhetoric he can take. For the moment, the Awami League “miscreants" are dead, incarcerated or negligible. Pakistan is cowed, but united.

 "Yet, the true balance sheet is very different. Perhaps (ideally, and even at some cost) Pakistan is better together than apart. Perhaps continual martial law can maintain that state and, as famine saps revolt, bring Smouldering servility. But Yahya must be forced to take a wider view. May be a coordinated Bengali resistance movement will need years to organise, but in the meantime Bengalis will remain one of the most populous people on earth, always simmering in crowds always ready to overwhelm and slaughter patrols or lone Punjabi soldiers. The province which-head for head provides a majority of Pakistanis will have to be held down by tanks and planes and large concentrations of troops for as long as any prophet can see. There is no decent hope of passing the buck to some civilian regime, since virtually every civilian politicians-bar the ancient, sickly Nurul Amin-was obliterated at the polls last December. Collaborators with Islamabad will have no democratic justification; they will not be able to appear in public without peril.

 "The Eastern prospect, in short, is long, weary gloom-economic stagnation, starvation, murders the slow growth of extremism. Even Chinese friendship has a touch of poison in the embrace. Peking may care little if Maoist Bengalis like Maulana Bhashani find themselves at the wrong end of Yahya's bayonets: anything to worst the pro-American Sheikh Mujib. But once the Awami League is defunct and East Pakistan is given over to wild men of rebellion, then only the most stupid of generals will be surprised to find Chinese arms in every guerilla cache. And in the West there lies bleakness too. Mr. Bhutto may rejoice at army action today; but he will not rejoice long if it keeps him from the power he won at the ballot box. Pakistan is a nation in hock to the World Bank and to the aid-givers of the world: They are already turning away; gorged on brutality Pakistani defense policy (and the whole existence of the generals) rests on confrontation with India over Kashmir. Pakistan alleges that India holds the Pakistani loving Kashmiris in check by steely repression. It is the most ludicrous of cases now. As the junta of Islamabad openly exercises just such repression on 75 million bonafide Pakistanis. The United Nations will surely collapse in bitter laughter if Kashmir comes up again. The issue is as dead as the students of Dacca University.