390 বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড will be supported by several hundred country-craft which have been requisitioned and converted for military use by the addition of outboard motors. The army intends to take to the water in pursuit of the rebels. Colonization of East Bengal There is also the clear prospect of famine, because of the breakdown of the distribution system. Seventeen of the 23 districts of East Pakistan are normally short of food and have to be supplied by massive imports of rice and wheat. This will not be possible this year because of the civil war. Six major bridges and thousands of smaller ones have been destroyed, making the roads impassible in many places. The railway system has been similarly disrupted, though the government claims it is "almost normal." The road and rail tracks between the port of Chittagong and the north have been completely disrupted by the rebels who held Feni, a key road and rail junction, until May 7. Food stocks cannot move because of this devastation. In normal times only 15 per cent of food movement from Chittagong to up country areas were made by boat. The remaining 85 per cent was moved by road and rail. Even a 100 percent increase in the effectiveness of river movement will leave 70 per cent of the food stocks in the warehouses of Chittagong. Two other factors must be added. One is large-scale hoarding of grain by people who have begun to anticipate the famine. This makes a tight position infinitely more difficult. This other is the government of Pakistan's refusal to acknowledge the danger of famine publicly. Lt Gen. Tikka Khan, the military governor of East Bengal, acknowledged in a radio broadcast on April 18 that he was gravely concerned about food supplies. Since then the entire government machinery has been used to suppress the fact of the food shortage. The reason is that a famine, like the cyclone before it, could result in a massive outpouring of foreign aid-and with it the prospect of external inspection of distribution methods. That would make it impossible to conceal from the world the scale of the pogrom. So the hungry will be left to die until the clean-up is complete. Discussing the problem in his plush air-conditioned office in Karachi recently the chairman of the Agricultural Development Bank, Mr. Qarni, said bluntly: "The famine is the result of their acts of sabotage. So let them die. Perhaps then the Bengali will come to their senses." The Military Government's East Bengal policy is so apparently contradictory and self-defeating that it would seem to justify the assumption that the men who rule Pakistan cannot make up their minds. Having committed the initial error by resorting to force, the Government, on this view, is stubbornly and stupidly mudding through. There is, superficially, logic in this reasoning. On the one hand, it is true that there is no let up in the reign of terror. The policy of subjugation is certainly being pursued with vigour in East Bengal. This is making thousands of new enemies for the Government every day and making only more definitive the separation of the two wings of Pakistan.
