397 বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড Brisk smuggling Naturally each side knows what the other is doing, as scores of agents cross each day and there is still a brisk smuggling business. While the Indian side is packed with refugees and it is not easy for the Army to move around the Pakistani forces operate in a completely deserted countryside, passing through villages, even towns, in which one or two old cripples or a blind man have been left behind It is hardly surprising refugees are not returning in any appreciable numbers to the reception centers the Pakistan authorities have prepared for them. A few familiesfive or six-cross by "unauthorized routes" here each night and they are generally picked up by the Army. They are taken to transit camps where they are fed, given anti-cholera shots and questioned to substantiate their claim to be "from Pakistan". The civil authorities, and indeed senior officers on both sides, are genuinely anxious to defuse border. The presence of a United Nations peace-keeping force would be the best solution, in view of the ever-rising tempers and bellicose attitudes of battalion and company commanders. INDIAN STATE SWAMPED BY REFUGEES By Peter Gill in Tripura As fresh waves of East Pakistani refugees break on the tiny Indian state of Tripura, anxious officials are fighting a "do or die" battle to preserve their desperately tenuous supply routes with the outside world Bengali peasants, most of them Moslems and some with hideous shell and mortar-bomb wounds, are now fleeing into Tripura at a rate of at least 10,000 a day. With a resident population of 1,600,000 to feed through the lean monsoon period, the Tripura authorities now have an additional, and entirely unproductive, Im refugee. During visits to border areas along Tripura's 560-mile frontier with East Pakistan over the past few days, I have seen Indian villages swollen in a matter of hours by hordes of tearful, uprooted Pakistani peasants. Killing crossfire They have been caught in a murderous crossfire between the Pakistan Army and the Mukti Foujguerrillas fighting for an independent East Bengal. One young farmer who crossed near the Indian border post at Debipur showed me fragments of four mortar bombs which he had collected that day from his village. A girl of 12 was pushed towards our Jeep as we drove through another border village. Shivering with shock, she held out a limp and roughly bandaged hand that had been hit by a shell splinter earlier in the day. Blood was still oozing from the wound,
