পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (চতুর্দশ খণ্ড).pdf/৪৫৯

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427 বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড শিরোনাম সূত্র তারিখ ১৭১। জীবিত এবং মুক্ত ডেইলি মিরর ২৭ ডিসেম্বর, ১৯৭১ THE DAILY MIRROR DECEMBER 7, 1971 ALIVE AND FREE The Mirror's John Pilger reports on the birth of Bangladesh, a nation that cheated the executioners Calcutta, Monday. Five months ago I crossed the border between India and what was then East Pakistan, and reported that a nation called Bangladesh existed; and that its people were being murdered in their thousands for wishing to be free. On that day, the mirror's front page said "Death of a Nation." Bangladesh, it seemed, was to be stillborn, for already 500,000 people had been killed by the Pakistan Army, and 7,000,000 had fled to India, where unaccountable numbers died from diseases like cholera. Then we in the West cared briefly, we gave charity until the story of their suffering was no longer immediate news. But, really, we did not care about these boxwallahs of our colonial past; we did not care or understand about their uprising against that colonial past, and its legatees, the military despots of West Pakistan whose almost comical delusions of Aryan superiority had parallels in Nazi Germany, and whose determination to rule Bengal included a policy of genocide: to be exact, the death of a nation. I now report the birth of a nation. Bangladesh, Clive of India's Golden Bengal, having in the last year lost more than 1,000.(X)0 people through violence, cyclone and disease, and now facing perhaps the greatest famine of our time, has survived. Moral movement This morning, the People's Republic of Bangladesh, comprising 2 percent of the human race, was formally recognized by the Indian Government, whose army is now attacking the army of West Pakistan on twenty-two fronts inside Bangladesh. Tonight and tomorrow at least a dozen other countries are expected to offer recognition. Like other reporters here, who have worked on this story alongside Bangalees. I do not conceal my support for Bangladesh, which I believe embodies the most moral national movement since the cause of those who fought the Spanish Civil War and lost. My feelings stem not only from my regard for the Bengalese who are among tile most attractive and resilient people on earth, but also from the knowledge that their triumph today-as yet to be confirmed by India's victory in this war-is in spite of an enforced poverty typical of two-thirds of the human race, and unimaginable in the West. Usually we in the West, who are the world's rich, watch the new nations, who arc the poor, fall quickly to systems of dictatorship and corruption.