বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ ত্রয়োদশ খণ্ড
Some of the women instinctively picked up a few pots and pans or a bag of rice as they rushed into the protective marshland. With luck some of the men had few coins in their pockets, which were quickly spent. These roaming people keep well away from the main routes frequented by the army. Indeed the sound of an army jeep causes all the able bodied to dive into the nearest undergrowth. Sometimes the wanderers take possession of an uninhabited village but they are too frightened to appeal to the local authorities for food. They believe with some reason that it is the army that has the real power and requests for help will merely cause the arrest of Some of the younger men and women.
Owing to floods, a chronic shortage of boats, and the havoc the Mukti Fouj have caused to the railways and roads, these pathetic groups of wanderers are not easy to trace except in those areas where there are Christian missions or European workers,
It is difficult to say how many of them die on their way to India but at least, according to some doctors, one fifth. The groups I have seen certainly showed advanced signs of malnutrition.
These displaced wanderers urgently need clothes and medical services but it is difficult to know how this can be arranged until they arrive in India except by sending supplies to those few missions still working in East Pakistan and urging the United Nations to put pressure on the Pakistan Government to allow relief workers to distribute food. At present the Pakistan Government have agreed to allow a totally inadequate handful of observers to see that the gift food reaches the right mouths. Food is a political weapon and as it grows more scarce the “good guys" who are members of the peace committees set up by the Pakistan army are likely to feed their political supporters.
The “bad guys" who have not demonstrated in favor of a united Pakistan and are therefore believed to have some sympathy with Bangladesh can count on rough treatment except in whose limited areas where the army has established an efficient civil administration.
Many hundreds of thousands of people are already suffering from the pangs of hunger in their own homes when there is still plenty of rice in the nearby village market; but they have no purchasing power owning to the breakdown of economic life. Growers have not been able to sell their jute and men have been “laid off work on development projects as a result of the civil war. Again, the impartial distribution of relief is urgent, otherwise hundreds of thousands more miserable people will leave the familiar shelter they have and take the road to India.
The only way to save thousands, perhaps millions, of lives is to begin the relief operation. Famine cannot be avoided when the autumn rice crops have been consumed as the population will eat two million more tons of rice and grain each month than the amount now available. The problem is largely one of transport for at present food stocks arc building up at the major ports and there are no trains and far too few vessels and lorries to distribute it. What is urgently needed are powered river boats and trucks with the authority to use them to carry grain to those areas not on the well-known main routes from the capital.
