বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ ত্রয়োদশ খণ্ড
It seems to me that in the face of such a dramatic situation, private and charitable giving is not enough. Only a huge and concerted action by governments can put an end to the tragedy.
Monseigneur Bruce Kent War On Want
It was a Saturday and with the monsoon starting, heavy rain had fallen for nearly five hours. There was a little, almost unofficial camp, not far away from our hospitalperhaps a thousand people huddling in shelters on the roadside or even without shelter at all. In a few large bamboo type huts a number of families had crowded-perhaps 12 families to a hut.
But the huts had been built below flood level and the water had risen in the huts to a depth of about two feet. A crowd stood around one in particular. With the endless rain the roof had given way. Most of the people had got out. But a baby, knocked on to the ground had either drowned or suffocated and its little body was held by a weeping mother. Guilty of nothing, life was suddenly over. I could not look at the parents who had come so far only to find this extra tragedy at the end of a road of tears.
Kevin Rafferty, Financial Times
The biggest tragedy is the meanness of the rich nation “friends" of the refugees. If one creams off the layer of self-interested businessmen and politicians, who have dealt too much with men from the power blocks of the West, whose concern is with money, the people of India and Pakistan are simple and poor-but hospitable and loving. When I first went to India a complete stranger in Delhi offered me his room in his 3 roomed house, fed me and looked after me when I was ill and would not take anything in return. I found the same warmth in East Pakistan and was always greeted with a smile and a ready offer of a cup of tea.
Yet we Christians!-cannot cough up even half a percent of our annual defence budget to rescue these poor people. Their plight is not their own fault. Ironically it is the fault of men of their own country who have dedicated themselves firstly to pursuing Western inculcated ideas of wealth and power.
Romano Cagnoni, Photographer
I was in Biafra for six months. I hoped I would never see a tragedy on that scale again. The situation in Bengal in it beginning is worse than Biafra at the end of the war.
Dr. Meyer Caritas
So many marasmic children are seen suck the breast and looking like wizened old men, that the mothers get used to the idea of having a very thin child and do not become unduly alarmed at the sight. In fact, they would rather leave the child alone than coax him to take any extra rice or dahl if the child refused to take anything at alleven fluids.
