paddy becomes a lake. Bombing is not an effective tactic since there are no industrial centres and the few towns are not essential to the survival of a country which is one huge village covering 55,126 sq. miles. According to our sources, sabotage and guerrilla activities are increasing. Blowing up Dacca airport could virtually maroon the army in a sea of hostility.
It would seem then that the military leadership has given ample proof of its criminal brutality and stupidity. The Consortium countries and the United States now have the power to perpetuate this leadership, to give them the impunity they gave their own murderous soldiery.
The answer we are given to this charge is that the only aid contemplated is supervised aid. This reads very well on paper but is rather hard to put into practice. What does “supervised aid” really mean? It means this: a handful of foreigners, diplomats and technical experts, will be sent to Dacca; they will be quartered at the Intercontinental Hotel where they will be pleasantly wined and dined; they will speak no Bengali; they will be wholly dependent on the army for transportation and protection from Bengali guerrillas, who will obviously consider them allies of the Punjabis.
Even with the presence of intelligent, well meaning foreign supervisors, aid cannot be effective as long as the army remains in East Bengal. It is enough to remember how callous the West wing was to the suffering of the cyclone victims last November to realize how Punjabis feel about Bengalis at the best of times. One can imagine how likely it is for Tikka Khan to turn suddenly into Florence Nightingalefor soldiers who just spent nine weeks butchering people to now minister to these people's needs. If only commodity aid is granted, this is still tantamount to financing and perpetuating the slaughter. Commodity aid will simply enable the West to use its dwindling funds on arms. Even food will become a lethal weapon in these circumstances-a way of cowing people into submission with the threat of starvation. A letter we got from an American in East Bengal quotes a West Pakistani officer who said: We'll do what the British did. We'll just starve the bastards to death.” The East Bengalis realize this will happen and have repeatedly begged our American source to urge the United States and the Consortium countries not to send any aid-not even food-because they prefer starvation to the perpetuation of the nightmare of terror in which they live.
After all, it was aid, hedged about by all sorts of conditions, and entrusted to these same military leaders that made this holocaust possible. Surely this experience should make the donors pause and reconsider their methods of ensuring the welfare of the poor in developing countries. The tragedy of this catastrophe will be horribly compounded if the Western countries fail to learn anything from this experience and proceed to commit the same mistakes again.
One of the conditions always put on aid since the days of Foster Dulles has been that military aid could only be used against outside communist aggression. Between 1956 and 1965, Pakistan received approximately 2 billion dollars in military aid. The only use it has made of this aid has been in the war with India in 1965 and now against 75 million
