পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (সপ্তম খণ্ড).pdf/৩৫৯

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বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র : সপ্তম খণ্ড
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have taken under various Governments here which have furthered self-Government, and which have created independent countries with full sovereignty over their affairs will prove to have been in vain...

 In the course of the same debate, the British Prime Minister said:

 "...A legitimate Government has, it seems to me, the right to ask for help in its difficulties from another friendly Government. Whether that help should be forthcoming or not is, of course, a matter of judgment, but I do not think that there is anything legally improper for a nation faced with aggression from outsider with internal disturbances supported from outside, to ask for help. I think that this is commonly recognized.

Intervention

 One might describe the 1950s and early 60s as a time of interventions because inspite of the established rules of international law and conduct set out earlier there were numerous attempts, notably in Africa, by states to intervene in the internal affairs of other states.

 Ghana, under Nkrumah, attempted intervention by providing finance, training and bases of operations for dissidents against (at one time or another) the Cameroon, Niger, Upper Volta, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Congo and Togo. Togo in its turn attempted it against Ghana in retaliation: Tanzania against Malawi; Mali against Senegal: Brmrrundi against Rwanda, Zambia, Tanzania, Ivory Coast and Gabon against Nigeria during the Biafra uprising; and no less than nine African states against Congo during Tshombe's regime. But one of the major reasons in Africa was the fact that state frontiers were arbitrary and, originally at any rate, entirely artificial.

 They bore no relation to the religious, ethnic or cultural affinities of the inhabitants and merely constituted the lines of demarcation agreed to at conferences in various European cities by imperialist powers carving out their colonial possessions. Nevertheless, despite the artificiality of these frontiers, over the years of independence, African states have tended to become increasingly hostile to the idea of intervention, above all when was aimed at challenging the integrity of state frontiers.

 As Immanuel Wallerstein neatly put it in his book Africa: The Politics of Independence, “Every African nation...has its Katanga. Once the logic of secession is admitted, there is on end except in anarchy."

 Of course, Africa is not alone in this. Asia has its fair share of plural societies and even Europe can show examples of States where religion, language, nationality and cultural affinities do not coincide.

 The Balkans, of course, is littered with such examples and in Western Europe; there are the Bangques, Catalans, and Walloons apart from Northern Ireland. Indeed the Anglo-Irish question has shown itself to be very much alive recently two hundred and eighty years after the Battle of the Boyne) with religion, race, nationality and language