বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (ত্রয়োদশ খণ্ড)/৮৫
| শিরোনাম | সূত্র | তারিখ |
| প্রতিনিধি পরিষদে ই, গ্যালাঘের-এর বক্তৃতা ও উদ্ধৃত্তি | কংগ্রেস-এর কার্যবিবরণী | ১৩ মে, ১৯৭ |
VULTURES TOO FULL TO FLY
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
May 12, 1971
Mr. GALLAGHER. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to comment briefly on the situation in East Pakistan or Bangladesh as the Bengalis and their supporters prefer it to be called. On May 11, my Foreign Affairs' Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs held a hearing on this matter. We were scheduled to meet May 13 to hear the witnesses from the Department of State and the Agency for International Development in executive session and Professor Robert Dorfman of Harvard University in open session. Unfortunately, that day of hearing must now be postponed and it will be rescheduled as soon as possible.
Whatever the politics involved in this region. I firmly believe that one of the great human tragedies of modern times may be in the process of being created. As additional background material for the continuing debate over the American role and the role of the world community in mounting a humanitarian assistance program. I would like to call my colleagues attention to the testimony of Senator EDWARD M. KENNEDY before my sub- committee yesterday, a position paper of the Ripon Society dated April 3, and a news dispatch from the Washington Star of May 12.
The phrase in the news dispatch about “vultures too full to fly" may be regarded as vulgar by many people unfamiliar with the history and the potential for tragedy in his region. However, it does graphically reflect the position of many who are intimately familiar with past events and with informed future predictions.
[From the Washington Evening Star. May 12, 1971]
VULTURES TOO FULL TO FLY-EAST PAKISTANI
CALAMITY DEFIES BELIEF,
(By Moit Rosenblum)
DACCA, EAST PAKISTAN-Vultures too full fly perch along the Ganges River in grim contentment. They have fed on perhaps more than a half million bodies since March.
Civil war flamed through Pakistan's eastern wing on March 25, pushing the bankrupt nation to the edge of ruin. The killing and devastation defy belief.
From a well at Natore, fetid geses bubble up around bones and rotting flesh. A tiny child gazes at a break in the lavender carpet of water hyacinths in a nearby pond where his parents' bodies were dumped.
TOLL COULD BE MILLION
No one knows how many Bengali families the army machine gunned or how many migrant settlers Bengali secessionists slashed to death. But estimates of the total dead start at six figures and range to over a million.
In the port city of Chittagong, a blood splattered doll lies in a heap of clothing and excrement in a jute mill recreation club where Bengalis butchered 180 women and children.
Along the road to the mill, entire blocks of Bengali homes and shops were blasted and burned to the ground by the revenging Pakistani army.
Reporters were banned from East Pakistan from March 26, when 40 newsmen were bundled out and stripped of their notes and film, until the government escorted in a party of six on a conducted tour may 6-11.
From visible evidence and eyewitnesses questioned out of official earshot the following account emerged:
Throughout March, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's Bengali dominated Awami League harassed the military government with a non-cooperation campaign demanding autonomy and more benefits from West Pakistan.
Bengalis killed some West Pakistanis in flurries of chauvinism.
Mujib's party had won a majority in the National Assembly elections and he was Pakistan's major political figure. But negotiations in Dacca with President Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan broke dean and Yahya flow back to West Pakistan March 25. That night the army roared out of its barracks, and East Pakistan was aflame.
PROFESSORS EXECUTED
Soldiers assaulted two dormitories at Dacca University where radical Bangali students made their headquarters. They used recoilless rifles, then automatic weapons and bayonets.
They broke into selected professors' and students' quarters. They executed some 14 faculty members, at least one by mistake. Altogether, more than 200 students were killed.
Army units shelled and set fire to two newspaper offices, then set upon the Bangali population in general. More than a dozen markets were set afire and at least 25- blocks were devastated in Dacca.
Hindu Bengali jewellery shops in the Shakari patti quarter were blown apart. Two Hindu villages inside the Dacca race course were attacked with almost holy war fury by the Moslem troops.
Accounts, projected from body counts at mass graves indicate above 10,000 persons were shot to death or burned to death the first few nights in Dacca.
Official spokesmen contended that the army went into action to stop a rebellion planned for 3 o'clock the next morning. They insisted that the army killed no one but those who fired at the soldiers.
But other officers said the rebellion plot was only an assumption.
Eye-witnesses said at least hundreds of the victims were women and thousands were unarmed civilians gunned down indiscriminately.
I took firm action to prevent heavy casualties later,” said the martial law governor, Lt. Gen. Tikka Khan.
Dacca was brought under army control quickly, but word of the army action flashed through the province of 58,000 square miles and 75 million inhabitants, one of the world's most densely populated areas.
Thousands of Bengalis in the army, police, militia and border forces revolted. Under the banner of Bangladesh, the independent Bengali state, the deserters and armed volunteers fought back, seizing wide areas of the provinces before the 11,000 West Pakistani regulars could occupy them.
Bengali civilians and “liberation troops” began a mass slaughter of MohajirsIndian migrants from the 1947 partition-and West Pakistanis.
They raced through market places and settlements, stabbing, shooting and burning, sometimes stopping to rape and loot.
The army shelled towns and fired at anything that moved. The army action was far more brutal than anything seen in the Nigerian civil war.
Europeans likened the damage to that of the hardest hit the eaters of World War II.