EDITORIAL : BENGAL-MONEY AND DIPLOMACY
THE GUARDIAN (London) October 6, 1971
The week has been thick with gloom about Pakistan’s displaced nine million. At Brighton, Labour publishes a peremptory statement expressing grave concern over “the totally inadequate response of the world community to Bengal’s vast refugee problem.” Oxfam announces, with open desperation, that “tens of thousands of children face slow death”. In Geneva, Prince Sadruddin Khan, keeper of UN refugees, proclaimed acute and appalling crisis : unless world aid to Bengal (which has dwindled to a “trickle”) rapidly swells once more, India expects death tolls to make the Bihari famine seem a vicarage tea party.
Of course, such prophecies never precisely come to pass. The aid officers on the spot who predict catastrophe tomorrow will always find their instant doom turning to slow and complex disaster—disaster stripped of glib dramatics, numbing disaster which exhausts public patience because there is no single down payment to make it go away. Nevertheless, the Prince and Harold Wilson and Oxfam are, in essence, right Bengal is a crucial test of world civilization. If the children die we are all indicted. Perhaps nobody can sell enough charity flags. Perhaps an airport in Essex excites more voluble mass condemnation. Perhaps no coherent means exists to pressurize Whitehall. Nevertheless, the guilt is there and the guilt is shared. Nevertheless.
Yet it must also be said that Sadruddin Khan and his fellow UN committeemen cannot be allowed to escape with pure exhortation; and that no nation, or world community, can realistically be expected to succor nine million refugees indefinitely. We must pay today, but Governments and international forums must not rest content with mere cash flows. West Bengal’s camps of squalor represent, starkly, a country in tatters, the rubble of united Pakistan. These refugees are not the result of some unimaginable natural phenomenon, a flood to dwarf last December’s. They are the direct result of political and military action—action that can be reversed. Yahya’s army drove them from their pitiful paddy fields. Now Yahya must get them back. Without this hope, in the context of Calcutta and its already abject environs, the millions face gradual disintegration.
There are tardy but distinct signs from Islamabad that the enormity of the blunder and the situation are sinking in. Gradually a bloody, desperate predicament in the backlands of Bangladesh is forcing reappraisal. But the United States, as Senator Kennedy revealed this week, is still supplying millions of dollars worth of military hardware to Yahya’s army. The United Nations has not even formally addressed itself to a world political crisis which could yet lead to sub-continental war. Pakistan, as Oxfam believes, can be moved. But only by unrelenting diplomatic attack. Without this attack, all the money to save the starving may merely prolong a frightful agony. Governments must find the money and keep up the diplomatic pressure.
The week has been thick with gloom about Pakistan’s displaced nine million. At Brighton, Labour publishes a peremptory statement expressing grave concern over “the totally inadequate response of the world community to Bengal’s vast refugee problem.” Oxfam announces, with open desperation, that “tens of thousands of children face slow death”. In Geneva, Prince Sadruddin Khan, keeper of UN refugees, proclaimed acute and appalling crisis : unless world aid to Bengal (which has dwindled to a “trickle”) rapidly swells once more, India expects death tolls to make the Bihari famine seem a vicarage tea party.
Of course, such prophecies never precisely come to pass. The aid officers on the spot who predict catastrophe tomorrow will always find their instant doom turning to slow and complex disaster—disaster stripped of glib dramatics, numbing disaster which exhausts public patience because there is no single down payment to make it go away. Nevertheless, the Prince and Harold Wilson and Oxfam are, in essence, right Bengal is a crucial test of world civilization. If the children die we are all indicted. Perhaps nobody can sell enough charity flags. Perhaps an airport in Essex excites more voluble mass condemnation. Perhaps no coherent means exists to pressurize Whitehall. Nevertheless, the guilt is there and the guilt is shared. Nevertheless.
Yet it must also be said that Sadruddin Khan and his fellow UN committeemen cannot be allowed to escape with pure exhortation; and that no nation, or world community, can realistically be expected to succor nine million refugees indefinitely. We must pay today, but Governments and international forums must not rest content with mere cash flows. West Bengal’s camps of squalor represent, starkly, a country in tatters, the rubble of united Pakistan. These refugees are not the result of some unimaginable natural phenomenon, a flood to dwarf last December’s. They are the direct result of political and military action—action that can be reversed. Yahya’s army drove them from their pitiful paddy fields. Now Yahya must get them back. Without this hope, in the context of Calcutta and its already abject environs, the millions face gradual disintegration.
There are tardy but distinct signs from Islamabad that the enormity of the blunder and the situation are sinking in. Gradually a bloody, desperate predicament in the backlands of Bangladesh is forcing reappraisal. But the United States, as Senator Kennedy revealed this week, is still supplying millions of dollars worth of military hardware to Yahya’s army. The United Nations has not even formally addressed itself to a world political crisis which could yet lead to sub-continental war. Pakistan, as Oxfam believes, can be moved. But only by unrelenting diplomatic attack. Without this attack, all the money to save the starving may merely prolong a frightful agony. Governments must find the money and keep up the diplomatic pressure.
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