LONDON, July 11—After Hitler, there were many—and not only Germans by any means—who said they had had no idea of the extent of the horror. They knew terrible things were happening, but six million Jews in the gas chambers….

Similarly with Stalin's terror in the Soviet Union; it took years for people even in the West to appreciate the level of brutality and murder that obtained. And in Vietnam: most of us failed for too long to understand the inevitable consequences of American tactics in terms of human misery, death and destruction.

Right now another immense human disaster is taking place for political reasons. This time there can be no excuse for any informed person failing to understand what is happening; con temporary accounts leave little of the horror to the imagination. And yet, somehow, some responsible men do not see.

The disaster is in East Pakistan. Since West Pakistani troops moved in last spring to suppress the Eastern political movement, six million people have fled to India. Tens, probably hundreds of thousands have been killed. And the feeble Pakistani propaganda claim to be dealing only with “miscreants” does not conceal the fact that the army is killing and terrorizing on grounds of race and politics.

A first‐hand account of the savagery appeared on June 13 in The Sunday Times of London. It was by Anthony Mascarenhas, a West Pakistani journalist who went to the East with a group at the army's invitation but was so sickened by what he saw that he came to Britain to tell the truth.

Mascarenhas saw the troops kill men because they were not circumcised—and were therefore presumptively Hindus. He saw Bengali Moslem villages burnt. West Pakistan officers told him they were ready to prevent the East's secession, if necessary, by killing two million people and running the country as a colony for thirty years. He concluded that they meant it, that they were determined to push through their “final solution” of the East Bengal problem.

Within the last few days that picture of life under the army in East Pakistan has had authoritative and independent confirmation from two weighty sources. Both make clear, moreover, that the terror did not stop soon after the army takeover, but has continued.

One of these sources is the report by a joint team of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, just distributed to the Bank's directors. It found a continuing reign of military terror in East Pakistan. Much of the urban population has been killed or has fled, the report said; guerrilla activity is growing.

The other persuasive confirmation comes from four members of the British Parliament who have just toured the area. Two were Conservative and two Labor M.P.'s; they went at the invitation of the Pakistan Government and were hardly prejudiced against it. But they came back saying they were sickened by what one called the army's “continuing repression, using the most brutal methods.”

Now General Yahya Khan is not Hitler, and it is doubtless true that his Government did not set out deliberately to commit mass murder and destruction in its Eastern territory. But those are the results.

That is why the silence in some quarters is so puzzling. President Nix on has said nothing. That great moralist, U Thant, who regularly criticizes American action in Vietnam, has not had much to say about racial killing by Pakistani soldiers. And there are many others.

The answer must be that they are all practical men. Yahya is in charge, and so it is necessary to do business with him. That is the import of recent testimony by a State Department official who said that a cut‐off of American aid would “undermine the productive political relations with the Government of Pakistan.”

Even in practical terms that is a doubtful argument. The World Bank mission reported that chaos in East Pakistan precluded effective use of aid now. The British Government among others has said there must first be a political settlement—necessarily meaning some form of autonomy for the East,

Reginald Prentice, who was Minister for Overseas Development in the Labor Government, wrote after visiting Pakistan that outside economic pressure on the Pakistani generals was the “only hope.” His experience in the aid field, he said, made him think it was “wrong in 99 cases out of 100 to attach political conditions—but this is the 100th.”

There are now reports in London that the Communist Chinese Government is reassessing its commitment to Yahya Khan; it may have come to feel that a split between East and West Pakistan is inevitable. Hopefully, Henry Kissinger will bring back from his visit to Pakistan a realistic appraisal of the political future.

But the American interest goes beyond realism. We can no longer have any illusions about our ability to make unpleasant governments around the world behave well, but there does come a point at which self‐respect requires us to stop helping them. That is why an American official, one who is certainly a realist, said the other day:

“There is not much we can do about East Pakistan, but I dislike—pardon the phrase—our moral posture,”