To the Editor:

Your Oct. 28 editorial “On the Edge of the Precipice” is balanced in one respect: Your reluctance to commend Pakistan for its series of positive responses to proposals for a United Nations role in the present Indian-Pakistani crisis is matched only by your renitence to condemn India for its consistent rejection of these proposals. This unfortunate inhibition has resulted in your discussing the Indian-Pakistani situation on the basis of incorrect or incomplete information.

The President of Pakistan, your editorial says, “has appealed to Secretary General Thant to mediate between the two countries.” The correct position is that the Secretary General, at his initiative, offered his good offices, and Pakistan has accepted the offer.

You advocate mediation by U Thant between the Pakistani Government and leaders of the outlawed Awami League. Does the United Nations Charter provide for intervention by the Secretary General in the internal politics of a member state?

The basic issue threatening peace, you say, is “persisting military repression in East Pakistan and the continuing flight of refugees into India.” Both these assumptions are incorrect. The only military action now in East Pakistan is against armed guerrillas operating from bases in India. The Western press generally identifies them as guerrillas if they blow up a bridge but transforms them into East Pakistani villagers if they themselves become casualties.

Also, there is now no flight of refugees from East Pakistan. Visibile “proof” of the refugee flow into India comes from such stage‐managed shows as the one put on at Boyra far Senator Edward Kennedy. The Guardian of London said on Aug. 11 that when Senator Kennedy left, after seeing “dozens of canoes” with refugees come across the border, press correspondents were told by Indian villagers that the entire incident had been staged, the refugees having been sent from the camp to time their re‐entry with Senator Kennedy's visit.
Continue reading the main story

It must be to hide such recycling of refugees that India has not accepted Pakistan's proposal to allow an impartial international agency to check India's figures. Such inquiry might also have dramatically revealed the fact that on an average only one of every four inmates of refugee camps in India is a genuine East Pakistani refugee.

The posting of U.N. observers, as proposed by Pakistan, is the most effective way of removing the threat to peace on the subcontinent. War would help only those who wish to frustrate the political solution now in the process of being worked out in East Pakistan.

The National Assembly has been summoned to meet on Dec. 27. I shall attend it, work for the adoption of a new constitution which will give East Pakistan and the other provinces of Pakistan maximum autonomy within a single federal state (this incidentally was decided in principle early in 1970, eight months before the general elections last December) and the formation of a representative civilian government by the new year.

Mahmud Ali
Chairman, Pakistan Delegation to the U.N. General Assembly
New York, Nov. 2, 1971