Le Monde (Weekly English Edition)

Fate has been merciless with the Bengalis of East Pakistan. Last summer the regime was hit by flooding, which destroyed homes and crops. In November an unusually violent cyclone killed between 300,000 and a million people in the Ganges delta. in a land where the annual per capita income is less than $40, stocks of food were just about wiped out.

The situation in Bengal might have been different had the Islamabad government honoured the verdict of the people in last December's general election, which gave Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's reformist Awami League all absolute majority in the Constituent Assembly. Sheikh Mujib had sworn to free Bengal from "colonialist domination" by the West Pakistanis, to give the wretched people in the eastern wing of the country a chance at last to benefit from their own natural resources .

But the Pakistani central government decided differently. Confronted by Sheikh Mujib's determination to obtain a certain measure of autonomy for East Bengal, President Yahya Khan undertook a repressive operation in the province last March, which was soon to take on the proportions of a massacre .

No one knows how many people died in what is euphemistically referred to as the "civil war." Understandably, no official count has been made, but estimates vary from 250,000 to a million victims.

As if three disasters in the space of a year were not enough, the repression in East Bengal set off a mass exodus of refugees. More than 4 million Bengalis, many of them Hindus fearing religious persecution, fled their homes and villages, some of which had been razed, and sought refuge in the Indian state of West Bengal.

Inevitably, a cholera epidemic has now broken out among the refugees. From 2,000 to 4,000 people were said to have died from the disease at the beginning of the week; pessimistic sources placed the figure closer to 10,000. Indian Health Minister Uma Shankar Dixit predicted that 50,000 could die in the next few days. In addition to the Pakistani refugees crowded into camps, the 8 million inhabitants of Calcutta, a city lacking adequate sewerage facilities and drinking water, were threatened by the outbreak.

Added to this calamity is the fact that famine threatens East Pakistan. The floods, the cyclone and the war prevented the planting of rice, the Bengalis' staple food. Economic activity in the province is paralyzed. According to the Financial Times, which bases its estimates on hard statistics, from 4 to 9 million people could die of hunger there in the next few weeks.

How much more is needed to rouse world opinion? The rich nations in particular have hardly reacted at all to the suffering of a people who have already endured so much. The assistance offered by the United States, Britain and the United Nations agencies is only a drop in the bucket. If hundreds of thousands more are not to die, ten times the level of the present aid will have to be dispatched .

But the Indian government is right in insisting that, more than material aid, pressure from foreign governments is needed to find a way out of the political crisis in East Bengal, Surely a solution can be arrived at without violating the Pakistani government's sovereignty .