1971-12-15
By V. Kudryavtsev
Page: 0
By V. Kudryavtsev, Izvestia Political Analyst Reprinted in the Soviet Review, January 18, 1972, Supplement to Issue 3 Volume 9 SOVIET UNION AND THE STRUGGLE OF THE BANGLA DESH PEOPLE Official Documents and Articles from the Soviet Press
WITH the military operations between India and Pakistan entering the second week, there is anxiety everywhere, especially as attempts to liquidate hotbeds of war in the Middle East and South-East Asia have so far failed.
Commentaries on the events on the Indian subcontinent show that many bourgeois politicians and press organs, in the first place those directly involved in creating flash-points of war in South-East Asia and in the Middle East, pretend that military operations on the Indian subcontinent came as a complete surprise. To distract the public from the true reasons of the conflict they seek to determine the aggressor according to who fired the first shot, although it is known to all that the Pakistani air force dealt an unprovoked bombing strike at Indian airfields on December 3. However, the facts are so eloquent that even some of the bourgeois press could not but admit the true reasons of the conflict.
When elections were held for the first time in Pakistan in accordance with the constitutional provisions, the Awami League led by Mujibur Rahman scored a decisive victory in East Pakistan.
According to the constitutional provisions the Awami League should have formed the government. But while the leaders of the victorious party conducted talks with Yahya Khan, the latter sent armed forces to East Pakistan which cruelly dealt with the population and threw into prison the leaders of the Awami League, including Mujibur Rahman. The West Pakistani troops killed or maimed several hundred thousand of the East Pakistani population. Some ten million East Pakistanis fled to India, placing the latter in an extremely difficult position. One can imagine the scale of terror if ten million people left their homes and sought a haven in a neighbouring country!
Is it surprising that the population of East Pakistan started to rebuff the oppressors and cutthroats by organising guerilla Mukti Bahini detachments, protecting the lives and the dignity of the inhabitants of the province?
The British colonialists used religion to set Muslims against Hindus and vice versa. They used the religious strife which they themselves had incited during the partition of the Indian subcontinent, thus placing delayed-action political mines. With the present scope of the national-liberation movement, there should be nothing surprising in peoples ever more completely discarding religious prejudices which had been cultivated with the assistance of the colonialists. Under such conditions the Bangla Desh government came into being.
Millions of Pakistani refugees can return home only if terror is ceased and a normal political situation created in East Pakistan. The problem of East Pakistani refugees is not so much a matter of humanism as of politics, but bourgeois pseudo-humanists shut their eyes to this.
Why didn't "humanists" from the West take timely measures to defend democracy in East Pakistan and protect the people of East Pakistan from the terror and extermination, from the horrors they suffered from the West Pakistani army?
It must be said outright that strife between the two countries suited imperialist instigators of different shades because it weakened the anti-imperialist struggle in Asia. They staked on both countries growing weak as a result of internecine conflicts. When representatives of the United States and its allies pretend in the UN debates that they stand for peace on the Indian subcontinent, their speeches and resolutions smell of gross hypocrisy.
The US ruling circles want to demonstrate their "impartiality" in respect to the Pakistani-Indian conflict, saying that they keep a "neutral stand" in relation to it. However, this "neutrality" reveals itself in the fact that the United States applies economic sanctions to India (and only to India!). Despite preliminary agreement, it has refused to supply that country with loans totalling 87.6 million dollars, thus also showing that the US renders "aid" not to strengthen independent developing countries, but to strengthen its positions in these countries. When this doesn't work, economic sanctions are applied.