The whole country feels pity and horror at the reports and the pictures in newspapers and on television of the wretched fate of refugees in Bengal. The humanitarian conscience has been fully aroused, despite the familiarity in recent years with disaster and suffering. Yet even now the full dimensions of the tragedy are unknown.

How insidious are the outbreaks of cholera and how many will die before the disease is contained? How many more refugees may yet cross the border from East Pakistan to India? Now that the monsoon has been added to all the other causes of suffering, how many more can perish from exposure or other disease? Faced by such urgings of conscience there is the need to get aid quickly and effectively to those who need it. In a world where communications are measured only by hours for the aircraft, and where all possible needs of the refugees are available in quantity in one country or another, we all wonder why so much appealing and coordination has to go on before the flow of aid is effective.

In a crisis such as this it is always difficult to keep priorities right. Almost all the news and pictures have come from the Indian side of the border because correspondents have thus far not been admitted to the Pakistan side. Yet the fate of as many millions in East Pakistan must also be at stake. Cholera strikes there too, and is now probably widespread. Food shortages are chronic in this over-populated corner of Asia and they can only have been made worse by the losses sustained in last year's cyclone damage.

In his statement in Parliament yesterday. the Foreign Secretory foresaw the danger of widespread starvation in East Pakistan later this year from the disruption of communications and the shortfall of the rice harvest. Even if all the repressive measures by the Pakistan army have come to an end—which we still cannot know for sure—the communal tensions aroused will not easily die down. The steady flow of Hindus now crossing the border may be the luckless scapegoats of Pakistani military contempt and the blind despair of Bengali Muslims. Certainly suffering in East Pakistan must not be overlooked merely because it is less publicized, or because aid is more difficult to arrange.

It should be plain that no boycott or accusations pressed now against the Pakistan Government will lessen such suffering. If aid is to save lives the military authorities in East Pakistan must be accepted as the channel for relief. They have the transport and the administrative facilities for dealing with an area that presents many difficulties of communications. Now is not the time to draw up the balance of political charges or to take positions about the future of East Pakistan. The first priority is to get aid to those who are suffering and to do it in ways that will not sharpen the political animosities that exist. The aid must go to the suffering for whom the great political causes have very little relevance.

The Government of Pakistan must however be willing to play its part in this. At present the exclusion of journalists and the limitations on aid flowing into East Bengal create considerable uncertainty and anxiety. The world suspects that widespread deaths are continuing, not because of any intention of the Pakistan Government, but because effective counter-measures are not yet being, applied. In the absence of the reporting that has been possible on the Indian side of the frontier such fears are inevitable, and they may increasingly influence the judgment of other nations.

Much the best thing the Pakistan Government could do would be to open up East Pakistan, so that the world would know what is happening there. No doubt the situation is bad; with 1,300 miles of cholera affected frontier it could hardly be anything else. Yet it will take the active sympathy and assistance of many nation to bring effective help. That aid will be available much more quickly and fully if East Bengal is again opened to accurate information and effective assistance.