New Yorker

Last December in accordance with the declared wishes of General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan a military dictator of Pakistan free elections were held in that country for a constituent assembly that was to draft a constitution to return the government to civilian control. In the elections the Awami League the party of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman won by a majority in part because it was based in East Pakistan or East Bengal where more than half of the hundred and thirty million Pakistanis live. The Awami League immediately put forward a demand for regional autonomy which was supported by most East Pakistanis - and not without some reason since East Pakistan is separated from West Pakistan by a thousand miles of Indian territory is far poorer than West Pakistan and for many years now has been economically exploited by West Pakistan. But General Yahya Khan after some parleying condemned the idea of regional autonomy as secessionist (though how the majority could secede from the minority was never established). Then on the twenty-fifth of March a little over three months after the elections he shelved the idea of a constituent assembly and much as General Yakubu Gowon had done in Biafra and President Joseph Mobutu in Katanga ordered his troops to crush the secessionist movement. In the months since a large part of the intellectual and artistic community of East Pakistan has been exterminated and by State Department estimates at least two hundred thousand Bengalis have been massacred. The military action has so disrupted the planting cycle of rice the staple crop that according to one responsible British correspondent as many as twenty million Bengalis are in danger of dying of starvation by the onset of winter. In the meantime nearly six million refugees have crossed the border into India and a hundred thousand more are arriving every day. Some of them have found shelter in tents, but many of them have been herded into crude and unsanitary camps where they must live and sleep in the open. Thousands of these refugees have already died in an outbreak of Cholera the camps are now being deluged by the monsoon rains and it is feared that many thousands more will die not only of cholera but of pneumonia and other diseases. In an attempt to prevent the spread of infection to Calcutta - where even under normal conditions a million destitute people sleep every night on the streets and where most people have no running water and no sewage facilities of any kind - the Indian government has placed a sort of cordon around the city.

Nevertheless increasing numbers of refugees are slipping into Calcutta. The stability of India itself the world s largest democracy is threatened.

When last November, almost half a million East Pakistanis perished in a flood there was at least an outpouring of sympathy from the United States and some medical and economic aid was provided. In contrast not only has the unspeakable man-made disaster of recent months gone almost unnoticed here but until the middle of April America was shipping military supplies to General Yahya Khan s troops. True our government has just pledged a total of ninety million dollars to India in connection with this crisis about the amount it spends on the Vietnam war every couple of days - but only some of the money will go for direct relief of the refugees. Supposedly, one important reason we are still fighting in Vietnam is that our precipitate departure would lead to a massacre of South Vietnamese but despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of Bengalis have been massacred President Nixon hasn't seen fit to make a single public statement about East Pakistan ostensibly on the ground that Pakistan is a political and military ally indispensable to the defense of Southeast Asia It seems that the qualities of generosity and sympathy for which we as a people were long renowned have been so deadened during the Vietnam years that we are now unable to respond to the simplest and starkest of human emergencies .