Observer (London)

Headed by a young white South African, a group of 10 people will assemble in Calcutta within the next few days and then try to drive two jeeps loaded with food and medical supplies across the closed frontier into East Pakistan. The leader, Mr. Colin Jackson, is a 29-year-old writer whose family lives in Johannesburg. Operating under the title Omega, the group will include an American woman married to a Bangladesh activist, a British nurse in her fifties, a Peace News journalist, an ex-policeman and an official of British European Airways, who is devoting his leave to the enterprise.

Mr. Jackson, who leaves for Calcutta today, said yesterday that he believes aid desperately needed inside East Pakistan is being prevented from getting there by ‘the principle of national sovereignty,’ backed up in this case by the Pakistan Army.

ON OWN GUARD

‘We feel that this principle ought to be challenged,’ said Mr. Jackson, ‘and that we have an obligation to make a spirited attempt to get into East Pakistan.’ While agreeing that the millions of refugees who have left Pakistan also need help, the Omega group believes that this can be only ‘a patch-up operation,’ and that aid taken into the country would be in the long run more valuable. ‘If people can be helped on their own ground, Mr.
Jackson argued, ‘they will be able to use their restored energy on doing what they normally do, instead of wasting away in a refugee camp.’

The attempt to cross the frontier will probably be made in the first week of August and will be carried out openly at the Benapol crossing point, in clearly marked vehicles and in the presence of as many witnesses as can be gathered together. Mr. Jackson insists that the Omega group is entirely non¬partisan. He says that all its members have signed a document accepting the risk that Pakistani troops may open fire on them.