The Cavalier daily :: Wednesday, February 16, 1972 :: University of Virginia Library

On Dec. 16, 1971, when the Pakistani
troops surrendered, Bangladesh began its
career as a new independent nation. The
well-deserved victory of the Bengalis has
brought for them many new
responsibilities.

The most important of these are:
rehabilitating 10 million refugees who
fled to India and 20 million people
(excluding the refugees in India) who
were rendered homeless, reconstructing
the facilities that were destroyed during
the war and setting the country on a
course of peace, stability and progress.

How well and how soon they can
begin their work and how satisfactory
their performance will be depends not
only on them but also on a few other
factors, namely, (1) what India's short
term and long term plans are regarding
Bangladesh and (2) how long will it take
for the U.S.A., communist China and the
world community to reconcile themselves
to the emergence of Bangladesh, and how
they will react to what India may now do
with regard to the new nation.

At the moment the world organization
is not in a mood to give its blessings to
the new nation. The United Nations tried
to calm the latest geopolitical storm in
the Indian subcontinent by waving the
magic wand of "resolution."

Hostilities Prevail

The magic did not work; the storm ran
its course and the state of Bangladesh was
born. The ego of the magicians
(supporters of the resolution in the
General Assembly which urged a
cease-fire and withdrawal of troops) was
hurt. And hence, most of them have
assumed a hostile posture toward
Bangladesh.

It seems that the more the United
Nations is growing in the number of its
members the more it is losing in wisdom.
This is one of those times when the world
body should have learned a few lessons.

Lessons To Be Heeded

One lesson is that the peace of the
world is endangered not only when a
shooting war begins, but long before
that—when the causes of the war are
being generated by the stupid government
of a member state in its own territory and
they (the causes) spill over the border
into a neighboring state.

If the United Nations hides behind the
screen of 'domestic jurisdiction' or
'internal affairs' too long as it did when
the military rulers of Pakistan were killing
Bengalees in Bangladesh and sending
millions of refugees into India, its belated
action will do no good.

The second lesson is that
self-determination means more than
freeing the Asians and Africans from
white colonial rule. Non-white colonial
oppression is no less abhorrent and no
more bearable than white colonialism.

Threat To Peace

South Africa, Rhodesia, and
Portuguese colonies in Africa are not the
only colonial enterprises that call for
international action. In quite a few
de-Europeanized countries the European
masters have been supplanted by
non-European neo-colonizers. If Katanga
and Biafra failed to alert the world body
about the threat to peace posed by the
non-white colonial rulers, Bangladesh
should not fail.

It is not only the inability of the
overwhelming majority of United Nations
members to stop the war in the Indian
subcontinent that has influenced their
present attitude to Bangladesh, for quite
a few of them who have restive racial,
linguistic and ethnic groups within their
borders. Opposition to Bangladesh stems
from their refusal to recognize the right
of self-determination of these groups.

This explains why the General
Assembly acted so speedily to stop the

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