Izvestia

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.

Peking's Absurd Position

The Peking Government has taken the most clamorous and, at the same time, politically absurd position. Clamour has never been an argument in respect to major political questions. It is usually used to cover up the weakness or absence of arguments. In the press and from the UN rostrum, PRC representatives accuse India of aggression and, thus acting jointly with the Pakistani Army, trample the legitimate rights of East Pakistan's people under foot. However, it should be recalled that long before the beginning of military operations the Pakistani leader Bhutto, together with his country's chief military leaders, went to Peking to come to terms about military aid to Pakistan well in advance. It is also known that the PRC Government promised such aid and support, in any case as far as arms deliveries are concerned. In Peking, as well as in Washington, it was clearly realised that military aid to the Pakistani Government means not only the country being pushed to an attack on India, but also helping it in brutally suppressing the Bengali people.
In doing so, the Peking Government was only pursuing its selfish aspirations of establishing domination in Asia. Pakistan has become a weapon of this great-power policy. It should also be noted that this has not been the first case of the Peking leaders siding with governments brutally suppressing the people.
The louder Peking's representatives speak in the United Nations, the more they reveal their great-power chauvinism, the more they demonstrate their link-up with imperialist powers in practice. Not looking at themselves in the mirror, they declared that India had constantly "intimidated almost all her neighbours!" If any one did try to intimidate his neighbours it was the Maoist group that did so, and nobody in the world, especially Asia, has forgotten that. They were not ashamed to compare Bangla Desh with Manchukuo, once set up by the Japanese militarists under the former Chinese emperor Pu Yi. This is not only an insult to the victims of terror in Last Pakistan but an outrage upon the victims of Japanese terror in north-eastern China. The head of the Chinese delegation made no mention of the fact that Pu Yi had not only been released from prison by the Peking authorities but had lived in very easy circumstances, writing memoirs which were published by the Peking Government.
(APN, December 15, 1971)