Jerusalem Post

CALCUTTA.—Around Bongaon town and along the main road to Calcutta, there is scarcely a piece of open land which the refugees have not occupied. Those who cannot be accommodated in the overcrowded camps have built huts for themselves wherever they can find room.
The roofs of these huts are made of pieces of bark from trees or of rice straw and their walls are of cane. They are good enough shelter from the rain, which at this season continues night and day with an occasional break.
The density of population in Bongaon subdivision is now 1,600 per square mile. The shortage of accommodation for the refugees is so great that when word gets around that the government is building a new camp for 5,000 there are 25,000 applicants for living room in it, the director of relief operations told me.
He said tension was already developing between the local people and the newcomers. The local inhabitants were turning hostile because the refugees were creating insanitary conditions and chopping oft the branches of village trees for firewood, which was very scarce in the region.
The refugees in the camps are assured at least of shelter, one full meal a day and medical care. According to a relief official of the United Nations Children's Emergency Fund, the free rations each refugee gets contain 2,000 calories a day, while that of the local people averages about 1,500. Many of them have lost their homes and standing crops in the floods.

WIDESPREAD SIGNS

Signs of tension are visible not only in Bongaon but in all the border areas where large masses of fugitives from East Bengal have congregated. This is what I learnt from senior administrators in Agartala, the capital of Tripura, and in Silchar, headquarters of the border district of Cachar in Assam.
They feared the flashpoint might not be far off. Prices in the local markets were rising—in Tripura they had risen 30 per cent in four weeks—and able-bodied refugees were hiring themselves to farmers at wages much lower than the prevailing rates. "We have issued orders that refugee labour should not be employed to the detriment of local labour," a relief officer said in Silchar, "but we cannot enforce our orders."
Feeding a refugee costs the government about 13 cents (U.S.) daily. He gets 400 grams of rice, 100 grams of lentils and 300 grains of fresh vegetables besides cooking oil and spices. There is also milk powder for children, nursing and expectant mothers and the sick. To many Indians living in the border areas these rations, frugal though they are, constitute a feast.
The relief officer's last words to me were : "Is it possible to register, inoculate and feed 30,000 to 40,000 new refugees coming daily ? The answer is no. We do our best, but there is a limit to what human effort can do. We never expected this crisis to last four months and we do not know how much longer it will go on. I tell my officers to forget they are government servants and work for humanitarian reasons. I tell the refugees to go farther inland as there's no place for them here."

EMOTIONAL SHOCK

The camps organised by the Indian 'Government serve the basic physical needs of the refugees but do little to lessen the emotional shock caused by the disruption of their lives, often accompanied by the indiscriminate killing of their kinsfolk and loss of property. Camp life gives them a feeling of security from Pakistani terror, but even this is temporary.
For the refugees have been told that India cannot provide them with sanctuary for long. What therefore will happen to them when government relief programmes run out of funds, as they inevitably will in a few months, and conditions in East Pakistan are not sufficiently secure to induce the refugees to return voluntarily ?
The Indian Government first planned to provide succour to the refugees for six months, ending in 'September. Now it has extended the period, under the pressure of circumstances, till December. Short of funds to finance its programmes for economic development, India cannot possibly continue to carry this enormous burden almost singlehanded much beyond that month without generating serious economic and social tensions.

UNREST IN CAMPS

Within the camps too there are factors operating which are signals of coming trouble. Millions of able-bodied males and females are confined within them without employment or occupation of any kind. Similarly, millions of children are without schooling. Adults and children alike are denied all facilities for recreation, such as listening to the radio or seeing an occasional film.
Apart from this, there are the apathy and shock caused by the violence and bloodshed they have seen in the villages they have abandoned or on the anxiety-filled flight to India.
At a camp in Tripura State I spoke with Priyavashi Sheel through the camp superintendent. Although scarcely more than a child herself, she had two children of her own. All three were in a daze. In stumbling sentences she explained that she had left her village in Sylhet district with her husband and children after a Pakistan Army unit had raided it. Other Pakistani troops had intercepted them and shot her husband.
I visited a camp at Sidhai, 50 yards from the East Pakistan border. The international boundary is a shallow ditch, and the nearest Pakistan Army camp is two miles distant. From time to time, the Pakistanis fire mortar shells and rocket into Indian territory.
I met Fulchand Bibi, a young Moslem widow and her four children at the camp. They had come across a month earlier from a nearby village which Pakistani troops had burnt down. The day before my visit her husband had sneaked over the border to harvest the rice crop in his fields in the deserted village. The Pakistanis had caught and shot him.
As she told her story Fulchand Bibi and her brother-in-law, who was standing beside her, covered their faces with their hands to hide the tears that flowed down them. Such instances where families had lost their bread-winners were common in all the camps.
At the Govind Ballabh Hospital in Agartala I saw wounded men brought from the border in Red Cross ambulances. They were victims of shelling of their villages the same morning. They were Moslems. The doctor in charge of this government hospital said it was running short of medicines to treat people with wounds caused by bullets or shell splinters.
Crouched in a corner of the corridor in one ward were seven-year-old Babu Miya and his three-year-old brother. They were the only survivors of a Moslem family of eight. The rest had been shot while in flight.
The body of a nine-day old infant lay on a bed with a bandage covering its head. A shell splinter had entered its head while it was sitting on its mother's lap
in their village home. The mother had died of a similar wound instantaneously. The child's grandfather had brought it across the border to the hospital the evening before, but medical attention could not save its life.
A significant feature of the refugee camps is the small number of educated middle-class townsfolk among them. I suggested to a retired university professor whom I met in a camp in Tripura that most of the middle-class refugees were able to find shelter with friends or relatives.
He assured me I was wrong. The professional people had been systematically slaughtered by the Pakistani Army in the early days of the civil war. This was part of a deliberate policy to "liquidate" the Bengali middle class, particularly the Hindus, so as to deprive the liberation movement of a politically articulate leadership.

PARTY'S VISIT

The following day, the press party to which I belonged visited the border area near Bhanga, near the town of Karimnagar in Assam. Escorted by an officer of the Border Security Force, the paramilitary organization which guards India's land frontiers, we crossed the broad muddy, flood-laden Kusiyara river in a frail canoe propelled by a single paddle.
We walked along the raised banks of ricefields parallel with the border, which was 150 metres distant. About the same distance beyond it, we could see a Pakistan Army checkpost. Watchful eyes surveyed us from behind machinegun emplacements concealed in thick clumps of bamboo along the edge of fields on the Pakistani side.
With the Khasi and Jaintia Hills forming a backdrop and the sun chasing white clouds overhead, fertile fields below and the lazy river flowing in an arc around them, the scene appeared to be one of untroubled rural peace. But every night, the officer accompanying us said, his border guards underwent heavy firing from the other side.
This was also a region where the Mukti Fauj was very active. A few days earlier, guerillas had blown up a bridge over the Kusiyara in Pakistan territory some hundred metres from the point where we had crossed it. The Pakistanis had stationed about 20 soldiers on the river bank where the bridge had stood and they indulged in "defensive firing" almost every night at the Indian border posts.
We met Mohammed Aminuddin, the secretary of a local branch of the proscribed Awami League. He had sought safety in India when Pakistani troops came to his village in search of him. He was in close touch with the Mukti Fauj, and only the night before had gone out on a mission to round up collaborators with the Pakistani authorities.
The guerillas had captured a village doctor and his son and were interrogating them. What would happen to them after the questioning, we asked. Aminuddin replied, with a shrug of his shoulders, that they would probably be executed.

REBEL RECRUITS

Aminuddin visited the nearby refugee camps to recruit males between 14 and 24 for the Mukti Fauj. He said the response was good and 25 to 30 recruits joined
daily. They went to training camps in East Bengal, where the instructors were Bengalis who had served previously in the Pakistani armed forces but had joined the liberation struggle.
Later, an Indian security officer said one "effective" guerilla was equal to 100 regular soldiers. The Mukti Fauj was learning the art of guerilla warfare rapidly
and was harassing the Pakistani forces and their quislings on an increasing scale. The Pakistanis were stepping up their attacks on Indian territory as a diversionary tactic. They were also laying landmines on the Indian side of the border.
Forced to operate in a hostile atmosphere in East Bengal, the Pakistani troops were being demoralised. Evidence of this, the officer said, was the rising number
of desertions of officers and men who came across the frontier and surrendered to Indian security men. The deserters said they had been told when they were brought to East Bengal from West Pakistan that they were going to fight India. But they discovered once they reached the eastern province that they were expected to kill unarmed peasants and workers.
Back in Calcutta, I met Mr. J. G. Andersson, chief of the emergency section of the United Nation's Children's Fund. He was working feverishly on a special feeding programme for refugee children. This organisation is setting up 1,000 fully equipped centres which will each feed 2,000 children on a top-priority basis. Mr. Andersson said the condition of most of the children, especially those between six months and four years, in the camps was fast deteriorating. Unless
this programme got under way immediately, another UNICEF observer said, children "are going to die like flies."