Nine million refugees from East Pakistan in India have now had their case put before the United Nations General Assembly. The UN is naturally concerned with the humanitarian problem of these suffering people, but it is also concerned to avert a much more intractable problem: the danger that tension along this frontier should worsen to the point when India and Pakistan might find themselves coming to blows over the future of East Bengal as well as over the refugees who have flooded into West Bengal.

Sir Alec Douglas-Home yesterday added his warning to the increasing anxiety with which the world is watching this troubled frontier. There must be much more help in cash and kind, he said, than has so far been mobilized. Furthermore, the UN machinery on the ground must be strengthened so that it will be ready to cope with the famine that may come in East Pakistan.

But the crucial point he made was that the danger of war could only certainly be avoided if and when there was a return to civil government in East Pakistan. Such a government, he added, must be one which gives confidence to all Pakistanis to stay at home and develop their country. This is the real point at which both the political and the humanitarian arguments meet in this tragic situation. A government in which the people of East Pakistan, Muslim or Hindu, have confidence is an absolute necessity, whether Pakistan’s two wings are to remain united or whether they are to be separated, or whether some new compromise is to be arrived at between secession at one extreme and the other extreme of the present imposed government holding down by military force a resentful people.

At the United Nations the rival arguments of India and Pakistan met at the point of Sir Alec’s ineluctable necessity. India says the refugees must be a temporary charitable responsibility, deserving of international aid and concern, whose return to their homes in East Pakistan must be effected as soon as possible. The longer they stay in India the greater the burden that India is coming to find intolerable. Pakistan replies that the matter is not international—have not refugees been crossing the frontiers both ways ever since 1947? In any case the Indian figure of nine million is a wild exaggeration. Moreover Pakistan welcomes the return of all refugees and has set up rehabilitation centres for them.

India retorts that refugees are still coming in a steady flow, most of them Hindus. If the Pakistan army has ceased its repression the reprisals of local black-and-tans are quite enough to spread fear on all sides. To this charge Pakistan urges that if India were not backing and giving aid to the Bangla Desh guerrillas. East Pakistan would now have happily returned to normal and there would be no cause for reprisals.

When all these allegations are examined and balanced up the rub, as Sir Alec Douglas-Home put it, remains. What hope can there be of the great majority of refugees who are Hindus returning, when not only their homes or their land but the very society they once inhabited has been dismantled? Obviously conditions of government must be restored in East Pakistan in which they can have confidence. The shadows of a civil government that have so far been offered in Dacca are no more than a pretence, scarcely even a promise of what is really needed if the Muslims of East Bengal, let alone the Hindus, are to think of going home.

The only hope, and the only grounds of hope to bring a decent life to these millions of suffering people, must be negotiations with the Awami League. That party has been shown by Pakistan’s own election to be the natural spokesman for the people. It would enter fresh negotiations in a very different mood from that of last March. At the same time Shaikh Mujib must be associated in freedom with such negotiations. Of course an acknowledgment of these necessities would reopen the question of the future relations of East and West Pakistan. That cannot be evaded. Sooner or later, the realists in Islamabad will have to face the only possible path to peace or, by rejecting it, see the tension with India growing, and further disasters in Bengal become more certain.