Shamsuddoza Sajen

Ravi Shankar and George Harrison organised an all-star concert in New York’s Madison Square Garden today to help Bengali refugees, who had fled violence and were in India.

The United States, working behind the scenes, won the agreement of both Pakistan and the United Nations to station an international group of 153 civilian relief and rehabilitation experts in East Pakistan under United Nations sponsorship, officials said today.

India reacted sharply against UN Secretary General U Thant’s proposal which suggested posting observers in both India and East Pakistan. The Indian government considered the proposal as a design to divert the world’s attention from the real issue and depicted it as one between India and Pakistan.

The New York Times reported today, “the Pakistan’s military Government was waiting for what it fears may be a protracted guerrilla war, in East Pakistan, and Government strategists are drawing from the writings of Mao Tse-tung and other experts in their plans.”

American President Richard Nixon, his security adviser Henry Kissinger and the US Ambassador to Pakistan Joseph Farland held a discussion today on issues surrounding Bangladesh War.

In a telephone conversion with American president Nixon, his security adviser Kissinger stated, “I will make it clear with the Indians that there isn’t going to be a war. …The problem—no military aid to Pakistan, they are not even getting economic aid. If anything will tempt the Indians to attack, it will be the complete helplessness of Pakistan.”

Handbills prepared by Bangalee guerrillas were distributed in Dhaka asking the population to begin evacuation of the city in preparation for a campaign against the Pakistan Army, reported The New York Times.

East Pakistan Governor Lt Gen Tikka Khan today admitted that a railway bridge in Cumilla had been blown up by the Mukti Fouj recently.

Foreigners in Dhaka were warned this week to avoid Chinese restaurants, which apparently became the latest targets for Bangladeshi guerillas.

KM Shehabuddin, diplomatic representative of Bangladesh, described Pakistan President Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan’s threat of declaring war against India as a “desperate and heinous attempt to hide his shame and hoodwink the world opinion by implicating India”.

Pakistan President Yahya Khan in an interview published in The Financial Times today said Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman would be put on trial “very soon”.

All the members of the Bangladesh mission interviewed by the Swiss representative Dr Bonard in Calcutta today refused to be repatriated to Pakistan and reaffirmed their allegiance to the Bangladesh government.

A three-member Canadian parliamentary delegation that visited Pakistan was told by Pakistani officials in Islamabad that Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was at present in a jail in West Pakistan.

Reg Prentice, a member of the British parliamentary delegation which had visited both Pakistan and India to study the present crisis, wrote an account of his tour today in the New Statesman:

The Prime Minister of Bangladesh Tajuddin Ahmed declared today that “military victory is the only solution to the situation in Bangladesh”, reported The People, a pro-AL English-language weekly.

The New York Times in an editorial published today urges the US administration to promptly divert military supplies already en route to Pakistan.

The New York Times today published excerpts from a report by a mission of the World Bank that visited East Pakistan in June, 1971 and from a report on a survey of the western area of Bangladesh by Hendrik van der Heijden, an economist and member of the mission.

The Indian External Affairs Minister Swaran Singh told the Lok Sabha today that supply of arms to Pakistan by any country in the present context “amounts to an intervention on the side of the military rulers of West Pakistan against the people of Bangladesh”.

The first conference (July 11-17) of Sector Commanders began at the office on Theatre Road-8 in Kolkata today.

World Bank board members today received copies of an outspoken report on the dire situation in East Pakistan.