ন্যাট জিও ১৯৭২: ইতিহাসের ধূসর পাঠ-৩

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পূর্বকথা

ন্যাট জিও-১৯৭২ এর ইংরেজী ভার্সন চমৎকার সাবলীর বাংলায় ভাবানুবাদ করে চলেছেন সহব্লগার শিক্ষানবিস। 'বাংলাদেশ: আশায় নতুন বসতি'। শাবাশ!

প্রিয় পাঠক, আগেই জেনেছেন, শুধুমাত্র অনুবাদের অভাবে মুক্তিযুদ্ধের এই অমূল্য সম্পদ বছর পাঁচেক ধরে আমার বাক্সবন্দি হয়ে পড়েছিলো।!

প্রয়াত শ্রদ্ধেয় সহব্লগার মুহাম্মাদ জুবায়ের ভাই এই লেখা অনুবাদ করতে চেয়েছিলেন; কিন্তু সময়, হায় সময়! নিষ্ঠুর সময় তাকে সামান্য সেই অবসরটুকু দেয়নি!

শিক্ষানবিস তাঁর অনুবাদ-পর্বটি জুবাইয়ের ভাইকে উৎসর্গ করে আমার কৃতজ্ঞতা বোধ আরেকটু বাড়িয়ে দিয়েছেন।

তাঁর কাছে বিনীত অনুরোধ, অনুবাদ পর্বের ভূমিকায় যেনো প্রয়াত ব্যবসায়ী আহমেদ উল্লাহ এবং মুক্তিযুদ্ধের বিশিষ্ট গবেষক এমএমআর জালাল ভাইকে স্মরণ করা হয়। কারণ এই লেখাগুলো সিডি আকারে আমি প্রথম সংগ্রহ করি আহমেদ উল্লাহ পারিবারিক লাইব্রেরি থেকে, যে পরিবারটি মুক্তিযুদ্ধের এতো বছর পরেও ঐতিহাসিক দলিলটি পরম যত্নে আগলে রেখেছেন; তারা অতি বিশ্বাসে এই দলিলটি আমার হাতে তুলে দেন এই ভেবে যে, একদিন এর বঙ্গানুবাদ প্রকাশ হবে; আবারো সমৃদ্ধ হবে মহান মুক্তিযুদ্ধের গৌরব গাথা!

আর মুক্তিযুদ্ধ বিষয়ক এ পর্যন্ত যে সামান্য প্রচেষ্টা--তা এমএমআর জালাল ভাইয়ের উৎসাহ-পরামর্শ ছাড়া কখনোই সম্ভব ছিলো না।

সম্ভব হলে সবগুলো লেখার সংক্ষিপ্ত রূপ একটি পর্বে যেনো তুলে ধরা হয়।

আবারো এমএমআর জালাল ভাইকে উদ্ধৃত করে আবারো বলি:

আসুন, আমরা ফিরে দেখি ১৯৭১! ঘুরে দাঁড়াক প্রিয় স্বদেশ!!

জয় বাংলা।।

গণকবর ও মুক্তিবাহিনী, ন্যাট জিও, ১৯৭২
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that they can share in the workings of the government (one cabinet post is now held by a Hindu). Of the three remaining principles, socialism raises the biggest question as to the future stability of the country.
Although Mujib plans continued large- scale nationalization of industry, his Awami League is basically middle class. Radical left-wing elements in the country, including many students, hold suspicions concerning the league's devotion to socialism.
"The Awami League simply is not geared to the ideals of socialism," said Enayetullah Khan, editor and owner of the highly critical Holiday, an English-language weekly news- paper. "They have nationalized some indus- tries, yes, but they have no long-range plans of how to run them."
All Watch the Government's Perfonnance
Khan's paper hits hard at the government, but as we talked at the Dacca Press Club, he conceded that Mujib is probably the only man who can hold the country together at this crucial time. However, if the govern- ment fails to carry through with its promises for social reform, he said, Bangladesh will be in for a long spell of political turmoil.
"The landless peasant is now aware of his rights," he told me, "and because he found his bravery in the war , he no longer will back down in the face of guns. Besides, he probably has a gun now himself."
Thousands of guns were given to Bengali freedom fighters during the struggle for in- dependence. When the fighting ended, Mu- jib appealed for surrender of the weapons, but many remain out. Crime has become a significant problem, not so much in Dacca, but rather in the countryside.
"Until we can establish law and order, nothing can work here," said Mahbubullah, a 26-year-old former law student at Dacca University. "Our struggle has not ended."
Mahbubullah (the only name he uses) spoke at a student rally in February 1970 calling for an independent Bangladesh. "One month later I was arrested at the airport," he said. "1 was tried in a military court and awarded one year in prison and 15 lashes."
He, too, said that no one is better suited to lead the country now than Sheik Mujib. Although no longer a student, Mahbubullah spends much of his time at Dacca University talking politics with his friends. There are few subjects more popular among the more
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than 10,000 students enrolled there, of whom 3,000 are women.
In addition to medicine and law, the uni- versity offers a wide range of other studies, including a new School of Business Admin- istration. A few people are skeptical:
"Some hard decisions are going to have to be made concerning education and employ- ment here," I was told by an American who serves as an advisor to the government. "If you slip on a banana peel on a street in Dacca, two of the three people who help you to your feet may be unemployed economists. It's obvious that what the country needs is more street cleaners and fewer business- administration graduates."
Perhaps. Yet at the end of the war, few Bengalis were prepared by training and ex- perience to take over management and other positions of responsibility. These were the jobs formerly held by West Pakistanis, or, in many cases, Biharis.
Reviled Biharis Barely Survive
The Biharis are Moslems, and when Paki- stan was established in 194 i, they moved from India into the eastern wing to escape Hindu domination. Urdu-speaking and often contemptuous of the Bengali's way of life, many of them collaborated with the Pakistan Army. Now most of the estimated million Biharis remaining in Bangladesh were being subjected to a cruel revenge. They were fac- ing death from malnutrition and disease.
I went to the Dacca suburb of Muham- mad pur, where there were five camps holding more than 30,000 Bihari refugees. One of the camps was a former school, and it covered an area of about two acres; 18,000 men, women, and children lived there in a nightmarish sinkhole of suffering (pages 320-21).
A lucky few had tents; 300 were supplied by the International Red Cross. For the others, there was a piece of plastic or burlap thrown over a few sticks pushed into the ground, or perhaps a lean-to of corrugated iron.
"We are ready to go anywhere, because nothing can be worse than this," Dr. Anwar Raza, a young Bihari physician, told me.
But no one had offered to take the Biharis- not even the Pakistanis. Sheik Mujib had said that the Biharis were free to assimilate themselves into Bengali society, but Dr. Raza only scoffed at that.
"How can we be safe out there when wetre not even safe in here," he said. "Just this
Bangladesh: Hope Nourishes a New Nation

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morning they broke into the camp, kidnaped a young woman and beat her severely before sending her back. The kidnapings go on all the time. Of course I'd like to go back to my hospital, but I'm afraid."
So he attended to the sick in the camp with his meager medical supplies. It was not enough; the death rate was staggering. Daily food
distribution amounted to less than 500 calories a person. There was not a single working toilet in the camp, and the only avail- able water came from two pumps, neither of which offered more than a trickle.
A small army of children followed me as I walked through the camp, and nothing un- derscored the depths of the tragedy so much as did their eyes: the sleepy, glazed, staring eyes of the starving.
Spry Old "Criminal" Enlivens a Village
This time my escape from despair took me to the village of Boliarpur, about a 20-minute drive from Dacca. The 600 or so houses there, clustered and raised for protection against monsoon flooding, are surrounded by fields planted to vegetables and rice.
Almost every man in Boliarpur is a farmer , and on the morning I visited there most were tending their crops. Not Abdul KhalaQ, though.
He's "between 82 and 85" now, and one eye gives him trouble, but he's still spry and well enough to work at making life enjoyable. His double fistful of rice each day is devoured with elan. He is a raconteur with a store- house of unlikely anecdotes filled with bril- liant exaggeration.
He boasted of his past: " A life of crime- ah, who knows how many were my victims -but one admired even by the police. Once they came to arrest me, but decorated me instead. Yes, a medal."
Wherever we went in the village, his pres- ence set off a wave of lightheartedness. The woman making disks of unleavened bread smiled when she saw him. So did the young girls gathered before the village mo5QUe for their daily two-hour session of Koran study.
Later that day, while flying to Jessore on a United Nations plane, I tried to single out Boli
arpur from among the countless villages
sitting like hobnails on the flat sheet of land. But, of course, I couldn't.
From Jessore I went by jeep to Khulna, a drive of 40 miles along a road that comes to an end in the swampy expanse of the Sundar- bans. The Bhairab River runs through Khul- na, and at one place along its banks sits a white house with a well-tended lawn. There is also a large compound with a chapel and a school building.
For most of the past 20 years this has been the home of Howard and Olive Hawkes, mis- sionaries of the Assemblies of God Church. Both speak Bengali-and speak it with some authority when boys climb the compound wall to see if the fruit on the mango trees is ripe for snitching.
At other times, thousands of children in- vade the grounds, and they are made wel- come. Twice a week the Hawkeses .pass out rations of instant corn-soya-milk powder, a sweetened, flavored, and vitamin-fortified mixture supplied by the United Nations Chil- dren's Fund. Nursing mothers, pregnant women, and children six months to 12 years of age receive the ration.
"They'll be here in the morning," Mrs. Hawkes told me. She and her husband had invited me to stay in their house for the one night that I would be in Khulna. "You'll hear them starting to gather out there before our rooster crows."
Rations Gone Before Sun Has Risen
At four o'clock the following morning there were nearly a thousand children pressing against the compound gate. Thirty minutes later the number had doubled. They came bearing pans and cans, paper cups and glasses-anything big enough to hold the ration (preceding pages).
They moved quickly past the distribution stations, and when the last one stepped up-- a girl of four who accepted her ration in the bunched-up rag that was her skirt-it was still early.
But the rising sun seldom tarries on the horizon in Bangladesh. The red-and-purple curtain of the first light was quickly burned off, and then it was there, full and fat and filling the sky with its white glare. D
His heritage and his future, the rich soil of Bangladesh responds to the care of a farmer near Boliarpur. Undeterred by staggering problems, Bengalis exude an incredible optimism fired by their newborn freedom.
National Geographic, September 1972

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