Bhutto’s view of Mujibur

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32586, 21 April 1971, Page 13

Bhutto’s view of Mujibur

W.Z.P.A.-Reuter— Copyright) LONDON, April 20. The West Pakistani leader, Mr Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, said in a televirion interview last night that the East Pakistan political leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, had pleaded with him to rule their respective regions inde- ' pendently.

< Mr Bhutto told a British Broadcasting Corporation interviewer that he had rejected the proposal, made at an abortive meeting last month in Dacca, the East Pakistan capital, aimed at solving the political crisis between the two regions. - “He (the sheikh) literally pleaded with me that I should agree to the concept of two committees of the National Assembly, and that 1 could look after West Pakistan, do whatever I wanted in West Pakistan, and he would be the Prime Minister of East Pakistan,” Mr Bhutto Mid. Mr Bhutto said that die sheikh was prepared to meet him secretly. “He wanted a final compromise, and only I could be a party to that compromise," Mr Bhutto said. But, he explained, “interim arrangements of this nature generally become final arrangements because already there is a polarisation, and the links, national links, have been critically weakened and broken.”

Asked whether the sheikh's proposal would have been better than the present bloodshed in East Pakistan, Mr Bhutto said: “It would have led to two Pakistans. “It would have meant the end of a nation of 120 million people. It would have meant the end of a country for which the Moslems of the sub-continent sacrificed and suffered, for which more than three million lives were lost,” he argued. Asked whether Sheikh Mujibur was actually hoping for a confederation and not secession, Mr Bhutto expressed doubt. “I think that even if you accept that he wanted confederation, perhaps he wanted it for the moment as a diving board for the final parting of the ways,” he said Mr Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan People's Party, denied that he and his supporters did not wish to accept an East Pakistani as over-all leader of the country. The sheikh had, he continued, many qualities of leadership and he was undoubtedly a talented person, who had rendered great contributions in the past.