Refugees may want to stay

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32803, 31 December 1971, Page 13

Refugees may want to stay

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright) SALT LAKE

(India), Dec. 30.

Only 20 of the 350,000 Bengali refugees at the Salt Lake refugee camp have returned home in the two weeks since India’s war with Pakistan ended, and their homeland, East Pakistan, became Bangla Desh.

Now, the commandant of the camp—the largest of about 850 similar coi—’exes —says that he expects a very serious problem when the official repatriation drive begins in a few days. The arrangements call for all refugees to begin trooping home en masse this weekend, but United Nations sources in New Delhi say that the plans may be set back a week or more. “It would be absolutely ! correct to say that 50 per !cent will not want to go back,” the Salt Lake camp

commandant, a retired Indian Army officer, Colonel R. Sen, said, looking out of his window at the rows of shoddy wooden barracks and tents. Small columns of smoke rose from fires heating meagre meals, adding to the already-indescribable stench which seems to linger permanently over the camp, two miles from Calcutta Airport. What, then, will the Army do if they refuse to go back? “We can always cut off their aid,” Colonel Sen said. “That will make all the difference.”

Though such a drastic step probably is not planned, chats with some of the refugees existing in the squalor of Salt Lake indicate that it might be necessary. The refugees have sent out several “scouts” into “liberated” Bangla Desh to see what is left of their homes and land, now that the war is past. AU have returned, but the outward flow from the camps has not increased, possibly because the scouts were not impressed with what they saw.

The war was not kind. Many homes were levelled, and of those left standing, almost all have been looted, according to one refugee who just returned from a brief visit to Bangla Desh. “Why should I go home?” he asked. “I am happy here. I have work and food, and I my family is safe.” In Salt Lake the refugees have security—at least, compared with the terror and horror from which they fled last March.

Here they are poorly clothed; in many cases all they have is a blanket in which to roll themselves, supplied by the Indian Government. But they also have a roof over their heads, tarpaulin, or wood, or even large irrigation pipes. And there is at present little risk of invaders arriving in the night to massacre them.

The love of the new-found “security” may bring the refugees into a head-on collision with the Indian Government, which went to war because, it said, its economy could not support the 10

million refugees, and seems determined to repatriate them as soon as possible. The refugees will be sent back in groups, by road, on foot, into the districts where they used to live. Colonel Sen says that international aid for maintaining the refugees is already by-passing India to the new Bangla Desh Government, which plans to establish resettlement camps in each district. "India continues to receive food for distribution among the refugees, but not enough,” he adds.

The reluctance of some refugees to return is apparently the product of fear, and fear alone. One woman, a. Hindu schoolteacher in East Pakistan before she fled for her life to escape the terrorism at home, said that she would not go back without much greater assurances than she has now that the trouble is ended. “Last March was not the first bloodbath in Bangla Desh, and it probably won’t be the last,” she said.