Statement by Dlr. Peter Shore, British M.P.

September 2, 1971

 

 

Following is a report on the statement:

 

The British Government should not resume consortia aid or economic aid to West Pakistan in the view of Mr. Peter Shore, Labour MP for Stepney.

 

Mr. Shore, who has just returned from a week's visit to Delhi and West Pakistan with the Right Rev. Trevor Huddleston, Bishop of Stepney, has put this proposal to Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the Foreign Secretary, in order to persuade the West Pakistan Government to recognize that its bonds with East Pakistan are shattered and to start to disengage from power there.

 

Mr. Shore said yesterday (September 2), " The British Government has taken a satisfactory line so far, but a decision is coming up in October about whether consortia aid should be resumed.

 

" The West Pakistan Government is going through an elaborate window-dressing operation in East Bengal to try to make a case for the resumption of aid. We have to make sure that nobody is taken in by it.

 

" We must work closely with the American Government which has a consider­able influence with the West Pakistan Government. The American Government's policy is uncertain, though they are under pressure from their own Congress.

 

“This has grown since the visit of Senator Kennedy to India, and I hope that American opinion will be moping in the same «ay that opinion is moping in Britain."

 

The stark truth, said fir. Shore. is that Pakistan has broken up. " From the start they were separated b} 1.000 rises geographically ", he said. " Nom, they are separated by an equal distance in terms of their political goals and their sense of common purpose. The bonds have been broken and shattered.

 

" Against the background of the extraordinary outpouring of people from East Bengal, still going on at a rate of over a million every month, I do not see

that it is possible under any conceivable degree of pressure, indeed tyranny, from the West Pakistan Government to bring these two disparate parts of Pakistan together into a single political community.

 

Mr. Shore, who had a talk with Tajuddin Ahmed, the " Prime Minister of Bangla Desh ", during his visit, said that if the West Pakistan Government did not now start a disengagement from power in East Bengal "another bitter and uncontrolled civil war would ensure in which other nations could be involved".

 

(THE TIMES, London-September 3, 1971)

 

 

 

Source: Bangladesh Documents, vol – II, p. 195 – 196