PAKISTAN – Growing War Threat – Monday 16 August 1971 – Time Magazine
PAKISTAN – Growing War Threat
Monday 16 August 1971
Time Magazine
MuktiJuddho e-Archive Collection
In a televised interview aired throughout West Pakistan last week, General Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan was almost preternaturally calm as he uttered the chilling words. “Total war with India is very near,” said Pakistan’s President. “There is a limit to our patience, and we are very close to it.” Alarmist talk? Perhaps. Yet in the capitals of both countries, foreign diplomats rate the chances of averting a conflict at no better than fifty-fifty.
The outlines of the 4½-month-old Pakistani civil war have become all too familiar: the country’s more prosperous West pitted against the poor and populous East, with some 8,000,000 East Pakistani refugees fleeing to India (TIME cover, Aug. 2). Beyond the talk, last week brought these developments:
In New York, U.N. Secretary-General U Thant warned the Security Council that the Indian-Pakistani border clashes “could all too easily expand.”
Earlier, Thant proposed that U.N. observers be stationed on both sides of the frontier to aid repatriation of refugees. India rejected the plan because it implied that New Delhi rather than Islamabad was preventing the refugees’ return.
¶ In Islamabad, Yahya issued a White Paper charging that 100,000 men, women and children had died since March 1 in a “reign of terror unleashed by the Awami League,” East Pakistan’s strongest political party, with “the active assistance of Indian armed infiltrators.” He added that his regime’s attack on the East March 25 was merely a preemptive attempt to avert a planned rebellion. Observers who were in East Pakistan during the period called the paper a mixture of half-truths, juxtaposed events and outright lies.
¶In New Delhi, Yahya’s charges of Indian collusion were seen as a buildup for a jihad, a Moslem holy war, against predominantly Hindu India. New Delhi is also concerned over Yahya’s casual declaration during a recent interview that Sheik Mujibur Rahman, the Awami League leader now awaiting trial for treason, “might not be alive” by October. Last week 467 members of India’s Parliament sent an appeal to U Thant to secure Mujib’s release.
At week’s end New Delhi announced that Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko would visit India this week, reportedly to discuss the danger of war. The fact that both China and the U.S. are providing aid to Yahya has made the Indians and Russians uneasy—not to mention many Americans. Indian officials said it was unlikely that Gromyko’s path would cross that of Senator Edward Kennedy, who will also be in Pakistan and India this week on a fact-finding mission as chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Refugees.
