Your World This Week; 1971-12-03

<v John Schwarzwalder>Although only one nation, indeed, one could say only one woman wants it, we are entering into a major war between India and Pakistan and that is the big story in your world this week. Good evening. Although no one really seems to want this war except Mrs. Gandhi and her government, we are now entered upon a major war between India and Pakistan. Many people say, why hasn't this been sent to the Security Council of the UN and you will remember, of course, that the Security Council is supposed to deal with threats to peace. Certainly there is a threat to peace, but it has not gone to the Security Council, largely because Mrs Gandhi does not want it to go there. And yet the truth of the matter is that the United States certainly does not want this war, nor does the Soviet Union, nor does China. Nor, for that matter, does Pakistan. And yet the war has commenced, and as I will explain in a moment or two, I believe that it will go on until there is an independent autonomous Bangladesh. And this means until the Indian army's defeat, the Pakistani army's, which will be hard enough on the army's concern but which will exacerbate the fate of literally millions, I said millions of refugees and will create more millions of refugees. Now, why is this happening? Well, it's happening for essentially two reasons, which may be termed by the phrase Pakistani idiocy. And Mrs. Gandhi's, in my view, totally immoral strike for the main chance, and she's got the main chance. Let's go over here just for a moment to to the map. Pakistan, as you will recall, is divided between the east Pakistan and west Pakistan areas, they have nothing much in common, these two areas except the Muslim faith, except Islam. These people, though, in a much smaller area, are Bengali. These are Punjabi, Balochi, Pakistani and others up through here. They have, as I say, a conflict of interest, because while this looks like a much bigger country, many, many more people live here, perhaps as many more as 20 more million Bengali are living in this area, as are the Punjab and the [Pashtuni] and the Balochi who live in this area. All right. Yahya Khan, who is the military dictator of Pakistan, decided that he'd take a chance on free elections and he took the chance all right, in the free elections took place. And these people, being more numerous, got a clear majority, which meant, in effect, the Bengali would have been able to rule the Punjabi to whom Yahya Khan and Ali Jinnah and Ali Liaquat Khan, who are the great pioneers of this. All of them belong to this group over here. They were not about to have it. And so they sent in three divisions plus supporting troops of their excellent army. And it is an excellent army was trained by the British the officer corps. The senior officer corps is still British trained, they sent in three divisions plus supporting troops, perhaps as many as 70, 80 thousand of their troops in here. They have put down the rebellion and they have, incidentally, thrown more than 10 million refugees into India, into India's state of West Bengal, which is right here. Now, it should be said that West Bengal itself is not exactly the prize showplace of the Indian subcontinent. It has been so rebellious, so torn by riot and assassination that for the last four years, Mrs. Gandhi's government has had to rule West Bengal, the Indian part of Bengal, the Hindu part of Bengal. They've had to rule it directly from New Delhi, which in effect means they send the Indian army in to keep it somehow functioning. It cannot function at all obviously, with the 10 million extra refugees, Mrs Gandhi has now taken this opportunity to settle several problems. Let's take a look at the map again to see what these problems are. Twice within the last 20 years, the Indians and the Pakistanis have gone to war each time the major hostilities occurred along this frontier, the state of Kashmir up in here still belongs to India, though its population is mostly Moslem and would like to belong to Pakistan. I'm not even going to go into that and how India got it in the first place and held on to it in spite of the fact the great majority of the citizens of Kashmir actually do belong to the Muslim religion and want to be united to Pakistan over here. But this fighting in the last two wars has occurred mostly along this area. However, the Indian army in all these cases, there are, after all, about 78 million people that live over here and the Indian army has had to keep the flower of its army over here to guard against attacks on the other flank. Obviously, if Mrs Gandhi could get rid of the military threat, which exists here. Her country then would have a much narrowed frontier with Pakistan, which they could defend or from which they could attack with a great deal greater chance of success. In other words, she has them divided. If this could be neutralized, if this could be made into a weak and independent state, the military position of India would be greatly improved. Mrs. Gandhi knows this perfectly well, and she is determined for that reason to do so. Now, this does not take away from her for one moment. From the fact that the Pakistani and the west Pakistani have sent in an army, have created these refugees, have dealt with the utmost severity not to say sadism with a poor Bengali in there, that the Hindu Bengali that is those Bengali in east Pakistan who were not Muslims, that they have had an especially bad time of it. And that does not take away from the fact that this was compounded by an act of utter stupidity in trying to keep a nation down by means of military force. But this, in my view, does not excuse the fact that Mrs. Gandhi, who could have had this matter arbitrated, the communist Chinese, ourselves, the Russians, the British, the French, everybody was willing to do almost anything to prevent actual war. And there's going to be indeed there is now actual war going on there, and this war is, of course, because Mrs. Gandhi sees these long range military advantages and simply insists upon sending in an Indian army in order to remove West Pakistan's influence from what is now likely to become the independent but very weak state of Bangladesh. That is what has been going on. That's what is going on. And that is what is behind all these claims of whose airplanes bombed, what little railroad junction from what little place and so forth and so on. There's been a lot of this going back and forth, actually. The Pakistan army, which knows it's outnumbered and cannot probably win, though it will give an excellent account of itself, has been trying to avoid any extra hostilities there in east Pakistan. That doesn't mean that they have not been cruel, that they have not bombarded and raised the villages of the Bengalla. They've done all of that. Indeed, their troops from time to time have been totally out of control. This has happened. So, as I say, between the West, Pakistani viciousness and stupidity with the special attention to the stupidity. And Mrs. Gandhi's obvious desire for war at whatever cost and or whatever excuse, in order that she may get rid of this West Pakistan army on one flank and thus devote herself to the total struggle against the Pakistani on the other. Her insistence upon war is the reason why the UN, for example, is powerless even to take up the matter. And of course, our sympathy goes to the not only the 10 million refugees from East Pakistan or Bangladesh or, if you prefer, who are now in India. But they at least 10 million more. Oh, by the hostilities, which I have now commenced, will be driven into such exile and 10 million more is a relatively. Small quantity, I don't think that Americans generally quite realize the sum total of human misery involved in something like 10 million refugees, but maybe it will come as a little bit better. Example of what this really means, if I say that 10 million refugees means every man, woman and child in the states of Minnesota and Wisconsin and the Dakotas and Iowa, that grand total is about 10 million. That is about the number of the Bengalis who so far have been driven out of their homes and into exile in a land, which, as I say, is already overpopulated and which already has had its share of miseries and has had to be kept down literally by martial law. Now, you take a country like that and then put all the total population of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa and the Dakotas into it, and you begin to see the difficulties and you begin to see why there has to be a major effort made toward peace. But such a major effort has not been made in this case and it has not been made because Mrs. Gandhi sees long term. Military advantages for India in conducting a war and in conducting a war now, and she's going to have it. There's been much talk of conducting a war in another area, namely the Middle East, and this brings up a matter of dates, which is most interesting. For months now, Mr. Anwar Sadat, the president and for all practical purposes, the dictator of Egypt, he has his political opposition in jail and some of them on trial. He is the dictator of Egypt. For months now, he has been telling his army and his people that 1971 is the year of decision or war. His last speech along this line was to his troops only about 10 days ago. 1971 means this is the year of war, everything else, he says, has failed. We're going to destroy the Israeli in 1971. Well, as you and I know, as of tonight, there are 28 days, exactly four weeks left in 1971. Now, Arab leaders for a long time have been accustomed to a great deal of rhetoric of one kind or another. They make fiery speeches. They are radio stations are perhaps the worst examples in the world of radio used for propaganda purposes. The idea is to excite the mob. And since the mob has been excited now by radio, by political leaders speeches ever since about 1945, you have to get more and more and more violent and what you say just for people to pay attention to you. And yet. The question remains in the minds of the Israeli government, does he mean it? Are we going to have an attack from the Egyptians within the next four weeks? I look at the map, shows you a little bit of what's involved. The Israeli army and the Egyptian army are in direct confrontation across the Suez Canal just here, oh, approximately one hundred yards from each other at the farthest point, some places much, much closer. The Egyptians are well dug in on this side, the on this side, the Israeli are well dug in on this side. Both have a large air bases, very close indeed, so that one can intercept the other's planes. The Egyptians have been notably well-armed by the Russians, and the Israelis have several sources of arms. One, until recently, we arm them. And secondly, they captured in the 1967 war from the Egyptians. They captured very large numbers of the very best of the Russian arms. There is no lack of fighting spirit on the Israeli side, though, the other side is a question. Someone said to Mr Sadat just the other day, but don't you have to ask for Russian permission since you have at least seventy thousand Soviet Russian technicians and army officers in your midst? Don't you have to get their permission before you go to war? Mr Sadat replied as he had to reply. That Egypt was, after all, a sovereign nation, and it would decide for itself when it was going to go to war and the Russians could like it or lump it. He has to say that for internal consumption, what sovereign nation can ever say, no, we dare not go to war or make peace without the permission of somebody else. On the other hand, it is doubtful that the Russians want him to go to war unless they think he can win. Yet so big is the propaganda buildup he has given to the year 1971 that he may have to make some sort of an attack in order to say I tried to keep my promise because armies take these sorts of warnings from their leaders seriously, if the commander of the army and the dictator of the state says, 1971 is our year to go to war. Then the army commanders down to the lowliest private have to get ready for the war in 71. And the question is, is the Egyptian army ready to go to war with that excellent little fighting machine that the Israelis maintain? A couple of other things that ought to be mentioned in connection with this news in Cairo. The leaders of all the Arab states got together to plan a joint strategy on how they would drive the Israelis into the sea. And while they were there, some guerillas with Syrian nationality shot and killed one Wasfi Tal who was the prime minister of Jordan. This illustrates, of course, just one of the difficulties that the Arab nations have getting together to defeat Israel. This was a planned assassination and they had planned to do a good deal more assassinating and were unfortunately or fortunately, depending on the point of view, unable to accomplish this. In Jordan itself, of course, one Ahmad Lozi, who was equally a foe of the guerrillas, was promptly put in Wasfi Tal's place. And King Hussein, of all things, said, what we must do now is get ready to jointly make war upon the hated Israeli. Why did he do this? Well, as you will recall, about seven months ago, the guerrillas in Jordan and the Jordanian government had a bloody clash in which some people say ten thousand Palestinian guerrillas were killed, some say more. Some say less. But the military power of the Palestinian guerrillas was crushed. And the Syrians sent a tank column across the across the border up in this general area said a tank force across the border and the Jordanian tanks crushed the Syrian tank column defeated them utterly. Since which time the there has been little heard from the guerrillas, there have been no planes that have been hijacked by them and so forth. All right, yet they have now assassinated the prime minister, King Hussein's prime minister, they have assassinated him. And what should King Hussein do? Should he say to the guerrillas, you have assassinated my prime minister, I will therefore destroy, you know, this is what he believes. But what he said was, let us all unite to destroy Israel. This is, again, a part of this internal Arab rhetoric, this says, I am as good an Arab as anybody, indeed, a little bit better than most. We must all unite, everybody knows that the Jordanian monarchy and the guerillas are not going to unite, but this is part of this internal rhetoric. And yet if there are people who believe it, then some sort of a guerrilla attack against the Israeli might be made. I consider that most doubtful. But young men sometimes pay attention to rhetoric that others don't. Now there's one more story that comes out of this area, though, it really comes out of Washington, D.C., and that is that Mrs. Golda Meir, who is the head of the Israeli government, visited Mr. Nixon the other day. And what she wanted was phantom airplanes, the Congress by a vote of 80 to eight or some such overwhelming margin. The other day, the Senate at least said give them 250 million dollars for the phantom aircraft. Mr. Nixon did not promise Mrs. Meir that she would get the aircraft, but he did promise that he would see to it that the military balance of power in the area was maintained and the implication to the Russians and others were would be if they need things to preserve this balance of power, to protect themselves from the Arab nations, we, the United States will see that they get that kind of material. Mrs. Meir was smiling. So was Mr. Nixon. It was not a threat. We don't indulge in that kind of rhetoric, but there it was. And what are the chances of war in the Middle East before the end of nineteen seventy one? I personally think that Mr. Sadat is going to have to swallow his promises or to use some such excuse as the assassination of Wasfi tale as meaning this has changed things. We may have to delay it, never give it up and so forth and so on. I don't think we're as close to war there as we are in in east Pakistan, although we can never predict with accuracy about the Middle East if one is even halfway wise as Somerset Maugham observed some 20 years ago, I'll be back with a good deal more news. But first, just a word from your friend and mine, George Lyman Arms. George. <v George Lyman Arms>Dr. Schwarzwalder and I were killing each other the other day about who had been in the most countries, the most different countries in the world. So to prove the point, we each sat down and made a list. John won by a large margin. It turns out that John's been in twenty seven different countries in this world of ours, including all of the major countries of Europe and such unlikely places as Iceland, Cyprus, Yugoslavia and San Marino. I've been in a good many of the same countries as John has, but in addition, I've been to such places as Nigeria, Malawi, Liberia, Ghana and Kenya and Tanzania. All together, during the past 30 years, John and I have spent about 14 years of our collective lives in some thirty five different countries now the implication of this is very simple. It gives a flavor, a perspective to Your World This Week, a flavor and perspective which you folks seem to find very interesting, judging from the cards and the letters that you write us. Now you're aware that Your World This Week, like other programs on Channel two, are subsidized by channel to itself, partially subsidized by Channel two and partially subsidized by your memberships in the TV fund. And this is your invitation to add to or renew your membership in the fund by sending us a check for 15 dollars or more to KTCA TV, 1640 Como Avenue, St. Paul. That's KTCA TV 1640 Como Avenue. Thank you.

<v John Schwarzwalder>The fighting in Southeast Asia goes on, although it goes on almost without benefit of the participation of the United States of America, the fatalities last week were nine Americans as compared with five hundred in the ARVN, in the army of South Vietnam and an estimated fourteen hundred enemy deaths. This is the eighth week in a row in which the American fatalities have been under 10. And there are quite literally single accidents in the United States, which are taking more on average than the average weekly fatalities of the United States. In other words, though, the war is being fought in Vietnam and other places in Southeast Asia, it is not being fought any longer by us on the ground, although, as we will see in a moment, air participation and air support continues. There are three different campaigns going on in Southeast Asia this week. One is an abortive attempt by the North Vietnamese coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to break into the Central Highlands at about this point. So far, it has gotten nowhere, although it has put pressure upon South Vietnamese troops. Another drive is a drive by some twenty five thousand South Vietnamese ARVN and troops into the Mekong Delta here trying to clear out the last two thousand or so Viet Cong who remain this whole area, which used to be the great Viet Cong source of strength. This area from the from the the parrot's beak on south used to be the place where the the Viet Cong had its pseudo government. They used to collect taxes down here. They used to recruit the young men for their forces. It now appears that there are probably less than two thousand of them there, hidden the vast stretches of the forest of the delta and they've sent down, the government of Saigon, has sent down twenty five thousand troops to get rid of those few remaining Viet Cong as fast as they as they possibly can. Incidentally, it was interesting to note this morning that the Viet Cong, who used to absolutely disdain any overtures of peace from the Saigon government, are now loudly calling for a truce at Christmas and New Year's and for the Tet holidays as well. They are badly hurt. They want to they want some time to recover themselves in the Saigon government is unlikely, I think, to give them that time so that this clean out drive goes on. Now, there is another area of fighting, and this is the significant one. North of Phnom Penh in the ragtag bobtail retrained and reequipped Cambodian army drove up to a town called [Kompong Thramar, Komgpong Thramar] just about up here and at [Kompong Thramar], they were strewn out along 60 miles of highway. Some veteran North Vietnamese divisions immediately began hitting them on the flanks, cut them off and they have had to give up [Kompong Thrarmar]. They've had to give up ?Ba Lai?, which is to the south of it, by about six miles. And of the sixty miles of highway, they've had to give up more than 30 miles. They have been cut into smaller groups which can defend themselves as long as they get supplies. The United States, I noticed, flew more helicopter missions last week than in any period in the last three months. And I'm quite sure of those helicopter missions were essentially supply missions to the Cambodian troops on the ground. OK, won round one one might say for the North Vietnamese. But in the meantime, the South Vietnamese have been sending their troops and there are about forty thousand of them in there and out into this area of Cambodia, right in this area, right in through here. They have been sending their troops in there in order that they may be in a position to cordon off and outflank in their turn the North Vietnamese troops. That battle, I would judge is a couple of weeks away, partly because even up here in the Fishhook district, the South Vietnamese are not moving forward as fast and as efficiently as the Cambodians for perfectly good reason, think that they should. The Cambodians are in dire straits. They are being supplied. And I'm sure that the the helicopters are also doing a pretty good artillery job for them. But they are in danger. They can only be rescued if the South Vietnamese troops constitute such a threat to the north, to the flank, to the left flank of the North Vietnamese that they the North Vietnamese in their turn, will have to withdraw. That's what the strategy and tactics are all about there. And as I say, it'll be another week before we find out if the South Vietnamese are aggressive enough. To actually save this, that's that's the struggle there at this moment. And as I say, it's an interesting one because except for some helicopter and Air Force support, it is a struggle being fought by the North Vietnamese against the Cambodians and the South Vietnamese. There is one other news story on which I must touch before I go, and I only have a minute to do it, and that is the Irish news story. And in Ireland right now, the violence goes on and the British public is finding more and more of its troops are being killed by snipers and the British public is sick of it. Why any longer, they ask, should we put our troops in between the Protestant Unionists on the one hand and the Irish Republican Army on the other? They're tired of it. They are sick of the thing. And for the first time in Britain, there is serious talk of saying, why not let the six provinces of Ulster go to the Republic of Ireland? And they put that in there, in addition, with adequate guarantees, of course, of civil rights and participation in the government by the Protestants, which the Protestants in Ulster, I might add, are having no part of and simply do not believe the situation is no closer to a solution in Ireland now than it was two months or three months or six months ago, or for that matter, back in 1922. And delighted to have this chance to be back with you again on Your World This Week and until next week, at which time I hope you'll be with us again at this 730 hour until next week then this is John Schwarzwalder saying good night for Your World this Week. Good night.

<v Announcer>Your World This Week with Dr. John C. Schwarzwalder, returns next week at this same time, and we cordially invite you to join us then. This program is made possible through your membership in the KTCA TV Channel two fund. If you are not now a member, you may become one by sending fifteen dollars or more to the KTCA TV channel to fund 1640 Como Avenue, St.. Paul, Minnesota 55108.