SHORT SUBJECTS
P., S.
APART FROM BASIC DIFFERENCES in language, tradition, culture, and even the manner in which their common Islamic religion is practiced, the Urdu-speaking West Pakistanis and the Bengali-speaking...
...Primary commodities, primarily jute (East Pakistan is the world's leading producer of raw jute), were exported throughout the world in order to earn foreign exchange which was, in turn, channeled for the industrial development of West Pakistan...
...In this instance, it is Mohammed Yazid, once minister of information in the government, and presently its ambassador to the United Nations...
...He returned briefly to Algeria when Ben Bella was ousted in a coup by the present head of state, Colonel Boumedienne...
...East Pakistan was subject to a colonial pattern of economy for two decades...
...As for nondevelopmental expenditures, the bulk of this went for the Indus Basin program in the West...
...He was one of the original nine Young Turks who had taken leadership of Algeria's nationalist movement out of the hands of its founding father, Messali Hadj, now a lonely and aged man living in permanent exile in France...
...YPSLs have concentrated most of their energies in two national programs they helped establish...
...Lahouel Hussein is director of the pari-mutual track-betting system in Algeria...
...government to guarantee Israel's security...
...But having lived through the rise and fall of the New Left, the YPSL should continue to make gains on campus and to strengthen its ties with liberal adult movements, particularly the trade union movement...
...Whichever regime held power, it was bound to be dominated by West Pakistanis and to further the principle of keeping the East Pakistanis in their proper place...
...The poor in rural East Pakistan are particularly wretched...
...The fate of Ben Bella and Belkacem Krim we have already described...
...policy through both Negotiation Now...
...In addition, there are about 15 organizing committees, many of which should soon achieve chapter status...
...Four years later, he was condemned to death by Boumedienne...
...Boussouf is a businessman in Algiers...
...perhaps "volunteers of the court...
...If he thinks about the long list of his former associates, all now gone, he remains silent...
...After the coup of 1958, which installed the "guided democracy" (i.e., military dictatorship) of Ayub Khan, the political dispossession of the Bengali middle class was complete...
...Half of these voters were registered in key assembly districts in California in an effort that helped liberals take control of the state legislature...
...Later, after the call for insurrection, Belkacem Krim became a member of the 17-member CNRA (National Council of the Algerian Revolution...
...These are the major factors behind the movement for fiscal and political autonomy in East Pakistan, centering in the Awami League headed by the imprisoned Sheikh Mujibur Rahman...
...It was only at the insistence of Mohammed All Jinnah, head of the original Muslim League and creator of the Pakistan state, that Bengal was split into East and West Bengal with the predominantly Muslim East Bengal forming East Pakistan while the predominantly Hindu West Bengal became part of India...
...Meanwhile, the economic disparity between East and West Pakistan kept growing...
...With one exception—he held the Finance portfolio for four days—no East Pakistani was appointed minister over the past 15 years...
...APART FROM BASIC DIFFERENCES in language, tradition, culture, and even the manner in which their common Islamic religion is practiced, the Urdu-speaking West Pakistanis and the Bengali-speaking East ex-Pakistanis have stood in an unhealthy political, social, and economic relationship to one another ever since Pakistan was founded in 1947...
...and the Vietnam Moratorium, and they have demonstrated against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the persecution of Soviet Jewry...
...In 1968, the East Pakistani representation in the Civil Service of Pakistan (the elite cadre of civil servants) was only 36 percent...
...The bulk of central funds for developmental and nondevelopmental purposes were also diverted to West Pakistan, while in the East only about half the alloted funds would actually be spent...
...But Krim shortly found himself opposed to Boumedienne as well and left Algeria for the last time in June 1965...
...But an active, politicized, resentful Bengali middle class continued to emerge in the East...
...There are 25 chapters, half of which are located in New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, while 7 others are in California...
...In concrete terms, this has meant standing up for Israel's right to exist against the violent opposition of New and Old Left groups, and trying to convey to students an appreciation for Israel's social democratic institutions...
...The remaining 5 percent come from the rest of the country, including the East...
...The second program is the Youth Committee for Peace and Democracy in the Middle East, a nonsectarian coalition that is trying to rally student support of a lasting Mideast peace settlement that will secure the existence of every state in the area...
...The production of rice (the major staple) has been stagnant...
...G. q 408...
...Demands for varying degrees of autonomy extending to separation were raised as early as the 1950s...
...A decline in the world price of jute caused by the growing use of synthetics and a phenomenal increase in the ranks of landless agricultural laborers have contributed to a drop in the income of the Bengali agrarian population...
...Approximately 10,000 student volunteers worked with Frontlash and succeeded in registering 200,000 poor and minority group voters...
...They have provided the leadership for the Youth Committee to Support the GE workers, and thus have taken an active part in the grape and lettuce boycotts initiated by the United Farm Workers' Organizing Committee...
...continued on page 408) 323 BOOKS PROGRESS REPORT ON THE YPSL (continued from page 323) YPSLs have been active on many issues...
...Chaddly Mekki has a minor post as a functionary in the Algerian Ministry of National Education...
...Ben Tobbal is out of political life and manages a small steel plant in Algeria...
...Their fate has been death, imprisonment, or a fall from power...
...Of 50 senior army officers who had attained the rank of major-general and above since 1947, 17 came from the Punjab, 19 from the Northwest Frontier, 11 from among Indian refugees in 1947, and 1 from Bengal...
...Representation in the armed forces followed a similar pattern...
...Sixty percent of the army consists of Punjabis and 35 percent of Pathans from the West...
...The political development of Pakistan was turbulent from the very beginning...
...P. q Algeria: The Revolution Devours Its Children THE ASSASSINATION OF BELKACEM KRIM, one of the nine original leaders of the Algerian FLN (National Liberation Front) in Frankfurt, West Germany, on October 21, 1970, leads one to ask, what has become of the original FLN leadership since its launching of an insurrection on November 1, 1954...
...A little bit of that democracy which certain "leftist" intellectuals in America sneer at when they discuss the Third World might have stood Algeria in good stead—to say nothing of those who led its liberation...
...They are now preparing to mobilize student support for national health insurance...
...Actually, within this broad surge toward autonomy one must note two basic currents: a Bengali middle-class movement for regional autonomy (now transformed into a movement for complete independence, Bangla Desh), and a more radical peasant and workers' movement for a restructuring of the socioeconomic order...
...Half a dozen Bengali civil servants reached the prestigious position of secretary in the central government, but no East Pakistani held the post of secretary in the key ministries of Finance, Home, or Defense...
...He was living on borrowed time, since in its decision the court had said that "anyone" had the right to carry out its sentence...
...Nor was the splitting of Bengal put to a vote of the people...
...There, in the words of Gustav 321 SHORT SUBJECTS Papanek (Pakistan's Development: Social Goals and Private Incentives, Cambridge, Mass., 1967) a philosophy of industrial development based upon "the social utility of greed" prevails...
...They have fought for peace in Vietnam and for a change in U.S...
...The YPSL now is a substantial force on campus and has close to 1,000 members...
...And with the bulk of defense expenditures and costs for civil administration concentrated in West Pakistan, there naturally developed a lopsided distribution of resources...
...it was accepted reluctantly and unhappily as part of the overall division of the subcontinent...
...The first is Frontlash, a voter registration program that had projects in 10 states in the last election...
...It should also benefit from the growth that its parent organization, the Socialist party, is now experiencing...
...The economic contrast is even sharper...
...Francis died a natural death in a Swiss clinic two years ago...
...When he broke politically with Ben Bella, then head of the Algerian Republic, Krim left the country in 1963 to form a political opposition in exile...
...Nevertheless, it is being done, with modest but impressive success...
...Every revolution has its professional opportunist who turns up on all the lists of the victors...
...He became Minister of Defense and Deputy Prime Minister of the Provisional Algerian Republic, then the Republic's first Vice President in 1958 until 1962...
...Through their violent repression, the West Pakistanis have succeeded in welding these two currents into one...
...Of the original membership of the CNRA and the nine signees of the original revolutionary call, not a single one remains in a leading position in Algeria...
...Mohammed Khider, after going into political opposition, was assassinated in Spain in 1967...
...in lower-rank services, such as taxation, audit and accounts, police, customs, etc., the percentage was the same...
...Ben Khedda returned to practicing his profession of a pharmacist...
...Krim had previously been sentenced to death in absentia by a revolutionary tribunal in Algeria meeting on April 6, 1969...
...Again, the revolution devours its children, and too often the best of them...
...The Young People's Socialist League was reestablished five years ago by about two dozen democratic socialists concentrated in New York City and the West Coast...
...During the period of the Third Plan (1965-70), in per-capita terms the disparity between the two rose from 46 percent to 60 percent...
...Over the last two years, a number of chapters have been started in Illinois and Michigan...
...with Ben Tobbal and Boussouf, Krim may be described as one of three who led a revolution...
...Ouamrane has a minor post in the 322 present administration...
...From the start, the East Pakistanis were treated as second-class citizens by the West...
...The Youth Committee organizes teach-ins and debates, publishes a monthly bulletin called Crossroads that has a circulation of 20,000, and is now initiating a national petition campaign calling upon the U.S...
...To complete the cycle, manufactured products from West Pakistan were sold at artificially inflated prices in the protected East Pakistani market...
...The YPSL faces a number of problems in the coming years, among which will be the growing student apathy that is accompanying the disintegration of the New Left, the tendency on the part of many students to escape into a counter culture, and the rise of a strong New Right on campus...
...I. q Progress Report On the YPSL BUILDING A RADICAL YOUTH MOVEMENT is never easy...
...Where partition in the West led to the tragic slaughter familiar to the world, the Bengal Partition, even though it involved the exchange of millions of people, was relatively nonviolent and peaceful, thanks partly to Gandhi's efforts but mainly to a sense of common brotherhood (of fellow Bengalis) despite religious differences...
...Building one that is committed to the discipline of reason and to the ideal of democracy is considered all but impossible...
...Born in the mountainous Grand Kabylia region of Algeria in 1922, Krim was a talented guerrilla leader who, like many others, had been trained in the French army...
...Krim's original comrades-in-arms have fared equally poorly...
...Who they were we do not know...
...A growth of radical movements in the countryside followed...
...If the YPSL can maintain its cohesion and avoid the mistakes of past youth movements, it could provide the basis for a sustained and effective student radicalism, and this, in turn, could lead to the revival of the Socialist movement in the United States...
...The original secular leadership of the Algerian Revolution has been replaced by narrow militarists and technicians who flavor their authoritarian regime with "Arabization" and the teachings of Mohammed...
...Like "K" in The Trial, he met his executioners in a cheap hotel room—and was strangled...
...Rural percapita income dropped from 228 rupees for the period between 1949-50 and 1953-54 to 198 rupees for the period between 1964-65 and 1967-68...
...Ahmed Mezerna lives the difficult life of a political exile in Paris...
...A number of them had dropped out of Students for a Democratic Society, having seen (with some prescience) the direction in which that movement was heading...
...Debaghine lives obscurely in Algeria...
...The answer is a tragedy of historic proportions, though widely unknown...
Vol. 18 • August 1971 • No. 4
