Word: awami
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...conflict had its genesis last March when the Pakistani President and his tough military regime 1) moved to crush the East Pakistani movement for greater autonomy, 2) outlawed the Awami League, which had just won a majority in the nation's first free election, 3) arrested its leader, Sheik Mujibur Rahman, and 4) launched a repressive campaign that turned into a civil war with East Pakistan's Bengalis fighting to set up an independent Bangla Desh (Bengal Nation). Nearly 1,000,000 people were killed and 10 million refugees streamed into India. "We have borne the heaviest...
...Jinnah put it shortly after independence, there was little to hold the country's two divergent wings together except "faith." It was not enough. Last December, when the nation went to the polls in the first free elections in its history, East Pakistanis gave an overwhelming endorsement to the Awami League and its leader, Sheik Mujibur Rahman, 51, who had pledged to bring the exploited wing greater autonomy...
...prospect of the political balance of power moving from West Pakistan to the East was not acceptable to the generals. On March 25, Yahya outlawed the Awami League, arrested Mujib, who is now being tried for treason, and launched a ruthless repression that by one estimate has claimed a million lives and has sent nearly 10 million refugees flooding into India, most of them into the state of West Bengal. Awami League leaders who escaped to India promptly set up the Bangla Desh government in exile with headquarters in Calcutta, and some 130 Bengali diplomats subsequently defected from Pakistani missions...
There were also indications last week that Yahya is beginning to feel threatened by political opposition in the West. Charging that "some of its leaders are in collaboration with the enemy and are trying to foment revolt in West Pakistan," he suddenly outlawed the National Awami Party, a labor-oriented leftist group that emerged as the dominant provincial party in elections last December. The Pakistani President has promised to convene the National Assembly later this month. But with both the East's Awami League and the West's National Awami League disenfranchised, the Assembly is beginning to appear about...
...withdraw aid to the Pakistan government until "there is a political settlement with the elected Awami League leadership of East Bengal...