Whatever the ethnic or linguistic origin of the original wave of refugees who migrated to Pakistan, a very large segment of this population was born in East Pakistan after 1947.

Many have asked me through the years why I struggle so hard to write about a people in the world, few know or care about. The answer lies in the question it self. It is precisely because nobody knows or cares that I have stubbornly persisted. Nor will I cease that mission until the last camp in Bangladesh is closed and the last stranded Pakistani is granted the choice to either live as equal citizens in Bangladesh or the right to enter and live as full citizens of Pakistan.

A man rushed out of the door way of his shelter. Suddenly his hands were reaching for my throat and as others pulled him back and held the violently struggling man, he screamed out, “Don’t bring any more Pakistani tourists here. We’re not animals in a zoo to be watched”. The man stopped fighting and sank to his knees. He broke down sobbing, “I am old and tired. I’ll die in this wretched camp”.

“I spent just a few days with husband who after marrying me was going to take me to Pakistan with him. But then he just left… abandoned me. Now I am left here with a child to raise and disgraced”.

In that way, according Husnain, the missionaries have managed to lure eight thousand children from Mohammadpur camps to their missions over the past five years. Once at the mission the children are put to work making crafts and other things to sell to raise money. What education they do receive is Christian indoctrination.

As for World Vision, it apparently uses the camps to make films used in fundraising for the organization. None of the millions of dollars World Vision raises with those heart-wrenching documentaries ever benefits the Bihari camps.

With the Urdu language banned country wide, only in our schools can they still learn Urdu. But they come also because their children actually score higher in the examinations when they go through our school.

He showed me the prescription, which had a notation at the left hand corner-Bihari. There was no need to elaborate any further. This was a family that never registered with the ICRC as Pakistanis. This was in fact a family with Bangladesh citizenship.

“This fire was cause by the cyclone winds”, she began, but we have had fourteen fires that were deliberately set, that have burned the entire camp to the ground, a fire for each year we have been here. Always on Ahsura. For us this place is Karbala and every day is Ashura.

He was right his father was domed. It took fifteen more days for Khaliluddin to die. And though we made concerted attempts to get medical treatment for him and others we found in dire need, we could get no doctor to come or find one hospital that would admit them. The only response was, “We don’t treat Biharis!”

As we were leaving Murapara Camps, we came across a little girl sitting outside a hut making garlands of paper flowers. This was one of the few sources for income in the smaller, remote camps. “Can you sell a garland to me?” I asked. She thought about it, then nodded.

“How much?”

“No!”. was the resounding answer to that question, not only from them, but almost everyone in every camp.

“I spoke fluent Bangla but my height singled me out at once as a non-Bengali”. Ahmed is large framed six foot three. He described his attempts to leave his home, even six months after the war. “People would see me on the street, spit on me. Roving gangs went after me. Even my neighbors who had been friendly before, would call me Bihari rubbish”.

There was no evidence of Bangladesh offering the full rights citizenship to non-Bengalis, unless forcing them to pass themselves off as Bengalis in order to work, receive education or even move about freely in the streets is considered a legitimate form of assimilation.

“What happened to the others?”
“Three died of thirst in the desert.” Pain crossed over his young face as he described the death of the other two. They were caught by Indian border patrols and shot.”

“Why were they shot?”
“Because there is no where to deport us. When we get caught, so they just shoot us.” He then told me how he forced himself to walk on feet that had become raw and bloody after the shoes he had bought for himself in India had worn out.
“How has life been for you since coming to Pakistan?”
“Hard and it is not getting any easier. Still it’s better than Bangladesh. It took four years to save enough money for a broker to bring my mother and sister here.

“The last time I saw Mustafa was on the afternoon of April 21, 1986. He waved at me as he passed carrying one pole of a large banner during a repatriation demonstration in Orangi Town.” Uniformed police opened fire on peaceful demonstrators, Mustafa was one of those killed.

I was in the seventh class and living in the railway quarters in 1971, he explained. He saw his cousin lured out of their house and then killed by his close Bengali friends in early March. “Then the day after the fall of Dhaka, police came and shot my father to death through the window of our house. Soon after that the army appeared and forced them to leave their homes and go to the camp.

Ansari then said he wanted to live in harmony with all his Muslim brothers. “And I don’t resent aiding the Mujahadeen. The Afghans in Benars Chowk are not part of the frredom fighters, and I realize that .” He also did not resent the presence of an estimated one million Bengalis in Pakistan. “All I want is the right to also live in Pakistan. Yet I have been denied the right to call myself Pakistani. I can’t get an identity card and that makes it hard to get a job that pays a living wage.”

“I am here legally but I have been denied the right to even sponsor my own family to bring them here legally”. Muzaffar was thirty years old at the time of the interview, but because of the need to bring the rest his family and limited finances he has not been able to get married and start a family of his own.

“Before the Pakistan Army arrived my cousin had been tortured and brutally killed by the Mukti Bahini. He was my age, fourteen at the time. His eyes were gouged out, his throat slit. We found his body on the road.” Syed Shamim Javed.

A shipload of refugees was turned away from the American shores. With no country willing to give them sanctuary, the ship was forced to return to its home port. What awaited those passengers was death in concentration camps. The year was 1939. The country, if you have not guessed by now, was Hitler’s Germany. And the passengers were Jews.

The parallels between the Jews of World War II Europe and the Biharis of Bangladesh does not step there. Both were minority groups, labeled as traitors, accused of being previliged and used as scapegoats. Both became targets of mob mentality that was whipped up by their leaders. The very name, Bangladesh, roughly translated into English is Bengali Nation, and conjures up the same image as Hitler’s Aryan Nation, with its basis of racial purity and nationalism as a central theme. And in both cases, the world closed its eyes on the plight of the victims.

The fact that a people, who because of the language they speak have been allowed to languish in camps and found no shores in the world offering sanctuary, and no protests about their plight, must mean we have not learned a thing.

Bangladesh could not isolate or deprive a minority group of basic human rights if there was a world voice out there protesting. The Biharis would not have been marooned in that hostile land if there was a world out there to put pressure on the government of Pakistan to fulfill their moral obligation.

Allowing this to go on, is not only condemning 300,000 men, women and children, but other potential victims in some other part of the world, when some government decides they speak the wrong language, are the wrong color or practice the wrong religion, and decides it can get away with oppressing another minority population without interference.

Still missing were their two youngest daughters who were two and four years old. A few days later, after giving up hope that he would find his nieces alive, a Bengali servant who had worked in their house turned up at the Cantonment in Rajshahi. With him were the two little girls. Ahsan (now retired) and his wife were raising the orphaned girls in Karachi.

Only 275 of the 19000 children in camps go to school. Only six of the 66 camps have a school.

“All we want is for Zia ul Haque to agree to repatriation. We will walk to Pakistan if we have to”.

Major Mirza Murtaza Ali (Retd.): But there was massive slaughter and rapes of the Biharis by the Bengalis and we came upon the bodies in mass graves, clogging every river and pond in every village, town and city we went through.