The place was dirty and damp. Sanitary conditions were absolutely poor there. People were filled with fear and foreboding, with no iota of hope left. The joy of life was something beyond their wildest imagination.
They were depressed and disheartened. Their faces were an accurate mirror of the pain they were bearing deep inside.
Looking at their blank eyes was enough to make one understand the volumes they spoke.
There were dead people lying on the ground. There were sick people lying on makeshift hospital beds and floors.
An ambience of distress was all around, and being there was simply a nightmarish experience for anyone.
Such was the scenario Lars Leijonborg, human rights activist and former Swedish politician, spoke of when recalling the miseries and sufferings of Bangladeshi refugees at one of the camps at Salt Lake in Kolkata in 1971.
Around 10 million Bangladeshis fled to neighbouring India to save their lives soon after the West Pakistani army launched a full-scale crackdown on the unarmed Bangladeshis as darkness fell on the night of March 25 that year, and the inception of the nine-month-long bloody war followed.
Sitting inside a café in Stockholm on December 16, 2014, Lars, who visited different refugee camps in India’s Kolkata during the war in October, 1971, said it was the largest refugee disaster in history.
For his activism in Sweden, after coming back from India, in favour of an independent Bangladesh that finally was liberated on December 16, the same year, Lars was awarded the “Friends of Liberation War Honour” by the Bangladesh government in 2012.
Born in Stockholm in 1949, Lars became president of the Liberal Youth of Sweden, youth organisation of the Liberal People’s Party), in 1971. He was 21 years old then.
As the young president of the youth organisation, he then gave interviews to television channels and newspapers, wrote articles, took part in debates supporting Bangladesh’s independence and opposing West Pakistan’s military offensive.
The 65-year-old said the sufferings of Bangladeshis he witnessed in the refugee camps had compelled him to highlight the issue in Swedish media on humanitarian ground.
As a leader of the youth organisation in 1971, he said he had played his role to create public opinions in Sweden and engage the Swedish government to stand by Bangladesh.
Once the Bangladesh issue came to the fore through media, it helped Bangladesh’s right to freedom gain growing acceptance among different quarters in Sweden at that time, said the friend of Bangladesh.
He, however, never forgot to give credit to the Liberal People’s Party -- the mother organisation of the youth wing he was leading then, which resolved to back Bangladesh’s freedom struggle at a party congress in September 1971.
“In the congress, a statement regarding Bangladesh was made,” he said.
Therefore, it was much easier for him at a personal level to actively engage in upholding the cause of Bangladesh’s freedom struggle.
Asked, why he became interested in Bangladesh, Lars said he had come to know about West Pakistan’s military atrocities in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, from Western media that extensively covered the Bangladesh issue.
Apart from that, he particularly mentioned a Bangladeshi named Abdur Razzak, who later became the first Bangladesh ambassador to Sweden after independence.
Abdur Razzak persuaded him to visit the refugee camps in India, and visit some of the liberated areas in Bangladesh, if possible.
“He (Razzak) contacted my party office, met me in person, and requested me to raise my voice against indiscriminate killings in Bangladesh,” Lars said.
Razzak was a member of the Pakistan Foreign Service, who quit his job protesting West Pakistan’s oppression.
But he could not tell how Razzak, who might have been posted elsewhere, had ended up in Sweden.
Lars, who was president of the Liberal People’s Party from 1997 to 2007, said he, along with his friend Thomas Berglund, also a Swede, had reached Kolkata in October 1971.
During their stay for around a month, they visited refugee camps to see the plight of suffering souls, and met the chief of the mission in Kolkata for the Bangladesh government-in-exile on October 20, requesting that they be given permission to enter the Bangladesh territory.
After some days, the duo got approval.
The concluding part of this long form will be published tomorrow.
