When I came to Dhaka in January 1972, I was advised by UN, British and other aid officials to pay a courtesy call on Sheikh Mujib. My meeting was organized by Tajuddin Ahmed, who I had met a few times in Calcutta in 1971 when he was Prime Minister of the Mujibnagar government.
My meeting with Sheikh Mujib is one I will never forget. I told him that I wanted his advice about what a small organization like OXFAM might be able to do to assist in the rehabilitation and development of Bangladesh. Sheikh Mujib took his pipe out of his mouth and pointed the stem of the pipe at me.
“How did you come here, young man?” he asked in a booming voice.
I told him that I had driven overland from Calcutta.
“In that case,” he told me, “You have seen more of my country than I have, as I was a prisoner for over nine months, so please tell me what you think my country needs. What have you seen?”
I told Sheikh Mujib that I had seen many villages that had been burnt down, many bridges and culverts blown up, and many ferries and launches, large and small, sunk in the rivers.
I told Sheikh Mujib that, on behalf of OXFAM, I had already ordered, in India, £ 250,000 worth of CI sheets for a big house rebuilding program and these would arrive by early March. I added that I thought that bridge building and replacement and repairs of ferries were more suited to bilateral and multilateral aid.
“No,” Sheikh Mujib said, “Ferries are and will be the lifelines of food supplies for my people. Please discuss with officials of the Bangladesh Inland Waterways Authority and see what OXFAM can do.”
Before I left him, Sheikh Mujib asked me about my experiences working with the people of Bangladesh in the refugee camps and what would I remember most. As I spoke, emotion got the better of me and tears welled up in my eyes. I told him that I would always remember, most of all, the plight of the children and that so many never lived to see and enjoy their new country. In addition, I told him that the plight of the children had, to a great degree, affected Senator Edward Kennedy who had visited the camps in August 1971 and had written the following in Oxfam's publication The Testimony of Sixty, “It is difficult to erase from your mind the look on the face of a child paralyzed from the waist down, never to walk again; or a child quivering in fear on a mat in a small tent still in shock from seeing his parents, his brothers and his sisters executed before his eyes; or the anxiety of a 10-year-old girl out foraging for something to cover the body of her baby brother who had died of cholera a few moments before our arrival. When I asked one refugee camp director what he would describe as his greatest need, his answer was “a crematorium.” He was in charge of one of the largest refugee camps in the world.
I told Sheikh Mujib that the children perished because of acute hunger and disease (a rough estimate is that at least one million children perished in the refugee camps in India). Sheikh Mujib wiped his own eyes and put his arm around me and asked me more details about what I had witnessed regarding the state of the children in the camps.
“I will always remember about 20 children fighting over one boiled egg,” I told him and added, “In the same camp I saw a child in the milk queue vomit and collapse and nearby a woman groaning and giving birth in the mud.”
I told Sheikh Mujib that I had met parents who had given up hope of ever seeing their children well again. I told him that I will never forget seeing infants with their skin hanging loosely in folds from their tiny bones-lacking the strength even to lift their heads. Also, seeing the children with legs and feet swollen with oedema and malnutrition, limp in the arms of their mothers. From my time with Bangabandhu in early 1972, it was so very clear how concerned he was about children, particularly the new generation of Bangladeshis.
Julian Francis has been associated with relief and development activities of Bangladesh since the War of Liberation. In 2012, the Government of Bangladesh awarded him the ‘Friends of Liberation War Honour' in recognition of his work among the refugees in India in 1971 and in 2018 honoured him with full Bangladesh citizenship. Julian has also been honoured with the British award of the OBE for ‘services to development in Bangladesh.'
