THIS is my first opportunity to speak to an audience after our Independence. I convey my sincere thanks to Bangla Academy for affording me this opportunity.

Every moment of the night of March 25 in 1971 and the following two-months will always shine brightly in the depths of my memory.

AS you open newspapers you read that East Pakistanis are fleeing their country, taking shelter in refugee camps and dying in thousands from cholera. But why? What is the genesis of this holocaust? Who is responsible for this human misery?

OUR nationalist movement that led to the War of Liberation began soon after the creation of Pakistan. Since inception, the Pakistani rulers began maligning our culture to destroy our independent cultural identity.

WHICH memories of 1971 are horrific? The whole period from March 25 to December 15 was one continuous hell.

IN the absence of a political solution the crisis thrown up by the events in East Pakistan can only get worse.

This is my third visit to the India-Pakistan border 60 miles east of Calcutta. The countryside has not changed.

EXACTLY 214 years after Bangla's sun of independence set in the mango grove of Polashi in Behrampur on June 23, 1757, the resting sun rose once more to glory in an unknown village in Meherpur, Kushtia through the announcement of independence of then East Pakistan by the Awami League.

AUGUST 15, 1971. On that day, after midnight, then East Pakistan's sea and river ports were attacked with mines one after the other. Occupation forces, shaken, sent out SOS signals to the whole world.

I would wish these pages were not only an anthology of eye-witness accounts. People of my generation have experienced enough horror to be, alas! no longer shocked. And human nature is such that it is rare that horror does not breed horror.