Creation of Bangladesh exposed Nixon and Kissinger
Nixon and Kissinger set the stage for an ongoing decimation of Pakistan’s democratic opposition, giving time and space to Islamicize the country more and more. -
'The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide'
Nixon and Kissinger found themselves boxed in by their country’s liberal and democratic system; they had to moderate their policies, much against their will. As Kissinger complained to the president, “We are the ones who have been operating against our public opinion, against our bureaucracy, at the very edge of legality.”
"....trapped in the quagmire of Vietnam; there was no American appetite for another Asian conflict. Thus the leading critics of the Nixon administration, like Kennedy, linked Vietnam with Pakistan: two places where the United States was standing behind illegitimate governments, at a terrible cost to those peoples, and to the good name of the United States"
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| Mass leader Mujib: During a visit to Lahore |
Come, fall in love with a forgotten page of bitter human history
New Delhi: Some names and incidents may not be just coincidence. In 1970-71, when genocide and bloodshed were rampant in 'East Pakistan'; incidentally the US envoy in Dhaka (consul general) was also named Archer Blood.
In later years, came a book and it was also aptly titled --- 'The Blood Telegram.......' . Why am I writing this blog ??
Bangladesh has been in the news lately. There could be many reasons. One of them certainly in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit; - some of it had resonance in West Bengal election season and the other one is violence in Bangladesh against Modi's visit.
In this blog, I propose not to dwell on contemporary issues and hence the focus is in the history ad some of its lesser known pages and protagonists.
Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger was one of them. Another person who deserves mention is Archer Blood, who was then the United States’ consul general in Dhaka (earlier name was Dacca). A book, 'The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide' by Gary J. Bass, a journalist and a professor of politics at Princeton, is worth referring due to its content and the manner it brings into light the conduct of the American leadership at that time.
Diplomatic necessities often can make a leader or even a country bitter, insensitive, impolite and perhaps also inhuman.
The preface of the book notes: "Pakistan’s crackdown on the Bengalis was not routine or small-scale killing, not something that could be dismissed as business as usual, but a colossal and systematic onslaught." But US sided with the military rulers in Islamabad.
The American 'hypocrisy' came to light - of course not for the first time in its long history. There was yet again the 'China factor'. Of course, Beijing was trying to emerge out of the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. At the time of military crackdown against Bengali population, President Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, were trying to establish relations with China and hence life carried on for Pakistanis as well.
Pakistan was an ally—a military dictatorship, but fiercely anti-communist. Consul general Blood was particularly irked because Pakistan was using US weapons—tanks, jet fighters, gigantic troop transport airplanes, jeeps, guns to crush the Bengalis. "In one of the awkward alignments of the Cold War, President Richard Nixon had lined up the democratic United States with this authoritarian government," says the book, 'The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide'.
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| Blogger: 2017 Dhaka |
Pak military boss Yahya had become Nixon’s secret liaison man with the Chinese leader Zhou Enlai and helped lay the groundwork for the visits to China by Kissinger and then Nixon. That today China has emerged as a chief strategic rival of the US is only a twist of irony and time.
There were more paradoxical situations, the communists USSR had backed 'a democratic' India while in one of the 'awkward alignments' of the Cold War, President Richard Nixon had lined up the "democratic United States with this authoritarian government" (in Islamabad).
According to an article in Pakistani newspaper, 'Dawn', "Academics studying the process of democratisation in Pakistan have argued that one of the many reasons why elections were never held in Pakistan was the fear of the Punjabi-Muhajir elites, and of their military-bureaucratic alliance, that with East Pakistan’s majority population universal franchise would always result in a majority of seats from East Pakistan. The 1970 election results went further in confirming these fears. Sheikh Mujib’s Awami League won 160 of the 162 seats in East Pakistan, giving it a majority in united Pakistan’s parliament."
Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party won 81 seats out of 138 in West Pakistan, becoming the majority party in West Pakistan, mainly from Sindh and Punjab. The critical outcome from the 1970 elections was that neither of the two largest parties won a single seat in the other wing. Electorally, Pakistan stood divided.
Of course Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman, often described as "a pipe-smoking Bengali leader" by the western newspapers, won the elections on the promise of 'autonomy' for East Pakistan. Officially, he never had called for "independence".
Essentially, the confrontation was between Bengalis and Pak army dominated by Punjabis. The military’s 'Operation Searchlight' commenced in March 1971. But for many Pakistan had to give up its eastern wing largely due to the ego hassles of a handful of West Pakistani politicians that matched pretty well with the gross incompetence and unwillingness of the military leadership in understanding the root problem and addressing political issues.
On to a different plane, and the conduct of the US:
Many years later and in the new millennium, Henry Kissinger had come under attack for name calling against Indians and using the phrase 'goddamn people'. In 2005, a tape came to light which revealed that during his 'informal tele talks'with President Nixon, Kissinger had said - "They are the most aggressive goddamn people around."
Of course, in a television interview, he later regretted his comments. "I regret that these words were used. I have extremely high regard for Mrs Gandhi as a statesman...The fact that we were at cross purposes at that time was inherent in the situation". Well, as they put it - all in the name of Cold War!
In a book review piece for “The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide", New York Times says it well - "This is a dark and amazing tale, an essential reminder of the devastation wrought by the hardhearted policy and outright bigotry that typified much of the diplomacy of the cold war.
It is not a tale without heroes, though; a number of American diplomats — most especially a man named Archer Blood — risked and even sacrificed their careers by refusing to knuckle under to the White House and telling the truth about what was happening on the ground".
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| Mujib with Indira Gandhi |
Book Excerpts:
## It was left to India, which did not have the option of ignoring the slaughter of the Bengalis, to stop it. The gargantuan democracy was entwined with the tragedy next door in countless ways, from its own shocked Bengali population to its bitter confrontation with Pakistan.
Indira Gandhi’s government was motivated by a mix of lofty principle and brutal realpolitik: demanding an end to the slaughter of a civilian population and upholding the popular will of voters in a democratic election, but also seizing a prime opportunity to humiliate and rip apart India’s hated enemy.
Indira Gandhi, India’s prime minister and the great Jawaharlal Nehru’s daughter, would later claim she acted “first of all, for purely humanitarian reasons.” India’s ambassador at the United Nations declared that his country had “absolutely nothing but the purest of motives and the purest of intentions: to rescue the people of East Bengal.”
But there was nothing pure about the protection of human rights. Some eminent political theorists and international lawyers have pointed to India’s intervention as a singular and important case of an Asian postcolonial country launching a humanitarian intervention—a kind of war more commonly associated with Western military campaigns in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Libya. But there has been no proper chronicle of India’s real motives.
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The United States and India are radically different societies, in everything from wealth to ethnic composition to sheer size of population; but they do share some basic similarities in their systems of democratic governance. In both, democratic leaders were goaded and prodded by rambunctious elements at home: a free press with an ingrained habit of seeking out inconvenient or embarrassing stories; opposition politicians and partisans waiting to pounce should a president or prime minister stumble; and a public whose moral sensibilities often did not align with the dictates of the state’s cold calculus of strategic interest.
In both of these enormous democracies, the people were more moralistic than their governments.
$$$ Nobody would idealize India’s flawed democracy, least of all Indians themselves: this was and is a land of heartbreaking poverty, endemic corruption, collapsing infrastructure, enduring caste fissures, arrogant bureaucratic inefficiency, and shocking social inequality. Some 350 million Indians—roughly a third of the country’s population—today live below the poverty line. But this is also a country of stupendous pluralism and vitality that, against all odds, maintains a democratic system and culture, offering a way for a fractious public to make its multitudinous voices heard and a chance for the government to correct itself.
Indians were overwhelmingly outraged by the atrocities in East Pakistan. In a factionalized country where popular harmony is a surpassingly rare thing, there was a remarkable consensus: Pakistan was behaving horrifically; the Bengalis were in the right; India had to act in defense of democracy and innocent lives. Almost the entire Indian political spectrum, from Hindu nationalists on the right to socialists and communists on the left, lined up behind the Bengalis.
Well written
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