One book tells it all

In the words of the author and Harvard educated Princeton Professor Gary J Bass, “This book is about how two of the world’s great democracies—the United States and India—faced up to one of the most terrible humanitarian crises of the twentieth century. The slaughter in what is now Bangladesh stands as one of the cardinal moral challenges of recent history, although today it is far more familiar to South Asians than to Americans. It had a monumental impact on India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—almost a sixth of humanity in 1971. In the dark annals of modern cruelty, it ranks as bloodier than Bosnia and by some accounts in the same rough league as Rwanda.”  

The title comes from Archer Blood, and the many telegrams he sent to State Department officials during Pakistan’s grisly campaign: telegraphs that were brusquely cast aside by a White House keen to stay affable with Pakistan’s military dictator, against a democratic India that Nixon abhorred. (“I want to piss on them,” Nixon would later say, of India’s leadership.)

As conflict escalated, Blood’s telegrams changed: from methodical dispatches cloaked in diplomat speak to desperate pleas for aid and charges of “selective genocide”—culminating in the U.S. Foreign Service’s first-ever formal dissent cable, sent by the staff of the Dhaka consulate and accusing America of “moral bankruptcy” in the face of what they bluntly termed “genocide”.

Prof. Bass’s history relies on newly unclassified documents and interviews with retired government officials. But Bass warns us that his account is far from complete. “The Whitehouse staff routinely sanitized their records,” he writes. “Even now, mildewed and bogus claims of national security” keep critical documents hidden from sight. Henry Kissinger declined Bass’s request for an interview

By quoting some of the controversial opinions expressed by Nixon and Kissinger, the author not only provides a detailed overview of the factual happenings in Pakistan in the early 1970s, but more than that he reveals the reproachable  attitude of the American statesmen towards the humanitarian crisis in South Asia. In practice, this meant that Yahya — a vain, shallow mediocrity — was suddenly considered indispensable, free to do whatever he wished in East Pakistan. With the White House averting its eyes, when Pakistani Army killed hundreds and thousands of Bengalis and forced 10 million to flee to India. Bass lays out his indictment of the White House: Nixon and Kissinger spurned the cables, written by their own diplomats that said West Pakistan was guilty of carrying out widespread ‘selective genocide’. The men in the White House, however, not only refused to condemn Yahya — in public or private — but they also declined to withhold American arms, ammunition and spare parts that kept Pakistan’s military machine humming. Indeed, Nixon regarded the dictator with genuine affection and attributed him as “a decent man”.  “I understand the anguish you must have felt in making the difficult decisions you have faced,” he told Yahya.

The voices of Kissinger and Nixon are the book’s most shocking aspects. Bass has unearthed a series of conversations, most of them from the White House’s secret tapes, that reveal Nixon and Kissinger as shockingly vulgar and hateful, especially in their attitudes toward the Indians, whom they regarded as repulsive, shifty and, anyway, pro-Soviet — and especially in their opinion of Indira Gandhi. “The old bitch,” Nixon called her. “I don’t know why the hell anybody would reproduce in that damn country but they do,” he said while referring to the huge population of India. Nixon’s loathing for India led him to bitterly curse, “The Indians need---what they really need---“Kissinger interjected, “They are such bastards.” Nixon finished his thought, “A mass famine.”  Likewise, Nixon expressed equal profanity in dismissing the Bengalis as "just a bunch of brown goddamned Moslems". When Kenneth Keating informed Nixon that India could not stand the strain of some 10 million refugees, “why don’t they shoot them”, Nixon suggested.

In the domestic front, there was Senator Edward Kennedy, whom Nixon particularly loathed. Based on the cable, Kennedy gave a passionate speech denouncing the use of US weaponry and urging the Nixon administration to stop the killing. And throughout the crisis, Kennedy was villain to Nixon-Kissinger clique.

These sorts of statements will probably not surprise the experts, but what is most telling is what they reveal about Nixon’s and Kissinger’s strategic intelligence. At every step of the crisis, the two men appear to have been driven as much by their loathing of India — West Pakistan’s rival — as by any cool calculations of power. By failing to restrain West Pakistan, they allowed a blood bath to unfold, and then a regional war, which began when India finally decided that the only way to stop the tide of refugees was to stop the killing across the border. That, in turn, prompted West Pakistan to attack India.

At this point, the recklessness of Nixon and Kissinger only got worse. They dispatched ships from the Seventh Fleet into the Bay of Bengal, and even encouraged China to move troops to the Indian border, possibly for an attack — a maneuver that could have provoked the Soviet Union. Fortunately, the leaders of the two Communist countries proved more sober than those in the White House. The war ended quickly, when India joined the war side by side with Bangladesh liberation forces and crushed the Pakistani Army resulting in freeing the newly born Bangladesh from the clutch of what the Bengalis called ‘the occupation forces’.

The book is a breathtaking tale of hitherto unknown or little known role of Nixon administration, and Kissinger in the complicity in the genocide of Bengalis. Nixon stands disgraced in Watergate, but he deserves no less an indictment for his tacit support in one of the worst genocides of human history. And this book has revealed Kissinger deserves no less a conviction than his former boss.

For us, the Bengalis, the book is a documentary evidence, however unfortunate, Jefferson’s America’s collusion with a despotic dictator in the horrific massacres of unarmed people, the stories that we have been telling the world for decades. The book is an authentic documented history of our liberation war as well. The fact that the book has garnered numerous prizes, including the most coveted Cundill prize ($75,000) administered by McGill University of Canada for historical literature last month has glaringly endorsed the veracity of its contents.  Thank you, Prof. Gary Bass for painstakingly revealing to the world for what we have been telling them for years.

The writer is the Convenor of the Canadian Committee for Human Rights and Democracy in Bangladesh