The National Post, Canada
Nov 7 2014
The ‘selective genocide’ that Washington ignored
Gary J. Bass, Special to National Post
On November 20, The Cundill Prize in Historical Literature at McGill
will be awarded to the author of a book “determined to have had (or
likely to have) a profound literary, social and academic impact in the
area of history.” This week and next, the National Post will be
publishing excerpts from all six 2014 Cundill Prize finalists.
Archer Blood, the United States consul general in Dacca, was a
gentlemanly diplomat raised in Virginia, a World War II navy veteran
in the upswing of a promising Foreign Service career after several
tours overseas. He was earnest and precise, known to some of his more
unruly subordinates at the U.S. consulate as a good, conventional man.
He had come to like his posting to this impoverished, green and swampy
land. But outside of the consulate’s grimy offices, in the steamy
heat, the city was dying. Night after night, Blood heard the gunshots.
On the night of March 25, 1971, the Pakistan army had begun a
relentless crackdown on Bengalis, all across what was then East
Pakistan and is today an independent Bangladesh. Untold thousands of
people were shot, bombed or burned to death in Dacca alone. Blood had
spent that grim night on the roof of his official residence, watching
as tracer bullets lit up the sky, listening to clattering machine guns
and thumping tank guns. There were fires across the ramshackle city.
He knew the people in the deathly darkness below. He liked them. Many
of the civilians facing the bullets were professional colleagues; some
were his friends.
It was, Blood and his staffers thought, their job to relay as much of
this as they possibly could back to Washington. Witnessing one of the
worst atrocities of the Cold War, Blood’s consulate documented in
horrific detail the slaughter of Bengali civilians: an area the size
of two dozen city blocks that had been razed by gunfire; two newspaper
office buildings in ruins; thatch-roofed villages in flames; specific
targeting of the Bengalis’ Hindu minority.
The U.S. consulate gave detailed accounts of the killings at Dacca
University, ordinarily a leafy, handsome enclave. At the wrecked
campus, professors had been hauled from their homes to be gunned down.
The provost of the Hindu dormitory, a respected scholar of English,
was dragged out of his residence and shot in the neck. Blood listed
six other faculty members “reliably reported killed by troops,” with
several more possibly dead. One American who had visited the campus
said that students had been “mowed down” in their rooms or as they
fled, with a residence hall in flames and youths being machine-gunned.
Archer Blood’s cable — perhaps the most radical rejection of U.S.
policy ever sent by its own diplomats — blasted the United States for
silence in the face of Pakistan’s atrocities
“At least two mass graves on campus,” Blood cabled. “Stench terrible.”
There were 148 corpses in one of these mass graves, according to the
workmen forced to dig them. An official in the Dacca consulate
estimated that at least five hundred students had been killed in the
first two days of the crackdown, almost none of them fighting back.
Blood reckoned that the rumored toll of a thousand dead at the
university was “exaggerated, although nothing these days is
inconceivable.” After the massacre, he reported that an American
eyewitness had seen an empty army truck arriving to get rid of a
“tightly packed pile of approximately 25 corpses,” the last of many
such batches of human remains.
This was, Blood knew, the last thing his superiors in Washington
wanted to hear. Pakistan was an ally — a military dictatorship, but
fiercely anticommunist. Blood detailed how Pakistan was using U.S.
weapons — tanks, jet fighters, gigantic troop transport airplanes,
jeeps, guns, ammunition — 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, while the
despots in the Soviet Union found themselves standing behind
democratic India.
Nixon and Henry Kissinger, the brilliant White House national security
advisor, were driven not just by such Cold War calculations, but a
starkly personal and emotional dislike of India and Indians. Nixon
enjoyed his friendship with Pakistan’s military dictator, General Agha
Muhammad Yahya Khan, known as Yahya, who was helping to set up the top
secret opening to China. The White House did not want to be seen as
doing anything that might hint at the breakup of Pakistan — no matter
what was happening to civilians in the east wing of Pakistan.
Related
Gary J. Bass: Nixon knew of the massacre in Bangladesh
Jonathan Kay: Outside the world’s media glare, Bangladesh is fighting
against militant Islam
The onslaught would continue for months. The Dacca consulate
stubbornly kept up its reporting. But, Blood later recalled, his
cables were met with “a deafening silence.” He was not allowed to
protest to the Pakistani authorities. He ratcheted up his dispatches,
sending in a blistering cable tagged “Selective Genocide,” urging his
bosses to speak out against the atrocities being committed by the
Pakistani military. The White House staff passed this up to Kissinger,
who paid no heed. Then on April 6, two weeks into the slaughter, Blood
and almost his entire consulate sent in a telegram formally declaring
their “strong dissent” — a total repudiation of the policy that they
were there to carry out. That cable — perhaps the most radical
rejection of U.S. policy ever sent by its diplomats — blasted the
United States for silence in the face of atrocities, for not
denouncing the quashing of democracy, for showing “moral bankruptcy”
in the face of what they bluntly called genocide.
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 20th 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. It was a defining moment for both
the United States and India, where their humane principles were put to
the test.
For the United States, as Archer Blood understood, a small number of
atrocities are so awful that they stand outside of the normal
day-to-day flow of diplomacy: the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust,
Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda. When we think of U.S. leaders failing the
test of decency in such moments, we usually think of uncaring
disengagement: Franklin Roosevelt fighting World War II without taking
serious steps to try to rescue Jews from the Nazi dragnet, or Bill
Clinton standing idly by during the Rwandan genocide.
Getty
But Pakistan’s slaughter of its Bengalis in 1971 is starkly different.
Here the United States was allied with the killers. The White House
was actively and knowingly supporting a murderous regime at many of
the most crucial moments. There was no question about whether the
United States should intervene; it was already intervening on behalf
of a military dictatorship decimating its own people.
This stands as one of the worst moments of moral blindness in U.S.
foreign policy. 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. Midway
through the bloodshed, both the Central Intelligence Agency and the
State Department conservatively estimated that about 200,000 people
had lost their lives. Many more would perish, cut down by Pakistani
forces or dying in droves in miserable refugee camps.
“The story of East Bengal will surely be written as one of the
greatest nightmares of modern times,” declared Edward Kennedy, who led
the outcry in the Senate. But in the depths of the Cold War, Nixon and
Kissinger were unyielding in their support for Pakistan, making
possible horrific crimes against humanity — plausibly even a genocide
— in that country’s eastern wing.
The ongoing Bengali slaughter led within a few months to a major war
between Pakistan and India. In that time, the White House had every
opportunity to grasp how bad these atrocities were. There were sober
misgivings voiced in the White House, and thunderous protests from the
State Department and its emissaries in Delhi and Dacca, with Archer
Blood the loudest voice of all. But throughout it all, from the
outbreak of civil war to the Bengali massacres to Pakistan’s crushing
defeat by the Indian military, Nixon and Kissinger, unfazed by
detailed knowledge of the massacres, stood stoutly behind Pakistan.
As its most important international backer, the United States had
great influence over Pakistan. But at almost every turning point in
the crisis, Nixon and Kissinger failed to use that leverage to avert
disaster. Before the shooting started, they consciously decided not to
warn Pakistan’s military chiefs against using violence on their own
population. They did not urge caution or impose conditions that might
have discouraged the Pakistani military government from butchering its
own citizenry. They did not threaten the loss of U.S. support or even
sanctions if Pakistan took the wrong course. They allowed the army to
sweep aside the results of Pakistan’s first truly free and fair
democratic election, without even suggesting that the military
strongmen try to work out a power-sharing deal with the Bengali
leadership that had won the vote. They did not ask that Pakistan
refrain from using U.S. weaponry to slaughter civilians, even though
that could have impeded the military’s rampage, and might have
deterred the army.
There was no public condemnation — nor even a private threat of it —
from the president, the secretary of state, or other senior officials.
The administration almost entirely contented itself with making
gentle, token suggestions behind closed doors that Pakistan might
lessen its brutality–and even that only after, months into the
violence, it became clear that India was on the brink of attacking
Pakistan.
National Post
Excerpted from The Blood Telegram by Gary J. Bass. Copyright (c) 2013 by
Gary J. Bass. Excerpted by permission of Vintage, a division of Random
House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be
reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the
publisher.
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/11/07/gary-j-bass-the-selective-genocide-that-washington-ignored/