The Blood Telegram Page 13
But there was mounting evidence that among the Bengalis, the Hindu minority was doubly marked out for persecution. From the first few days of the crackdown, Blood had noticed this. Many of the West Pakistanis seemed to blame Bengali nationalism and secessionism on the Hindus, even though the Bengali Muslims had overwhelmingly supported the Awami League. “There was much feeling against Hindus,” says Meg Blood. “It was one way they whipped up their soldiers to do such abominable things.” Butcher remembers that the Hindus were “seen as making them less pure as Pakistanis.”44
There was, Archer Blood thought, no logic to this campaign of killings and expulsions of the Hindus, who numbered about ten million—about 13 percent of East Pakistan’s population. Later he would call it “criminally insane.” There was no military need for it. The Hindus were not the nucleus of any armed resistance. They were unarmed and dispersed around East Pakistan. But the Hindus were tainted by purported association with India, and were outliers in a Pakistani nation defined in Muslim terms. Lieutenant General Tikka Khan, the military governor leading the repression, argued that East Pakistan faced “enslavement” by India. He said that the outlawed Awami League would have brought the “destruction of our country which had been carved out of the subcontinent as a homeland for Muslims after great sacrifices.”45
Desaix Myers remembers, “We were aware the Hindu markets had been attacked. The villages that we visited were Hindu. We were aware that Hindus specifically were being attacked.” In a letter at the time, he wrote, “The Army continues to check, lifting lungis [a kind of sarong worn by Bengalis], checking circumcision, demanding recitation of Muslim prayers. Hindus flee or are shot.” He recalls that on one trip out of Dacca, “I was convinced I saw people wearing pieces of cloth identifying themselves as Hindus.” Butcher says, “You heard stories of men having to pull down their lungis. If they were circumcised, they were let go. If they were not, they were killed. It was singling out the Hindus for especially bad treatment, burning Hindu villages, it was like a pogrom. It was ridding the province of these people.”46
The consulate was full of dark theories about Pakistan’s motivations. In his letter home, Myers argued, “The West Pakistan Army seems bent on eliminating them; their rationale, by eliminating Hindus, Pakistan purifies itself, rids itself of anti-state, anti-Pakistan, anti-Islam elements.” India might absorb the refugees who fled. “Pakistan will have ridded herself of ten million undesirables,” he wrote, “having used them as a scapegoat, and East Pakistan’s total population will have been reduced enough to return it once again to minority position, thereby allowing continued dominance by the West.”47
Senior Pakistani officers would later admit much of this targeting before a secret Pakistani postwar judicial inquiry. It noted that “senior officers like the COAS [chief of army staff] and CGS [chief of general staff] were often noticed jokingly asking as to how many Hindus have been killed.” One lieutenant colonel testified that Lieutenant General A. A. K. Niazi, who became the chief martial law administrator in East Pakistan and head of the army’s Eastern Command, “asked as to how many Hindus we had killed. In May, there was an order in writing to kill Hindus” from a brigadier. (Niazi denied ordering the extermination of the Hindus.) Another lieutenant colonel said, “There was a general feeling of hatred against Bengalis amongst the soldiers and the officers including generals. There were verbal instructions to eliminate Hindus.”48
Blood was particularly unnerved by the execution of Dev. Brooding on that death, he returned to the subject of the genocidal methods of the Pakistan army, now offering to Washington a more serious case for using the chilling word.
In the countryside, Bengali nationalists were forming an armed resistance to the Pakistan army. This brought with it some atrocities carried out by Bengalis, in vicious revenge against people thought to be loyal to West Pakistan. So Blood and his staff began to reframe the fighting more as a two-sided ugly civil war than a purely one-sided genocide. Despite ongoing reports of unprovoked killing by soldiers, Blood saw the army launching a military campaign to take control of the countryside. Still, he thought, genocide was the right description for what was happening to the Hindus. So the consulate “began to focus our ‘genocidal’ reporting on the Hindus.” The military crackdown, he cabled, “fully meets criteria of term ‘genocide.’ ”49
Over and over, Blood tried to alarm his superiors in Washington. “ ‘Genocide’ applies fully to naked, calculated and widespread selection of Hindus for special treatment,” he wrote. “From outset various members of American community have witnessed either burning down of Hindu villages, Hindu enclaves in Dacca and shooting of Hindus attempting [to] escape carnage, or have witnessed after-effects which [are] visible throughout Dacca today. Gunning down of Professor Dev of Dacca University philosophy department is one graphic example.”50
He explained that the Pakistani military evidently did not “make distinctions between Indians and Pakistan Hindus, treating both as enemies.” Such anti-Hindu sentiments were lingering and widespread, Blood wrote. He and his staff tenaciously kept up their reporting of anti-Hindu atrocities, telling how the Pakistan army would move into a village, ask where the Hindus lived, and then kill the Hindu men. There was little evidence, he said, of the killing of Hindu women and children. (He also pointed out that the Bengali Muslims abhorred this slaughter.) Blood and his team emphasized the “international moral obligations to condemn genocide … of Pakistani Hindus.”51
But for all the effort that Blood put into defining and documenting genocide, the terrible term had no impact at the White House. Neither Nixon nor Kissinger ever mentioned genocide against either the Bengalis or the Hindus. If they were shocked, they kept it to themselves. Although Nixon had once decried genocide in Biafra, as a campaign issue against Lyndon Johnson in 1968, the term held little resonance for him later. After all, the Nixon administration was, like previous administrations since Harry Truman, working quietly to avoid joining the Genocide Convention. John Mitchell, Nixon’s attorney general, dismissively told Kissinger, “It’s good for Biafra and the Black Panthers.”52
THE BIHARIS
As Bengali nationalist guerrillas fought back, all the major U.S. posts—Dacca, Islamabad, and Delhi—agreed that Yahya had little chance of winning a civil war. The Bengali resistance held the countryside, and could get arms, supplies, and safe haven from India. Even the Islamabad embassy accepted that the army could not win and that the radicalized Bengalis would never again be willing citizens of Pakistan: “Bengali grievances now etched in blood.” From Dacca, Blood fervently agreed, arguing that for Yahya and his generals, “power will grow out of gun barrels.”53
While Pakistan plunged into civil war, Kissinger looked for massacres committed by Bengalis, to generate a moral equivalence that would exonerate Yahya. It would be convenient for Nixon and Kissinger to be able to say that both sides were equally rotten. Blood—who laid the basic responsibility for the horrors squarely on the Pakistani military authorities—might have been tempted to be one-sided in his advocacy, rather than risking giving ammunition to Kissinger. But while his cables still concentrated on the slaughter of Bengalis, he worked hard to show the cruelties committed by the Bengali nationalists too. Contrary to what was being said about him in the White House, he showed himself to be more a professional than a partisan.54
Blood reported to Washington growing signs of a “civil war in which atrocities committed on both sides,” including “atrocities by Bengalis on non-Bengalis.” These non-Bengalis were known as the Biharis, an Urdu-speaking and Muslim minority, reviled by Bengali nationalists as ostensible tools of their fellow Urdu speakers in West Pakistan. (Many were originally from the nearby Indian state of Bihar and, like so many other Muslims, had come to Pakistan in the catastrophic communal dislocations of Partition.) Some Biharis supported the Awami League, believing in autonomy for East Pakistan, but many others backed West Pakistan.55
When the crackdown began on March 25, the Biharis wer
e in a terrible situation, seen as a fifth column by many Bengalis. Some Biharis helped the Pakistani authorities in their repression, looting or killing Bengalis. Scott Butcher remembers, “You had atrocities committed not just by the military but by their collaborators, by Biharis.” The most violent elements on both sides now had a chance to do their worst. Despite Mujib’s own declarations that the Biharis should be protected, Bengali nationalists began reprisal attacks against them. British and American aid workers reported that in one town, nearly two hundred Biharis were put up against a wall and shot. The Biharis took revenge, killing some four hundred Bengalis. Blood’s consulate reported with horror about “numerous atrocities” committed by Bengali nationalists against Biharis in places such as Chittagong and Khulna.56
While documenting with disgust the atrocities against the Biharis, the Dacca consulate tried to keep a sense of proportion. They officials saw the civil war as primarily the result of Yahya’s assault on the Bengali population, not as an inchoate spasm of violence in which all sides were matched in bloodshed—even though that view would have been more congenial to Nixon and Kissinger. Instead, Blood and his staffers reckoned that some two-thirds of the dead were Bengalis. As a State Department official would later estimate, thousands of people died in violence between Bengalis and Biharis, while tens of thousands of Hindus were killed in subsequent attacks.57
The reprisals between Bengalis and Biharis brought back some of the worst memories of Partition. Desaix Myers remembers that the Bengali rebels did “some pretty atrocious things to Urdu speakers.” Then when the Pakistan army heard about these cruelties, it took vengeance on Bengalis. Myers remembers a Bengali who had been bravely protecting some Biharis from the Bengali rebels in Chittagong. Despite that, a Pakistani major apprehended this Bengali and put him in his jeep. Myers tried to block the jeep’s path with his car, but the major stuck his gun into the car and told him to move it. “He gets around the corner,” says Myers. “We heard a shot within fifty yards. The story we later got was the major was enraged, he’d seen the Bengali atrocities. So he went to get this Bengali.” That night, there was a mournful gathering. “Bengalis and Pakistanis were mixed together, all wailing in grief over what essentially was another Partition. They couldn’t understand. They had brothers in Islamabad, they had studied in Lahore. They were bemoaning this war among one family.”
“WAS IT THEREFORE NOT IMMORAL FOR HITLER TO KILL THEM?”
Back in Washington, the Blood telegram got the attention of Kissinger and the president himself. Meeting in the Oval Office—which was decorated to impress with gold sofas and chairs, elaborate sconces, and curtains in a richer shade of gold—Kissinger told Nixon, “The Dacca consulate is in open rebellion.” Nixon was worried about Yahya and startled at the prospect of cutting off economic aid to Pakistan. Kissinger, sensing presidential indecision, weighed in emphatically: “Mr. President, we’re going to wind up on the worst side if we start backing a rebellion there now.”
Nixon pointed out that they had not backed the rebellion in Biafra. Striking a philosophical note, the president suggested that Biafra had been worse than East Pakistan, and argued that it was moral hypocrisy to rescue Bengalis when the United States had not rescued Biafrans: “I know, there are less people in Biafra. Is that the reason?” He raised another example: “look, there weren’t very many Jews in Germany.” Kissinger, who had been one of those German Jews, murmured in quiet assent, “That’s right.” Nixon asked, “was it therefore not immoral for Hitler to kill them?” Kissinger again murmured, “That’s right.”
Unbidden, the president of the United States was comparing his own ally and friend to Adolf Hitler. The distinction that Nixon drew between Yahya and Hitler was about the scale of their killing of their ethnic victims. (Nixon was kicking ideas around free form, but this argument actually cut against him: if it was wrong for Hitler to kill Germany’s small Jewish population, it would also be wrong for Yahya to kill Pakistan’s large Bengali population.) Nixon’s own rough analogies for East Pakistan, unprompted by anyone, were Biafra and the Holocaust. But rather than taking stock, let alone recoiling, he instead grew angry at what he took to be hypocrisy by his critics: “It’s ridiculous.”
Kissinger did not dwell on the Hitler comparison. Instead, he insisted they not pressure Yahya: “Mr. President, if we get in there now, we get West Pakistan turned against us, and … the Bengalis are going to go left anyway. They are by nature left.” Although the State Department had explained ad nauseam that the Awami League was quite pro-American, Kissinger continued, “Their moderate leadership is in jail, maybe they shouldn’t have been put in jail, but that’s the way it is now”—at this point, realizing that he was actually criticizing Yahya’s repression, he ran out of steam and fell silent.
Nixon, fortified, said, “I think that if we get in the middle of all this, it’s a hell of a mistake.” Kissinger assured him, “It’s a disaster. No one else is doing it.” He concluded, “It’s a classic situation for us to stay out of. There’s nothing for us in there to take sides in this.”58
Chapter 6
The Inferno Next Door
Indians were horrified by the slaughter next door. “From the high hopes of establishing a Democratic and popular system of Government,” wrote a senior Indian diplomat posted in Islamabad, “Pakistan plunged into mediaeval barbarism when naked military force was used to eliminate the right of the elected majority.”1
Indira Gandhi’s government was startled. One of her close aides recalled that “we were taken by surprise when news of the sudden termination of negotiations, followed by a savage military crackdown in Dacca, started coming.” Even after getting reports of bloodshed, “we continued to believe that negotiations would be resumed after a brief show of military might.” It was hard for Gandhi’s team to understand why Pakistan’s generals would ignite a civil war, alienating their Bengalis into a permanent rupture. But Jaswant Singh, formerly a foreign minister and defense minister, remembers that Yahya “saw the problem as a bluff soldier would, purely as a law and order problem. Therefore he sent Tikka Khan. There was also an attitudinal problem. ‘Oh, these are cowardly Bengalis. We need to just put a few shotgun pellets in their buttocks and they’ll run away.’ ”2
Indian diplomats in Pakistan reported that the military government there was trying to eliminate Awami League supporters and engaged in “systematic terrorisation” of the young and the poor, as well as the intelligentsia. As one of Gandhi’s inner circle wrote, her advisers quickly decided that this was a well-planned operation meant to “decapitate the Awami League leadership” and “cow down the Bengali population through genocide.” They were appalled. P. N. Haksar, Gandhi’s top aide, wrote, “Both as a democratic country and a country firmly committed to secularism as a basis for nationhood, our sympathies naturally lie with the people of East Bengal.” But he hoped to keep India’s public opinion under firm control. He wanted India’s opposition parties to stay calm and keep their emotions from running amok.3
Thus Swaran Singh, the foreign minister—a thoughtful, tall, and elegant man, with a traditional Sikh turban and graying beard, dressed impeccably in Nehru-style achkan suits—tried to soothe an angry Lok Sabha, the powerful lower chamber of Parliament. While voicing “deep emotions,” he carefully tried to avoid provoking Pakistan. This was a disaster. Singh was roasted as uncaring, and Gandhi had to explain that her government sympathized with the suffering Bengalis.4
The Indian press exploded with ever more emotional stories, wildly estimating as many as three hundred thousand dead in the first week of the crackdown. Respected newspapers accused Pakistan of genocide. Gandhi was slammed for inaction not just in the English press, but also in Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, and other languages all around the country.5
Indian politicians of all stripes launched demonstrations, demanded swift action, and denounced the government’s spinelessness. Politicians from the Communist Party of India condemned Gandhi’s timidity; the Samyukta Socialist Par
ty demanded immediate recognition of Bangladesh; even Gandhi’s own Congress party decried “the crime of genocide”; and a member of the right-wing Jana Sangh, a Hindu nationalist party that was the predecessor to today’s powerful Bharatiya Janata Party, wanted a naval blockade of East Pakistan. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the leader of the Jana Sangh—who would many years later become prime minister—denounced Pakistan for genocide in front of a vast crowd at a park in Bombay, and offered to be the first to volunteer to enter East Pakistan.6
The public uproar was at its most intense in West Bengal, where Bengalis were shocked at the killing of their fellows in neighboring East Pakistan. The newspapers ran sensationalist stories of death tolls in the tens of thousands, with furious editorials condemning Yahya and urging Gandhi to recognize an independent Bangladesh. There were general strikes and huge demonstrations in solidarity with Mujib.7
Gandhi had to do something. Although true mass mobilization is a rarity for a country as gigantic and impoverished as India, she faced tremendous pressure from the middle class and elites, and from Parliament. So she joined with all her rivals in Parliament in an all-party resolution of solidarity with the Bengalis. The prime minister introduced the measure herself. On March 31, both houses of India’s Parliament unanimously condemned “the atrocities now being perpetrated on an unprecedented scale upon an unarmed and innocent people,” and urged all governments to press Pakistan to stop immediately “the systematic decimation of people which amounts to genocide.”8
Pakistan’s government furiously lashed back at this “gross interference” in its sovereign domestic affairs, but India’s Parliament and press wanted much more. As a top strategist secretly advised Haksar and other senior leaders, after this resolution “it is too late to feel compunctions about intervention.”9