The Blood Telegram Page 20
FUTILE DIPLOMACY
In dire need of foreign help, India’s creaky diplomatic machinery heaved itself into action. The initial international response was minimal.12
George H. W. Bush, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, quietly told his Pakistani counterpart of U.S. humanitarian “concern”—the future president, like other U.S. diplomats, could go no further than that pallid word—and asked him to consider accepting international aid. But as Bush noted, the Pakistani government flatly rejected international relief. It was not until late May that Yahya finally agreed to let the United Nations provide humanitarian relief in East Pakistan. And the United Nations’ high commissioner for refugees, Prince Sadruddin Khan, considered himself close to Yahya personally and was known among international aid officials for his warm ties with Pakistan’s government. Bush wrote that Sadruddin was skeptical about the Indians’ motives and suspected they were greatly exaggerating the scale of the refugee problem.13
In May, Gandhi sent out a global appeal for help, accusing Pakistan of “trying to solve its internal problems by cutting down the size of its population in East Bengal.” She candidly admitted, “The regions which the refugees are entering are over-crowded and politically the most sensitive parts of India. The situation in these areas can very easily become explosive. The influx of refugees thus constitutes a grave security risk which no responsible government can allow to develop.”14
India frantically blanketed the world with almost identical copies of Gandhi’s letter, sent to sixty-one countries—from the superpowers to friends in the Non-Aligned Movement such as Yugoslavia and Egypt, from storied figures like Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania to the sordid likes of Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi of Iran and Muammar al-Qaddafi of Libya. Although Gandhi had been lethargic about reaching out to the Americans—even sluggish in accepting an invitation from Nixon for a Washington summit in November—Haksar instructed his ambassador in Washington that it was vital to know whether the U.S. government saw “the squeezing out of millions of its [Pakistan’s] own citizens by Pakistan as legitimate.” Gandhi pleaded to Nixon to use U.S. power to uphold democracy in Pakistan.15
Gandhi and Haksar were morose about the prospects for international help. Most of the costs, they assumed, would fall on India. The major governments were, Haksar wrote, “watching and waiting,” with the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and Japan all seeing the atrocities as an internal matter for Pakistan. The Soviet Union was only a little more forthcoming. But most Western governments would not recognize Bangladesh until the rebels won territory and authority. The Bengalis would first have to win their fight on the battlefield.16
Following up on Gandhi’s appeal, India dispatched a small army of ministers and diplomats to plead its case around the world, everywhere from Afghanistan to Kenya to Chile. An envoy slated for Bucharest balked at the dismal prospect, but Haksar packed him off anyway. Haksar instructed the Indian ambassador in Warsaw that “the Poles should be made to understand that there is an irrevocable break between the people of East Bengal and the people of what is now called West Pakistan.”17
India’s diplomats were fully aware of the public relations aspect of humanitarianism: “We have to launch a massive programme of assistance to the refugees and see to it that this is done in the full glare of international publicity.” The Indian foreign ministry secretly helped the Bangladeshi exile government create and circulate pamphlets decrying genocide against the Bengalis, while publicly denying that it had anything to do with it. And an Indian team touring the refugee camps wanted to organize doctors, engineers, professors, and lawyers among the refugees, who could be sent to tour the world to plead their cause: “The Bangla Desh movement offers vast scope for destroying and demolishing the communal and parochial foundations of Pakistan.”18
Swaran Singh, India’s foreign minister, working himself mercilessly, berated his discouraged diplomats for substandard advocacy. India was a big country and they should throw their weight around. They should reach out not just to foreign officials, but to the press, activists, political parties, and legislatures. They should make nuisances of themselves. “We are in the right and we have always to say that our cause is just,” he exhorted them. “Plug this once, twice, thrice, four times. Start from the lower rung[,] go up to the highest levels.”19
In June, Singh made an energetic tour of foreign capitals. What India really needed was international pressure on Pakistan, but that was a faint hope. “I do not hope to achieve any spectacular results during these visits,” he said glumly. He scored his only real success in Moscow, where, fulfilling Dhar’s dream, the two sides returned to the drafting of a friendship treaty between India and the Soviet Union—a bulwark against Pakistan and China. The Soviet Union issued a joint statement demanding that the flow of refugees stop and that the exiles return home. In private, Kosygin urged Singh to hold off from recognizing Bangladesh, but also hawkishly said that “you and I have to act in the best way so that the struggle continues, so that it succeeds after the return of the refugees. It may take any form—guerilla activity, an open mass struggle, war.” Dhar, pleased as ever with the Soviet leadership, cheered. “If we receive a response half as good in other capitals we shall have won the day.”20
They did not. India’s education minister made a catastrophic trek around Asia, striking out in capital after capital. The minister, himself a Bengali from Calcutta, reported that Japan’s government agreed that an independent Bangladesh was inevitable, but dared not say so in public. Australia said it could not do much, while its foreign minister consolingly said, “You are in a hell of a jam.” The Indian envoy was cheered up by a friendly welcome in Malaysia, whose government secretly agreed that this was not an internal Pakistani issue, and a Malaysian minister griped that Bhutto had “called us many funny names.” But the Malaysian government said it was too fragile and unstable to take any public stance, and yielded to Indonesian pressure to back Pakistan. Thailand also privately agreed this was no internal matter of Pakistan’s, but was too scared of a hostile China to say anything. The Indian minister slunk home in defeat.21
K. C. Pant, the minister of state for home affairs, who would go on to become defense minister, got precious little from a two-week circuit in Latin America, winning a few public statements of sympathy from Panama and Mexico, and not even that from Jamaica and Cuba. He remembers the incredulity of Mexico’s president when told about Pakistan’s bisected geography. “He asked someone to bring him an atlas,” Pant recalls. “And he said, ‘By God, it’s really so.’ ”22
Things were only a little better in Europe. Willy Brandt, the West German chancellor, was the most supportive. Edward Heath, Britain’s prime minister, had personally urged Yahya to stop assaults on civilians, but also vigorously pressed India to avoid escalation. From Paris, the Indian ambassador was funereal. “The problem really is of India, and the world in general is not directly affected,” he wrote. “As time goes on, the world publicity media will tend to forget the tragedy in East Bengal and even if the resistance continues, it will evoke irritation—not sympathy. What we may admire as resistance will be criticized as terrorism by others. (The French were too intelligent to engage in serious resistance until German armies were broken in Russia.)”23
In Indonesia and elsewhere, India was stung by the betrayal of its fellows in the Non-Aligned Movement. Only Yugoslavia rallied to India, with Josip Broz Tito visiting India and issuing a heartening statement. In the Middle East in particular, India was bitterly disappointed. After all, Nehru had partnered with Gamal Abdel Nasser to form the Non-Aligned Movement; Indians and Arabs shared cruel experiences of colonialism; and India firmly sided with the Arab states warring against Israel. Haksar hoped that these commonalities would dissuade Muslim states from rallying to Pakistan’s side. “The foreign policy of so-called Muslim countries is not conducted on the basis of Pavlovian complex of Islam,” he wrote. “Their relations with India are not affected when M
uslims are killed in India any more than they would be affected with Pakistan just because Muslims are being killed there.”24
Saudi Arabia vehemently supported Pakistan’s prerogative to take any steps to maintain its domestic stability, urging the United States to affirm that Pakistan had the right to deal with its internal problems however it saw fit. Singh sourly told Indian diplomats that Saudi Arabia and Iran would give financial assistance to Pakistan, although they were “extremely greedy” and would not give much.25
Egypt proved especially dismaying. The Indian ambassador in Cairo was crestfallen at Egypt’s “studied indifference” throughout the crisis. He noted that Anwar al-Sadat’s government was unsympathetic to India’s refugee problem and seemed fixated on preventing East Pakistan’s secession. The state-controlled Egyptian media gave “almost no coverage to the genocide,” leaving Egyptians in the dark about the basic facts. In a United Nations council, Amr Moussa, a prominent Egyptian diplomat who later went on to be Egypt’s foreign minister and the secretary-general of the Arab League, insisted on maintaining Pakistan’s unity. Bad as this was, Egypt was probably the most pro-Indian country in the Arab world, with Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Kuwait all pressuring Egypt to be even more pro-Pakistan.26
There was one surprising minor success: Israel. India did not have diplomatic relations with the Jewish state, and Haksar and many Indian leaders were frosty toward it. But in July, Golda Meir, Israel’s prime minister, secretly got an Israeli arms manufacturer to provide India with some mortars and ammunition, along with a few instructors. When Haksar pressed Israel for support, Meir promised to continue helping out.27
The absolute worst was China. The embassy there complained of “Peking’s near pathological suspicion of Indian motives,” especially by Zhou. China’s state media accused India of fomenting war and preventing the refugees from returning. The Indian embassy in Beijing—whose forlorn diplomats spent their days skittishly poring over Politburo lineups, turgid government statements, and propaganda newspapers in search of dim inklings as to what Mao and his henchmen might actually be thinking—did note that China’s rhetoric was somewhat less incendiary than it could have been.28
Even the prolix Haksar could barely bring himself to pen an appeal to China. Admitting that he was dismally late in taking a stab at this “extremely difficult exercise,” he was atypically seized with self-doubt. Haksar did not even ask China for help. Instead, he produced wavering verbiage about “international proportions” that tried to circumvent China’s simple insistence that Pakistan could do whatever it wanted to crush secessionists. India’s government braced itself against the inevitable slap from Zhongnanhai. Haksar noted that “we have refrained from making any statement which might even remotely irritate them.”29
In the end, India’s global diplomatic rounds proved crushingly disappointing. Nobody was going to put serious pressure on Pakistan—the kind that might have averted a war. Most countries only offered sympathetic words or token relief aid.30
But India demanded more than cash. Singh believed that rich Western governments thought that India had absorbed refugees before and would do so again, if paid off by the Soviet Union or the West. He bristled. This was not about money. India could not shelter the refugees permanently. As he complained to a meeting of Indian diplomats in London, “The help that they are giving is not at all a help to me. They are helping the Pakistani nationals”—the refugees—“to live; because these Pakistani nationals are the primary responsibility of Pakistan and if you give any money to India it is not a favour to India.” The exiles would have to go home, perhaps through “harsher action”—a threat of war.31
Anyway, the donations were, as Haksar told Gandhi, “very disappointing.” India would need some $400 million to look after these refugees for half a year, and more were coming every day. By the White House’s reckoning, the Indians netted merely about $20 million from the whole world, as well as roughly $12 million from the Soviet Union. Nixon said that “the European nations have talked a great deal but done very little.” Frustratingly, these miserly donations usually came without plausible suggestions for getting the refugees home, but with firm exhortations to avoid military confrontation with Pakistan. India was left buckling under its burdens.32
“THEY’RE SUCH BASTARDS”
India’s most important disappointment came from the United States. Nixon’s initial impulse was not to help the refugees at all. “Someone is saying we are contemplating sending aid to help the Pakistani refugees,” he said. “I hope to hell we’re not.”33
Yahya would resent such relief, but Kissinger thought some token donations were inevitable, if only to undercut press and congressional criticism of the White House’s support for Pakistan. Kissinger grudgingly wrote, “Despite the possible West Pakistani reaction, I do not see how we can not go ahead with some such assistance.” Still, Nixon would not sign off until being promised that the aid would bypass India and instead be funneled through international or U.S. agencies. Both Kissinger and his deputy, Alexander Haig, worried that some of the refugees were probably guerrillas, with Haig wanting to be sure that U.S. supplies were not used to help the Bengali insurgency. Once reassured, Nixon agreed to a “modest” $2.5 million of mostly food aid, which might temporarily feed some three hundred thousand refugees—a small slice of those millions.34
The refugee crisis drew Nixon and Kissinger’s attention primarily because it could drive Gandhi to war. “Of course everyone believes that she wanted to attack,” remembers Samuel Hoskinson, Kissinger’s staffer. “That seemed to be her mind-set. It fit the mind-set in Washington about her.” By offering some aid, the Nixon administration sought to undercut India’s primary reason for war, and ease Indian domestic pressure on Gandhi. Showing his CIA background, Hoskinson says, “We do have a pretty good picture of Delhi during this period, from embassy reporting and good old human intelligence. By well-placed sources in high places, we have a pretty good perception of her and her generals. Manekshaw was a piece of work. When you marry this intel with a mind-set about her anyway, and mix in this concern about the Russians, it all is very credible and very worrisome.”35
Hoskinson wrote to Kissinger, “Mrs. Gandhi reportedly has ordered her army to prepare a plan for a rapid take-over of East Pakistan and is said to be particularly interested in an ‘Israeli-type lightening thrust’ that would present the world with a fait accompli.” There were exchanges of artillery and small arms fire at India’s border with East Pakistan. In the Situation Room, General William Westmoreland, the U.S. Army chief of staff, briefed Kissinger that India would trounce Pakistan if war came.36
Kissinger stuck to a core principle: Pakistan could do whatever it wanted to its people, despite consequences spilling beyond its borders. He put India’s ambassador in Washington on notice that “you can’t go to war over refugees.” Kissinger told Nixon that “there is absolutely no justification for it—they don’t have a right to invade Pakistan no matter what Pakistan does in its territory.” He then added, “Besides the killing has stopped”—which was not true, as all posts in South Asia were reporting. Nixon said, “It has quieted down.”37
At most, Nixon and Kissinger’s aid would relieve a fraction of the consequences of Pakistan’s slaughter. If the Nixon administration had wanted to make major efforts, winning over the Indian public in the process, there was a limitless amount of refugee misery to be addressed. But Harold Saunders remembers, “That’s not the way he [Kissinger] thought. Using a humanitarian crisis as a political way in—that was not something that he would have come to mind right away.”38
One program gives a sense of the possibilities: an Indian request for a U.S. airlift, with four U.S. Air Force C-130 transport airplanes flying refugees from overcrowded Tripura to Assam. Hoskinson persuaded Kissinger that this could help hold India back from war, and for a month the gargantuan planes carried relief supplies and flew some twenty-three thousand Bengali refugees to Assam. This was not the same as getting the refu
gees back home, but it was creative and helpful—a tantalizing glimpse of what could have been done.39
With alarms of imminent war ringing in their ears, Nixon and Kissinger boosted U.S. aid up to a new total of $17.5 million. This was far less than the State Department wanted, although more than the Soviet Union had given. As welcome as it was, it still composed only a sliver of India’s overall costs, which Kissinger’s staff reckoned at more than $400 million annually—assuming that no more refugees came, which was daily shown to be wrong. Along with the relief, Nixon exhorted Gandhi not to go to war. While pleased with the fresh donation, Haksar rankled at that pressure. “The developing insurgency in Bangla Desh cannot be halted even if we wish to do so,” he told Gandhi. “Consequently, these exhortations for ‘maximum restraint’ sound a little hollow and meaningless.”40
In the privacy of the Oval Office, Nixon said that “if they’re not going to have a famine the last thing they need is another war. Let the goddamn Indians fight a war.” Kissinger agreed: “They are the most aggressive goddamn people around there.” He said that they should pressure Gandhi to avoid military action, and complained that the Indians were “getting so devious now.”
Nixon wanted to be sure that Pakistan would be well looked after: “But we don’t say anything against Yahya?” “No, no,” Kissinger assured the president. “You just say you hope the refugees will soon be able to go back to East Pakistan. He will then reply to you that’s exactly what he wants. I’ve got it all arranged with the embassy. You can tell the Indians to pipe down, and we’ll keep Yahya happy.”
Nixon bitterly said, “The Indians need—what they need really is a—” Kissinger interjected, “They’re such bastards.” Nixon finished his thought: “A mass famine.”41