The Blood Telegram Page 25
Nixon gushingly told Yahya that he would “always remember with deep gratitude what you have done.” Kissinger warmly wrote to Yahya, “I have so many reasons to thank you that it is difficult to know where to begin.” As Nixon told the Pakistani ambassador, “it all started with my good relationship with Yahya.” Years later, Nixon still deplored that the United States had not managed to be generous enough to Yahya. Haldeman wrote that he and the president “got to talking about Yahya’s cooperation in this whole thing with Henry, particularly how funny it was that Yahya made such a point at the luncheon in Islamabad of making a fuss over Henry’s so-called stomachache, and in effect ordering him to the mountain retreat, saying he would send his Deputy Foreign Minister to keep him company, and so on, making a big public fuss out of Henry’s indisposition so it would be reported as such and give Henry the cover he was seeking.”57
Indira Gandhi’s government was left spluttering. Indians who had imagined that their travails warranted Kissinger’s attentions were humiliated to realize how little they really mattered. As the Indian embassy in Beijing lamented, Kissinger’s move was met with “incredulity, followed by euphoria, shock or plain numbness, depending on one’s political convictions.” Major General Jacob-Farj-Rafael Jacob, the chief of staff of the Indian army’s Eastern Command, remembers, “Kissinger arranged with Yahya Khan to meet the Chinese. After that, he felt obligated to Pakistan that they had done that.” Jagat Mehta, a former Indian foreign secretary, says, “It was as much a signal to China that the U.S. can be a reliable friend, but we tended to see it as if it was a threat to India.”58
India’s diplomats in Islamabad, who had not noticed the main event as it went on under their noses, complained ineffectually that “Kissinger’s dash to Peking” drew “world attention away from the Yahya regime’s guilt in perpetrating one of history’s biggest carnages in East Bengal.” The Nixon administration had “incurred some kind of obligation to help the Yahya regime continue its rule over East Bengal by brute force, against all considerations of democracy and justice.”59
Samuel Hoskinson, Kissinger’s staffer on South Asia, had had no idea about what his boss was doing on China. This revelation, he says, explained the studied silence that his questioning of the administration’s Pakistan policy had gotten from Kissinger. He suddenly realized that “the paramount thing is this approach to China. So I’m making noise out here, not getting much response one way or the other.” Without the secret overtures to China, he says, Nixon and Kissinger might have taken a different stance on Pakistan. “It was a China-first policy. Everything else was secondary.”
The Dacca consulate was blindsided. Archer Blood later reflected that he hoped he would have joined with the dissent telegram even if he had known. “You need to let your soldiers in the field have some idea of what the battle is for,” says Scott Butcher, the junior political officer. “They could have sent a cable to Arch Blood saying, ‘We hear you, but we are not able to be as assertive as we’d like.’ We still would have dissented, but the decibel level would have been down a notch or two. At least we’d know it wasn’t a total black hole of silence.”60
With Nixon’s own upcoming historic trip to China in the works, the president could not afford a subcontinental war in the next three or four months. “The Indians are stirring it up,” he told his senior foreign policy team in mid-July at a meeting at the Western White House in San Clemente. Taking the lead, he said that it was vital that Pakistan “not be embarrassed at this point.” The Indians are “a slippery, treacherous people.” They “would like nothing better than to use this tragedy to destroy Pakistan.” Nixon admitted that he had “a bias” here—a fact lost on nobody in the room. Kissinger, the man of the hour, agreed that the Indians seemed “bent on war. Everything they have done is an excuse for war.” He called the Indians “insufferably arrogant.”
Kissinger, however, now seemed to realize that it was inevitable that Pakistan would break up. Standing up to Nixon and disparaging Yahya, he said that over the long run, seventy thousand West Pakistanis could not hold down East Pakistan—finally recanting his own opinion in the fatal days of March, when it had mattered most. Nixon, still sticking up for his Pakistani friend, interrupted with the high compliment that Yahya was not a politician. Kissinger, holding his ground, replied that he had urged Yahya to deliver a generous deal on the refugees, so that India would “lose that card as an excuse for intervention.” He warned that if there was a war that dragged in China, everything they had done with China “will go down the drain.”61
On July 19, Nixon and Kissinger summoned the White House staff to the Roosevelt Room for a briefing about the president’s upcoming trip to China. This momentous achievement would help to end the Vietnam War and win the Cold War itself. Nixon was somber, but Kissinger was giddy with success. “The cloak and dagger exercise in Pakistan arranging the trip was fascinating,” he said. “Yahya hasn’t had such fun since the last Hindu massacre!”62
Chapter 12
The Mukti Bahini
This was Sydney Schanberg’s first war. The New York Times bureau chief in Delhi would go on to cover terrifying combat in Cambodia and Vietnam, but he was green as he began reporting on Bangladesh’s guerrilla warfare. “You learn a lot in a short time,” he recalls grimly.
For his early education in war, he ventured out alongside the Bengali insurgents. He got permission to go to the Indian border, he says, where Indians in the Border Security Force were training the Mukti Bahini—the Liberation Army, as the Bengali rebels called themselves. The Indians said they would take him out and show him what they did. The raid still has an awful clarity for Schanberg. He went in with a squad of about ten rebels, three of whom did not even have shoes. They were creeping stealthily by a river when the insurgents spotted a unit of unsuspecting Pakistani soldiers. The Bengalis told him to crouch down and keep quiet.
“Suddenly my guys open fire,” he says. “All I really remember was that they hit a man, who had been standing up. When you hit someone, the body goes up, and then comes down. That’s what he did.” Schanberg was overcome with horror. “I could see they were showing off for me,” he recalls. “I knew they were doing it to show me that they were doing their jobs.” He beseeched them, “That’s enough.” He finally got them to stop.1
He was struck by the youth of the guerrillas. “They were revved up,” he says. “The ones I went in with, I don’t think anyone was over twenty. They weren’t child soldiers”—although there actually were some rebels as young as ten. Schanberg says, “They came from rural backgrounds, which was the most exploited of all the people in Bangladesh. They didn’t speak much English. Sheikh Mujib had one hell of a following, though.” He remembers how unequal the war was. The rebels could blow up bridges or power stations, but could not win their independence: “They really weren’t an effective fighting group; they couldn’t fight the Pakistan army.”
The insurgency raged on throughout the sweltering summer. In public, Indira Gandhi dodged admitting India’s supporting role. “There is a liberation struggle in Bangla Desh,” she said. “What is the point of mediating with us?” When asked specifically about Indian sponsorship, the prime minister deflected: “The freedom-fighters have many resources.”2
In fact, Gandhi’s government escalated its backing for the Bengali uprising from July onward. The Indian army had direct orders to help the rebels, involving India’s top generals. India secretly helped the insurgents buy weapons and ammunition. D. P. Dhar, back from his ambassadorship in Moscow and wielding great influence in the government, wrote, “All arms must be procured by us.” While conceding that such clandestine arms deals were “full of profanities,” he urged India to take the lead. With the help of India’s foreign minister, Bengali exiles in London bought weapons in Belgium and shipped them to the guerrillas.3
When asked later if India had provoked the December war, Gandhi candidly said that “if you want to go way back, we helped the Mukti Bahini. So, if you consider
it all as beginning with that aid and from that moment, yes—we were the ones to start it.” But by sponsoring guerrilla war, India was postponing a direct clash with Pakistan. “War—open declared war—fortunately in my opinion, in the present case is not the only alternative,” Dhar told his friend P. N. Haksar. “We have to use the Bengali human material and the Bengali terrain to launch a comprehensive war of liberation.”4
One small part of this war effort was Shahudul Haque, Archer Blood’s young Bengali friend. “It was all very idealistic,” he recalls. “I had no clue what was happening.” Radicalized by the military crackdown, and emboldened by the example of friends and a cousin who had gone off to join the rebels, he packed a small rucksack and set out for the Indian border. Guided by a relative, he reached the frontier, dodging Pakistan army trucks along the way. He could hear firefights. He met up with a guerrilla guide, who walked him across to a sprawling, makeshift training camp.
The rebels would ambush small groups of Pakistani troops, trying to kill them and capture their weapons. They hit Pakistani supply dumps, railways, bridges, and boats. As a makeshift report seen by Haksar put it, “Mukti Fauz man must learn to convert night into day and day into night.” Sometimes they used animal calls to indicate a particular battle formation. Although the insurgency’s original core of soldiers from the East Pakistan Rifles and the East Bengal Regiment could handle sophisticated weapons, the new volunteers required lots of drilling. To fight an effective riverine campaign, the rebels—accustomed to their homeland of marshes and waterways—needed to be taught about camouflage and crawling, about trap pits with punji stakes, how to lurk underwater while breathing through a pipe, how to use rifles and grenades, and how to treat shock and stanch bleeding.5
This was a politicized insurgency, aiming to win over the peasantry. As one senior Bangladeshi politician wrote, “I would quote Mao Tse-tung, ‘Guerillas are like fishes and the people are like water.’ If water is dried up, fish cannot survive. Already Pak army has started killing the innocent civilians including women and children, whenever there is any sign of guerilla activity.” In pursuit of their nationalist revolution, Bengali rebels wanted the active involvement of their whole people: women to endure hardships, peasants to seize land, locals to torch wooden bridges or cut telephone and electric lines. Chillingly, the guerrillas demanded unity in revolution—“Yahya Khan has not found any quislings so far and he is not going to get any stooges from among Bengalis”—and harshly ensured it by teaching their fighters to be “ever vigilant of enemy agents and ruthlessly anihilate [sic] them. Thus, cut away the tentacles of this monstrous octopus.”6
The Indian army and other units busily trained and sponsored the Bengali rebels, then also known as the Mukti Fouj (Liberation Brigade). Bengalis discreetly referred to the Indians as their “Friends” or the “Friend army”—a pitiful subterfuge that could hardly have gulled the dimmest Pakistani officer. As an Indian intelligence agency secretly noted, “Our Army took up the training of guerillas on an extensive scale, and established a fairly big organisation for this purpose.”7
India was thoroughly enmeshed in this guerrilla warfare, as shown by a report to Gandhi’s government from an Indian team touring the border states of Assam and Tripura. (This report was fed to India’s government by the activist Jayaprakash Narayan, urging Gandhi, Haksar, and the defense minister, Jagjivan Ram, to help the cause.) Dhar wanted to quicken India’s training programs, heighten the rebels’ political motivation, and instruct them in all kinds of arms and warfare. The rebel training camps, on the Indian side of the border, were either supervised by India’s Border Security Force or under the direct control of the Indian army.8
The Border Security Force provided cover when the rebels attacked towns or Pakistan army positions. Under fire, the guerrillas relied on the force to provide support or resupply them with ammunition. (In one firefight, the Indian forces fled.) Indian officers were in direct command in many places. In some sectors, the Border Security Force even disarmed the Bengali guerrillas to prevent them from rashly attacking the Pakistan army.9
India’s spies played a major role too. The R&AW kept up ties with Bengali forces. Another intelligence agency, the Special Service Bureau, had been set up to run underground resistance if China ever attacked India again, but was now repurposed for the Bengali insurgency. The SSB and another agency—the Directorate General of Security, which answered directly to the R&AW—ran two main training camps, specializing in advanced methods of guerrilla warfare. In strict secrecy, they drilled more than five thousand insurgents in the use of firearms and explosives, “elementary field techniques involving ambush, demolition, disruption of lines of communication etc.”10
Vice Admiral Mihir Roy, India’s director of naval intelligence, was glad to run India’s support of the rebels’ destructive naval operations. He believed in the cause. “When the genocide started,” he remembers, “it was obvious that we cannot run a country with ten million refugees. We have to get them back to their homes.” He talks proudly about India’s backing for the Mukti Bahini, saying it put great pressure on the Pakistani military. The Indian generals, who shared some of their Pakistani counterparts’ stereotypes about Bengali cowardice, were not invariably impressed. “[General Sam] Manekshaw said, ‘You Bengalis run, you don’t fight.’ So we had to bleed them slowly. Attack, run away, attack, run away.”
Roy, who speaks Bengali, wanted to block East Pakistan’s ports, so that the Pakistan army would only be able to reinforce itself by air from West Pakistan. “So we formed the frogmen,” he says. “I said I wanted volunteers, those whose sisters were raped, whose mothers had been killed.” He hastily trained them in India, he says, running a frogmen camp, made up mostly of well-educated university students. They were excellent swimmers and knew the terrain. “If we wanted to attack Chittagong, I took people who lived in Chittagong.
“Surprise was the most important thing,” he explains. “We knew the first attack must be a major attack. We shall choose the time. It should be a moonless night. We infiltrated people into these places. They are Bengalis, so it’s no problem infiltrating. At first we gave them equipment, but then you get found out.” He says he had some two hundred frogmen striking all over East Pakistan.
Richard Nixon angrily said that the Indians “are blowing up the damn boats and everything.” In total, Roy remembers with satisfaction, the Lloyd’s of London insurance firm estimated “we had damaged one lakh”—one hundred thousand—“tons of shipping. There was no movement in the ports.” Major General Jacob-Farj-Rafael Jacob, working closely with Roy, says, “We sank a lot of ships. I don’t want to say more. We’ll be sued by the merchant ship owners.”11
The rebels, in desperation, used children as soldiers. This was widely known. A few months later, in a Delhi speech, Indira Gandhi would praise the bravery of “young boys of even 12 years of age who joined the Mukti Bahini.” In a major speech to India’s Parliament, she would say, “We hail the brave young men and boys of the Mukti Bahini for their valour and dedication.”12
Under the eyes of the Indian army, Bengali rebels trained child soldiers as young as ten years old. Although a great many were older than that, there was no apparent effort to screen out children in camps in Assam and Tripura. Indian observers noted that “the boys are taken over by the Indian Army for special and regular military training.” The Indian government planned youth training camps—including children and older youths—which started with political indoctrination and then four to six weeks of training in guerrilla warfare, after which they were sent into battle. Many of the youth camps were supervised by the Awami League and run by India’s Border Security Force, with the military training given by the Indian army.13
The conditions in the youth camps were miserable, without adequate clean water or food. Although many young rebels arrived wearing only a lungi, there were no clothes or shoes provided. In one camp, Indian observers saw “young boys huddled in torrential rain without any shelter.” A
fter visiting all twenty-one youth camps in the Indian border state of Tripura, a senior Bangladeshi official “found the boys living in sub-human conditions.” He claimed that some youths, rather than stay in the camps, had returned to East Pakistan—where reportedly “a good number of boys were shot at sight.”14
The Indian troops and Border Security Force men were impressed with the Bengali youths, who proved to be courageous fighters. Based in Border Security Force camps on Indian soil, the young rebels launched sorties twenty miles deep into East Pakistan. At one such camp, these Indian observers saw that a “unit of 32–40 boys, hardly 10–12 years old, was getting training in the use of hand-grenades.” Two of “these boys” had infiltrated into East Pakistan, where they lobbed two hand grenades at the Pakistan army. This often meant their death. As a senior Bangladeshi politician wrote with horror, these child soldiers were being used as little more than cannon fodder: “boys trained in guerilla warfare are sent deep into the occupied zone in groups of 5 to 10 with one or two handgrenades and one or two conventional and obsolete weapons. In such circumstances, most of them cannot but fall helpless prey to the enemy.”15
“SOMEONE HAS TO COME TO THEIR AID”
Indira Gandhi’s government had at first harbored some hope that the Bengali insurgents might be able to triumph over Pakistan by themselves. She later said with a slight smile, “I was certain the revolution would succeed.”16
By July, the Mukti Bahini claimed to have killed as many as fifteen thousand Pakistani troops, with demoralized soldiers fearing to leave their camps after dusk. The Indian mission in Islamabad noted with satisfaction that intensifying attacks had inflicted heavy casualties on the Pakistan army, disrupted transportation and the power supply, and eroded the morale of Yahya’s military government. Yahya, aiming to prove that everything in East Pakistan was normal, had hoped to visit Dacca in late July, but was forced to call off the trip because of the Mukti Bahini menace. Gandhi declared publicly, “History has shown that such battles for freedom may have a setback but they are always won.”17