Nixon and Kissinger’s Forgotten Shame

[Inqhilab]

BANGLADESH is in fresh turmoil. On Sept. 17, its Supreme Court decided that Abdul Quader Mollah, a leading Islamist politician, should be hanged for war crimes committed during the country’s 1971 war of independence from Pakistan. When he was given a life sentence by a Bangladeshi war-crimes tribunal back in February, tens of thousands of Bangladeshis took to the streets demanding his execution. Since then, more than a hundred people have died in protests and counter protests.
This may sound remote or irrelevant to Americans, but the unrest has much to do with the United States. Some of Bangladesh’s current problems stem from its traumatic birth in 1971 — when President Richard M. Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger, his national security adviser, vigorously supported the killers and tormentors of a generation of Bangladeshis.

From the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, Pakistan was created as a unified Muslim nation with a bizarrely divided geography: dominant West Pakistan (now simply Pakistan) was separated from downtrodden East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) by a thousand miles of hostile India. Pakistanis joked that their bifurcated country was united by Islam and Pakistan International Airlines. This strange arrangement held until 1970, when Bengali nationalists in East Pakistan triumphed in nationwide elections. The ruling military government, based in West Pakistan, feared losing its grip.

So on March 25, 1971, the Pakistani Army launched a devastating crackdown on the rebellious Bengalis in the east. Midway through the bloodshed, both the C.I.A. and the State Department conservatively estimated that about 200,000 people had died (the Bangladeshi government figure is much higher, at three million). As many as 10 million Bengali refugees fled across the border into India, where they died in droves in wretched refugee camps.

As recently declassified documents and White House tapes show, Nixon and Kissinger stood stoutly behind Pakistan’s generals, supporting the murderous regime at many of the most crucial moments. This largely overlooked horror ranks among the darkest chapters in the entire cold war.

Of course, no country, not even the United States, can prevent massacres everywhere in the world — but this was a close American ally, which prized its warm relationship with the United States and used American weapons and military supplies against its own people.

Nixon and Kissinger barely tried to exert leverage over Pakistan’s military government. In the pivotal days before the crackdown began on March 25, they consciously decided not to warn the Pakistani generals against opening fire on their population. They did not press for respecting the election results, nor did they prod the military to cut a power-sharing deal with the Bengali leadership. They did not offer warnings or impose conditions that might have dissuaded the Pakistani junta from atrocities. Nor did they threaten the loss of American military or economic support after the slaughter began.

Nixon and Kissinger were not just motivated by dispassionate realpolitik, weighing Pakistan’s help with the secret opening to China or India’s pro-Soviet leanings. The White House tapes capture their emotional rage, going far beyond Nixon’s habitual vulgarity. In the Oval Office, Nixon told Kissinger that the Indians needed “a mass famine.” Kissinger sneered at people who “bleed” for “the dying Bengalis.”

They were unmoved by the suffering of Bengalis, despite detailed reporting about the killing from Archer K. Blood, the brave United States consul general in East Pakistan. Nor did Nixon and Kissinger waver when Kenneth B. Keating, a former Republican senator from New York then serving as the American ambassador to India, personally confronted them in the Oval Office about “a matter of genocide” that targeted the Hindu minority among the Bengalis.

After Mr. Blood’s consulate sent an extraordinary cable formally dissenting from American policy, decrying what it called genocide, Nixon and Kissinger ousted Mr. Blood from his post in East Pakistan. Kissinger privately scorned Mr. Blood as “this maniac”; Nixon called Mr. Keating “a traitor.”

India was secretly sponsoring a Bengali insurgency in East Pakistan, and the violence ended only after India and Pakistan went to war in December 1971, with the Indian Army swiftly securing an independent Bangladesh. Economic development and political progress were always going to be difficult there. But Bangladesh’s situation was made tougher by the devastation: lost lives, wrecked infrastructure and radicalized politics.

Bangladesh, despite its recent economic growth, is a haunted country. Part of the tumult centers on the fate of defendants like Abdul Quader Mollah, who face judgment in a series of national war crimes trials for atrocities committed in 1971 by local collaborators with West Pakistan. These trials are popular, but the court has often failed to meet fair standards of due process. Its proceedings have ensnared members of the largest Islamist political party, Jamaat-e-Islami, which is aligned with the main political rival of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

It will be up to Bangladeshis to fix their country’s rancorous politics, but their task was made harder from the outset by Nixon and Kissinger’s callousness. The legacy of 1971 still stains the reputation of the United States in India as well. If an apology from Kissinger is too much to expect, Americans ought at least to remember what he and Nixon did in those terrible days.

Gary J. Bass, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton, is the author, most recently, of “The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/30/opinion/nixon-and-kissingers-forgotten-shame.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0

 

[Sashan]

Thanks for opening a thread - I have been quoting snippets of the book in the threads here after it got released on Sept 26th - Bought the Kindle version but never had time to read it through except for few selective pages.

 

[faithfulguy]

This news irrelevant to Americans. None of American's business what happen between India and its neighbors.

 

[Sashan]

This news irrelevant to Americans. None of American's business what happen between India and its neighbors.

When U.S is part of the security council then there is a role to play there. Moreover U.S arms were used in the genocide. One can't selectively play the policeman role across the globe. Just raises one question - I am not a fan of Modi but Modi is an internal Indian issue - what has U.S got to with India? his visa was revoked under some U.S domestic laws. And the racial expletives by a president - it is disgusting.



Snippet from the preface of the book -


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.1
“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 twenty five corpses,” the last of many such batches of human remains.2
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.
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

Source: http://www.defence.pk/forums/bangla...g-operation-searchlight-16.html#ixzz2gRK1rt8y

And more on this -


With the White House averting its eyes, the largely Muslim Pakistani Army killed at least 300,000 Bengalis, most of them Hindus, 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 in Dacca (the capital of East Pakistan), that said West Pakistan was guilty of carrying out widespread massacres. Archer Blood, the counsel general in Dacca, sent an angry cable that detailed the atrocities and used the word “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. “I understand the anguish you must have felt in making the difficult decisions you have faced,” he told Yahya.



http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/books/review/the-blood-telegram-by-gary-j-bass.html?pagewanted=all

 

[faithfulguy]

When U.S is part of the security council then there is a role to play there. Moreover U.S arms were used in the genocide. One can't selectively play the policeman role across the globe. Just raises one question - I am not a fan of Modi but Modi is an internal Indian issue - what has U.S got to with India? his visa was revoked under some U.S domestic laws. And the racial expletives by a president - it is disgusting.



Snippet from the preface of the book -


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.1
“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 twenty five corpses,” the last of many such batches of human remains.2
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.
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

Source: http://www.defence.pk/forums/bangla...g-operation-searchlight-16.html#ixzz2gRK1rt8y

And more on this -


With the White House averting its eyes, the largely Muslim Pakistani Army killed at least 300,000 Bengalis, most of them Hindus, 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 in Dacca (the capital of East Pakistan), that said West Pakistan was guilty of carrying out widespread massacres. Archer Blood, the counsel general in Dacca, sent an angry cable that detailed the atrocities and used the word “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. “I understand the anguish you must have felt in making the difficult decisions you have faced,” he told Yahya.



http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/books/review/the-blood-telegram-by-gary-j-bass.html?pagewanted=all

Modi is a pro-Chinese candidate. Now, I will need to quantify that an Indian politician can only be so "pro-Chinese" to a certain level. So he is as pro-Chinese as Indian politics allow him to be. And he is an anti US and western alliance politician. His election will only damage US Indian relation. But alas, Indian election is an internal Indian issue and America and the rest of the world can only judge India by its foreign policies, not who is elected. Contrary to popular beliefs, we rarely get into other people's internal affairs unless its endangering US interest. At least that would be the case if my candidate Ron Paul is the president.

 

[Sashan]

Modi is a pro-Chinese candidate. Now, I will need to quantify that an Indian politician can only be so "pro-Chinese" to a certain level. So he is as pro-Chinese as Indian politics allow him to be. And he is an anti US and western alliance politician. His election will only damage US Indian relation. But alas, Indian election is an internal Indian issue and America and the rest of the world can only judge India by its foreign policies, not who is elected. Contrary to popular beliefs, we rarely get into other people's internal affairs unless its endangering US interest.

Forget about Modi here - that is just an example I showed. This was a genocide confirmed by the U.S officials from Dacca. More than what happened in Rwanda - forget about not interfering but U.S took sides - took side in support of a dictator who was ordering his army to conduct a genocide. Then we should not claim moral fiber while interfering across the globe.

 

[faithfulguy]

Forget about Modi here - that is just an example I showed. This was a genocide confirmed by the U.S officials from Dacca. More than what happened in Rwanda - forget about not interfering but U.S took sides - took side in support of a dictator who was ordering his army to conduct a genocide. Then we should not claim moral fiber while interfering across the globe.

US should not both with affairs of others. Let others deal with themselves. America has lot of problems and our resources should be to solve our own problems, not fight other's wars.

 

[Sashan]

US should not both with affairs of others. Let others deal with themselves. America has lot of problems and our resources should be to solve our own problems, not fight other's wars.

This is your view but not U.S foreign policy. U.S foreign policy includes human rights as part of the Foreign Assistance Act 1961 where U.S can't provide assistance to a country which violates human rights. And here there was a genocide more than on the scales of Rwanda and the President and Kissinger turned a blind eye.

 

[Thorough Pro]

Why are indian ****** still crying over a lie that india created over 42 years ago?

You ******* off-springs of rape, have you forgotten the state sponsored massacre of Kashmiri Muslims, brutal genocide of Sikhs, and Christians to name a few.

 

[Lightningbolt]

India needs to reduce its population because its far too crowded. India has just as many people as us with only 1/3 the land area. So I agree with Nixon that a famine might be needed to reduce the Indian population and ease the pressure on the Indian government and global resource use.

 

[sankranti]

This is your view but not U.S foreign policy. U.S foreign policy includes human rights as part of the Foreign Assistance Act 1961 where U.S can't provide assistance to a country which violates human rights. And here there was a genocide more than on the scales of Rwanda and the President and Kissinger turned a blind eye.

US policy includes RELIGIOUS FREEDOM also as part of Foreign policy

That however does not apply to Saudi Arabia ..... but to Narendra Modi for denying him Visa ..... so lets just cut the Cr@p.