Book review: Archer Blood, the American hero of 1971 Bangladesh saga

By Dipankar Mukhopadhyay The year 1971 will remain a memorable year in the history of the Indian sub-continent. Between March to December, the world witnessed Pakistan’s first election under a military junta, rejection of the popular verdict, a genocide, a mass exodus, a civil war culminating in a fortnight-long war between two hostile neighbours, and finally, the painful birth of a new country, Bangladesh. In his book The Blood Telegram, Gary J. Bass, a Princeton academic, looks at these familiar events from an unusual point of view. He scrutinizes the role played by the White House and the American State Department in the whole saga and in the process, many untold stories and cleverly-hidden secrets tumble out of the cupboards. But to begin at the beginning: in 1947, the Quaid-e-azam (or “great leader”) Mohammad Ali Jinnah, after long and bitter negotiations, accepted Pakistan, a cartographic oddity. The two wings of the new country were separated by 1000 miles of territory in between, ruled by the not-so-friendly India. The Western side was the land of the burly, militant Punjabis and suave Sindhis, and always called the shots over the diminutive and delicate Bengali population of the East. By culture and habits, the two were as different as chalk and cheese and there was nothing to bind them together except religion. [caption id=“attachment_1244323” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Courtesy: ibn live[/caption] When the principal political party of East Pakistan, Awami League, swept the polls by winning 160 out of 162 seats, the president of the Party, Sheikh Mujib, had a strong claim to become the Prime Minister. But such a scenario was unacceptable to both the junta and the ambitious Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, whose Pakistan People’s Party emerged second in the contest. Mujib demanded autonomy for Bangladesh and negotiators were sent to reason with him in March, 1971. When the negotiations failed, the troops took over. On the night of 25 March, soldiers ran through in Dhaka University, firing indiscriminately and killing a large number of students, academics and intellectuals, all of them supporters of Mujib’s Awami League. The killings didn’t stop there but escalated. Statistics are not reliable but a few million are believed to have been killed. Approximately 10 million people had to take shelter in neighbouring India, creating huge socio-economic problems for the reluctant host. Pakistan deployed 70,000 troops to administer 75 million people. They were led by a bloodthirsty general, Tikka Khan, popularly known as the ‘Butcher of East Pakistan.’ This carnage was reported by Archer Blood, the American Consul-General in Dhaka. Like a reporter, this career diplomat filed detailed reports every day to Washington, informing his government of the current situation in East Pakistan. He felt the world’s most powerful democracy should not remain a silent spectator at this critical, violent juncture, but his hopes were belied. Nothing stirred in Capitol Hill since President Nixon was a friend and admirer of the Pakistani president, General Yahya Khan. Nixon’s National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger may have thought Khan a moron, but he wasn’t going to pick up the cudgels on behalf of a “bunch of goddamned brown Moslems”, as Nixon described the Bangladeshis. Also, Kissinger was obsessed with sidling up to China to offset the Soviet influence on global politics and in this endeavour, Khan was of great help. He had set up secret meeting with the top Chinese leadership and also provided Kissinger with a cloak-and-dagger cover to fly in and out of China via Pakistan. Bass and his team have listened to hundreds of tapes that recorded Nixon and Kissinger’s conversations. This is how we get such juicy nuggets of both information as well as the former president’s colorful vocabulary. (For instance, Indians are “bastards”, and Indira Gandhi is either “a bitch” or a “witch” and often both.) Faced with silence, Blood – whose name is chillingly resonant, considering the events of the time – did something unprecedented. Along with twenty-odd consular staff, Blood dispatched a cable on April 6, expressing their “dissent from US policy toward East Pakistan”. The cable, from which Bass’s book gets it title, said bluntly, “Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities.” The message ended with this assertion: “We, as professional public servants, express our dissent with current policy and fervently hope that our true and lasting interests here can be defined and our policies redirected… .” In simple terms, Blood had brought a ‘no confidence motion’ against his own government; something few bureaucrats can imagine even in their worst nightmares. Blood was the first to point out that there was “a selective genocide”, that Hindus were being specially targeted and butchered to offset and change the demographic pattern. Long before Serbia and Bosnia, ethnic cleansing was practiced in the green fields of East Pakistan by Pakistani troops. Nixon was not one to tolerate defiance. So, 18 months before his tenure was to end, Blood was unceremoniously whisked off from Dhaka and was obscured somewhere in the State Department in Washington. Nobody ever heard his name again. But 33 years later, when he breathed his last, the news of his death was in the front page of all Bangladeshi newspapers and his family was overwhelmed by the spontaneous expressions of grief from that country, as flowers, phone calls and messages poured in. In spite of all the blood and gore and the overall bleak and depressing setting of The Blood Telegram, this 500-paged tome reads like a thriller. Bass may not be liked by his countrymen for his open and strong criticism of the American foreign policy of the ’70s and this book is certainly not a centenary tribute to Nixon. What makes The Blood Telegram particularly compelling is that Bass is no impartial observer, but his stand is one that has been reached as a result of painstaking and meticulous research. There’s no doubt what Kissinger did in China changed the course of history. But the price he paid was the lives of a few million Bangladeshis. (Dipankar Mukhopadhyay is a Historian and an author based in Kolkata)