 "Head-on | Pakistan’s genocide in Bangladesh had a hidden US hand")
Ramesh Sharma’s new documentary Chronicle of the Forgotten Genocide has reopened a chapter that Pakistan, the Islamist interim government of Bangladesh, and the United States would like to keep shut.
Why would the US, an advocate of democracy and freedom, want to put a lid on the 1971 Bangladesh genocide? As filmmaker Ramesh Sharma told The Sunday Times of India: “Almost every genocide that has taken place in the 20th century has the fingerprints of American imperialism – besides Bangladesh, there is Cambodia, Vietnam, Chile. You might say that this was during the Cold War and America was fighting a proxy war with the Soviet Union. But that doesn’t justify the killing of millions of innocent people.
“The research of American scholars like Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz helped shed light. I also came across an incredible number of documents that were declassified, largely due to the efforts of historian Gary Bass who fought for the Freedom of Information Act, which is similar to the RTI. My film couldn’t focus only on the genocide. It also had to unveil the puppet masters like the CIA and Henry Kissinger who were helping Pakistan.”
The role of the US in regime change and illegal invasions of sovereign nations is well known. Washington has not yet been held accountable. After a brief period of goodwill with post-Independence India in the 1950s, the US began to use military-led Pakistan as a geostrategic asset. Islamabad was on sale to the highest bidder. It asked no questions and did Washington’s “dirty work”, as one television anchor termed it, giving the US plausible deniability for the covert use of terror groups, assassinations of global leaders, and regime change.
Flush with American military aid funds, Pakistan in the 1960s had a higher per capita income than socialist India (it is half India’s per capita income today), and the streets of Lahore and Islamabad were filled with imported American cars.
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View AllThe loss of East Pakistan was a blow to the complicit US-Pakistan relationship. As the Pakistani army embarked on genocidal killings in East Pakistan in 1970, the US helped Islamabad with intelligence, arms and logistics. The CIA, notorious for its role in subversive acts globally, was in charge of the operation to save East Pakistan from liberation and provide an alibi for Islamabad’s genocide.
Gary Bass, a professor at Princeton University, has written searingly on the complicity of US President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the East Pakistan genocide as well as the direct involvement of the CIA.
In an interview in September 2019 with the Mittal South Asia Institute at Harvard University, Bass said: “Bangladesh was born out of violence: a devastating military crackdown by the Pakistan army, back when Bangladesh was the eastern wing of Pakistan. The horrors of 1971 are still a living memory for many Bangladeshis — and for many, a defining national trauma. It seems appropriate that Americans should remember how Nixon and Kissinger stood behind Pakistan’s military dictatorship in 1971 in its slaughter in what became Bangladesh, and realise that there is a certain American responsibility to make amends for the White House’s cruel and counterproductive policies in 1971.”
The Indian armed forces ended the genocide in December 1971 to establish an independent Bangladesh. But as both Sharma and Bass point out, the US continues to escape accountability for its role in Pakistan’s genocide in East Pakistan before Bangladesh was liberated by India.
Fast forward to August 2024: Did the US have a role, however tangential, in the regime change in Bangladesh following the forced exit of Sheikh Hasina? Sharma says: “I don’t think the involvement of the US in the 2024 regime change can be discounted. Also, a lot of the trials related to the 1971 pogrom took place only when Hasina came to power – the same trial that is now being used against her.
Under President Donald Trump, the US has dropped all pretence of denying its role in regime change in sovereign nations. It has rehabilitated former al-Qaeda terrorist Ahmed al-Sharaa as Syria’s president. Trump approved Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth’s alleged order to “kill them all” as two survivors clung to a boat struck by US gunfire in the Caribbean Sea. The inquiry under a bipartisan Congressional committee has been buried.
An unrepentant Hegseth has denied issuing the order to “kill them all” – a serious violation of human rights law. With Trump’s backing, Hegseth says the US will continue to attack drug cartel boats in international waters.
The same disregard for international law drove Nixon-Kissinger to help Pakistan unleash a genocide in Bangladesh. But in 1971, Washington at least sought plausible deniability. In MAGA-driven America today that is no longer a concern. Hosting former terrorists like Syria’s al-Sharaa in the White House is the new norm.
This has emboldened funders of terrorists like Pakistan army chief Asim Munir to lace every public speech with venom directed against India. Washington doesn’t just look the other way: Trump’s family strikes crypto deals with Munir’s corrupt Pakistan military establishment.
With elections due to be held in Bangladesh in February 2026, the Muhammad Yunus-led government in Dhaka is trying to erase all memories – and documented evidence – of Pakistan’s genocide in Bangladesh. The country was liberated 54 years ago this month by India. Sharma’s new documentary is a timely record of one of the most brutal genocides in modern history, Washington’s complicit role with Pakistan, and one of India’s greatest military triumphs.
(The writer is an editor, author and publisher. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)
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