The recent publication of “The Blood
Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide” by Gary J. Bass, a professor of politics and international
affairs at Princeton University, has reopened raw wounds in the collective psyche
of Bangladeshis.
Drawing on recently declassified White House
tapes and documents, Bass has summoned a searing story of hubris and genocide
that will shock readers four decades after the violent birth of Bangladesh.
That Prof. Bass was able to
find an American publisher for his book is rich in irony. Archer Kent Blood, Bass’s
protagonist, wrote an even more searing first-person account of the blood-bath
in Bangladesh but not a single American publisher would touch it. It
was eventually published by The University Press Limited of Dhaka in 2002.
Author of “The Cruel Birth of Bangladesh:
Memoirs of an American Diplomat,” Blood was the United States Consul General in
the-then East Pakistan during the turbulent ‘70s. When the Pakistani army mounted
a war against unarmed Bangladeshis to reverse the results of the 1970 national
election in which Sheikh Mujibur Rahman won a clear majority, Blood was stunned
by the silence of his government.
The diabolical Nixon-Kissinger duo was
obsessed with appeasing Yahya Khan for the general’s role in facilitating the
“grand opening to China.” They supplied him with all the arms, ammunition and
spare parts he asked for. 10,000 Bangladeshis were massacred in the first three
days alone. Over a period of nine months, as many as 3 million were killed (other conservative estimates put the figure much lower) and
10 million had to flee to India
Responding to the call of his conscience,
Blood sent a telegram to the State Department that read in part, “… Our
government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government
has failed to denounce atrocities. Our government has failed to take forceful
measures to protect its citizens while at the same time bending over backwards
to placate the West Pak government and to
lessen likely and deservedly negative international public relations impact
against them. Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral
bankruptcy …”
The late Christopher Hitchens, in his 2001
book "The Trial of Henry Kissinger," described the cable as "the
most public and the most strongly worded demarche, from State Department
servants to the State Department, that has ever been recorded."
Kissinger was furious and recalled Blood to
Washington where he was assigned to the State Department’s personnel office, a
public demotion. It was the same Kissinger who, at the height of the genocide
in late April of 1971, sent a message to General Yahya Khan to thank him for
his “delicacy and tact.” Nixon was equally invested in the asinine dictator
when he told him, “I understand the anguish you must have felt in making the
difficult decisions you have faced.”
In 1973, when Blood’s name was proposed for a
possible ambassadorial position, Kissinger responded with: “Get that guy
out of Washington!”
Blood’s book is filled with glimpses of men steeped
in arrogance and their attempts to trash the truth. In June, 1971, for example,
a World Bank Mission visited East Pakistan and
filed a devastating report on Pakistani brutality. World Bank President Robert
McNamara desperately tried to suppress the report but the New York Times obtained the document and splashed it on the front
page. McNamara sent a letter to the Pakistani government apologizing for the
leak! During a briefing in 1971 in Islamabad, a sneering Brigadier General
Chuck Yeager, the first test pilot to break the sound barrier, challenged
Blood’s contention that Bengali resistance would win out in the end. “Do the
Bengalis have any aircraft? Any tanks?” Yeager asked. “Then, how can they stand
up to the well-equipped, disciplined Pakistani army?”
Blood’s testimony is proof that people armed with
hope and a will to be free can defeat armies equipped with weapons of war. The
diplomat saw a parallel between his own country’s war of independence against
the British in 1776 and Bangladesh’s war of independence almost two centuries
later.
Blood received the Herter award in 1972 for
“extraordinary accomplishment involving initiative, integrity, intellectual
courage and creative dissent.” The award was named after the former Secretary
of State Christian A. Herter and established by the American Foreign Services
Association in 1969. In 2005, he was posthumously given an Outstanding Service
by the Bangladeshi-American Foundation, Inc. (BAFI) in Arlington, Virginia.
Archer Kent Blood passed away peacefully at Ft. Collins , Colorado
Reflecting on the fateful “Blood Telegram”
years later, Blood said, “I paid for my dissent. But I had no choice. The line
between right and wrong was just too clear-cut.”
If this is not human spirit at its finest,
what is?
Prof. Bass’s “The Blood Telegram” will
undoubtedly contribute to a renewed appraisal of the Nixon-Kissinger foreign
policy and the lasting damage these two “statesmen” inflicted on the world,
reverberations from which continue to be felt to this day.
At the same time, it should serve as a
reminder to the leaders of Bangladesh that they too are under the spotlight of
history, that they too will be judged by whether or not they have squandered
the sacrifices of millions. It is easy to point fingers and wallow in the past.
It is far more challenging to develop policies and institutions that can move
the nation forward. Bangladesh is now politically polarized to the point of
paralysis. Integrity, magnanimity and farsightedness are missing from the
national discourse. Perhaps our politicians should read and re-read “The Blood
Telegram” and “The Cruel Birth of Bangladesh” to gain perspective on what constitutes hubris and what
constitutes enlightened leadership. Forty-two years later, surely it is time.
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