The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide

The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide is a 2013 book by American journalist and academic Gary J. Bass about The Blood telegram. The Blood Telegram is a state department dissent memo on American policy during the 1971 Bangladesh genocide sent by Archer Blood the American Consul General to Dhaka, East Pakistan.

Quotes

• Myers wrote a desolate letter home to his friends lamenting what he had seen in a small, impoverished Hindu village in the countryside. The army had “lined up people from their houses, shot down the lines, killing close to six hundred.” The people in nearby villages heard the gunfire and fled. The rice mills were burned to charcoal, the rice to ash. The handful of villagers who had returned told their stories through sobs. A tall, frail Bengali man took Myers to his scorched house: “a room with a rice ash heap and charcoaled bed stead, nothing remained to show us that his three children and wife had lived there, died there. Another old man, pan stained teeth, mucus glazed eyes, (glaucoma or tears?), whimpered the loss of his family.”

• “There was clear targeting of Hindus,” says Scott Butcher. “You might also talk about going after Bengalis as a racial or cultural group. It was an extraordinarily brutal crackdown.”

• Senior Pakistani officers would later admit much of this targeting before a secret Pakistani postwar judicial inquiry. It noted that “senior officers like the COAS [chief of army staff] and CGS [chief of general staff] were often noticed jokingly asking as to how many Hindus have been killed.” One lieutenant colonel testified that Lieutenant General A. A. K. Niazi, who became the chief martial law administrator in East Pakistan and head of the army’s Eastern Command, “asked as to how many Hindus we had killed. In May, there was an order in writing to kill Hindus” from a brigadier. (Niazi denied ordering the extermination of the Hindus.) Another lieutenant colonel said, “There was a general feeling of hatred against Bengalis amongst the soldiers and the officers including generals. There were verbal instructions to eliminate Hindus.”

• Still, he thought, genocide was the right description for what was happening to the Hindus. So the consulate “began to focus our ‘genocidal’ reporting on the Hindus.” The military crackdown, he cabled, “fully meets criteria of term ‘genocide.’ ”

• He explained that the Pakistani military evidently did not “make distinctions between Indians and Pakistan Hindus, treating both as enemies.” Such anti-Hindu sentiments were lingering and widespread, Blood wrote. He and his staff tenaciously kept up their reporting of anti-Hindu atrocities, telling how the Pakistan army would move into a village, ask where the Hindus lived, and then kill the Hindu men. There was little evidence, he said, of the killing of Hindu women and children. (He also pointed out that the Bengali Muslims abhorred this slaughter.) Blood and his team emphasized the “international moral obligations to condemn genocide … of Pakistani Hindus.”

• The Indian prime minister’s secretariat knew that there was sure to be a rush of refugees, likely to overwhelm the local authorities in West Bengal. But the actual scale was a shock: the lieutenant governor of Tripura, an Indian state jutting deep into East Pakistan, alerted Gandhi to “the unexpectedly large influx of refugees.” As one of Gandhi’s senior aides remembered, her government now really began to worry. The expulsions seemed massive and systematic.

• Schanberg saw Pakistani soldiers throwing phosphorus grenades into thatch huts and setting villages ablaze, apparently to deny hiding places to the guerrillas. He reported that, at a minimum, tens of thousands of people had been systematically killed by the army. The troops had killed much of the Bengali leadership class, including engineers, doctors, and students. He wrote, “As smoke from the thatch and bamboo huts billowed up on the outskirts of the city of Comilla, circling vultures descended on the bodies of peasants, already being picked apart by dogs and crows.”

• Yahya was effusive in his gratitude to Nixon. In a warm letter, he sympathized about the American public pressure that Nixon was withstanding, and insisted that reports of atrocities were Indian-inspired exaggerations. He was “deeply gratified” that the United States saw the crisis as “an internal affair” to be resolved by Pakistan’s government. This was certainly Kissinger’s view. Even relatively minor insults to Pakistan’s sovereign prerogatives were too much for him. When it was suggested that Yahya promise that U.S. food aid would get to rural Bengalis, Kissinger recoiled at that “substantial challenge to the West Pakistan notion of sovereignty.” He said, “It would be as though, in our civil war, the British had offered food to Lincoln on the condition that it be used to feed the people in Alabama.”

• Kissinger worked Nixon up. “It shows you’re a weakling, Mr. President,” he said. “[T]hese leaks are slowly and systematically destroying us.… It could destroy our ability to conduct foreign policy.”

• In public, Indian officials such as Swaran Singh would impeccably speak up for sovereignty. But behind closed doors, he coached his officials to take the opposite line: “repression internally has resulted in the uprooting of six million refugees. With what stretch of the imagination is this an internal matter?” Upending the argument, he accused the United States of meddling in Pakistan’s internal affairs by helping a military junta to slaughter the Bengali majority: supporting Yahya was “truly interference in the internal affairs.” He instructed his diplomats, “You can use your genius for the purpose of thinking of other such arguments.”

• One reputable Indian government official, himself a Bengali, relied on his local sources to remind Haksar what the refugees were fleeing: with encouragement from the Pakistan army, volunteers deliberately killed the Hindu men. He darkly wrote that it was not hard to imagine what had happened to the women. There were some Hindu families hidden in the granaries of “kind hearted Muslims who are against these deliberate atrocities but who find themselves entirely helpless.”

• These kinds of stories were echoed six million times—the number of refugees that India officially estimated it was now sheltering. That number was, the Indian foreign ministry claimed, unparalleled in the world’s history.

• Anyway, the donations were, as Haksar told Gandhi, “very disappointing.” India would need some $400 million to look after these refugees for half a year, and more were coming every day. By the White House’s reckoning, the Indians netted merely about $20 million from the whole world, as well as roughly $12 million from the Soviet Union.

• The Nixon administration had ample evidence not just of the scale of the massacres, but also of their ethnic targeting of the Hindu minority—what Blood had condemned as genocide. This was common knowledge throughout the Nixon administration. Kissinger once told the president himself, “Another stupid mistake he [Yahya] made was to expel so many Hindus from East Pakistan. It gave the Indians a great cause” for war. Kissinger, in a memorandum drafted by Saunders, alerted Nixon to the difficulty of getting Hindu refugees to return. The undersecretary of state said to Nixon, “The Hindu population has suffered strong persecution, and many have fled the country.”
  • Chaper 10. NSC Files, Box 625, Country Files—Middle East, Pakistan, vol. IV, Haig to Nixon, 10 May 1971. White House tapes, Oval Office 558-10, 9 August 1971, 5:44–6:18 p.m. NSC Files, Box 759, Presidential Correspondence File, Kissinger to Nixon, 2 July 1971. NSC Files, Box 759, Presidential Correspondence File, Saunders to Kissinger, 24 June 1971. FRUS, Irwin to Nixon, 9 June 1971, pp. 172–74.

• Kissinger was repeatedly alerted about this genocide. Harold Saunders informed him about reports that the Pakistan army was “deliberately seeking out Hindus and killing them,” while a senior State Department official notified him that Pakistan’s policy was “getting rid of the Hindus.” In a Situation Room meeting, another State Department official plainly told Kissinger, “Eighty percent of the refugees are Hindus.” In the same meeting, the CIA director doubted the prospects of refugees returning to East Pakistan, no matter what Yahya said to them: “The way the Pakistanis have been beating up on the Hindus, the refugees would have to be convinced they wouldn’t be shot in the head.”
  • NSA, Saunders to Kissinger, 18 May 1971. FRUS, SRG meeting, 23 July 1971, pp. 270–83. FRUS, WSAG meeting, 26 May 1971, 4:35–5 p.m., pp. 149–56. See NSC Files, Box 625, Country Files—Middle East, Pakistan, vol. V, Van Hollen to Farland, 17 May 1971; NSC Files, Box 626, Country Files—Middle East, Pakistan, vol. VI, Williams to Rogers, 20 August 1971, Islamabad 8534 (the cable is signed Farland, following protocol, but is actually from Williams); NSC Files, Box 626, Country Files—Middle East, Pakistan, vol. VI, Saunders to Kissinger, 13 August 1971.

• This was about as far as Kissinger could be from the teeming miseries of West Bengal and Tripura while still inside India. The Indian government asked him to come visit the refugee camps for himself. If he had served in another White House, he might have at least made a side trip to Calcutta, or perhaps have been packed off to one of the hundreds of camps in West Bengal to see U.S. dollars at work feeding the destitute. But Kissinger refused. Samuel Hoskinson, Kissinger’s aide, says, “It’s not really Henry’s kind of thing.” Kissinger was clear that, as an Indian diplomat noted, “he would not be able to visit any of the refugee camps.”

• 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!”
  • NSA, Nixon and Kissinger talk to White House staff, 19 July 1971, 11:40 a.m.

• At the White House, Kissinger worried that “when Kennedy comes back, he will blow the roof off.” He was right: the senator returned to Washington, haunted by what he had seen, to deliver a jeremiad against Nixon.

• Kissinger was put off by Gandhi’s mention of her democratic mandate: “Then she started praising herself, she said in effect that yes, this praise was well deserved, that I ran an election campaign.… And she said it was wrong to treat them the same way as the Pakistanis. Oh, it was really revolting, God.”

• Kissinger urged Nixon to be tough on her. “I think publicly you should be extremely nice,” said the national security advisor—and at this point the tape is bleeped out, to hide whatever words he used to urge being rougher in private.... Kissinger, doing a little slobbering of his own, reassured the president: “How you slobbered over her in things that did not matter, but in the things that did matter, you didn’t give her an inch.”

• She thought he was worthy to be an ambassador or an assistant secretary of state, or more, despite Nixon and Kissinger. “For some reason they thought it could be kept quiet! All of those killings!”

• Even when his own officials denied him such evidence, he persisted, at one point furiously saying, “Henry, I just want the Indians to look bad. I want them to look bad for bombing that orphanage”—an incident that the U.S. consulate and the UN representative in Dacca believed had actually been done by a Pakistani airplane, in order to discredit India’s air force. But such hypocrisies are beside the point.

• A senior Indian official put the Bengali death toll at three hundred thousand, while Sydney Schanberg, who had excellent sources, noted in the New York Times that diplomats in Dacca thought that hundreds of thousands of Bengalis—maybe even a million or more—had been killed since the crackdown started on March 25. Even the lowest credible Pakistani estimates are in the tens of thousands, while India sought vindication with bigger numbers: Swaran Singh quickly claimed that a million people had been killed in Bangladesh.