Tikka Khan

General Tikka Khan HJ SPk (10 February 1915 – 28 March 2002) was a four-star army general in the Pakistan Army who was the first chief of army staff from 3 March 1972 until retiring on 1 March 1976. Along with Yahya Khan, he is considered a chief architect of the 1971 Bangladesh genocide

Quotes about Khan

• Yahya shoved aside the moderate general who had been governor of East Pakistan, terrifying Bengalis with his replacement: Lieutenant General Tikka Khan, known widely as “the butcher of Baluchistan” for his devastating repression of an uprising in that West Pakistani province. Blood knew he was one of the most extreme hawks in the military—a killer.
  • quoted in Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide.

• Bhutto put the notorious General Tikka Khan in charge of the army, insisting that during the massacres “he was a soldier doing a soldier’s job.” (Tikka Khan later became a leader of the Pakistan People’s Party.) He denied not just the inflated Bangladeshi statistic of three million dead, but also the number of ten million refugees, insisting that Indira Gandhi had sent people from West Bengal. As for the women who were raped and killed, he flatly said, “I don’t believe it.”
  • quoted in Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide.

• Tikka Khan was a soldier doing a soldier’s job. He went to East Pakistan with precise orders and came back by precise orders. He did what he was ordered to do, though he wasn’t always in agree­ment, and I picked him because I know he’ll follow my orders with the same discipline. And he won’t try to stick his nose in politics. I can’t destroy the whole army, and anyway his bad reputation for the events in Dacca is exaggerated. There’s only one man really respon­sible for those events—Yahya Khan. Both he and his advisers were so drunk with power and corruption they’d even forgotten the honor of the army. They thought of nothing but acquiring beautiful cars, building beautiful homes, making friends with bankers, and sending money abroad. Yahya Khan wasn’t interested in the government of the country, he was interested in power for its own sake and nothing else. What can you say of a leader who starts drinking as soon as he wakes up and doesn’t stop until he goes to bed? You’ve no idea how painful it was to deal with him. He was really Jack the Ripper.
  • Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, April 1972 interview to Oriana Fallaci, as quoted in Interviews with History and Conversations with Power (2011).