On Wednesday (November 29), Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger passed away at his home in Connecticut at the age of 100. Kissinger’s death was announced in a statement by his consulting firm, which did not mention the cause. Kissinger, a statesman, and celebrity diplomat held unparalleled power over US foreign policy during the administrations of Presidents Richard M Nixon and Gerald Ford. After Nixon became the U.S. president in 1969, Kissinger was appointed as the National Security Advisor.
Henry Kissinger oversaw US military actions around the world during his tenure, first as National Security Adviser and later as Secretary of State, influencing events in China, Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent with long term implications. His role during the Vietnam war, and his bombing campaign in Cambodia resulted in deaths of untold people. Hailed as an ace of statecraft and diplomacy many; others, particularly the sufferers of his political and military activities, will remember him as an oppressor.
Beyond the conventional meaning of ‘legitimacy,’ Henry Kissinger held that the international order was “legitimate” as long as decision-makers in major nations were willing to accept it — and that problems of public opinion and morality could therefore be discarded as immaterial.
Bangladesh Liberation War and the Kissinger Intervention
When conflict erupted between India and Pakistan in 1971 over the Pakistani army’s genocide of the Bengali population in East Pakistan and the ensuing refugee crisis, Islamabad served as an intermediary to facilitate exchanges between Beijing and Washington at a period when relations between the two were nearly absent.
On March 25, 1971, the Pakistan Army launched Operation Searchlight, a brutal crackdown on East Pakistan’s nationalist movement after Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League won 160 out of 162 seats in the East registering an absolute majority. The genocide and rape of the Bengali people of the then East Pakistan was spearheaded by former Army chief General Yahya Khan. Even as per the conservative estimates, over 200,000 Bengalis were killed and in a deliberate campaign of genocidal rape, Pakistani military personnel and the Razakars raped between 200,000 and 400,000 Bengali women and girls. An even more terrifying aspect of this genocide of the Bengalis of East Pakistan was that both President Nixon and Henry Kissinger were aware of Yahya Khan’s repressive actions in the occupied land and did nothing. It is worth noting that Kissinger was behind US’s pro-Pakistan tilt since he opined that favouring Pakistan would help US forge new ties with China.
In his book ‘White House Years’, Kissinger wrote, “The issue (Pakistan crisis) burst upon us while Pakistan was our only channel to China.”
The Blood Telegram
As the Pakistani crimes continued unabated, Archer Blood, the US Consul General in Dhaka, wrote to Washington DC in April 1971 to assist, but was met with what Blood described as a “deafening silence.” As the US continued to provide Pakistan with military and economic help, Blood and his staff issued a strongly worded dissent letter.
“…. Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy, ironically at a time when the USSR sent President Yahya a message2 defending democracy, condemning arrest of leader of democratically elected majority party (incidentally pro-West) and calling for end to repressive measures and bloodshed. In our most recent policy paper for Pakistan,3 our interests in Pakistan were defined as primarily humanitarian, rather than strategic. But we have chosen not to intervene, even morally, on the grounds that the Awami conflict, in which unfortunately the overworked term genocide is applicable, is purely internal matter of a sovereign state. Private Americans have expressed disgust. 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 order to salvage our nationʼs position as a moral leader of the free world,” Archer Blood’s telegram read.
The US encouraged China to make military moves to ‘intimidate’ India
In Henry Kissinger’s own words, ” The United States, with Pakistan at the time as a conduit in conducting secret negotiations with China, sought to defuse the crisis and prevent fighting between India and Pakistan. When the fighting developed, the Nixon administration “tilted” toward Pakistan. The tilt involved the dispatch of the aircraft carrier Enterprise to the Bay of Bengal to try to intimidate the Indian Government. It also involved encouraging China to make military moves to achieve the same end, and an assurance to China that if China menaced India and the Soviet Union moved against China in support of India, the United States would protect China from the Soviet Union. China chose not to menace India, and the crisis on the subcontinent ended without a confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. For a brief period in December 1971, however, the record indicates that the crisis had a dangerous potential and that President Nixon and his National Security Assistant Henry Kissinger were prepared to accept serious risks to achieve their policy objectives.”
According to a report by The Atlantic, Kissinger had ignored the rise and strength of Bengali nationalism and believed in the Pakistani military’s assertion that the Bengalis were ‘cowardly’ people and easy to subdue. “The Bengalis aren’t very good fighters I guess. The use of power against seeming odds pays off. ’Cause all the experts were saying that 30,000 people can’t get control of 75 million. Well, this may still turn out to be true but as of this moment it seems to be quiet,” Kissinger told President Nixon.
Kissinger’s disdain towards India and Indians has not been a secret, as evident from Nixon and Kissinger’s meeting with the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi a month before India declared war on Pakistan in December 1971. Following the meeting, the duo called Indira Gandhi a “b*ch”, with Kissinger accusing her of “starting a war”. Kissinger called Indians “b***ds”, and “the most aggressive people around”.
In a secret meeting with a Chinese delegation during the 1971 war, Kissinger not only admitted to supplying weapons to Pakistan, via Iran and Jordan, but also boasted he did so despite being aware that his actions violated the congressional arms embargo.
In a meeting with Nixon and Attorney General Newton Mitchell on December 8, 1971, Kissinger said that he had “got a message to you from the Shah (of Iran), in which he says he can send ammunition (to a beleaguered Pakistan) – he is doing it now.”
Kissinger’s indifference to the plight of Bengali freedom fighters in East Pakistan is evident in his conversation with the US President in 1972 wherein he said: “Not one has yet understood what we did in India-Pakistan and how we saved the China option which we need for the bloody Russians. Why should we give a damn about Bangladesh?”
In his book “The Blood Telegram and a Forgotten Genocide”, Princeton University professor Gary J Bass described the genocide of Bengali rebellions as “one of the cardinal moral challenges of recent history.” “Although today it is far more familiar to South Asians than to Americans. It had a monumental impact on India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh — almost a sixth of humanity in 1971,” Bass writes.
When Kissinger told Nixon “You’ve saved West Pakistan”
According to confidential documents disclosed by the US Department of State, a day after Dhaka was liberated on December 16, 1971, then-US President Richard Nixon was told by his strategic advisor Henry Kissinger that he had “saved West Pakistan.” Despite diplomatic humiliation, Kissinger informed President Nixon, “Congratulations, Mr. President. You saved West Pakistan.”
Years later, Kissinger admitted that the US stance in the Bangladesh Liberation War was “a case history of political misjudgment”. Apparently, in Kissinger’s quest to prevent India from allying with the Soviet Union and forging a new ‘alliance’ with China, he backed Pakistan as a counterbalance in the first case and a facilitator in the second. This, however, also facilitated Pakistan’s genocidal campaign against Bengali rebels who were slaughtered and raped mercilessly. The horror was such that Bengali women lay like corpses while Pakistani men raped them. Among Henry Kissinger’s many failures which include his failure in intimidating India, and establish long-lasting cordial relations with China, his indifference towards the democratic struggles of smaller nations remains the greatest despite the fact that he himself being someone who was driven out of his own country since he was a Jew when the Nazis rose to power and prominence in Germany.
