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

““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.””

“Wikipedia: The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide”

“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!””

“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.””

“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!””

“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.”

“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.”

“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.’ ””

“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.””

“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.”

“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.”

“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.””

“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.”

“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.””

“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.”

“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.””

“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.””

“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.””

“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.””

“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.””