by Gary J. Bass
Dacca was a great place for adventuring American reporters too. Sydney Schanberg, the New York Times reporter covering the Indian subcontinent, had wound up there by accident. With piercing eyes and a tidy beard, he is intense and indignant, fiercely moralistic, holding a deep affection for the peoples he has covered in his long career as a reporter. After graduating from Harvard and spending two years in the U.S. Army, he started out as a copy boy at the New York Times, and wound up staying for twenty-six years. As a cub reporter, his fondest hope was to go to Africa, where he could roam and report widely. Instead, the Times foreign desk offered him the exact opposite: Poland, in the Soviet deep freeze. But by a stroke of luck, the job of Delhi bureau chief came vacant, and Schanberg, in his late thirties, grabbed the chance. He is famous for covering the murderous fall of Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge in 1975—a nightmarish experience that was turned into a movie, The Killing Fields—but by then he would have already seen plenty of that kind of horror in East Pakistan.12
DEMOCRACY IN PAKISTAN
Pakistan was in those days a country divided. The British, leaving India, had decided to create a single Muslim state in the subcontinent. To do so, they had to lump together Punjabis, Pashtuns, Baluchis, and Sindhis in the northwest with Bengalis far away in the east. Out of the bloody chaos of Partition, Pakistan was born as a cartographic oddity: a unitary state whose two territories did not connect. West Pakistan was separated from East Pakistan by a thousand miles of India—a gigantic enemy with bitter memories of the displacement of millions of people in Partition in 1947, not long earlier. A senior Indian diplomat execrated the British for leaving behind “this geographical monstrosity.” People joked that only three things kept Pakistan united: Islam, the English language, and Pakistan International Airlines—and PIA was the strongest.13
Scott Butcher, new to the region, was surprised by the strangeness of this bifurcated nation. His first stop was in West Pakistan, to check in with the embassy in Islamabad and the consulates in Karachi and Lahore. It was hot beyond belief, like stepping into a furnace. It was 111 degrees in Lahore, he remembers, and they said it was a cool spell. Everything seemed to him brown, sandy, parched, and dry. Then he flew on to Dacca, the capital of East Pakistan, terrain roughly the size of Florida. It was completely different. “It was so emerald green it almost hurt your eyes,” he says. It was also unbearably hot, in the heat of June 1969, but swampy and moistly tropical. Another official in the Dacca consulate remembers “wonderful rice paddy fields, rivers with fantastic dhows with tattered sails. Everything was so flat you could see what looked like boats sailing through rice paddy fields. They were actually miles away.”
The differences were more than geographic. The central government, the main military institutions, and the established bureaucracy were based in West Pakistan, far from the concerns of the Bengalis. West Pakistanis spoke many languages, the commonest being Urdu, while in East Pakistan almost everyone spoke Bengali. The whole country was dominated by Punjabi elites in West Pakistan, to the resentment of Bengalis in East Pakistan. The Bengalis were mostly Muslim, but in an officially Islamic nation, there was some suspicion of the sizable Bengali Hindu minority. While West Pakistan nursed grudges against India, the Bengalis in East Pakistan took little interest in that feud.14
Many Bengalis had started off as loyal Pakistani citizens, but they came to think that they were worse off economically than their fellow citizens in West Pakistan, and found their own ethnic traditions unwelcome. West Pakistan’s military elite scorned the “Bingos” as weak and unmartial. Bengali nationalists grumbled that they had replaced British colonialism with West Pakistani colonialism.15
It would have been hard to make a united Pakistan function even if it had the best government in the world. It did not. The country had to withstand civilian leaders who high-handedly tried to mandate Urdu as the national language, infuriating Bengalis; and then, even worse, was the imposition of martial law in 1958. Since the British had tended to favor Punjabis as their chosen warriors, there were few Bengalis in Pakistan’s military. The generals stifled the country, banning political parties and making it impossible for Bengalis to voice their grievances as they had loudly done before.16
Democracy was always going to be a terrible challenge for a country that was literally split in two. There were plenty of enthusiasts for democracy in both wings of the country, but they faced tough basic demographic facts: East Pakistan, with about seventy-five million people, was more populous than West Pakistan, which had a population of some sixty-one million. The east demanded its proper democratic representation; the west feared losing its grip; and so constitutional negotiations deadlocked. When Bengalis called for ending martial law and holding elections, they also hoped to turn their numbers into political clout.17
By the time Yahya seized power in March 1969, East Pakistan was in almost constant turmoil, with Bengali street protesters facing off against the army. When Archer Blood returned to Dacca, he found a much darker mood among his old Bengali acquaintances, including Shahudul Haque, now a restless young nationalist. The old economic resentments had simmered for too long, and after a ruinous war with India in 1965, many Bengalis were sour about being asked to take risks for the remote cause of Kashmir.18
Yahya was not just Pakistan’s president, but also its foreign minister, defense minister, and chief martial law administrator. Still, he was far from the most antidemocratic general to rule Pakistan. Soon after taking office, he began working to end martial law and yield power to a new elected government, and then announced historic new elections. Blood and many of his staffers were impressed, but this democratic turn elicited no particular enthusiasm from Yahya’s friend in the White House. “I hope you keep a strong Presidency as in France,” Richard Nixon told him. Yahya agreed: “Without it Pakistan would disintegrate.”19
The elections across the country were, after a postponement, finally set for December 7, 1970. Throughout Pakistan, a remarkably boisterous campaign went into full swing. As the balloting approached, Yahya was relaxed and expansive. “I think they miscalculated the way it would go,” says Samuel Hoskinson, the White House aide. “That West Pakistani elite were quite capable of deluding themselves as well. They weren’t close enough to it. Or they had faulty information from their own people—sugarcoating bad news for the bosses. I don’t think they had a good appreciation of that situation.”20
Then a cataclysm struck. On November 13, not long after Yahya’s visit to Washington to win U.S. arms, a massive cyclone devastated East Pakistan.
The gales shrieked to 150 miles an hour, followed by a monstrous tidal wave over twenty feet high. “There are still thousands of bodies of cattle and hundred of bodies of people strewn on beaches and countryside,” Blood’s consulate reported over a week later, with an official in a low-flying helicopter staring in horror at the devastation below. “[D]ead and alive cattle and dead and alive humans all mixed in one area.” Scott Butcher heard stories of bodies thrown thirty feet into the trees, and of corpses found sixty miles out at sea. By the estimation of U.S. humanitarian agencies, at least 230,000 people died—fully 15 percent of the population of the areas hit by the storm. The State Department put the death toll even higher, at half a million, many of them drowned. One U.S. colonel with four years of battle experience in Vietnam said that it was worse than anything he had seen there.21
“There was nothing to see after that water went through,” recalls Meg Blood, who went out to deliver emergency supplies. “People were up in trees holding their children, and the trees were swept clean away. There was nothing to see. The homes were mostly thatch, on the water, and they were the first to go, to be swept away.” Approaching the stricken zone in a helicopter, she had the image of a huge chocolate pudding dotted with raisins. As she got closer, she realized with horror that the dots were actually human corpses.
After the natural disaster came the man-made disaster: the central Pakistani government’s feeble response. Fully 90 percent
of the area’s inhabitants needed relief aid. A few days after the cyclone struck, Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times went down to an island in East Pakistan that had been razed by the storm. He heard stories of a baby torn from its mother’s arms. But Schanberg was appalled by the Pakistani government’s lassitude about delivering aid. Eric Griffel, the development officer who ran the large U.S. relief effort, says, “The West Pakistani government didn’t do anything, and other countries did a lot, led by our own.”22
“It was almost as if they just didn’t care,” Archer Blood remembered later. The international response—from the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and other countries—was much more visible than Pakistan’s meager effort. American and Soviet helicopters were particularly conspicuous. There was huge resentment among Bengalis, notes Griffel, who saw foreigners doing more than their own government. Griffel says, “The cyclone was the real reason for the final break.”23
Blood and Griffel’s teams worked day and night, fanning out across the stricken region. The Nixon administration gave substantial aid. U.S. government officials, privately frustrated at the Pakistani government, worried that U.S. emergency measures were getting swamped by complaints about stalled aid. One of Blood’s officials in Dacca noted that three months later, nothing whatsoever was being done for the victims.24
The Bengalis’ alienation was all but complete. Even the Nixon administration secretly admitted that Pakistan’s government had flubbed it. After getting roasted in the press, Yahya belatedly flew to East Pakistan to take personal command of the disaster relief. His brief appearance did not go well. Blood remembered disgustedly that Yahya had stopped in fleetingly on the way back from a China trip. “There were still bodies floating in inland rivers, mass graves being dug with backhoes, everyone wearing masks because of the smell, throwing lime on it,” says Schanberg. “And he was walking through with polished boots and a walking stick with a gold knob. These people didn’t have any gold anything. We asked a couple questions, and he brushed us off with blah-blah, then went home.” Schanberg asked a Pakistani army captain why the military had not come sooner. The captain explained that if they had, India would have attacked. Schanberg was stunned. “It just was totally paranoid,” he says.25
At the White House, Kissinger warned Nixon that the deep antagonism of Bengalis for the central Pakistani government was now much worse. They worried that conspicuous U.S. emergency relief efforts could undermine Yahya’s authority. The election, they knew, was just two weeks away.26
On December 7, millions of Pakistanis went to the polls, although some of the most devastated areas of East Pakistan had to delay their voting until January. The timing could not have been worse. Bengali politicians of all stripes slammed Yahya’s government for ignoring their people in their hour of need. The voting gave Bengali nationalists a chance to shout their rejection of West Pakistan.27
The leader of the Bengalis was Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman, who led a popular mainstream Bengali nationalist party called the Awami League. He was a middle-class Bengali Muslim, whose lifelong activism had cost him almost ten years in Pakistani jails, making him a hero to many Bengalis. “Mujib’s very appearance suggested raw power,” cabled Blood, “a power drawn from the masses and from his own strong personality.” He was tall and sturdy, with rugged features and intense eyes. Blood found him serene and confident amid the turmoil, but eager for power. “On the rostrum he is a fiery orator who can mesmerize hundreds of thousands in a pouring rain,” Blood wrote. “Mujib has something of a messianic complex which has been reinforced by the heady experience of mass adulation. He talks of ‘my people, my land, my forests, my rivers.’ It seems clear that he views himself as the personification of Bengali aspirations.”28
Mujib had distilled Bengali nationalist grievances into “Six Points,” calling for democracy, and also for autonomy for both wings of a federal country, with the central government restricted to running only foreign affairs and defense. East Pakistan would be able to engage in trade and aid talks, and even to raise its own militia. The Awami League campaigned hard on their Six Point program. Mujib went to the cyclone areas to personally supervise the Awami League’s own relief efforts, and returned to Dacca to declare that the Pakistani government was guilty of murder: “They have a huge army, but it is left to British marines to bury our dead.” When Blood met with Mujib, the Bengali nationalist leader predicted with preternatural confidence that he would sweep almost every seat in East Pakistan.29
That would not spell a Cold War defeat for the United States. The Awami League was well known as moderate and pro-American. Blood described the League as center-left, a temperate and middle-class party with no animus against the United States. Mujib liked to reminisce about his affection for Americans and his love of San Francisco.30
The 1970 balloting was a tremendous experiment in democracy. This was the first direct election in Pakistan’s twenty-three years of independence, with all adults allowed to vote—including, for the first time, women. The people of Pakistan were to choose a Constituent Assembly, which would have the difficult job of drawing up a new constitution for the fragile country. Yahya might have tried to rig the voting, or used the cyclone as an excuse for an indefinite postponement of the elections, but he opted to allow this democratic moment.31
In West Pakistan, the rulers wondered whether Mujib really wanted autonomy, as he repeatedly said, or an independent state of Bangladesh—a debate that goes on to this day. Blood and the Dacca consulate thought that the Bengalis could be satisfied with autonomy. (The Indian government also believed this.) Yahya and many West Pakistani leaders, however, suspected that Mujib’s Six Points would prove to be merely the first six steps toward outright secession. Late in 1970, suspicious Pakistani intelligence agencies captured Mujib in a breathtakingly frank moment. They played their tape to Yahya, who was shocked to hear Mujib declare, “My aim is to establish Bangladesh.” He would “tear” Yahya’s federalist framework for upcoming constitutional negotiations “into pieces as soon as the elections are over. Who could challenge me once the elections are over?” Yahya, reeling, growled to one of his top political aides, “I shall fix Mujib if he betrays me.”32
An almost equally audacious electoral campaign took place in West Pakistan. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, a former foreign minister heading up the Pakistan People’s Party, assembled a coalition for dramatic change, drawing on conservative rural leaders and urban radicals. Bhutto was handsome, sardonic, urbane, and rich—an unlikely background for such a volatile populist. He had earlier been thrown in jail by the military, but was now back out. Yahya may have hoped that a PPP victory would allow him to stay in power, but Bhutto had his own fierce ambitions. He championed a leftist and tough vision of Pakistan, with a strong central government and a foreign policy that stood bitterly against India. Despite his Berkeley education, he was firmly anti-American. So Nixon loathed him: “the son-of-a-bitch is a total demagogue.” (Kissinger, more cautiously, described him as “Violently anti-Indian. Pro-Chinese.”) Blood skewered him with a single word: “malevolent.”33
Blood, who adored elections, was thrilled at the widespread excitement as Pakistanis got their first chance to choose their government. There were plenty of rallies and parades, with Mujib and other candidates in full cry, but relatively little violence. The major party leaders got to broadcast speeches on radio and television, in their choice of two out of three languages: English, Urdu, or Bengali. “It was raucous and colorful,” Butcher says, enjoying the memory. Blood was touched when a Bengali historian explained that the grinding experience of poverty had been relieved by the campaigning: powerful people asked for your vote, gave you respect, and promised to govern with your consent. You were no longer told that you did not know what was good for you.34
When the big day came, U.S. officials in Dacca were pleasantly surprised: the voting was impressively legitimate, the best the country had ever seen. The soldiers and policemen at the polling stations were there only to keep
the peace, and Blood saw no signs of voter intimidation. Everyone agreed that it had been free and fair. Women voted in droves. “The elections were remarkably free,” says Butcher. “It was fairly unique, turning a military government to civilian authority. It was a extraordinary thing.”35
The Awami League won hugely. Out of 169 contested seats in East Pakistan, the League took all but two, winning an outright majority in the National Assembly. Mujib stood to be prime minister of all of Pakistan. “I was not surprised that Mujibur Rahman won easily and tremendously in East Pakistan,” recalls Eric Griffel. “There was tremendous Bengali pride in Mujibur.”36
Yahya’s military dictatorship got trounced. His preferred candidates did miserably in both wings of the country. Humiliated, he was ruling over people who had rejected him east and west. Meanwhile the Pakistani military—some of them more hard-line than Yahya—recoiled at the prospect of Mujib running East Pakistan, demanding autonomy and resources, and perhaps making friends with India.37
Bhutto had ridden a populist wave to an impressive victory in West Pakistan, but because East Pakistan was more populous, Mujib won twice as many seats. The ambitious Bhutto thus found Mujib’s triumph blocking his way. While Yahya and Bhutto were cutthroat rivals—a conservative, pro-American military man pitted against a leftist, anti-American firebrand—they were driven together in the panicky days after the election by a shared hostility toward India and a fear of losing East Pakistan.38
Blood, worried that Mujib would overplay his hand, coolly put off congratulating him for weeks. (He would later fault an exultant Mujib for a “blind faith in ‘people power.’ ”) When an Awami League leader asked if the United States would mediate if East Pakistan declared its independence, Blood flatly refused. He wanted nothing to do with secession, and hewed to the U.S. official line: one Pakistan.39
