by Gary J. Bass
The soldiers turned on the Bengali media. “They headed for a newspaper,” Schanberg remembers, “and then people were jumping out of the windows to get away from that. There wasn’t any paper that wasn’t supporting Mujib.” As Blood’s consulate reported, the Pakistani authorities violently targeted the local press, starting with pro–Awami League local newspapers like The People and Ittefaq. According to a survivor, tanks opened fire on Ittefaq’s building without warning. The newsprint would still be burning two days later, with a charred corpse lying outside.6
The army aimed to cow the foreign reporters into silence rather than kill them. Schanberg and the other captive journalists could only manage fragmentary reporting. On March 26, Pakistani troops stormed into the Intercontinental Hotel. An officer warned, “Anyone who leaves the hotel will be shot.” The soldiers tore down a Bangladesh flag and burned it. Schanberg remembers being herded up with the other journalists. With their guns on showy display, the soldiers packed the foreign correspondents onto planes for Karachi. When a stubborn reporter tried to sneak out of the hotel, a Pakistani soldier stopped him. “I have killed my countryman,” the soldier said. “Why shouldn’t I kill you?”7
There were only a few foreign correspondents who managed to dodge the Pakistani dragnet, including a reporter and a photographer from the Associated Press. The London Daily Telegraph’s reporter hid on the roof of the Intercontinental Hotel, toured the city’s devastation, and flew out two days later for West Pakistan; he evaded two strip searches by hiding his notes in his socks. Archer Blood later said that he sheltered one reporter who snuck across the border: “We hid him in our house so they could keep reporting.”8
Along the road to the airport, Schanberg saw burned huts and houses. “We didn’t see any bodies,” he recalls. “They had probably done something about that. It was clear they had killed a lot of people.” They were flown first to Ceylon (Sri Lanka today), where he tried to sneak off, and was caught in the airport by a Pakistani officer pointing a gun at him. “I wasn’t ready to die,” says Schanberg, “so I got back on the plane.” In Karachi, the Pakistanis tried to seize Schanberg’s notebooks, but he held on to them. He wrote up some of what he had seen for the New York Times—“a surprise attack with tanks, artillery and heavy machine guns against a virtually unarmed population”—but had to file his reporting from the safety of Delhi.9
Scott Butcher, Blood’s young political officer, was spending a quiet night with his wife at their lakeside home in a comfortable neighborhood not far from where Mujib lived—a certain target for the Pakistan army. Late at night on March 25, he got an ominous telephone call from a grim Schanberg, whom he knew from the latter’s coverage of the cyclone. The reporter, held by the army at the Intercontinental Hotel, tried to sneak out a bulletin. The military was tearing down Bangladeshi flags at the hotel; Yahya had fled; something was going on. Butcher tried but failed to get the word out. When Butcher called another consulate staffer, that official said he had a wounded person at his house.
Butcher heard a gunshot or two. There was clanging and banging outside. He ventured out to find local youths from the Awami League, hastily trying to build a barricade to protect Mujib, when the army came. This was going to be a major clash. Butcher had an instant of odd clarity: he was going to need all the sleep he could get. So he and his wife went directly to bed. Somehow they managed to fall into an uneasy slumber.
The army came on foot. Hushed, silent in the warm night, they crept past the makeshift barricades. Butcher and his wife did not hear them. “All of a sudden—machine-gun fire, right outside our bedroom window,” he remembers. “I went flying off our bed.” He hit the carpet, telling his wife to get down on the floor. They crawled into their infant daughter’s bedroom to get her. Hearing what sounded like heavy weapons, they stayed away from the windows, afraid of getting caught in the crossfire.
Butcher tried to phone out, but the line made a strange noise and went dead. He felt a wave of frustration: he was a political officer, used to walking around the city during strikes and demonstrations, but now he could not get out. After a while, he made his way up to the roof. He saw flames all over. The city was burning. “We could hear rhythmic firing which sounded like executions,” he says. “One time a jeep with machine guns went roaring down our street. We could hear them firing off some rounds.”
The army imposed a severe curfew. Anyone defying it would be shot. In a radio address on March 26, Yahya denounced Mujib and the Awami League as treasonous enemies of Pakistan. The army, he said, would hold the country together. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, returning to Karachi, supported the crackdown, declaring, “By the grace of God Pakistan has at last been saved.” Mujib was arrested and the Awami League banned, along with all political activity. In Dacca, the main radio station broke off its sitar music to broadcast stern martial law orders: no uncensored news, speeches, or posters; no guns, axes, knives, or lathis; no strikes or gatherings of five or more. As a Pakistani lieutenant colonel later noted, any Bengali alleged to be a rebel or Awami Leaguer was “sent to Bangladesh”—the euphemistic “code name for death without trial.”10
On the morning of March 27, Butcher finally went outside. He wanted to know what had happened to the man who had won the recent Pakistani elections. He saw shot-up vehicles outside Mujib’s house. The residence seemed empty, except for a few guards. The Bangladesh flag was gone. The Pakistan flag was flying.
THE DEAD
It would be two days before anyone from the U.S. consulate could venture out. Butcher had a diplomatic vehicle, with the protection of consular license plates, which finally got him to the office. The Americans drove through a charred and terrified city. They could hear gunfire. The shops were closed and the traffic was stopped. There were thousands of Bengalis trying to get out of Dacca. “We were just sort of awestruck by the extent of the damage,” says one U.S. official.11
The Americans knew many of the people being hounded or killed. “Arch made some very close friends there,” says Meg Blood. “A number of them were executed at their front doors. He lost friends. One was a Hindu gentleman who had been very generous about invitations to go out on the river and study the life that teems on the rivers.”
In Old Dacca, an area the size of two-dozen city blocks had been razed by gunfire. Pakistani soldiers had reportedly destroyed a Bengali police barracks, pounding it with heavy weapons and killing many, and had stormed Dacca University, whose leafy, shaded campus is ordinarily a relatively quiet sanctuary from the city’s tumult. Many students and professors had backed the Awami League. Iqbal Hall had evidently been blasted by mortar fire. The inside of the hall, which had been rumored to be a weapons stockpile for the Bengali nationalists, was scorched; a corpse lay nearby. (An American witness later reported that a few students in Iqbal Hall had been armed, which enraged the troops, although a Pakistan army brigadier testified that his fellow soldiers faced no resistance and acted out of “revenge and anger.”) Some of the worst killing of civilians, according to students, took place at Jagannath Hall, the Hindu dormitory.12
“I saw bodies rotting in the fields,” says Scott Butcher. “I saw a decomposing body left in a main street, obviously left there as an example.” He remembers the consulate’s public safety officer, a hard-bitten cop, with tears streaming down his face; the Bengalis he had worked with had all been killed. When a colleague said he had seen lots of bodies stacked up in a park, and asked Butcher if he wanted to come see them, Butcher said, “I’ve seen enough bodies.”
Blood, Butcher, and their team grimly got down to work, gathering reliable information from as many sources as they could find. Stymied by the curfew, without functioning telephones, they managed to check in with aid workers, people from the Pakistan SEATO Cholera Laboratory, professors, missionaries, and others. Discounting what they heard from Awami League partisans, the U.S. diplomats instead secured dependable eyewitness reports, many from trusted Americans. These people had seen dead bodies and burning shantytowns. One Ame
rican who worked at the posh Dacca Club’s golf course saw a dozen corpses. There were, Butcher remembers, “lots of stories of atrocities, of heavy-handed military action.”13
Butcher pressed farther out, trying to find out everything he could. It was hard to make sense of the chaos. In one village, he found a makeshift hospital, with people lying on cots with horrific, festering slash wounds. When he came across bodies rotting in grassland, he remembers, “I don’t know if they were Hindus, Bengalis, or Biharis.” Once, driving into Old Dacca, “We saw one man chasing another man with a cleaver. My friend saw the man get whacked in the head with the cleaver.” He had no idea who was who. In some cases, the consulate’s reporting on specific events may have been incomplete or wrong. Still, he says, the overall pattern was unambiguous: “It was very clear there was an excessively brutal putdown of this autonomy movement.” He says that “this military that was so restrained when they were being provoked, once they were unleashed, they were unleashed with a vengeance.”
Eric Griffel, the chief U.S. development officer, saw the army, unprovoked, open fire on children and fishermen, although somehow no one was hit. He remembers hearing shooting. He heard terrible rumors, “most of them true, actually.” Later, when the U.S. officials were able to meet with the army, who told them that everything was perfectly normal, Griffel’s impression was that they believed this would soon be over. “The Bengalis were cowardly,” he says, describing the military’s attitude. “It was sort of the view of the man on the horse for the shopkeeper.”14
Blood and his team found themselves almost completely isolated. They were a thousand miles away from their home embassy in Islamabad, with nobody from there allowed to come check up on them for several weeks. The mail was late and erratic. The telephones were still down. The Pakistani government needed to conceal, as much as possible, the atrocities from the outside world.15
The consulate’s only line out was a secret wireless transmitter, unauthorized by the Pakistani authorities. Unbeknownst to Yahya’s government, Blood could still send cables to the State Department. This was thanks to two American officials who had braved the streets on the first night of the crackdown, making it to the consulate despite being shot at several times by Pakistani troops. The U.S. embassy in Islamabad tried to conceal these illicit telecommunications, which risked the army’s fury. Even so, Blood allowed some local Bengalis to send and receive messages, to help friends in a moment of dire need.16
A few days into the slaughter, a State Department spokesman slipped up and mentioned information coming from the Dacca consulate about Pakistani troops firing and using tanks in the city. The U.S. ambassador to Pakistan exploded at this “dullard, thoughtless” mistake, “a stupid and colossal blunder.” He wrote that “our secret transmitter in Dacca has been compromised unless we assumed total stupidity on the part of Pak intelligence. If Dacca is forced off the air and if the situation there worsens, our personnel are going to be subjected to added jeopardy.”17
The Pakistani press blasted Blood. Pakistan’s foreign ministry complained that Blood’s cables were being cited publicly by Voice of America radio. In response, the U.S. government agreed to cover up the Dacca consulate’s reporting on the atrocities. The U.S. embassy in Islamabad assured Yahya’s government that it would henceforth keep Blood’s information to itself, and demanded that no U.S. officials in Dacca be quoted describing the atrocities. Blood nervously agreed, but warned that the real story would inevitably get out. The Voice of America gave priority to Pakistan’s rosy official version of events, often absurdly so. Henry Kissinger, muting Blood, asked his staff, “Are we going to keep VOA quiet about reports coming from our Consul?”18
“SELECTIVE GENOCIDE”
Yahya had a green light for his killing campaign. At the White House, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger knew that a fierce assault was starting, but made no move to stop or slow it.
On March 26, Kissinger told Nixon that the Pakistan army had moved in. Passing along the Islamabad embassy’s assessment that the military could endure over the long haul, he asked the president to consider asking Yahya to stop the bloodshed. This would win Bengali appreciation and ward off the domestic political risk that the killings “could arouse emotions like those surrounding Biafra over time.”19
It was a jolting analogy. Biafra, an oil-rich region of Nigeria that tried to secede in 1967, had faced a devastating military crackdown and blockade from the central Nigerian government. Despite gruesome press stories and images of starving Biafran civilians, Lyndon Johnson’s administration had stood against breaking up Nigeria, and had given only a modest amount of humanitarian aid as a sop to popular outrage. (Johnson said, “Just get those nigger babies off my TV set.”) In the end, in 1970, the Nigerian government crushed the resistance and held on to Biafra, at a horrific human cost. Although Nixon had done little more than Johnson, he was privately shocked at the ethnic toll in Biafra: “The Ibos got decimated, finished.” Now Kissinger—invoking Biafra on the first day of Pakistan’s crackdown, at the prompting of his aide Samuel Hoskinson—was under no illusions about how ugly Yahya’s crackdown would be.20
In a Situation Room meeting, Kissinger said that he had talked to Nixon: “His inclination is the same as everybody else’s. He doesn’t want to do anything. He doesn’t want to be in the position where he can be accused of having encouraged the split-up of Pakistan. He does not favor a very active policy. This probably means that we would not undertake to warn Yahya against a civil war.” State Department officials pointed out that there was already considerable anti-American suspicion in West Pakistan that the United States was secretly plotting to break up Pakistan—even though the United States was in fact secretly plotting just the opposite. The group agreed not to do anything to minimize the carnage or ask Yahya to call off or restrain his troops.21
There was a consensus—spanning Kissinger’s staff, the State Department, and U.S. military intelligence—that Yahya could never win his civil war. Despite this, nobody wanted to caution him to back off. The State Department correctly predicted that the Pakistan army might be able to hold Dacca, but the overwhelmingly popular Bengali nationalists would seize the countryside. Conferring with these U.S. officials, Kissinger appeared to grasp the inevitability of an independent Bangladesh emerging at the end of the civil war.22
But Kissinger took the opposite line when he was speaking to the president alone. A day later, he told him that “it looks at the moment as if Yahya has gotten control.” Nixon was surprised: “Really? How?” Kissinger told the president, “The Bengalis aren’t very good fighters I guess.”23
Blood’s gory reporting got no response from Washington. At first, he figured that his superiors were unhappy to hear damning accounts of the Pakistan army’s actions. Then it began to dawn on him and his staff that maybe their bosses simply did not believe them.
Scott Butcher was baffled at the studious silence from Washington. “We’re sending in all these spot reports on incidents, and not getting any particular reaction,” he remembers. “Arch is engaging at the higher policy level, and still not getting any reaction.” Butcher says, “We thought it was just a silence benefiting the authorities.”
“March 1971 was the most horrible month of my life,” Blood later wrote. He remembered the anger of his consulate, mixed with fluctuating hope and despair. Meg Blood recalls that her husband’s frustration was beginning to show: “He was expecting a reaction that he wasn’t getting.”24
In response, Archer Blood decided not to soft-pedal his reports. Instead, he sent in even tougher cables. The army, he wrote, had acted “often with ruthless brutality.” A consulate staffer had witnessed “heavy firing of automatic weapons by troops,” much of it “seemingly at random.”25
The next day, Blood reported an army attempt to round up all Awami League leaders, including parliamentarians and students. There was still gunfire and explosions, although less intense than on the first nights of the crackdown. Despite daunting army chec
kpoints, a steady flow of people hastily fled the city, mostly from the Bengali Hindu minority but also “panic-stricken Muslims.” Blood had heard of “large-scaled looting, pillaging and murder … against Hindus and Bengalis.” The city was awash in stories of atrocities. One Bengali who worked with the consulate tearfully told Blood how the army had burst into his home to search for weapons, and had fatally bayoneted his seventeen-year-old sister when she tried to protect him.26
On March 28, Blood reached a breaking point. He was overwhelmed with frustration and anger. “For three days we had been flooding Islamabad and Washington with graphic reports of a vicious military action, only to be answered with a deafening silence,” he later recalled. “I was suddenly tired of shouting into the dark and I decided to ratchet the intensity of our reporting up a notch.”27
Thus Blood sent a furious cable with a jolting subject line: “Selective Genocide.” He was not a lawyer, but the use of the word “genocide” was meant to shock, to slice through the anodyne bureaucratic niceties of State Department cables.28
Blood held nothing back: “Here in Dacca we are mute and horrified witnesses to a reign of terror by the Pak military.” (Within the U.S. government, Blood had hardly been mute, but he could not protest to Pakistani officials.) He warned of evidence that the military authorities were “systematically eliminating” Awami League supporters “by seeking them out in their homes and shooting them down.” He recounted the killing of politicians, professors, and students. The streets were flooded with Hindus and others trying desperately to get out of Dacca. This assault, he wrote, could not be justified by military necessity: “There is no r[e]p[ea]t no resistance being offered in Dacca to military.”29
