DHAKA: Most obituaries that on Nov. 29 bid farewell to Henry Kissinger have omitted reference to his role in the war of independence of Bangladesh, where the prominent US secretary of state will remain seen as an enabler of massacres of civilians.
In 1971, Kissinger advised then President Richard Nixon to side with the Pakistani military dictator Gen. Yahya Khan in his war with Bangladesh, then East Pakistan.
According to the Bangladesh government, the war that eventually led to the nation’s independence came at a cost of 3 million lives, most of them civilians, including intellectuals, whom historians say were deliberately targeted.
The nine-month war also displaced 10 million people, a seventh of Bangladesh’s population at the time, forcing them to flee to neighboring India.
“Bangladesh will remember him as an accomplice and, to some extent, an instigator of the genocide that was committed against Bangladesh in 1971. He was an enemy of Bangladesh,” Touhid Hossain, former foreign secretary of Bangladesh, told Arab News.
Kissinger and the US administration turned a “blind eye to the genocide going on in Bangladesh. It was largely influenced by Kissinger,” Hossain added.
At the time, the state of Pakistan existed as a two-winged artificial entity — West Pakistan, which is today’s Pakistan, and East Pakistan, which is now Bangladesh — split in between by India.
After the 1970 elections yielded a democratic victory for ethnic Bengalis in East Pakistan and their leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was expected to become the prime minister of the whole country, the army generals ruling West Pakistan launched a military crackdown that turned into a mass slaughter of his supporters and of Bengali civilians.
The American support for Pakistan came because of Islamabad’s role as a mediator in the normalization of relations between the US and China.
“They could have done it without supporting the genocide,” Hossain said.
“It’s said that since Pakistan was trying to mediate the US-China relations during that period against the Soviet Union, that’s why from a geopolitical consideration, he turned a blind eye to the other things and went all for Pakistan.”
Kissinger and Nixon repeatedly ignored reports from Archer Blood, the US consul in Dhaka, as Pakistani forces, using US-made weapons, massacred thousands of people in the city.
“Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, both of them were complicit,” Dr. Imtiaz Ahmed, professor of international relations at Dhaka University, told Arab News.
“Blood sent the information about the ongoing genocide here. But he (Kissinger) didn’t pay much attention to that … Their point was not to disturb Yahya Khan as Khan was involved in his negotiating and bringing China into the global arena.”
Bangladesh has yet to hear an apology from the US over the role it played in enabling the killing of its civilians. Ahmed hoped that it would finally at least recognize the historical facts.
“The US didn’t recognize the genocide till today, as Kissinger was alive. Now, that he is no longer there, I think it opens up the possibility of the US recognizing the 1971 genocide as genocide,” he said.
“Kissinger played a complicit role in the genocide that took place in Bangladesh in 1971. There is no doubt about this.”