THE CASE AGAINST HENRY KISSINGER


Introductory Comments:
Dr. Mohammad Omar Farooq
Courtesy: Shetubondhon
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Shetubondhon/message/4813


 
Not too many people have been as influential in the area of international diplomacy and formulation of foreign policies in our contemporary time as Henry Kissinger. Christopher Hitchens has made a valuable contribution in making a thoroughly researched and documented case against Kissinger and his dubious as well as devious role as a foreign policy-making icon. Only Bangladesh-related part of Hitchens' article is presented below.
 
People from less powerful countries need to appreciate the reality as to how little control they have in shaping their own lives and how at the alter of the national interest of major powers even genocide can happen without appropriate or any accountability.
 

 
THE CASE AGAINST HENRY KISSINGER
(former secretary of state, United States)
 
Author: Christopher Hitchens
Harper's Magazine: March 2001
Courtesy: http://www.findarticles.com/m1111/1810_302/71250720/p1/article.jhtml

Crimes against humanity
 
On the twentieth of December 2000, as the first part of this article was being readied for publication, we contacted Henry Kissinger's office, stipulating our areas of interest and requesting an interview. Receiving no direct response from him, we wrote again and graciously offered to match the usual sultanlike fee that he charges for making pronouncements. This elicited only a pompous letter from a hireling, and we were left to assume that there are some subjects Kissinger prefers not to discuss, not even for ready money.
 
Whether or not their perpetrator cares to comment on them, the crimes discussed in Part I--the havoc visited on Indochinese civilians, the illegal subversion practiced on Chilean democracy --did in fact occur, and they set the tone for the remainder of his time in office. The murder of General Rene Schneider was soon eclipsed by more, and more gross, atrocities in Chile and the Southern Hemisphere. And the same paw print of unchecked power was to be found in Cyprus and Greece, in Bangladesh and East Timor, in the succeeding years. These are not, as is too often argued, the results of geopolitical forces for which no one is to blame. They are crimes for which Henry Kissinger is, and should be held, responsible, and they vividly insist on an accounting.

 
CHILE (PART II): DEATH IN THE SOUTH (see the complete text by clicking on the link given above)
CYPRUS:
 
BLOODBATH IN BANGLADESH
 
Cyprus was not the first instance in which a perceived need to mollify China outweighed even the most minimal concern for human life elsewhere. On April 6, 1971, a cable of protest was written from the United States Consulate in what was then East Pakistan, the Bengali "wing" of the Muslim state of Pakistan, known to its restive nationalist inhabitants by the name Bangladesh. The cable's senior signatory, the consul general in Dhaka, was named Archer Blood, though it might have become known as the Blood Telegram in any case. Sent directly to Washington, its purpose was, quite simply, to denounce the complicity of the United States government in genocide. Its main section read:
OUR GOVERNMENT HAS FAILED TO DENOUNCE THE SUPPRESSION OF DEMOCRACY. OUR    GOVERNMENT HAS FAILED TO TAKE FORCEFUL MEASURES TO PROTECT ITS CITIZENS    WHILE AT THE SAME TIME BENDING OVER BACKWARDS TO PLACATE THE WEST  PAK[ISTAN] DOMINATED OVERNMENT. OUR GOVERNMENT HAS EVIDENCED WHAT MANY WILL CONSIDER MORAL BANKRUPTCY, IRONICALLY AT A TIME WHEN THE USSR SENT  PRESIDENT YAHYA KHAN A MESSAGE DEFENDING DEMOCRACY, CONDEMNING THE ARREST  OF A LEADER OF A DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED MAJORITY PARTY. ... 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 AN 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....[Italics added.]
This was signed by twenty members of the United States' diplomatic equipe in Bangladesh and, on its arrival at the State Department, by a further nine senior officers in the South Asia division. It was the most public and the most strongly worded demarche, from State Department servants to the State Department, that has ever been recorded.
 
The circumstances fully warranted the protest. In December 1970, the Pakistani military elite had permitted the first open elections in a decade. The vote was easily won by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the leader of the Bengali-based Awami League, who gained a large overall majority in the proposed National Assembly. (In the East alone, it won 167 out of 169 seats.) This, among other things, meant a challenge to the political and military and economic hegemony of the Western "wing." The National Assembly had been scheduled to meet on March 3, 1971. On March 1, General Yahya Khan, head of the supposedly outgoing military regime, postponed its convening, which resulted in mass protests and nonviolent civil disobedience in the East.
 
On March 25, 1971, the Pakistani army struck at the Bengali capital of Dhaka. Having arrested and kidnapped Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and taken him to West Pakistan, it set about massacring his supporters. The foreign press had been preemptively expelled from the city, but much of the direct evidence of what then happened was provided via a radio transmitter operated by the American consulate. Archer Blood himself supplied an account of one episode directly to the State Department and to Henry Kissinger's National Security Council. Having readied the ambush, Pakistani regular soldiers set fire to the women's dormitory at the university and then mowed the occupants down with machine guns as they sought to escape. (The guns, along with all the other weaponry, had been furnished under American military-assistance programs.)
 
Other reports, since amply vindicated, were supplied to the London Times and Sunday Times by the courageous reporter Anthony Mascarenhas and flashed around a horrified world. Rape, murder, dismemberment, and the state murder of children were employed as deliberate methods of repression and intimidation. At least 10,000 civilians were butchered in the first three days. The eventual civilian death toll has never been placed at less than half a million and has been put as high as 3 million. Since almost all Hindu citizens were at risk by definition from Pakistani military chauvinism (not that Pakistan's Muslim co-religionists were spared), a vast movement of millions of refugees--perhaps as many as 10 million began to cross the Indian frontier. To summarize, then: first, the direct negation of a democratic election; second, the unleashing of a genocidal policy; third, the creation of a very dangerous international crisis. Within a short time, Ambassador Kenneth Keating, the ranking American diplomat in New Delhi, had added his voice to those of the dissenters. It was a time, he told Washington, when a principled stand against the authors of this aggression and atrocity would also make the best pragmatic sense. Keating, a former senator from New York, used a very suggestive phrase in his cable of March 29, 1971, calling on the administration to "PROMPTLY, PUBLICLY AND PROMINENTLY DEPLORE THIS BRUTALITY." It was "MOST IMPORTANT THESE ACTIONS BE TAKEN NOW," he warned, "PRIOR TO INEVITABLE AND IMMINENT EMERGENCE OF HORRIBLE TRUTHS."
Nixon and Kissinger acted quickly. That is to say, Archer Blood was immediately recalled from his post, and Ambassador Keating was described by the president to Kissinger, with some contempt, as having been "taken over by the Indians." In late April 1971, at the very height of the mass murder, Kissinger sent a message to General Yahya Khan, thanking him for his "delicacy and tact."

We now know of one reason why the general was so favored at a time when he had made himself--and his patrons--responsible for the grossest crimes against humanity. In April 1971, an American Ping-Pong team had accepted a surprise invitation to compete in Beijing, and by the end of that month, using the Pakistani ambassador as an intermediary, the Chinese authorities had forwarded a letter inviting Nixon to send an envoy. Thus there was one motive of realpolitik for the shame that Nixon and Kissinger were to visit on their own country for its complicity, in the extermination of the Bengalis.

Those who like to plead realpolitik, however, might wish to consider some further circumstances. There already was, and had been for some time, a "back channel" between Washington and Beijing. It ran through Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania; not a decorative choice but not, at that stage, a positively criminal one. To a serious person like Chou En-Lai, there was no reason to confine approaches to the narrow channel afforded by a blood-soaked (and short-lived, as it turned out) despot like the delicate and tactful Yahya Khan. Either Chou En-Lai wanted contact, in other words, or he did not. As Lawrence Lifschultz, the primary historian of this period, has put it:

Winston Lord, Kissinger's deputy at the National Security Council, stressed to investigators the internal rationalization developed within the
upper echelons of the Administration. Lord told [the staff of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace], "We had to demonstrate to China we were
a reliable government to deal with. We had to show China that we respect a mutual friend." How, after two decades of belligerent animosity with the
People's Republic, mere support for Pakistan in its bloody civil war was supposed to demonstrate to China that the U.S. "was a reliable government
to deal with" was a mystifying proposition which more cynical observers of the events, both in and outside the U.S. government, consider to have been
an excuse justifying the simple convenience of the Islamabad link--a link which Washington had no overriding desire to shift.

Second, the knowledge of this secret diplomacy and its accompanying privileges obviously freed the Pakistani general of such restraints as might have inhibited him. He told his closest associates, including his minister of communications, G. W. Choudhury, that his private understanding with Washington and Beijing would protect him. Choudhury later wrote, "If Nixon and Kissinger had not given him that false hope, he'd have been more realistic." Thus the collusion with him in the matter of China increases the direct complicity of Nixon and Kissinger in the massacres.

Only a reopened congressional inquiry with subpoena power could determine whether there was any direct connection, apart from the self-evident ones of consistent statecraft attested by recurring and reliable testimony, between the secret genocidal diplomacy of 1971 and the secret destabilizing diplomacy of 1975. The task of disproving such a connection, meanwhile, would appear to rest on those who believe that everything is an accident.
 


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Bangladesh 1971 Genocide Liberation Bangladesh 1971 Genocide Liberation Hindu Genocide East Pakistan
Bangladesh 1971 Genocide Liberation Bangladesh 1971 Genocide Liberation Hindu Genocide East Pakistan
Bangladesh 1971 Genocide Liberation Bangladesh 1971 Genocide Liberation Hindu Genocide East Pakistan
Bangladesh 1971 Genocide Liberation Bangladesh 1971 Genocide Liberation Hindu Genocide East Pakistan
Bangladesh 1971 Genocide Liberation Bangladesh 1971 Genocide Liberation Hindu Genocide East Pakistan
Bangladesh 1971 Genocide Liberation Bangladesh 1971 Genocide Liberation Hindu Genocide East Pakistan