Responsibility to Act

In early 1971 the U.S. Consul-General to East Pakistan, Archer Blood, first became acutely aware that the government which he was tasked to vet on behalf of his own government, to keep abreast of all matters cultural, social, political, and to so advise his State Department, was beginning a relentless campaign against the Bengalis living in East Pakistan. The restive Bengalis who, when Pakistan separated from India in 1947, found themselves part of Pakistan, found good reason to want separation from Pakistan; Muslim like themselves, but viewing the Bengalis as ethnically and culturally inferior.

Pakistan set about punishing the Bengalis for daring to believe they had a right to become independent from Pakistan, and from a regime which held their language, culture, ethnic origins in contempt. A government which never regarded them as needful of aid or assistance as a result of having to cope with natural catastrophes, leaving them to fend for themselves, but insisting that they remain a part of Pakistan's sovereign geography.

When the crackdown on Bengals unfolded thousands of people were shot, bombed or burned to death in Dacca. Fires were blazing across the city while machine guns and tank guns were heard everywhere. Dutifully, the U.S. consulate sent along detailed accounts of killings at Dacca University where professors were murdered and students mowed down in their rooms or as they fled the carnage. The residence hall left in flames while the young students were machine-gunned.

"At least two mass graves on campus. Stench terrible", Consul-General Blood cabled to Washington. Reaction there was none, because Pakistan was an ally of the United States. Then-President Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had poor relations with India, selecting Pakistan as their partner in regional affairs. Eventually Mr. Blood and his consulate staff formally declared "strong dissent" with the White House and the State Department over the "deafening silence".

This was the moral atmosphere that prevailed at that time in the Washington corridors of power. And diplomacy's purpose though meant to keep state officials informed in bilateral relations between nations, also had another purpose, offering heads-up alerts when governments engaged in behaviours that were clearly beyond the borders of humanitarian concerns. We see their counterparts now in the current American administration where traditional allies of the U.S. have been cast aside.

The Bengali slaughter led to a major war between Pakistan and India. India attempting to intercede on behalf of the Bengalis, who were, before the British-mandated Partition part of India, as was Pakistan. The death toll among Bengalis, who were soon to become Bangladeshis, with the rise of an independent state of Bangladesh has been conservatively estimated at 200,000 although figures rise to ten times that, in some circles.

The world thinks of the United States as the great benign moderator, guiding the international community toward stability, away from conflict, through its intercession as the reluctant, but powerfully persuasive global policeman. That global policeman failed on too many occasions when genocidal atrocities have taken place in the past, from Armenia to the Holocaust, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Syria.

And now the global policeman, under the Obama administration is treading lightly with Iran.

Where secretive manipulations and bland denials have succeeded in 'persuading' the Obama administration that there is nothing to be gained by ongoing sanctions against a regime whose resolve is that no power on Earth will stop them from acquiring nuclear weapons since Allah has decreed that it must indeed, as a singularly aspiring global actor, to inspire the kind of respect that evolves from fear.