As in Bangladesh, so in Georgia
13th September 2008
By Premen Addy
Bangladesh 1971, Georgia 2008: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose (The more things change, the more they remain the same). The US postured that the territorial integrity of its clients -- Yahya Khan's Pakistan and Mikhail Saakashvili's Georgia -- had to be upheld, whatever their crimes and misdemeanours, with the contrived spectre of Moscow looming menacingly.
Pakistan, homeland for the sub-continent's Muslims, was a dream that had given way to a deepening nightmare of ethnic strife. The seamless robe of Islamic unity was rend asunder by the forces of linguistic and cultural identity. The primordial hatred of 'Hindu' India -- the Punjabi-dominated military's traction to keep a disparate nation on course -- was the irresistible force up against the immovable object of Bengali nationalism.
Pakistan's military rulers were weaned on generous supplies of American arms. The country was a member of the US-led regional cold war alliances such as CENTO and SEATO, both of which were directed principally at the USSR, but were also levers against India's will to pursue an independent foreign policy free of Washington's and Moscow's control.
So appalling were the Pakistan military's massacres in East Pakistan (three million dead and 10 million displaced refugees in India) that US diplomats in Dhaka and New Delhi appealed to their superiors in Washington to take a principled moral stand. Mr Henry Kissinger, in his White House Years, told how the US Consul-General in Dhaka, Archer K Blood, was transferred on President Richard Nixon's orders, while Kenneth Keating, the US Ambassador in India, was ridiculed for having been "taken over by the Indians."
Anthony Mascarenhas, a Pakistani journalist at the time, fled to London with his family, having witnessed the horrors at first-hand. He relates the following scene in The Rape of Bangladesh. "Just before the curfew was sounded at 6 o'clock, I saw Sebastian and his three companions, all tied by a single rope, march down the street and into the compound of the Circuit House (in Dhaka). Minutes later I heard screams and the maddening sound of clubs beating flesh and bone. Then the screaming stopped, as though turned off with a switch. The silence, to my anguished ears, suddenly became the loudest sound in the world. It has echoed a million times and it still blows my mind."
The Indo-Pakistani war that broke out on the night of December 3, 1971, began with a pre-emptive Pakistani bombing attack on selected Indian airfields, but ended a fortnight later in a comprehensive Indian victory. Nixon took a pro-Pakistan tilt throughout the conflict, during which he despatched an nuclear-armed unit of the US Seventh Fleet into the Bay of Bengal in a bid to intimidate India. Keeping her cool, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi played her Soviet strategic card with consummate skill and weathered the crisis. The hallowed construct of India-Pakistan strategic parity had been demolished.
The delusional Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto -- like Mikhail Saakashvili, essentially a sheep in wolf's clothing -- issued a clarion call for a thousand-year Pakistani jihad against India, the ensuing war with India being his perceived tryst with destiny (he bore with good cheer the cross of a Napoleon complex). On the eve of its outbreak, one of his confidants in President Yahya Khan's office informed him in a secret message: "Any day now you should become the Prime Minister to our great delight," and that "once the back of Indian forces is broken in the East, Pakistan should occupy the whole of eastern India and make it a permanent part of East Pakistan... This will also provide a physical link with China. Kashmir should be taken at any price, even the Sikh Punjab and turned into Khalistan". (Zulfi Bhutto: His Life and Times by Stanley Wolpert. The author was given access to the Bhutto archive by his widow Nusrat and daughter Benazir.)
Bhutto's inimitable voice lent authenticity to the text: "Let us not forget the whole background and history of India compared to our own. In the remotest of our village the humblest of our people possess a self-confidence, a ready willingness to march forward into India -- a spirit the equivalent of which cannot be found on the other side... Great and terrible scourges have come to India from this side... every invasion from this side has defeated India."
Mr Kissinger, with Swiftian irony, no doubt, described Bhutto as a man with a world-class mind, while Oxford University, under the prompting of its chancellor Harold Macmillan, a former British Prime Minister, came perilously close to conferring an honorary doctorate on him in 1974. The human rights banalities of ministerial commerce remain a source of Orwellian wonder.
Washington invests in Mr Saakashvili's Georgia what it has done many times over in Pakistan for the past 60 years. The confection of US realpolitik and criminality (the CIA destroyed Swiss records of Dr AQ Khan's trafficking of nuclear weapons technology and was silently complicit in his clandestine proliferation activities) is destroying the latter and may well debilitate the former: The timeless tragedy of Hubris and Nemesis.
There are, of course, unique features to the Pakistan story. One recalls Abdul Gaffar Chowdhury, an eminent Bangladeshi journalist, who left Dhaka for Kolkata to escape the maelstrom, speaking of his disappointment at discovering a lack of enthusiasm among many Indian Muslims for his country's liberation struggle.
I was reminded of this after reading a recent attack on Mrs Indira Gandhi's support for it by Islamist JS Bandookwala, a blunderbuss much given to the sport of shooting himself in the foot. He was simply following in the footsteps of Pakistani Marxist Eqbal Ahmed, who led a demonstration against the Concert for Bangladesh, organised by George Harrison and Ravi Shankar, in New York to raise funds for the suffering Bengali masses.
Likewise, certain British broadsheets were none too pleased at the concert in Tskhinvali, in celebration of South Ossetian freedom. As galling for them was the sight of the world famous conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, Valery Gerglev (a South Ossetian, as it happens), leading the St Petersburg's Marinsky Orchestra, amid the waving of Russian flags, in a programme which included Tchaikovsky's Pathétique symphony followed by Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony, written on Stalin's orders to rouse the Soviet people against the Nazi invaders.
Tblisi, meanwhile, shook to the growl of US Vice-President Dick Cheney, while Tory leader David Cameron was out and about winning hearts and minds in Islamabad -- human subtext to the divine comedy.
Source: Daily Pioneer