Pulitzer award winning New York Times journalist Tim Weiner, in his latest interview with an Indian news outlet, has said former US president Richard Milhous Nixon “did not give a fig for the 1971 genocide in Bangladesh.”
While discussing on Weiner's latest book One Man Against The World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon with the Times of India on Sunday, the journalists came up with the statement.
Asked why did Nixon and Kissinger ignore the genocide of millions of Bengalis, Weiner replied: “He didn't give a fig for the genocide that was being committed in present-day Bangladesh, crimes for which people are still being tried and convicted.
“The origins of this are simply loyalty to Yahya for smuggling Kissinger to China.”
Replying to another query on Nixon's antipathy for India, especially towards the then Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, he said: “We knew ages ago that Nixon called Indira Gandhi a bitch. He caused a great tilt in US ties towards Pakistan but initially very few people knew about it aside from Nixon and Kissinger.
“Yahya Khan knew, the Shah of Iran knew and the King of Jordan knew. Now there are fresh new details about the intensity of the tilt, particularly the ways in which Kissinger and Nixon talk about drawing Chinese to the Indian border and recapitulating 1962.”
"We knew ages ago that Nixon called Indira Gandhi a bitch"
The journalist further said: “They start staring down the barrel of World War Three in the name of Yahya facilitating the US opening to China. They do this despite knowing there was no question who was going to win this (India-Pakistan) war.”
Describing the effect of the war on Nixon administration, Weiner said: “The India-Pak war, like Vietnam, has two aspects. There was a war abroad and a war at home.
“The war at home was happening between the Joint Chiefs of Staff at Pentagon and the White House and National Security Council, because the mistrust Nixon had for his generals and admirals became mutual.”
“The chiefs thought the covert arming of the Pakistanis was a dangerous mistake and playing the Chinese card against Indians would have gone out of hand,” he added.
More than four decades after he became the only US president ever to be forced out of office, Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, “willfully ignored and tried to denigrate the many warnings and ample evidence provided by their own consular officers, of atrocities committed by the Pakistan army during 1971.”
The Blood Telegram by Gary Bass is the best single account of how the United States responded to the 1971 Bangladesh independence war.
In his book, Bass said for Nixon and Kissinger, the world was a superpower chessboard where the lives of millions of Bangladeshi civilians and refugees amounted to little more than expendable pawns in their obsession with global power plays and the Soviet Union.
The 1971 war left three million people dead and around a quarter million women raped.