It fills my heart with pride to say that not everybody went along with Kissinger's policies. Archer Blood was back then the consul-general in Dhaka, East Pakistan. He witnessed the beginning of a massacre that would take millions of lives. The Pakistan army, faced with a rebellion, slaughtered thousands in an attack on the University of Dacca and the barracks of Bengali police. Columns of troops followed the roads throughout the country, burning and killing.
Blood in his first cable described what he termed a "selective genocide," alerted President Richard Nixon and national security adviser Henry Kissinger to what was happening and urged them to pressure Gen. Yahya Khan, the Pakistani dictator, to stop the killing. His cable, dated March 28, 1971, wrote:
"Here in Dacca we are mute and horrified witnesses to a reign of terror of the Pak military ..."
Problem was that Nixon and Kissinger had decided to support Pakistan as a counter to the Russian influence and didn't want to hear what Blood was reporting.
That cable was followed by another, signed by 20 Americans diplomats stationed in East Pakistan, decrying the official American silence as serving "neither our moral interests broadly defined nor our national interests narrowly defined ..."
A courageous and upright diplomat, Archer Blood was never seen again in any forefront. He was soon called back of Washington and put in the doghouse, for as long as Nixon was in the White House. When he died, in retirement, there was family, a few old friends and an entire nation to mourn his passing, but the nation that grieved for him was not his own. It was Bangladesh.
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