The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Archer Blood and the 1971 Bangladesh Genocide
In April 1971, Archer Blood, the US consul general in Dhaka, sent Washington the "Blood Telegram", a formal dissent cable signed by his staff that accused the US government of ignoring genocide in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger kept backing Pakistan's military ruler, Yahya Khan, their secret channel to China, and Blood was recalled.
The Pakistani army's crackdown, which began with Operation Searchlight in March 1971, killed hundreds of thousands of people, with estimates up to 3 million, many of them from East Pakistan's Hindu minority, and drove about 10 million refugees into India.
Chapters
00:00 What was the Blood Telegram?
01:05 A split nation: East and West Pakistan
01:45 Pakistan's struggle for democracy
02:25 Cyclone Bhola, 1970
03:00 The 1970 election results
04:23 Nixon's choice: military dictatorship vs democracy
04:55 Nixon's wilderness years
05:13 Presidential racism
06:00 Pro-democracy protests in East Pakistan
06:30 Operation Searchlight
07:00 Mujib arrested
07:38 The Dhaka consulate's secret telegrams
08:20 Yahya Khan's Beijing mission
09:00 Ruchir Sharma on Operation Searchlight
09:43 The dissent cable
10:20 The Bengali refugee crisis in India
11:00 What Indira Gandhi kept from Indians
Read the full essay
The Birth of Bangladesh: The 1971 War, with full sources.
