Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General, invoked Article 99 of the UN Charter for an emergency session of the Security Council to call for a humanitarian ceasefire in the ongoing conflict in Gaza. It was vetoed by the US.
At the UN General Assembly, the opinion was again near unanimous calling for a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza in which almost all nations, including India, were in favour of it with only ten against. The outcome is that the war continues unabated creating refugees out of nearly 2 million people.
52 years ago a similar devastation was witnessed as a state turned its guns on its own citizens. Nearly ten million East Pakistanis escaped to India, while almost three million were killed in what was clearly a genocide identified as a crime against humanity.
Though the trigger for the response in Israel was an unprovoked and dastardly attack on its civilians, the circumstances in 1971 was quite different. It is unknown to many that the seeds of the crisis in East Pakistan lie in a shoddy response by West Pakistan to a devastating cyclone Bhola in East Pakistan in November 1970 that killed and displaced millions.
Pakistan did little to alleviate the misery of the eastern wing. The first election in decades held in March 1971 saw the Awami League gain absolute majority and it stood to take control of both wings of the country.
This was totally unacceptable to the western Pakistanis, who could not stomach being governed by Bengalis who they considered inferior to themselves and did not share anything in common except a religion. They were different not just in their appearance but also culturally and spoke Bengali.
Therefore, General Yahya Khan, the military dictator of Pakistan negated the results and unleashed a military solution, Operation Searchlight instead. The commander in charge of the operation in East Pakistan was General Tikka Khan, whose aim was to create panic and fear by overwhelming use of military force. His infamous orders were “we want the land, not the people”.
The Pakistani military issued death lists very much like what the Nazis had for the holocaust—here the Jews were replaced by Bengali political and cultural leaders, intellectuals, and others with even their followers being listed. The unity of East and the West wings of Pakistan were already fractured and the massacres carried out under Operation Searchlight made it beyond reconciliation.
Millions of East Pakistanis escaped to India. India felt the genocide gave a moral foundation to intervene, as a nation that kills its own citizens has already lost its right to govern them. It was also immoral to look on silently as attacks against civilians were perpetrated— the same argument being used against Israel.
India presented its right to unilateral action to uphold human rights, prevent genocide, right to self-determination of the Bengalis and the need to protect India’s sovereignty as East Pakistan’s internal problem had become a threat to India. India hoped for Chapter VII resolution because the actions of Pakistan ought to have shocked the world.
The United States, Britain, France, West Germany, and Japan all saw the atrocities as “a matter of internal affairs of Pakistan. Henry Kissinger, the White House National Security Adviser, told President Richard Nixon, “There is absolutely no justification for India’s interference no matter what Pakistan does in its territory” despite concrete evidence of the genocide called by the US consul general in Dhaka, Archer Blood.
Regrettably in October 1971, India had voted along with a third of the world to get communist China to replace Republic of China not just in the United Nations but the Security Council itself. With the solid support of the Chinese and US vetoes, there was no question of a Chapter VII in 1971.
India had unwittingly abetted in the entry of a second blind supporter of Pakistan in the highest UN body. The narrative of India interfering in the affairs of a sovereign state with the intent to dismember Pakistan was perpetrated, while millions of East Pakistanis were massacred.
In fact, the genocide and refugee crisis were blacked out of the media to the extent possible to make India look like the aggressor, until the famous Concert for Bangladesh took place in New York in August 1971 with Ravi Shankar and George Harrison. It brought the genocide to the public glare and consciousness.
Ravi Shankar said that “In one day, the whole world knew about Bangladesh.” But nothing changed in terms of US policy. What was odd was, America condemned a struggling third world democracy strained under the burden of the refugee influx from East Pakistan. The US brushed aside Pakistan’s initiation of a full-scale war in December and instead now questioned the credibility of the United Nations with Bush, the PR of the US at the UN stating, “If it is to fulfil the responsibilities imposed on it by the Charter, it must act to stop the fighting and preserve the territorial integrity of member states.”
Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, then serving as Pakistan’s Deputy Prime Minister said at the UN “India’s interference was a negation of all UN precepts and principles.” Pakistani arguments about sovereignty won considerable support around the world. India decided to proceed militarily but the ignominy of being the aggressor was taken away when Yahya Khan ordered pre-emptive airstrikes on 3 December 1971 on the western borders of India.
An all-out war was what India was already prepared for. Very few supported India and it was a race against time once the war was declared. The world was divided not on basis of what was “just and unjust” or “moral or immoral”, but on cold war lines.
The Nixon administration and the UN exerted pressure to order a ceasefire or face escalation and interference. The Seventh Fleet had set sail from Vietnam where the US had been embroiled in an unjust war, but that didn’t matter.
It was assessed that they planned a beach head to assist Pakistan’s beleaguered troops. Following the historic handshake between Kissinger and Zhou-en Lai and Mao in July 1971, facilitated by Pakistan, there was a subtle expectation on them to activate the borders with India.
U Thant proposed to the UN Security Council, based on the UN Secretariat reports, that a ceasefire be called and the UN be allowed to position observers in India and Pakistan and called for the withdrawal of Indian troops from the border with East Pakistan. Mrs Gandhi rejected the UN proposal to post UN observers on the India-East Pakistan border asking, “Would the League of Nations observers have succeeded in persuading the refugees who fled from Hitler’s tyranny to return even whilst the pogroms against the Jews and political opponents of Nazism continued unabated?”
The Indian armed forces achieved a spectacular victory in East Pakistan and true to the intent expressed all throughout, withdrew from the newly created Bangladesh, ceased operations in the west, proving it was not a war for conquest but a liberation of oppressed people.
The creation of Bangladesh stands as an enduring reminder of how the United Nations failed then, as it is failing now. There is no reason why the world’s first unilateral involvement in what can be called the “responsibility to protect” drew little support but it explains how multilateralism and the United Nations work.
The UN charter was supposed to be the constitution of a new world but that remains a utopian fantasy. UN reactions to East Pakistan show the inability to uphold the Charter and humanitarian legal obligations. The UN consistently failed, be it in Cambodia, Srebrenica, Rwanda, or in the case of the Yazidi genocide in Iraq.
The truth is, it’s the UN which falls apart at the most critical times. That explains why its decrees and resolutions do not command the intellectual or moral respect except among those who make a career out of it. The UN, if it has to be relevant today, needs immediate reform more than at any time in its history.
That reform demands that the Security Council created when 51 nations signed up to include at least 15 and India earn its rightful place in that.
Col (Dr) D.P.K. Pillay (Retd), is Research Fellow, Manohar Parikkar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses.