Meanwhile, the press too kept up a drumbeat. Reporters snuck into East Pakistan, and the refugees in India brought with them terrible tales, which Pakistan could not censor. From Calcutta, the Indian army did what it could to encourage journalists to venture across the border into East Pakistan.
Bengalis were stunned to hear that some U.S. arms were still making their way to the Pakistan army. In the midst of the army’s terror, these fearful people got their news by radio. “Why are you sending the army more guns?” a Bengali bitterly asked a Washington Post reporter.
In London, the Sunday Times published a detailed and gruesome story by a Pakistani journalist, Anthony Mascarenhas, with the screaming headline GENOCIDE. Newsweek ran a horrific cover story. Village after village had been reduced to rubble, with stinking corpses. The magazine said that a quarter of a million Bengalis had died. It told of a three-year-old child and his teenage mother, both of them refugees: “They sat on ground made muddy by the steady drizzle of the summer rains. The baby’s stomach was grotesquely distended, his feet swollen, his arms no thicker than a man’s finger. His mother tried to coax him to eat some rice and dried fish. Finally, the baby mouthed the food feebly, wheezed—and died.”
Trying to blunt the impact of these terrible stories, Pakistan allowed in some foreign correspondents. Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times, who had been expelled from Dacca in March, jumped at the chance. He remembers the Pakistan army’s contempt for Bengalis: “Even the officers in charge of these units would say, ‘You can’t trust these people, they’re low, they lie.’ ” The officers gave “no denials that they had just killed them.” He recalls, “You’d see places where they had marked little wooden houses as Hindus.” Survivors told him that the army would “come through yelling, ‘Are there any Hindus there?’ When they found out there were, they would kill them.” He concludes, “It was a genocide”—perhaps even a more clear case than Cambodia.
In the New York Times, Schanberg reported, “The Pakistani Army has painted big yellow ‘H’s’ on the Hindu shops still standing in this town.” Emphasizing the targeting of Hindus, he described “the hate and terror and fear” throughout the “conquered province.” Back in Dacca at last, Schanberg found the city “half-deserted,” with fresh loads of troops arriving daily from West Pakistan at the airport. Terrified merchants had taken down signs in the Bengali language and put up new ones in English, because they did not know Urdu. He wrote that foreign diplomats estimated that the army had killed at least two hundred thousand Bengalis.
...
George Harrison knew the uses of celebrity. The guitarist for the Beatles, who had broken up in 1970, was a soulful, confused, and tender-hearted man, but also an unexpectedly politically savvy operator.
Over the last few years, he had grown close with Ravi Shankar, the famed Indian musician. Harrison spent six weeks in India, gulping in lessons in the sitar and spirituality; sitar music popped up in classic Beatles songs like “Norwegian Wood.” Now, as the number of refugees in India soared into the millions, Shankar, a Bengali, asked Harrison for help with a benefit concert.
Other musicians spoke up too, such as Joan Baez, who wrote a mournful “Song of Bangladesh.” But Harrison had a practical purpose in mind—to raise some money, as he later explained, but mostly to raise awareness that Bengalis “were getting killed and wiped out, and there was a lot of countries were supporting Pakistan with armaments and stuff.” Since the concert was being held in New York, there was no doubt about which country in particular Harrison and his friends had in mind.
The Concert for Bangladesh was the first rock event for humanitarian relief—the precursor for shows like Live Aid in 1985, with all the attendant sincerity, vapidity, and showy self-righteousness. Harrison and his crew threw together the event at breakneck speed, choosing August 1 because it was the only date on which Madison Square Garden, in midtown Manhattan, was available. Two shows sold out fast to more than forty thousand fans.
Under the spotlights, in a cream suit with a hideous orange shirt, sporting shaggy hair and a huge scraggly beard, Harrison was a fervid countercultural figure to dumbfound the generals in Rawalpindi. With rather more adrenalized benevolence than comprehension, he ardently sang, “Bangla Desh, Bangla Desh / Such a great disaster, I don’t understand / But it sure looks like a mess / I’ve never known such distress.” Harrison had hastily assembled a scruffy all-star band from his old friends, including Ringo Starr on drums and Eric Clapton on guitar, although John Lennon and Paul McCartney never showed. Shankar and other Indian musicians played sitar to general puzzlement.
Of course, the eager young crowd came mainly for the music. But many of them knew about the horrors, and Shankar explained to the audience the misery of the Bengalis. In between freewheeling sets, the musicians showed devastating films of the refugee camps, with corpses and starving children. The Village Voice wrote, “How glorious—to be able to launder one’s conscience by laying out a few tax-deductible dollars to hear the biggies.”
After a series of blazing performances, Harrison had a rare surprise. “I’d like to bring out a friend of us all,” he told the startled crowd, “Mr. Bob Dylan.” This, the Village Voice raved, was the “real cortex-snapping moment.” Dylan—who had been largely in seclusion since a near-fatal motorcycle accident—appeared from the darkness, slight and unmistakable, in a jean jacket, with a guitar and a harmonica. After the pandemonium subsided, he blazed through thrillingly emotional renditions of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.” As if aiming at Nixon, he sang passionately, “How many deaths will it take till he knows / Too many people have died?”
~~The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide -by- Gary J. Bass
