Bangldesh sbāgatama!
This week we travel from the least
populated country in the world (Mongolia) to the most – Bangladesh
is the world's 8th most populace country and the 92nd
largest. This makes it the most densely populated large country –
the capitol city of Dahka alone is home to 15 Million people.
Dahka
I tried making Bangladeshi food this
week to some success. I made a delicious and easy fried cabbage dish,
which you can try for yourself here!
Cabbage with Raita and Chipate! A great lunch
My reading this week explores a principle which
may be a reoccurring theme of this blog: white people ruin
everything. Bangladesh's short history is a tortured one. The ominous
title of the book I read for this week, "The Blood Telegram",
foreshadows the deeply tragic story of Bangladesh's fight or
independence, and America's nefarious role in this history.
As many tragic histories do, this story
begins with the stoke of a colonial administers pen, a stroke which
made one country of what is now Pakistan and Bangladesh – East and
West Pakistan. This country shared a majority faith (Islam), but was
separated by language, culture, and hundreds of miles. Such a flimsy
arrangement could hardly last under the best governance, and the West
Pakistani government did nothing to stabilize the precarious
situation. In 1970, a Tsunami devastated the low-lying country and
killed 50,000 people. To this disaster, the central government in
West Pakistan responded at a snail's pace. Rotting bodies, human and
animal, lingered in the open for weeks. Those who survived were left
without homes or food while international agencies came to their aid
faster than their own government. The president of Pakistan, Yehya
Khan, made one curtailed visit several weeks after the Tsunami
struck.
Colonial division of Pakistan
So it was in a setting of grief and
rage that the 1971 election occurred. Not surprisingly, the
Bangladeshi nationalist party the Awami League won by a landslide.
The Western Pakistani government refused to acknowledge the
Bangladesh's push towards independence and arrested the Awami
league's leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. This broke the precarious
balance between the unhappily married two halves of Pakistan. Dahka
erupted into protests – until troops arrived. The West Pakistani
army did far more than suppress political decent. They set out to
suppress the possibility of any future descent in a systematic
slaughter of intellectuals, the upper class, and the Hindu minority.
American observers witnessed university students gunned down in
droves. Again, bodies piled the streets of Dahka, left in the open as
a warning to anyone who might resist. They were murdered with
American bullets.
In this battle for democratic
independence, America took the curious position of opposing election
results to prop up a dictator, meanwhile aggressively cutting the
democratic India off of aid for supporting the people of Bangladesh.
This backward policy was primarily determined by Cold War political
maneuvering and Nixon's personal relationship with the president of
Pakistan, Yahya Khan, a brutish military general whom he liked for
his tough straightforwardness. This fond personal relationship
contributed to the death of 3 million Bangladeshis. Pakistan was a
poor country, dependent on America for military aid to maintain the
slaughter in East Pakistan. This, despite the repeated and desperate
pleas of diplomats stationed in East Pakistan, continued throughout
the war. When congress at last capitulated to public opinion and
attempted to stop the flow of guns, bullets and aircrafts destined
for use against civilians, Kissenger and Nixon intentionally and
knowingly broke the law to smuggle aircrafts through Jordan to
maintain Yahya's doomed attempt to slaughter his way to security.
Never once did Nixon use his considerable influence to suggest Yahya
should temper his violence. This went beyond the non-intervention
that later doomed Rwanda – Nixon actively contributed to the
genocide of the Bangladeshi Hindus. As is proved again and again
throughout history, American values stretch no further than American
interests.
Nixon and Yahya
Even American power could not prevent
the course of history from bending towards justice, however. India
intervened on the part of the Bangladeshis, partly out of moral duty,
and partly out of desperation to hid themselves of the 10 million
refugees, mostly children, who crowded the poorest regions of their
country. India was too poor to support even its own people, and the
refugees were primarily left to die in their own filth in India or
return to East Pakistan and its hail of American bullets. Eventually
though, despite their better arms, the Pakistani army had to admit
defeat. All the blood finally bought Bangladesh freedom.
Recent history fares little better.
BBC's short Bangladesh time line is scattered with military coups,
corruption, stolen elections and conflict. Today Bangladesh is one of
the world's many invisible victims of terrorism – Islamic
extremists have begun to pick off secular writers, and foreign
visitors. The Fulbright English teachers for Bangladesh were sent to
Sri Lanka this year.
It is, however, a dangerous trap to
focus too much on the sorrow of history. As I have learned traveling
in the wake of genocide, there is always more to a country than pain.
For this week I also read Gitanjali, a book of poetry by the great
Bangladeshi writer Rabindranath Tagore, the first non white man to
win a Nobel prize for literature. His words speak to the hope and
beauty of Bangladesh, a universal prayer as relevant today as it was
100 years ago. I will let his wisdom and hope conclude this blog.
“Where the mind is without fear and
the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up
into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of
truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its
arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has
not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee
into ever-widening thought and action –
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father,
let my country awake.”
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