Frontier

Recently, I received a letter from a friend of mine in Calcutta asking me why America is silent over the massacre in East Bengal. At about the same time, I came across an article published in The Statesman which claimed that the average American was "deeply moved" by the army action against unarmed freedom fighters in East Bengal.

Both reactions are typical of the confusion that, I assume, prevails ill West Bengal regarding the U.S. posture on East Bengal. The confusion, I suppose, has been made worse by the action of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee calling for suspension of all military aid and military sales licenses to Pakistan until the conflict in East Bengal is resolved. The confusion stems from our muddled thinking on some simple facts of life about the United States, its political process and its foreign policy assumption.

When we criticise, support, oppose or adore the "United States," we do slot know what we are talking about. Are we referring to the Foreign Policy executed by the Administration, or to newspaper editorials in a handful of great newspapers or magazines? Are we thinking of some Congressmen and public opinion leaders, assuming that their views can influence Congressional deliberations and, eventually. the White House?

To avoid confusion. it is necessary to retake a separation between three factors relevant to the making of U.S. foreign policy. First, there is the executive branch of the United States Government. Second, there is Congress. Third, there is the vague thing called public opinion which is supposed to be reflected in or moulded by the mass media, When we discuss the United States' silence on the atrocities in East Bengal, Owe must remember to make a clear distinction between these three factors.

Let me take the third factor first. Tin Statesman article is very much on my mind, and I would like to use it as an illustration of how journalists often mislead people in their ignorance combined with a lofty opinion of their own vocation. The Statesman's reporter-K. K. Katyal is his name--wrote, "A recent visit to the USA and Britain revealed surprising gaps between official postures and popular sentiments. In both countries, there was no mistaking the non-official mood-expressions of horror at the genocide in East Bengal were forthright and sincere. The Government, however, dithered-or so it seemed." In another part of the article, Katyal talked glibly of the "average" American, and sermonised, "Whatever the Government or politicians may or may not do, the average American, it was clear, was deeply moved by the army action against unarmed freedom fighters."

Katyal seems to have accepted the people he must have met during his short visits to big cities as representative of the "average" American. He must have, also, read editorials and newspaper reports in great "national" newspapers and magazines and quickly concluded that they reflect the views of the "average" American. It is not that simple; if it were, the Vietnam war would have been over by now and the Negroes in this country would have had real, substantive equality in all walks of life, not merely in the small area of schooling. In fact Nixon .and his political strategists are making the point that the mass media do not accurately reflect the views of the "middle America", the "average" American, if you please, and they are not all that wrong in their estimate.

Newspapermen from India and other "underdeveloped" countries, visiting this country on Government or Foundation auspices, often make the easy mistake of equating the views of great newspapers as representative of the "average" American. They forget that these great newspapers are few in number, straddling a country geographically much larger than India and population- wise about two-fifth of India's size.

AVERAGE AMERICAN

The "average" American, if there is one, reads his hometown newspaper, which is fatter than Indian newspapers and frequently, leaner in coverage of foreign news. He works from eight to five, and if you take into account the time for commuting, his household worries, his downpayment problems, etc., he is a pretty harassed fellow who does not only lack time for absorbing foreign news carefully, belt often, also, intellectual capacity, interest or motivation to do so. Whatever the "average" American may do or think. he certainly does not sit behind a typewriter in the office of the New York Times or the Washington Post.

American public opinion, thus, cannot be judged from opinions and news reports published in a few newspapers and magazines, such as the New York Times or Newsweek. Secondly, even if these handful of publications did reflect the opinion of the "average" American, we have to recognize the fact that public opinion is a vague, elusive thing, and that unless it is aroused on an issue that affects the interest of the country directly, it is unlikely to have any influence on the machinery of policymaking. The "average" American has only peripheral interest in East Bengal; he will have a great deal of difficulty even in locating the country on the map. East Bengal is not an issue which falls in the area of the "average" American's interests-cultural, political or economic. The situation would perhaps have been different if there were large pockets of American residents of East Bengal ancestry who could have campaigned for public interest or put pressure on Congressmen.

Public opinion in this country may have taken into cognizance the events in East Bengal with a mixture of curiosity, puzzlement and some compassion. On some sensitive minds, the reports and pictures from East Bengal may have left scratches. But it would be outright folly to claim, as the writer in The Statesman has done, that the "average" American has been "deeply moved" by the events in East Bengal.

The elites are, however, another matter. They consist of intellectuals, writers, journalists, old India hands, such as former Ambassadors or Fulbright scholars and Congressmen. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee's action on the military aid to Pakistan was taken, independent of any pressure from the "deeply moved" average American. The Senators on the Committee were moved, not their constituents. Likewise, Chester Bowles exposed the folly of the U.S. arms aid to Pakistan.

Peggy Durdin wrote an excellent article in the New York Times Magazine. The AP correspondent, one of the six foreign newsmen to visit East Bengal under army escort, described the horrors of carnage there. Popular magazines like Newsweek and Time published reports which can be interpreted as critical of the Yahya regime. Left-wing journals such as the New Republic and I.F. Stone's Biweekly have called for suspension of aid to Pakistan.

It is one thing, however, to claim that these opinions exist; it is another to argue that they reflect a deep concern on the part of the average American, and that, consequently, the U.S. policy towards Pakistan is likely to change. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has spoken as did a number of newspapers and magazines; but there is little indication that policymakers in Washington are going to change their thinking towards Pakistan.

At the moment of writing, the U.S. Government different from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and some newspapers and magazines-seems to be unflinching in its military and economic support of the Yahya government. The State Department's answer to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's vote against continuance of military aid to Pakistan is evidence of the U.S. Administration's official attitude to the problem. The suspension of aid, the State Department argued, "would not significantly affect the military situation in East Pakistan and could have a strongly adverse political impact on our relations with Pakistan." If the logic appears Machiavellian, it is so only in the eyes of those who are emotionally involved in the struggle for Bangladesh. To policy-makers in Washington, it is realism.

The parameter of U.S. "realism" in foreign policy is, of course, a balance of power that favours its interests and endangers Communists. It is not that intellectuals in the State Department and the White House and strategists in the Pentagon do not have emotions and sentiments; they do not take them into account in making decisions. The killings in East Bengal are not likely, therefore, to weigh as much in the thinking of the U.S. policymakers as they do on the minds of Bengalis. If a Bengali reader is shocked by this statement and angrily point out the U.S. contradiction in harping on the theme of "bloodbath" in Vietnam and official ignorance of the same in East Bengal, he is confusing the rhetoric of foreign policy with its reality, superficiality with substance. The United States is a Big Power and like all Big Powers, it controls its tear ducts like a ham actor and tells fairy tales like a governess. As Richard Barnet, author of Intervention and Revolution, pointed out, the U.S. policymakers are highly selective in the violence they notice and inconsistent in the moral judgments they make about them.

"On November 23, 1946, for example," Barnet wrote, "at the very moment when the State Department was preparing a major U.S. intervention against Greek 'terrorists', a French naval squadron turned its guns on the civilian population of Haiphong and killed more than six thousand in an afternoon. The United States did not protest, much less intervene. Violence in behalf of the established order is judged by one set of criteria, insurgent violence by another. When established institutions kill through their police or their armies, it is regrettable but, by hypothesis, necessary. When the weak rise up and kill, their violence threatens order everywhere.

Sympathetic as U.S. bureaucrats were with the objectives of the Hungarian freedom fighters in 1956, they breathed a sigh of relief when they were disarmed ."

The State Department's position on the military aid to Pakistan shows once more what Barnet has so forcefully pointed out and what any dispassionate observer of the U.S. foreign policy must have known. Bengalis are not, however, dispassionate on the issue of East Bengal and continue to equate righteousness with the impulse for success. What they forget is that violence can be successful when used by the unscrupulous. Hitler had succeeded with his reign of terror in Europe and although the movies and magazines later made folklores out of the partisan struggle in Europe, the fact remains that the underground movement by itself could not topple Hitler. A massive invasion army organized from abroad defeated him.

The U.S. Government which has used violence throughout history may have overestimated its value in Vietnam; but certainly it knows its use better than the greenhorn fighters for Bangladesh who died heroically but uselessly. The latter's fault was underestimating the power of organized violence and terrorism.

The State Department's position on the military aid to Pakistan reveals its philosophy of realpolitik. It shows that the U.S. policy is not going to change simply because thousands of people were killed in East Bengal. In his recently published book, Promises to Keep, Chester Bowles has confessed that after eight years of effort as Ambassador to India he has encountered no success in persuading the State Department to revise the U.S. policy in South Asia. Yahya and the ruling clique in Pakistan know this; the freedom fighters for Bangladesh do not. That is why Pakistan has always gotten away with murder-in its conflicts with India and now, in its genocidal policy in East Bengal.

It appears that Pakistan may pull it off again over the dead bodies of thousands in East Bengal and aided by the opportunistic policies of Big Powers, including the United States which may deplore the use of violence privately but knows its efficacy in international affairs. After all, as I. F. Stone pointed out, the methods West Pakistan are using in East Bengal are "fully as cruel as those we have been using in Vietnam."