Senator Edward Kennedy, the influential American politician who died Wednesday in Massachusetts, was one of the first international figures to alert the world of the Pakistani army’s genocide in Bangladesh.
At a time his country’s government was busy wooing Pakistan and China, Kennedy also helped focus the world’s attention on the unprecedented humanitarian and refugee crisis that had begun unfolding in the Subcontinent – at a cost that India was left to bear at the time.
Successive governments in Dhaka have insisted that up to three million Bangladeshis died in a Pakistani-inflicted genocide.
If the liberal ‘Ted’ Kennedy was considered a good friend by India, he was positively lionised in Bangladesh after he took on the Republican Administration led by Richard Nixon in 1971 over the destiny of what was then East Pakistan.
In 1971, the 39-year-old Kennedy travelled across West Bengal and other parts of eastern India and documented the plight of Bangladeshi refugees in a scathing report on American policy. He was among the first to tell the world of how Hindu Bangladeshis were targeted by the Pakistani army.
In his report to the Judicial Committee on Refugees, titled Crisis in South Asia, Kennedy told of seeing “one of the most appalling tides of human misery in modern times”.
“Nothing is more clear, or more easily documented, than the systematic campaign of terror – and its genocidal consequences – launched by the Pakistani army on the night of march 25th,” Kennedy wrote.
“Hardest hit have been members of the Hindu community who have been robbed of their lands and shops, systematically slaughtered and, in some places, painted with yellow patches marked ‘H’.
“All of this has been officially sanctioned, ordered and implemented under martial law from Islamabad.
“America’s heavy support of Islamabad is nothing short of complicity in the human and political tragedy of East Bengal,” he concluded.
In the 200 days from April 1 to mid-October, he wrote, over half a million refugees – 954,012 to be exact – had crossed over to India, a flow that he said was “without parallel in modern history”.
When Bangladesh gained independence, Kennedy flew over Feb 14, 1972, and gave a speech at a rally at Dhaka University where thousands of students greeted him with cries of “Joi Kennedy”.
It was an appropriate echo of the Bangladeshi independence slogan of “Joi Bangla” – at a venue where the Pakistani army had begun its pogrom a year ago.
