Looking Away From Genocide

Gary Bass, Looking Away From Genocide. The New Yorker, 20 November 2013. “On March 25, 1971, the Pakistani Army launched a devastating military crackdown on restive Bengalis in what was then East Pakistan. While the slaughter in what would soon become an independent Bangladesh was underway, the C.I.A and State Department conservatively estimated that roughly two hundred thousand people had died (the official Bangladeshi death toll is three million)…. Pakistan was a Cold War ally of the United States, and Richard Nixon and his national-security advisor, Henry Kissinger, resolutely supported its military dictatorship; they refused to impose pressure on Pakistan’s generals to forestall further atrocities.”

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