Accelerated Media & 1971 Genocide

Introduction

In 20th century media, technology transformation has come through epochal shifts. From early celluloid images, through newspaper, radio, television, video, internet, and most recently, video enabled mobile devices. Although still at a nascent stage, mobile devices will supplement and, in some cases, replace television and the internet as a primary vehicle for journalism -- just as the internet replaced television, which replaced radio, and so on in a daisy chain of media evolution.

Rapid technological transformation is altering the way media covers conflicts zones facing civil war, ethnic warfare or genocide. Reporters have played a pivotal role in shaping the outcomes of major conflicts, reaching back to the Congo crisis of the 1800s and beyond. The 1971 genocide in Bangladesh marked a zenith in this media influence. Although the technology of media was changing rapidly through the 1950s and 60s, the 1971 conflict ushered in full use of much of this technology for the first time. The proliferation of TV channels, mobile radio stations, the advent of lighter cameras, and new methods of news transmission-- all of this accelerated reporting about the Bangladesh crisis.

Significant to a discussion of race and technology, the 1971 genocide was played out on western television sets. The victims (Bengalis from Bangladesh) and protagonists (the Pakistani army) were largely absent as storytellers. Instead, BBC and CBS cameramen were in the region, capturing scenes of tragedy. Earlier, television had embraced a primary role in war reportage in Vietnam. With Walter Kronkite inside war zones, and nightly news stories of GI death tolls, this was the first television war. But even within that tableaux, the iconic stories of Vietnam were broken in print. The massacres at My Lai, the Napalm burnt naked girl, the burning monk's protest suicide, the point blank execution of a Vietnamese man-- all these images came to life through the old technology of photographs.

By 1968, TV technology was advanced, but the barrier in Vietnam was access. As the conflict worsened, the press faced severe curbs on free movement. By contrast, when the Bangladesh civil war began, media technologies had good access to the conflict zone. Television cameras pushed into refugee camps, documentary filmmakers followed Senator Edward Kennedy on his fact-finding mission, guerilla activists pulled media stunts targeting the 9 o'clock news, and George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh became the blueprint for future mega-events like Live Aid. All of these were new innovations deployed to bring the genocide to world attention, and played a decisive role in ending the conflict within nine months.

The 1971 civil war and subsequent genocide in Bangladesh represented a watershed event, which managed to capture the world's unified attention. The 1970s ushered in an era of decentralized civil wars, military coups and ethnic strife. The list of conflicts seems endless, but the most significant ones are Afghanistan (Coups: 1973-1978), Angola (War with UNITA: 1975-1992), Argentina (Dirty War: 1976-1983), Bosnia (Civil War & Genocide: 1992-1995), Cambodia (Genocide:1970s), Chad (Civil War: 1965-1979), El Salvador (Civil War: 1970s-1980s), Ethiopia (War & Civil War: 1974-1999), Guatemala (Civil War: 1975-1979), Guyana (Ethnic Conflict: 1970s-1980s), Haiti (Civil War: 1990s), East Timor (Indonesian invasion & Genocide: 1974-1999), Iran (Iran-Iraq War: 1980-1989), Lebanon (Civil War: 1975-1990), Liberia (Civil War: 1989-1997), Libya (War with Chad: 1980-1987), Mozambique (Renamo War: 1970s-1992), Nicaragua (Contra War: 1980s), Pakistan (Balochistan Insurgency: 1973-1977), Palestine (1st Intifada: 1987-1992), Peru (Shining Path War: 1980s), Russia (Chechen Uprising: 1994-1996), Rwanda (Civil War and Genocide: 1991-1996), Sierra Leone (Civil War: 1990-2002), Somalia (Civil War: 1977-78, 1986-1990), South Africa (Anti-Apartheid Struggle: 1948-1994), Sri Lanka (Tamil Civil War: 1983-2002), Sudan (Civil War: 1980s-1990s), Uganda (War In The Bush: 1980-1985), and Yemen (Civil War: 1990-1994). For most of these cases, media attention was fleeting and ineffective. Media reporting succeeded in bringing international attention and humanitarian or peacekeeping intervention only in a few cases-- most notably Bosnia, Lebanon, Somalia, and South Africa. In most other cases, international attention was sporadic and ultimately failed to bring results. Why the media was so successful in the case of Bangladesh is a question we will explore in the course of this essay.

In analyzing the 1971 conflict, we telescope in on particular aspects of the media coverage, and consider the way those patterns have been applied or broken elsewhere. We look at identity of the narrator, visual ethnic codes, the pressure for shock statistics and media events, and advanced tools' impact in compressing news cycles. All of this can be seen through the prism of race. When western media portrays protagonist people of color, an inevitable result seems to be obscuring of complexities and a paucity of follow-up.

Background on 1971 Genocide

In 1971, Bangladesh was the theater for a large, globalized conflict. A raging civil war, ruthless genocide, sustained global protests and a power struggle between Nixon and the State Department-- all these elements were thrown together by the crisis. The civil war in Bangladesh (then called East Pakistan) and the Pakistan military's response had become a global signifier. Just as Vietnam stood for US military misadventures, the Bengali genocide was a symbol, writ large, for the subjugation and cleansing of an ethnic group. Commentators invoked the Holocaust to describe the horror -- yet even that comparison seemed insufficient. The Pakistan crackdown lasted nine months, one-seventh that of the Second World War-- but in that short time-span, a brutal killing machine managed to eliminate an estimated 1 Million people.

Thirty years earlier, Mahandas Gandhi had looked at British officers across the table and intoned, for maximum effect, "There is no people on earth who would not rather have the bad government of their own people, than the good government of an alien power." The British divided India and left, but for the Bengalis on the eastern side of India, alien powers stayed in place. The Islamic state of Pakistan was created out of a geographical impossibility-- two landmasses on opposite sides of India, with hundreds of miles of enemy territory in the middle ("You can see the wings but not the bird."[i]). Like many colonial creations, the borders of India and Pakistan were illogical, dividing towns and families. Bengalis in East Pakistan felt more kinship with the Bengalis of neighboring India, and none with their new Pakistani masters.

The two Pakistans stumbled along for two decades, avoiding the demographic reality by postponing elections and tolerating successive Army dictatorships. Relationships between the two wings kept getting worse. There were deadly riots over the national language and resentment over coded racism towards darker-hued Bengalis. Money, good jobs and ownership of industry steadily accumulated to West Pakistan's light-skinned, Urdu-speaking elite. When a report published the names of the 22 richest Pakistani families, there were no Bengali names on the list. East Pakistan was the sole producer of jute, the wonder fabric of the time, but most export revenues were used to build West Pakistani infrastructure. A World Bank study indicated a widening chasm-- 80% of all export revenue was being invested in West Pakistan.

Culture was a key divider-- the Bengalis' national icon, the Nobel Prize winning poet Rabindranath Tagore, was viewed with suspicion as a "Hindu poet." But attempts to cleanse Bengali culture from its Hindu influences backfired. When the West Pakistanis tried to push Urdu (a more "Muslim" language because of its kinship with Arabic) into the Bengali schools, the intelligentsia rebelled. From the Bengal Renaissance of the 1800s onwards, the region had produced united India's strongest writers, poets, and filmmakers. But in the 1960s, culture became a weapon-- a willful, defiant pushback against West Pakistani domination. The resistance took diverse, sometimes even comical, forms. When the Pakistani military dictator, General Ayub Khan, gave the National Literature Award to Shaukat Osman-- it eluded his entire staff that Osman's novel "The Slave's Laugh" was a thinly veiled satire of Ayub himself.

In 1968, as the streets of Paris, Tokyo and Prague exploded with synchronicity, a people's revolt against Ayub was underway. An ecstatic Tariq Ali wrote from the streets of Pakistan, predicting another "Russian Revolution." The anger on the streets was enough to sweep Ayub from power, but the "revolution" was rapidly co-opted. The staunchly middle class Awami League party capitalized on Bengali resentment towards West Pakistan, smothering any talk of "worker revolution" and focusing instead on the safer Bengali ethnic nationalism. This became the key part of their platform, leading up to Pakistan's first fully democratic elections in 1970.

It was at this point that demographic reality caught up to Pakistan. Though the Bengalis were invisible in the national power structure, they were numerically a clear majority. The election results made this fact shockingly apparent and jolted the West Pakistani rulers. When the final results were in, the Bengali Awami League had won 70% of all seats in Pakistan, earning the right to appoint the first Prime Minister of the country. Thoughts of being ruled by their inferiors-- short brown men with slurred vowels ("Not savages exactly." quipped Rushdie) drove the West Pakistani rulers insane. The election results were cancelled and the West Pakistanis began protracted negotiations with the Bengali side.

The negotiations were actually a stalling tactic, while the Pakistani army secretly flew troops into East Pakistan. On 26th March, with the negotiations stalled, the Pakistan army launched a crackdown on the streets of East Pakistan-- massacring university students, professors, journalists, political leaders and, especially, the Hindu population. "Sort them out," said one General, "Teach the bastards a lesson." The US Embassy's Consul General Archer Blood telexed Washington, describing a "massacre in the streets." Blood's urgent telegram was deep-sixed by the White House, anxious not to destabilize Pakistan, which was then a crucial go-between in secret China talks. With that tacit green light from Pakistan's largest foreign aid donor, the killing fields of East Pakistan began in earnest. As millions of panicked Bengalis fled across the border to India, the world woke up to a looming crisis, with ten million refugees overflowing hundreds of refugee camps.

George Harrison's "Concert For Bangladesh" was not the only outpouring of support for the besieged Bengalis. The conflict, with its images of random massacre, and shadows of ethnic cleansing, captured the imagination of the world. Already incensed by the Vietnam war, the global peace movement was able to rapidly mobilize in support of this new cause. Bill Moyers and his merry men led a media-savvy blockade of US shipments to Pakistan. Joan Baez and George Harrison both had number one singles titled "Bangla Desh." A charismatic, pre-Chappaquidick, Ted Kennedy was gunning for a future White House run. Kennedy seized on the Bengal crisis as the latest evidence of the Nixonian tradition of supporting non-democratic, ruthless military regimes. In Europe, Andre Malraux threatened to parachute into Pakistan to fight with the Bengali guerilla army. From London's Trafalgar Square to the Paris Arondissements, protestors successfully mounted street theater and loud protests.

The Nixon White House kept up a spirited defense, but the opposing forces had the upper hand. A bill was pushed through the Senate banning US arms sales to Pakistan, giving Nixon a bloody nose. In December, after months of covertly supporting the fledgling Bengali guerilla resistance, India entered into direct war against Pakistan. The US Seventh Fleet sailed into the Bay of Bengal in support of the Pakistani army, but was faced by an equally determined Russian fleet. The world was, as in Cuba, on the brink of nuclear confrontation over a tiny country. But after requisite saber rattling, both fleets retreated, letting Pakistan and India fight out a short, decisive, war. In ten days, the capital of East Pakistan fell to the Indian army. Pakistani posturing at the UN continued, while a bored Ambassador George Bush looked on. But all this diplomatic sound and fury could not stop the inevitable. On December 16, 1971, Bangladesh was born as a free republic.

The world saw in the defeat of Pakistan a direct humiliation of the US, and a vindication of Vietnam-era protest politics. There are strong and instructive parallels to today's world. Then, as now, a US President continued to support a corrupt Pakistani military regime because of strategic considerations. Like Rumsfeld, Kissinger became increasingly isolated, escalating into Rasputin-like secrecy and paranoia. And, just like Howard Dean, Presidential hopeful Ted Kennedy used the genocide as a tactical weapon against Nixon. The US peace movement that mobilized in 1971 was aided by the anger over Vietnam, just as the opposition to the Iraq war was assisted by the memory of the Afghan bombing campaign.

The breakup of Pakistan had geopolitical resonances that stretch to today's post-9/11 world. As a result of this split, Pakistan moved further to the right, became a staunch US military ally, supported the Afghan war against Russia, and later became a haven for freelance terrorists. In addition, tensions between India and Pakistan escalated, and re-focused on the Kashmir conflict. During the 1970 election campaign, the Bengali leader Sheikh Mujib was accused by West Pakistani politicians of being "soft" on security-- because he had talked about "peaceful solutions to Kashmir." If Mujib had become Prime Minister of all Pakistan, there may have been detente on this thorny issue, altering the course of South Asian politics.

For South Asia itself, the liberation of Bangladesh had a different message. Pakistan's founder Qaid i Azam Jinnah, in his first speech, said, "From today all religions are equal in Pakistan." That gentle ideal was rapidly hijacked as the years progressed. The hard-line Islamists considered East Pakistan a weak link, with its large Hindu population and syncretic mixture of both religious traditions. The 1971 liberation of Bangladesh was interpeted by many as an explicit rejection of the "Islamic State."

Narrators & "Missionary Complex"

"If you can write a nation's stories, you needn't worry about who makes its laws." - George Gerbner[ii]

In major conflicts in de-colonized nations, we note a lack of native informants. Instead, the conflicts are reported and defined by white westerners. When reporters with a closer connection cover the story, they often find themselves marginalized. Before looking at Bangladesh, we look at specific examples from the Congo crisis, which make the contrast even more apparent.

George Washington Williams, a freed American slave, was the first investigator to expose King Leopold's Congo misrule. Williams' Open Letter was the first comprehensive, documented charge that the Belgian colonial regime was engaged in wholesale slavery. His charges included torture, forced slavery, cruelty, kidnapping and concubinage and concluded with the critique, "Your Majesty's Government is engaged in slave- trade, wholesale and retail. It buys and sells and steals slaves."[iii] This was followed by an open letter to the US President urging American action. But when newspapers like New York Herald ran the story, they gave equal weight to the belgian denials. Leopold's advisers were initially concerned by "un vrai scandale" of "le pamphlet Williams." But they soon found it fairly easy to attack Williams' veracity and bias. It was easily shown that Williams could not be trusted because, as a Black man writing about Africa, he had inherent sympathies and bias. Congo administrators were able to repeatedly caricature him as "an unbalanced negro."

A decade after Williams, E. D. Morel, an employee of an English shipping line doing business in Congo, stumbled onto the mechanics of King Leopold's empire. As a quiet shipping clerk who paid attention to bookkeeping records, Morel discovered massive amounts of arms being shipped to the Congo off the record. He also analyzed the discrepancy between imported goods exported rubber and ivory and discovered the Belgian state was not paying anyone for these materials. This led him to the conclusion that, hidden from the public eye, King Leopold was running the colonial state with thousand of natives working as slaves to extract raw materials and plunder the nation, while pretending to the outside world that Belgium and the Congo were engaged in a mutually beneficial trading partnership. Describing the fortuity of his discovery, Adam Hochschild wrote, "It was as if, in 1942 or 1943, somebody who began to wonder what was happening to the Jews had taken a job inside the headquarters of the Nazi railway system."[iv]

Morel was a very different opponent from Williams-- with access to the sympathy of white readers, he could not easily be debunked. Morel first resigned his commission and began working for British newspapers. Finding his articles censored, he quit in 1903 and started his own publication, The West African Mail. Besides editing the newspaper, and writing under his own name, he also took on an African identity and wrote as "Africanus." He went on to write three full books and segments of two others, hundreds of articles for British newspapers, articles in French for French and Belgian newspapers, hundreds of letters and dozens of pamphlets. Morel's reporting ultimately forced passage of the Congo protest resolution in British Parliament in 1903. This was the beginning of the stirring of a global campaign, which would ultimately force an end to Leopold's rule over Congo. As a white employee of British shipping that Morel was presumed to be "one of us." This gained him trusted access to precious records, which he then turned around and used against the regime. Although some may have considered him a "race traitor," it was precisely his whiteness that gained him a wider audience.

Looking ahead to 1971, over the course of the nine-month genocide in Bangladesh, several crusading journalists and activists burst into the spotlight. With one exception, every protagonist was white American or European. Reporters covering the conflict included Sidney Schanberg (New York Times, Pulitzer-winner for his 1971 reporting) Tad Szulc (New York Times), John Chancellor (NBC News), and Jack Anderson (Washington Post, Pulitzer-winner for his reporting on Nixon's handing of the crisis). Jack Anderson in particular emerged as a cause celebre through his direct conflicts with President Richard Nixon. The leaking of The Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, and the subsequent government lawsuit against Daniel Ellsberg had already set a confrontational path between American journalists and the embattled Nixon White House. Anderson followed this by divulging official secrets regarding Bangladesh, later dubbed The Anderson Papers. On December 3, 1971, India intervened on behalf of Bangladesh in the nine month long civil war, sparking off direct war between India and Pakistan. It was in this period that Anderson discovered a disconnect between public White House statements and secret meetings. On December 6, Nixon informed leaders of Congressional groups that the Administration planned to be "even handed"[v] in the dispute. But according to secret memos obtained by Anderson, in a meeting on December 3, Henry Kissinger said the opposite:

HENRY KISSINGER (Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs): I am getting hell every half hour from the President that we are not being tough enough on India...He wants to tilt in favor of Pakistan.
RICHARD HELMS (Director, CIA): There are conflicting reports from both sides...The Paks say the Indians are attacking all along the border; but the Indian officials say this is a lie.
JOHN IRWIN (Under Secretary of State): The Secretary leans toward making a US move in the UN soon.
KISSINGER: The earlier draft statement for Bush is too evenhanded.[vi]

In another memo obtained by Anderson, Kissinger said, "When is the next turn of the screw against India?" He also asked if the US could ship arms to Pakistan via Saudi Arabia or Jordan. More damaging for Nixon was the revelation that he had secretly ordered the nuclear-operated Enterprise into the Bay of Bengal to confront Indian forces. The Enterprise was headed off by a Russian frigate and after a tense standoff both sides retreated, leaving the Indians and Pakistanis to fight out the war. How close the world came to another Cuba style nuclear standoff was not revealed until Jack Anderson wrote about the affair based on secret memos. Blowing the lid off this subterfuge, Anderson publicly blasted Nixon over his handling of the Bangladesh crisis: "Now you don't like to say the President lied, but there is no other word for it. The President lied. It was an outrageous lie. It was deliberate and it was in violation of the US Constitution."[vii]

Through this very public battle between Nixon and the Fourth Estate over Bangladesh, we saw the emergence of the crusading American journalist and hero figure. Because Anderson was "one of us", his story gained wide currency. There were many Indian journalists covering the same story, none of whom received the same attention. On the Pakistani side, reporter Anthony Mascarenhas was the first person to announce the discovery of ethnic cleansing. A member of Pakistan's Christian minority, Mascarenhas sympathized with the Bengali population. Discovering evidence of mass killings, he fled to England in order to break the story. Only after his family had found safe refuge outside the country did he break the story in the British press. The words "genocide" were first in print in his front-page article for the London Sunday Times. Speaking of how Asian journalists were frozen out of the inner circles, Mascarenhas commented:

"I had been too long a journalist not to know that a relative "outsider" such as I was, even with the biggest story in the world, could be indefinitely knocking on the doors of Fleet Street."[viii]

In spite of his authoritative role, and personal connection to the conflict, Mascarenhas was soon eclipsed in the larger narrative of 1971. Instead, it was Jack Anderson, along with peace activists such as Bill Moyer who emerged as the protagonists of the movement to "save Bangladesh." The Bengalis themselves were rendered side-props to the unfolding crisis of their own nation.

Savagery among "pre-technology" people

"Oh those unspeakable Serbs! And then there are the envious Hutus and the arrogant Tutsis, not to mention the aggressive Dinka. Consider how many groups of people and cultures about whom- until they were recently engaged in bloody civil wars- you knew little- but of whom you now have a clear, despairing, view."[ix] - Jean Seaton

As television has come to dominate news reporting, this hyper visual media has changed the rules of conflict journalism. Complex situations, with multiple causes, linkages to colonial structures and hazy outcomes are flattened to "good vs. evil" narratives, or as David Keen describes it, "Who's it Between?"[x] There is a desire to reduce all conflicts between ethnic groups to "ancient barbarism", or the infamous "from time immemorial" explanation for the Bosnian conflict. This is explained by a theory of primordialism, as reflected in British coverage of the Bosnian conflict:

"They were driven by that atavistic fury that goes back to the times when human beings moved in packs and ate raw meat."[xi]

This theory of primordialism plays out strongly in media coverage of African conflicts, infected by a streak of what we can call "afropessimism"-- where Africa is always a savage land that descends to bestiality at the slightest provocation, with no agency assigned to its colonial history. African political cliques also play into this, because a theory of prime bestiality allows them to escape censure and legal action. The Rwandan conflict is a recent example where a complex political process laid the groundwork for ethnic cleansing. But all this was deleted in favor of the story of "ancient hatred" between Tutus and Hutsis. Much was also made of the use of machetes to accomplish the genocide, playing into the notion of a pre-technology people:

"Although the killing was low tech-- performed largely by machete-- it was carried out at dazzling speed: of an original population of about seven and a half million, at least eight hundred thousand people were killed in just a hundred days."[xii]

This is precisely why the killing of well-armed GIs at the hands of a "pre-technology" Somali mob, using the lynch mob tools of the American South, came as a shock to the American body politic.

These simplifying structures were used to paint an easy-to-digest narrative of the 1971 conflict and mobilize international support for the victims. Lost in this process were the complexities of the struggle, especially the conflicting political strands within the Bengali liberation movement. The movement for greater autonomy, as it erupted in Pakistan in the 1960s, had two important aspects. First, there was the strongly class antagonistic, workers vs. business overtone of the struggle. Second, there was the potential for the movement to become a pan-Pakistan movement, as the West Pakistani students and unions were equally dissatisfied with the newly industrializing economy. These trajectories were challenged by the rise of the Awami League (AL) as the key political movement in East Pakistan. The AL was led by a newly powerful Bengali middle class and business elite. This leadership considered the Marxist rhetoric of the students and unions to be a direct threat to their own power. In a strategy to neutralize this fervor, while reaping the benefits of the movement's energy, the AL recast the movement as one of ethnicity-- that is, this was now a "Bengali nationalist" movement. This simultaneously isolated the class-politics elements, and cut off collaboration with the West Pakistani movement.

When the 1971 civil war broke out, these tensions manifested themselves overtly, especially as the Bengali guerilla army set up headquarters in India. The Indian government had two concerns as they actively assisted in setting up the rebel command in exile. First, there was the opportunity, to split up Pakistan, reducing the military and strategic might of its closest rival besides China. Second, there was a focus on the militantly leftist tendencies within the Bengali movement, with the intention of derailing these strands and preventing linkages with the underground Maoist party (the Naxalites) in India. Both the Indian administration, and the AL leadership actively persecuted the leftists within the Bengali guerilla army. These unresolved tensions exploded after independence, when the new Bangladesh government engaged in a "dirty war" against leftist parties, killing members of the JSD party, executing the leader of underground Maoist Sarabahara Party, and mounting military coups and counter-coups that replaced the Leftist elements of the army with more Islamist factions.

But in the media treatment of 1971, all these complexities were erased. In its place, a more palatable story of simple, gentle Bengali people, persecuted by more aggressive, militant and more Islamic Pakistan. Although there was some truth to this characterization, there was also active exaggeration, both by the foreign press and by their native Bengali informants. The Bengali tendency to go along with this is understandable, because all of this helped build international support. Anthony Masceranhas played into this, taking tangible differences and pushing them to unintentional caricature:

"In West Pakistan, nature has fostered energetic, aggressive people-- hardy hill men and tribal farmers who have constantly to strive for a livelihood in relatively harsh conditions. They are a world apart from the gentle, dignified Bengalis who are accustomed to the easy abundance of their delta homeland in the east."[xiii]

Salman Rushdie replayed these constructs in his novel Shame, representing the Pakistani attitude towards Bengalis as, "Savages, breeding endlessly, jungle-bunnies good for nothing but growing jute and rice, knifing each other, cultivating traitors in their paddies." And later, "... the appalling notion of surrendering the government to a party of swamp aborigines, little dark men with their unpronounceable language of distorted vowels and slurred consonants; perhaps not foreigners exactly, but aliens without a doubt."[xiv]

All the hosannas about "gentle" people came in spite of a long history of revolutionary movements in Bengal. This included the 1930 Chittagong armory raid (inspired by the Dublin Easter Uprising), which was one of the first rejections of the Congress Party's nonviolent movement against British rule. An even more serious challenge to Gandhian von-violence came from Bengali guerilla leader Subhas Bose, who broke from Congress and formed the anti-British INA army with the intention of winning independence by force. In fact, the technology-rejecting program of Gandhi offered comfort to the British, while Bose, who believed in fighting the British with modern weapons, was a far more unsettling sight. Remarking on the allure of Gandhi, Orwell said:

"The things that one associated with him-- home-spun cloth, "soul forces" and vegetarianism-- were unappealing, and his medievalist program was obviously not viable in a backward, starving, over-populated country."[xv]

During the anti-British movement, a segment of the Bengali intelligentsia rejected the back-to-nature and non-violence program of Gandhi. They preferred to arm themselves with western weapons and carry out militant struggle. But in spite of this tradition, the Bengalis in the 1971 conflict were portrayed as helpless victims with no recourse to modern weaponry. The iconic image in the western media was of a Bengali villager defending his mud shack with bamboo sticks, while on the other side the Pakistani army came armed with modern weapons.

Although the Bengalis were clearly outgunned by a well-armed Pakistani army, the portrait of "gentle, rice-eating people" obscures darker complexities. Later, when they came to power, Bengalis showed the same penchant for using military technology for cruelty and domination. Just as the victims of the Holocaust, often characterized as "weak," later metamorphosed into muskeljuden, the helpless Bengali victims carried out their own genocide in the form of military aided, ethnic cleansing operations in the Chittagong Hill Tracts against the Buddhist ethnic minority.

Fundamentally, Western media simplified the story for two reasons. For the purposes of a television-friendly story, the narrative structure had to be boiled down to striking visual images. The fetishized photo of a half-naked Bengali woman being carried by her husband, and the crippled refugee hobbling through mud towards India came to represent the Bengali masses. Increasingly lighter camera technology made it easier to go to remote zones to capture these images. Filmmaker Lear Levin was able to take a full camera crew to follow a Bengali singing troupe that was raising funds for the guerilla army[xvi]. This new technology allowed the capture of verite moments, which would have been unthinkable a few years ago. Levin's images of refugee camps, starving children and valiant Bengali freedom fighters were tailor-made for the new television era. These images inspired Americans to carry out a paternalistic "crusade" on behalf of the Bengali movement. Their enthusiasm might have been dampened if complexity were introduced.

It was also necessary to have the victims be a pre-technology people. The Bengali peasant, shirtless and starving to death, was a comforting image in the West. The middle class, guerilla fighter, using Chinese bombs to attack international hotels in occupied Dhaka was a less comforting image. If the Bengalis could master technology to defend themselves, they might not need western helping hands. For these reasons, both the Bengali and the Western media actively partnered to continue presenting stories of a primordial people.

The Pressure for Shock & Media Stunts

"A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic" - Joseph Stalin

By 1970, a proliferation of TV channels, competing broadcasts and industry pressure led to acute "9 o'clock syndrome." This was the pursuit of news that was calibrated to appeal to a mass audience tuning in for event viewing-- that is the 9 'o clock news. In order to appeal to an increasingly mechanized news gathering process, it was necessary to pursue shock value and media stunts. Both these factors were in ample supply in the 1971 conflict, making it one of the most well televised events of that year.

As the 1971 conflict escalated, the key issue being debates at international bodies like the UN was the role of India in escalating the conflict and serving as the operations base for the Bengali guerilla army. India's counter-argument was that 10 Million Bengali refugees were inside India, and the death toll inside East Pakistan was climbing into the Millions[xvii]. In this situation, India had to choice but to get involved, even if it was with the ultimate objective of sending the Bengali refugees back after cessation of hostilities. In the matter of establishing India's right to intervene in the civil war, twinned with the need to capture western media attention, the statistics from the conflict were a key element. Lacking sophisticated measurement devices, most of the media accepted the official Indian estimates-- both for deaths and for refugees. The death toll that the Indian administration firmly established was a staggering 3 Million[xviii]. This was the figure that was most widely quoted by the media and later enshrined in official Bangladeshi history books. For years this death toll has been an article of faith and immune to any empirical challenge. However, more recent analysis has argued that it would be physically impossible for the Pakistani army to kill 3 million people, without mechanized means of execution. To use a simple calculation, employing an advanced railroad network, organized death camps, and gas chambers, Nazi Germany managed to kill 6 million Jews over a period of six years. There is no argument that the Pakistani army carried out a pogrom of ethnic cleansing, but it would be physically impossible for them to kill 3 million people in nine months without extensive death camps and mechanized killing systems. More reasonable estimates would put the death toll at 0.5 to 1 million-- which is still sufficient to justify the tag of "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing."

Even with modern statistical methods and advanced estimate models, it is still difficult to correctly calculate death tolls in crisis areas. One snapshot, taken two decades after the 1971 conflict, will illustrate the continuing difficulties and media pressure in this matter. On September 30 1993, western India was struck by the worst earthquake in fifty years. Within a few hours, the New York Times reported "1,000 feared dead." [xix] In twenty four hours, three conflicting estimates emerged. Indian police estimates calculated 12,000, Indian state television said 10,000 and the government-controlled Press Trust of India pegged the number at 6,500. USA Today combined all these sources and came up with their own estimate: "16,000 feared dead in India."[xx] Within a week, the New York Times was quoting an international agency employee to come up with a number of 50,000[xxi]. By October 6, the estimates had again began to fall, with the New York Times now reporting a range between 10,000 and 30,000[xxii]. Looking at these more recent events, it is no surprise that the estimates for the Bangladesh death tolls varied so widely. At the time of the conflict, a new form of media coverage that pushed for shocking statistics also contributed to the inflated numbers.

Another development of this time was the media's need for stunts or "events" which would be worthy of inclusion in headline news. Many American activists had taken on the Bengali cause as the logical successor of the anti-Vietnam war movement. They found, however, that the mainstream media had become blase to antiwar protests. In this environment, a group of activists called Friends of East Bengal (FEB) hit on the idea of creating events or "street theater" to grab the television cameras. Led by a media-savvy Bill Moyer, FEB decided to mount blockades of ships carrying US arms to Pakistan, using little boats and canoes. "Like civil rights sit-ins, it was dramatic, direct and nonviolent."[xxiii] Starting in July 1971, this team began a sustained campaign of tracking down the Pakistani ships Padma, Al Ahmadi, Al Hasan and Rangamati. As each of these ships would try to dock at Philadelphia or Baltimore, the FEB would head out to the dock with their flotilla of small boats to block entry. The focus was always the media-- no trip was taken without first contacting TV, radio and newspapers and ensuring their timely arrival. The results were always measured by whether newspaper reports carried photos, and more importantly, whether the TV news carried film of the event. In this period, Bill Moyer emerged with a relentless focus on TV news, often delaying actions until reporters arrived.

As the action grew in scale and spread out across weeks, a cat and mouse game ensued between the shipping lines and protesters. Increasingly the ships would change course and not arrive. Soon, the authorities started getting orders not to reveal docking information. A Philadelphia Maritime Exchange officer confessed to one of the activists:

"We've been instructed not to make public any information on ships to Pakistan. We're not supposed to put them on the big board or to list them in the Journal of Commerce." The pursuit of the ships became the news item itself. Each time the blockade would show up at a dock and not find the ship, the news media would be told the ships were afraid to dock. In these matters, the protesters showed themselves very adept at managing the media. The changing dynamic of direct action was reflected in one confrontation:

"One reporter angrily confronted Bill Moyer: 'You got us here on a wild goose chase. The boat's not here.' Bill smiled: 'I guess you don't know a successful blockade when you see one. The ship is afraid to come in. We're claiming success and we're going to continue.'"

In an image-driven era, the protesters were highly aware of their own visual impact. Almost all the activists of Friends of East Bengal were white. Bengali activists were on the sidelines, partially due to the dominance of white activists, and also out of fear of reprisals against their families in Pakistan. The one exception seemed to be Sultana Krippendorf, who was married to an American and therefore presumably had some immunity. Richard Taylor was the unofficial biographer of the blockade movement, and in his descriptions we see a high awareness of race-coded visual impact. In his text, he almost seemed at pains to delineate the "all-American" makeup of the participants. The lack of faces of color in the movement went unremarked. In Taylor's iconography Alex Cox was a " red haired Texan," Jack Patterson a "tall, slim, mustached, thirty-two year-old," and Wayne Lauser was "tall, with a head band," On the other side, Patrolman Walter Roberts, who showed sympathy to the demonstrators, was described as "friendly, open face, with hazel eyes and close cropped blond hair." Although there were few Bengalis in visible positions within the movement, they were fetishized as "foreign objects" by the media. Monayem Chowdhury, the Bengali male in the group was inevitably described as "short, soft-spoken, Gandhi-like" and Sultana Krippendorf was in "flowing sari, petite figure, long black hair, lovely dark skin, and large brown eyes"-- elsewhere she was a "lovely woman with foreign accent." Television channels, ewly confident and self-aware, actively picked up on these visual cues. Because TV carried nightly broadcasts of the blockade action and its "colorful" protagonists, newspapers also followed, afraid of being left behind by the newer media. The power dynamic had shifted-- television was where the action was, and the protesters now calibrated their activities based on which images were ideal for moving film. Reflecting the new reality, Bill Moyer told a planning meeting:

"I can talk every night for one hundred years to audiences of one hundred people, and still not reach nearly as many people as if I get on CBS evening news just one time. I can pass out hundreds of thousands of leaflets and still not reach anything like the audience Walter Cronkite reaches every night."

It was the full realization of the television war.

Fast Media & "Hot News" cycles

As technology brings breath-taking changes to news media, the two largest impacts are in portability of media tools and the compression of the news cycle. One reporter can have a full news production kit, including video camera, editing laptop and satellite phone in one briefcase. As tools get smaller and faster, the cycle of news-gathering is getting faster. Going back to the Congo genocide, the gap between the news-gathering and broadcast was often months. George Washington Williams' open letter to King Leopold, subsequent open letter to the US President, publication as a pamphlet, citation in the New York Herald, translation in French press and eventual rebuttal Journal de Bruxelles-- each of these milestones occurred with gaps of several months. Between Williams' initial report, and E.D. Morel's next investigation, there is a gap of ten years. In totality the media coverage of the Congo crisis extended over decades, only reaching its denouement very late.

Today, not only is there incredible velocity in media mechanisms, there is exponential growth on an annual basis The speed of media change can be shown through a simple comparison between two years. In 1994, when an earthquake hit Los Angeles earthquake, it took forty minutes for the news to reach President Clinton, via HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros who was sitting in CBS television studios. In contrast, a year later, when the Kobe earthquake happened, University students-- the earliest users with access to Internet networks-- started spreading word of the earthquake before the tremors had even faded. "The ground was still shaking when university students began firing up their computers to spread word of the disaster."[xxiv]

As speedy media takes over, the first victim is the news cycle. In conflict zones, the focus is now always on "hot news". Today a conflict in Sudan can only hold attention for a few months before the press is sent on the next hot spot. This pattern of rapid media exhaustion seems to have already been established in 1971. It has often remarked that the Indians intervened in December 1971 because they correctly calculated that waiting any longer would cause the world media to move on. Nine months seems to be the optimal time for conflicts involving the developing world to stay on western television screens. Those who covered the Bangladesh conflict would have a hard time recognizing that country today. A rising tide of Islamist politics is a strong force in the country today-- seeming to contradict the essentially secular politics that resulted in the rejection of the "Islamic homeland."

In the rush to move on to the next war zone, the media missed most of the major developments inside Bangladesh between 1971 and 1979, all of which can help explain the current situation. Out of media sight, Bangladesh's first years were plagued by all the unresolved tensions of the 1971 civil war manifesting themselves through instability, conflict, palace intrigue and death. Shortly after independence, the AL showed its antipathy towards radical left groups by carrying out a program of secret killings of left party activists. The nadir was reached with the mysterious death in custody of the leader of an underground Maoist group, in perfect synchronicity with an identical killing of his counterpart in India. The AL's rapid moves towards autocracy, coupled with a disastrous famine that was accelerated by Kissinger's refusal to allow US grain shipments, created fertile ground for a 1975 military coup. Although reporters like Jack Anderson made their name by investigating Kissinger's double-dealing in 1971, by 1975 no western media seemed interested in pursuing the rumors that the CIA station chief in Dhaka had, at the least, known about the coup in advance and had taken no action. The following years set a familiar pattern of coups and counter-coups, and just as in Pakistan, the military regimes introduced Islamist politics to build a power base. None of this seemed of much interest to any media anywhere. The hot zone had moved elsewhere.

Today the genocide and eventual liberation of Bengal is often re-written in media reports as the "Third India-Pakistan war." What was a conflict between the Bengalis of East Pakistan and West Pakistan is now a footnote in the story of "enduring enmity over Kashmir." Over the last three decades, the Kashmir conflict has mounted steadily, sending India and Pakistan to the brink of nuclear war. Both sides now find it strategic to describe the 1971 war as a direct conflict, deleting the Bengalis from the equation. Once again, there is a "since time immemorial" subplot, but the Bengalis themselves don't have any space within this narrative.

Conclusion

In looking at the role of evolving media in covering conflicts, the Bangladesh genocide was chosen as both representative and atypical. It is representative because many of the issues regarding elimination of complexity, racial coding, news cycle and the role of the narrator played out in 1971 in a fashion similar to other conflicts. At the same time, it is atypical because certain factors converged in a unique fashion to make electronic media the deciding factor in the mobilization of world attention to this conflict. In subsequent confllagrations, media has tried for an equally decisive role, with mixed results. Television commanded a level of world attention in 1971, which would be impossible in today's ultra-fragmented, hyper-speedy media landscape. Still, with all these caveats, several key trends emerged in coverage of the Bangladesh civil war that were seen in other conflict zones as well.

First, there is the uber-role of the narrator, especially a white journalist or protagonist. In various conflicts, they play the decisive role of storytelling and building the defining history. In many cases, they are fashioned as crusaders for truth, at other times they are angels of mercy. Native journalists, who are connected to the conflict zone are mostly sidelines. Often they are seen as biased and inherently irrational.

Second, new media necessitates flattened narratives, which lead to obscured complexities and cartoonish good vs. evil sides. This need is combined with a theory of primordial behavior among developing nations. Following this line, conflicts are the natural result of savagery lurking below the surface, and tensions that go back to the "beginning of time." Also coupled with this is a portrayal of the victims as being pre-technology people.

Third, the proliferation of visual news has led to an over-emphasis on the use of shocking statistics to jolt the viewer. This can often lead to a race to inflate death tolls and casualty rates, in order to gain space on TV screens. This is coupled with the need for events and media stunts to gain attention. The inevitable result is that conflicts without a media-friendly visual image are neglected by the world stage.

Finally, accelerated media news cycle means that "hot news" becomes cold very quickly. Conflicts that last for longer period are simply left behind by the news cycle.

For media to be relevant as a shared entity, and a technological tool that does not empower the status quo, all these trends have to be understood and challenged. The impact of news media is immense, especially in the lives of the developing world. Accelerated development of the related technologies has come at a high price. Highly evolved technologies have led to dehumanization of the news cycle. It is crucial to find ways to use advanced technologies in media work without losing our original humanity and complexity.

[i] Nawab Mushtaq Ahmad Gurnani, quoted in Anthony Mascarenhas, The Rape of Bangladesh, Vikas Publications, 1972, P. 12.
[ii] George Gerbner, appearing on Bill Moyers' Journal: TV or not TV, April 23, 1979
[iii] Quoted in Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost, Mariner Books, 1998, p. 111.
[iv] Hoschchild, P 177
[v] Vinod Gupta, Anderson Papers: A Study of Nixon's Blackmail of India, ISSD Publications, 1972
[vi] Memo to Assistant Secretary of Defense (3 December 1971), quoted by Gupta, P. 97
[vii] Anderson, speaking to Inland Daily Press Association Convention, February 29, 1972, quoted by Gupta, P. 44.
[viii] Mascarenhas, P. iv
[ix] Jean Seaton, "The New Ethnic Wars and the Media", The Media of Conflict, Tim Allen, Jean Seaton, Ed., Zed Books, 1999.
[x] David Keen, "Who's It Between? Ethnic War and Rational Violence", The Media of Conflict, Tim Allen, Jean Seaton, Ed., Zed Books, 1999.
[xi] Guardian, 25 April, 1998
[xii] Philip Gourevitch, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, Picador, 1998.
[xiii] Mascarenhas, P. 10.
[xiv] Salman Rushdie, Shame, Jonathan Cape, 1983, P. 195.
[xv] George Orwell, "Reflections On Gandhi," A Collection of Essays, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1953, P. 172.
[xvi] Documented by Catherine & Tareque Masud, Song of Freedom.
[xvii] The estimated number of Bangladeshi refugees in India ranged from12 Million[xvii] to 10.0 million[xvii] and the number of internally displaced people was set at 20 million[xvii].
[xviii] National Geographic, Sept. 1972
[xix] "Quake Hits India," New York Times (September 30, 1993)
[xx] Marilyn Greene and Juan J. Walte, "Quake Tragedy 'Unimaginable'", USA Today (October 1, 1993)
[xxi] Edward A. Gargan, "Relief For Victims Of Indian Quake Comes Slowly," New York Times (October 3, 1993)
[xxii] "Aid To India Quake Victims Stick To Main Roads," New York Times (October 6, 1993)
[xxiii] Richard Taylor, Blockade, Orbis Books, P. 7.
[xxiv] John M. Moran, "Internet Becomes Quake-Net," Hartford Courant (January 20, 1995), A1.