The Foreign Service Journal, December 2004

A PPRECIATION A True Foreign Service Hero Archer Kent Blood 1923 – 2004 B Y D OUGLAS K ERR D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 61 n Sept. 3, Archer Blood, who served as U.S. consul general in Dhaka in 1971 during Bangladesh’s Libera- tion War, passed away. Bangla- deshis have always regarded Blood as a much-loved friend, and he is seen as a heroic, even tragic figure, not only for his conduct dur- ing those dark months in 1971, but also because of the way the State Department treated him thereafter. In 1996 he was invited to return to Bangladesh to participate in cere- monies marking the 25th anniversary of independence. For both Blood and his Bangladeshi friends, that 1996 trip was a joyful reunion. Archer Blood will be remembered for his personal integrity and moral courage in a time of crisis, and as senior signatory to a dissent cable written during the bru- tal military crackdown by the Pakistan government on its Bangladeshi eastern wing. For Foreign Service officers, Blood’s 1971 conduct stands as a stark object lesson in the use of the Dissent Channel. The American Foreign Service Association honored him in 1971 with its presti- gious Christian A. Herter Award for “extraordinary accomplishment involving initiative, integrity, intellectual courage and constructive dissent by a Senior Foreign Service officer.” Three decades later, Blood recounted his experience in his book The Cruel Birth of Bangladesh: Memoirs of an American Diplomat (University Press, Ltd., 2002), a combi- nation of personal biography and professional memoir. Perhaps the greatest value of the book lies in Blood’s repro- duction and analysis of the declassified cables from 1971. Against a backdrop of vicious cruelty and “selective geno- cide,” a term he coined as the subject line of one of his reports, Blood and his team sought to inform their superiors in Washington of Pakistani General Yahya Khan’s military crackdown, and urged them to try to stop it. Pakistan’s Military Crackdown In March 1971, following the failure to reach a negoti- ated settlement to the political dispute arising from the recent election, the government of Pakistan had pre-emp- tively removed the foreign press from Dhaka and then commenced a vicious military crackdown in Bangladesh. Awami League leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was arrested and the Pakistan army set about murdering his supporters. The focus of their savagery was Dhaka University’s campus, seen as a hotbed of radical and Hindu-inspired opposition. Blood himself reported directly to the State Department and Henry Kissinger’s National Security Council one episode in which the army laid siege to the women’s dormitory on campus, set fire to it, and mowed down the occupants with machine guns as they fled the flames. A generation of senior Hindu acad- emics was rounded up one by one, taken out to the coun- tryside and shot. In rural areas, the Pakistani murderers would order men they suspected of being Hindus to lift their lunghis; uncircumcised men were shot on the spot. “Rape, murder, dismemberment and the state murder of children were employed as deliberate methods of repression and intimidation. At least ten thousand civil- ians were butchered in the first three days,” reports Christopher Hitchens in his book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (Verso Books, 2001). “The eventual civilian death toll has never been placed at less than half a million, and has been put as high as three million.” At the height of the atrocities, in March-April 1971, Dhaka was almost completely cut off from the rest of the world. But Blood had ingeniously secured permission from O