When only Malraux fought for Bangladesh

It is difficult to say what this name could mean for a 20-year-old today. If he has some passion and / or musical attendance, perhaps he will be able to trace back to that Concert for Bangladesh which in August 1971, more or less half a century ago, gave life to the first charity live in the history of rock, with English George Harrison, already mythical name of the Beatles, and the Indian Ravi Shankar, as organizers. Precisely in the summer of that year, a military repression and civil catastrophe was taking place in that territory that suddenly appeared on the front pages of newspapers and televisions. Bangladesh was then called East Pakistan, the result of the unfortunate partition of 1947, when the Indian subcontinent was divided in two, India on one side and Pakistan on the other. Until then, East Bengal had called that region and 2400 kilometers separated Karachi, the capital of the new Pakistani state, from Dacca, the capital of the Bengali one. In the middle there was India in all its breadth and in short, that distant province had found itself for sectarian or religious reasons, assigned to a nation with which it had nothing to do with ethnic, economic, social specificities. In the following years, the separatist instances had gradually strengthened and in 1970, on the occasion of the first free general elections, the Awami League, led by its leader Mujibur Rahman, had won and put on the ground the question of Bengali independence in front of the central government of Pakistan. The latter’s president, Yahya Khan, had in response declared the elections invalid, had Rahman arrested and invaded the rebel province. Operation Searchlight had been called that invasion, with intellectuals and Hindus as primary targets. Within a few months, the rebels had given birth to the Provisional Government of Bangladesh, based in Calcutta, one million dead, about 10 million refugees, the real threat of famine, the result of rebellion and repression, and Suddenly Bangladesh had turned into a humanitarian catastrophe and a delicate political problem.

In looking around for Western help, the new Bengali government found itself facing a wall of diplomatic silence. The US was stuck in Vietnam, a war that began three years earlier and from which they no longer knew how to get out. Pakistan was still an ally of them and President Nixon, through his State Security Advisor Kissinger, saw India, fresh from an economic-military agreement with the USSR precisely from an anti-Pakistani perspective, like smoke in the eyes. “We covered that old witch with saliva,” said the first to the second, when Indira Gandhi was invited to the White House to test her intentions. “Indians are anyway bastards” was the answer of the second “You have to be Machiavellian,” the latter then told the American ambassador in New Delhi, worried that in Bangladesh the Pakistani army was using American weapons and equipment to stifle the rebellion. “It is ethnic cleansing”, however, the American consul protested in Dhaka: “It is a real genocide that we have a moral duty to condemn.”

In such a context, with the British linked with a double thread to American politics and the Germans condemned to eternal international passivity, the Indian ambassador in Paris decided to organize, through the Gandhi Peace Foundation, an international conference on the subject and to invite, on behalf of its president Narayan, André Malraux , then in his seventies, former minister of culture in the 1960s, a famous writer albeit with a somewhat worn glory, and, as he wrote, a man deeply “linked to the cause of freedom and humanity”.

Malraux’s response to Narayan was surprising. It is not the time, he replied, neither for circulars, nor for petitions, nor for the United Nations, all useless initiatives: «Bengal must appeal to its own firmness. It is no longer about decorative things but about Maybe we will die, but we will not be defeated. On this statement, not another, you will find the help you expect. If he organizes the guerrilla war, Pakistan will be defeated. The United States also did not crush Vietnam. Here’s how I think. I’d like to know what you think. I can meet you in India, even without an international conference, it is worth it and we will certainly be able to do more effective things together than conferences. Furthermore, it would not have been at a congress that I would have met the leaders of the resistance and I would have a great need to know them. ‘ By return of post, Malraux then wrote to the Indian ambassador letting him know that he intended to go there, set up a war school, recruit volunteers, establish ties with the insurgents, seek support in the third world, organize a “great march of freedom. “. Basically, who made himself available, if not at the head, of the Bangladesh resistance!

Half a century after those events, Malraux et le Bangladesh (edited by Michaël de Saint Cheron, Gallimard, 180 pages, 18 euros) brings together all the documents of this incredible story, including the public appeal he pronounced in which he declared himself ready to take command of an international brigade and the letter, published in the form of an article, addressed to President Nixon when the latter had reiterated his alliance with Pakistan: “I would like that for free Bengal you do not have to wait twenty years before reminding you that it is not convenient for the country of the Declaration of Independence to crush the misery of who is fighting for their own. I know a little about your country. He does not like at all that the winners of the elections (and even the losers) are sent to prison. He does not like at all that his allies sweep away millions of refugees to a neighboring and poor country. Charity has nothing to do with it: you can give alms to corpses. ”

It matters little whether Malraux really would have gone to Bangladesh. In December 1971, the Indian army finally got out of the way by besieging Dhaka alongside the Bengali troops, resulting in the fall of Yahya Khan’s Pakistani government and consequently independence. Two years later Malraux will be received in Bangladesh, in an impressive crowd shrewd to thank him, and as if he were a head of state, a triumphal journey that was the most evident response to those who had accused him of mythomania, calculation, dangerous. senility. The people of Bangladesh recognized him, in short, that in their time of need he had been by their side, and not others.

It matters little that Malraux knew little or nothing about Bangladesh. For him it was nothing more than a significant part of the whole of an India which he felt as the irrational in its pure state, Gandhi and Siddartha, the sacred caves of Ajanta, Ellora, Elephanta, India as the eternal enchanted garden of the world.

It is interesting to recall the deposition that Malraux himself made at the trial against Jean Kai, one of the French then seduced by his appeal, to the point of seizing, at Orly airport, an aircraft of Pakistan Airlines and ask for twenty tons of medicines for Bangladesh in exchange. «For the accused one speaks of piracy. – he said on that occasion – If the pirates had done nothing but steal medicines from the galleons of the king of Spain, today we would speak of them as a religious order. In such acts there is a mixture of great generosity and small folly … Now, the tons of medicine men obtained by Jean Kay have reached their destination, meaning 600 thousand lives saved. And that’s what matters. The man you are about to judge deserves much more than me the flowers with the colors of France that I received from the mutilated in Bengal ». Kai will be sentenced to five years and soon after released.

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