Word: yahya
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Bengali-dominated East, separated by 1,000 miles of India from the less populous but long-dominant West, was moving toward autonomy, if not outright independence. Civil war loomed. The East's 75 million people had been under martial law since 1969. Now Pakistani President Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan's troops, most of them Punjabis from the West who were offended by the East's separatist demands, went on a murderous rampage. Bengali refugees began streaming into India, eventually numbering some 8 million. India's Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, protesting that the refugees were placing...
...What made the crisis so difficult was that the stakes were so much greater than the common perception of them. I remain convinced to this day that Mrs. Gandhi was not motivated primarily by conditions in East Pakistan. India struck in late November; by the timetable that we induced Yahya to accept, martial law would have ended and a civilian government would have taken power at the end of December. This would almost surely have led to the independence of East Pakistan-probably without the excesses of brutality, including public bayoneting, that followed...
...their relationship. There followed what Kissinger calls "an intricate minuet, so stylized that neither side needed to bear the onus of an initiative, so elliptical that existing relationships on both sides were not jeopardized." The complex maneuvers began paying off. In October 1970, Nixon asked Pakistan's President Yahya Khan, who was about to visit Peking, to let the Chinese know that the U.S. was ready to improve relations...
...Pakistan's Ambassador Agha Hilaly said that he had "a message" for me relating to Yahya's trip. I invited Hilaly to the White House the next day, where in my office a few minutes after 6 p.m. he produced an envelope containing a handwritten missive on white, blue-lined paper which had been carried to him by hand, Yahya not trusting the security of cable communications. (This was to be the form for all messages through the Pakistani channel.) Hilaly said he was not authorized to leave the document with...
...resign, but the rising tide of bitterness signaled the end of an era of good will that had accompanied his takeover of power after Pakistan's defeat in the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war. Bhutto tried to repair the damage wrought by his predecessor, General Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan, whose brutal excesses in East Pakistan forced the province to break away and form the nation of Bangladesh. He pushed through a land reform program, gave the country a constitution that changed the government from a presidential to a parliamentary system, and reaped a windfall in aid (almost $1 billion over...