Pakistan. Out of these early initiatives in the Senate emerged the Saxby-Church amendment to the U. S. Foreign Aid bill, which aimed to stop U. S. aid to Pakistan as long as the genocide in Bangladesh continued. But this is a later part of the story and required a much larger mobilization.
Following our Success in the Senate we heard that M. M. Ahmed was scheduled to address a press conference at the National Press Club. We decided to beat him to it and managed, through the efforts of Razzaque Khan and his associates. to organize our own conference. This was well attended by the press, radio and TV media. Voice of America carried excerpts from my speech which were heard round the world. Nasim Ahmed correspondent of Dawn, who later became Information Secretary, under Bhutto, had been sent by Pakistan, along with another journalist, Qutubuddin Aziz, to counter my campaign. Nasim Ahmed was at my press conference but appeared more interested in monitoring who was there than in putting any scrious questions to me. The success of the conference and the favorable publicity that Bangladesh was attracting in the media sufficiently discouraged M. M. Ahmed who subsequently cancelled his own press conference.
Whilst the U.S. Congress and media had given us a favorable hearing it was much more difficult to get through to the upper echelons of the Nixon administration. We had set our sight on making contact with IIenry Kissinger who had taught a number of Bengalis in his International Seminar at Harvard and was thus thought likely to be more familiar with the background to the liberation struggle. We soon found that the U. S. administration was a closed door to Bangladeshis. I was advised to fly to Cambridge to meet with Kissinger's former colleagues to see if they could get me an audience with him. Apart from some of the ranking economists such as Prof. Dorfman, I met with a colleague of Kissinger in the Dept. of government, Prof. Samuel Huntington and with Prof. Lodge at the Harvard Business School, supposedly another close friend of Kissinger. None of these contacts proved particularly useful.
At the official level in Washington the best I could do was to meet at the home of Enayet Karim, Craig Baxter, who was then the Bangladesh desk officer at the State Department. I also met through the good offices of Tom Hexner, a consultant to the World Bank, with Maurice Williams, who was then Deputy Director. U. S. Aid. I remember this meeting for the message communicated by Williams, that if Bangladesh expected its cause to be taken more seriously in Washington, it must demonstrate its military capability.
My other target in Washington was the World Bank who had till then been the leader of the Pakistan consortium and were indeed its principal spokesman in the international community.
My first contact in the Bank was with the Englishman, I. P. Cargill who was then a Vice President and the person who chaired the Pakistan Consortium. He was a close friend of M. M. Ahmed from their I. C. S. days and the most knowledgeable about affairs in Pakistan. In a recently concluded meeting of the Consortium in Paris, the members, under advice from Cargill and suspended further consideration of aid to Pakistan, till the
