1971 Dhaka chaos captured by a Pakistani cameraman
Cricket match between Pakistan and World XI turned violent amid political protests
Fifty years ago, Akbar Hussain walked into Dhaka Cricket Stadium with his Bell and Howell camera to film a four-day test match between Pakistan and a World XI.
The crowd was cheering, and everyone looked excited. But then the mood suddenly changed and the match was called off amid violence as two prominent Pakistani cricketers, Wasim Bari and Sarfraz Nawaz, were building a partnership.
“I was not sure what was happening,” Hussain told Arab News, speaking about the incident that took place on March 1, 1971.
Just months earlier, Pakistan had held its first general elections, in December 1970, which were won by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League party.
Passions were still running high, though things looked normal to Hussain, who could not figure out why everyone around him had become so furious.
“They set tents on fire and started pelting stones at players, who rushed to the dressing room to save their lives,” he said. “Several shops were burnt outside the stadium as rioting continued.”
Hussain, who at the time worked as a cameraman with the Dhaka television station before moving to Karachi in 1973, later discovered that the provocation was caused by a radio broadcast about the cancelation of a National Assembly session scheduled in Dhaka.
Crowds of people came out in the streets of the city in protest, and stores and business centers in the city closed. The cricket match between Pakistan and the World XI was suspended as audiences left to take part in the protests. Ghulam Mujtaba, a former banker who was also among the audience, said it was “total chaos.” “The stadium where people were cheering for their favorite players a little while ago was now on fire,” he told Arab
News. “The news bulletin had turned the sporting arena into a battlefield after the radio announcement spread like a wildfire.”
Intikhab Alam, the skipper of the Pakistan team that came under attack, recalled the “horrible story,” telling Arab News that he had just returned to the pavilion when the rioting began.
“The World XI was fielding, so its players ran to take refuge,” he said. “Some went to their dressing room, others came to ours. For about two hours, we could not get out of the stadium.”
The foreign cricketers reached the InterContinental Hotel where they were staying. Things were difficult for the Pakistani players, however, since their accommodation was further away from the stadium and they had to temporarily stay at a nearby guest house.
“The phone lines were dead,” Alam said. “Our team remained there until midnight and reached the hotel at 1 a.m.”
The former Pakistani captain added that World XI was lucky to board an empty Pakistan
International Airlines flight for Lahore.
“We got stuck and could not go out of our hotel,” he added.
The situation lasted several days until arrangements were made to ensure the safe movement of local cricketers.
“Our jeep was escorted by a police truck that took us to the airport, which was hardly 20 minutes away from our hotel,” he said. “However, our journey continued for about two hours since the network of roads was littered with smashed cars and burning tires,” he said.
Alam said this was still not the end of the team’s agony.
Since Pakistani flights were not allowed to move through Indian airspace, the cricket squad had to take a detour and go to Sri Lanka first.
Just as the plane touched down at the Colombo airport, its tire burst. The team was due to play its last test match against the World XI in Lahore, but almost missed the clash. “The airlines added extra seats for us on the connecting flight to Lahore after we reached Karachi,” the former captain said. “By the time we reached our destination, the match had been postponed due to rain. That is how we managed to play the game.” Despite the shocking incidents, the two teams were still willing to finish the series.
“Sportsmen think differently,” Alam said. “They try to send out the message of peace and are willing to play in difficult circumstances to make that happen.”
They set tents on fire and started pelting stones at players, who rushed to the dressing room to save their lives. Several shops were burnt outside the stadium as rioting continued.
Akbar Hussaini Pakistani cameraman
Seventy-five years on from Winston Churchill’s historic speech — in which he said, “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent” — political analogies continue to be made with the former UK prime minister’s prescient warnings about the impending US-Soviet Cold War.
However, prior events can be misinterpreted by policymakers, just as they can also learn useful lessons. While history can provide a valuable framework for addressing very similar policy challenges, significant differences between past and present conditions must also be called out to guide action and avoid misjudgments.
Three-quarters of a century after Churchill’s eloquent March 5, 1946, address, the iron curtain analogy has been used in diverse contexts, from Belarus to China, in only the last few months. Take the example of China, whose actions before and after the pandemic in a range of policy areas, from security to digital and financial, have led some academics, thinktank officials and policymakers to resurrect the remarkable wartime leader’s words.
Such framing of events in international affairs is, of course, commonplace. In the complexity and uncertainty of sometimes fast-moving developments, policymakers and other influential figures often seek to draw what they perceive as key takeaways from the past while seeking to guide and provide rationales for future actions. But they should beware of making mistakes. On China, for instance, analogies with the Cold War can belie the differences between the openness of US-China relations today compared to those with the Soviet Union after the Second World War, particularly in areas such as economic interwovenness and people-to-people interactions.
None of this is to dispute that some of China’s actions are very troubling, including in Hong Kong, where the new security law has been rightly criticized by much of the international community as a violation of the 1997 “one country, two systems” joint declaration with the UK. But there are dangers in conflating the concerning breaches of freedoms in the territory to date with the sweeping totalitarianism imposed on much of the Eastern Bloc by the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
One danger is that it can lead to suboptimal policy prescriptions, such as then-US President Donald Trump’s threat last year to “cut off the whole relationship” with Beijing. In what appeared to be a parallel with America’s containment policy of the Soviet Union, he asserted that this would save the country $500 billion (likely a reference to the $557 billion of US imports from China in 2018), despite the fact most economists believe it would cause significant harm to the US and the wider global economy.
The iron curtain analogy is not the only one that continues to act as a source of confusion, as well as clarity, in international relations.
For much of the period since the 1970s, for instance, many US officials have been fearful of “another Vietnam,” referring to the troubled American intervention there. In the period until 9/11, this reduced Washington’s willingness to deploy US military force internationally. That is, unless any action — such as the 1991 Gulf War — had clear, attainable objectives that could be swiftly achieved with a minimum of casualties.
Vietnam also became a key frame of reference when the US-led intervention in Iraq faltered after 2003. This was despite the fact that the two experiences (Iraq and Vietnam) were dissimilar in many respects, including the nature of the insurgencies and America’s objectives in each country.
However, perhaps the most widely used historical analogy is that of the ill-fated 1938 UK-French Munich Agreement with Nazi Germany. Numerous politicians claimed to have been influenced by it, including George W. Bush during the “war on terror,” Margaret Thatcher over the Falklands conflict, Lyndon Johnson with Vietnam, Anthony Eden and
Guy Mollet during the Suez crisis, and Harry Truman over Korea. But not all diplomatic agreements turn out like Munich, just as not all military actions end up like Vietnam. And Suez and Vietnam underscore how Munich was used to guide or justify major foreign policy blunders by the US, the UK and France in the 1950s and 1960s.
These examples underline that the use of analogies is fraught with difficulties — despite the valuable lessons that can be learned from history — due to the constant risk that past crises can be misinterpreted. The coronavirus pandemic has, if anything, only added to the uncertainty of international affairs and extra care is therefore needed by policymakers as they think through the range of options at their disposal in the tumult of the postpandemic world.