Yahya Khan

Yahya Khan held Pakistan's first free election and refused to accept its result, and the country broke in half. He was a professional soldier from a Qizilbash family, served with distinction in North Africa and Italy, was captured and escaped, and rose under Ayub Khan to become army commander. He took over in March 1969 when Ayub handed him power, imposed martial law, and then did something no Pakistani ruler had done: dissolved the One Unit scheme, restored the provinces, introduced one man one vote, and held a genuinely free general election in December 1970. The Awami League under Mujibur Rahman won 160 of 162 seats in East Pakistan and an absolute majority of the national assembly. Yahya postponed the assembly rather than let a Bengali party form a government, and on 25 March 1971 launched Operation Searchlight, a military crackdown in Dhaka that began nine months of killing; estimates of the dead run from several hundred thousand to three million, and millions of refugees crossed into India. India intervened in December and the Pakistani eastern command surrendered at Dhaka on the sixteenth with over ninety thousand prisoners. Yahya resigned within four days and handed the remainder of the country to Bhutto. The Hamoodur Rahman Commission, whose report was suppressed for decades, recommended he be tried publicly. He spent five years under house arrest and was never charged. He was a heavy drinker and the subject of open contempt in Pakistani accounts written after 1971. He had acted as an intermediary in 1971 for the secret American opening to China, and Henry Kissinger flew to Beijing from Pakistan on his arrangement, which is part of why Washington tilted toward him during the war. He died in Rawalpindi in 1980. Bangladesh, the country his decision created, marks 25 March as a day of genocide remembrance.

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