Conference in Algiers in the wake of the October Arab-Israeli War and the Arab oil embargo against Western countries supporting Israel. I remember meeting young men at my hotel from Portugal’s African colonies — Angola, Mozambique and Guinea Bissau. They had come to plead with the Arabs to keep withholding oil from Portugal even if they restored supplies to the United States. The conference’s declaration of Nov. 28 included the commitment to “sever all the diplomatic, consular, economic, cultural and other relations with South Africa, Portugal and Rhodesia of those Arab States which have not yet done so.” Economic hardship in Portugal produced the Carnation Revolution the next April, which overthrew the dictatorship and led to Portugal’s abrupt withdrawal from its colonial empire after four centuries.

Civil wars ensued in the largest colonies, Angola and Mozambique, while Portuguese East Timor, half of an island between Indonesia and Australia, awaited its fate. Indonesia claimed the territory, though the Timorese favored independence. The United States decided the issue on Dec. 6, 1975, when President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger descended on the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, to inform military dictator Suharto that East Timor was his for the taking. A cable from the U.S. Embassy quoted Kissinger on the legality of Indonesia’s use of U.S. weapons in invading East Timor: “It depends on how we construe it; whether it is in self-defense or is a foreign operation.” East Timor, which had no army, did not attack Indonesia, but the self-defense ruse was sufficient for Suharto to invade as soon as Ford and Kissinger departed. Indonesian forces killed more than 200,000 people in the operation — one-third of East Timor’s population — suppressed all civil rights, confiscated land and implanted settlers from Java.

Once upon a time here in Dhaka, Bangladesh, this teeming city on the Buriganga River, the bells of the Holy Resurrection Church echoed for miles. Armenians built their house of Orthodox Christian worship amid the palm groves in 1781, almost two centuries after Persian Shah Abbas the Great conquered eastern Armenia and thousands of them migrated to Bengal. They and their progeny prospered as traders in jute, silk and leather. In 1880, the church clock stopped ticking, perhaps because of rust from the tropical damp, and the bells rang no more. Despite that ill omen, the Armenians of Dhaka were among the lucky few of their compatriots spared the Ottoman Turks’ genocide during World War I.

Yet genocide is no stranger to Bangladesh, known from 1947 to 1971 as East Pakistan. More than a million Bangladeshis died during the India-Pakistan War of 1971, when West Pakistani soldiers raped tens of thousands of Bangladeshi women and sent millions of refugees fleeing to India for safety. After Pakistan conceded Bangladesh’s independence, the Bangladeshis themselves proved susceptible to the genocidal urge, slaughtering Muslim Biharis and Buddhist Chakmas.

Now, nearly 50 years later, genocide haunts the country again. This time, the Bangladeshis are neither victims nor perpetrators. They are witnesses who have provided haven to more than 620,000 survivors of the mass executions, expulsions and rapes that Myanmar’s army and Buddhist paramilitaries have committed since last August. What baffles people here in Dhaka is that the United Nations, the United States, the European Union and other preachers of international morality refrain from labeling the killings and expulsions as genocide. Important visitors to Myanmar, including Pope Francis just this week, shy away from so much as referring to the victims by the name they use to describe themselves — Rohingyas — lest they upset the country’s military and jeopardize its fragile transition to democracy. The Burmese ruling class denies the Rohingyas’ existence as a people.