Category Archives: Europe

by | 17 April 2004 · 1:41 pm

Burma, TotalFinaElf, and Bernard Kouchner

A blog I only recently discovered via Belmont Club, the Last of the Famous International Playboys, posted back in January a long, detailed, and nuanced report on a scandal involving Kouchner, Total & Burma:

Good people make mistakes, too. Someone I very much admire, founder of Médecins sans frontiéres Bernard Kouchner, has drawn the wrath of right-thinking people down on his head.In his long career, the popular Kouchner (click on “afficher ma sélection” to plot his rising and falling poll numbers) has been a champion of human rights and was one of the only public figures in France to express support for the removal of Saddam Hussein.

But according to a few articles, France’s illustrious former socialist Minister of Health, Kouchner, has been accused of whitewashing the matter of the complicity of French oil giant Total (which recently merged with its highly corrupt and rapacious competitor Elf, forming the fourth largest oil company in the world) in alleged human rights abuses as part of the construction of a pipeline in the Yadana region of Myanmar.

On 7 April, the “tenth anniversary of the first full day of slaughter in the Rwandan genocide,” Last of the Famous posted another long, detailed, and nuanced retrospective on Rwanda, with a follow-up on 11 April. Both fascinating, but grim reading.

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Filed under Burma, France, industry, NGOs

by | 10 April 2004 · 1:33 pm

East Timor: The World’s Newest Country

The Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Hawai‘i has made freely available online (in PDF format) a brief, 33-page high-school level workbook, East Timor: The World’s Newest Country, by Flo Lamoureux.

The purpose of this book is to provide students with an overview the world’s newest nation–East Timor. The narrative begins with a section on pre-colonial Timor and continues through the Portuguese era. It covers the 25-year period when Indonesia governed the entire island of Timor. After a varied and violent past, on September 27, 2002 this little known state became the United Nation’s 191st member. In addition to an accounting of important historical events, the book covers language, education, religion, women’s issues and government. The Center for Southeast Asian Studies wishes to acknowledge Dr. Douglas Kammen who carefully read and edited an early draft of the book. His experiences in East Timor significantly enriched its contents.

The workbook is loaded with provocative discussion questions. Here are the questions for the history section.

  • Sandalwood was the major source of income and bartered goods in Timor prior to 1500. How would sandalwood trade in the 16th and 17th centuries have differed if current international regulations related to conservation have been in effect? Compare the economic results of over-cutting sandalwood to the present day economic questions raised in the matter of drift net fishing. (For material on driftnet fishing, see http://www.nwr.noaa.gov/1salmon/salmesa/pubs/fsdrift.htm; and http://www.unescap.org/mced2000/pacific/background/drift.htm)

  • The explorer, Ferdinand Magellan, sailed under the Spanish flag. When his crewmembers landed on Timor they did not claim the island for Spain. They had previously landed in the Philippines and claimed those islands for Spain, why do you think they did not plant the Spanish flag on Timor? If Timor had been a Spanish colony and more closely connected to the Philippines how do you think that would have impacted on the island’s future?

  • The Portuguese were never able to maintain full control of Timor. The local Christianized Timorese resisted Portuguese rule and dealt with the Europeans only when required by commercial matters. Explain why the Topasses were more successful in their dealings with both the indigenous Timorese and the Portuguese.

  • It took well over a hundred years for the Dutch and Portuguese to sign a formal treaty that divided Timor between the two European nations. Since they essentially agreed to an informal division in 1777, why do you think they did not get around to a formal treaty until 1916?

  • In 1910 the Portuguese monarchy was overthrown. This was a cause for alarm among the elite class in East Timor who had developed a comfortable working relationship with the Portuguese government there. As a result of this change in the government in Portugal, a plantation economy emerged in East Timor. Compare the plantation economy with its salaried income and taxes to the economy that existed under the Portuguese monarchy where the East Timorese elite collected goods from the peasant farmers and turned them over to the Portuguese government representative.

  • Explain why the Japanese Army of occupation treated West Timor differently from East Timor. Compare this to the situation in Vietnam where the French government was an ally of Germany and hence not an enemy of Japan.

  • Give three reasons why post-World War II East Timor was such a poor region. Why do you think Portugal neglected it?

  • Explain why the Viqueque rebellion in 1959 led to Portugal exiling rebel leaders. What role did Communism play in the Portuguese government’s decision to do this?

  • In 1974 the conservative Portuguese government was overthrown and a new liberal government emerged. What policy did the new government implement that had a dramatic affect on East Timor?

  • Name the three major parties that vied for power in the newly independent East Timor? Compare their goals.

  • In August 1975 Fretilin controlled most of East Timor and the new nation’s independence seemed secure. Explain how the alliance of UTD, Apodeti and Indonesia reacted to this situation.

  • Once Indonesian troops forced Fretilin forces into the mountains, guerrilla warfare became the norm. One matter that encouraged East Timorese to join the guerrillas in the mountains was the Indonesian policy of encirclement. Explain how this policy worked.

  • Neither Australia, the United States nor Portugal supported East Timor’s struggle for democracy. Compare the reasons why the three countries did not support East Timorese independence.

  • If Indonesia built more hospitals and schools in ten years than Portugal did in 400 years, why were the East Timorese so adamant about being a separate nation?

  • Many brutal incidents took place in East Timor under Indonesian rule. What made the November 1991 incident outside a church a turning point in world opinion of East Timor’s quest for independence?

  • What role did the 1997 economic crisis in Asia play in East Timor’s independence?

  • How did the Indonesian military forces (the militia) react when Indonesia declared East Timor an independent nation? Why were the military in East Timor especially angry about it?

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Filed under Indonesia, Spain

by | 19 March 2004 · 9:43 pm

Medieval al-Maghreb and al-Murabitun and al-Muwahhidun in al-Andalus

Lee Smith’s backgrounder on Spain in Slate elaborates on al-Andalus mentioned in an earlier post.

The Arabic name for Morocco is al-Maghreb, the place where the sun set on the westernmost limit of the 8th-century Arab empire.

The Arabs conquered the Berbers, a general term encompassing numerous tribes throughout western North Africa, whose warrior ethos they put to good use. It was a largely Berber army, led by a Berber general, that conquered Spain in 711. The Berbers were, by and large, enthusiastic converts to Islam, perhaps a little too fervent for some of the ruling Arab elite. Unlike the Arabs, who fought just for plunder, the Berbers believed that they waged war to glorify Islam.

… when al-Qaida lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri referred to “the tragedy of al-Andalus,” he wasn’t pining for what the Spanish call the “convivencia,” when Muslims, Christians, and Jews all lived together in relative harmony. That picture of Muslim Spain is undoubtedly a little over-gilded, but it’s good that the myth of al-Andalus continues to fund the world’s imagination. Without the legend of peaceful co-existence, a city like New York–where Muslims, Jews, Christians, and others get along handsomely–would’ve been much more difficult to conceive.

At any rate, there was trouble in al-Andalus long before Ferdinand and Isabella banished the Muslims and the Jews in 1492. Two of the more serious challenges came from Morocco in the late 11th and then 12th century, first the Almoravids and then the Almohads, both of them Berber dynasties and Muslim fundamentalists.

Almoravid is a Hispanicized version of the Arabic word “al-Murabitun,” or “those of the military encampment.” As Richard Fletcher writes in Moorish Spain, the Almoravids “saw their role as one of purifying religious observance by the re-imposition where necessary of the strictest canons of Islamic orthodoxy.” They came to redeem a weakened Muslim state against the Christians. Once the Almoravids got soft, the Almohads, still more theologically austere, came north to replace them. Almohad is a corruption of “al-Muwahhidun,” or “those who profess the oneness of God.” It is an Arabic word still in usage; in fact it is the other polite way [like Salafi] to say Wahabbi.

via Michael J. Totten

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Filed under Africa, religion, Spain

by | 5 March 2004 · 3:19 pm

A Chronology of West New Guinea (West Papua) since 1945

The conflict between the Dutch and the Indonesions over the disposition of Netherlands New Guinea followed the Indonesian revolution of 1945-9. The Round Table Conference Agreement (1949) had left that part of the former Netherlands East Indies under Dutch occupation, as a concession to Netherlands nationalist feeling; in the succeeding decade the Netherlands devoted considerable attention to developing the area as an example of constructive colonial effort. The Indonesions, however, considered ‘West Irian’ an essential part of their state, and as the nationalist temper rose during the 1950s increasing emphasis was placed on forcing its concession.

In 1957 Dutch residents were expelled from Indonesia and the Netherlands-owned property was nationalized, and in 1961 military harassment of the colony began. The US entered the dispute as a mediator favourable to the Indonesion side, as a result partly to this, and partly of pressure by Dutch businessmen anxious to restore relations with Indonesia, the Netherlands agreed in August 1962 to relinquish control. After interim UN rule, West Irian was handed over to the Indonesians in May 1963, on the understanding that in 1969 the Irianese would be allowed to chose whether they wished to continue under Indonesian rule. Mismanagement, economic stringency, and the contempt with which Indonesians tended to regard the local Papuan population led to a series of uprisings under both Sukarno and Suharto. However, all non-Papuan parties to the dispute were agreed that the territory should remain in Indonesian hands, no international objections were raised when the 1969 ‘act of free choice’ was made a purely symbolic one.

1. The West New Guinea question resulted from the demands during the 1920s and 1930s of ultra colonial Dutch groupings to have the area declared as a separate Netherlands crown colony.

2. After the outbreak of the Indonesian revolution in 1945 it were especially the Eurasian group–now suffering Republican attacks and seeing their earlier superior social status being demolished–supported by conservative politicians again agitated for West New Guinea to be put aside as their new fatherland under the protection of the Dutch crown.

3. On 20 December 1946 the Netherlands parliament passed an amended Dutch-Indonesian agreement (Linggajati) in which West New Guinea was accorded a special political status. This clause was again included in the Renville agreement of 17 January 1948.

4. In order to avert for the West New Guinea question to cause the derailment of the Round Table negotiations, as a compromise the matter was shelved to further negotiations in 1950, and on 27 December 1949 the Netherlands transferred its sovereignty to Republic of United States of Indonesia.

5. During 1950 Dutch-Indonesian relations gradually deteriorated causing various meetings about West New Guinea to fail; and on 17 March 1951 the Dutch government decided to ‘freeze’ the issue.

6. After the failure of the Eurasian experiment the Netherlands government in 1951 directed its attention to the socio-economic development of the Papuan population and to guide Papuan nationalism towards to achievement of self government and finally independence.

7. Indonesia put the question to the United Nations, but during 10 December 1954 UN Assembly meeting failed to achieve the two-third quorum.

8. By 1956 the Dutch position regarding West New Guinea had grown irrevocably stubborn causing parliament to have the area enshrined in the constitution as part of the Netherlands kingdom.

9. By 1960 it is clear that the vast majority of Papuan leaders rejected to join the Indonesian Republic and instead called for the establishment of an independent Papuan state. A this time, however, the eventuality of this had become rather dim as the Netherlands had been unable to secure military support from the USA and Australia in the case of a threatened full-fledged Indonesian invasion.

10. Originally Australia was absolutely opposed to an Indonesian take over of West New Guinea. For example in March 1947 Dr. Burton, the head the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, made a strong plea in the Netherlands embassy in Canberra for West New Guinea to be kept out of Indonesian hands. Similarly the succeeding Menzies government in February 1950 emphasised that West New Guinea was of same vital strategic interest to Australia as Papua-New Guinea.

11. Australian attempts to secure American agreement of military help in the view of war with Indonesia received the same vague responses as the Dutch have been given in Washington. As a result in January 1959 Prime Minister Menzies told Dutch ambassador Lovink that it was impossible for Australia to ally itself militarily with the Netherlands.

12. The USA only grudgingly tolerated continued Dutch control of West New Guinea. Washington took a neutral stand in Dutch-Indonesian dispute and never openly supported the Dutch position. American policy was solely concentrated on keeping Indonesia out of Communist hands and showed no interest in the human rights of the Papuan people. So in 1961 President Kennedy abandoned the American policy of ‘neutrality’ regarding West New Guinea forcing in 1963 the Netherlands to hand over the territory to Indonesia via an United Nations commission. In Washington the right of Papuans of self-determination had ended up in the wastepaper basket.

13. April 1962 Indonesians launch Operation Mandala under command of Benny Murdani and General Suharto. 1419 commandos dropped into West Papua. Most captured or killed.

14. Increasing US support for Indonesian position after US $450 million low-interest loan in 1960 to Indonesia from USSR. Indonesians playing US and USSR off against each other.

15. New York Agreement between Indonesia and Dutch (no Papuan representation) allows for United Nations Temporary Executive Authority to administer WNG from 1 October 1962 to 1 May 1963. Control then to go to Indonesia with change of sovereignty confirmed by ill-defined ‘Act of Free Choice’ within five years.

16. ‘Act of Free Choice‘ carried out in 1969 with 1025 hand picked and savagely coerced representatives voting unanimously for incorporation. Outcome accepted by UN as both Holland and Indonesia agree to process.

17. Large-scale uprisings throughout country against Indonesian rule. Put down by Indonesian military although widespread protests continue, for instance in Manokwari in the mid-1960s; Baliem Valley in mid-1970s and around Jayapura and border area in mid-1980s. [See map.] These result in many thousands of deaths and over 10,000 refugees in PNG. Organisasi Papua Merdeka (OPM) formed gaining mass support for an independent future. Sporadic ongoing guerilla campaign commences.

18. Australian Council for Overseas Aid (ACFOA) report released in April 1995 detailing killings of villagers and a priest by ABRI [Indonesian government and armed forces] soldiers in the Freeport Mine operations area. Partially in response to expansion of the mine’s concession area from 10,000 hectares to 2.5 million.

19. Seven young European scientists kidnapped on 8 January 1996 by OPM Central Command under Kelly Kwalik. Held until May 9 when rescued by Kopassus troops.

20. July 6 1998 Biak Island massacre occurs when ABRI troops attack hundreds of unarmed Morning Star flag raisers demanding independence. Reportedly 20 killed and 141 injured in original attack, some 139 others, mostly women and children taken on board Indonesian naval frigates and reportedly killed at sea, many grave atrocities reported. No independent investigation into these events.

21. February 23-25 2000 Kongres Rakyat Papua, or Congress held in Jayapura where thousands of Papuans gather to discuss future. Plans made for a Musyawarah Besar (MuBes), or ‘large consultation’ later in year. President Wahid gives A$172,000 and his support as long as independence not declared. Name changed from Irian Jaya to Papua.

22. May-June 2000 MuBes held in Jayapura and attended by some 20,000 Papuans from across the country and social spectrum. 31 member leadership Presidium elected with Chief Theys Eluay emerging as Chairman and acknowledged leader.

23. Law No 21/2001 passed on Special Autonomy for Papua Province aimed at dealing with separatists’ grievances through increased local Papuan control over society and economic resources. Opposed by many Papuans who feel that Autonomy has been forced upon them. Widespread demands for independence continue.

24. Vice-President Megawati Sukarnoputri takes control of West Papua ‘issue’ after widespread criticism of Wahid for encouraging separatists. Military crackdown commences with banning of Morning Star flag, arrest and harassment of Papuan leaders. Assassination of Chief Theys on 10 November 2001 by Kopassus soldiers.

25. August 31 2002 Two Americans and one Indonesian killed and eight Americans injured in attack on a school teachers picnic near Tembagapura, support town for the Freeport Mine. OPM initially blamed by Indonesian military, although TNI remains suspect. FBI investigations continuing.

26. Presidential Instruction No1/2003 on the establishment of West and Central Irian Jaya Provinces, in addition to Papua Province. This decree contradicts the previous Autonomy law and has invoked fear and uncertainty amongst Papuans.

27. December 2003 Timbul Silaen, former police chief in East Timor during the UN sponsored referendum in 1999, is appointed as the new police chief for Papua. Eurico Guterres (who worked with Salaen in East Timor) announces plans to establish a branch of his pro-integration Red and White Defender Front militia in Papua. He has been convicted of crimes against humanity but is free pending an appeal.

28. January 2004 rumors abound about the declaration of a ‘State of Emergency’ to deal with separatists. Fears of an Aceh style military operation to destabilize Papua in the context of Indonesian presidential and parliamentary elections.

29. March 4 2004 U.S. officials believe local army commanders ordered the ambush that killed two American teachers near a gold mine in a case that has held up resumption of normal US-Indonesian military ties, two American officials told The Associated Press. “It’s no longer a question of who did it…. It’s only a question of how high up this went within the chain of command”. The officals say little doubt remains about who was responsible for the attack on vehicles driving down a road to a gold mine operated by New Orleans-based Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold.

SOURCES: C.L.M. Penders. 2002. The West New Guinea Debacle (Crawford House/KITLV Press/U. Hawai‘i Press) [reviewed (pdf) in The Contemporary Pacific]; Jim Elmslie. 2002. Irian Jaya Under the Gun (Crawford House/U. Hawai‘i Press).

Chronology compiled by A. L. Crawford, Crawford House Publishing Aust. Pty Ltd., ABN 31 102 847 656, 14 Dryandra Drive, PO Box 50, Belair, SA5052 Australia; Tel: + 61 8 8370 3555; Fax: + 61 8 8370 3566; Email: tonycraw@bigpond.net.au

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by | 18 February 2004 · 7:54 pm

The Sole Surviving Umayyad Heir Enters al-Andalus, 755

Once upon a time in the mid-eighth century, an intrepid young man named Abd al-Rahman abandoned his home in Damascus, the Near Eastern heartland of Islam, and set out across the North African desert in search of a place of refuge. Damascus had become a slaughterhouse for his family, the ruling Umayyads, who had first led the Muslims out of the desert of Arabia into the high cultures of the Fertile Crescent. With the exception of Abd al-Rahman, the Umayyads were eradicated by the rival Abbasids, who seized control of the great empire called the “House of Islam.” … The prince’s mother was a Berber tribeswoman from the environs of today’s Morocco, which Arabs had reached some years before. From this place, which the Muslims called the Maghrib, the “Far West,” the descendants of the Prophet and his first followers had brought women such as Abd al-Rahman’s mother back east as brides or concubines for the highest-ranking families, to expand and enrich the bloodlines….

Beginning in 711, the Muslims–here the Berbers under the leadership of the Syrian Arabs–had pushed across the small sliver of sea that separates Africa from Europe, the Strait of Gibraltar, to the place the Romans had called Hispania or Iberia….

Abd al-Rahman followed their trail and crossed the narrow strait at the western edge of the world. In Iberia, a place they were calling al-Andalus in Arabic, the language of the new Muslim colonizers, he found a thriving and expansive Islamic settlement. Its center was on the banks of a river that wound down to the Atlantic coast, the Big Wadi (today, in lightly touched up Arabic, the Guadalquivir, or Wadi al-Kabir). The new capital was an old city that the former rulers, the Visigoths, had called Khordoba, after the Roman Corduba, who had ruled the city before the Germanic conquest. It was now pronounced Qurtuba, in the new Arabic accents heard nearly everywhere. The governor of that amorphous and fairly detached frontier “province” was understandably taken aback by the unexpected apparition of this assumed-dead Umayyad prince. Out in these hinterlands, after all, so far from the center of the empire, the shift from Umayyad to Abbasid sovereignty had, until that moment, made little difference in local politics….

The vexed emir of al-Andalus saw at least some of the handwriting on the wall and offered the young man permanent refuge in the capital city as well as his daughter’s hand in marriage. But the grandson of the caliph, the successor to the Prophet and the supreme temporal and spiritual leader of the Islamic world, could not be so easily bought off. Abd al-Rahman assembled forces loyal to him, Syrians and Berbers combined, and one day in May 756, a battle just outside the city walls of Cordoba decisively changed the face of European history and culture. Abd al-Rahman easily defeated his would-be father-in-law and became the new governor of this westernmost province of the Islamic world….

But this young man was, for nearly everyone in these outer provinces, the legitimate caliph, and he was not about to spend the rest of his life in embittered exile…. Although it would be two more centuries before one of his descendants actually openly declared that Cordoba was the seat of the caliphate, al-Andalus was transformed and now anything but a mere provincial seat….

This book tells the story of how this remarkable turn of events, which actually had its origins in the heart of the seventh century in what we call the Near East, powerfully affected the course of European history and civilization. Many aspects of the story are largely unknown, and the extent of their continuing effects on the world around us is scarcely understood, for numerous and complex reasons. The conventional histories of the Arabic-speaking peoples follow the fork in the road taken by the Abbasids. At precisely the point at which the Umayyad prince sets up his all-but-declared caliphate in Europe, the story we are likely to be told continues with the achievements of the Abbasids, who did indeed make Baghdad the capital of an empire of material and cultural wealth and achievement….

The very heart of culture as a series of contraries lay in al-Andalus …. It was there that the profoundly Arabized Jews rediscovered and reinvented Hebrew; there that Christians embraced nearly every aspect of Arabic style–from the intellectual style of philosophy to the architectural styles of mosques–not only while living in Islamic dominions but especially after wresting political control from them; there that men of unshakable faith, like Abelard and Maimonides [Musa ibn Maymun] and Averroes [Ibn Rushd], saw no contradiction in pursuing the truth, whether philosophical or scientific or religious, across confessional lines.

SOURCE: The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Back Bay Books, 2002), by María Rosa Menocal, pp. 5-11

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by | 13 February 2004 · 10:27 pm

Germans in Hawai‘i: Beer, Bible, Music, Commerce, Grammar

In 2000, the Lutheran Church in Hawai‘i celebrated its 100th anniversary. But Germans in Hawai‘i go back much farther than that.

  • Heinrich Zimmerman, who arrived with Captain James Cook in 1778, published his own journals in Germany three years before Captain Cook’s official English version was released.

  • Ship captain Henry Barber from Bremen, Germany, made his name by running an English ship aground at Kalaeloa (‘the long cape’) on O’ahu, later named Barber’s Point (and now renamed back to Kalaeloa).

  • The German scholar Adelbert von Chamisso, a naturalist who arrived in 1815 aboard Captain Otto von Kotzebue’s Russian brig Rurik, wrote one of the first Hawaiian grammar books.

  • Claus Spreckles, a California sugar refiner, found his business greatly threatened by the Kingdom of Hawai‘i’s 1876 reciprocity treaty with the United States. Rather than fight the treaty, he sailed to Hawai‘i and immediately bought half the sugar crop of 1877 just before its value skyrocketed. His innovations in sugar planting included steam plows, electric lights, railroads for hauling cane, and controllable irrigation.

  • Sprecklesville in Maui, and Spreckles Street, Widemann Street, Hausten Street, Isenberg Street, and Hamm Place in Honolulu, all signify the heritage of Germans in Hawai‘i.

  • The Deutsch-Evangelisch-Lutherische Gemeinde zu Honolulu was founded in 1900. The Hackfelds and Isenbergs each donated $25,000 to build it and import a pastor and pipe organ from Germany. Henri Berger, Royal Hawaiian Band bandmaster and composer of the state anthem “Hawaii Pono‘i,” was a charter member and the first organist.

  • Rev. Arthur Hörmann who came as pastor in 1916 at the instigation of his brother-in-law, who managed the old Primo Brewery, would later tell people he came to Hawaii “for beer and the Bible.”

World War I changed everything. According to “The Effect of World War I on the German Community in Hawaii” by Sandra E. Wagner-Seavey in The Hawaiian Journal of History 14 (1980): 109-140:

  • In October 1914, two Japanese warships, the Hizan and Asama, arrived off Honolulu to intercept the German warship Geier and its collier Locksun, which were then interned in Honolulu under very friendly conditions until February 1917, right after the U.S. severed relations with Germany, when Honolulu authorities discovered that the German crews had sabotaged much of the machinery aboard their ships.

  • In June 1917, U.S. Army Private Luisz Sterl was sentenced to hard labor and dishonorably discharged for treasonously refusing to fight in France and disparaging U.S. troops sent there to fight.

  • A devastating anthrax epidemic aroused suspicions (never proved) against Max Weber, a German timekeeper at Pioneer Mill.

  • Many Germans lost their jobs, including Minna Maria Heuer, an assistant professor of German and French at the College of Hawaii, who failed her loyalty test. She then taught at the German language school in Lihue until it was forced to shut down in 1918.

  • Under the Rev. Dr. Arthur Hörmann’s guidance, the Lutheran church changed from a German-speaking, foreign-based congregation to an American church. English services were introduced gradually and both languages were used in the ministry until 1941, when the U.S. entered World War II and the church legally became “The Lutheran Church of Honolulu.”

  • In 1918, H. Hackfeld & Co. was reorganized as American Factors, and the B. F. Ehlers & Co. department store was reorganized as Liberty House (which lasted until Macy’s bought it out in 2001).

“By the end of the war, there was no longer a German community in Hawaii, as there once had been. Germans had lost their jobs, church, leadership, and the respect of their neighbors. Many had migrated to the West Coast to escape persecution. Those who remained assimilated into the greater haole community, some by anglicizing their names. Young Germans after the war did not renew their cultural ties to Germany. They kept no German publications or customs, spoke no German, and did not even use German gestures. Their homes were 100% American and so were they. The German community simply disappeared.”

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by | 11 February 2004 · 9:11 pm

The Arabophile Holy Roman Emperor Enters Jerusalem, 1229

Frederick II was one of the most energetic medieval monarchs, and he remains one of the best remembered. His ambitions operated powerfully in the intellectual and cultural spheres as well as in the political, where he spent a lifetime carving out and defending his combined German, Norman, and Sicilian claims, most often against the papacy….

The man who had been crowned Holy Roman Emperor …, in 1220, spoke and read Arabic, and he was so familiar with both the philosophical and the religious traditions of the Muslims that he had astonished and perplexed witnesses of his 1229 entry into Jerusalem. In that year the excommunicated Frederick, who was militantly at odds with the pope, had entered the Holy City. Sovereignty over Jerusalem had been contested, violently, ever since Christians arrived with the First Crusade, more than a century before, and Frederick was there to establish his own complex claims and to be crowned king, which he managed to do, even while excommunicated, in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. He seemed to the local Muslims a rather different species of Christian from the Franks who preceded him, and dozens of anecdotes were later recounted about this leader of a Crusader army whose first deed in the city was to restore the public call to prayer that had been suppressed by previous Christian sovereigns: “When the time came for the midday prayer and the muezzin’s cry rang out, all his [Frederick’s] pages and valets rose, as well as his tutor, a Sicilian with whom he was reading Aristotle’s Logic in all its chapters, and they offered the canonic prayer, for they were all Muslims…. It was clear from what he said that he was a materialist and that his Christianity was simply a game to him.”

SOURCE: The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Back Bay Books, 2002), by María Rosa Menocal, who dedicates her book “for un hombre sincero de donde crece la palma, my father, the intrepid Enrique Menocal, who has lived in lifelong exile from his own land of the palm trees”

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by | 1 February 2004 · 8:08 pm

The German Pacific "Gutpela Taim Bipo"

Germany acquired its colonial empire in the Pacific beginning in the 1880s and lost it abruptly in 1914. Conventional wisdom usually assumes that one colonial administration was as bad as another and that colonial transitions usually made little difference to the indigenous population. However, the new military administrators who took over from the Germans in Micronesia, Samoa, and New Guinea ran so roughshod over their new territories that the inhabitants of all three regions soon began to look back on German times as the good old days–at least according to a meticulously researched revisionist history of that transition entitled The Neglected War: The German South Pacific and the Influence of World War I, by Hermann Joseph Hiery (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1995).

While Germany’s African colonies were governed by aristocrats, often with the aid of sizable contingents of Schutztruppe (colonial troops), the farflung Pacific colonies were governed by administrators drawn from the middle class, with the aid of tiny police forces.

In New Guinea they replaced the “Perpetuum Bellum Melanesicum” with a Pax Germanica, which attracted more and more unpacified Melanesians. But they also generally let Melanesian villagers settle their own disputes in traditional ways, often by compensation for damages rather than by the trial and conviction of offenders before German courts. This was in marked contrast to the later Australian administration, under whom flogging, the pillory (“Field Punishment No. 1”), and public executions became not only far more common, but far more arbitrarily applied. The Australians also began to dispossess indigenous plantation owners and to impose new restrictions on native dress and education. (For instance, New Guineans were prohibited from speaking proper English and from wearing nonnative garments on the upper half of their bodies.)

In Micronesia, the laissez-faire attitude of the German administration gave way to the much more hands-on approach of the Japanese, who modernized the island economies with unprecedented force and speed. By 1921, the value of exports from Micronesia had already exceeded the value of imports. (And by 1940, the population of Micronesia was over 50% of foreign origin.) The islanders were forced to assimilate to Japanese norms in every respect.

Perhaps the most incompetent new administrator, however, was Col. Robert Logan, New Zealand’s military governor of German Samoa. Whereas Wilhelmine Germany and oligarchical Samoa had shared basic values about social hierarchies and ritual forms of behavior, “the Samoans perceived the ‘democratically’ undifferentiated behavior of New Zealanders as an insult and expression of open disregard for Samoan mores” (p. 250). During the war years, New Zealand bled dry the Samoan treasury, and the fiercely anti-Chinese and anti-American Logan also issued discriminatory edicts against their representatives in Samoa. Worst of all, Logan allowed an influenza-infected ship from New Zealand, the Talune, to dock in 1918, then stubbornly refused either to implement strict quarantines, as the American administrator had done in eastern Samoa, or to accept American medical aid. “Rarely would anti-American prejudice have more disastrous consequences than in Samoa under New Zealand occupation” (p. 174). As a result, about 20% of the population of western Samoa died, while eastern (American) Samoa escaped virtually unscathed. (New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark issued an apology to Samoa in 2002.)

Among the many other gems Hiery’s archival research unearths is a dispirited quote from Woodrow Wilson recorded in the minutes of a meeting at Versailles on 28 January 1919: “the question of deciding the disposal of the German colonies was not vital to the world in any respect.” He seems to have anticipated by exactly half a century Henry Kissinger’s alleged comment about Micronesia in 1969: “There are only 90,000 people out there. Who gives a damn?”

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by | 26 January 2004 · 9:15 pm

A Polynesian Schindler? Isle Musician Saves Lives in Holocaust

He’d have them impersonate groupies or say they were his stage hands or relatives. Once, he even snuck a few over the border tucked in his trunk and hidden among the colorful folds of his stage costumes.

In all, McKinley High School graduate and Laie resident Tau Moe, who traveled the world playing Hawaiian music with his family for more than 50 years, estimates he helped at least 150 of his Jewish musician friends escape Germany and Austria just before the height of Adolf Hitler’s reign….

The Moe family was a sell-out act during their heyday. They toured Singapore, the Middle East, Germany, Italy and India. They found fans of Hawaiian music in Egypt, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Denmark, England, Sweden and Finland.

Moe was in charge of the steel guitar and tap dancing for the group. Moe’s wife, Rose, took care of the singing while also sprinkling in some dancing and playing of her own.

The Moe children–son Lani, who was born in Japan, and daughter Dorian, born in India–played instruments, danced, sang and were featured in a number of European films.

Lani, who died in 2002 at age 73, was something of a child star and became so popular in Germany that when he raised thousands of dollars for an orphanage charity through his performances, he was selected to ride in Hitler’s car during a parade.

SOURCE: Mary Vorsino, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 26 January 2004

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by | 13 January 2004 · 8:56 am

A Shogun Examines Dutchmen

On 20 April 1692, a party of Dutchmen from Nagasaki had an audience with the shogun. Engelbert Kaempfer (1651-1716), a German doctor in attendance, narrates:

The shogun asked [the translator] to welcome us, have us sit upright, take off our coats, state our name and age, get up and walk, first act and dance, and then sing a song and pay compliments to each other, punish each other, get angry, prevail upon a guest, and hold a conversation. Then he had us act like two people close to each other, such as a father and his son, like two friends parting and arriving, or friends meeting again, a husband parting from his wife, people hugging children and carrying them, and so forth….

We had to play husband and wife, and the women laughed heartily about the kiss. Then we had to show how we saluted people of lesser rank, women, nobles, a king. After that, they said I was to sing another piece by myself, and I did this to their satisfaction by singing two, which all liked so much that they asked whether one had to learn this as an art. Then we had to take off our coats, and one after the other step in front of the blinds and bid farewell in the most exuberant fashion, as we would to a king in Europe, and after that we left. Judging from people’s expressions and laughter, they were all very pleased.

SOURCE: Beatrice Bodart-Bailey, ed. and tr., Kaempfer’s Japan: Tokugawa Culture Observed (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1999), pp. 408-409.

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