Category Archives: military

by Joel | 29 June 2008 · 8:02 pm

Ethiopia, 1978: One More Equal Than Others

From The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, by Martin Meredith (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. 245-248:

In September 1976 the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP), drawing support from the labour unions, teachers and students, all vehemently opposed to military rule, embarked on a campaign of urban terrorism against the Derg and its civilian ally, the All-Ethiopian Socialist Movement, usually known by its Amharic acronym, Meison. An assassination attempt was made on Mengistu in the centre of Addis Ababa in September, the first of nine such attempts. Scores of officials and supporters of the Derg were murdered. The Derg in turn sent out its own murder squads…. By mid-1977 the EPRP was effectively destroyed. In the final phase of the red terror, to establish his own supremacy, Mengistu turned on his Meison allies, destroying them too. The young generation of intellectual activists, who had so avidly supported the revolution were all but wiped out.

Mengistu’s hold over other parts of Ethiopia was nevertheless precarious. By mid-1977 the Ethiopian army in Eritrea had lost most major towns and controlled little more than Asmara and the ports of Massawa and Assab. In July 1977 Somalia, deciding the time was ripe to take advantage of the Derg’s preoccupation with Eritrea and other revolts, launched a full-scale invasion of the Ogaden. By August the Somalis controlled most of the Ogaden. In September they captured Jijiga, an Ethiopian tank base, and pressed on towards the town of Harar and the rail and industrial centre of Dire Dawa, the third largest city in Ethiopia.

What rescued Mengistu from military defeat was massive intervention by Soviet and Cuban forces, determined to prop up his Marxist regime. In November 1977 the Soviets mounted a huge airlift and sealift, ferrying tanks, fighter aircraft, artillery, armoured personnel carriers and hundreds of military advisers to Ethiopia. A Cuban combat force numbering 17,000 joined them. Led by Cuban armour, the Ethiopians launched their counter-offensive in the Ogaden in February 1978, inflicting a crushing defeat on the Somalis. The full force of the Ethiopian army, supported by the Soviet Union, was then turned on Eritrea.

At the fourth anniversary celebrations marking the overthrow of Haile Selassie in 1978, Mengistu sat alone in a gilded armchair covered with red velvet on a platform in Revolution Square in Addis Ababa watching a procession of army units and civilian groups pass before him. Then he returned to his headquarters at the Grand Palace. Having succeeded in holding the old empire together, he liked to portray himself as following a tradition of strong Ethiopian rulers. Indeed, Mengistu came to be compared with the Emperor Tewodros, a nineteenth-century ruler who started his career as a minor local chieftain, fought his way up to take the Crown and then strove to reunite the empire after a period of disintegration. At official functions at the Grand Palace, while members of the Derg stood respectfully to one side, Mengistu chose to preside from the same ornate chair that Haile Selassie had once favoured.

One of his ministers, Dawit Wolde Giorgis, once a fervent supporter of the revolution, recalled his growing sense of disillusionment.

At the beginning of the Revolution all of us had utterly rejected anything having to do with the past. We would no longer drive cars, or wear suits; neckties were considered criminal. Anything that made you look well-off or bourgeois, anything that smacked of affluence or sophistication, was scorned as part of the old order. Then, around 1978, all that began to change. Gradually materialism became accepted, then required. Designer clothes from the best European tailors were the uniform of all senior government officials and members of the Military Council. We had the best of everything: the best homes, the best cars, the best whisky, champagne, food. It was a compete reversal of the ideals of the Revolution.

He recalled, too, how Mengistu changed once he had gained complete control.

He grew more abrasive and arrogant. The real Mengistu emerged: vengeful, cruel and authoritarian. His conduct was not limited by any moral considerations. He began to openly mock God and religion. There was a frightening aura about him. Many of us who used to talk to him with our hands in our pockets, as if he were one of us, found ourselves standing stiffly at attention, cautiously respectful in his presence. In addressing him we had always used the familiar form of ‘you’, ante; now we found ourselves switching to the more formal ‘you’, ersiwo. He moved into a bigger, more lavish office in the Palace of Menelik. He got new, highly trained bodyguards – men who watched you nervously, ready to shoot at any time. We now were frisked whenever we entered his office. He began to use the Emperor’s cars and had new ones imported from abroad – bigger, fancier cars with special security provisions. Wherever he went he was escorted by these cars packed with guards, with more riding alongside on motorcycles.

He concluded: ‘We were supposed to have a revolution of equality; now he had become the new Emperor.’

You get the same result every single time a revolutionary thug promises equality—and begins to deliver it with the help of other revolutionary thugs. Every French Revolution yields a new Robespierre—and then a new Napoleon.

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Filed under Cuba, Eritrea, Ethiopia, labor, language, military, USSR, war

by Joel | 20 April 2008 · 1:21 pm

Jenkins in Jakarta

The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea, by Charles Robert Jenkins with Jim Frederick (U. California Press, 2008), pp. 163-165:

Once we touched down in Jakarta, my wife was there on the tarmac along with throngs of media…. The bus ride into the city took two hours. I had never seen such a bad traffic jam in my life. In Pyongyang there was rarely any traffic at all, even in the center of the city, but here the streets were jammed with cars. I did not wait long before getting down to business with my wife. I had already been waiting so long, I didn’t see any reason to delay the discussion any further. The bus was full of the Japanese delegation, so I still had to be a little discreet. We sat side by side, not looking at each other while we talked. “Why didn’t you want to have this meeting in China?” I asked. “If we met in China,” she said, “I may have been sent back to North Korea.” So I asked, “You don’t want to go back to North Korea?” “No,” she said quietly but firmly. “But I thought you did,” I said. “The [Korean Workers Party] Organization told me that you have been trying and wanting to come back this whole time.” “Gae-so-ri,” she said. (That is dog talk.) “Well,” I thought, “that’s it, then. The decision has been made. We are not going back.”

They put us up in a hotel downtown that was the nicest place I think I have ever stayed. We were in a suite on the fourteenth floor. It was larger than any house I had ever lived in. Brinda and Mika were in a state of shock. The television just blew them away. Actually, it blew me away, too. All those channels. The size of it. The brightness of all the colors. Some of the stuff that was shown, and the fact that it was on twenty-four hours a day. I think that was their very first whiff that there might be a lot more to the outside world than the North Koreans had ever told them. It didn’t take them long to sense that the rest of the world was much more free than North Korea had been. At the same time, there was only so much freedom for us: There was a guard on our door (officers from the Niigata police force, to be specific) twenty-four hours a day. Right across the hall from us was the Japanese delegation, including Saiki and Nakayama.

The next morning, my wife and I continued the discussion we had been having on the bus. To test her resolve on the matter, I said to her, “If you are not going back, then there is no point to me being here. The girls and I will go to China for a little while and then return to North Korea to pick up our new house. I don’t see what the problem is for you to come to North Korea. The Organization says you can go and come as you please. You can take the ferry back and forth. You can visit anytime you want.” She responded, “You know one big reason why I am not going back? It is not just because of me. It is because of you. Because of your family in the United States. If you go back to North Korea, you will never see your mother and sisters again.” “But I am not going to see them anyway, since I am going to go to jail for life!” I yelled. “You are not going to go to jail!” she yelled back. “How can you say that? ” I asked. “You can’t say that for sure.” I had realized by then that she and Koizumi were doing everything they could to appeal to the Americans for understanding and leniency in my case, but I also knew that my wife was in no position to offer me assurances about how the U.S. Army was going to choose to punish me. Whenever it was I had to face my accusers, I knew at least on that count, I would be doing it alone.

It was around that time I also realized that the power between my wife and me had changed. In North Korea, I was primarily responsible for protecting her and providing for her, and she would do what I thought was best for us almost without exception. She needed me. Now, however, the equation had changed. I would have to listen to her; she would be my guide. I now needed her more than she needed me. This change in our relationship has been one of the most noteworthy parts of our lives together since 2002, and, to be honest, sometimes one of the hardest for me to adjust to.

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Filed under Indonesia, Japan, Korea, military, U.S.

by Joel | 20 April 2008 · 1:20 pm

Jenkins by Other Names

The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea, by Charles Robert Jenkins with Jim Frederick (U. California Press, 2008), p. 173:

[My defense attorney] introduced himself, and we made a little small talk. He asked me what he should call me. I told him something we used to say ages ago in the army: “You can call me anything you want, as long as you call me three times a day for chow and once a month to get paid.” So with that, he started calling me Charlie. I had never been called Charlie before in my life. Growing up, I was always Robert. When I was a teenager, I was Super. In the army, I was Jenkins. In North Korea, the three other Americans took to calling me C. R., while the Koreans sometimes called me Min Hyung-chan. (They gave me this name when I started acting—they needed something to put on the credits—but in person, I refused to answer to it.) So, although I have gone by many names in my life, Charlie was a new one. But now, thanks to Capt. Culp, a lot of people, especially everyone I now know in the U.S. Army stationed in Japan, refer to me as “Charlie.”

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by Joel | 21 July 2007 · 3:10 pm

Eating Across America: Road Trip Food Stops

On the long travel days during our Great Square Route (MN – MS – GA – CT – MN) car trip in May, we would aim to get on the road early, then stop for a late breakfast at some place with local flavor, trying to avoid national chains. We might snack a bit on the road, but would not eat another meal until the evening, again trying to avoid national chains. Here are the most memorable food stops. Like my father and brothers, when I travel I tend to remember the meals above all else.

First breakfast stop – Our first breakfast stop on I-35 South out of Minneapolis was at the Perkins restaurant in Clear Lake, IA. Despite being a national chain, it offered the big plate of biscuits and gravy that I was determined to indulge in at least once on this trip.

Greasiest omelet – After a nice visit with my stepbrother and his family in Kansas City, MO, we hit the road early on I-70 East. We didn’t see much with local flavor until we got to the Midway Auto/Truck Plaza near exit 121 between the Missouri River and Columbia. Their Southwestern Omelet needed extra tabasco to cut the grease as much as to add spice.

Most filling meal – We made good time around St. Louis, whose waterfront we had each visited before, then dawdled down I-55 South on the way into Sikeston, MO, where I was determined to subject my wife and mother-in-law to regionally famous Lambert’s Cafe, “The Only Home of Throwed Rolls.” I ordered just 4 vegetables (cole slaw, green beans, turnip greens, and white beans), but helped my mother-in-law with her (very tasty) catfish and my wife (very little) with her polish sausage and kraut. Between those ample portions and the irresistible black-eyed pea and fried okra “pass-arounds,” I came away stuffed to the gills.

Tiniest restaurant – After stopping two nights in Paducah, KY, to see two brothers, a new sister-in-law, a niece, and a nephew-in-law, grand niece, and grand nephew that I hadn’t met yet, and also to pick up my wife’s sister who flew in from Minneapolis to join us for the jaunt across the South, we headed out on I-55 South, stopping for breakfast at The Grill on Main Street in New Madrid, MO. It had only three or four tables, but served a steady stream of take-out customers and had a lot of local flavor. Above the kitchen doorway was a sign honoring a local U.S. Army lieutenant killed in action.* Every table had a well-used ashtray, emptied but not washed between customers. The restroom in the kitchen contained various cosmetics used by the staff. And the steak I ordered with my eggs—on the chef’s recommendation—was very nicely marinated, very nicely grilled, and very tender.

(*The New Madrid KIA was 1st Lt. Amos C. R. Bock, 4th Battalion, 320th Field Artillery Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne, killed when a roadside bomb exploded near his vehicle in Baghdad, Iraq, on 23 October 2006.)

Fanciest restaurant – We found a motel in Jackson, MS, before driving over to Vicksburg. After little success finding a restaurant overlooking the Mississippi River, we ended up at Bourbon’s in the Ameristar Casino. (It was my first time in a casino.) The food and drinks were excellent and we could look out on the river when we weren’t fiddling with the wooden blinds trying to keep the glare of the sunset off the water out of the eyes of our neighbors and ourselves. I had a cup of their Seafood Gumbo (which turned out to be dirty rice, not soup) and Caribbean Steak Salad.

Emptiest restaurant – Traveling east the next day on I-20, we stopped for breakfast at a Barnhill’s restaurant in a ghost-town of a shopping center in Meridian, MS. Barnhill’s is a regional chain that mostly offers Southern-style buffets, but some branches offer breakfast buffets on the weekends. I had sausage, grits, and a good bit more. It was Sunday morning about time for Sunday school to start, so the huge dining hall was practically empty.

Strangest smell – We crossed most of Alabama on U.S. 80, passing through Selma and Montgomery on the way to visit old friends from Micronesia who now live on Ft. Benning, GA, where the father, a Sgt. 1st Class born and raised on Yap, has been teaching infantry tactics to officers ever since he returned from deployment in Afghanistan with the 10th Mountain Division (Light Infantry). During his 20+ years in the Army, he earned a B.A., and is now pursuing an M.A. in international relations.

After a long visit and a quick chew of betel nut, we repaired off-base to Country’s Barbecue in Columbus for a late supper. The food was tasty, but the dining room smelled more like a wet mop than a hot grill. When the party at the booth next to us left, I understood why. The waitresses not only cleared, wiped, and reset the table, they also pulled it out and mopped the floor beneath it. The wait help doubled as bus help and tripled as janitorial help. We left a good tip.

Best grits – It was slim pickings for breakfast the next morning along GA 96 through the heart of pecan and peach country. We got off course in the old railroad junction town of Fort Valley and ended up in Perry, where we settled on an outlet of the Krystal regional fastfood chain. I tried their breakfast “scrambler” with egg and sausage atop grits in a bowl. It was surprisingly tasty, billed as low-carb but plenty high in fat, salt, and cholesterol. The outlet we stopped at seemed exceptionally well managed.

Second most gimmicky (after Lambert’s Cafe) – After an afternoon exploring a bit of historic downtown Savannah, GA, we drove out to Tybee Island on U.S. 80, which ended at a sign saying “my other end is in San Diego” (an assertion that hasn’t been true for several decades). We dined that night at The Crab Shack, at an outdoor table that had a hole in the middle to discard the shells and corncobs from our heaping platter of seafood. The baby alligator pond was the gimmick that most caught my fancy. I asked the host on the way in if I could pick which one I wanted to eat. He said, “You can pick one, but we ain’t gonna cook it for you.”

Homiest atmosphere – Driving up I-95 from Savannah, we stopped for breakfast at the Olde House Cafe in Walterboro, SC. It was the only “unchained” restaurant we could find. The food was great but the architecture was more interesting. As the name suggests, the building really was built to be someone’s home. We ate in what may once have been a bedroom, and the front porch had a rocking chair on it.

Second worst chitlins – Before we arrived at my dad’s place in South Boston, VA, I had asked him to find some place in his neck of the wood that served decent chitlins (= chitterlings). A long time ago, when he lived in Roanoke, he had taken my wife and me to a mostly black restaurant that served the only good Southern-style chitlins I’ve ever tasted. They were chopped, marinated, and sauteed with vinegar and pepper. (Since then, I’ve had pretty decent Korean-style chitlins several times, both grilled and in soup.) The worst (and first) chitlins I ever tasted was when I was a kid in Winchester, VA. My mother boiled them without enough flavor to disguise the taste and they were terrible. I couldn’t get them past my tongue (or nose). I’m sure my father made a valiant effort to eat them, but we kids all turned up our noses.

Well, on this occasion, my youngest uncle and an older cousin and their respective spouses had driven over from Tidewater Virginia, so we all went out to Paulette’s Place in Halifax, which served batter-fried fish, shrimp, oysters, and chitlins. My father, my uncle, and I ordered the chitlins. Everyone else had better sense. My uncle drowned his in vinegar, and I dumped tabasco on mine, but I think my father was the only one who didn’t leave any on his plate. The rest of the menu was fine.

Oldest restaurant – The next leg of our journey ran through the Blue Ridge Mountains and up the Shenandoah Valley to Middletown, VA, where we stopped for a light snack at the historic Wayside Inn, founded in 1797, before paying respects to my aunt, who lives on a farm nearby, and my cousin’s wife and mother-in-law, who live up the road a bit in a house that dates back to the 1740s. (My cousin was off hunting big game on a South African preserve.) The four of us confused the waitress by ordering three house salads and three bowls of their signature Colonial Peanut Soup, reputed to be one of George Washington’s favorites.

Most sushi – The reason we snacked so lightly in Middletown is that we were headed for another family reunion at the other end of I-66, at the Todai [= Lighthouse] Restaurant in Fairfax with: my brother, sister-in-law, and their two kids; my sister and brother-in-law from Annapolis, MD; my father, who came up from South Boston; and my mother-in-law and sister-in-law, who were flying back to Minneapolis the next day, leaving us the car for the rest of our trip. When I eat at Todai, I concentrate on the huge variety of sushi and a few cold salads. When my brother in Fairfax turned 50, I took him to Todai for lunch and we ate 50 pieces of sushi between us.

Best oasis – Our worst day of driving, by far, was between Fairfax, VA, and New Haven, CT, on the Friday before Memorial Day. Even though we avoided I-95 as much as possible, we spent far too much time in bumper-to-bumper traffic until we got past Baltimore during the morning rush hour, then again after we got across the Hudson on the Tappan Zee Bridge later that afternoon. After trying a stretch of U.S. 1 between Greenwich and Stamford, we decided to break for an early supper in Stamford. After finding the food court still under construction at a brand-new downtown shopping plaza, we discovered Fiesta Atlantic, a refreshing Peruvian restaurant across Atlantic Street that was already open for dinner before 5 pm. Their Sangria had canned fruit cocktail in the bottom of the glass, but tasted quite refreshing, and the two appetizers and two side dishes we ordered were fresh, flavorful, and nicely presented. We had cebiche (ceviche) mixto, ensalada de pulpo (octopus), platano (plaintain) frito, and yuca (yucca) frita.

Most unexpected language – After a long but lovely ride through Pennsylvania on I-80, then through a rather ugly corner of Ohio, we took the North Ridgeville exit on the way to the pleasant Cleveland suburb of Avon Lake, OH, where a busy friend had invited us to stay the night. We had agreed to meet her for breakfast the next morning, so we looked for supper on our own. The Gourmé [sic] Family Restaurant (“Good Home Cooking”) on Lorain Road caught our fancy, so we sampled their fare. I had their lake perch and pierogie combination. Two things puzzled me. Why did every table have a squeeze bottle of syrup as well as ketchup on it? (If ketchup was for the fried fish, was syrup for the pierogies?) And which language was the staff speaking to each other? Their appearance and their accents were vaguely Eastern European, but I heard enough of their talk to rule out Germanic, Slavic, Romance, Hellenic, Turkic, and even Finnic and Ugric. It turned out to be Albanian. We never did solve the mystery of the syrup.

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by Joel | 27 March 2007 · 6:50 am

Good Soldier Outlier: Student Teacher

The only reason I ended up in the Army in 1969 was because I had dropped out of college while the draft was still on. But I quickly resumed my formal and informal education as soon as I finished boot camp. After my idyllic nine months of formal but fun Romanian language study at the Defense Language Institute–West Coast, I was assigned to the do-nothing 95th Civil Affairs Group at Fort Gordon near Augusta, Georgia.

At Fort Gordon, I initially spent a lot of my off-duty time at the small public library near my barracks and even took a couple of on-base extension courses from Augusta College: physical anthropology and “humanities” (mostly Greek classics). But as my language skills atrophied from disuse, I began spending time at the language lab on base, where I tried to refresh my childhood Japanese by plodding through Eleanor Jordan’s Japanese language textbooks—listening to the audio portion on vinyl records!

The language lab didn’t have any Romanian materials, but it did offer occasional introductory classes in languages soldiers might expect to encounter when posted abroad. I signed up for a short introduction to Korean, taught by a ROK army officer who might have been studying at the Army Signal School. He managed to teach his class of beginners a few very formal phrases, the rudiments of the most excellent Korean alphabet, and one version of the national folksong, Arirang.

The director of the lab (and its sole full-time employee) was a friendly DoD civilian from Puerto Rico. I spent as much time chatting with him as I did trying to study Japanese on my own, and he recruited me to teach a few English conversation classes, one to a group of lovely GI wives, mostly from Thailand, and another to a rather tougher group of officers from South Korea, Turkey, and possibly Iran.

By that time, my civil affairs unit had transferred to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, leaving me behind with the base Personnel Control Facility because I was due to get out soon. In order to escape my boring new duty of escorting would-be deserters to their military tribunals, I had signed up for a six-week, full-time cement masonry class under Project Transition, designed ostensibly to help us become productive civilians.

One problem for me was that both my daytime class studying cement masonry and my evening class teaching English to foreign officers were a long way from my barracks, and I no longer had a car. I had to wear my uniform during Project Transition, but there was no way I was going to appear in my enlisted man’s uniform in front of a class of status-conscious foreign officers. So I had to hike a long way back and forth to my barracks at the far end of the post every evening in order to make the transition from student soldier to (ostensibly) civilian teacher.

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by Joel | 4 August 2006 · 8:17 pm

Oil Barons of Baku, 1901-1905

By 1901, Baku was supplying half the world’s oil. It became an international city overnight, and the local Azeris were soon outnumbered by Russians, Georgians, Ossetians, and others from the four corners of the earth. Between 1856 and 1910, Baku’s population grew at a faster rate than that of London, Paris, or New York. The Nobel brothers, who dominated the industry in the first decades, invented the concept of the tanker to handle the demand for Baku oil in the Far East, appropriately naming their first tanker Zoroaster. They made the bulk of the family’s fortune in Azeri oil, though brother Alfred’s invention of dynamite is more famous.

The oilmen came in all stripes—Swedes and Jews and Poles and Armenians—but the dominance of big foreign groups like the Nobels and Rothschilds didn’t last long. By the turn of the century, half of the tanker business and much of the production was in local hands. So-called oil barons arose from both the peasantry and the feudal aristocracy—anyone who dug a hole in the ground and got lucky. (The Nobels tried whenever possible to buy out these new oil barons, along with smaller producers. According to documents in the Baku archives, Abraham Nussimbaum sold the Nobels most of his wells in 1913, on the eve of the Great War, a highly opportune business decision.)

The new oil millionaires became great philanthropists, determined to turn their city from a provincial backwater into the finest Islamic city in the world—a showcase of the possibilities of the positive merger of East and West. As the representative local group, the Muslim oil barons felt the most obliged to make showy public statements with their new wealth. They took grand tours of Europe and hired architects to build copies of the mansions, museums, and opera houses they had seen, all in an attempt to anchor their city in the Occidental future rather than its Oriental past. While some Azeri Muslims were outraged by the education of women or their appearance onstage or in an office building, Baku benefited from having been so long at the crossroads of East and West that people were used to new fashions and change.

Equal parts Dodge City, medieval Baghdad, industrial Pittsburgh, and nineteenth-century Paris, fin de siècle Baku was the last great city built before the First World War spoiled the dream that the West could keep expanding forever in a grand civilizing pageant. It was a place of fantastic extremes of wealth and poverty, where gas lights and telephones made a stark contrast to camel caravans and emaciated Zoroastrian monks. The city’s wild and clashing history came to ahead at the turn of the century, when it was the “Wild East” frontier of Europe, the world’s greatest oil-boom town: A British visitor at the time wrote, “One might almost fancy oneself in an American city out west. There is the same air of newness about everything, the same sanguine atmosphere. Everyone is hopeful.”

Yet by 1905, the entire Russian frontier was bathed in blood, as the empire entered the first of its revolutions. The unrest reached from the coast of Korea to St. Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospekt, and Baku was not spared. The revolution came, as many do, on the heels of a disastrous war, one of the bloodiest in history. The czar’s advisers had dreamed up the 1904–5 Russo-Japanese War in part as a means of diffusing revolutionary tension, by acquiring, via quick victory, an injection of patriotism as well as some much-needed timber concessions on the Korean coast. Instead, the Russians experienced total defeat. The catastrophe in the Far East—against a people the czar called “little, short-tailed monkeys”—made the Russian Empire look fragile and moribund. As the war’s losses sank in—in addition to the hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers, practically the entire Russian Navy was sunk by the Japanese fleet—years of left-wing terrorism and czarist oppression collided in a year of uprisings, ethnic cleansing, and generalized breakdown.

The semi-destroyed Russian military was in no position to quash the unrest. The only part of the vast czarist navy that had not been sunk by the Japanese was the famous Black Sea Fleet, and on its main battleship, the state-of-the-art Potemkin, the sailors rioted in the spring of 1905 and shot their officers. All around the Black Sea and the Caspian, public order broke down. While the staggering numbers of Russian dead, machine-gunned on the icy hills of Manchuria and the Korean peninsula, showed the new lethality of war, the revolutionary terrorism and pogroms that arrived inside Russia that year showed the new brutality of politics—and both foreshadowed what horror might be born through the mediums of modern mass violence.

SOURCE: The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, by Tom Reiss (Random House, 2005), pp. 11-13

One of the most intriguing photographs reproduced in the book is labelled “Muslim-Jewish Christmas party, Baku, 1913.” Days long, long gone.

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Filed under Caucasus, Central Asia, energy, industry, Japan, military, nationalism, religion, Russia, Turkey, war

by Joel | 20 May 2006 · 3:43 pm

Military vs. Monks in Burma Now

In Burma, there is no escape from politics – not even at the pagoda. Many Buddhist monks joined the protests of 1988, and hundreds were shot and killed by soldiers. Two years later, some 7,000 monks walked silently through the streets of Mandalay with their begging bowls, to collect alms in memory of those who had died in 1988. The peaceful remembrance ended in bloodshed as soldiers shot into the crowd, killing and wounding a number of monks. Afterwards, the sangha, or holy Buddhist order, launched a nationwide religious boycott of the regime by refusing to accept alms from military families or to oversee their weddings and funerals. The action is known as pattam nikkujana kamma – ‘the overturning of the alms bowl’. This passive protest reportedly upset members of the army, as it robbed them of any control over their spiritual destiny: at Buddhist funerals, monks are necessary to guide a person’s vulnerable soul into the next life. Soldiers raided over 100 monasteries, arresting more than 3,000 monks and novices. The sangha now operates under strict government control. All monks must be checked by the government before ordination, even those who take holy orders for only a few weeks or months, as many Buddhist men do. Traditional ceremonies require prior permission from local authorities. And informers, dressed in the brick-red robes of a Burmese monk, are rife within the sangha itself. Senior monks are coerced into toeing the party line with threats and bribes. Abbots, who often have influential moral power within the village, are ordered to keep villagers in check.

SOURCE: Secret Histories: Finding George Orwell in a Burmese Teashop, by Emma Larkin (John Murray, 2005), p. 84

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by Joel | 8 October 2005 · 4:20 pm

The Nearly Invisible Japanese Military

The Times (of London) on 6 October carried a report by Richard Lloyd Parry and Robert Thomson on the ambiguous status of the Japanese military.

IF YOU encountered Tsutomu Mori as he travels to work in central Tokyo, you would never guess what he does for a living. Every day, hundreds of people like him in well-pressed suits and shiny shoes converge upon a well-guarded compound in the Ichigaya district.

Only there does he put on his olive uniform with its rows of medal ribbons and four stars. Safely concealed from public gaze, he emerges as General Mori, chief of staff of the Ground Self-Defence Force.

For 40 years he has risen up the ranks of one of the best-equipped military forces in the world. He meets his military counterparts from all over the globe (General Sir Mike Jackson was a recent visitor). But 60 years after the end of the Second World War, during which his father fought the British in Burma, he is constrained from wearing his uniform in public or from referring to his organisation as an army.

“It’s a delicate and complex question,” he told The Times. “For people like me it’s difficult to wear a uniform in a crowded train.” This is the continuing paradox of the Japanese military: despite being more active in the world than at any time since 1945, it remains close to an embarrassment for many of its countrymen.

That reminds me how embarrassed I was during the one day a week that we had to wear our uniforms to class during my only year of ROTC at the University of Richmond in 1967-68. (It would have been worse than embarrassing at a lot of other colleges, both then and now.) I ended up dropping ROTC for journalism class going into my sophomore year, but then dropped out of school altogether at midyear.

My only personal experience relevant to any “resurgent Japanese militarism” during my recent 2 months in Japan involved the combined recruiting office for all branches of the SDF on the outside ground floor of the busy Ashikaga Tobu line train station (60+ trains daily to and from Tokyo). The glass-fronted office was as big as the travel agency offices that can be found at any such train station. It had several large posters, like any travel office, but no racks of flyers and no visible customers. In fact, I never saw any activity whatsoever in that office, despite passing it several dozen times during normal business hours.

The way Japanese demographics are headed, the SDF is going to have to either recruit foreign legions or rely more heavily on robots in order to sustain itself, just as many Japanese factories are already doing.

via Foreign Dispatches

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by Joel | 11 July 2005 · 5:26 pm

PTSD in UN Peacekeepers

Among the many retrospectives published today, on the 10th anniversary of the massacre at Srebrenica, is an article in the Washington Post focusing on the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders suffered by the Dutch troops under UN command who were charged with preventing such atrocities.

For days, the [Dutch] battalion had waited for reinforcements and air support. None came. One soldier already had been killed by Muslim forces. By the time the Serb attack started on July 11, the soldiers’ nerves were shot.

“All those people … screaming and crying. A truck, normally fit for 18 people, was packed with 200 refugees. We helped them from the truck and gave them a place in the factory hall,” Poortinga recalled in the book.

“It was hell. I did my best, but after a while I collapsed. The shouting became louder and louder. The shooting came close, grenades fell, dust came from the ceiling. I found myself crying like a baby. I am not a baby at all, but then I was like a child.”

Co-author Hendrina Praamsma said 40 percent of those interviewed had needed psychological treatment at some point. Some had attempted suicide. “Most of them feel abandoned, rejected, falsely accused,” she said.

A 1999 report by the United Nations said Yugoslavia’s then president, Slobodan Milosevic, bore primary responsibility. Milosevic is now on trial in The Hague.

Nonetheless, Holland remained traumatized.

In 2002, an exhaustive study by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation concluded the government of Prime Minister Wim Kok had sent ill-prepared troops on an impossible mission because it wanted to boost its international prestige. The report prompted the government, still headed by Kok, to resign.

A subsequent parliamentary inquiry also cleared the troops of blame. But Srebrenica isn’t over for Holland.

A district court in The Hague is hearing a civil suit by Bosnian Srebrenica survivors seeking $2.6 billion in compensation from the state for its troops’ failure to protect them.

One of them is Hassan Nuhanovic, a U.N. translator whose brother and father were forced off the U.N. base by Dutch troops and haven’t been seen since.

Their accusations reawakened the shame among some veterans, said Jan Burger, head of the Veterans Institute’s social services. In the past two months, with the approach of the 10th anniversary, another half dozen Srebrenica veterans have sought help.

Back in April, the Canada-resident Dutch blogger Peaktalk compared Karremans, the Dutch commander at Srebrenica, with Dallaire, the Canadian commander at Kigali.

If you google Karremans you will find lots more, but I think you get it: the Dutch commander not only failed to do anything to sa[v]e Bosnian Muslim lives, he couldn’t even bring himself to make a moral distinction between the warring parties. Of all people, Robert Fisk has a good summary with this sobering observation:

The Dutch published their own miserable, chilling account of Srebrenica. But Karremans was packed off to become Dutch military attaché in Washington, under orders not to talk. And silent he was, to the great relief of the Dutch.

We can’t accuse Dallaire of failing to see the difference between right and wrong, or, for remaining quiet. His book and the documentary of his return to Rwanda are getting ample attention and rightly so. Cynics may argue that Dallaire learned from the Karremans experience and went on a media blitz to defend his record, but having studied the man and the mandate he had, the Canadian commander comes out far cleaner than some of his critics now argue. Sure, he made mistakes and there may be braver people who would have been willing to die to take a stand against the terror in front of them. We can even entertain the notion that the post-war military of left-liberal nations like Canada and Holland has failed to produce the battle-hardened moral men that we like to see when we think of war, or when we watch an epic Hollywood rendition of some historic struggle. Heroes like that are in short supply, reality is different.

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by Joel | 7 July 2005 · 10:18 am

Justice vs. Due Process in Haiti, 1994

Six years after the fact, Dr. Paul Edward Farmer reminded me, “We met because of a beheading, of all things.”

It was two weeks before Christmas 1994, in a market town in the central plateau of Haiti, a patch of paved road called Mirebalais. Near the center of town there was a Haitian army outpost–a concrete wall enclosing a weedy parade field, a jail, and a mustard-colored barracks. I was sitting with an American Special Forces captain, named Jon Carroll, on the building’s second-story balcony…. I was in Haiti to report on American soldiers. Twenty thousand of them had been sent to reinstate the country’s democratically elected government, and to strip away power from the military junta that had deposed it and ruled with great cruelty for three years. Captain Carroll had only eight men, and they were temporarily in charge of keeping the peace among 150,000 Haitians, spread across about one thousand square miles of rural Haiti. A seemingly impossible job, and yet, out here in the central plateau, political violence had all but ended. In the past month, there had been only one murder. Then again, it had been spectacularly grisly. A few weeks back, Captain Carroll’s men had fished the headless corpse of the assistant mayor of Mirebalais out of the Artibonite River. He was one of the elected officials being restored to power. Suspicion for his murder had fallen on one of the junta’s local functionaries, a rural sheriff named Nerva Juste, a frightening figure to most people in the region. Captain Carroll and his men had brought Juste in for questioning, but they hadn’t found any physical evidence or witnesses. So they had released him.

The captain was twenty-nine years old, a devout Baptist from Alabama. I liked him. From what I’d seen, he and his men had been trying earnestly to make improvements in this piece of Haiti, but Washington, which had decreed that this mission would not include “nation-building,” had given them virtually no tools for that job. On one occasion, the captain had ordered a U.S. Army medevac flight for a pregnant Haitian woman in distress, and his commanders had reprimanded him for his pains. Up on the balcony of the barracks now, Captain Carroll was fuming about his latest frustration when someone said there was an American out at the gate who wanted to see him.

There were five visitors actually, four of them Haitians. They stood in the gathering shadows in front of the barracks, while their American friend came forward. He told Captain Carroll that his name was Paul Farmer, that he was a doctor, and that he worked in a hospital here, some miles north of Mirebalais…. He asked the captain if his team had any medical problems. The captain said they had some sick prisoners whom the local hospital had refused to treat. “I ended up buyin’ the medicine myself.”

Farmer flashed a smile. “You’ll spend less time in Purgatory.” Then he asked, “Who cut off the head of the assistant mayor?”

“I don’t know for sure,” said the captain. “It’s very hard to live in Haiti and not know who cut off someone’s head,” said Farmer.

A circuitous argument followed. Farmer made it plain he didn’t like the American government’s plan for fixing Haiti’s economy, a plan that would aid business interests but do nothing, in his view, to relieve the suffering of the average Haitian. He clearly believed that the United States had helped to foster the coup–for one thing, by having trained a high official of the junta at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas. Two clear sides existed in Haiti, Farmer said–the forces of repression and the Haitian poor, the vast majority. Farmer was on the side of the poor. But, he told the captain, “it still seems fuzzy which side the American soldiers are on.” Locally, part of the fuzziness came from the fact that the captain had released the hated Nerva Juste.

I sensed that Farmer knew Haiti far better than the captain, and that he was trying to impart some important information. The people in this region were losing confidence in the captain, Farmer seemed to be saying, and this was a serious matter, obviously, for a team of nine soldiers trying to govern 150,000 people.

But the warning wasn’t entirely plain, and the captain got a little riled up at Farmer’s denunciation of the School of the Americas. As for Nerva Juste, he said, “Look, that guy is a bad guy. When I do have him and the evidence, I’ll slam him.” He slapped a fist into his hand. “But I’m not gonna stoop to the level of these guys and make summary arrests.”

Farmer replied, in effect, that it made no sense for the captain to apply principles of constitutional law in a country that at the moment had no functioning legal system. Juste was a menace and should be locked up.

So they reached a strange impasse. The captain, who described himself as “a redneck,” arguing for due process, and Farmer, who clearly considered himself a champion of human rights, arguing for preventive detention.