Category Archives: war

by | 6 September 2008 · 1:59 pm

What China Taught India, 1962

From India: The Rise of an Asian Giant, by Dietmar Rothermund (Yale U. Press, 2008), pp. 46-48:

The big blow to [Afro-Asian] solidarity came in 1962 when China invaded India in order to settle a border dispute. Nehru had assumed that China was an anti-imperialist power just like India and that such powers would live in peace with each other. Moreover, he had supported China’s control over Tibet, which was supposed to be an autonomous region. Unfortunately, he had failed to get from China a definitive statement concerning the India-China border in return for this support. The treaty which Nehru concluded with China in 1954 only mentioned some passes through which the trade between the two countries might flow. It also contained the five principles (panchshila) relating to mutual benefit and non-interference in each other’s internal affairs which Nehru henceforth regarded as the cornerstone of his foreign policy. However, none of this could prevent a clash with China. In 1959, the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s priestly ruler, fled to India and Nehru granted asylum to him but did not permit him to establish a Tibetan government in exile. In the following months border clashes increased and notes were exchanged which Nehru did not publish until he was forced to do so by the Indian parliament. In 1961, the Chinese Prime Minister Chou En-lai visited India for border negotiations. Nehru had collected all relevant maps and was surprised that Chou En-lai did not wish to look at them but immediately proposed a deal: China would recognize India’s eastern border as delineated by the McMahon Line of 1914 if India would leave the Karakoram Pass and Aksai Chin (northeast Kashmir) to China. China had secretly occupied most of Aksai Chin in the 1950s, so India would simply have to acquiesce in this loss. The access to the Karakoram highway was of great strategic importance to China for the control of its western provinces. However, Nehru as head of a democratic government could not deal with national territory as easily as Chou En-lai had expected. The deal was not accepted and border clashes continued. Finally, China forced the deal on an unwilling India by means of a well-planned military offensive. When the USA and the Soviet Union were busy with the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, a division of Chinese troops crossed the McMahon Line in the east and soon reached the Assamese plains. But this was a diversionary move. These troops withdrew before their supply lines could be cut. In the meantime the Chinese also launched a massive offensive in the west to capture the Karakorum highway – and they did not withdraw as this was the area which really interested them. Subsequently, there was a conspiracy of silence between India and China as to what had happened there. India was not willing to admit its losses and China would not reveal its illegitimate gains. China has adopted an attitude of superiority ever since and sometimes this has even been expressed quite openly. When China invaded Vietnam in 1979, Deng Xiao-ping compared this to what China had done to India in 1962. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who visited China at that time as India’s Minister of External Affairs in order to ‘normalize’ relations with China, got this message and immediately returned home. ‘Normalization’ had to wait for a long time.

The clash between India and China had sounded the death knell of Afro-Asian Solidarity even before 1962, but anti-colonial solidarity still motivated Nehru, who was sensitive to appeals from leaders of countries which were involved in their freedom struggle. In September 1961, Kenneth Kaunda, the future President of Zambia who had attended the Belgrade Conference of the Nonaligned Nations, visited New Delhi and gave a lecture in which he blamed Nehru for tolerating Portuguese colonial rule in Goa. He argued that rather than setting an encouraging example which the Africans could follow Nehru obviously wanted to wait until the Africans had overcome Portuguese colonial rule, whereupon Goa would then fall into his lap like a ripe fruit. Kaunda was clearly quite right in assessing Nehru’s motives and his speech stung him into action. Goa was liberated by the Indian army in December 1961; it proved to be a walkover but this could not have been predicted. As a member of NATO, Portugal was well armed and had a strong garrison in Goa. It could also rely on support from Pakistan. If the Portuguese Governor-General had decided to defend Goa seriously, the liberation could have ended in a bloodbath. Fortunately, he only blew up a few bridges and surrendered gracefully as he was aware of the far superior power of the Indian army. This was Nehru’s last great triumph, but he experienced it with mixed feelings. He lost his reputation as an apostle of peace and was berated by every Western power. This he could live with, but the humiliating defeat he suffered at the hands of the Chinese in 1962 broke his heart. He must have felt very deeply that he had failed as architect of India’s foreign policy.

Nehru’s successors adopted a more realistic approach: India’s regional position was more important to them than its role in world affairs. The twin challenges of China and Pakistan converted India with a vengeance into a self-conscious territorial state concerned with its defence. A retired Indian general had once said that the colonial legacy of a huge army embarrassed India’s political leaders as much as inheriting a brewery would embarrass a teetotaller. Nehru did not invest much money in armaments; however, this changed after India’s defeat by the Chinese in 1962. Defence expenditure was stepped up, which alarmed Pakistan. The Chinese had shown that India could be beaten and had thus set Pakistan an example, but due to India’s rapid armament, the window of opportunity for Pakistan seemed to be closing fast. Pakistan’s military dictator Ayub Khan was pushed by his young Foreign Minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, to attack India in Kashmir. Bhutto had forged a military alliance with China in 1963 and Pakistan had yielded a large part of territory to the west of the Karakoram Pass to China at that time. Nehru’s successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, was considered weak and inexperienced. Pakistan tested his reaction to a border intrusion in the Rann of Katch in the summer of 1965. Shastri requested the then British Prime Minister Harold Wilson to arbitrate in this matter, which only served to encourage Ayub Khan to launch his Operation Grand Slam in September 1965 and he sent his tanks to cut the only connection between India and Kashmir. If Shastri had again called for arbitration, Ayub Khan could have finished his business in Kashmir and then negotiated from a position of strength. But this time Shastri ordered his troops to launch a counter-attack on Lahore. He also refused to listen to a Chinese ultimatum which referred to their threat to cross the border of Sikkim. Pakistan had hoped that China would open a second front in the east, but the Chinese did not follow up their ultimatum and bitterly disappointed their Pakistani allies. China had encouraged Pakistan in the hope that it would do some damage to India, but it was not interested in investing anything in this war as it had reached its aims in 1962. The same Chinese stratagem was repeated in 1971 when Pakistan lost its eastern half and the Chinese supported Pakistan, but did not give the Pakistanis help when they needed it.

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by | 6 September 2008 · 10:49 am

Registan’s Foust on Citizen Propagandists

I’ve been distracted by other projects lately (no, not watching the major-party infomercials in the U.S.) and by reading hard-to-blog chapters in books (but a good long excerpt will follow), so I’ve neglected to post a link to a blogpost by Joshua Foust on Registan (the first blog to link to mine, back in 2003) about the rise of citizen propagandists. I’ll cite just one paragraph from the full article, which is online at Columbia Journalism Review.

Non-official propaganda matters greatly, because while most bloggers issued shallow and predictable jeremiads about either the horrors of the “new Cold War” or the horrors of American-supported client states, there were some out there who were largely getting things right. Unfortunately, these sober voices were often drowned out by the overwhelming amount of citizen propagandists flooding the blogosphere. Nevertheless, they bear mentioning.

Foust’s article concerns the role of citizen propagandists in the current war between Russia and Georgia, since Registan’s regional focus is the Russian Near Abroad in Central Asia. But Foust’s thesis also applies to political blog spinmeisters, comment-thread propagators, and the lazy professional journalists who rely on their favorite blogs both to determine the newsworthiness and to frame the narratives of the “news” stories they bother to report (or not).

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by | 25 August 2008 · 8:47 pm

End of the Americo-Liberian Aristocracy, 1980

From The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, by Martin Meredith (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. 545-548:

In his book Journey Without Maps, an account of his travels in Liberia in the 1930s, the English writer Graham Greene recorded that ‘Liberian politics were like a crap game played with loaded dice’. It was a game that Liberia’s ruling elite – the descendants of some 300 black settler families from the United States who set up an independent republic in 1847 – played among themselves with considerable relish. For more than 100 years – from 1877 to 1980 – Liberia was governed under a one-party system in which the same party, the True Whig Party, controlled by the same elite group, held office continuously, dispensing patronage, deciding on public appointments and retaining a monopoly on power – a record equalled by no other political party anywhere in the world. Elections were nevertheless taken seriously, if only to determine which family – the Barclays, the Kings, the Tubmans – emerged on top. ‘The curious thing about a Liberian election campaign,’ wrote Greene, ‘is that, although the result is always a foregone conclusion, everyone behaves as if the votes and the speeches and the pamphlets matter.’ However, he added, the system was more complicated than it seemed. ‘It may be all a question of cash and printing presses and armed police, but things have to be done with an air. Crudity as far as possible is avoided.’

As members of a ruling aristocracy, the Americo-Liberians, as they called themselves, were immensely proud of their American heritage. They developed a lifestyle reminiscent of the antebellum South, complete with top hats and morning coats and masonic lodges. They built houses with pillared porches, gabled roofs and dormer windows resembling the nineteenth-century architectural styles of Georgia, Maryland and the Carolinas. They chose as a national flag a replica of the American Stars and Stripes, with a single star, and used the American dollar as legal tender.

Just like white settlers in Africa, the Americo-Liberians constructed a colonial system subjugating the indigenous population to rigid control and concentrating wealth and privilege in their own hands. Despite their origins as descendants of slaves from the Deep South, they regarded black Liberians as an inferior race, fit only for exploitation. The nadir of Americo-Liberian rule came in 1931 when an international commission found senior government officials guilty of involvement in organised slavery.

When other West African states shed colonial rule in the 1960s, the Liberian system stayed much the same. Liberian law stipulated that only property owners were entitled to the vote, so the vast majority of indigenous Africans were effectively left without one. Small numbers were assimilated into the ranks of the ruling elite: ‘country boys’ adopted by coastal families; girls selected as wives or concubines; ambitious ‘hinterlanders’ climbing the ladder. During the 1970s a few were co-opted into government. Local administration in the ‘hinterland’ was largely run by indigenous officials. But essentially Liberia remained an oligarchy where 1 per cent of the population controlled the rest – some 2 million people.

The last of the line of Americo-Liberian presidents was William Tolbert, the grandson of freed South Carolina slaves who had served as vice-president for twenty years. A Baptist minister, he attempted a series of cautious reforms, abandoning the top hat and tail-coat traditions favoured by his predecessor, William Tubman, selling the presidential yacht and abolishing a compulsory ‘tithe’ of 10 per cent of every government employee’s salary that went to the True Whig Party. But much of Tolbert’s efforts were also devoted to amassing a personal fortune and promoting the interests of family members in the traditional manner. One brother was appointed minister of finance; another was chosen as president of the senate; a son-in-law served as minister of defence; other relatives filled posts as ministers, ambassadors and presidential aides. The crap game of Liberian politics was as highly profitable in the 1970s as in the 1930s.

Economic development in the 1960s and 1970s helped underpin the system, as well as provide new opportunities for the elite’s self-enrichment. The mainstay of the economy had initially been rubber. In 1926 the Firestone Tyre and Rubber Company leased a million acres for ninety-nine years at six cents an acre to meet the American demand for car tyres. But iron ore exports from massive, high-grade deposits in the Bomi hills then overtook rubber as the major source of foreign investment and government income. By 1970 Firestone and the Liberian Iron Mining Company were providing the government with 50 per cent of greatly increased revenues. A third source of income came from registration fees from the world’s largest ghost fleet of ships: Liberia possessed only two ships of its own, but allowed more than 2,500 vessels plying the seas to fly Liberia’s flag of convenience without the bother of inspection, for a suitable fee.

Liberia ‘s economic advances, however, served only to highlight the growing disparity between the ostentatious lifestyle of the rich elite and the overwhelming majority of impoverished tribal Africans. In 1979 – the same year that Tolbert spent an amount equivalent to half the national budget while acting as host to an OAU heads of state conference – demonstrators took to the streets in protest against a 50 per cent increase in the price of rice, the staple food of most Liberians. The price increase had been authorised by Tolbert in the hope of encouraging local production. But since one of the chief beneficiaries was the president’s cousin, Daniel Tolbert, who owned the country’s largest rice-importing firm, it was seen as another move to enrich the elite. On Tolbert’s orders armed police and troops opened fire on the demonstrators, killing dozens of them.

In the following months Tolbert struggled to contain a rising tide of discontent, colliding not just with the poor but with a new generation of the educated elite. He allowed the formation of an opposition party, but when opposition politicians called for a general strike, he had them arrested on charges of treason and sedition and banned the party.

On the night of 12 April 1980 a group of seventeen dissident soldiers led by a 28-year-old master sergeant named Samuel Doe, scaled the iron gate of the president’s seven-storey Executive Mansion, overpowered the guards and found Tolbert in his pyjamas in an upstairs bedroom. They fired three bullets into his head, gouged out his right eye and disembowelled him. His body was dumped in a mass grave along with twenty-seven others who died defending the palace. Ministers and officials were rounded up, taken before a military tribunal and sentenced to death.

Amid much jubilation, watched by a crowd of thousands laughing and jeering and filmed by camera crews, thirteen high-ranking officials were tied to telephone poles on a beach in Monrovia and executed by a squad of drunken soldiers, firing volley after volley at them. A great shout arose from the mob. ‘Freedom! We got our freedom at last!’ The soldiers rushed forward to kick and pummel the corpses.

Thus the old order ended.

Thus begins the chapter entitled “Blood Diamonds,” in which the barbarism only gets worse and worse. Few societies have solved the problem of how to overthrow recalcitrant aristocrats without descending into a period of barbarism that only serves to unduly enhance nostalgia for prerevolutionary times, as Theodore Dalrymple observes in his retrospective on Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

The Russian satirical writer Vladimir Voinovich satirized Solzhenitsyn’s Russian nationalism by depicting someone resembling him having his employees flogged in Vermont. This satirical scene, in fact, made a profound criticism of Solzhenitsyn’s political thought. Voinovich was alluding to the fact that, were it not for the horrors of Bolshevism, the pre-revolutionary Russian political tradition would be regarded as so brutal that no sensitive person of good will could be a Russian nationalist. As it was, the Bolsheviks regularly killed in a few minutes more people than the Romanovs managed in a century, giving pre-revolutionary Russian history the retrospective luster of decency, wisdom, and compassion that it did not in the least deserve. For Voinovich—and the distinguished historian of Russia Richard Pipes—Leninism had its roots in the Russian tradition as well as the Marxist one. This meant that Solzhenitsyn, while absolutely right in his uncompromising attitude to Marxist-Leninism and all its works, belonged in the category of Dostoevsky: a brilliant seer who would nevertheless have made a very bad guide.

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by | 25 August 2008 · 6:52 pm

Religion and Romania’s Iron Guard

From Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror, by Michael Burleigh (HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 270-271:

Few European Fascist movements went so far as to proclaim that ‘God is a Fascist!’ or that ‘the ultimate goal of the Nation must be resurrection in Christ!’ Romania was the exception. Romanian Fascists wanted ‘a Romania in delirium’ and they largely got one. The Legion of the Archangel Michael was founded in 1927 in honour of the archangel, who had allegedly visited Corneliu Codreanu, its chief ideologist, while he was in prison. It was the only European Fascist movement with religion (in this case Romanian Orthodoxy) at its core. In 1930 the Legion was renamed the Iron Guard. While rivalling only the Nazis in the ferocity of their hatred of Jews, these Romanian Fascists were sui generis in their fusion of political militancy with Orthodox mysticism into a truly lethal whole. One of the Legion’s intellectual luminaries, the world-renowned anthropologist Mircea Eliade, described the legionary ideal as ‘a harsh Christian spirituality’. Its four commandments were ‘belief in God; faith in our mission; love for one another; son’. The goal of a ‘new moral man’ may have been a totalitarian commonplace, but the ‘resurrection of the [Romanian] people in front of God’s throne’ was not routine in such circles. But then few European Fascists were inducted into an elite called the Brotherhood of Christ by sipping from a communal cup of blood filled from slashes in their own arms, or went around with little bags of soil tied around their necks. Nor did they do frenzied dances after chopping opponents into hundreds of pieces. Not for nothing was the prison massacre of Iron Guard leaders – including the captain Codreanu himself – by supporters of King Carol II known to local wits as ‘the Night of the Vampires’. Although the Romanian elites emasculated the Guard’s leadership, much of their furious potential was at that elite’s disposal.

Hitler’s conquests in western Europe in 1940 led Carol II to abandon his country’s alignment with Britain and to seek a role for Romania within the all-conquering German ‘new order’. That June, the Soviet Union took Bessarabia and Bukovina under the terms of the deal it had struck with Hitler. Three million Romanian Orthodox Christians languished under an alien and atheist regime, a state of affairs that outraged opinion in the Old Kingdom. In September 1940 Carol invited the military strongman, General Ion Antonescu, to form a government, which within a month deposed the king in favour of his son prince Michael, who is still the claimant to the throne of Romania. Because, like Franco, Antonescu lacked a political base, he revived the Legion so as to provide a basis for what became the ‘National Legionnaire State’. The Iron Guard leader, Horia Sima, became vice-premier, and the Guard gained five ministerial portfolios. For the ensuing five months the Guard attempted a stealthy coup from within, even as their corruption and violence created chaos. Since sections of the Nazi leadership favoured the Guard, the wily Antonescu knew where to turn.

In January 1941, Antonescu flew to Germany for a meeting with Hitler , whose troops were massing in Romania for the projected invasion of the Soviet Union. The strong personal rapport between these two implacable haters of the Jews enabled Antonescu to provoke and crush a revolt by the Guard after he returned home; nine thousand were detained and eighteen hundred sentenced to imprisonment. The Guard was proscribed and the Legionnaire State abandoned. Antonescu assumed the title of ‘conducator’ used by the murdered Codreanu, while his son Mihai became vice-premier of a government largely consisting of antisemites of the National Christian Party, for in this respect the old elites were no different from the Fascists. Acting reflexively in its search for someone to blame, the Guard carried out a pogrom in Bucharest, killing 630 Jews, some of whose corpses hung in the capital’s slaughterhouse as ‘kosher meat’.

In 1983-84, we lived in an apartment at the north end of Parcul Tineretului within easy walking distance of both the main slaughterhouse and the main crematorium, the latter surrounded by huge cemeteries, including Cimitirul Israelit. (The crematorium features in Saul Bellow’s novel The Dean’s December, which we read that year.) Here’s my translation of the paragraph on the history of the crematorium at the link above:

The crematorium “Cenusa” [‘Ash’] is one of the few monuments in Bucharest that is closely tied to the recent history of Romania. The first person incinerated here after its inauguration in 1928 was Profira Fieraru, a woman who died at the age of 40. The opening of the crematorium was the subject of controversy between church and state, leading to discussion of the legitimacy of the burning of cadavers from the point of view of religious doctrine. Among those said to have been cremated in “Cenusa” are General Antonescu, several legionnaires from the interwar period, and Ana Pauker from the communist period. At the Revolution of 1989, those 43 people killed at Timisoara were brought to the crematorium and incinerated, but their ashes were thrown away.

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by | 15 August 2008 · 10:50 pm

Stalin Reinstates the Church, 1942-43

From Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror, by Michael Burleigh (HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 233-236:

Unlike Stalin, who suffered a mental collapse when the reality of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union penetrated his state of denial, on the very day of the attack metropolitan Sergei sent a message to every Orthodox parish. It reminded the Russian faithful of the heroic deeds of their ancestors, and of the saints Alexander Nevsky and Dimitri Donskoi, who had rescued Holy Russia in past crises: ‘Our Orthodox Church has always shared the fate of the people. It has always borne their trials and cherished their successes. It will not desert the people now … The Church of Christ blesses all the Orthodox defending the sacred frontiers of our Motherland. The Lord will grant us victory.’ … When Stalin did finally address the nation on 3 July, he spoke in the uncharacteristic tones of ‘Brothers and sisters! My dear friends!’ whose religious accents were unmistakable. He may have mentioned Lenin, but the radio address was much more like a simple priest sounding the village tocsin. In October, patriarch Sergei wrote a further address, as the Germans came within sixty miles of the capital. He condemned clergy who had defected to the enemy, notably metropolitan Voskresensky who had been despatched to the Baltic States before the war as part of a wider attempt to exploit Orthodoxy to integrate the newly acquired states into the Red Empire. On 11 November, Stalin harangued troops on Red Square as German troops battled their way towards suburban Moscow, invoking Nevsky, Donskoi, Suvarov and Kutusov, realising that common or garden patriotism and religion had greater mobilising potential than Marxist-Leninism. Typically, patriarch Sergei had been dragged from his sickbed a few days before and deported to Ulyanovsk.

Of the other two remaining Orthodox hierarchs, metropolitan Nikolai was brought back from the Ukraine to Moscow, where he became the regime’s main clerical foreign policy propagandist, while metropolitan Alexei rallied the faithful during the terrible siege of Leningrad. The regime made a few cautious and parsimonious concessions to a Church that played a major role in maintaining wartime morale. It tolerated rather than encouraged religion. Overt anti-religious propaganda may have ceased for the duration, perhaps in rueful recognition of Pius XII’s leading role in persuading sceptical US Catholic bishops of the legitimacy of their government’s Lend-Lease aid to the Russian people despite his predecessor’s comprehensive damnation of Communism, a stance that militates against the notion that anti-Communism was the overriding obsession of his pontificate. Sunday was restored as a day of rest, and artists were allowed to repair damaged icons. In 1942 the presses of the almost defunct League of the Militant Godless were used to produce a tome called The Truth about Religion in Russia, in which the weary remnants of a Church the Soviets had tried to destroy were displayed for foreign consumption. Beyond this there were no concessions. At Easter 1942 churches in Moscow were allowed to hold candlelit processions as the curfew was raised for a night. This was a meagre gesture given the enormous role that the Churches had played in the war effort. Starting with Alexei in Leningrad, sermons became appeals to donate money to the war effort. By January 1943, over three million rubles had been raised in Leningrad alone. Another five hundred thousand rubles funded a tank column named after Dimitri Donskoi. By the end of the war, the Church had contributed 150 million rubles.

In November 1942 metropolitan Nikolai became the first cleric since 1917 to have an official function, when he joined a government commission to investigate Nazi war crimes on Soviet territory. That included putting his name to accusations that the Germans had carried out massacres at Katyn for which the NKVD had been responsible. In January 1943, patriarch Sergei sent a telegram to Stalin requesting permission to open a central bank account where the Church could deposit such monies. When Stalin assented, relaying the gratitude of the Red Army, the Church effectively received corporate legal recognition for the first time. It was a sign of the times that in the same month a senior party official in distant Krasnoyarsk formally received a bishop, who was also a brilliant surgeon, the man still being a prisoner at the time. In September, the exiled Sergei was surprised to find himself brought back to Moscow and installed in the former residence of the German ambassador. At 9 p.m. the following night, he and metropolitans Alexei and Nikolai, were driven to the Kremlin for a session with Molotov and Stalin. The former improbably asked what the Church might need. Recovering from the shock of this request, Sergei said the reopening of churches and seminaries, a Church council and the election of a patriarch. As if it had nothing to do with him, Stalin gently inquired: ‘And why don’t you have cadres? Where have they disappeared to?’ Rather than pointing out that most of these ‘cadres’ had died in camps, Sergei quickly joked: ‘One of the reasons is that we train a person for the priesthood, and he becomes the Marshal of the Soviet Union.’ This set Stalin off on a monologue about his days as a seminarian which went on until 3 a.m. Stalin helped the elderly Sergei down the stairs, saying, ‘Your Grace, this is all I can do for you at the present time,’ although he also appointed Georgi Karpov as the regime’s liaison with the Orthodox Church. Karpov was the NKVD official who had arrested and shot most of the clergy, though Stalin added, ‘I know Karpov, he is an obliging subordinate.’ At some point in the course of that night there was oral agreement regarding the future status of the Orthodox Church. Within four days nineteen bishops were found who elected Sergei patriarch, successor to patriarch Tikhon who had died in 1925. They issued a joint exhortation to Christians around the world to unite against Hitler.

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by | 15 August 2008 · 2:17 pm

Vichy, 1940: ‘Heaven-sent’ Defeat

From Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror, by Michael Burleigh (HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 239-240:

Vichy used much of the moralising rhetoric that had been favoured by the French Catholic Church in the century since the Revolution. The regime denounced the ‘esprit de jouissance’ (pleasure-seeking) that was allegedly responsible for the defeat, promising ‘moral recovery’. This resonated with a Catholic tradition of moralising major events, as in 1789, 1870, and 1914….

The Catholic hierarchy converted a complex national disaster into a moralising myth, which suited what the Jesuit Henri de Lubac called the ‘masochistic’ spirit of those times. Victory, some senior ecclesiastics argued, would have led to further moral degradation; defeat afforded a ‘heaven-sent’ opportunity for regeneration. Victory in 1918 had proved a wasted opportunity; perhaps 1940 could be different? The Catholic writer Claudel regarded defeat as a form of deliverance, confiding in his diary: ‘France has been delivered after sixty years from the yoke of the anti-Catholic Radical party (teachers, lawyers, Jews, Freemasons). The new government invokes God … There is hope of being delivered from universal suffrage and parliamentarism.’

Similar attitudes seem quite prevalent in the West these days, especially among our hordes of jet-setting Jeremiahs, but one wonders how many Japanese citizens felt the same way on this day 63 years ago. How many members of the ruling elite of Imperial Japan felt let down by their masses and determined to teach them a lesson? Certainly a good many ordinary citizens were ready to sacrifice their elites in return for peace.

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by | 6 August 2008 · 8:53 pm

The Vatican as UN/NGO in World War Two

From: Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror, by Michael Burleigh (HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 218, 220-221:

As an international institution, the Catholic Church had to negotiate every political context, protecting the rights of Catholics in all belligerent countries through the mechanism of concordats; rendering assistance to a much wider range of humanity; and balancing its diplomatic cum spiritual objectives with the role of moral prophecy. Perhaps no one could have performed the multiple roles of pope to universal satisfaction in such circumstances, and the legacy of Pius XII, who faced these challenges, is still disputed, as was that of Benedict XV during and after the First World War.

Nazi racial exterminism has become so dominant in the historiography of the last two decades that it has eclipsed every other aspect of the war, including attempts to prevent, contain or mitigate it. That downgrades most of the activities that were of paramount concern to all Europe’s Churches in the two years before the ‘Final Solution’ started under cover of a war that had raged since September 1939. One of the chief activities of the papacy was to prevent war at all, an activity that sometimes had the support of Mussolini, as well as the European democracies and the US. This papal diplomatic activity is relatively straightforward to understand, while in its sheer unassuming scale the relief and rescue work is difficult to get a purchase on despite the abundance of documentation….

The pope, informed of the invasion of Poland, retreated to his chapel to pray. The war immediately raised urgent humanitarian problems…. He established the Pontifical Relief Commission, whose remit was to provide war refugees with food, clothing and shelter. To take one example, the US Catholic dioceses collected US$750,000 which the bishop of Detroit sent to the pope for distribution among Poles in Poland and scattered throughout Europe. He also revived the Vatican Information Bureau, its aim being to reunite people separated by warfare, including prisoners of war – about whom the families everywhere were desperately anxious. The Bureau received a thousand items of correspondence per day, requiring a staff of six hundred to process it and conduct the ensuing inquiries. Its card index contains the names of over two million prisoners of war whom it helped locate and support. Like the parallel work of the International Red Cross, such labour involved a certain suspension of open moral judgement if it was to be at all effective. Vatican Radio also broadcast nearly thirty thousand messages a month in the search for missing persons.

Vatican documents are quietly eloquent on the papacy’s variegated interventions on behalf of so many victims of the Second World War, whether the despatch of food to Greeks starving because the Italians had made off with all the available food and the British were blocking ships bringing grain; exchanges of sick or wounded British prisoners in Italian captivity in North Africa; or, when the war had reached the Pacific theatre, having nuncio Morella in Tokyo organise medical supplies from Hong Kong for British prisoners of the Japanese. The Greek famine, in which one hundred thousand people starved to death, is instructive. The Germans handed over control of Greece to the Italians in the summer of 1941. Bulgaria had occupied some of the main grain-producing areas, while the Italians had commandeered much of the food stored. The 1941 harvest was poor. The British blockaded Greece, stopping grain shipments from Australia and preventing the arrival of 320,000 tons of grain that the Greeks had bought. Into this extremely complicated set of circumstances, where enemy nations were passing the buck on to their opponents while Greeks died, came monsignor Roncalli, the apostolic delegate to Greece and Turkey who was based in Istanbul. He visited senior German commanders, celebrating a mass for wounded German troops and visiting British POWs, so as to win the confidence of his interlocutors. Simultaneously he urged the Holy See to intervene with the US and British to bring about a temporary lift of the blockade. This persuaded the Germans to allow food to go to Greece via neutral Turkey; they also promised that any future food shipments would go exclusively to the civilian population. The British finally allowed a one-off shipment of eight thousand tons of wheat and flour. Meanwhile, in Athens, Roncalli organised soup kitchens that served twelve thousand meals a day, with supplies purchased by the Holy See in Hungary. Because of these measures fewer people died. It was complicated, undramatic work, in which each side blamed the other for the plight of the Greeks, and it resulted in an agreement between the belligerent powers to put in place mechanisms to ensure that the famine was not repeated.

It seems to me that today’s UN and NGOs, whether secular or religious, are caught in the same moral bind as the Vatican and the Red Cross during World War Two, sanctioning moral ambiguity and complicity in return for whatever good they think they can salvage from absolutely horrific local circumstances over which they have little or no control. After a while, absolutely everything becomes subject to terms of trade.

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Filed under Europe, NGOs, religion, U.N., war

by | 13 July 2008 · 10:31 pm

Sudan’s Second Civil War, 1980s

From The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, by Martin Meredith (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. 358-360:

As in the case of Chad, Sudan’s second civil war drew in an array of foreign players. Mengistu‘s regime in Ethiopia supported the cause of the southern Sudanese in retaliation for Khartoum’s support for Eritrean secessionists and Tigrayan rebels. In Libya, Gaddafi, who had once supported the Eritreans but who switched sides when Mengistu came to power, joined Mengistu in supporting the southern Sudanese. Numeiri meanwhile supported an anti-Gaddafi Libyan group, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya, which set up offices in Khartoum in 1981 and broadcast propaganda programmes attacking Gaddafi. Numeiri also gave assistance to anti-Gaddafi groups from Chad. The United States, for its part, despite the repression Numeiri unleashed in southern Sudan, invested heavily in his regime to bolster him as a counter-weight to Gaddafi and Mengistu, both of whom it regarded as pro-Soviet activists; US assistance to Numeiri totalled $1.5 billion.

With American support, Numeiri was confident he could deal with any threat posed by rebels in the south. But he was beset by a host of other difficulties. Hoping to establish Sudan as the ‘breadbasket’ of the Middle East, Numeiri had encouraged massive investment in mechanised agriculture, but the overall result was a decline in agricultural production and a foreign debt of $12 billion that Sudan had no means of repaying. When drought struck in 1983 and again in 1984, causing mass hunger, Numeiri, like Mengistu in Ethiopia, ignored the consequences, desperately trying to avoid jeopardising Sudan’s image as a suitable destination for agricultural investment. Only after an estimated quarter of a million people had died was he prevailed upon to take action. Forced by foreign creditors to accept austerity measures, Numeiri found his grip on power slipping. Shortages, inflation, unemployment, deteriorating social services and rampant corruption caused widespread discontent. The famine itself provided a rallying point for organised protest. A coalition of trade unions and professional groups, including lawyers, doctors and civil servants, led the opposition. When urban strikes, riots and demonstrations erupted, not even the army was willing to stand by Numeiri. In April 1985, after sixteen years in power, he was overthrown.

An election in 1986 brought to power northern politicians fully committed to the establishment of an Islamic state. As prime minister, Sadiq al-Mahdi, the leader of the Umma Party, pronounced himself in favour of ‘the full citizen, human and religious rights’ of non-Muslims. But he also declared: ‘Non-Muslims can ask us to protect their rights – and we will do that – but that’s all they can ask. We wish to establish Islam as the source of law in Sudan because Sudan has a Muslim majority.’ The sharia code introduced by Numeiri in 1983 remained in force.

Under Sadiq’s regime the north experienced many of the benefits of liberal democracy – parliamentary debate, a vigorous press, an independent judiciary, active trade unions and professional associations. But for the south there was unrelenting warfare. The SPLM refused to accept a ceasefire or to take part in the election, demanding a constitutional convention. Sadiq responded by arming Baggara Arab militias in western Sudan – murahalin – licensing them to raid and plunder at will in the Dinka and Nuer areas of Bahr-al-Ghazal, just as their forefathers had done in the nineteenth century. Dinka and Nuer villages were attacked and burned, their livestock stolen, their wells poisoned; men, women and children were killed or abducted and taken back to the north where they were traded or kept as slaves. Atrocities were commonplace. In revenge for an SPLM attack on a Rizeigat militia group in March 1987, Rizeigat survivors attacked Dinka men, women and children in the town of Al Diein in southern Darfur, setting fire to six railway carriages where they were sheltering, killing more than 1,000; those who were not burned to death were stabbed and shot as they tried to escape. A report on the massacre, written by two Muslim academics at the University of Khartoum, blamed the killing on the government. ‘Government policy has produced distortions in the Rizeigat community such as banditry and slavery, which interacted with social conflicts in Diein to generate a massacre psychosis … Armed banditry, involving the killing of Dinka villagers, has become a regular activity for the government-sponsored militia.’ Rizeigat militias, they said, made a practice of selling Dinka women and children to Arab families for use as servants, farm workers and sex slaves. ‘All this is practised with the full knowledge of the government.’

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by | 6 July 2008 · 7:44 pm

Foreign Surgeons at the Birth of Zimbabwe, 1974-79

From The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, by Martin Meredith (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. 321-326:

The coup in Lisbon in April 1974 changed the fortunes of Rhodesia irrevocably. The end of Portuguese rule in Mozambique not only deprived Rhodesia of a long-standing ally and brought to power there a left-wing nationalist movement; it meant that Rhodesia’s entire eastern border, some 760 miles long, was potentially vulnerable to infiltration by Zanu guerrillas operating freely from bases in Mozambique. Moreover, Frelimo‘s accession to power in Mozambique emboldened Rhodesian nationalists to believe that in Rhodesia too guerrilla warfare would succeed in overthrowing white rule.

The South Africans were quick to recognise, in the aftermath of the Lisbon coup, that an entirely new strategy was needed. Hitherto, they had looked on Angola, Mozambique and Rhodesia as a valuable buffer separating them from contact with black Africa, a cordon sanitaire which it was in their own interests to strengthen. But with the withdrawal of the Portuguese from Angola and Mozambique, Rhodesia was no longer important as a front-line defence, for the winds of change had finally reached South Africa’s own frontier. The South African prime minister, John Vorster, calculated that in the long run Smith’s position, without an open-ended South African military and financial commitment, was untenable. White rule in Rhodesia was ultimately doomed. In this new assessment, Smith, with his long history of intransigence, was no longer a useful partner but a potential liability. His stubborn resistance to change only served to magnify the dangers of communist involvement in southern Africa. An unstable white government in Rhodesia was less preferable than a stable black government, heavily dependent on South African goodwill.

With this objective in mind, Vorster set out to force Smith to come to terms with the Rhodesian nationalists. He was obliged to act circumspectly for fear of antagonising his own electorate and provoking an outcry in Rhodesia. Fortuitously, he found an ally in Zambia’s President Kaunda, who had become increasingly concerned about the disruption caused in Zambia by the Rhodesian imbroglio and about the dangers of a widening guerrilla war there. In conjunction with other African leaders, Vorster and Kaunda conspired to impose on Smith and the nationalists their own plan for a Rhodesian settlement. As a preliminary step, Smith was required, much against his better judgement, to release nationalist detainees, including Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe….

Under pressure from South Africa, Smith went through the motions of attempting a negotiated settlement but, like Mugabe, saw no need to compromise. A conference in August 1975, held under the auspices of Vorster and Kaunda in railway carriages parked on the Victoria Falls bridge on the border between Rhodesia and Zambia, broke up in disarray after the first day….

In early 1976 the guerrilla war entered anew and more perilous phase. From bases in Mozambique, hundreds of Zanu guerrillas infiltrated into eastern Rhodesia, attacking white homesteads, robbing stores, planting landmines and subverting the local population. When Nkomo’s talks with Smith broke down, Zapu guerrillas joined the war, opening a new front in western Rhodesia, along the borders with Zambia and Botswana. Main roads and railways came under attack. White farmers bore the brunt, living daily with the risks of ambush, barricaded at night in fortified homes. A growing number of whites, rather than face military service, emigrated.

Though Rhodesia’s army commanders still expressed confidence in their ability to defeat the guerrilla menace, in many parts of the world it seemed that Smith was embarked upon an increasingly risky venture to sustain white rule which endangered the stability of the whole region. Among those whose attention was drawn to the Rhodesian war was Henry Kissinger. In the wake of the Angolan debacle, Kissinger was particularly alert to the dangers of how nationalist guerrilla wars could widen the circle of conflict, drawing in neighbouring countries and providing the Soviet bloc with opportunities for intervention. He found Vorster similarly worried and impatient with Smith’s intransigence. In tandem, they agreed on a plan to force Smith to accept majority rule. To make Smith amenable to the idea, Vorster cut back oil shipments and supplies of arms and ammunition, withdrew helicopter pilots and technicians from Rhodesia and delayed its import and export traffic through South Africa. Kissinger was left to present the terms of surrender.

At a meeting in Pretoria in September 1976, Kissinger handed Smith a typed list of five points that he said must be used as the basis for a Rhodesian settlement. Smith took the document and slowly read aloud the first point: ‘Rhodesia agrees to black majority rule within two years.’ He looked around the room and said: ‘you want me to sign my own suicide note.’…

When Smith finally left the stage as prime minister on the last day of white rule on 31 May 1979, his legacy was a state unrecognised by the international community, subjected to trade boycotts, ravaged by civil war that had cost at least 20,000 lives and facing a perilous future.

As the war intensified, Britain launched one last initiative to find a solution, calling for negotiations at a conference to be held in London. Muzorewa and Nkomo readily agreed to attend, but Mugabe saw no need. His guerrilla army was planning to embark on a new phase of urban warfare. ‘We felt we needed yet another thrust, and in the urban areas, in order to bring the fight home to where the whites had their citadels’, he recalled. The longer the war lasted, the greater were the prospects for achieving his revolutionary objectives.

Only under extreme pressure from Zambia ‘s Kenneth Kaunda and Mozambique’s Samora Machel did he eventually agree to attend. Both Zambia and Mozambique had suffered heavily as a result of Rhodesian raids on guerrilla bases and supply lines they harboured. Neither could afford to sustain the war any longer. Machel was blunt in his warnings: if Mugabe refused to go to London and explore negotiations, then Mozambique would withdraw its support….

Mugabe arrived in London in September 1979, a cold, austere figure who rarely smiled and seemed bent on achieving revolution, whatever the cost. While in exile he had repeatedly insisted on the need for a one-party Marxist state, threatened that Ian Smith and his ‘criminal gang’ would be tried and shot, and warned that white exploiters would not be allowed to keep an acre of land. His main hope was that the conference would break down.

Against all odds, however, the conference stumbled towards agreement. At the final hurdle, when Mugabe balked at accepting the ceasefire arrangements and made plans to fly to New York to denounce the whole proceedings at the United Nations, he was given a direct warning by an envoy from Machel that unless he signed the agreement, he could no longer count on using Mozambique as abase for operations; in other words, as far as Mozambique was concerned, the war was over. Mugabe was resentful about the outcome of the conference: ‘As I signed the document, I was not a happy man at all. I felt we had been cheated to some extent, that we had agreed to a deal which would to some extent rob us of [the] victory we had hoped we would achieve in the field.’…

Returning to Rhodesia in January 1980, nearly five years after his escape into exile, Mugabe was given a hero’s welcome by one of the largest crowds ever seen in Rhodesia. Banners portraying rockets, grenades, land mines and guns greeted him, and many youths wore T-shirts displaying the Kalashnikov rifle, the election symbol that Zanu wanted but the British had disallowed. But Mugabe himself was unexpectedly conciliatory. In Mozambique, shortly before Mugabe’s return to Salisbury, Samora Machel, still struggling to overcome the massive disruption caused by the exodus of whites at independence in 1975, had intervened to warn Zanu against fighting the election on a revolutionary platform. ‘Don’t play make-believe Marxist games when you get home,’ he said. ‘You will face ruin if you force the whites into precipitate flight.’ Consequently, Mugabe’s manifesto was stripped of all reference to Marxism and revolution.

Black Star Journal has an update on the latest reactions of African leaders to what Mugabe hath wrought.

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Filed under Britain, democracy, Mozambique, nationalism, Portugal, South Africa, U.S., war, Zambia, Zimbabwe

by | 2 July 2008 · 6:24 am

Red Cross Inspector Shibai, Nagasaki, 1944

From First into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War, by George Weller (1907-2002), ed. by Anthony Weller (Three Rivers, 2006), pp. 63-67:

Underground in the mine you could always tell when the B-29s were making a visit overhead. The main power plant on the surface closed down, the weaker auxiliary pumps went into action, and the air grew gluey and hard to breathe. In a slightly different way you could tell, while underground, when the Red Cross man was making a visit. From every section gang the strongest American was told off and ordered to take the mine train to the surface. He had ceased being a miner; he was now an actor. He had a role in a play that the mine authorities were going to put on for the benefit of the audience of one: the Red Cross inspector.

Two or three days before the Red Cross man—usually a Swiss or Swede—actually arrived, secret rehearsals had already been begun by what might be called the leads: the Japanese authorities of the camp. But for the real fibre of the performance the Japanese counted on their unrehearsed extras, the Americans.

Show day comes. A one-shot performance can be as good as its scenery, rarely any better. What is this extraordinary change that has overtaken the filthy little clinic, where operations without anesthesia have often taken place? It is transformed. Not only ether and morphine, but other medicines have appeared, the very medicines that were unobtainable 24 hours ago…. And look at the notice board! What are those neatly typewritten sheets fluttering from its black surface, now suddenly innocent of punishment records? It is the Daily News Bulletin, no less. (“We do what we can, Mr. Inspector, to satisfy the extraordinary American curiosity about current events.”)

And here comes the Red Cross visitor, walking like a prisoner himself in a phalanx of potbellied Japanese colonels and majors. Has he been underground? He has not. Will he get a view of the barracks? Well, a quick one, maybe. But first he is shown documents for three hours, till his eyes ache. Then the place for him to go is to the hospital. After all, a hospital is the great index of humanity. If the hospital in a prison camp is all right, everything else must be all right, too.

And everything in the little hospital is right, as superlatively right as the last canto of Scrooge’s Christmas. Just the entrance alone is beautiful. On each side of the door, Red Cross boxes are piled tastefully in twin pyramids—medicines, food, a cornucopia of abundance. The military interpreter opens the door and the inspector enters. Order and cleanliness, a lovely sight. The faces of the men on their cots are turned toward him. Sick? If these men are the sick, confined to the hospital under medical treatment, then it is hardly necessary to see the healthy, now working down in the mine. For these men, as prison standards go, are not badly off at all. Their faces—though wearing a peculiar quizzical, stolid expression—are round and full. Their eyes are clear. A Japanese doctor would call them robust.

The visitor, stroking his moustache, turns to the Japanese nurse, one of several chubby little starched creatures who have been placed at even intervals the length of the ward, like markings on a clinical thermometer. “How are the prisoners doing?” he inquires through the interpreter. “Oh, very well, very very well,” she says, with a shining nursely smile.

The inspector observes there are white sheets on the mattresses. Really not bad, altogether. Each man has a can of salmon or of pears at the same geometrical point near his bed. Not quite within reach, perhaps, but nearby.

Gently Captain Fukuhara suggests that perhaps the official party had better not delay too long in the hospital. Luncheon is already waiting. Would the inspector like to see what the prisoners are eating? The party passes rapidly through the kitchen to the mess hall, where the prisoners are lined up, waiting to be seen. Their faces still bear looks of unmistakable pleasure and anticipation, in which a sharp eye might detect strong traces of astonishment. There is no doubt that this is a happy camp. Look at the faces of the prisoners as they scan the miracle that lies waiting for them in their wooden mess gear: three camp rolls with a dab of margarine, bean soup with a bit of pork, a spoonful of Japanese red caviar, and a baked apple.

(It is the baked apple, though the visitor does not know this, which has really bewitched them. This baked apple is more than remarkable; it is historical. It is the only baked apple ever seen at Camp #17 in two years.)

The inspector has now seen the camp. But he must not go away without talking to one or two individual prisoners. So he is led to the Japanese headquarters, he is settled in the comfortable chair of the commandant, and several handpicked Americans are brought to him. The room is full of Japanese military and police; the only non-Japanese are the prisoner and the Red Cross man.

“We were selected for health, first,” Sergeant Joe Lawson of Klamath Falls explains it. “Then, when they knew the inspector was at the railroad station, they double-timed us to a bath, clean clothes and a shave. We went in that room and only needed to look around at the familiar faces to know what we were up against. We’d had plenty of stickwork done on us already. We knew that to get plenty more, all we needed to do was open our mouths.”

Now the last monosyllabic prisoner has walked out. The inspector rises. It is all over. Everybody is smiling. Nobody has said or heard anything disagreeable or discordant. Even the prisoners back in their quarters are happy in a way, for their fears that the visitor would ask penetrating questions and make it impossible for them to conceal the truth have been dispelled. The lie is still intact. How cheerful everyone is! Captain Fukuhara—on whose hands is the blood of five Americans beaten and starved to death in the aeso, the guardhouse—is geniality itself. He suggests a photograph to perpetuate the occasion. His lieutenants take up the proposal with an acclaim like bacchantes. A picture, a photograph of everybody! We must have it!

A table is decorated with cigarettes, cookies and fruit from the mess of the kempeitai, the military police. A Japanese Cecil Beaton runs around, all dithery excitement until he finds what he wants to put on the table with the edibles: a trumpet, a harmonica and a guitar. A suggestion is made that some of the irreproachable prisoners might be summoned back to get in the picture, but the picture is too crowded already, and the suggestion falls flat…. “All smile, prease!” (It is a little joke, for the fussy photographer to use the language of the prisoners, and all smile at it.) “Sank you! All finish!”

The military motorcar is waiting for the Red Cross man. Perhaps, in this last moment of shaking hands, he may be troubled by some inner doubts. But there is no time to sift them. He must hurry off, for he is to catch the train for Moji, connecting with the express for Tokyo. See you next year!

If he had seen the prisoners the next day, instead, the inspector would have learned more. If his officer escort would allow him to get off at the first station, turn around and go back to the camp, the inspector might see how the pageant of his welcome, as insubstantial as Prospero’s, faded into nothingness as soon as he left.

What has happened in the camp? The pyramids of Red Cross packages are demolished. The boxes are in Captain Fukuhara’ s closet, and the key is in his pocket. The cans of fish and pears have disappeared. Gone, too, are the white sheets from the hospital beds; where, nobody knows. The little nurses are climbing into their truck to be taken back to the local hospital in Omuta, swans never seen before in camp, unlikely to be seen again. The Daily News Bulletin is gone without a trace from the notice board, and a kempeitai is frowningly nailing back the punishment schedule. In the kitchen the Navy cook, Woodie Whitworth of Bourne, Texas, is preparing supper. The menu is the same as usual: one-half bowlful of plain rice, laced with millet to make it cheaper.

A column of prisoners dressed for work, with cap-lamps and sweat rags, is marching past the god of the mine (a giant, greenish-black statue of an idealized Mitsui miner, towering in the prison yard above the buildings). As their guards command them, they all bow to his exalted, unsmiling image. These miners are the extras of the benefit performance, who were patients in the hospital until a few minutes ago.

Having arrived at the entrance shaft they adjust their lamps for the last time, hug their mess-gear full of cold rice, climb into the roller coaster-like iron train and hold on. The cable starts moving. The train slides down the slanting chute into the sooty, echoing tunnel. For a while its roar is loud, but soon it dies away. After five minutes or so a bell rings. The cable slows, tightens, and finally stops. The patients from the hospital have reached their normal level of operation, 1,440 feet below ground. The sideshow is over. The Mitsui show is on once more.

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