Far Outliers

by Joel | 4 July 2004 · 10:31 pm

Naipaul on Revolutionary Fashion

Mehrdad’s sister was unmarried, and had little chance of getting married, since too many men of suitable age had been killed in the eight-year war [with Iraq]. She simply stayed at home when she came home from work: silent, full of inward rage, her unhappiness a shadow over the house and a source of worry for her parents, who couldn’t work out a future for her. It was too difficult for her to go out; and now she had lost the will. In this she was like the fifteen-year-old daughter of a teacher I had got to know. This girl had already learned that she could be stopped by the Guards and questioned if she was alone on the street. She hated the humiliation, and now she didn’t like to go out. The world had narrowed for her just when it should have opened out.

In February 1980 I had seen young women in guerrilla garb among the students camped outside the seized U.S. embassy: Che Guevara gear, the theater of revolution. I remembered one plump young woman, in her khakis, coming out of a low tent on this freezing afternoon with a mug of steaming tea for one of the men: her face bright with the idea of serving the revolution and the warriors of the revolution. Most of those young people, “Muslim Students Following the Line of Ayatollah Khomeini,” would now have been dead or neutered, like all the other communist or left-wing groups. I don’t think that young woman with the mug could have dreamed that the revolution to which she was contributing–posters on the embassy wall and on trees were comparing the Iranian revolution with the Nicaraguan, making both appear part of a universal movement forward–would have ended in this way, with an old-fashioned tormenting of women, and with the helicopters in the sky looking for satellite dishes.

The very gear and style of revolution now had another meaning. The beards were not Che Guevara beards, but good Islamic beards, not cut by razors; and the green guerrilla outfits were now the uniform of the enforcers of the religious law.

SOURCE: Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage, 1998), pp. 225-226

Leave a comment

Filed under Iran, Islam

by Joel | 4 July 2004 · 6:22 pm

A Foxhole View of the Korean War

In June 1950, Pfc. Susumu Shinagawa of Able Company, 34th Infantry, found himself heading north from Pusan, at the southern end of Korea, to stop the North Korean troops advancing south.

The train chugged to a stop just before daylight at Pyongtaek. There was a light, steady drizzle as we got off the train and waited in the muddy streets for our orders. Without a poncho, I was soaked to the skin. When the orders came, Able and Baker Companies were to set up blocking positions on two hills about 2 miles north of the town. Charlie Company was designated the reserve company somewhere behind us.

The rain stopped when we started the 2-mile hike to our objective. When we got to the hills Able Company veered left and occupied the hill to the left of the road and Baker Company peeled off to the right of the road. Separating us were rice paddies, a rail line, and the road. I could see a small bridge several hundred yards farther north. Five hundred yards separated our company from Baker Company.

We paired off and dug our foxholes. I can’t remember who my foxhole buddy was at the time. About this time we were sloshing around on the hillside, slipping and falling, which made it difficult to dig our holes.

The 3d Platoon was on our left and the 1st Platoon was in the rice paddies to our right. My platoon, the 2d, was in the middle. There were no friendly units to the left of the 3d Platoon.

From my position I could see refugees moving south on a road to the left of the 3d Platoon. My squad leader came by and told my buddy and me to camouflage our position with some branches and leaves. Then it began to rain. It rained for about an hour. I was already soaking wet from the earlier rainfall when we first arrived at Pyongtaek.

Nothing happened that night except that it rained all night. My steel helmet kept my head dry—the only part of my body that wasn’t wet. Within a couple of hours there was more than a foot of water in our foxhole. My feet were sloshing in my oversize boots. In July the weather was very, very warm and, despite being soaking wet, I wasn’t cold. I got out of the foxhole and sat on the edge of the foxhole. My buddy was asleep, curled up in over a foot of water. When I gazed north into the darkness I asked myself, What am I doing here? How can events turn so drastically in such a short time from one of ease and comfort to this miserable situation that I am now in?

Sometime after midnight I was startled by several explosions coming from the north. I didn’t know what caused them but later someone explained that a patrol from one of the other companies had gone to destroy the small bridge just north of our positions.

Just before daylight, a light morning fog settled on the hill but did not affect our visibility. Then I heard a loud bang. I peered through the fog and saw three tanks making their way toward us on the road near the blown-up bridge. We knew that Task Force Smith, which was north of us, didn’t have tanks so we knew the tanks were North Korean. Then puffs of smoke appeared from the enemy tanks and a split second later we could hear the sharp blast of their guns.

To the back and left of the tanks I could see more tanks, followed by North Korean infantry. Then another line of tanks and more infantry came into view on the right side of the road. Our mortars located in the rear started firing and I could see the rounds exploding among the North Korean tanks and infantry. Our mortars had no effect on the tanks. When the line of tanks was about 300 yards away, a few of the men opened fire. I fired my M-1 rifle for the first time in more than a year. My right shoulder got sore after emptying a few clips at the North Koreans.

Then enemy tanks turned their big guns on our hill, the bursting shells showering the area with shrapnel, dirt, and rocks. The fog had now dissipated and I could clearly see the North Korean infantrymen as they ran past the blown-up bridge and fanned out on both flanks. We were in danger of being surrounded.

“Pull out! Pull out!” came frantic shouts from the top of the hill. I was only too damn happy to obey the order. I grabbed my gear and hauled ass with several other men to the top of the hill and down the reverse slope. We headed for the village behind the hill. There were no officers around to give us any instructions.

While we were retreating, several shots rang out. No one knew where the shots came from but this meant the North Koreans were probably very close. Before we got to the village, we were fired on by North Koreans who somehow got abreast of us on our left about 200 yards away. Not only were they behind us, but they were in a position to surround us. We dove to the ground and fired back. I emptied a clip, firing blindly, when my rifle jammed. I tried kicking the bolt free but it wouldn’t budge. The North Koreans stopped firing, so we decided to move again.

We came to a granary that was just outside the village and stopped to rest. While we were deciding what to do, a Korean civilian ran toward us and told us the North Korean soldiers were coming. We hurried inside the granary and hid behind some bundled rice straws.

The North Koreans knew where we were and threw hand grenades into the granary. They also just shot it full of holes with their burp guns. Wood splinters and rice straws filled the air above us. My rifle was still jammed so I couldn’t return fire. All of a sudden, I felt my right arm being thrown back. I tried to move it but could not feel a thing. I thought, Good God, my right arm is blown off! I turned my head and reached out with my left arm to find out what was wrong and saw my right arm bent back in an awkward position. Instinctively, I pulled my right arm back in place. Through all of this I don’t remember feeling any pain. I was relieved to know that I had not lost my arm and stuck it in my shirt like a sling. We didn’t have a chance to fire back. Someone yelled, “We may as well surrender or we’ll all be killed. Okay?”

For a brief moment no one said anything. Finally, during a lull in the firing, one of the guys yelled, “We surrender! We surrender!” The firing from the outside stopped, and he got up and walked to the door. We all followed him out of the granary.

For the first time I came face to face with North Korean soldiers. Man, they looked mean. One had a uniform different from the others and I guessed he must have been an officer because he had red epaulets on his uniform. Gesturing with their weapons and blabbering in Korean, which none of us understood, they herded us in a single file on the road and pointed north.

I really felt terrible having to surrender and I thought this day would be the last day of my life.

As we were walking out, I realized that I was also shot in the thigh just above the right knee. It was a clean wound where the bullet passed through and I felt little pain. With wounds on my right arm and right leg, I wondered what was going to happen to me. But both wounds bled very little so I was lucky in a way. While our captors were deciding what to do with us, one of our guys opened up my first aid kit and helped me apply sulfur and bandages to my wounds. For the next five or six days, that was all the treatment I had.

We were taken to a village, where we joined about a dozen captured Americans, including a couple of ROK soldiers and a lieutenant from our company. There were now a couple dozen of us and about a dozen North Korean soldiers.

They questioned us and wanted to know why we had come to Korea and all that bull. After they were done, we were marched to the rail line, where we thought we were going to be shot. At this point I really didn’t care much and accepted whatever they were going to do with us. No one cried or complained. I guess we were too numb to realize the seriousness of the situation. Instead, they lined us up by the color of our hair. Those with red, blond, and brown hair were put in one column and those with black hair in another column. “You are all Japanese,” a North Korean said, pointing to us with black hair, “and you are all Americans,” he said, pointing to the light-color-haired men. No one tried to explain we were all Americans. It wasn’t funny then, but recalling that incident later in the prison camps made me laugh.

Except for me, because of my injured right arm, all the prisoners’ hands were tied behind their backs with commo wire. I was allowed to keep my hands under my shirt to support my injured arm. We were then marched north along the rail line. It was dark when we arrived at a small village after about four hours of walking. We were all crowded into a jail house that had wooden bars, just like the ones I saw in Japanese movies back home. My arm and leg didn’t hurt too much that night and I was grateful for that.

SOURCE: A Foxhole View: Personal Accounts of Hawai‘i’s Korean War Veterans, edited by Louis Baldovi (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2002).

Leave a comment

Filed under Hawai'i

by Joel | 4 July 2004 · 11:34 am

Sumo Onomastics

Among other things, July Fourth this year marks the beginning of sumo’s Nagoya Basho. Former #1 maegashira (“leading” rank, the lowest ranking in the highest division) Hokutoriki, who forced the sole yokozuna (grand champion) Asashoryu into a playoff on the final day of the Natsu Basho in May, has been promoted two ranks, to sekiwake (junior champion), right below ozeki (champion, formerly the top rank). The Georgian Kokkai, who made his “big league” (makuuchi) debut in January, is now ranked a #2 maegashira.

As a backgrounder, I’ll offer a glimpse into the onomastics of sumo, focusing mostly on the foreign rikishi. Corrections from experts in either the language or the sport would be most welcome.

The Mongolians Asashoryu (‘Morning Green Dragon’) and Asasekiryu (‘Morning Red Dragon’) belong to the illustrious Takasago-beya (‘stable‘), whose current master’s ring name was Asashio (‘Morning Tide’), a name that dates back beyond the 46th yokozuna (1959) Asashio, whom I used to watch as a kid, as he fought the 45th yokozuna (1958) Wakanohana and the later 48th yokozuna (1961) Taiho.

The Mongolians Kyokutenho (‘RisingSun Heaven Roc/Phoenix’) and Kyokushuzan (‘RisingSun Eagle Mountain’) belong to the smaller Oshima-beya, whose master fought under the name Asahikuni (‘Morning Sun Land’).

The Mongolian Tokitenku (‘Time Heaven Sky’) and his Japanese stablemate Tokitsuumi (‘Time Harbor Sea’) belong to the Tokitsukaze-beya (probably ‘Time Harbor Wind’), which is reputed to be foreign visitor-friendly. The gloss ‘harbor’ doesn’t really do justice to tsu, which is the first character of tsunami, literally ‘harbor wave’, which would sound no more fearsome than “tidal wave” would in English if we didn’t know better.

The Georgian Kokkai (‘Black Sea’ in its “Chinese” pronunciation) and his Japanese stablemate Hayateumi (‘Tailwind/Gale Sea’ in its tricky native Japanese reading) belong to the fairly new Oitekaze-beya (probably ‘Chasing Wind = Tailwind’).

The Korean Kasugao (‘Spring Sun King’) belongs to the small Kasugayama-beya (‘Spring Sun Mountain’), whose master fought as Kasugafuji (probably ‘Spring Sun Wisteria’).

Although they belong to different stables (Miyagino and Otake, respectively), makuuchi-division Mongolian rikishi Hakuho (‘White Roc’) and juryo-division Russian rikishi Roho (‘Dew Roc’) share the character ho ‘large mythical bird’ (hence ‘roc, phoenix’).

Leave a comment

Filed under sumo

by Joel | 3 July 2004 · 10:31 am

Naipaul on Punishing the Bourgeoisie

Ali was arrested by the revolutionary court in Kerman. A number of charges were made against him: strengthening the royal régime, grabbing millions of square meters of people’s land, exporting billions of U.S. dollars, directing a failed coup d’état against the government, directing an antirevolutionary organization. The accusations were not specific; they were formal, standard accusations, and they were made against many people.

Ali said, “In the Kerman area, if you are a little active everybody knows you. I was very active before the revolution. I was known. I was a little Shah, the symbol of power there. When they set up a branch of the revolutionary court in that city they came after people like me. The Guards were all from rural backgrounds. They have their own special accent. They were very young, and happy with their trigger. Many of them later died in the war. I would say that there was a mixture of forty percent mujahidin, and sixty percent Muslim groups. The mujahidin, Marxists, had infiltrated the revolutionary courts from the very beginning. They didn’t identify themselves; they pretended to be Muslim.”

Ali could identify the mujahidin and the Muslims, because he, too, was pretending: he was pretending to be a Muslim revolutionary. “My life was in danger, and I had to make friendship with them regardless.” Very soon Ali discovered a third group who had infiltrated both the mujahidin and the Muslims. “They were people who simply wanted to grab some money for themselves. But they acted Islamic.” And they in their turn soon understood that Ali was also acting, and he was not a Muslim revolutionary. “These people became friends of mine because they knew I had money, and they told me gradually what is going on in the court, and who is who.”

Ali was arrested many times and held for four or five days. Once he was held for six months. The revolutionary prison was an old factory shed that had been divided up. There were a few cells for people being kept in solitary confinement; two big compounds for social prisoners, people like opium smugglers and thieves; and a big cell for political prisoners. Ali was put at first in a solitary cell, one yard wide by two and a half yards long, with only half an hour a day outside to go to the toilet and wash. The first day he read a sentence on the wall written by somebody before him: The prisoner will eventually be released, but the prison-keeper will be forever in the prison.

“And that was an encouraging sentence because it told me that the man before me had been released. Even now, after fifteen years, though I have been released for so many years, and have been so free to go on so many journeys anywhere in the world, and I have gone and enjoyed myself, even now, when I have certain things to do, and I go to the prison in that area, although the place has changed, and the prison is not the factory shed, I still see some of the prison-keepers there. So they are the prisoners. Not us. They were the prisoners.”

Some of the Revolutionary Guards in the factory-shed prison introduced themselves to Ali. He found out that they were the sons of laborers who had worked for him in his building projects.

They said to him, “In the past you wouldn’t look at us. You were so proud. Now you are behind bars here and we have to feed you. Allah ho akbar! God is so great!”

They went and told their fathers about Ali, and to their surprise their fathers said that they should do everything in their power to help Ali, because in the past Ali had helped them by giving them jobs.

“And those boys helped me a lot. They didn’t have a lot of power, but they could tell me things. They could post letters and bring letters from my wife. They would give me the best quarters in the prison and give me the best food.”

SOURCE: Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage, 1998), pp. 175-176

Leave a comment

Filed under Iran, Islam

by Joel | 3 July 2004 · 10:22 am

Kurdish Rights Improve in Erdogan’s Turkey

Stephen Kinzer reports in the New York Review of Books on developments in Turkey since the electoral triumph of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party last March.

In little more than a year as prime minister, Erdogan has proven himself more committed to democracy than any of the self-proclaimed “secular” leaders who misruled Turkey during the 1990s. He has secured passage of laws and constitutional amendments abolishing the death penalty and army-dominated security courts; he repealed curbs on free speech, and brought the military budget under civilian control for the first time in Turkish history. He authorized Kurdish-language broadcasting, swept aside thirty years of Turkish intransigence on the Cyprus issue, and eased Greek–Turkish tension so effectively that when he visited Athens in May, Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis proclaimed that the two countries now enjoyed “a relation of cooperation based on mutual trust.” …

No longer is it considered a crime to assert one’s Kurdish identity. Kurdish language courses have begun in three cities, and more are to open soon. On June 9 a court ordered the release of Leyla Zana, a fiery advocate of Kurdish rights, and three other former members of Parliament who had been imprisoned since 1994 on charges of supporting Kurdish terror. “I believe that a new period has started in this country,” Zana said as she emerged from prison in Ankara, “and a new page is opened.” On June 9, too, apparently by coincidence, the state-owned TRT television network broadcast its first Kurdish-language program, a thirty-minute mix of news and features called “Our Cultural Riches.” After watching it, Mayor Osman Baydemir of Diyarbakir, the main Kurdish city, said it was “very important that an eighty-year taboo, a phobia, has been overcome.” Like most Turkish Kurds, Mr. Baydemir strongly favors his government’s campaign to join the EU, and he is planning to tour European capitals later this year to lobby for it. He will argue that by admitting Turkey, the EU would be bringing Kurds into Europe, a step that would secure their rights in Turkey and help stabilize volatile Kurdish politics throughout the Middle East.

However, Kinzer does note a few warning signs on the horizon.

What struck me most about Erdogan during our forty-minute conversation was his burning sense of his own authority. He sees himself personally, not his party or his government, as the force driving Turkey today. When we talked about what has happened in the city of Bingol since it was shaken by an earthquake last year, for example, he told me, “I built a new town for four thousand people who lost their homes,” and “I built new schools right away, much better than the old ones.” Regarding conditions in the former Kurdish war zone, he said, “I am cleaning up all the mines that were planted along the Syrian border.” This is not a self-effacing man, not one who is unsure of his mission.

via Gary Farber of Amygdala on Winds of Change

Leave a comment

Filed under Turkey

by Joel | 2 July 2004 · 9:22 pm

Naipaul on Revolutionary Disillusionment

PAYDAR, GROWING UP in poverty in the poor northwest, was possessed by the idea of revolution From an early age, he was tormented by what he saw every day and every night of the suffering of his widowed mother. She stitched clothes and made socks and stockings for a living. and often sat at her machine until two in the morning.

In time Paydar joined the Tudeh communist party. The Tudeh hoped to ride to power on the back of the religious movement, and in the early days of the revolution it was the policy of the party to adopt an Islamic camouflage. That was easy enough: the themes of justice and punishment and the wickedness of rulers were common to both ideologies. But the Tudeh party destroyed itself. It gave a Soviet-style apparatus to the Islamic revolution. and then it was destroyed by that apparatus.

Ali, in his provincial factory-shed jail in 1980 and 1981, had seen the beginning of the roundup of the left. Though the enraged communists in the political section of Ali’s jail were still threatening to hang Ali outside his house when they came to power, their day in Iran was really over. Two years later, in 1983, the Tudeh party was formally outlawed by the government. And two years after that. Paydar, who was in hiding, like the surviving members of the party, was hunted down and taken away to a jail outside Tehran.

Paydar didn’t know then in what part of the country the jail was; he didn’t know now. For two months, as he calculated, he was kept in something like a hole, without a window, “without a speck of light,” and questioned. And it was in that darkness and intense solitude, that disconnectedness from things–at first in the hole, and then in a cell with fourteen others, where he spent a further year–that he began to think dispassionately about the idea of revolution that had driven him for so much of his adult life. And he arrived at an understanding–especially painful in the circumstances–of why he had been wrong, and “why revolutions are doomed to fail.”

“I thought that people are much too complicated in their nature to be led in a simple fashion, with a few slogans. Inside ourselves we are full of greed, love, fear, hatred. We all carry our own history and past. So when we come to make a revolution we bring with ourselves all these factors in different proportions. Revolutions have always disregarded all these individual differences.”

So, in the jail, he had rejected the idea of revolution. It had been his great support, the equivalent of religion; and no other idea quite so vital had come to him afterwards. He was like a man in whom something had been extinguished. He was a big man from the northwest. It was possible to imagine him full of fire. Now he was strangely pacific; his suffering, old and new, was always there to make him watch his moods, consider his words, and make him take the edge off passion or complaint. He was trying now–exposed as he was, and liable to be picked up again at any time–to make a cause out of his privacy, his family life; though day-to-day life was hard, and in the economic mess of revolutionary Iran, and with the decline of the currency, the value of his earnings as a teacher went down and down.

SOURCE: Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage, 1998), pp. 179-180

Leave a comment

Filed under Iran

by Joel | 2 July 2004 · 7:36 pm

Stormy Seas in Mongolia

James Brooke reports on Landlocked Mongolia’s Seafaring Tradition

Mongolia, the world’s largest landlocked country, with its capital almost 1,000 miles from an ocean beach, is the latest entry in the business of flags of convenience. With Mongolia’s red, yellow and blue colors now flying on 260 ships at sea, this unlikely venture is part business, part comedy and part international intrigue.

“We earned the treasury about $200,000 last year,” Bazarragchaa Altan-Od, head of the Maritime Administration, said, slightly tense for his first interview with the world press. “We have 20 to 30 new registrations every month. The number is increasing.” …

Mongolia’s maritime niche may be North Korea, which has revived relations in recent months with the ruling Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party, the former Communist party here. (On June 27, after a parliamentary election campaign that included corruption accusations against the government, the opposition Motherland Democratic Coalition unexpectedly won 36 of 76 seats. A final outcome is not expected until early July.)

North Korea flag vessels increasingly are watched around the world. Under the Proliferation Security Initiative, the United States and a dozen nations started to monitor North Korean vessels in 2003 for illicit cargos, like drugs, missiles or nuclear weapon fuel.

via The Argus

Let’s hope the Mongolia-flagged merchant fleet fares better than Kublai Khan’s invasion fleet in 13th-century Japan, which fell victim to the kamikaze. (The ships and sailors were mostly Koreans.)

Although noted for his administrative skill and policy of religious tolerance, Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan continued the trend of Mongol territorial expansion. Though he met with success in southern China, the conquest of Japan proved to be a difficult, and ultimately disastrous, endeavour. In 1274 the Mongols landed a large expeditionary force on the Japanese island of Kyushu, but this force was eventually driven off by skilled Japanese warriors. In 1281, the Mongols made another attempt, this time with an even larger force. Approximately 40,000 troops from North China and 100,000 troops from South China were transported in two huge invasion fleets that met and converged off Kyushu. But, unfortunately for the invaders and most fortunately for the Japanese, a colossal typhoon hit the coast, sinking many of the Mongol vessels. About one half of the troops perished or were captured, while those who managed to survive fled back to the Chinese mainland. It was as if the typhoon had appeared at the behest of Japan’s religious leaders, who had been fervently praying for deliverance as the invasion fleet approached. It is little wonder that the grateful Japanese termed this particular tempest Kamikaze or “divine wind.”

The Marmot’s (Final) Hole has more on Mongolia’s recent elections, in which the governing “Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party — the former Communist Party” lost its majority, thanks to a surprisingly strong showing by the Motherland Democratic Coalition.

Leave a comment

Filed under China, Mongolia

by Joel | 1 July 2004 · 8:08 pm

Naipaul on the Hanging Judge of the Revolution

WHEN I WENT TO TEHRAN in August 1979, Ayatollah Khalkhalli, the hanging judge of the revolution, was a star. The Islamic Revolutionary Court in Shariati Street was sitting almost round the clock, as Ali had said. People were being killed all the time in Evin Prison and trucks were taking away the bodies through the blue gates at night.

There was nothing secretive or abashed about this killing. Some revolutionary official was keeping count, and regularly in the Tehran Times there was an update. In the beginning the counting was to show how clement the revolution was; later, when the killing became too much, the counting stopped. In those early days official photographs were taken of people before they were killed and after they were killed–killed and, as it were, filed away, naked on the sliding mortuary slab, in the giant filing cabinet of the morgue. These pictures were on sale in the streets.

Ayatollah Khalkhalli, the ruler of the Islamic Revolutionary Court, was open to the press. He was giving many boastful interviews. I went with an interpreter to see him in Qom. It was Ramadan, the fasting month; and Qom was where the ayatollah had temporarily retired to fast and pray. It was August and very hot in the desert. When we got to Qom we had to wait for more than five hours until the ayatollah had finished his prayers and broken his fast. This was at nine in the evening. We found him then sitting on the floor of the verandah of his modest house, at the center of a little court also sitting on the floor: his guards, some Iranian admirers, and a respectful, formally dressed African couple (the man in a light gray suit, the woman in a chiffon-like, sari-like garment) who were visiting.

The ayatollah was white and bald and very short, a clerical gnome, messily attired. He liked, perhaps because of his small size, to clown. His jokes were about executions, and then his court threw themselves about with laughter. He also liked–and this mannerism might have come with his hanging duties–abruptly to stop clowning and for no reason to frown and grow severe.

He was from Azerbaijan in the northwest. He said he was the son of a farmer and as a boy he had been a shepherd. So, going by what Ali had said, Khalkhalli would have been just the kind of village boy for whom, fifty years or so before, the theological schools had offered the only way out: a room, food, and a little money. But Khalkhalli had almost nothing to say about his early life. All he said, with a choking, wide-throated laugh, was that he knew how to cut off a sheep’s head; and this was like another joke about executions, something for his little court. Perhaps, because he had never learned how to process or meditate on his experience, never having read widely enough or thought hard enough, his experience had simply gone by, and much of it had even been lost to him. Perhaps the thirty-five years (as he said) of theological studies in Qom had rotted his mind, pushed reality far away, given him only rules, and now with the revolution sunk him in righteousness and vanity. He was interested only in the present, his authority and reputation, and in his executioner’s work.

He said, “The mullahs are going to rule now. We are going to have ten thousand years of the Islamic Republic. The Marxists are going to go on with their Lenin. We are going to go on in the way of Khomeini.”

Revolution as blood and punishment, religion as blood and punishment: in Khalkhalli’s mind the two ideas seemed to have become one.

And, in fact, that double idea, of blood, fitted revolutionary Iran. Behzad, my interpreter, was a communist, and the son of a communist father. Behzad was twenty-four; with all his Iranian graces, his scientific education, and his social ambitions, he had his own dream of blood. His hero was Stalin. Behzad said, “What he did in Russia we have to do in Iran. We too have to do a lot of killing. A lot.”

SOURCE: Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage, 1998), pp. 200-201

Leave a comment

Filed under Iran

by Joel | 30 June 2004 · 5:13 pm

Greater Armenia Impearled

To add depth to the brief mentions of Armenia on this blog and elsewhere, the wonderfully informative Impearls “proceeds to reveal its own look at medieval Armenian history, drawing from a now public-domain chapter in the first edition of the renowned Cambridge Medieval History, by early twentieth century French scholar of Armenia Frédéric Macler (1869-1938), Professor of Armenian for many years at the École nationale des Langues orientales vivantes, Paris.” I’ll post just a few paragraphs from each part. Visit Impearls for the rest, plus illustrations, maps, notes, and acknowledgments.

Introduction

Lying across the chief meeting-place of Europe and Asia, Armenia suffered immeasurably more from the conflict of two civilisations than it profited by their exchange of goods and ideas. If the West penetrated the East under pressure from Rome, Byzantium, or crusading Eruope, if the East moved westwards, under Persian, Arab, Mongol, or Turk, the roads used were too often the roads of Armenia.

This was not all. East and West claimed and fought for control or possession of the country. Divided bodily between Rome and Persia in pre-Christian times, an apple of discord between Persia and the Byzantine Empire during the early part of the Middle Ages, Armenia for the rest of its national history was alternately the prey of Eastern and Western peoples. When the Armenian kingdom was strong enough to choose its own friends, it turned sometimes to the East, sometimes to the West. It drew its culture from both. But, belonging wholly neither to West nor to East, it suffered consistently at the hands of each in turn and of both together….

The Arab Conquest

… In this long period of foreign rule, the Armenians invariably found a change of masters a change for the worse. The Persians ruled the country th{r}ough a succession of Marzpans, or military commanders of the frontiers, who also had to keep order and to collect revenue. With a strong guard under their own command, they did not destroy the old national militia nor take away the privileges of the nobility, and at first they allowed full liberty to the Katholikos and his bishops. As long as the Persians governed with such tolerance, they might fairly hope to fuse the Armenian nation with their own. But a change of religious policy under Yezdegerd II and Piroz roused the Armenians to defend their faith in a serious of religious wars lasting until the end of the sixth century, during which Vardan with his 1036 companions perished for the Christian faith in the terrible battle of Avaraïr (454). But, whether defeated or victorious, the Armenians never exchanged their Christianity for Zoroastrianism….

Shortly after the Arab conquest, the Armenians turned once more to their old masters, the Greeks. With the help of Leo the Isaurian, Smbat (Sempad) Bagratuni defeated the Arabs, and was commissioned to rule Armenia by the Emperor. But after a severe struggle the Muslims regained their dominion, and sent the Arab commander Qâsim to punish the Armenians (704). He carried out his task with oriental ferocity. He set fire to the church of Nakhijevan, into which he had driven the princes and nobles, and then pillaged the country and sent many of the people into captivity….

Recovery and Independence

As the long period of gloom, faintly starred by calamitous victories, passed into the ninth century, the Arab oppression slowly lightened. The Abbasid Empire was drawing to its fall. While the Arabs were facing their own troubles, the Armenian nobility were founding principalities. The Mamikonian family, it is true, died out in the middle of the ninth century without founding a kingdom. Yet, because they had no wide territories, they served Armenia disinterestedly, and though of foreign origin could claim many of the national heroes of their adopted country: Vasak, Mushegh, and Manuel, three generals of the Christian Arsacidae; Vardan, who died for the faith in the religious wars; Vahan the Wolf and Vahan Kamsarakan, who fought the Persians; David, Grigor, and Mushegh, rebels against Arab misrule…. Many other principalities were also formed, each claiming independence, the largest and most important of them all being the kingdom of the Bagratuni.

Like the Mamikonians, the Bagratuni seem to have come from abroad…. The Bagratuni were also wealthy. Unlike the Mamikonians, they owned vast territories, and founded a strong principality in the country of Ararat. Their wealth, their lands, and their history made them the most powerful of Armenian families and pointed out to them a future more memorable than their past. Midway in the ninth century, the power of the Bagratuni was inherited by Prince Ashot. The son of Smbat the Confessor, he refounded the ancient kingdom of Armenia and gave it a dynasty of two centuries’ duration. Under the rule of the Bagratuni kings Armenia passed through the most national phase of its history. It was a conquered province before they rose to power, it became more European and less Armenian after their line was extinct. Like Ashot himself, his descendants tried at first to control the whole of Armenia, but from 928 onwards they were obliged to content themselves with real dominion in their hereditary lands and moral supremacy over the other princes. This second and more peaceful period of their rule was the very summer of Armenian civilisation. [See Map of Bagratid Kingdoms in Armenia (964-1064).] …

The Arabs return, but are driven out

Under Smbat I (892-914) the lesser princes did more mischief than under his father Ashot because they made common cause with the Arabs of Azerbâ’îjân, who hated Armenia. For more than twenty years Smbat held his kingdom against the persistent attacks, now separate, now connected, of the Ostikans of Azerbâ’îjân and of the Armenian princes, and for more than a generation he and his son looked perforce to the Greeks as their only source of external help….

To thwart the new-born power of Armenia, Yûsuf [Ostikan of Azerbâ’îjân,] crowned a rival king and provoked a fierce civil war, which was finally ended through the mediation of John, the Katholikos. Many other internal revolts followed, but Ashot suppressed them all, and Yûsuf turned aside to attack the peaceful kingdom of Van. Here, too, he was unsuccessful, but he appointed a new Ostikan of Armenia. The purpose of this new Ostikan and of his successor Bêshir was to capture the Armenian king and the Katholikos. But Ashot retired to the island of Sevan, and built ten large boats. When Bêshir marched against him with a strong army, he manned each boat with seven skilled archers and sent them against the enemy. Every Armenian arrow found its mark, the Arabs took to flight, and were pursued with slaughter as far as Dwin by Prince Gêorg Marzpetuni, Ashot’s faithful supporter. After this epic resistance, Ashot left Sevan in triumph, and took the title “King of Kings of Armenia” in token of his superiority to the other Armenian princes. He died in 928.

(Mostly) Peace and prosperity

Two reigns of perpetual warfare were followed by nearly a century of comparative peace (928-1020). Ashot’s successors were content with more modest aims. At home they confined their real rule to their own patrimony and exercised only a moral sway over the other Armenian States. Abroad they sought the favour of the Arabs, rather than that of the Greeks. In this way alone was it possible to secure a measure of peace….

Armenian culture was pre-eminently ecclesiastical. Its literature did include chronicles and secular poems, but was overwhelmingly religious as a whole. Armenian manuscripts, famous alike for their antiquity, their beauty, and their importance in the history of writing, are nearly all ecclesiastical. Most interesting of all in many ways (especially for the comparison of text and variant readings) are the numerous copies of the Gospels. The Moscow manuscript (887) is the earliest Armenian manuscript actually dated, and two very beautiful Gospels of a later date are those of Queen Melkê and of Trebizond. A collection of theological and other texts executed between 971 and 981 is their earliest manuscript written on paper. Other important writings were dogmatic works, commentaries, and sharakans or sacred songs composed in honour of church festivals. Armenian art, again, was mainly ecclesiastical, and survives, on the one hand in the illuminations and miniatures which adorn the sacred texts, and, on the other, in the ruined churches and convents which still cover the face of the country. Architecture was military as well as ecclesiastical, but it is hard not to believe that the people of Ani were prouder of their galaxy of churches than they were of their fortress, their walls, and their towers….

Greeks and Turks

Two generations of misfortune (1020-1079) opened with civil war. Gagik had left two sons. His successor John-Smbat (1020-1040), timid and effeminate, was attacked and defeated by his younger and more militant brother Ashot, who was helped by Senekherim Arcruni, King of Vaspurakan (Van). Peace was concluded through the mediation of the Katholikos Petros Getadartz and Giorgi, King of the Georgians, but only by a division of territory. John-Smbat kept Ani and its dependencies, while Ashot took the part of the kingdom next to Persia and Georgia (Iberia). On the death of either brother the country was to be re-united under the survivor….

By the end of the eleventh century not a vestige remained of Byzantine dominion over Armenia. The Greeks saw too late the fatal consequences of their selfish hostility towards a country which on south and east might have served them as a rampart against their most dangerous foe.

Little Armenia and Aftermath

The national history of Greater Armenia ended with the Turkish conquest and with the extinction of the Bagratuni line. Little by little, numbers of Armenians withdrew into the Taurus mountains and the plateau below, but though their country rose again from ruin, it was only as a small principality in Cilicia. The fruits of Armenian civilisation — the architectural splendour of Ani, the military strength of Van, the intellectual life of Kars, the commercial pride of Bitlis and Ardzen — were no more….

After the Turkish victory of 1453, Mahomet II founded an Armenian colony in Constantinople and placed it under the supervision of Joakim, the Armenian Bishop of Brûsa, to whom he afterwards gave the title of “Patriarch” with jurisdiction over all the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. From that time to this, the Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople has carrried on the work of the Katholikos and has been the national representative of the Armenian people.

Leave a comment

Filed under Central Asia, Middle East

by Joel | 29 June 2004 · 10:54 am

The Ngatik Massacre, July 1837

In July 1837, a ship sailed into Ngatik atoll near Pohnpei on a nefarious mission.

The ship was the trading cutter Lambton, out of Sydney, Australia, manned by the classic motley crew of runaways, villains, adventurers, and entrepreneurs–the sort who abounded in the European population of the Pacific in the early nineteenth century. Any of those words could describe the Lambton’s master, C. H. Hart. Hart had roamed the Western Pacific for years, making his way by a mix of fair trade and sly schemes. Hart traded Islanders beads and knives, guns and ammunition, tobacco, cloth, and rum, driving a hard bargain for the bêche-de-mer, pearl shell, and tortoiseshell that he loaded aboard the Lambton. Bêche-de-mer, sea cucumber, went to China for soup. The Chinese paid well for it, but it had to be boiled and cured in a foul, messy job. Collecting pearl shell, like processing bêche-de-mer, was labor intensive…. Tortoiseshell, from hawksbill turtles–that was the stuff. It was made into ladies’ combs and mirrors, decorated boxes, and knickknacks. The Victorian world, Far East and West, was wild for it, and hawksbill turtles were being decimated to fill the demand.

It took time and hard work to find the turtles, though they were easy enough to kill once you located them. But what Hart had, or thought he had, on the atoll called by its inhabitants Sapwuahfik (but by Hart “Ngatik,” and on navigational charts by a dozen other names) was a hoard of tortoiseshell without the trouble of work–except the work of taking it from the island’s people, who would, no doubt, object. They had objected when Hart’s crew first found the treasure trove of shell, more than a year earlier. Two of the Lambton’s men had gone inland and discovered a cache of turtle shell, but the Islanders would not sell and resisted theft. In fact, a group of men chased the sailors down to the beach, and the crew escaped by quick oar strokes. The Lambton returned to island trading and a trip to New South Wales, but Hart did not forget the shell, nor the close call he and his crew had experienced. Greed and revenge took root, and in Hart’s mind he marked Sapwuahfik for a return trip.

The Lambton sailed to the region again in mid-1836, arriving at Pohnpei Island in August, just after a group of whalers from the ship Falcon had been killed following an altercation with Pohnpei men. The Europeans in the area, Hart among the leaders, joined forces to take revenge, culminating in the murder of a Pohnpei nobleman. (By involving himself with these events, Hart made sure that his name went down on the list of persons to be investigated two years later by a British warship, HMS Larne, under Commander P. L. Blake. Blake was a thorough and principled investigator, cautious but relentless in his pursuit of evidence of criminal activity. Because of Blake we have a historical record of Hart’s crimes.)

After the Falcon incident, Hart went back to business, sailing between Guam, Manila, and Pohnpei. Then, on the last days of June or the first days of July 1837, he made ready for his return to Sapwuahfik–where, he said, he wished to “trade quietly” with the natives–by making cartridges and taking on extra hands from Pohnpei.

When he arrived at the atoll, Hart tried to land where he had landed before, but this time he was met with hostility. Sapwuahfik men beckoned them ashore, indicating their intentions with a display of their own weapons. The people of Sapwuahfik had known from divination when the ship would return; they had been watching, and when they saw it appear on the horizon, they prepared for war, readying clubs and slings.

Hart thought better of an immediate landing, taking the crew to spend the night on another islet of the atoll. The next day he loaded them into the ship’s boats for a straightforward assault. Despite the defenders’ preparations, the battle turned against them. In two days of fighting, every Sapwuahfik man but one was killed or fled by canoe. Though one woman was accidentally wounded, the invaders did not make targets of women and children.

Soon after the Lambton sailed from the atoll–which, now that the native voices were stilled, would be called Ngatik for more than a century–it returned to leave a group of Pohnpeians and a European in charge of what Hart saw as his conquered domain. The plan was to operate Ngatik as a business, producing tortoiseshell. They would bring in more settlers, marry the widows and girls of old Sapwuahfik, and see how much money they could make in this pretty place. So survivors and murderers began a curious interaction that would eventually produce a new population and a unique culture [and language]. Sapwuahfik’s history had come to an end. The story of Ngatik had just begun.