An op-ed by the Norwegian novelist Torgrim Eggen, readworthy especially for its historical point of view.

Now they are bombing Beirut again. That’s what it’s like to have the world’s worst neighbor.

THE INTERNET is quite a tool. I am sitting here with Google Earth looking at satellite images of Beirut. I think I have found Khraibeh Street, where I lived in the fall of 1993.
     Khraibeh Street is situated in the hillside in Hadeth east of the airport, and from my roof terrace adorned with pictoresque bullet holes I enjoyed a panorama view of western Beirut. Nearest was the ghetto Hay al-Sellum, which US Marines called “Hooterville” when they served as a peacekeeping force in Beirut from 1982 to 1984. Hay al-Sellum is Hizbollahstan. The area was dangerous, claimed my Christian hosts, so when we ventured there it was on the condition that I was “Swiss.” This, of course, was thanks to the Oslo Accords.

NORTH OF “Hooterville,” in good view of my terrace, was the Palestinian refugee camp of Bourj al-Barajneh. Or rather, what was left of it. North-west of this, in turn, are Sabra and Shatila, the scene of perhaps the blackest chapter of Israeli and Lebanese history.
     I recall people asking: — What are you doing in Beirut day after day? Why don’t you head up to see the Roman ruins at Baalbek, or the ruins of Byblos? My reply: — Don’t you think I see enough ruins from the terrace? There was, as it were, nothing else.

AND NOW THEY are at it bombing Beirut again. What wrong have these people done?
     It would be unfair to blame all of Lebanon’s misery on its southern neighbor. Let us say Israel is merely responsible for ninety percent. It is shocking what brutality the Israelis display when Lebanon is the target. The current Chief of Staff is Dan Halutz, and the acts of war had barely begun when he declared that they would “bomb Lebanon 20 years back in time.” This week he reportedly said that Israel “will bomb ten housing blocks in Beirut for every missile hitting Haifa.” To avoid the commonplace accusations of “anti-Semitism” I shall not mention what this is reminiscent of. According to the Jerusalem Post, Halutz was misquoted. In any case, this is a man who is staying the course toward the Hague. His former boss Ariel Sharon, now in coma, should have been charged there as well.

IN THE WAR OF 1982, Israel managed to commit just about every war crime in the book. Bombing of hospitals. Terror bombing of residential quarters. Use of phosphorous and cluster bombs against civilians. Summary executions of prisoners. You name it. Israel was even able to bomb Beirut’s sole remaining synagogue. All this and more can be read in Pity the Nation: Lebanon and War by Robert Fisk, hereby recommended. This is the book that will make you laugh out loud the next time you hear the term ’surgical strikes’.

SO WHY dwell at length on a war 24 years past? Because that was when Israel invented Hizbollah. It was an accomplishment making the expression ‘to shoot oneself in the leg’ sound tame.
     When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978 and 1982 to weed out the PLO, the poor Shia minority in southern Lebanon were relatively impartial. The conflict lacked the religous resonances it has today, and besides, the majority of the PLO, Fatah, et cetera were Sunnis. The problem was that the Shias were in the way. The savagery and brutality with which Israel proceeded, first against southern villages and then against the quarters of Beirut to which the villagers fled (those who weren’t mowed down by Israeli aircraft underway), led to radicalization. The Shias became militant, and there was inspiration (as well as finances) on offer in Iran.
     On November 11 1982 it said boom. Israel’s military headquarters in Tyre went up in smoke; 75 Israelis died. A previously unknown group that called itself Islamic Jihad took responsibility for what was in fact the first suicide operation in the Middle East. Islamic Jihad is believed to have been a branch of “the Party of God.”

CAN I TEMPT with an interesting moral dilemma? A “terrorist organization” stations a SAM site on a hospital roof in violation of the Geneva Conventions. A martial power bombs the hospital and kills everyone inside — doctors, nurses, and civilian patients. Is it possible to talk about ‘degrees’ of responsibility here? I think it is. The “terrorists” put civilian lives in danger. The martial power executes them. Much of today’s Lebanon conflict is about such things, about “living shields” and “collateral damage.”
     The above example is once again from Israel’s invasion in 1982. To be fair, they also bombed hospitals on which the “terrorists” had stationed nothing whatsoever. At Bourj al-Barajneh it appeared that the Israeli pilot had used the Red Cross-symbol on the roof to aim. After all, there could be “terrorists” in the hospital beds. This year it seems that shooting at ambulances is the sport in vogue. Or was it UN observers?

ISRAEL’S FORMER Prime Minister Menachem Begin once declared that “if Adolf Hitler were hiding in a housing block full of civilians, we would bomb it.” Now, there wasn’t any Israel at the time when Hitler frequented housing blocks. That is at the core of the problem, so to speak. Back when PLO was the main enemy, it was passable in the Israeli public sphere to compare Yassir Arafat to Hitler. This year the Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has the honor of being “Hitler.”
     But in that case it would surely suffice to bomb one house? As opposed to reducing a city of millions to rubble?
     This is where the Israeli logic fails, and it does so because it is the logic of terrorism. The logic of terrorism dictates that a hospital is a legitimate target if it may contain combatants.
     The logic is so bizarre that it values the life of one terrorist higher than other lives — if one kills twenty innocents to eliminate one Hizbollah stalwart, the operation is a success.
     Yes, I think Israel must have the right to exist and defend itself. I even find the idea of a “security zone” a good one. But then, in the name of decency, it should surely be located in Israel and not in Lebanon. After all, you don’t empty your garbage bin over the fence to your neighbor, right?

By Torgrim Eggen 2006. Translation by Sirocco.

In a previous post I described Israel as a strange but impressive modern hybrid of Athens and Sparta. The latter side of the Janus face being currently on full display, we might as well familiarize ourselves with its features. Forgotten history is written in its wrinkles.

This recent Telegraph report is a good place to start (emphasis added):

Interesting. Besides terrorist bombing of hotels, what else was the Irgun gang (and its off-shoot the Stern gang) about? Let us dig a little deeper into the history, shall we?

Begin was a dedicated terrorist well into the 1950s. It has recently been revealed that he attempted to assassinate West Germany’s chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1952 over disagreement on how the German compensation for the Holocaust should be paid.

The proud tradition of terrorist PMs would continue. Yitzhak Shamir was also a member the Irgun, and after the split, of the Stern gang.

Let’s see if this history does not also involve some other individuals we know (emphasis added):

Such is the “freedom” now unleashed on Lebanon. It has a face of its own:

Crossposted from European Tribune.

Today is the 70 years anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), which claimed a million victims, many to aerial bombardment.

Pablo Picasso: Guernica (1937)

Crossposted from European Tribune.

Western advocates of Israel tend to see it as a reincarnation of ancient Athens of the 4th century B.C. Like that celebrated city-state, it is the only functioning democracy in its region; a flourishing center of science, scholarship, and the arts; a technological powerhouse; and a bustling, free-trading economy of innovation and export. To paraphrase Pericles, Israel is “an education to all Middle East.”

In contrast, Israel’s Western detractors tend to view it as a modern-day Sparta, Athen’s arch-rival and nemesis, which colonized and oppressed the neighboring Messenia. Upon the latter’s revolt in 630 B.C., Sparta transformed itself into a permanent military camp — austere, oligarchic, insular, and rigid — to keep its conquered serfs under boot. In the same way, allege its critics, Israel uses a formidable standing army, based upon long compulsory service, to subjugate another people and steal its land.

In fact, Israel combines key traits of both Athens and Sparta.* It is a democratic, open society, yet sufficiently militaristic to constitute the world’s fourth-ranking military power at some six million citizens, of whom only 80 percent belong to the ethnic majority and are thus accepted in the army. It is a world-class producer of electronics that occupies and colonizes other people’s land while invading or bombing neighboring countries at will.

In terms of worldly success, or power, this is an extremely potent combination. Rome, the only ancient city-state to embody something like it, won itself an empire of fifty million, including all of Greece. But it is also an unstable combination, especially under modern conditions.

Whenever Israel’s Spartan side predominates, the economy suffers. During the Oslo peace process from 1993 to 1999, growth was 74 percent, compared to 18 percent from 1999 to 2004. Particularly vulnerable is the high-tech export sector at the heart of Athenian Israel. Meanwhile, the imperatives of constant war and occupation are a strain on its democratic culture and civil society.

Paradoxically, those in the West who emphasize Israel’s Athenian nature are also the only ones outside Israel itself to applaud its Spartan excesses. If Israel truly does turn into a contemporary Sparta in the face of ever more hostile surroundings, then its Western enablers will have helped make their own opponents right.

*) Note, though, that the popular image of Athens versus Sparta is a bit inaccurate. Athens was hardly a democracy by modern standards, and for a long time it was more expansionist than Sparta, sometimes brutally so. For its part, Sparta, with its sophisticated pottery and poetry, was not quite the cultural wasteland as which it is often portrayed.

Crossposted from European Tribune.

It is always wise to start with the beginning:

A brief history of Kosovo. Part I: 1189-1989.

1989 On St. Vitus Day, June 28 1989 — the 600th anniversary of the mythologized battle — Slobodan Milošević returned to Kosovo Polje as president-elect of the Serbian Republic. Also back for the occasion was Prince Lazar, whose holy remains had toured the Orthodox monasteries of Yugoslavia for two years, rousing Serbian nationalism. As many as a million pilgrims convened at the plains, waving “Slobo’s” picture alongside that of his illustrious predecessor.

However, Milošević’s actual address on that day has been misrepresented on a scale almost comparable to the events which it commemorated. Though it did, ominously enough, suggest that armed struggle “should not be excluded yet,” it was hardly a “stirringly virulent nationalist speech” (The Economist, June 05, 1999, US edition) that “whipped a million Serbs into a nationalist frenzy” (Time International, July 9, 2001). On the contrary, it touted the peaceful coexistence of ethnic groups within common borders. Why the shift in rhetoric?

This declaration provides a clue: “Serbia of today is united and equal to other republics.” Milošević, in other words, had already achieved one of his key objectives and was seeking to consolidate his position at the helm of an undivided Yugoslavia.

There are rival accounts of how this came to be. The following is that of the the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia:

This version of what happened on March 23 1989 was, it must be emphasized, vigorously disputed by witnesses for Milošević at The Hague. What is clear is that Kosovo’s autonomy was downgraded to pre-1974 levels at Milošević’ behest. The Serbian Parliament followed up by passing a number of discriminatory laws, including one that barred Albanians from selling real estate without permission from Serbian authorities.

In July 1990 a majority of Albanian delegates in the Assembly of Kosovo responded by unofficially declaring Kosovo an “equal and independent” republic of SFRY, complete with a shadow government. Greg Campbell, in his book The Road to Kosovo, sums up what happened next:

By September 1990, a US National Intelligence Estimate warned that “the Yugoslav experiment has failed, that the country will break up” and that “this is likely to be accomplished by ethnic violence and unrest which could lead to civil war.” Yet like most close observers, it predicted that the first region engulfed by war would be Kosovo itself. Instead the Kosovo conflict set off a chain reaction through Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia that not before 1998 completed the circle and blew up the detonator.

The Serbian crackdown in Kosovo induced Slovenians to vote overwhelmingly for independence in a December 1990 plebiscite. As this left Serbia too dominant for their liking, it moved Croatia, Bosnia, and Macedonia to secede as well. The ensuing war in Bosnia left at least 100,000 dead and created 3 million refugees. The international community could do little to halt the carnage, and did even less.

How did the powder keg of Kosovo avoid war in the early 1990s? One factor is that, despite voting overwhelmingly for independence in an unofficial referendum of September 1991, Albanians lacked the military and political muscle to force secession, while Belgrade was kept in check by the outside world, notably the US. According to a former US ambassador to Croatia, the Bush sr. administration was more concerned about potential war in Kosovo and its destabilizing effects than about Bosnia. In its “Christmas Threat” of late 1992 — since reiterated by President Clinton — it threatened military action if Milošević were to deploy in Kosovo.

Another factor is the pacifism of the late Ibrahim Rugova; a silk-scarfed, Sorbonne-educated academic who in May 1992 was voted President of the “Republic of Kosova” in clandestine elections. Rugova and his party, the Democratic League of Kosova (DLK), favored passive resistance, establishing an underground state of diaspora-financed parallel institutions to which Serbian police saw fit to turn a blind eye. The strategy of the DLK was quietly to await Western support for independence. However, the US and the EU were by now preoccupied with Bosnia. Thus, when the 1995 Dayton Accords recognized Serbia and Montenegro as the new Yugoslavia and the sanctions were lifted, this was not made conditional even upon restored autonomy for the troubled province.

While understandable given the urgency of ending the Bosnian bloodbath, the neglect of the Kosovo question left ethnic Albanians — now on their own with the Serbs and Montenegrins — worse off than in the old SFRY. In result, many DLK adherents gave up on the non-violent approach and switched to the Kosova Liberation Army (KLA): a clan-based rag-tag militia which by 1993 had evolved from emigré separatist groups in Western Europe, comprising refugees from the 1980 crackdown. Faithful to the 19th century nationalist ideal of a polity coextensive with the ethnicity, it revived the old pipedream of uniting the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Albania itself in a Greater Albania. This grandiose irredentist project, harking back to the League of Prizren of 1878, was the long-term ambition. The KLA’s immediate end was independence.

As to the means it was prepared to use, indisputably part of its funding derived from organized crime, possibly including participation in the infamous Balkan Route of heroin to Western Europe. There have also been reports of ties with jihadi groups. Most likely, both accusations contain elements of truth — the former perhaps more than the latter — but have been exaggerated in pro-Serb propaganda. The KLA was not the armed wing of Albanian organized crime, nor did its agenda and leadership have much to do with political Islam.

KLA fighters.

In early 1996 the KLA launched a low-intensity insurgency, ambushing security forces and assailing “collaborators.” Its existence was long only rumored, but by early 1997 it began to claim responsibility.
Stocking up on cheap Kalashnikovs from the looted armories of Albania, then in a state of anarchy after the collapse of nation-wide pyramid financing schemes, the KLA escalated operations throughout the year. On the night to September 11 it performed a series of ten coordinated attacks as much as 150 km apart. On November 28 — a date commemorated as a national day among Kosovo Albanians — a KLA member appeared in public as such for the very first time.

At this point the guerrilla began to target civilian Serbs. The master strategy was a kind of martial judo familiar from terrorist campaigns: turning the enemy’s strength against him. Pinprick operations aimed to provoke disproportionate reprisals which would rally Kosovo Albanians around its cause and, with any luck, elicit Western intervention. Perhaps aware of this risk in the light of Clinton’s threats, and having experience with provocation tactics himself, Milošević shied away from deploying the army.

He eventually changed his mind. On some accounts, this happened when on February 23 1998, US special envoy Robert Gelbard imprudently, if not inaccurately, called the KLA “without any question a terrorist group” which the US condemned “very strongly.” Within a week, Serbian special forces backed by helicopter gunships and armoured personnel carriers performed a brutal crackdown in the western Drenica region, flattening entire towns that served as strongholds for leading KLA (and mafia) clans. To go by Kosovo Albanian sources, this involved summary executions, even outright massacres. Albanian media reported a hundred thousand attending the funerals.

The sweep continued into March, notably at the village of Prekaz in central Kosovo, where fifty-three members of the Jeshari clan allegedly were slaughtered. The KLA made the most of this, posting photos of the corpses on the Internet as soon as available. A massive uprising followed, swelling the ranks of the KLA. Meanwhile, up to 400,000 Kosovo Albanians were forced to flee their homes, some at gunpoint and many over the mountains to Albania.

This humanitarian disaster led to the UN Security Council to impose economic sanctions and an arms embargo on Yugoslavia, threatening “additional measures” if it failed to withdraw. To underline the point, 85 NATO aircraft overflew Albania and Macedonia; the US Sixth Fleet, put on battle alert, cruised into the Adriatic in a show of force. Finally, in late September the Clinton administration opened the door for air strikes; in October, NATO authorized such in the case of non-compliance with “the repeated political and humanitarian demands of the UN Security Council in regards to Kosovo.”

Belgrade had no choice but to fold. In the so-called Holbrooke-Milošević agreement of October 12, it agreed to restore Kosovo’s autonomy and pull out the army and police in return for a lifting of the UN sanctions. A multinational corps of 750 civilian monitors, under the auspices of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), moved in to supervise the implementation.

By all accounts, the some 130 strong US contribution to this Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) was heavily spy-infested. (There are unverified allegations that the KVM head, US diplomat William Walker — an old Latin America hand with stints in El Salvador and Honduras — was himself CIA.) According to the Sunday Times, the Americans operated on “completely different terms” than the Europeans, providing advice and combat manuals to the KLA.

The latter for its part was neither party to nor content with the ceasefire. It surged forth into the power vacuum, seizing half the province and extending a makeshift administrative structure as it went along. As reported in the BBC2 documentary Moral Combat, Walker confidentially told NATO’s governing body that the guerrilla was now “the main initiator of the violence,” apparently engaging in “a deliberate campaign of provocation.”

On January 15 1999, another massacre occurred in the town of Racak, a KLA stronghold in southern Kosovo, where some 45 Albanians were murdered in cold blood after attacks on Serbian police. Or so, at any rate, William Walker assured a press conference, describing in gory detail the aftermath of an “unspeakable atrocity” and a “crime against humanity.” The charge would be central to the case against Milošević in The Hague, where Walker testified for the prosecution about the heaps of dead bodies he had seen on that day.

Bodies at Racak — combatants or civilians?

Yet doubts immediately arose about this incident. There are indications that it was a hoax staged by the KLA to trigger NATO intervention. Frustratingly, there are also persuasive counter-arguments. In a sense it hardly even matters, inasmuch as neither side was morally above what it stood accused of by the other side. What is clear is that, if it was indeed a KLA hoax, it succeeded.

News of the Racak incident broke within hours of a National Security Council meeting in which US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who had for nearly a year favored putting military pressure on Milošević, argued in vain for “decisive steps.” Albright later called Racak “a galvanizing incident,” meaning that it galvanized will to contemplate the use of force.

She was right, both in terms of the Clinton administration and international opinion. For the German Foreign Minister Joschka Fisher, for instance, “Racak became the turning point”: “If people are being massacred, you cannot mutter about having no [UN Security Council] mandate. You must act.” Within two weeks, NATO announced its readiness to intervene, France and Britain vowed to send in ground troops if needed, and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan stateed that Bosnia had proven “the need to use force, when all other means have failed.”

Finally, the so-called Contact Group of Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Russia and the US summoned the parties, on pains of NATO airstrikes, to the Château de Rambouillet outside Paris. Talks began on February 6 amidst intermittent clashes, torched villages, and a Serbian presence some six times heavier than allowed by the ceasefire. What transpired at Rambouillet has been, it is fair to say, misrepresented widely in US and European media to this day.

It was announced that, merely by taking part, the parties implicitly accepted 26 principles which the British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook had stated on January 30. These non-negotiable principles were culled from the January 27 version of an ‘Interim Agreement’ drafted by the US envoy, Holbrooke’s deputy Christopher Hill.

This framework mandated an immediate truce and disarmament followed by restored self-government for Kosovo within the FRY. Upon free elections supervised by the OSCE, the province would enjoy its own parliament, president, judicial system and police; the cultural rights of all ethnic groups would be respected; all political prisoners would be released; and a final settlement would be reached after three years. A new version of the agreement, presented to the parties upon arrival, specified that the latter would occur through a “mechanism” determined by an “international meeting” on the basis of “the will of the people” and various “opinions” and “efforts.” Albright gave the parties one week to endorse this fait accompli and hash out the details, otherwise “appropriate conclusions” would be drawn. In case of Yugoslav refusal, that meant air strikes; in case of Albanian ditto, abandonment to the Serbs.

According to French journalist Paul-Marie De La Gorce writing in Le Monde Diplomatique, the Yugoslavian delegation accepted the proposal. However, the KLA did not: preferring status quo to “mere” autonomy, it demanded a clause guaranteeing eventual independence. This situation — Serbian acceptance cum Albanian refusal — was the opposite of what the US State Department had expected. Albright arrived on February 20 to persuade the KLA’s delegation leader, Hasim Thaci, to sign.

In a letter to Thaci dated 22nd February, she provided an interpretation of the aforementioned “mechanism”:

The next day, negotiations were adjourned, the KLA delegation heading off to Macedonia to consult with its leaders; the US sent down Senator Bob Dole to continue the lobbying. In addition to Albright’s concession, three novel elements were now introduced to further sugar the pill: elections would be held ASAP; the disarmament would not extend to “private weapons”; and last but not least, NATO forces would ensure Yugoslavian compliance.

On March 15, talks resumed in Paris and the KLA announced its readiness to sign the deal unilaterally.

And unilateral the signing would be, for the deal had evolved into something completely unacceptable to Belgrade. It is unclear whether Milošević knew of Albright’s letter; if so, that alone explains his refusal to sign. Having arguably lost three wars in the former Yugoslavia, he could ill afford to lose Kosovo, which he had personally touted as the Serb nation’s ancestral home and the embodiment of its historical martyrdom. Neither his government nor the equally nationalist opposition, nor indeed the disaffected Serbian populace, would condone secession.

The other novelties were also inedible to Belgrade. The revised ‘Interrim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo’ required Serbian security forces to withdraw to at least 5 km from the border. A NATO force with no upward cap or oversight by the the UN Security Council would move in and assume full control, including over the airspace. As if this were not enough, Appendix B on the ‘Status of Multi-National Military Implementation Force’ effectively authorizes NATO occupation of the entire Former Republic of Yugoslavia:

There is an under-appreciated irony in the Czech-born Albright informing reporters that “Munich is my mindset” while trying to coerce a sovereign state into accepting loss of territory on terms such as these. The pro-Serbian side of the continuing debate (or shouting match) argues that said terms both explain and justify Milošević’s rejection of the Rambouillet Accord. Pro-NATO pundits counter that they were lifted from the Dayton Accords, wherein Croatia agreed to the equivalent, and that they were anyway negotiable had the Serbs engaged in negotiation, which they did not.

The latter claim is flatly denied by De La Gorce. According to him, Belgrade’s prime representative at Rambouillet — the President of Serbia, Milan Milutinović — suggested an “international presence” in Kosovo independent of NATO and comprising forces from Russia, Greece, and Western Europe.

Some commentators go as far as to suggest that the US deliberately provoked Belgrade’s rejection to clear the way for war. A more plausible analysis is that it gambled and lost. Faced with the likelihood that no possible agreement would be acceptable to both the parties, its strategy was to secure a KLA signature with all necessary concessions and then make Milošević an offer he could not refuse. Such inequitable use of stick and carrot proved a grave miscalculation on March 18, as the KLA delegates signed while their Yugoslav counterparts refused.

Later that day, Clinton declared that “the treshold had been crossed” in regard to triggering NATO intervention. On the following day, “winter live fire exercises” commenced in Kosovo, prompting evacuation of KVM personnel; again according to the Sunday Times, CIA elements handed over advanced communications equipment to the KLA before leaving.

A major diplomatic crisis ensued. Russia had informally condoned the threat against Yugoslavia but stressed that it could never tolerate its actual implementation. China, preoccupied with sovereignty, was also opposed. Thus, though it cited several UN Security Council resolutions, the first war in NATO’s history lacked an explicit UNSC authorization. Within NATO, Greece and Italy objected.

But the resistance was brushed aside, in part, no doubt, owing to another miscalculation: the US and NATO believed that a brief, token bombing campaign would compel Milošević to sign. This belief also helps account for Clinton’s cavalier vow, in his March 24 address to the nation, that no ground troops would be deployed.

Moreover, the strategic error sheds light on the absence of planning characterizing Operation Allied Force from its beginning later on that day. A recent PhD dissertation by Captain Dag Henriksen at the Norwegian Air Force Academy documents that the NATO targeting cell at the air operations center CAOC Vicenza was asked to find arbitrary targets for a campaign of 2-3 days with no guidance as to strategic objectives. The personnel found the situation so amateurish that they assumed a political deal had already been struck with Milošević. When by a week later nothing had changed, the targeters decided to improvise a strategy of their own.

Based upon interviews with most central actors of Allied Force including the SACEUR, General Wesley Clark, Henriksen also brings out another, and quite remarkable, reason for the neglect of NATO strategy: unbeknown to its allies, the US unilaterally ran a bombing campaign of its own, hitting targets without NATO control. Consequently these targets were sometimes hit twice. European chiefs of staff reacted with fury to discovering this.

To the extent that key allies were kept out of the dark, it happened in a “Black Committee” comprising the US, the UK, and France. The democratic institutions of NATO were creatively bypassed to evade political control with the escalation of target categories as the campaign stagnated.

As other analysts have shown, there was conflict even between Clark and his principal US subordinate, Lt Gen Michael Short of the US Air Force. Clark ordered Short to target air defenses and military units in Kosovo while the latter wanted, as he put it, to “strike at the head of the snake” — Belgrade. Despite threatening to resign, he got permission for shock and awe tactics only by the end of May, by which time sorties had multiplied from 400 to 900 a day and there was still no resolution in sight, much to Washington’s despair. The target list was expanded to include infrastructure like bridges (more than half of those over the Danube were hit); oil refineries and power plants (causing nation-wide power blackouts); government facilities; factories owned by allies of Milošević; the state broadcasting service RTS (at the cost of 16-17 civilian lives); and infamously, the Chinese embassy.

Bombed bridge at Novi-Sad

Meanwhile, things had been taking a dramatic turn on the ground. True to form, and far from any idea of surrender, the cynical Milošević had taken the opportunity to launch the most extensive campaign of forced deportation since World War II, resulting in hundreds of thousands fleeing to Macedonia and Albania within the end of March. This ethnic cleansing was precisely the kind of atrocity the air strikes were supposed to prevent: a true humanitarian disaster on an epic scale. Adding insult to injury, Belgrade was able to argue that the refugees were running from NATO bombs.

Nor did the air strikes weaken Milošević’s popular standing, as naïvely anticipated. On the contrary, the Serbs rallied around him against the superior foreign enemy in what the propanganda could paint as a 20th century Kosovo Battle. To punctuate the symbolism, units of the Yugoslav army exercized on the myth-imbued plains as they trained to confront the NATO ground invasion that could not be excluded — especially not after British PM Tony Blair began to publically advocate it in April. Washington shut him up, but the option was now on the table and increasingly pushed by others, including Clark.

What ultimately swayed Milošević was probably less the strategic bombing than this prospect of ground troops, combined with the unwelcome news that Russia would stay passive in such a scenario.

By the end of April, NATO woke up to the necessity of dealing with Russia, so far humiliated and left to impotent rage as a fellow orthodox nation was attacked (Russian PM Yevgeny Primakov turned his Washington-bound plane around in mid-flight at the war’s beginning). By May, Russia and Germany had opened a secret back channel wherein a Swedish financier, Peter Castenfelt, was smuggled into Belgrade. He communicated to Milošević that not only President Yeltsin but the Russian security establishment would hang him out to dry if he failed to exit. This had the virtue of being true: Yeltsin, moved by the urgency of ending a war that sent his approval ratings nose-diving, had somehow bought off the military, which otherwise might have rebelled. All this according to the aforementioned BBC2 documentary, Moral Combat.

On May 31, Belgrade announced its consent to the Rambouillet Accord. The Serbian Parliament gave it the nod three days later, Milošević reportedly voting in favor. A withdrawal agreement was finalized on May 9, followed on May 10 by pullout; ratification of the Accord by the UNSC; preparations for the ongoing KFOR peacekeeping mission; and suspension of Operation Allied Force 11 weeks after it began.

NATO had launched a total of 38,004 combat sorties, of which 10,484 were strikes against targets in the FRY (Serbia, Kosovo, and Montenegro), and 18,439 were aerial tanker and airlift sorties. The Alliance’s first war properly so-called was also the first in history without a single combat fatality for the victor. As to civilians, Human Rights Watch confirms that at least 500 Yugoslav such were killed in 90 separate incidents over 78 days of bombing, a number considerably smaller than Yugoslav public estimates of up to 5,000 civilian casualties.

On the other hand, the 2000 report noted that:

The report also found that NATO on several occasions broke international humanitarian law, and criticized the use of cluster bombs in civilian areas. Another controversial issue has been the use of DU-tipped munitions, whose detrimental health effects, according to some authorities, are seen in the cancer statistics today.

But what of the campaign’s overarching strategic goals for Kosovo — were these achieved? That is hard to say, not least because these were so ill-defined in the first place. Asked by Captain Dag Henriksen to which extent the operational planning focused on what Kosovo would look like when the strongest military alliance in history had prevailed, then deputy SACEUR General Rupert Smith replied: “Oh, it wasn’t in focus at all.”

Such myopia, especially on the political level, had consequences. Upon the end of hostilities in June, Kosovo Albanian refugees started to return; but at the same time, Serbs fled or were chased out by Albanians in equally large numbers. By July 20, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that 150,000 Serbs were flooding into Serbia, which already harbored half a million refugees from the other ex-Yugoslavian wars. The total number of refugees from Kosovo rose to some 230,000, most of them Serbs. Of these, over 200,000 remain Internally Displaced Persons in what is Europe’s biggest refugee problem. A hundred thousand Serbs stayed put among approximately 1.8 million ethnic Albanians, among whom little love was lost on Serbs.

This minority now dwell in KFOR-guarded enclaves, with limited freedom of movement and high unemployment even by the standards of a dysfunctional UN protectorate where only the black economy flowers. The Serbian apartheid state has effectively been inverted. More than 4,000 Serbs worked at the public electricity service in 1999; today around 30 do so, out of 8,000 employees. Meanwhile, barbed wire and armed KFOR troops protect those medieval monasteries that remain recognizably intact.

Independence is, however, finally in the offing, mostly because the Western powers acknowledge once again that the majority would never settle for less. Serbia, impoverished and demoralized, is unable to do more than strut and fret at the impending loss of its “historical heartland.”

For now. Anyone doubting that ancient history lives in the Balkans should bear in mind quite a recent incident. On May 24, 1999, Slobodan Milosevic had become the first sitting head of state to be charged with war crimes in the midst of a war, the charges including murder and deportation in Kosovo. A little more than two years later, he was himself deported to the cell at the Hague that would be his final home.

The date chosen for his extradition just happened to be St. Vitus Day, June 28.

Crossposted from Daily Kos.

Who would have thought that a Tunisian scholar who perished 600 years ago developed a theory of the US Democratic netroots in the early 21st century? Right. And I will grant, off the cuff, that he didn’t. Yet his model of political history lends itself strikingly to what is being duly celebrated in Las Vegas.

The New York Times remarks on Yearly Kos:

For me, that passage brought to mind ‘Abd-ar-Rahmân Abû Zayd ibn Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldûn al-Hadramî, or as he is also known, Abû Zayd ‘Abd-ar-Rahmân ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldûn al-Hadrami al-Ishbilî; or with merciful simplicity: Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406).

Please let me explain this strange association.

The background for Khaldun’s work was the intellectual stagnation and political disintegration of the Islamic civilization since about 1000 A.D., when the Abbasid dynasty in Baghdad began to unravel. The Mongol hordes had dismantled the Caliphate and the Ottomans not yet established a new one. Across North Africa and the Middle East, Berber, Bedouin, and Tartar tribes washed over the urban settlements in successive waves of invasion. Khaldun, whose biography is extremely colorful, had first-hand experience with this: in 1401, he was lowered down the walls of besieged Damascus to negotiate with Tamerlane, Chinggiz Khan’s odious successor, who liked to build pyramids of his enemies’ skulls.

These turbulent times inspired his Muqaddimah (Prolegomena), which the great British historian Arnold J. Toynbee called “undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time or place.” Others have compared it to the work of Hegel, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Marx, and Durkheim. Founding a discipline that five centuries later would be called ‘Sociology’, the Muqaddimah highlights how environmental, social, and economic factors produce the ebb and flow of civilization (al-’Umraan).

Khaldun memorably defined the state as an institution that prevents injustice other than such as it inflicts itself. Yet “a thousand years of tyranny,” he affirmed in a classic aphorism, “is preferable to one day of anarchy.” Then again, the political order cannot be based upon brute subjugation. After all, who is to do the subjugation if not some armed group acting of free will? Essential, therefore, is cohesion or group-feeling (al-’Asabiyya); a social glue only prone to arise in the absence of subjugation that can be found in the hinterland of mountain, steppe, or desert.

Here self-governing clans and tribes roam free, protected by their mobility and environment from the emir’s or sultan’s control. Typically egalitarian communities where every man is a warrior, they hone their fighting skills by internal feuds, disdaining the unfree yet lax and decadent life of the city. At the same time they may, however, come to desire the resources and power of the urban rulers. Occasionally — rallied around a feisty leader — they may put their differences aside and ride on the alluring city in the distance.

The philosopher and anthropologist Ernest Gellner summarized Khaldun’s general account as follows:

Within such a cycle of a few generations, a successful urban ruling dynasty goes through five stages of power, theorized Ibn Khaldun:

1) the stage of success (tawr az-zafar).
2) that of establishing a monopoly on organized violence, or complete authority (tawr al-istibdaad).
3) that of leisure and tranquility (tawr al-faraj wa-d-dicah).
4) that of contentment and peacefulness (tawr al-qunuuc wa-l-musaalamah), and
5) that of waste and squandering (tawr al-israaf wa-l-tabdhiir).

It is at the fifth stage that the state is most in need of an infusion of fresh blood if it is not to be overrun by an enemy state. Fortunately, that is also the stage where it is most vulnerable to invasion by the free-roaming, fierce, egalitarian, and honor-craving hordes that, with any luck, will be crashing the gates.

I trust, fellow barbarians, that the analogy does not need to be spelled out further.

Update: I regret and retract the above praise of Daily Kos, whose owner, Markos Moulitsas, is a coward without the balls to speak up with a single word against the US-sponsored destruction of Lebanon.

The Belfast Telegraph reports on a Pope in rough weather:

What’s up? For one thing, Benedict XVI, a.k.a. Joseph Ratzinger, glossed over the shameful silence of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust, and he deserves rebuke for that. But there is more:

It is amusing to see secular intellectuals acting shocked, shocked that the Pope interprets the Holocaust in metaphysical terms. Whatever did they expect? He is the Holy Father, not an editor at Die Zeit.

In Catholic doctrine, evil is not a principle unto itself but privatio boni, a lack of good. Yet it does exist as an active force, personified by the Devil, whom God holds morally accountable (Matt. 25:41). This is obviously paradoxical, but Christianity was never known for its logical coherence, a fact which theology is the attempt to conceal by unintelligible jargon.

Now, to the point. If Nazism is indeed an expression of absolute evil, then it must be of the Devil. If it is indeed of the Devil, then its objective must be to drive a wedge between God and his creation. Hence, indeed “the true, intended victim of the genocide of the Jews was not actually the Jews but Christianity.” Q.E.D.

Those who think this conclusion ridiculous, as I do, might consider simply shrugging at the elaborate creed in question. More distasteful to my mind at least are the operators who, by symbol-heavy obfuscation, try to weld the Holocaust into a kitsch spirituality of its own.

The writ against Ratzinger continues:

Is it not true that the Germans were themselves also victims of a criminal ring? The sanctimonious efforts to deny this are predicated upon the false dilemma that one cannot simultaneously be victim and perpetrator. But of course one can. It’s called the human condition.

If the hysterical hate-monger Daniel Goldhagen now corners the market on historiographic validity, I think that’s more disconcerting than the news that the Pope is Catholic.

If Western humanism has a preeminent advocate of the ages, it is Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1456–1536). His Adagia (1515), a collection of proverbs with commentary, was the first bestseller in history. And its most popular essay is composed on an ancient aphorism: dulce bellum inexpertis — “war is sweet to the inexperienced.”

These are fitting words on Memorial Day.

Written at a time when war had for perhaps the first time risen to rival disease and starvation — the two traditional scourges of humanity — Erasmus’ essay has been called the founding tract of pacifism. But he was not a pacifist. Rather he insisted, against the grain of his times, that war be confined to a last resort of self-defense, for the excellent reason that “even the most successful and just war,” waged by a good prince for a noble purpose, is prone to descend into unspeakable atrocities. Thus:

Man, says Erasmus, is the one creation made entirely for friendly acts, yet in war his social disposition turns him into “a brute so monstrous that no beast will be called a brute in future if compared to man.” After all, “When did anyone hear of a hundred thousand animals falling dead together after tearing each other to pieces, as men do everywhere?”

How is such perversion even possible? It is due to concerted campaigns for amnesia by which the bitter lessons of the past are unlearned. Though experience teaches that the expenses of bloodshed are ten times higher than those of peace with results much worse, the propaganda of clerics, lawyers, and princes has again made war “such a respectable thing that it is wicked — I might almost say ‘heretical’ — to disapprove of this which of all things is the most abominable and most wretched.”

Five centuries hence, another thoughtful commentator reflected on the difference between West Europeans and North Americans in this respect. William Pfaff, writing in The International Herald Tribune in January 2003, is worth quoting at length:

Pfaff adds the following observation:

Evidently, not just individuals but the whole country has ignored central lessons of “what war means for its victims.” As International Law scholar Richard Falk has put it in The Nation:

In mainstream US discourse, the unforgivable flaws of the Vietnam War are that it was (1) lost at (2) by US standards, a hefty cost in American lives (3) without clear US interests at stake. The scholars debate which was more instrumental in eroding support for the war. It is clear, however, that either dwarfs the fact that it (4) involved grave war crimes such as free fire zones; the deployment of the most poisonous chemical weapons known to science in civilian areas; and the bombing back to the stone age of Laos and Cambodia at an officially estimated cost of respectively 350,000 and 600,000 civilian lives.

Certainly the US military and political establishment had no significant qualms about (4). Anyone in doubt about this should contemplate SIOP-62, the top secret contingency plan for US nuclear first strike. Effective from 1962, this plan mandated a nuclear annihilation of not just the USSR but its enemy China in the event of suspicious Soviet troop movements. Thus it prescribed the murder of up to a hundred million innocent citizens of a non-belligerent nation posing no threat to any NATO country. Anything less, explained the head of the Strategic Air Command, General Thomas Powers, “would really screw up the plan.”

The 2004 release of these utterly sinister documents failed to cause any noticeable stir in the US public, even though they prove that America was ready, at a moment’s notice, to carry out a nuclear holocaust making every previous genocide pale in comparison. One shudders to imagine what Erasmus would have said of this ultimate deviation from his — or any — conception of justifiable warfare.

Or, to return to the current malaise, whatever would he have made of the following sermon, given at a time when only 25 percent of Americans thought the Iraq War a mistake?

Now the warmongering pundits who shilled for that bungled war are using virtually indistinguishable rhetoric to enable another “preventive” onslaught; one that might need to avail itself of nuclear weapons as a tactical necessity. The leading political commentator on America’s most trusted television network thunders: “You know in a sane world, every country would unite against Iran and blow it off the face of the Earth. That would be the sane thing to do.”

Are such odious operators met with a firestorm of popular derision from the US public? Not outside of liberal blogs.

Apart from 9/11 and the events of 150 years ago, the American people still has no experience of being at the receiving end of “this which of all things is the most abominable and most wretched,” but which remains so sweet to the inexperienced.

Crossposted from Booman Tribune, Daily Kos, and European Tribune.

Three years ago, the US President co-piloted a fighter aircraft onto the deck of the USS Lincoln to declare “the end of major hostilities” in Iraq. Above him a banner proclaimed, “Mission Accomplished.” Today, a humble 9 percent of Americans believe that the mission has really been such.

Though I respect the majority view, I have to say that it is, in fact, mistaken.

It is true that the Iraq War has been far from flawless in its conception and execution. The war:

• was justified to the Congress and public with tailor-made and strongly counter-indicated reports of an ultimately non-existent threat to the US homeland — reports in large part supplied by a wanted criminal;
• was prepared in the face of warnings by numerous experts and international statesmen, including President Bush sr. and his senior foreign policy staff;
• triggered an international diplomatic crisis pitting the US against major allies including Germany and France, as well as against Russia, China, and other important countries;
• was blatantly illegal according to most qualified observers, including the International Commission of Jurists and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, thus undermining the authority of the UN Security Council;
• was conducted even though the Iraqi President offered to step down and go into exile;
• precipitated a costly, graft-ridden and utterly bungled reconstruction program of which only 30 percent of Iraqis are even aware, as exemplified by the miserable failure to build a health infrastructure;
• was marred by titanic tactical and strategic blunders such as allowing the looting of 250,000 tons of heavy ordnance from unguarded dumps, which is enough for several hundred years of attacks, and the decision to disband Iraq’s police force and 300,000 strong army overnight, thus offering the budding insurgency vast numbers of professional fighters as well as 1769 miles of unsecured border to exploit;
• has deteriorated to a brutal counter-insurgency involving the use of chemical weapons in cities; systematic torture by US troops, implicating hundreds of US service members and extending in some cases to rape of women and children, alienating even close US allies; and death squads manned by US-trained police;
• was based on planning which severely underestimated the required troop strength, against the advise of the US Army and US Air Force chiefs of staff and that of the Secretary of State, himself a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff;
• involves an effective occupation that keeps 132,000 US service members and thousands of others — many on their second or third deployments — away from home, but which nonetheless only 1 percent of Iraqis trust for their personal protection;
• depends for military morale on fantastic misconceptions among US troops, with 85 percent believing the US mission is mainly “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacks” and 77 percent that a major reason for the war was “to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq”; while even with such false beliefs at work, 72 percent of troops on the ground hold that the US should exit Iraq within this year whether it is needed there or not;
• in fact diverted key special operations forces and intelligence resources away from the hunt for al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan, and by depleting the US presence there, has enabled their allies the Taliban to reclaim most of that country and parts of Pakistan;
• has generally served the strategic interests of the USA’s principal enemy while likely also spurring it to develop nuclear weapons;
• has claimed an estimated 200,000 Iraqi lives, of which 120,000 directly by violence;
• has spawned a major civil war even by the most stringent definitions (pdf), forcing up to 100,000 families into internal displacement at present and threatening to destabilize the region;
• has not only caused enduring distrust and resentment of the US in Arab countries, including Iraq, but also become a rallying cry for international terrorism even by the administration’s own admission, as well as the main source of US civilian deaths in terrorist strikes;
• may within a matter of months have claimed as many American lives as the terrorist attack of 9/11 2001, preventing whose repetition was used to justify the war in the first place;
• will soon have seen 18,000 US service members wounded in combat, though actual numbers must be much higher considering that 144,424 veterans have sought treatment from the swamped and underfunded VA system since returning from Iraq (and Afghanistan), not counting those hospitalized in military hospitals; and considering that 35 percent of Iraq veterans have already sought treatment for emotional problems;
• has already cost more in inflation-adjusted dollars than the ten-plus-year war in Vietnam, and will, according to estimates by two world-class economists, cost current and future US taxpayers $1-2 trillion when such costs as lifetime disability and healthcare for injured troops as well as the impact on the US economy are factored in.

How, then, is the war a success? Well, do you have to ask?

The Iraq War allowed George W. Bush — who, to dedicate himself more fully to his primary interests, the joys of prostitutes, booze, and cocaine, deserted from the stateside posting his dad had secured for him to keep him out of combat in Vietnam — to at long last fly a fighter jet in war.

That mission, I submit, was accomplished to his satisfaction on May 1, 2003.

The article below ran in a noted European newspaper a week ago. Can you guess which one?

They had no idea what they were talking about. Born and raised in Habsburg Central Europe, they were thinking just like their surroundings. And they were thinking in imperialist terms.
    The natives of Palestine would embrace them, Herzl believed. Jewish supremacy was bound to be preferable to Ottoman ditto.

Two world wars hence a number of things are up for debate, but hardly that the origins of Israel lie in a European understanding of race, religion and language as the foundation of the state. One either belonged to the dominant people, enjoying the privileges of state, or else one belonged to a minority and had to make do as best one could.
    Prior to World War I, the Hungarians ruled the Croats, Slovakians, and Romanians with an iron fist. Then followed the Greater Romanian Kingdom, which treated its Hungarians and Gypsies as third rate citizens. The Czechs would despise the Slovakians, the Serbs would oppress Croats and Albanians, the Greeks would terrorize their Macedonians and Turks. The madness culminated in the German genocide against the Jews.
     That Israel is a democracy is demonstrated by the recent parliamentary election, but Israel has a fundamental problem: the emergence of the Jewish state in the form of a Habsburg nationalist project in the Middle East, long after such projects were discredited in Europe.
    Not for nothing does the great contemporary British-American historian Tony Judt write that “the very idea of a ‘Jewish state’ — a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded — is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.”

The debate will go on for a long time about what can be derived from the Israeli election and from that in the Palestinian territories, which Hamas won.
    Hamas’ involvement in terrorism and demands that Israel be wiped off the map are not the best starting point for detente.
    But what are the realities?
    The Hamas are laying low, knowing full well that they must continue to do so if they are to keep receiving financial aid from the West. Were they to give up terrorism, it would not be the first such change of direction in Middle Eastern history. The Israeli state was born in blood. One of its later heads of government, Menachem Begin, led the infamous Irgun Gang in 1948.
    Does Israel live up to its obligations? With its illegal settlements, Israel has done its part to sabotage the peace plan of President George W. Bush. Was the plan at all serious? That is open to doubt. As so much in today’s US Middle Eastern policy, it was rather a mixture of dreams and nightmares.
    Israel insists on a non-existent right to politically motivated killings. One absolves oneself of any responsibility for four million Palestinian refugees and displaced people who are entitled to return to their homes and property.
    For years, all that used to be in terms of Palestinian infrastructure — including the security apparatus, government buildings, olive fields, roads, and residential blocks — have been destroyed. Easily perishable export goods are routinely blockaded; customs and other fees due the Palestinian Authorities in Ramallah are not being paid. Whatever seeds of prosperity there were 15–20 years ago have been transformed into abject poverty. The Palestinians are stuck in their bantustans, powerless and desperate, hemmed in by barbed wire, minefields, roadblocks, passport requirements, and Jewish settlements. So far the latter encompass a quarter million colonists, many of them heavily armed. It is a lack of respect for international law and agreements that, one might say, also has a background in traditional European thinking.
    Radical rightwing politicians like Avigdor Lieberman declare their willingness to deport tens of thousands of Israeli citizens. Why? Because they are Arabs, not Jews. Lieberman is an immigrant from Moldova. To hear him speak is like hearing the Iron Guard on the march. There are many like him.

If the elections in Israel and the Palestinian territories are to have a common meaning, it must be that the time is ripe to abandon the old European ways.
    The initiative has to come from Israel, the military great power of the region. It ought to be generous: the policy that was implemented — alas, unilaterally — in Gaza should be followed up with an equally consistent withdrawal from all other illegally occupied areas. That means the Syrian Golan Heights; that means the West Bank; that means the Arab East Jerusalem. The parties may agree on modifications, but in general Israel must return to the borders from before the war of 1967. Furthermore, a genuine Palestinian state with its own airspace, sea territory, and security forces should be established — a serious country that inspires confidence in its citizens and that can be held responsible by the international community.
    To persist in building on a way of thinking that characterized Europe a hundred years ago is to invite a repetition in the Middle East of the European tragedy in the 20th century.

So where did the article run? Answer: the author is a staff writer at that most dreadful reactionary rag and purveyor of virulent ethnic nationalism, that foul anti-Arab and anti-Muslim propaganda outlet: Jyllands-Posten.

News from America: in the world’s supposedly leading nation, whose fine constitution is founded entirely on Enlightenment values, the tiny atheist minority are pariah, a study finds.

While I knew that declared atheists are unelectable for office above county level in the USA, I naïvely thought George Bush sr. went out on a limb when he opined (and yes, he really did) that atheists shouldn’t be regarded as citizens. Apparently he was expressing common sense.

Salman Rushdie — himself not unacquainted with the zealous mindset — sums up the attitude in question:

I wonder what blinkers such faithful bigots don to sustain their delusion of superiority. Aside from the philosophical hollowness of deriving ethics from the command of supernatural beings — exposed in Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro some 2,400 years ago — the idea sits rather poorly with the facts. Let us briefly consider the evidence.

The 1994 Rwandan genocide, wherein 800,000 men, women and children were slashed to pieces with machetes (or, if babies, bashed SS-style against the trees) took place in a devoutly Catholic country. The faith was introduced by the same Belgian colonialists who, moved by a mix of race theory and divide et impera, did such a splendid job of setting the Tutsis up against the Hutus, after their impeccably Catholic king had transformed the neighboring Congo basin into Hell. The US President who literally spent more time at the office pushing cigars up his intern’s vagina than stopping the butchery — though the latter was within his powers — is a Southern Baptist whose speeches brim with spiritual uplift. In Sudan another genocide is in its fourth year, conducted at the hands of glowing theists, who, rather like the Hutus, find the work fulfilling. Sudan’s 21-year, two million-victims civil war wasn’t waged by atheists either. And in northern Uganda “the Lord’s Resistance Army” has spent two decades turning children into monsters. Joseph Kony, its sadistic, child-raping leader, communes with the Holy Spirit; his political platform is the Ten Commandments. While true, it is beside the point that he makes a mockery of Christian doctrine. The point is his well-documented innocence of atheism — and of little else.

In Algeria a few years ago, some 70,000 civilians were slaughtered by insurgents of the kind that enjoys playing football with human heads. If these gentlemen were atheists, it is news to me.

Tony Blair, a passionate Evangelical who sees everything as a struggle against wickedness, thinks God will judge his effort to throw Iraq into civil war; and presumably, give it rave reviews. His American partner in war crime was born again with televangelist Billy Graham as a busy midwife. Graham, whom Bill Clinton has called “the man I love,” prayed with US Presidents before just about every commencement of hostilities from Vietnam to Iraq and will surely do so again when God instructs Bush the Lesser to smite Iran.

Ah yes, Iran. This safely non-atheist country — the only one besides the Vatican to be run by clergy — executes sexually active 16 year old girls and homosexuals by slow asphyxiation. As Pascal, who lived through the most horrific wars of religion in Europe, observed: “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” I recently forced myself to watch this movie of a stoning to death in the mullah’s paradise. Swaying back and forth in agony, the victims’ heads are mashed into bloody pulp to enthusiastic cries of Allahu akbar (”God is greater”). Well, if an allmighty sky-god exists — which I doubt even more after watching this savagery — I should hope he is greater than that.

Thirty years ago today there was a military coup in Argentina, upon which at least 10,000 people were murdered, often after rape and torture. Not noted for their atheism, the coupmakers spent most of the preceding day with Argentina’s leading bishops, who gave their blessings. And though some priests later joined the resistance, the Church condoned the regime, as it had those of Mussolini and Franco.

A woman to be stoned by confirmed non-atheists

Of course, none of this suggests that moral behavior necessarily goes with the absence of belief in deities. The two most prolific mass murderers of all time, Stalin and Mao — probably also Hitler, the bronze medal winner — are enough to invalidate that notion.

It does suggest, however, that indulgence in revealed religion is pretty useless as a bulwark against evil. The bigots among the believers, then, can take their smug condemnation of us godless people and stick it.

Update: My favorite blogger, Digby, tackles the subject here and here.

Crossposted from European Tribune.

The Balkans region has a penchant for producing more history than it can consume. ~ Winston Churchill

Getting history wrong is an essential part of being a nation. ~ Ernest Renan

The Serbian province — and UN protectorate — informally known as Kosovo is a fertile, mountain-ringed area of 10.887 km². It subdivides into the valleys of Kosovo proper and Metohija (Greek for ‘monastic land’): indeed, its full name, as Serbs often like to point out, is ‘Kosovo and Metohija’. Below, ‘Kosovo’ refers to the entire area unless otherwise noted.

The ancient history of the region is fairly obscure. Suffice it to say that, conquered by Alexander the Great 300 years B.C.E., it became part of the Roman province of Dardania in the 4th century A.D. and thus belonged to the Byzantine empire when the Serbs arrived in the Balkans about two centuries later. Fast forward to…

1189 In this year, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa passed through on his way to the Third Crusade. Stefan Nemanjić, ruler of the small Serbian principality of Rascia, met with him and signed a trade agreement. Barbarossa drowned underway to Jerusalem, but Nemanjić used the mayhem of the time to carve out a kingdom. One of his sons was crowned; another founded the Serbian Orthodox Church and secured it autocephalous status. As proven today by some 1,300 monasteries and churches, Kosovo was the cultural, political, and economic heartland of this advanced medieval state.

The Kingdom of Serbia flourished between the demise of the Byzantines, from whom it emerged, and the rise of the Ottomans, to whom it fell prey. This Golden Age spanned less than two centuries, culminating with Tzar Stefan Dušan the Powerful, who doubled his empire until it stretched from the Danube to the Peloponnes and encompassed present-day Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia, northern Greece, and Bulgaria. When Dušan died en route to seizing Constantinople in 1355, it dissolved into squabbling fiefdoms.

By then, the Ottoman Sultanate had embarked on a formidable campaign of conquest. In 1371 it vanquished a Christian army in modern Bulgaria, wiping out the chief contenders for the Serbian throne. Militarily, this spat was far more important than the one to follow in 1389; the same can be said of the final Serbian loss on the Danube in 1459. In terms of mythic significance, however, it is the other way around: “In all of European history,” notes Tim Judah in The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, “it is impossible to find any comparison with the effect of Kosovo on the Serbian national psyche.” (30). By way of attempts, the Battle of Kosovo has been likened to Hastings, Bastogne, the Siege of Leningrad, and the Fall of Troy — combined.

1389 On St. Vitus Day, June 28, 1389, at a desolate plain near Priština, a scrambled Christian alliance of Serbs and Bosnians faced its foe. Its commander was a minor Serb nobleman, a certain Prince Lazar; his Ottoman counterpart being the Sultan, Murad I. Neither man survived the day. And though the Turks gained the most in relative terms, the battle itself was apparently a tie which mostly pleased the blackbirds feasting on the tens of thousands of slain. This gave the region its name: Kosovo Polje means ‘the Field of Blackbirds’.

But legend has painted the draw as a Serbian disaster, and elevated the defeat, in turn, to a moral triumph. As was Ottoman practice, the Sultan had offered Prince Lazar a choice between vassalage and war. Après la lutte — likely in order to boost morale as well as the interests of Lazar’s heir — the Serbian Church cast the decision to fight as an affirmation of moral purity over worldly gain. According to this hagiography, God made Lazar choose between victory and temporal power, or death and an eternal Kingdom of Heaven. “And the emperor chose the empire of heaven above the empire of the earth,” one poem, “The Downfall of the Serbian Empire,” declares.

Lovingly embellished over the centuries, this story evolved into a veritable Passion. For example, a 16th century interpolation involves a Last Supper, as well as a Judas figure represented by Vuk Branković, one of Lazar’s favorite knights, who supposedly withdrew at a critical stage in the battle. Taken to extremes, the myth suggests that St. Lazar’s “martyrdom” absolved the Serbs of the sins by which their state had perished, making them in effect a “new Israel.” So, in the fullness of time, they shall be restored even their earthly kingdom.

In the present, however, Serbia was duly conquered by 1459 and would remain so for centuries. Killing or expelling most of the nobility, the Ottomans imposed shari’a laws reducing Christians to second-class citizenry. This included a poll tax (jizya), legal discrimination, and worst of all, devshirme: the dreaded “blood tribute” of perhaps a thousand male children per annum, to be converted to Islam and enrolled in the imperial apparatus. While these were better terms than those offered Muslims by Christian rulers of the age — notably in Spain upon the Reconquista — that obviously did little to console the Serbs. The most hardcore fled to the mountains of Montenegro, the only semi-independent Balkan state. There the monks would carry forth the martyr cult of Kosovo Polje, while by the flickering bonfires, village bards sang of Prince Lazar.

In the meantime, another ethnic group was moving down from the highlands. The people now known as Albanians began settling in the lowlands. These were fiercely clannish pastoralists of disputed ancestry, who are thought (though all such questions are controversial) to have been a minority in the Serbian Kingdom. Having neither a Church of their own nor the memory of statehood, the proto-Albanians proved more susceptible than Serbs to conversion and its rewards. An estimated two-thirds took up Islam. And from their ranks sprang the new feudal lords of Kosovo; a mainstay of Serb resentment ever since.

Kosovo Albanian folk dance

1689 The demographic shift came to a head after the failed second siege of Vienna. When the Turks repelled an Austrian invasion in 1689, Serb peasants, who had risen to support it, fled the harsh retaliations. In 1690 the Archbishop of Peć, whose monastery the Ottomans had destroyed, led 30,000-40,000 families across the Danube to the Austrian military frontier, the area now called Vojvodina.

This “Great Migration” — another paradoxically celebrated event, which in the Serbian national consciousness evokes the Exodus — moved the center of Serb culture to the Belgrade region, where it has since remained. This rendered Kosovo underpopulated, causing a Turk-sponsored influx of Muslims from present-day Albania. Along with not necessarily voluntary mass conversions among remaining Serbs, many of whom came in time to adopt Albanian customs and even language, this produced an ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo that has also endured to this day. Such, at any rate, is the simple version of a complex tale. Fast forward two centuries…

1889 By now the tide of power was turning on the Balkans. With the declining Ottoman Sultanate on the verge of bankruptcy, Serbia had resurfaced as a principality after a revolutionary war (1804-14) and under the auspices of the Turks’ most vehement enemy, Russia. At the 1878 Berlin Conference it had won recognition as a sovereign state, as did Montenegro. The Serbian Kingdom was back on the map; and its gaze became fixed on its historical heartland.

A 19th century representation of the epic poem “The Maiden of Kossovo.”

In Belgrade a nascent bourgeoise had discovered the epic cycles of Kosovo Polje, which had drifted north from Montenegro and were published in national-romantic fashion. (They attracted international admiration: Alexander Pushkin and Jacob Grimm cherished the poems, and Goethe, who taught himself Serbo-Croatian in order to read them, compared them to The Illiad.) As with nation-building in general, a literate high culture was constructed from folk traditions in a manner glorifying a distant past. What is unique here is the status assigned the fictionalized events of a non-decisive battle half a millennium back. In a rousing opening address to the nation-wide, months-long celebration of the 500th anniversary of this slaughter, Serbia’s minister of foreign affairs intoned:

On St. Vitus’ day, June 28 1889, 30,000 pilgrims paid homage to St. Lazar’s bones in Hungary.

In due course, the national myth was pressed into service for a Greater Serbia. Set in motion by ambitious politicians and sustained by a wave of yearning for the Golden Age, an irredentist project gained momentum: the “historic mission” of “liberating Old Serbia.” Thus, in the chaotic First Balkan War of 1912, Serbian troops advanced on Kosovo, whose defense the retreating Turks had left to the Albanian aristocracy. After centuries of tense but seldom violent co-habitation, Serbs and Albanians clashed for the first time in large-scale battle. Here is how one typical young enlistee responded to his southward deployment:

That year the Serbian army, trailed by thousands of peasant settlers and wreaking much havoc, conquered Kosovo proper in the face of stiff Albanian resistance. The next year the international community recognized the area as Serbian, with Montenegro getting sovereignty over Metohija.

Famously, however, on June 28 1914 another young Serb nationalist assassinated the Austro-Hungarian Archduke in Sarajevo. Gavrilo Princip was outraged that Bosnia remained a Habsburg province, and especially, that the prince had picked St. Vitus Day to oversee military manoeuvres on the Serbian border. He was also inspired by a mythical incident in the Battle of Kosovo, wherein a Serb nobleman, Miloš Obilić, infiltrated the enemy in the guise of a deserter and plunged a poisoned dagger into the Sultan. In any case, his wrath lit the fuse of World War I; an unprecedented carnage which would cost Serbia an incredible sixty percent of its fighting-age male population.

In Kosovo proper, a fierce guerrilla war ensued between Serbs and Albanians, before Bulgarian and Austro-Hungarian invaders crushed the Serbian army there and forced what is — characteristically — known as the “Great Serbian retreat” across Kosovo and over the Albanian mountains to a refuge on the island of Korfu. Constantly harried by insurgents, this hapless winter march claimed as many as 100,000 Serbian lives. (It is remembered in Serbia as the nation’s “Albanian Golgotha.”) However, by 1918, as the Dual Monarchy lost out to the French, the Serbian army inflicted a terrible revenge replete with massacres and ethnic cleansing. Meanwhile Serbia received accolades in the West. In June 1918, for example, the United States recognized St. Vitus Day as a day of special commemoration.

Retreat of the Serbian army through Albania, 1915

The colonization continued after Serbia joined the pan-Slavic monarchy later to be named Yugoslavia. Throughout the interwar period, the Belgrade government deported Albanians from Kosovo proper and resettled half the arable land, spawning a big Serb majority by the late 1920s. (More on this project and its ideology can be found in an official memorandum from 1937 called The expulsion of the Albanians.) But during World War II the tide turned again, with most of Kosovo incorporated into an Italian-controlled “Greater Albania.” Nearly 100,000 Serbs were expelled, and up to 10,000 killed, by Albanian militias allied to the fascists.

It was hoped that the country’s post-war reincarnation as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) under the partisan leader Josip Broz Tito would end this inter-ethnic bloodfeud. And after a final uprooting of the Albanian resistance, killing up to 48,000 in six months, it did for a while. The province of Kosovo enjoyed decades of relative tranquility wherein nationalism of every kind was suppressed with extreme prejudice by the equal-opportunity dictator and his secret police.

During this respite, a demographic bomb went off. Rural Albanians, plagued by poverty and low education levels, had the highest birth rate in Europe, making the population virtually explode. By 1961, Albanians accounted for 67%, Serbs for 27%, and others for 6%. This new situation on the ground, combined with frustration at the underdevelopment that propelled it, led Kosovo Albanians to riot for independence in the 1968 student revolts.

The pragmatic Tito responded by revamping the consitution in 1974, granting Kosovo (as well as the Vojvoidina province with its big Hungarian minority) effective self-government. Besides vast financial transfers from the center, Kosovo gained a seat on the federal presidency; a legislature; a supreme court; a university; a central bank; a police force; and a quota system ensuring Albanian dominance of all these institutions. But much as this displeased the Serbs, it also thwarted a growing Albanian demand for full Republic status, which carried the theoretical right to secede. A year after Tito’s death in 1980 — at which point 77% of the population were ethnic Albanians — near-revolutionary riots flared up anew. This time they were quelled with tanks.

Meanwhile there were now persistent claims of harassment and discrimination of non-Albanians. The complaints had considerable merit, as the thousands of Serbs fleeing Kosovo every year would readily confirm. It is equally true, however, that they were wildly exaggerated by Serb nationalists. In 1986, Serbian Orthodox bishops spoke of genocide in progress, as did 216 prominent Serbian intellectuals who decried “the physical, political, legal and cultural genocide” against the Serbs.

Then, a much-reported turning point occurred. In April 1987, the deputy president of the Serbian communist party, Slobodan Milošević, arrived at Kosovo Polje — by now a suburb of Priština — to mediate the simmering conflict. As he met with local Serbs, a crowd of nationalist Serbs outside the building began pelting stones at the (predominantly Albanian) police, who struck back with batons. As Milošević ventured outside to see what was happening, an elderly man approached him begging for help against “separatist police beating women and children.” The former retreated to a second-floor balcony and declared, while gesturing toward the Field of Blackbirds: “Noone shall be allowed to beat you again!” The crowd responded with chants of “Slobo, Slobo.”

This incident, which rebel leaders have proudly confessed to instigating — possibly in collusion with Milošević, who had met with some of them four days beforehand — was televised in all four corners of Serbia. It served as a firebrand for nationalist emotion. Transformed overnight from grey apparatchik to national hero, Milošević proceeded to wrest control of the communist party from Ivan Stambolić, his friend and benefactor for a quarter century. Stambolić, who in 2000 was assassinated on the eve of the Presidential election by eight Serbian secret police officers loyal to Milošević, has said he had seen that day at Kosovo Polje as the end of Yugoslavia.

While that may be an overstatement, certainly two basic taboos of the federation had been flaunted: on mass rallies and ethnic identity politics, respectively. Milošević, supported by hard-liners from Kosovo, followed up with more than sixty so-called “meetings of truth” on the Kosovo question across the length and width of Serbia. These mass rallies he deftly used to overthrow the provincial leaderships of Kosovo and Vojvoidina. At a November 1988 meeting in Belgrade, under the parole of “Brotherhood and Unity,” he thundered to a million listeners:

In grand demagogic style, he envisioned a new:

To be continued.

Update: Part II here.

In February 2005 a bizarre incident was reported in news media the world across: a 20-foot statue of King Léopold II (1835-1909) on horseback was reerected near Kinshasa’s central station after having spent four decades in an open-air dump. The statue was removed a few hours later, but would, according to Culture Minister Christophe Muzungu, be restored to a prominent location in a grand ceremony. The minister said people should not just see the negative side of the king, but also the positive aspects. “We are restoring the history of our country because a people without history is a people without a soul,” he declared.

That is one way of looking at it. Another was succintly put by Richard H. Davis in his book The Congo and Coasts of Africa (1907), based on travels in the country then King Léopold’s personal fiefdom: “Happy is the country without a history!”

The Congo has had no such luck. As we saw in the first installment of this series, four centuries of slave trade had already left a devastating impact on the societies of the Congo at the dawn of the colonial period. Yet the worst was still to come. The historian Robert Edgerton:

Who then was this tyrant of the rain forest, to be honored with statues by the descendants of his hapless victims? Léopold II of Belgium, a first cousin of Queen Victoria known for his sly and deceitful nature, was an unlikely imperial ruler. He was, after all, the purely titular monarch of a tiny country barely four decades old, composed of two ethnic factions and faced with a constant threat of annexation by greater powers. Despite this, or perhaps rather because of it, he kept harping on the boons of overseas expansion: “[S]ince history teaches that colonies are useful, that they play a great part in that which makes up the power and prosperity of states, let us strive to get one in our turn.” But his countrymen flatly refused.

For the Parliament, colonies meant huge investments in administration, education, infrastructure, and health care, with at best uncertain prospects of return, especially as economic analysis had shown free trade to be as profitable. Leopold’s dreams of empire by purchase - buying land on Fiji and Formosa; buying lakes on the Nile and draining them out; buying an island from Argentina; buying land in China, Vietnam, and Japan; buying the Philippines - all came to nought. Until, that is, he on January 7 1876 came across a brief note on the bottom of page six in The Times, which cited the explorer Verney Lovett Cameron on the “unspeakable richness” awaiting an “enterprising capitalist” in the Congo.

To get “a slice of this magnificent African cake,” which due to its inaccessibility had still escaped European conquest, Léopold concocted a three-step plan.

The first step came later that year as he hosted a conference in Brussels, gathering the leading explorers, scientists, and geographers of the day. Proposing to “open to civilisation the only part of our globe where it has yet to penetrate, to pierce the darkness that envelopes entire populations,” he secured the founding of an international philantropic society to be known as the Association Internationale Africaine (AIA). Léopold became the chair and only shareholder of what was in effect a private holding company with its own flag - a bright star shining in the center of a dark blue surface - and funded by a multinational banking consortium.

The next step, undertaken in 1878, was to hire as his agent the legendary Henry M. Stanley, just returned from his epic quest for David Livingstone. Stanley had for some time been trying to interest the British government in colonizing the land he had been mapping, without success. The King’s instructions were clear: “It is not a question of Belgian colonies. It is a question of creating a new State, as big as possible, and of running it [without] granting the slightest political power to the negroes. That would be absurd.” Stanley, a ruthless man considered by the notorious Tippu Tip a worse slave driver than any Arab, set to work using trinkets; an electric handshake to suggest supernatural strength; and as a last resort, naked force. Thus he persuaded 450 chiefs to sign away their lands, and the labor of their peoples, “for all posterity.”

Stanley’s compass pointing out the course of the Congo upon his water-stained map, photographed at Christie’s, 2002

Five expeditions later, in 1885, the AIA had established a string of trading stations along the Congo River. The uppermost one, the “Inner Station” in Joseph Conrad’s immortal novella Heart of Darkness, was located at Stanley Falls by agreement with Tippu Tip, who had his own bases there. Tip, the last of the great Zanzibari slave traders, would in fact be made a district governor of the entity created by Leópold’s final step.

In this brilliant move, Léopold had the AIA morph into a sovereign state with himself as chef d’état. By deft maneuvers centered on free trade guarantees, the “treaties” collected by Stanley, and a vow to combat the slave trade, he won diplomatic acceptance for this novelty. (Portugal’s claim to the Congo based upon Cão’s 1482 “discovery” was defused by a public campaign in Britain highlighting the crimes of the past, and the other powers were pitted against each other.) In April 1884, after relentless lobbying in Washington, the US recognized the AIA’s flag as that of a friendly government. 13 nations followed suit at the 1884-85 Berlin Conference, where most of Africa’s current borders were drawn up with pen and ruler.

Thus Léopold had pulled off what reason would suggest to be impossible: acquiring a region the size of India and bigger than Germany, England, Italy, France, and Spain combined, as probably the only private colony in history. Generous loans from Belgium enabled the new absolute monarch to get up and going his enterprise, which he for good measure baptized “The Congo Free State.”

The Berlin Act called for “effective occupation” of the territory, a requirement to which Leópold had no objection. The key to this was the creation in 1886 of the “Force Publique,” a mercenary-led “conscription army” based upon levies placed on local chiefs and on forced recruitment of children it rendered orphans. Led by European officers, armed with modern weaponry and peaking at nearly 20,000 men, it brutally quashed all resistance (”pacification”), forcing the Congolese to do their new master’s bidding. Between May and October 1887 alone, some 60,000 porters carried almost 1,000 tons of freight, mostly disassembled steamers, the 250 miles from Boma to the capital Léopoldville (now Kinshasa). Thousands died from the strain. In 1890 the slaves started on a railroad over the Crystal Mountains, completed eight years later. Now the Congo was open for business.

Hitherto the chief commodity pursued by Léopold’s men had been ivory. Unforgettably described in Conrad’s novella, which is inspired by the author’s stint as a steamer captain on the river in 1890, this trade was not all that profitable; the King ran up a troubling deficit. Over the next decade, however, the red numbers would turn a shiny black as the focus shifted to another natural resource of the Congo’s forests. The invention of the inflatable tire led to an insatiable demand for the sap from rubber wines.

This rubber boom would bear out a wry observation made by some American in 1885: Léopold related to the Congo just as Rockefeller did to Standard Oil. Incidentally, Rockefeller capital was itself involved via the American Congo Company, one of the numerous private contractors granted local monopolies on extracting rubber in return for half the proceeds. Such concessions were Léopold’s way of circumventing the Berlin Act’s ban on “a monopoly or favor of any kind in matters of trade.” Though trade was nominally free, Léopold declared by fiat that all rubber belonged to “the State”; thus there was nothing to buy or sell. He controlled many of the private companies himself and even reserved the better part of the Congo for his exclusive exploitation.

However, this was by far the least unethical side of his operation. Influenced by a book called Java, or How to Manage a Colony by a British attorney named Money, he had realized from the start that only a liberal use of slavery would return a handsome profit. He therefore unleashed a reign of terror upon his 20 million subjects to, as he put it, instill in them “a higher idea of the necessity of labor.” The slavery was imposed in the guise of “taxation.” Bertrand Russell sums it up well:

In the words of a stunned missionary, Léopold had created “a system of devilry hitherto undreamed of by his victims.” A late 19th century native song goes like this: “We are tired of living under this tyranny. We cannot endure that our women and children are taken away and dealt with by the white savages. We shall make war…. We know that we shall die, but we want to die. We want to die.”

The royal slave army, with its artillery and machine guns, unfailingly fulfilled such wishes. It even found the time to defeat the forces of the remaining Afro-Arab slavers, on whom it waged ferocious wars concluded by 1894. This was not necessarily to the advantage of the Congolese, however:

One of said blacks is on recording as lamenting: “No, we are not even slaves.”

On the bright side, profits could reach up to 700 percent. Léopold’s exorbitant returns, which he reinvested to make at least a billion in present-day dollars, financed lavish villas for Caroline: the prostitute teenage mistress he later married. He spent the equivalent of $6 million to enhance his palace at Laeken. To the 1897 World Fair in Brussels he contributed three artificial villages showcasing 267 Congolese who would sing, dance and conduct mock “tribal battles” for the spectators. By the toil of their countrymen the site of this human zoo would eventually become the sumptuous Cinquantenaire park with its Triumphal Arc, one of many public works that now grace the EU capital and have earned their donor a nice cognomen: “the Builder King.”

His underlings in the Free State had their own decoration projects. Like Conrad’s Kurtz, Force Publique commander Léon Rom ornated the fence posts around his flowerbeds with human heads on poles; he also had a rock garden full of rotting heads. An agent named Moray recounts the butchery of a village deemed insufficiently busy at work: “Thereupon the officer ordered us to cut off the heads of the men and hang them on the village palisades, and to hang the women and children on the palisades in the form of a cross.” This was, after all, a Christian civilizing mission.

As mentioned, troops were instructed to bring back a right hand for each cartridge fired. American missionary Joseph Clark reports in a letter of April 12 1895 that “it is blood-curdling to see them returning with hands of the slain and to find the hands of young children, amongst bigger ones, evidencing their ‘bravery.’” Indeed, hands and other limbs were routinely hacked off the living, smoked, and brought forth in baskets at the feet of officers to extract more bullets or prove that native ’sloth’ had been duly punished. Many units on patrol had a designated “keeper of the hands.”

Children mutilated by the soldiers. Photo: Lachlan Vass

Then there were certain other vices of the royal gendarmerie.

Click here for the famous photograph of Nsala staring at the scant remains of his daughter.

Unlike mass mutiliation, cannibalism did have a precedent in pre-colonial Congo, but it was not as widespread and brutal as it turned after the Arab slave trade had unraveled traditional societies. In the Free State period things deteriorated further. Much of the Force Publique was recruited from the most savage peoples of the Upper Congo, where the slave trade had hit the hardest; now cannibals with breechloading rifles were unleashed on the entire region. On occasion it was used as a means of terror: one would seal off a recalcitrant village and send in the cannibals, who were known to consume their victims more or less alive. White officers too ate human flesh. Meanwhile, Léopold, who never set foot in his fiefdom but kept informed, exulted in his newsletter: “The many horrors and atrocities which disgrace humanity give way little by little before our intervention.”

Léopold’s big lie did not go long unchallenged. The expression ‘crimes against humanity’ was coined as early as 1890 in a 16-page open letter to the King from George Washington Williams, an Afro-American minister and reporter whom the Belgian state had sent on an investigative tour. Though long extracts of his letter were published on both sides of the Atlantic, Williams’ account was largely ignored and he died the following year. His mantle was however donned by another Afro-American: William Sheppard (see photo), a Presbyterian missionary and himself the son of a slave. Sometimes known as “the black Livingstone,” Sheppard made pioneering use of photographic evidence. The Congo Free State sued him for libel and lost.

In time, such whistle-blowers would rally around the Englishman Edmund D. Morel. A shipping agent working in Antwerp for a major Liverpool line, Morel had made some intriguing observations. First, ships arrived from the Congo crammed with valuables (the difference between the real and the official value amounted to tens of millions in 2005 dollars). Second, the Free State imported chiefly guns and ammo. Inferring that he had “stumbled upon a secret society of murderers with a king for a [partner],” Morel quit his job in 1901 to found an activist newspaper. For the next twelve years he devoted his every waking hour to attacking “the system that is eating into the vitals of Africa.”

In 1904 Morel established the Congo Reform Association along with Roger Casement, the former British consul in the Congo, whose vivid accounts of flogging, murder, and the wholesale annihilation of villages outraged the British public. However, the Association was shunned by most European governments and the US, neither of whom wanted diplomatic unpleasantries. It was also fiercely resisted by Léopold’s international propaganda machine. For instance, a book-length shilling effort published in 1905 by a certain H. W. Wack concludes on this lofty proposition:

That appearance notwithstanding, the Congo Reform Association grew, enlisting such celebrity champions as Booker T. Washington, Mark Twain and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The first mass human rights movement in the 20th century, it was instrumental in shaming the Belgian Parliament into annexing the territory in 1908 - two years before it was contract-bound to do so anyway and eight years after it could have. Though the murders and slavery continued for a few more years, claiming an additional million lives, they had by the end of WWI been replaced with a kinder, gentler form of exploitation.

There were also less uplifting yet arguably more important reasons for the said transition. For one thing, industrial demand for wild rubber was being eclipsed by that for cultivated rubber, so that looting the Congo ceased to be as profitable. For another, labor was becoming a resource too scarce to waste by the methods which, together with the ensuing humanitarian disaster, had slashed the population in half in 23 years. The estimated death toll of ten million exceeds that of WWI.

One might expect this Holocaust-scale crime firmly to establish Léopold II and his business associates in the “monsters of history” hall of infamy, but this never really happened; and least of all in Belgium. Upon annexing the Congo the Belgian Parliament not only compensated the previous owner with 50 million francs to be drawn from there; it also commended his “grands sacrifices en faveur du Congo.”

Indeed, a mere decade after his death the following year, his compatriots had mostly forgotten about the scandal. At the famous colonial Tervuren museum in Brussels, there is still no mention of it. In 1995 Gerard Jacques, a former top diplomat who had just retired as head of the King’s ceremonial office, published a book which unabashedly charges: “The vicious campaign against Leopold II was caused by the greed of his adversaries [whose] campaign against the Congolese ‘atrocities’ culminated in the establishment of the Congo Reform Association in England.” And the airing in April 2004 of a BBC documentary film on the horrors was protested by the Foreign Minister, Louis Michel, who denounced it as “biased and unnuanced”; the Belgian royal house, which usually stands aloof from such matters nowadays, expressed “concern.”

Even among historians the story was largely unknown until the 1970s when Jules Marchal, then the Belgian ambassador to Liberia, saw a passing reference to a democide of ten million people in a local newspaper - ironically mirroring how King Léopold “discovered” the Congo a century before. Looking into this preposterous claim in order to refute it, he learned that the few surviving documents not burned by Léopold in a week-long bonfire had been classified by Belgian authorities. This spurred Marchal to produce a trailblazing four-volume work that rescued the atrocities from the memory hole, making him a successor to Edmund Morel. His treatise became the basis of Adam Hochschild’s best-selling King Leopold’s Ghost, in turn leading R. J. Rummel, the noted historian of modern genocide, to significantly revise upwards the sum total of people murdered by government in the 20th century.

Statue or no, King Léopold keeps haunting the Congo. In its 46th year of independence, what is now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo remains a treasury plundered by private armies to benefit wealthy foreigners, not seldom through non-voluntary labor. So it was perhaps darkly fitting when on independence day June 30 1960, King Baudouin of Belgium, himself a major stockholder in a mining company established by his grand-uncle, declared: “The independence of the Congo is the crowning of the work conceived by the genius of King Léopold II.”

These inflammatory words drew an impassioned reply from the infant nation’s first prime minister, to this day the only democratically elected leader in the history of the Congo. But less than 7 months later, Patrice Émery Lumumba had been literally liquidated by Belgian government agents in the wake of a CIA-sponsored coup.

And that shall be the focus of the next installment in this series.

In theory, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) should be among the richest countries on earth. After all, its vast territory brims with cobalt; copper; cadmium; oil; industrial and gem diamonds; coltan; flaggold; silver, zinc; manganese; tin; germanium; uranium; radium; bauxite; iron ore; timber; coal; and hydroelectric potential. Yet the DRC consistently ranks in the bottom ten of the Human Development Index. In its northeastern region the deadliest conflict since WWII continues to claim about 1,000 lives a day. Not inappropriately then, the name of the capital Kinshasa, where nearly 80% dwell in slums or squatter settlements, derives from the word kinsasa, meaning “why are things happening this way?”

This series of mine on Congolese history seeks to shed some light on why. The first two installments appeared in slightly different form on various other websites, including dKos and Booman Tribune.

The initial entry, below, looks at how the advanced Kongo Kingdom fell prey to the European - and later, Arab - slave trade that began in the 16th century, robbing the region of no less a resource than its people.

You may want to start with my primer on the stunning lay of the land.

On the ancient maps, regions marked terra incognita were not left blank but rather filled in by the imagination. And in the case of sub-Saharan Africa, European mapmakers would conjure up two-headed people, dragons, and the fabled Prester John. Thus the Portuguese navigator Diogo Cão must have been astounded when in 1482, arriving by chance at the Congo’s mouth, he found an organized society with a common language and a stratified political system - not at all unlike the fledgling nation-states of Europe.

Cão and his crew were the first Europeans ever to hit upon a large-scale foreign civilization. This was the Kongo Kingdom, evolved in the late 14th century when a bundle of Iron Age chiefhoods joined into a federation governed by a king. At its height extending from present-day northwestern Angola to Gabon and from the river’s mouth to Malebo Pool, the Kongo enjoyed a number of satelite states; a powerful urban nobility; the cultivation of twelve kinds of vegetables with a different one becoming ripe each month of the year; a complex religion with belief in an afterlife; sophisticated crafts including copper metallurgy; a money economy; and trade routes stretching thousands of miles across the African continent. The king (Manikongo) could levy an 80,000 strong army if required and maintained an elaborate court in the capital, Mbanza Kongo.

A representation of the first encounter between Portuguese and Bakongo. The latter initially thought the former to be water spirits.

Spurred by Cão’s discovery, a Portuguese expedition arrived at this capital in 1491 and was warmly welcomed by the king, Nzinga Nkuma. The travelers, impressed with the dignity and civilized mores of the Bakongo (people of the Kongo), were invited to build mission schools and churches. Indeed the Franciscan missionaries secured the prompt conversion of the king, who was baptized Dom João I - the name of his Portuguese counterpart. They also administered a decade of religious instruction to Nzinga Mbemba, the first-born son of his principal wife, who succeeded his father in 1506 or 1507. His seizure of the throne was a clear violation of tradition contingent upon the imported European notion of primogeniture and backed by Portuguese cavalry and rifles.

Better known as Afonso I, the new Manikongo was not only a zealous Christian but an aficionado of European culture, science and statecraft. On a 1514 visit to Portugal during which he amazed his hosts with his great piety, he plowed through five thick volumes of Portuguese law and remarked on its excessive harshness. He made Christianity the state religion, built churches and introduced an extensive program of education for the nobility. One of his sons became a professor in the humanities in Lisbon and another, Henrique, became the first black African Bishop in the Catholic Church - as well as the last until 1970.

Unfortunately, in keeping with the traditions of his society, Afonso agreed with the Church that slavery was consistent with the faith. Little did he know that this stance, and the Faustian bargain built upon it, would spell the doom of his civilization.

There is little doubt that slavery was a long-established practice in the Kongo, and apparently slaves could be bought and sold. However, a majority of the population were free subjects, slaves being either convicts; debtors; members of other societies captured in war; or children given away in dowry settlements. Most were domestic servants in noble households and fairly benignly treated. They were status symbols more than means to profit - until Afonso unwisely sold the Portuguese a few.

The customers soon returned for more. Based farther north on the island of São Tomé (see map), slave traders used a panoply of devious tactics to secure the supply. One such was inciting communities to revolt against Afonso so they could legally wage war upon them and enslave the resultant prisoners. Another was extorting the king to sell them slaves by threatening to provide his aristocratic enemies with arms and other commodities or refuse to ship his other wares like copper, silver, ivory and peppers. Eventually Afonso resorted to raiding neighboring inland peoples to meet their demands. Though the considerable revenues financed the hiring of priests, artisans and teachers as well as luxuries for the ever-wealthier nobility, and enabled the empire to expand until it was one of the mightiest on the continent, these gains would prove sadly ephemeral.

By 1516 the Kongo was exporting 4,000 slaves annually. By the 1520s big equitorial areas were becoming depopulated. By the 1530s the slave trade had become so profitable that some Bakongo were selling off their family members; the Milky Way, which traced the axis of slaves from the inland to the coast, was nicknamed Nzila Bazombo - “the Road of the Slavers.” In several parts of Portugal more than half the population were slaves, and as the market was being saturated there increasing numbers were shipped across the Atlantic to work the mines and plantations of Brazil.

Upon Afonso’s death in the 1540s, which tellingly enough went unnoticed by his “royal brother,” the Devil would at last exact his due. The depopulation and social disruption wrought by the slave trade led to political disintegration as the country was thrown into turmoil, culminating in a 1568 foreign invasion from which it never recovered. Civil strife yielded ever new fodder to the slave trade, the proceeds from which financed ever more civil strife. Eight kings ruled between 1614 and 1641. In 1678, following a crushing defeat of the Bakongo by a Portuguese army, a visitor to the capital described it as an abandoned ruin where flocks of elephants roamed. The Kongo persisted for two further centuries as a nominal entity encompassing hundreds of tiny chiefdoms dependent on the slave trade. Today the Bakongo survives as an ethnic group of more than ten million, yet its political dissolution is complete: villages being fully independent, the ancient kingdom is but legend.

‘Der König im Congo,’ from Allain Manesson Mallet: Beschreibung des Gantzen Welt, vol. II. Frankfürt am Main 1685.

There is perhaps some poetic justice in the fact that Portugal too was ultimately ruined by the slave trade. Soaking in the cash flow and neglecting to reinvest, it lost control of the trade routes during the late 17th century as British, Spanish, French and Dutch traders appeared on the scene.

When effectively terminated by the end of the Napoleonic Wars following the British ban in 1807, the European slave trade had unraveled traditional communities throughout the Congo basin. In 1816 a British scientific expedition sailed up to the town of Boma, the farthest navigable point; its leader Captain James Tuckey found the locals to be “sulky looking vagabonds, dirty, swarming with lice.” He noted that they had been given only gunpowder, muskets and liquor in exchange for slaves.

As the European slave trade waned, other sharks began plying the waters. Though the Arab slave trade had long traditions on the continent, a major slave revolt near Basra in present-day Iraq significantly cut back its scale in the 9th century. However, by the late 18th century it had resurged with a vengeance - 50-70,000 slaves were now taken annually to the Middle East, some winding up in India or even China. By the 1880s it had accomplished what even the European slave trade did not: undoing the highly advanced Luba states in the Kasai province of present-day DRC.

Based on Zanzibar, Afro-Arab slavers and their local allies would conduct savage raids on villages, marching off their captives to East Africa in massive caravans the routes of which were littered with the corpses of the fallen.

“Slaves abandoned”; engraving based upon a sketch by David Livingstone. Originally in Horace Waller (ed): The Last Journals of David Livingstone. London 1874, p.62.

On June 27 1866, David Livingstone recorded in his diary: “To-day we came upon a man dead from starvation… One of our men wandered and found a number of slaves with slave-sticks on, abandoned by their master from want of food; they were too weak to be able to speak or say where they had come from; some were quite young.”

Like the European equivalent it gradually replaced, the Arab slave trade did much to depopulate the Congo and grind down its social structure. In his classic Dick Sand, Jules Verne describes the effect of the slavers’ raids:

The Arab slave trade would prove a brutal interlude between rounds of European exploitation. In 1878, the very year Verne’s book was published, the latter of the said explorers was hired by a scheming European king to establish a state on the wooded plateau. Authorized at the 1884-85 Berlin Conference, where the heart of Africa was carved up by the Europeans, this project ostensibly aimed to end the Arab slave trade in the Congo Basin.

Aboard an Arab slave ship intercepted by the Royal Navy, 1869.

And so it did, but only to get rid of competition. For as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle later remarked, King Léopold II of Belgium had a new idea in the name of progress: he would enslave the natives in their home to extract other riches. In the next installment of this series we shall move upstream to see the rainforest becoming a vast genocidal gulag designed for stealing rubber - the Congo Free State.

Crossposted from European Tribune.

Utterly lost in the news mix of recent weeks was the report that a left-wing Catalan party has questioned the Spanish government about the massive use of mustard gas against indigenous resistance in the Rif mountains of northern Morocco some 80 years ago - war crimes Spain has yet to acknowledge. Resentment lingers in the region, however, reinforced by claims that the gassing continues to render land inarable; and worse, give rise to rampant cancer.

Nowadays the claim to fame of the Rif, fittingly rhyming with ‘kif,’ is to be one of Europe’s chief providers of hashish. But it wasn’t always so. There are still people alive who remember the region as the center of perhaps the most astounding insurgency in modern history, whereby ragtag mountain fighters demolished an imperial army.

The Rif mountains are home to some 19 ethnic groups speaking Tarifit, one of the ancient Berber languages of North Africa.

Morocco was an independent state (and notorious pirate haven) when European imperialist powers set upon it in the late 19th century. The stiffest resistance to colonization was offered by Berber tribesmen: descendants of North Africa’s original inhabitants, who once ruled all the land between Morocco and Egypt. Making zealous converts to Islam after the Arab invasion, Berbers were largely responsible for the conquest of Spain in 711. This time around, however, their effectiveness was crippled by ethnic strife and the tenuousness of tribal alliances. By 1912 most of Morocco was a French protectorate. Spain controlled the northern fifth, owing much to a British wish of insulating Gibraltar from the French.

Yet the inhospitable Rif mountains, whose particularly defiant Berber tribes had only nominally acknowledged the Sultans of Morocco, remained unoccupied. When this was rumored to change in 1919, the Spanish-educated Abd al-Karim (1882-1963), a disillusioned former functionary in the colonial administration, began uniting the tribes against the invaders. The sophisticated al-Karim was helped by his brother Mohammad, a rousing military leader. In July 1921 Spanish troops under the command of the adventurous General Manuel Fernández Silvestre crossed the Amekran River despite warnings by al-Karim that this would be considered an act of war; supposedly, the General laughed at this notification.

By mid-afternoon they were surrounded by Rifi. After five days of siege, several hundred Spaniards were killed and the rest expelled at the cost of 8 or 9 Berber irregulars. This launched a fierce guerrilla campaign of raids, ambushes, and attacks on overextended supply lines. In three weeks, 3,000 Berbers armed with outdated flintlock rifles killed more than four times as many Spaniards as the Americans have lost during two years of war in Iraq. An additional 13,000 fled in panic, leaving behind enough cannons, guns, ammunition, and other gear to equip a minor army. The ‘disaster of Annual’ remains one of the most throroughly repressed events in 20th century Spanish history, and conversely, one of the most celebrated in North Africa.

The smell is terrible as the Spanish Foreign Legion enters Nador town on September 18, 1921, after the disaster of Annual.

Still aided by his loyal brother, Abd al-Karim proceeded to seize the entire Spanish zone, except a few coastal outposts such as Ceuta and Melilla, and control it for about five years. On February 1 1923 he proclaimed the Republic of the Rif, a constitutional state with a formal administration. A modern army of 80,000 men was created, complete with machine guns, howitzers, and hired defectors from the French Foreign Legion. Abd himself held the title of Emir, refusing that of Sultan.

It was the intervention of the increasingly worried French that would spell the doom of the Rif Republic. When they advanced on the Berbers, the latter chased them back almost as far as Fez. But in 1925 the French and the Spanish joined forces - some 235,000 in total - to finish off the rebels. The cast of characters is remarkable; the French commander being none other than Marshal Henri Phillippe Pétain and the leader of the first wave of Spanish troops, landing in the heartland of al-Karim’s tribe, being the Spanish Foreign Legion’s second in command, Colonel Francisco Franco. Pinched between these two fascist dictators in spe, the Republic of the Rif collapsed the following year, ending what has rightly been called “one of the more astonishing bids for self-determination by a people bearing the yoke of colonialism.”

Abd al-Karim was exiled to the island of Réunion, Napoleon-style, until 1947 when he settled in Cairo. He continued opposing French rule in the Maghreb until his death. In 1949, at the behest of Ho Chi Minh’s government, he appealed to North African troops fighting for France in Indochina (Vietnam): “The victory of colonialism, even at the other end of the world, is a defeat for us and a setback to our cause. The victory of liberty in any part of the world is our victory, the sign of our approaching independence.”

This history, though all but forgotten, is undisputed. More contentious are the oral traditions in the Rif insisting that the Spanish deployed chemical weapons to quell the Rifi. Old people have described how a ‘yellow smoke’ burned the skin, causing asphyxiation. Among them is the nearly 100 years old Mohammad Farji, who told Islam Online how “the sky was pouring sulfur-similar liquids, people went blind and frail, cattle perished and vast swathes of farmlands became wastelands.” If true, this would be an unacknowledged crime against humanity, since chemical arms were internationally banned through the Treaty of Versailles in 1919; the year Britain used similar methods in Iraq.

In his book Historia Secreta de Annual (Madrid, 1999), Spanish historian Juan Pando confirms the use of German-produced mustard gas in aerial attacks from 1923 on. Gas being the treacherous weapon it is, official records abound with names of poisoned Spaniards. (Presumably, such self-toxication had graver effects than the Rifi attempts at retaliation: throwing bombs filled with chili powder.) And Sebastian Balfour, a British historian, shows in his Deadly Embrace (London, 2002) that Spain deployed chemical weapons as early as 1921 and intensively from 1924, killing thousands. Balfour believes it is high time for Spain to recognize this and offer apologies to the victims, as demanded by Moroccan NGOs.

Locals allege that the chemical weapons, as well as inducing cancer, are still rendering farmland arid.

Some of the latter - notably the local Association for Toxic Gas Victims - go further, asserting that the war crimes still produce fresh victims today. According to the activists, hospital records reveal that 60 percent of Morocco’s prevalence of larynx and stomach cancer is found in the affected parts of the Rif. As Pando notes, however, no such long-term harm is seen after the much more intensive gas use in Europe during World War I. Hence, if the Rifi are indeed abnormally prone to cancer, this must have other causes. Regardless, belief in the mustard gas theory holds strong in the region. It has not helped that the Moroccan government repeatedly has banned international conferences to look into the matter.

Half-forgotten conflicts have a way of weaving themselves into current affairs. Interestingly, it is my understanding that the Moroccans arrested for the Madrid Central Station attacks are Berbers from northern Morocco. If so, and given how local grievances are being reinterpreted to fit the narrative of the West attacking Islam, it is not inconceivable that resentment of the Spanish poison gas and its supposed late effects was among the motivating factors. Abd al-Karim, who defeated the Spanish invaders under the banner of jihad, is certainly likely to have been an inspiration.

The legacy of imperialism lives on in other ways as well. As Lee Smith has pointed out on Slate in respect to the incomplete decolonization of Morocco: “If the Spanish electorate believed that committing 1,300 troops to Iraq had needlessly exposed it to the jihadists’ ire, it ought to reconsider the 6,000 Spanish forces stationed in Ceuta and Melilla.”

There is much to ponder for the once proud colonial power.

Crossposted from European Tribune.

Israel has for the second time turned down a Polish request for the extradition of the 87-year old former labor camp commander Solomon Morel, wanted for genocide and crimes against humanity. An investigation by a Polish war crimes authority suggests that Morel is responsible for about 1,538 deaths at Świętochłowice-Zgoda, a sub-camp at Auschwitz. Himself an Auschwitz survivor who had lost more than 30 relatives, Morel was placed in charge of the camp by the Soviets in February 1945. The detainees were ethnic Germans. Some of them had been active Nazis, but many were only guilty of having German ancestry.

Eye-witnesses have alleged that Morel, in his craving for revenge, oversaw and indulged in acts of cruelty equal to the Nazis’ darkest deeds.

Morel fled to Israel in 1993 as Polish justice authorities launched a criminal investigation against him. At the same time his story was brought to light by journalist and fellow Jew John Sack in the book An Eye for An Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945. Solomon Morel now lives in hiding in Tel Aviv.

The Telegraph reported on the case back in February:

Świętochłowice-Zgoda was one of the some 40 sub-camps in the gigantic Auschwitz complex. During Morel’s tenure from February to November 1945, the about 6,000 inmates were tortured, degraded, starved, and used as slave labor in mines and metallurgical works (he later submitted an MA thesis to Wrocław University called Inmate Labor and its Significance). According to the affidavits of survivors, he took delight in smashing skulls. His guards would force detainees to jump on each other’s spines and train dogs to bite off men’s genitals on command. People were immersed in freezing water until they died. Starvation drove the inmates to eat grass. Morel also allowed an outbreak of typhoid fever which claimed more than 100 lives a month.

From the very first day, Morel made it clear that his business was revenge. This motivation was shared with many colleagues in the Office of State Security, a political police agency formed by Stalin in 1945, whose officers corps was initially stacked with ethnic Jews. Some 200,000 ethnic Germans were detained in the 1,255 ‘de-Nazification’ camps; up to 80,000 are believed to have perished under the frequently grisly conditions.

It may seem pointless to now punish Solomon Morel, considering his age and the mitigating factors, but there is no sensible reason not to try him. That Israel brushes the charges aside with a staple insinuation of anti-semitism is regrettable. Anti-semitism is indeed on the march; but here was a chance to demonstrate an impartial commitment to justice which could only strike a blow to such execrable sentiment. And after all, as the late John Sack said to 60 Minutes in 1993, the lesson of this forgotten history is surely that:

Appropriate as it would be to try this man, we might as well keep in mind that the perpetrators of equally unspeakable - and far more recent - crimes are walking free among us here in Europe. They include not just the guards but also the masterminds of a concentration camp known as Omarska.

Crossposted from European Tribune, joining which is a classy move.

I did not adopt my pen name in honor of Sirocco (1951). This is a dull Casablanca knock-off, casting Bogart as another jaded ex-pat with a conscience buried so deep underneath his trenchcoat that it can barely be retrieved. One of the few reviewers at Amazon.com ranks it the 48th best of his 50 films.

From Sirocco (1951). Director: Curtis Bernhardt.

Yet the plot rings oddly familiar, and not just for riding Casablanca’s coattails through the clichés of exotic melodrama. The Bogart tough-guy, Harry Smith, is an American war profiteer in a Middle Eastern country ravaged by insurgency against a hamfisted Western occupant. Nick Clooney in The Cincinnati Post recounts his viewing experience so:

As when taking a rook exposes you to checkmate, tactical gain can cause strategic defeat. The uprising, explains the Syrian emir, aims to provoke the French into defeating themselves by lashing out in a way that cedes the moral high ground in the eyes of the world. And of course, his men believe themselves to be fighting for their homeland, while their enemies know themselves to be fighting to retain somebody else’s.

These are universal traits of de facto occupation scenarios, as the French discovered the hard way. Chirac was himself a soldier in the Algerian War - a conflict in which France had more at stake than the US does in Iraq. Algeria was not only the most hard-won colonial asset of the French Republic, seized at great cost in the war of 1830-1847. It was considered a province of France itself, unlike, for instance, Morocco. Even so, France lost its will to administer and endure the required inhuman violence. And contrary to myth, that is not because the French are ’soft.’

Improbably in light of the past, the Arab street now looks to France as its defender against imperial aggression. An excellent BBC World Service documentary series from last year, France and the Arab World, explores the dealings of Paris with its clients in Damascus and Alger and its motives for assisting these undeniably oppressive regimes. To reveal the conclusions would be unkind, since all three programs can be listened to for free at the BBC site.

What is clear, though, is that France has learned a lesson the USA has not: To de facto occupy a territory whose population has a national consciousness, even a fledgling such, is incompatible with democracy. If it lasts, the situation spurs not the democratization of the occupied as much as the de-democratization of the occupant.

It is unlikely to last, however.

By the way: Bienvenue to my blog.