Author: AK Ray
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: May 3, 2003
I am an old man. Forgive me if contemporary
events make me recall the past. Perhaps therein I perceive lessons that
others, younger, may not. As CNN and BBC went on describing the events
of Day 21 of the Iraq war, my mind went back to Germany in April 1945.
Specifically Berlin. The great Russian winter offensive commenced on January
12, with 2.5 million men, 41,000 pieces of artillery, more than 6,000 tanks
and over 6,500 aircraft. By February 15, the Oder-Neisse line had been
reached. After the necessary pause, the final push towards Berlin began
on April 16.
Zhukov's massive force reached Berlin
on April 22-a distance of some 60 kilometres and surrounded it by April
25, and then began what was perhaps the most horrendous artillery pounding
in human history, lots of evidence of which I saw in East Berlin in 1955.
On the same day, Bradley's 12th Army Group made contact with Konev's First
Ukrainian Front at Torgau on the Elbe. Organised German resistance had
collapsed, but there was fierce street fighting in Berlin in which the
teenagers of Hitlerjugend took a massive suicidal part. By May 2, Russian
control over Berlin was complete. Meanwhile, after appointing Admiral Doenitz
as his successor, Hitler had committed suicide on April 30.
By contrast, Saddam Hussein and
his Ba'athist nomenklatura scurried away into burrows under cover of darkness.
That is to say, if they had not all been squashed in the first strike on
a 'target of opportunity'. If this possibility is indeed a fact, all those,
including that garrulous liar, Mohammad al-Sahaf, whom one saw on Iraqi
TV and Arab channels, were only doppelgangers.
All said and done, what an ignominious
exit of the ruling clique in Baghdad one witnessed! Perhaps, the end was
apt and just for the regime headed by the "Tikriti Butcher" as Saddam Hussein
was called by the Arabs in his neighbourhood. But, Saddam or his soul-if
he had any- need not worry: He will continue to be idolised or even deified
by the starry-eyed dolts of our fashionably left, who do not yet realise
that to be aggressively anti-US is passé even in Cuba.
As soon as US President George W
Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair made it clear that they meant
business, didn't an assortment of our mutually certified secularists get
into their well-rehearsed act and proclaim what a true and great secularist
ruler Saddam Hussein was? As proof, they cited the suppression of madrasas
and other centres of Islamic religious instruction. Bless their innocent
(?) souls, they are unaware of the phenomenon that in every Muslim country,
such institutions and the ulema who run or control them, are potentially
alternative sources and structures of power and legitimacy. Obviously then,
Saddam Hussein could not tolerate them, particularly the Shiite ones.
Look at what this paragon of secularism
did when the war was three or four days old. On TV, he urged his own people
and the whole ummah of believers to rise up in jihad against 'unbelievers';
he asked them to develop the true jihadist mentality and he told them that,
as 'believers', they should walk on the path of Allah (fi sabilillahi).
That, according to our certified secularists, must be the quintessence
of secularism. And those who do not agree are saffronists. Would you not
say that, in this city, the whole stretch from Jamia to JNU needs sanitisation?
One day, during the war, I was struck
by a by-lined story in a local English-language daily, which began with
the statement that Iraqis were being "slaughtered"-by the coalition forces,
of course. Now, now, that was a real scoop because not even the Arab TV
channels broadcasting out of Iraq had said any such thing. Who could be
the source? Must be someone resident at Gaborone, or Port Moresby, or even
Valparaiso. Or could it be that famous bearded mediaperson who has always
talked to someone in Iraq only the other day?
Slaughter means butchery, deliberate
killing. Not even Al-Jazeera nor BBC nor Al-Arabiya had spoken of any butchery
by the coalition forces. Where then was the slaughter? True, the scene
of those maimed, burned or otherwise injured in the air-strikes were heart-rending;
the wails of those who lost their loved ones will continue to ring in the
ears for a long, long time. But war, after all, is a bloody and messy business,
and there can be no war in which no lives will be lost-except, of course,
in the dreams of Beltway geniuses. Slaughter? Let us look briefly at what
humanity has witnessed and survived.
Remember Battle of Britain, which
lasted from August 8 to September 30 in 1940? It began with 1,485 sorties
by Luftwaffe on August 8; on August 15, there were 1,786 sorties. London
came in for special attention from September 7 to 30. The attack reached
its peak on September 15, when 1,000 bombers and 700 fighters swept over
London in wave after wave. Civilian casualties during this period were
300-600 dead and 1,000-3,000 injured per day. During the 'blitz' in November,
a 500 bomber Luftwaffe raid practically razed Coventry, including the famous
cathedral on November 14-15. There was also a devastating raid on London.
By the time the blitz' ended in May 1941, it had killed 43,000 civilians,
and seriously wounded 51,000. The British did not complain about being
"slaughtered".
On the other side, RAF carried out
a 1,000 bomber raid on Cologne on May 30-31, 1942. It was a devastating
assault, but left the cathedral untouched. During July 26-29, 1943, Hamburg
was incinerated by RAF. Two successive mass bombing assaults produced,
as Goebbels states in his diary, "a catastrophe the extent of which simply
staggers the imagination". There were tornado-like firestorms, and the
city was reduced to rubble. Civilian casualties were "enormous." Some 800,000
survivors were rendered homeless. On February 13-14, 1945, there was a
massive raid by RAF during the night, followed by a similar raid by USAF
during the day on Dresden. "Uncontrollable fire-storms" swept the city.
At least 100,000 civilians perished. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki stories
are well-known.
In the early autumn of 1955, my
wife and I, at the invitation of Marshal Grechko, Commander of the Russian
forces in Germany, visited Brandenburg, Weimer Leipzig and Dresden as guests
of the Soviet Kommandatura. We travelled by road, and saw evidence of the
horrible devastation caused by war. At Dresden, standing on the verandah
of the somewhat badly damaged Semper Gallery, I noticed a park dotted by
what appeared to be low hillocks. I was told that the entire area had been
totally razed during that fateful night and day; there was no one to dig
out the dead and the injured from under the rubble. In the end, the debris
was just piled up and covered with earth. One remembered the horror, but
no one talked of slaughter. If anything qualified as slaughter, it was
the planned killing of six million Jews, some 4.5 million Poles, Lidice
and other atrocities by the Nazis, particularly in the Soviet Union which
suffered 10-15 million civilian dead.
What happened during World War II
does not justify civilian deaths in Iraq. Yet, let us recognise the fact
no one regrets civilian deaths more than the fighting man. Hearts must
bleed, and rightly too, for the civilian dead and injured in Gulf War II
but why does not any progressive here recall Chemical Ali gassing 5,000
innocent Kurd civilians in one day on Saddam's orders? Why is there such
a calculated silence here about the death of some 4,000 innocent civilians
in the WTC outrage on 9/11? Because these were socialistic, anti-imperialist,
anti-colonial etc etc? Or, were these instances of fi sabilillahi? Did
Mahmud Ghaznavi not deliberately kill, according to Muslim chroniclers,
some 50,000 infidels at Somnath in AD 1025? Call that slaughter and see
what happens.
It is really an instance of our
political blindness that no one seems to have grasped the most important
fallout of Gulf War II-that a cold shiver is going up the spines of many
Arab and Muslim rulers. Not for the reason you would immediately latch
on to, but something else. About that, later.
