Author: Helena

This morning our Quaker Meeting held its regular (generally monthly) “Meeting for Worship with a concern for Business”. Since we don’t have a paid minister, it’s the responsibility of all members of the Meeting community to run all the Meeting’s affairs. So it’s quite a bit of work– but that’s the price we pay so that the spiritual gifts of all of us are equally recognized and valued. I love our way of doing things! (But boy, it was hot in the room this morning, even with all fans whirring like crazy.)
This evening we have the regular (also, generally monthly) business meeting of the C’ville Center for Peace and Justice. Phew! Enough meetings!
Meanwhile, here are a few of the other things I’ve been thinking about:
(1) The terrible current death toll from terror attacks inside Iraq. AFP is reporting today that More than 110 Iraqis were killed and 300 wounded in a three day suicide bombing blitz… That includes the incident in Musayyib where a fuel truck was exploded, though there are differing accounts of whether that was an intended part of the plan or not.
But how can someone culpably idiotic like Dick Cheney claim that the Iraqi insurgency is “in its last throes”?
How can any US leaders credibly claim that they brought “security and freedom” to Iraq’s people?
My first thoughts are for members of the country’s Shiite community, which seems to be the target of this wave of terror attacks. They must be feeling so pained, so vulnerable.
How long can Ayatollah Sistani and others who urge nonviolence continue to restrain the aggrieved from trying to hit back at those they accuse?
Meantime, I’d like to propose that communities around the world that held a 3-minute silence for 50 victims of terror in the UK also stage a silent commemoration for all the victims of violence in Iraq.
You have to know that many of those who were wounded in the attacks in Iraq, whose lives could have been saved if they’d had access to the kinds of medical services available in Iraq before March 2003, ended up dying in July 2005 because of the degradation of the country’s medical system and other public services under the impact of occupation. Perhaps those are the lives that we in the west should mourn the most.
(2) Sir Jeremy Greenstock— who’da thunk it? Remember Greenstock, the tight-lipped professional diplomat who was the UK’s representative at the UN during the lead-up to the US/UK invasion of Iraq, and after that was London’s representative inside occupied Iraq? So it turns out he wants to publish a tell-all memoir about those experiences. Okay, maybe not tell-exactly-all. But at least, tell a whole lot more than Tony Blair’s government currently wants told…
This, from the London Observer:

Publication of The Costs of War by Sir Jeremy Greenstock, UK ambassador to the UN during the build-up to the 2003 war and the Prime Minister’s special envoy to Iraq in its aftermath, has been halted. In an extract seen by The Observer, Greenstock describes the American decision to go to war as ‘politically illegitimate’ and says that UN negotiations ‘never rose over the level of awkward diversion for the US administration’. Although he admits that ‘honourable decisions’ were made to remove the threat of Saddam, the opportunities of the post-conflict period were ‘dissipated in poor policy analysis and narrow-minded execution’…
Greenstock is also thought to be scathing about Bremer and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Greenstock’s British publishers, Random House, were remaining tight-lipped but it is thought that the book is almost certain not to be published in the autumn as planned. It was also to be serialised in a British newspaper.
… The Foreign Office last night issued a statement: ‘Civil Service regulations which apply to all members of the diplomatic service require that any retired official must obtain clearance in respect of any publication relating to their service. Sir Jeremy Greenstock’s proposed book is being dealt with under this procedure.’

Oh, censorship– don’t you love it? So much for a commitment to the basics of democracy…
(3) And while we’re on the subject of a not-yet-post-colonial Britain, I wanted to mention that I’ve been hurriedly reading an amazingly good book called Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya. The author, Caroline Elkins, was a doctoral student in the History dept at Harvard, where she evidently found some excellent mentors amongst her teachers. Building on a wide variey of sources, she tells the story of the brutal counter-insurgency campaign the British waged in the 1950s against a nationalist secret organization in Kenya called Mau Mau.
The parallels with the situation in occupied Iraq (and Palestine) today are shockingly numerous, and quite mind-searing.
The testimonies she records– from perpetrators as well as survivors of British colonial violence– are quite disgusting, including a lot more lethal violence than in Iraq or Palestine, as well as a lot of “interrogation” techniques that are just about exactly the same.
At the height of the anti-Mau Mau campaign, the British colonial authorities had moved just about the entire 1.5-million population of Kenya’s Kikuyu community into barbed-wire-fenced detention camps. In a bizarre system called the “pipeline” they were supposed to be moved between these camps according to whether and how much they cooperated with their British captors.
Elkins writes (p.xvi) that,

Officially, fewer than one hundred Europeans, including settlers, were killed and some eighteen hundred [pro-British] loyalists died at the hands of Mau Mau. In contrast, the British reported that more than eleven thousand Mau Mau were killed in action, though the empirical and demographic evidence I unearthed calls into serious question the validity of this figure. I now believe there was in late colonial Kenya a murderous campaign to eliminate Kikuyu people, a campaign that left tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, dead. Mau Mau has been portrayed as one of the most savage and barbaric uprisings of the twentieth century. But in this book I ask that we reconsider this accepted orthodoxy and examine the crimes perpetrated by colonial forces against Mau Mau, and the conisderable measures that the British colonial government undertook to conceal them.

Among the many parallels with today’s “counter-insurgency situations” in Iraq and Palestine:
(a) The fact that the worst anti-personnel atrocities against Mau Mau suspects (and innocent Kikuyu) were perpetrated by settlers– whether civilians, or those hastily drafted into the colonial army;
(b) The kinds of explanations given by the colonial authorities for the anti-British actions of the Mau Mau– including that they it was “psychopathological in origin”, not political; and that it stemmed from the unique problems the Kikuyu had in “engaging with modernity”, and thus represented some kind of “crisis of modernization” within Kikuyu society.
H’mm. Well if modernization includes British settler colonialism and consigning all the indigenes to gulags, maybe that is justifiably judged “hard to deal with”???
More on Elkins’ great book later, I hope.
(4) I’ve also been reading Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist’s amazing 2000 book, A History of Bombing. It’s a very informative and fairly unconventionally organized book. Here’s a handy little excerpt from the history for 1920:

Like other colonial powers, the British had already been bombing restless natives in their territories for several years. It began with the Pathans on India’s northwestern border in 1915. It didn’t help much just to destroy their villages. But if their irrigation ditches were bombed, their water supply would be emptied and the topsoil washed away from the terraces. Then they got the message.
The British bombed revolutionaries in Egypt and the rebellious Sultan of Darfur in 1916. In 1917, bombers put down an uprising in Mashud, on India’s border with Afghanistan. During the third Afghan war in 1919, Dacca, Jalalabad, and Kabul were bombed by a British squadron chief named Arthus Harris. In his memoirs he writes that the war was won by a single strike with a ten-kilo bomb on the Afghani king’s palace. Harris would spend the rest of his life trying to repeat that strike. [He was the one who organized the fire-bombing of Dresden in WW2.]
That same year, the Egyptians demanded independence, and the RAF sent in three squadrons of bombers to control the rebellious masses. In 1920, Enzeli in Iran was bombed in an attempt to create a British puppet state, and in Trans-Jordan the British put down an uprising with bombs that killed 200.
This kind of thing was, only ten years after the first [aerial] bomb, already routine. But in Iraq the assignment was different. It was called ‘control without occupation.’ The RAF and its bombers were assigned to replace completely fifty-one battalions of soldiers, which was what the army had needed to control a country that, during the First World War, had freed itself from centuries of Turkish rule and now refused to accept the British as their new masters…
The first report from Baghdad describes an air raid that causes wild confusion among the natives and their families. “Many of them jumped into a lake, making a good target for the machine guns.”
Churchill wanted to be spared such reports…

Plus ca change plus c’est la meme chose, don’t you think?

The column I wrote earlier this week on New Zealand is in today’s Christian Science Monitor. They cut it pretty drastically and I see now there’s a little bit of infelicitous copy-editing in there. Basically, though, the editors did a pretty good job.
It probably wasn’t fair to cram into just the one small column all I had to say about the country. I wish I’d laid out and explored the reasons’s for the country’s general trend toward non-belligerency and a respect for “fairness” quite a bit more. Also, I didn’t even mention the upcoming elections and the things some of my NZ friends said about the roots of the dissatsifaction with PM Helen Clark.
Well, that’s all the things I didn’t say in the piece. You can go read it and comment on the things I did say.