Britain's War Crimes

[rowan]

This just focuses on Britain's involvement in 3 Middle Eastern countries. It could have easily added 3 more in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, although in those instances Britain is only acting as America's faithful side-kick.

Britain’s war in Libya in 2011 was illegal but no action has been taken or appears imminent to hold Ministers to account for this. British bombing in Libya, which began in March 2011, was a violation of UN Resolution 1973, which authorised member states to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya and to use ‘all necessary measures’ to prevent attacks on civilians but did not authorise the use of ground troops[14] or regime change[15] promoted by the Cameron government. That these were policies were illegal is confirmed by Cameron himself, who told Parliament on 21 March 2011 that the UN resolution ‘explicitly does not provide legal authority for action to bring about Gaddafi’s removal from power by military means’.[16]

The UK has consistently and falsely[10] told Parliament that it is “not a party” to the Saudi war in Yemen[11] presumably since this would formally implicate it in the illegal violations of humanitarian law of which Saudi Arabia is accused. The British government has even stated that it is “not acting to determine whether” Saudi Arabia violates international law in Yemen.[12] UK arms exports to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen are also illegal in that they fuel war crimes and human rights violations and thus violate the legally-binding international Arms Control Treaty.

UK policy is allowing trade with ‘Israeli’ goods from illegal settlements in the occupied territories.[1] The British government has stated that it does not even keep a record of imports into the UK from the illegal Israeli settlements.[2] Acquiescing in this illegal trade by an occupying power is a violation of international law.[3] The December 2016 UN Security Council Resolution, to which the UK agreed

http://markcurtis.info/2017/01/23/brita ... ional-law/

[rowan]

Interesting read

Britain is backing a Saudi invasion of Yemen that has cost thousands of innocent lives. It is providing advanced weaponry to the Saudis, training their military, and has soldiers embedded with the Saudis helping with targeting; and there is suspicion that British soldiers may even be involved in flying sorties themselves.

This is true of today. But it also describes exactly what was happening in the 1960s, in a shameful episode which Britain has, like so much of its colonial past, effectively whitewashed out of history.

In 1962, following the death of Yemeni King Ahmad, Arab nationalist army officers led by Colonel Abdullah Al-Sallal seized power and declared a Republic. The Royalists launched an insurgency to reclaim power, backed by Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel and Britain, whilst Nasser’s Egypt sent troops to support the fledgling republican government.

In his book ‘Unpeople’, historian Mark Curtis pieces together Britain’s ‘dirty war’ in Yemen between 1962 and 1969 using declassified files which – despite their public availability and the incendiary nature of their revelations – have only ever been examined by one other British historian. British involvement spanned both Conservative and Labour governments, and implicated leading members of the British government in war crimes.

Just as today, the side under attack from Britain clearly had popular support – as British officials were well aware. Christopher Gandy – Britain’s top official in Yemen’s cultural capital, Taiz – noted that the previous regime was “unpopular with large elements and those in many ways the best”, describing it as “an arbitrary autocracy”. Another British official, in the Prime Minister’s office, wrote that Nasser had been “able to capture most of the dynamic and modern forces in the area whilst we have been left, by our own choice, backing the forces which are not merely reactionary (that would not matter so much) but shifty, unreliable and treacherous” Even Prime Minister Harold Macmillan admitted it was “repugnant to political equality and prudence alike that we should so often appear to be supporting out of date and despotic regimes and to be opposing the growth of modern and more democratic forms of government”. Thus, wrote Curtis, “Britain decided to engage in a covert campaign to promote those forces recognised [by Britain itself] as ‘shifty’, ‘treacherous’ and ‘despotic’ to undermine those recognised as ‘popular’ and ‘democratic'”.

At the request of Mossad, MI6 appointed Conservative MP Neil MacLean to run a guerrilla war against the new Republican government. At first Britain’s role was primarily to support and equip Jordan’s involvement in the war; just as today, it was British fighter jets carrying out airstrikes on Yemen, with British military advisors embedded with their allies at the most senior level. This involvement stepped up a gear in March 1963, however, when Britain began covertly supplying weapons to the Royalist forces themselves via their Gulf allies. The following month, says MI6 biographer Stephen Dorrill, millions of pounds worth of light weapons were shipped from an RAF station in Wilstshire to the insurgents, including 50,000 rifles. At the same time, a decision was taken by Britain’s foreign minister (shortly to become Prime Minister) Alec Douglas-Home, MI6 chief Dick White and SAS founder David Stirling to send a British force to work directly with the insurgents. But to avoid parliamentary scrutiny and public accountability, this force would be comprised of mercenaries, rather than serving soldiers. SAS soldiers and paratroopers were given temporary leave to join this new force on a salary of £10,000 per year, paid by the Saudi Prince Sultan. An MI6 task force was also set up, to facilitate weapons and personnel supplies, and authorisation was given for British mercenaries to lay mines. The same time as these decisions were taken, Douglas-Home told parliament “our policy in Yemen is one of non-intervention in the affairs of that country. It is not therefore our policy to supply arms to the Royalists in the Yemen”. Foreign minister Rab Butler was more uneasy with such barefaced lying, especially when evidence began circulating of exactly what Britain was up to; a memo he sent to the PM in 1964 complained that his job of rebuffing UN claims that Britain was supplying the Royalists was made slightly more difficult “since we know that this is in fact true”.

British officials also knew that their insurgency had no chance of winning. But this was not the point. As Prime Minister Macmillan told President Kennedy at the time, “I quite realise that the Loyalists will probably not win in Yemen in the end but it would not suit us too badly if the new Yemeni regime were occupied with their own internal affairs during the next few years”. What Britain wanted, he added, was “a weak government in Yemen not able to make trouble”. Nor was this only Macmillan’s personal opinion; his foreign policy advisor Philip de Zulueta wrote that “All departments appear to be agreed that the present stalemate in the Yemen, with the Republicans and Royalists fighting each other and therefore having no time or energy left over to make trouble for us in Aden, suits our own interests very well…our interest is surely to have the maximum confusion in the tribal areas on the Aden frontier” with Yemen.

Labour came to power in the autumn of 1964, but the policy stayed the same; indeed, direct (but covert) RAF bombing of Yemen began soon after. In addition, another private British military company Airwork Services, signed a $26million contract to provide personnel for training Saudi pilots and ground crew involved in the war. This agreement later evolved into British pilots actually carrying out bombing missions themselves, with a foreign office memo dated March 1967 noting that “we have raised no objection to their being employed in operations, though we made it clear to the Saudis that we could not publicly acquiesce in any such arrangements”. By the time the war ended – with its inevitable Republican victory – an estimated 200,000 people had been killed.

At the same time as Britain was running the insurgency in North Yemen, it was fighting a vicious counter-insurgency campaign in South Yemen – then a colonial protectorate known as the Federation of Southern Arabia. This federation comprised the port city of Aden, under the direct colonial rule of the UK, and a series of sheikhdoms in the pay of the UK in the neighbouring hinterland. Its inhabitants were desperately poor, with one British commander noting that “there is barely enough subsistence to support the population”. These were the conditions behind a major revolt against British rule that broke out in the district of Radfan in April 1964 and would not be quelled for 7 months. The methods used to do so were typically brutal, with the British High Commissioner of Aden, Sir Kennedy Trevaskis suggesting that soldiers be sent to “put the fear of death into the villages”. If this didn’t work, he said “it would be necessary to deliver some gun attacks on livestock or men outside the villages”, adding that “we might be able to claim that our aircraft were shooting back of [sic] men who had fired at us from the ground”. The British use of airstrikes against the risen peasants was massive: historian John Newsinger writes that in just 3 months in 1964, British jets fired 2508 rockets and 200,000 cannon rounds, whilst British bombers dropped 3504 20-pound bombs and 14 1000-pound bombs and fired 20,000 cannon rounds. The government took Trevaskis’ advice and targeted crops in what Newsinger correctly described as a “deliberate, calculated attempt to terrorise and starve them into surrender.” Although the Radfan rebellion was eventually crushed, the British lost control of the hinterland to the National Liberation forces less than three years later, swiftly followed by Aden itself.

The 1960s was not the first time Britain had aided and abetted a Saudi war against the Yemenis, however. In 1934, Ibn Saud invaded and annexed Asir – “a Yemeni province by all historical accounts” in the words of the academic and Yemen specialist Elham Manea – and forced Yemen to sign a treaty deferring their claims to the territory for 20 years. It has never been returned to Yemen and remains occupied by the Saudis to this day. Britain’s role in facilitating this carve up was significant. As Manea explains, “During this period, the real power was Great Britain. Its role was crucial in either exacerbating or containing regional conflicts….[and] in the Yemeni-Saudi war they intensified the conflict to the detriment of Yemen”. When Ibn Saud claimed sovereignty over Asir in 1930, the British, who had been neutral towards disputes between the Peninsula’s various rulers hitherto, “shifted their position, perceiving Asir as ‘part of Saudi Arabia’… This was a terrible setback for [Yemeni leader] Yihia and drove him into an agreement with the British in 1934 which ultimately sealed his total defeat.” The agreement forced Yihia to recognise British sovereignty of Aden – Yemen’s major port – for 40 years. Britain then provided military vehicles for the Saudi suppression of the Asiri revolt and subsequent occupation that followed.

So the current British-Saudi war against Yemen is in fact the third in a century. But why is Britain so seemingly determined to see the country dismembered and its development sabotaged? Strange as it may seem, the answer is that Britain is scared of Yemen. For Yemen is the sole country on the Arab peninsula with the potential power to challenge the colonial stitch-up reached between Britain and the Gulf monarchies it placed in power in the nineteenth century, and who continue to rule to this day. As Palestinian author Said Aburish has noted, the very “nature of the Yemen was a challenge to the Saudis: it was a populous country with more than half the population of the whole Arabian peninsula, had a solid urban history and was more advanced than its new neighbour. It also represented a thorn in the side of British colonialism, a possible springboard for action against their control of Saudi Arabia and all the makeshift tributary sheikhdoms and emirates of the Gulf. In particular, the Yemen represented a threat to the British colonisation of Aden, a territory which considered itself part of a greater Yemen which had been dismembered by colonialism”. The potential power of a united, peaceful, Yemen was also highlighted by Aden’s High Commissioner Kennedy Trevaskis, who noted that, if the Yemenis took Aden, “it would for the first time provide the Yemen with a large modern town and a port of international consequence” and “economically, it would offer the greatest advantages to so poor and ill developed a country”. A peaceful, united Yemen – with over half the peninsula’s population – would threaten Saudi-British-US hegemony of the entire region. That is why Britain has, for over 80 years, sought to keep it divided and warring.

http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/br ... -809826615

[rowan]

Hair! Hair!

Britain should apologise for Balfour, says Scottish Christian group:



The Iona Community’s statement also refers to the centenary of the Balfour Declaration. Signed by Arthur James Balfour, then British foreign secretary, that 1917 letter pledged to support the Zionist movement’s objective of colonizing Palestine.

The Iona Community has urged that Britain apologize “for its part in the dispossession of Palestinian land and the wider Middle East conflict.”

Marten noted that Balfour came from a Scottish Presbyterian background, the same denomination as the founder of the Iona Community, George MacLeod.

https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ry ... tian-group

[rowan]

Interesting chapter from John Newsinger's 'The Blood Never Dried:'

"In December 1998 when Clinton launched the punitive air raids against Iraq, British aircraft took part in the attacks that hit 250 targets. The government supported UN sanctions that by 1996 were estimated to have killed some half a million Iraqi children. On one occasion a shipment of vaccines to protect children against diphtheria and yellow fever was blocked.

The most dangerous terrorist organisation in the post-world war has not been Al-Qaida but the American CIA. The CIA has assassinated and tortured people across the world, sponsored covert wars that have cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and overthrown democratically elected governments. A CIA sponsored coup actually took place on an earlier 11 September in 1973 in Chile, overthrowing the elected president Salvador Allende and installing the brutal Pinochet dictatorship.

The CIA, needless to say, is welcome in Britain, where it maintains a substantial secret establishment completely outside any parliamentary scrutiny. The new Labour government effectively condones the CIA used of torture, including incredibly enough, the torture of British prisoners held at the Guantanamo concentration camp.

Iraq, which had had no involvement with the 11 September attacks whatsoever, was to be invaded and occupied as part of the war on terror. The suicide bombings in London on 7 July 2003 were a response to the invasion of Iraq and would never have taken place but for Blair’s participation in America’s war.

The Bush administration took the decision to invade Iraq early in 2002 and Blair committed himself to support the attack in April of that year. The fact was that, if Iraq had actually possessed the weapons of mass destruction they were accused of having, there would have been no invasion. To this end the British people were told a pack of lies.

The BBC Today programme broadcast a report by Andrew Gilligan revealing that Alistair Campbell had ‘sexed up’ the September 2002 dossier. This was the story of the decade. It was to cost Gilligan his job, led to the resignations of both Greg Dyke, the director general of the BBC, and Gavyn Davies, the chairs of the BBC’s board of governers, and drove the government scientist David Kelly to suicide.

Greg Dyke himself noticed similarities with Watergate. He wrote of how Campbell had ‘turned Downing Street into a place similar to Nixon’s White House. You were either for them or against them. I was quite shocked by these similarities between the Nixon White House and Blair’s Downing Street.’

The American political system, however reluctantly and belatedly, called Nixon to account. The British political system has signally failed with regard to Blair. The invasion of Iraq began on March 2003. Its catastrophic consequences for the Middle East have been well documented."

But he needs to update it now to include Britain's war crimes in Libya, Syria and Yemen...

[rowan]

This excerpt from John Newsinger's 'The Blood Never Dried' is quite relevant to what is going on today in the Middle East. Certainly many parellels can be drawn in terms of imperialist brutality and demonization of the victim:

The British had established their East African protectorate in 1895 primarily for strategic reasons, but subsequently decided to open up the territory for white settlement. To persuade the African population to accept this required their large-scale slaughter by a succession of punitive expeditions.

An expedition against the Kisii in 1905 inevitably involved large-scale loss of African life. A British officer described the decisive encounter: ‘The machine gun was kept in action so long during this sharp engagement that it became almost red hot to the touch. Before the Kisii warriors were repulsed, they left several hundred dead and wounded spearmen outside the square of bayonets. This was not so much a battle as a massacre.’

The Mau Mau revolt: The revolt was largely the work of the Kikuyu tribe for whom the white settlemen had been a complete disaster. They were penned in by the settlers. By 1948 one and a quarter million Kikuyu were restricted to landholding in 2000 square miles of tribal reserve, while the 30,000 white settlers held 12,000 square miles, including most of the best farmland.

The revolutionary movement originated in the reserves and on the white farms, a product of Kikuyu land grievances. It is a testimony to the success of British propaganda that it is known as the ‘Mau Mau,’ the bastardised name given to it by the British and their collaborators. To the rebels themselves it was known at the time as the ‘Muingi’ or the ‘Movement…’

The Mau Mau revolt did not extend to the whole of Kenya. It was largely confined to the Kikuyu, Embru and Meru, and geographically restricted to the Central Province. Nevertheless, the revolutionary cause had the support of the overwhelming majority of the Kikuyu.

On 24 April 1954 Operation Anvil was launched. Some 25,000 troops and police cordoned off the city and proceeded to screen its population. An incredible 27,000 men and women were interned without trial. There can be little doubt this blanket use of internment was only possible because the victims were black, so that the violation of their civil liberties caused little concern back in Britain.

By the end of 1954 there were 77,000 people interned without trial including thousands of women and children as young as 12. This was accompanied, once again, by the mass deportation of the Kikuyu back to the reserves. Over a million Kikuyu had their homes and pessessions destroyed and were herded into over 800 guarded villages.

The reality was that in Kenya flogging, torture, mutilation, rape and summarary execution of the suspects and prisoners were everyday occurrences. The extent of the violence was successfully covered up at the time.

‘If a question was not answered to the interrogators satisfaction, the subject was beaten and kicked. If that did not lead to the desired confession, and it rarely did, more force was applied. Electric shock was widely used, and so was fire. Women were choked and held under water, gun barrels, beer bottles and even knives were thrust into their vaginas. Men had beer bottles thrust up their rectums, were dragged behind Land Rovers, whipped, burned and bayoneted. Some police officers did not bother with more time-consuming forms of torture; they simply shot any suspects who refuced to answer, then told the next suspect, who had been forced to watch the cold-blooded execution, to dig his own grave.’

As far as the settlers were concerned there was open season on the Kikuyu. Anyone thought suspicious could be flooged, tortured and, if necessary, killed with virtual impunity. They described the torture they had carried out with as much concern as they talked about the weather: ‘By the time I cut his balls off he had no ears and his eyeball, the right one, I think was hanging out of its socket. He died before we got much out of him.’

As well as the tens of thousands interned without trial (the best estimate is that over 160,000 people were interned during the course of the emergency), even more were imprisoned for emergency offences. Between 1952 and 1958 over 34,000 women were imprisoned for Mau Mau offences, and the number of men imprisoned was probably ten times that figure. ‘At least one in four Kikuyu adult males was imprisoned or detained by the British colonial administration.’

Between the declaration of the emergency and November 1954, 756 rebels were hanged. By the end of 1954 the number was over 900 and by the end of the emergency it had reached 1090. A mobile gallows was specially built so prisoners could be hanged in their home districts to provide an example. At one point they were being hanged at a rate of 50 a month.

The official British figure for rebels killed in action was 11,503, but the real number was much higher. Some estimates go as high as 50,000, and this is much closer to the truth. Only 12 European soldiers and 51 European police were killed. This disparity is a product of the overwhelming superiority in firepower that the British possessed and their readiness to use it.

How was it that British governments headed by such respectable figures as Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan were able to preside over the Kenya scandal without British public opinion calling them to account? Certainly racism was an important factor. The savagery of the repression of Kenya was possible because the victims were black.

American author Caroline Elkins gave an even more graphic and shocking account of this horrific chapter in human history in her Pulitzer Prize-winner 'Britain's Gulag:'

[rowan]

Interesting story here:

British Prime Minister David Cameron is headed to Jamaica, where he will discuss trade with the island nation and former British colony, and address the parliament. Despite calls that the UK pay billions of dollars in reparations to Jamaica for the horrors of slavery, Cameron reportedly will have none of it.

However, although he will not atone for the sins of his country in enslaving Africans, the prime minister will build a prison in Jamaica.

Cameron does not believe apologies or reparations for slavery are the right way to go, as reported in the Guardian. Already, the issue has dominated the prime minister’s visit. Sir Hilary Beckles, chair of the Caricom Reparations Commission and vice chancellor of the University of the West Indies, urged Cameron to “play its part in cleaning up this monumental mess of Empire,” as many Caribbean nations are overwhelmed from the inherited mess of slavery and colonialism.

“We ask not for handouts or any such acts of indecent submission. We merely ask that you acknowledge responsibility for your share of this situation and move to contribute in a joint programme of rehabilitation and renewal,” Sir Hilary wrote in an open letter in the Jamaica Observer. “The continuing suffering of our people, Sir, is as much your nation’s duty to alleviate as it is ours to resolve in steadfast acts of self-responsibility.”

The Jamaican academic called the prime minister “an internal stakeholder with historically assigned credentials,” given his family’s long history in Jamaica.

“To us, therefore, you are more than a prime minister. You are a grandson of the Jamaican soil who has been privileged and enriched by your forebears’ sins of the enslavement of our ancestors,” Beckles wrote.

Jamaican prime minister Portia Simpson Miller raises the issue of slavery reparations with David Cameron. The Guardian.
Jamaican prime minister Portia Simpson Miller raises the issue of slavery reparations with David Cameron. The Guardian.
Beckles also reminded the prime minister that “the Caribbean region was once your nation’s unified field for taxation, theatre for warfare, and space for the implementation of trade law and policy. Seeing the region as one is therefore in your diplomatic DNA, and this we urge that you remember.”

In March 2014, CARICOM unanimously approved a 10-point plan for slavery reparations. In its preamble, the plan asserts that European governments:

• Were owners and traders of enslaved Africans

• Instructed genocidal actions upon indigenous communities

• Created the legal, financial and fiscal policies necessary for the enslavement of Africans

• Defined and enforced African enslavement and native genocide as in their ‘national interests’

• Refused compensation to the enslaved with the ending of their enslavement

• Compensated slave owners at emancipation for the loss of legal property rights in enslaved Africans

• Imposed a further one hundred years of racial apartheid upon the emancipated

• Imposed for another one hundred years policies designed to perpetuate suffering upon the emancipated and survivors of genocide

• And have refused to acknowledge such crimes or to compensate victims and their descendants

In July, 14 Caribbean nations filed lawsuits against Britain, France and the Netherlands for slavery reparations in the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The suits target the nations for, respectively, slavery in the English-speaking Caribbean, Haiti and Suriname, as reported by Al Jazeera America.


Dr. Robert Beckford, a British academic theologian, calculated that Britain extracted an estimated £4 trillion from the Caribbean in unpaid labor, £2.5 trillion in unjust enrichment to the British economy, and an additional £1 trillion in pain and suffering, according to the Jamaica Observer. This amounts to a total of £7.5 trillion, of which Jamaica is owed 30.6 per cent, or £2.3 trillion (which is J$413.6 trillion and US$3.5 trillion).

Meanwhile, when Britain abolished slavery, it provided reparations not to slaves, but £17 billion in compensation to slave owners in today’s terms. The compensation of Britain’s 46,000 slave owners was the largest bailout in the country’s history until the 2009 bank bailout, notes the Guardian, and slave ownership was far more common than has been presumed. Moreover, the 800,000 emancipated Africans, who received nothing, picked up part of the tab, as they were forced to work 45 hours of free labor each week for four years after they were supposedly freed.

The large slave owners of the “West India interest” owned enormous estates and made massive fortunes over Black slave labor. The slave owner who was compensated the most was John Gladstone, the father of Victorian prime minister William Ewart Gladstone. Gladstone, who owned 2,508 slaves in nine plantations, was paid £106,769, or £80m in modern terms, the Guardian reported. Charles Blair, the great-grandfather of George Orwell, was paid £4,442, the modern equivalent of £3m, for the 218 African men and women he owned as chattel. Further, the records show that ancestors of Prime Minister Cameron, novelist Graham Greene, the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the architect Sir George Gilbert Scott all received compensation for slaves, along with so many thousands of other slave owners, large and small.

“The PM’s point will be he wants to focus on the future. We are talking about issues that are centuries old and taken under a different government when he was not even born. He wants to look at the future and how can the UK play a part now in stronger growing economies in the Caribbean,” said a UK government official, as quoted by the Guardian.

However, the U.K. will allocate £25 million ($37.9 million) of its foreign aid budget to help build a prison in Jamaica. The British government will pay for 40 percent of the facility, according to Time magazine, in which Jamaican prisoners prosecuted in the U.K. will spend their sentences.

“It is absolutely right that foreign criminals who break our laws are properly punished but this shouldn’t be at the expense of the hardworking British taxpayer,” Cameron said in a statement. “And it will help Jamaica, by helping to provide a new prison – strengthening their criminal justice system.”

The British Empire enslaved Black people and compensated slave owners, and will pay to keep Black people imprisoned today, yet it will not pay the trillions it stole from Black people in order to build its enormous wealth.

http://atlantablackstar.com/2015/09/30/ ... ign=buffer

[rowan]

Looks like an interesting read:

The Great War on the Eastern Front, viewed in hindsight one century later, led to major transformations in the way in which the people of the region—from the Ottoman capital of Istanbul to the Arab provinces of the Empire—looked at themselves and at the world. In my recent research I examine how the war and the fighting were reflected in the biographical trajectories of soldiers who fought in it, and civilians who endured it, and how the war led to the transformation of their lives, their societies, and reshaped their identity and affinities during and after the war.

The war was so devastating that, according to contemporary accounts, it took a toll of one-sixth of the total population of greater Syria—one of the highest among all war’s faught during that period. The victims, both civilians and combatants, perished from war, hunger, famine and diseases. Tens of thousands of civilians died as a result of the British naval blockade of food supplies coming into ports like Jaffa and Beirut, as well as as a result of sequestration of crops for the Fourth and Fifth Army Corps in Syria, commanded by Jamal Pasha. The urban landscape was devastated in a way that recalls, under different circumstances a century later, the destruction that we witness today in Syria and Iraq. At the time, Greater Syria—that is, the Ottoman provinces of Bilad ash-Sham, which included Palestine and Mount Lebanon—suffered the largest proportion of deaths of any region in the world, even when compared with Belgium, Britain, Germany and France.

I have examined this great transformation through the lives of several civilians and soldiers whose life trajectories marked the transition from Ottomanism to the new nationalist identities in the Middle East: Arab, Turkish, Kurdish, and others. Those narratives were published in the form of diaries and memoirs, as well as in semi-fictional accounts. A leading figure among civilian writers was the pedagogue Khalil Sakakini, who kept a daily diary during the war in Jerusalem. His account is riveting in that it captured a vivid portrait for the desolation of the city in 1915 and 1916, the famine years, and the urban collapse that followed. Another figure was Muhammad Kurd Ali, whose Damascene memoirs include his period as a publicist, some critics would say apologist, for the excesses of Jamal and Anwar (Enver) Pashas in Syria and Palestine. He was the chief organizer of two expeditions of Arab public figures and intellectuals to the Gallipoli and the Medina (in the Arabian Peninsula) to defend the war effort and bring the experience of the fighters to the general Arab public.

The most important fictional work to come out of the Great War in Arabic is The Life of Mifleh al Ghassani (1921), by the Palestinian writer and journalist, Najib Nassar. Subtitled “A Page from the Events of the Great War,” the novella is a thinly disguised autobiographical war memoir of the author, who spent 1916–1917 hiding from the Turkish gendarmes in the Bedouin encampments of the Jordan Valley, escaping possible execution on changes of being pro-British.

Another set of diaries and memoirs involves writings by fighters and military recruits. Soldiers’ narratives of the war were rarer, in large part because literacy was limited, but also because soldiers’ diaries did not survive the toll of exile, trench warfare, and fear of discovery. I have examined the narratives of three soldiers’ diaries that reached us against the odds, showing the impact of the war the lives of Ottoman (Arab and Turkish) soldiers. Their narratives are doubly significant because, contrary to popular assumptions, the manner in which their consciousness was transformed did not always correspond to their ethnic background.

The biographic trajectories of the three soldiers suggest several responses by soldiers to their experience of war: rethinking and reinvention of identity (Muhammad Fasih); separatist nationalism (Aref Shehadeh); and pacifism (Ihsan al- Turjman). Two conclusions can be drawn from these observations. First, the reconstruction of identity experienced in the Great War was ephemeral. Self-conceptions transform themselves through ruptures at a very fast rate during times of war, because the war disrupts the tempo of the daily routine. It compels us to rethink where we were and where we are heading in the immediate future. The second conclusion is that, when people are faced with devastation, they tend to revert to the comfort and security of local identity—because it is protective and familiar and allows people to insulate themselves from the seeming impending collapse of the world around them. This reverberates with the experience of Iraqis and Syrians in the current battles with Da’esh one hundred years later.



http://www.ucpress.edu/blog/23309/narra ... great-war/

[rowan]

[rowan]

This is quite a read (in more ways that one):

How Zionism helped create the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia - See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2016/01/zionism-k ... MsFoj.dpuf

The covert alliance between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Zionist entity of Israel should be no surprise to any student of British imperialism. The problem is the study of British imperialism has very few students. Indeed, one can peruse any undergraduate or post-graduate British university prospectus and rarely find a module in a Politics degree on the British Empire let alone a dedicated degree or Masters degree. Of course if the European led imperialist carnage in the four years between 1914 – 1918 tickles your cerebral cells then it’s not too difficult to find an appropriate institution to teach this subject, but if you would like to delve into how and why the British Empire waged war on mankind for almost four hundred years you’re practically on your own in this endeavour. One must admit, that from the British establishment’s perspective, this is a formidable and remarkable achievement.

In late 2014, according to the American journal, Foreign Affairs, the Saudi petroleum Minister, Ali al-Naimi is reported to have said “His Majesty King Abdullah has always been a model for good relations between Saudi Arabia and other states and the Jewish state is no exception.” Recently, Abdullah’s successor, King Salman expressed similar concerns to those of Israel’s to the growing agreement between the United States and Iran over the latter’s nuclear programme. This led some to report that Israel and KSA presented a “united front” in their opposition to the nuclear deal. This was not the first time the Zionists and Saudis have found themselves in the same corner in dealing with a perceived common foe. In North Yemen in the 1960’s, the Saudis were financing a British imperialist led mercenary army campaign against revolutionary republicans who had assumed authority after overthrowing the authoritarian, Imam. Gamal Abdul-Nasser’s Egypt militarily backed the republicans, while the British induced the Saudis to finance and arm the remaining remnants of the Imam’s supporters. Furthermore, the British organised the Israelis to drop arms for the British proxies in North Yemen, 14 times. The British, in effect, militarily but covertly, brought the Zionists and Saudis together in 1960’s North Yemen against their common foe.

- See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2016/01/zionism-k ... MsFoj.dpuf

[rowan]

Another fascinting read

For centuries, no other country brought more grief to the planet, destroyed more lives, ruined more nations and cultures, and stole more natural resources from the ‘natives’, than the United Kingdom.” All this was done with a straight face, all explained and justified by the most advanced propaganda apparatus on earth, all ‘morally defended’. The entire twisted concept of British-style ‘justice’ was first introduced at home, and then exported to many corners of the globe.

It went on for several long centuries, and it goes on until now: the rapists are introducing globally accepted moral codes. Mass murderers are running international courts of justice. Notorious liars and thieves are teaching the world about ‘objectivity’. Gurus of disinformation are even ‘educating’ their own children, as well as the children of elites from all parts of the world, in their ‘prestigious’ factories of indoctrination – schools and universities.

Of course there are some countries that have tried very hard to outdo the UK in terms of brutality, greed and tactics of deception. It is worth mentioning such candidates for genocidal world leadership like France, Germany, Spain and lately the United States. They really have been competing determinately and zealously, but despite all their efforts, they never truly managed to come close to the forerunner.

Please, just think about all this, if you haven’t already done it for years. Then wash your eyes thoroughly, and look anew at those tabloids and ‘serious publications’ that are printed in the UK. Look at the indoctrination television channels. If you are still able to retain at least some detachment and common sense, please compare what they are saying and writing and showing, with the reality outside your own window, wherever on this Planet you may be.

***

For many years I worked all over the world, on all continents, in some 160 countries. For many years, I was told stories, shown evidence, about the most monstrous and barbaric crimes that the Brits have been committing almost everywhere on this Planet.

To compile even some semi-complete list, one would need to compose at least a sizable brochure, if not an entire book. Let’s just mention a few of the most obvious horrors that ‘Great’ Britain is responsible for: Slave trade and destruction of entire huge parts of Africa with tens of millions people directly or indirectly killed. Monstrous occupation of the ‘Sub-continent’, with tens of millions of lives lost (including those in several artificially triggered famines). Ransacking of large parts of China, murdering and participating in breaking the most populous nation on earth. Brutal attacks against the young Soviet state. Horrid treatment of colonized peoples of the island nations, from Oceania (South Pacific) to the Caribbean. Gassing, bombing, literally exterminating people of the Middle East, from what is now Iraq and Kuwait, to Palestine. There were invasions of Afghanistan and the ‘reign of terror in Kabul’ in 1879. There were many other things, many nightmarish crimes, of course, but today I’m being brief…

In the “New World”, consisting of countries like the US, Canada and Australia, the most terrible massacres of the native people were committed by the first and second generation of Europeans, mainly the Brits.

Britain actually never ceased to commit crimes against humanity. Since WWII it has been tutoring the United States, strategically and ideologically, in the art of how to run the Empire and how to manufacture unanimity inside the West itself, and even among the population of the colonized nations (in the neo-colonialist context).

It has also been involved in some of the vilest acts in modern history, related to countries like Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Congo as well as entire areas of Asia Pacific and the African Great Lakes.

Again, that’s only a brief and incomplete summary.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/02/24/ ... ne-asylum/

[Lord Lucan]

What exactly are you trying to prove by dragging up all this old codswallop?

[rowan]

Not codswallop, Lucan, old boy! It's all true and well-documented, and knowing the past is key to understanding the present. In fact, nothing is more relevant to today's problems in the Middle East - the world's major hotspot since 9/11 (at least) - and to have any inkling at all about what is really going on, you need be cognizant of its modern history, in which Britain was among the major protagonists:

More from Mr Newsinger:

Suez Canal: On 21 February 1945 British troops in Cairo opened fire on demonstrators, killing more than 20 people. This provoked protests and demonstrations throughout the country. In Alexandria there were serious clashes that left two British soldiers and 17 Egyptians dead.

As far as the British were concerned, the military bases in the Canal Zone were of vital importance. The scale of the commitment was enormous. The network of bases occupied 750 square miles between the Nile Delta and the west bank of the Canal.

The British commander General George Erskine ordered most of the village of Kfr Abdu levelled because it was being used by snipers to harass the Suez water filtration plant. Some 80 houses were bulldozed and the inhabitants evicted. Violence escalated with the British shelling Egyptian villages in response to increase guerilla attacks.

A large British force surrounded the police station in Ismalia and demanded its surrender. The police refused and, to the surprise of the British, mounted a fierce resistance. Centurion tanks were brought in to shell the buildings. The police finally surrendered after more than 40 of their number had been killed.

Eden entered into secret discussions with the French and Israelis that eventually resulted in the Sevres protocol of 24 October 1956. Israel would attack Egypt, whereupon Britain and France, posing as peacemakers, would demand that both sides withdraw from the Suez Canal area. In response to the Egyptian refusal, an Anglo-French force would invade, ostensibly to separate the two sides, but in reality to overthrow Nasser.

The Israelis launched their surprise attack on Egyptian positions in Sinai on 29 October. French collusion was hardly disguised with French aircraft supporting the attack from Israeli airfields from day one. The Anglo-French ultimatum was presented to both sides the followng day. The Egyptians rejected the ultimatum and the British bombers began their attacks. The actual invasion began on 5 November with paratroop landings followed by a seaborne assault on Port Said. The following day the British and the French agreed to a ceasefire.

The decisive factor in defeating the Israeli-Franco-British attack on Egypt was the hostile stance adopted by the United States. The Americans were not prepared to tolerate independent action on this scale on the part of the British. Not only did they not want a revival of British power and influence in the Middle East, but they were afraid that Britain’s old fashioned imperialism would play into the hands of the Russians.

[rowan]

How about a war memorial for the Nazis too?

BBC News:
'A memorial dedicated to those civilians killed in both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars will be unveiled by the Queen in central London on Thursday.'
No, wrong universe.
In *this* universe:
'A memorial dedicated to those who served in Afghanistan and both Iraq wars will be unveiled by the Queen in central London on Thursday.'
And let's take a moment to ponder what the sculptor has to say:
'people were united, he added, in support of "what the military and civilians did, in putting themselves in harm's way, securing British lives and improving the lives of Iraqi and Afghan civilians".'
'Improving the lives of Iraqi and Afghan civilians'....by bombing and torturing them, perhaps?

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-39202897

Conservative & already outdated . . . http://www.mintpressnews.com/do-the-mat ... re/208225/

Also intesreting . . . http://markcurtis.info/2017/03/08/brita ... -pakistan/

[Edinburgh in Exile]

How about a war memorial for the Nazis too?

BBC News:
'A memorial dedicated to those civilians killed in both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars will be unveiled by the Queen in central London on Thursday.'
No, wrong universe.
In *this* universe:
'A memorial dedicated to those who served in Afghanistan and both Iraq wars will be unveiled by the Queen in central London on Thursday.'
And let's take a moment to ponder what the sculptor has to say:
'people were united, he added, in support of "what the military and civilians did, in putting themselves in harm's way, securing British lives and improving the lives of Iraqi and Afghan civilians".'
'Improving the lives of Iraqi and Afghan civilians'....by bombing and torturing them, perhaps?

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-39202897

Conservative & already outdated . . . http://www.mintpressnews.com/do-the-mat ... re/208225/

Also intesreting . . . http://markcurtis.info/2017/03/08/brita ... -pakistan/

I don't follow. Nazis? Do you mean German soldiers? Or do you think this memorial is for the political leadership?

[SerjeantWildgoose]

What exactly are you trying to prove by dragging up all this old codswallop?

Stop hogging the thread ye tedious wanker!

[rowan]

What exactly are you trying to prove by dragging up all this old codswallop?

Stop hogging the thread ye tedious wanker!

You 'n' all!

[OptimisticJock]

How about a war memorial for the Nazis too?

BBC News:
'A memorial dedicated to those civilians killed in both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars will be unveiled by the Queen in central London on Thursday.'
No, wrong universe.
In *this* universe:
'A memorial dedicated to those who served in Afghanistan and both Iraq wars will be unveiled by the Queen in central London on Thursday.'
And let's take a moment to ponder what the sculptor has to say:
'people were united, he added, in support of "what the military and civilians did, in putting themselves in harm's way, securing British lives and improving the lives of Iraqi and Afghan civilians".'
'Improving the lives of Iraqi and Afghan civilians'....by bombing and torturing them, perhaps?

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-39202897

Conservative & already outdated . . . http://www.mintpressnews.com/do-the-mat ... re/208225/

Also intesreting . . . http://markcurtis.info/2017/03/08/brita ... -pakistan/

I don't follow. Nazis? Do you mean German soldiers? Or do you think this memorial is for the political leadership?

You do realise who you've replied to?

[OptimisticJock]

What exactly are you trying to prove by dragging up all this old codswallop?

Stop hogging the thread ye tedious wanker!

You're just upset because the Nazis had better head dress.

[rowan]

My Irish friend passes these on to me. He's a former history teacher.

Given the gulf between Britain's imperial self-image and the unheroic truth, I always felt that the inevitable memorial to our recent failed wars would be off the mark when it arrived.

Yet first impressions indicate the star-studded unveiling in London's Victoria Embankment Gardens on Thursday 9 March of a new ''Iraqistan'' statue will plumb new depths of post-truthery.

Folding three wars of aggression into one fictional humanitarian aid operation is bad enough, I thought... and that was before I realised this latest extravaganza is the brainchild of the Murdoch press and was part-funded by global arms giant BAE Systems.

This state of affairs rules the Iraq Afghanistan Memorial out of representing the reality of the wars for many of the veterans who served in them or, indeed, the forgotten people of the victim nations.

I am not denying for a moment the immense skill apparent in the artist's work but he appears to have impaled himself on the same bayonet as the post 9/11 media: reiterating what the establishment says as if it were incontrovertibly true. A gilded fiction is still a fiction, after all.

The surest thing about the memorial is its parentage. It is obviously the progeny of an arms firm, the gutter press and a military and political establishment desperate to draw a line under embarrassing defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan with a view to repeating them elsewhere in future.

This desperation is captured perfectly in a Ministry of Defence promotional video tweeted ahead of unveiling which exhibits depths of self-delusion I haven't witnessed since I last encountered a senior British military officer.

In less than two minutes, the slick and emotively scored promo re-brands three wars of aggression – the signal foreign policy disasters of our time – as a 25 year long humanitarian aid operation carried out in uniform.

In a masterclass of selective memorialisation, it appears there will be no references at all to dodgy dossiers, extrajudicial drone assassinations, massive refugee crises, oil, Isis, a re-energised Taliban, rendition, Tony Blair or any of the other tentacled horrors which have come to define Britain's recent adventures in the sandpit.

As a recent veteran myself I can tell you I was surprised to find that far from violently occupying those far-off impoverished places, the British military had in fact "championed democracy", "protected British interests" and, most surprisingly of all, "rebuilt villages".

One can only assume that the latter activity took place after the occupying forces had levelled said hamlets from the air, which somehow makes the sentiment a little less impressive.

Despite the attempt to soften the wars by folding civilian aid and development workers in with the military, this new addition must be seen in much the same way as the Chilcot Inquiry.

While the two-million word report was the establishment's investigation of itself, this is the establishment's memorial to what it wishes the wars had been: just, right, necessary and worth the cost.

Prince Harry, who last year outrageously shook hands with George W Bush at the Invictus Games for wounded soldiers, will headline the opening in his apparently self-elected role as the soldiers' champion.

Naturally his dear grandmother, who uttered not a squeak in public against the wars, has been booked to look on.

When I first spotted and raised these discrepancies, I was understandably challenged for my view. Some people will appreciate being honoured in this manner, I was told.

I agree. Some people will be taken in by this exercise in bleaching the truth out of history. Just as many others, myself included, will not.

For veterans who have woken up this "Iraqistan" memorial will recall a time when we believed that the UK, and the British military, was fundamentally in the business of good causes rather than imperial adventures. A time which has passed.

For those of us who have come to realize what we were involved in our testament reads differently to that of the government, the military, arms firms or the Sun newspaper.

We will recall Afghanistan as what it was: a knee-jerk war against some of the poorest people in the world. A war in which we engaged initially to stay in with the United States and, after 2006, to recover our image in American eyes after utter failure in Basra.

Likewise we will recall the British role in Iraq as what it was: that of a junior henchman in the mother of all heists. And a failed heist at that.

On reflection, perhaps there is something to this flattering re-brand to delude future generations. Even if only ironically.

It may not be remotely based on what actually occurred in the wars but it captures precisely the new military bluster of the post-truth age combined with the established tendency of our leaders to overreach based on a cocktail of personal ambition, wishful thinking and faulty information.

http://www.stopwar.org.uk/index.php/new ... nd-reality

[Edinburgh in Exile]

How about a war memorial for the Nazis too?

BBC News:
'A memorial dedicated to those civilians killed in both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars will be unveiled by the Queen in central London on Thursday.'
No, wrong universe.
In *this* universe:
'A memorial dedicated to those who served in Afghanistan and both Iraq wars will be unveiled by the Queen in central London on Thursday.'
And let's take a moment to ponder what the sculptor has to say:
'people were united, he added, in support of "what the military and civilians did, in putting themselves in harm's way, securing British lives and improving the lives of Iraqi and Afghan civilians".'
'Improving the lives of Iraqi and Afghan civilians'....by bombing and torturing them, perhaps?

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-39202897

Conservative & already outdated . . . http://www.mintpressnews.com/do-the-mat ... re/208225/

Also intesreting . . . http://markcurtis.info/2017/03/08/brita ... -pakistan/

I don't follow. Nazis? Do you mean German soldiers? Or do you think this memorial is for the political leadership?

You do realise who you've replied to?

Ha! A fair point, well made.

[Lord Lucan]

Does anybody actually read any of these long winded cut and paste jobs, I canne be bothered.

[caldeyrfc]

Does anybody actually read any of these long winded cut and paste jobs, I canne be bothered.

And yet you will post any old lunatic from youtube as evidence in support of Trump
Well done racist John nice to see you haven't changed even if your name has

[Sandydragon]

How about a war memorial for the Nazis too?

BBC News:
'A memorial dedicated to those civilians killed in both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars will be unveiled by the Queen in central London on Thursday.'
No, wrong universe.
In *this* universe:
'A memorial dedicated to those who served in Afghanistan and both Iraq wars will be unveiled by the Queen in central London on Thursday.'
And let's take a moment to ponder what the sculptor has to say:
'people were united, he added, in support of "what the military and civilians did, in putting themselves in harm's way, securing British lives and improving the lives of Iraqi and Afghan civilians".'
'Improving the lives of Iraqi and Afghan civilians'....by bombing and torturing them, perhaps?

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-39202897

Conservative & already outdated . . . http://www.mintpressnews.com/do-the-mat ... re/208225/

Also intesreting . . . http://markcurtis.info/2017/03/08/brita ... -pakistan/

So in your world, British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan were comparable in their actions to the worst of the German soldiers in WWII? Evidence for that or are you just talking bollocks again?

[Sandydragon]

My Irish friend passes these on to me. He's a former history teacher.

Given the gulf between Britain's imperial self-image and the unheroic truth, I always felt that the inevitable memorial to our recent failed wars would be off the mark when it arrived.

Yet first impressions indicate the star-studded unveiling in London's Victoria Embankment Gardens on Thursday 9 March of a new ''Iraqistan'' statue will plumb new depths of post-truthery.

Folding three wars of aggression into one fictional humanitarian aid operation is bad enough, I thought... and that was before I realised this latest extravaganza is the brainchild of the Murdoch press and was part-funded by global arms giant BAE Systems.

This state of affairs rules the Iraq Afghanistan Memorial out of representing the reality of the wars for many of the veterans who served in them or, indeed, the forgotten people of the victim nations.

I am not denying for a moment the immense skill apparent in the artist's work but he appears to have impaled himself on the same bayonet as the post 9/11 media: reiterating what the establishment says as if it were incontrovertibly true. A gilded fiction is still a fiction, after all.

The surest thing about the memorial is its parentage. It is obviously the progeny of an arms firm, the gutter press and a military and political establishment desperate to draw a line under embarrassing defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan with a view to repeating them elsewhere in future.

This desperation is captured perfectly in a Ministry of Defence promotional video tweeted ahead of unveiling which exhibits depths of self-delusion I haven't witnessed since I last encountered a senior British military officer.

In less than two minutes, the slick and emotively scored promo re-brands three wars of aggression – the signal foreign policy disasters of our time – as a 25 year long humanitarian aid operation carried out in uniform.

In a masterclass of selective memorialisation, it appears there will be no references at all to dodgy dossiers, extrajudicial drone assassinations, massive refugee crises, oil, Isis, a re-energised Taliban, rendition, Tony Blair or any of the other tentacled horrors which have come to define Britain's recent adventures in the sandpit.

As a recent veteran myself I can tell you I was surprised to find that far from violently occupying those far-off impoverished places, the British military had in fact "championed democracy", "protected British interests" and, most surprisingly of all, "rebuilt villages".

One can only assume that the latter activity took place after the occupying forces had levelled said hamlets from the air, which somehow makes the sentiment a little less impressive.

Despite the attempt to soften the wars by folding civilian aid and development workers in with the military, this new addition must be seen in much the same way as the Chilcot Inquiry.

While the two-million word report was the establishment's investigation of itself, this is the establishment's memorial to what it wishes the wars had been: just, right, necessary and worth the cost.

Prince Harry, who last year outrageously shook hands with George W Bush at the Invictus Games for wounded soldiers, will headline the opening in his apparently self-elected role as the soldiers' champion.

Naturally his dear grandmother, who uttered not a squeak in public against the wars, has been booked to look on.

When I first spotted and raised these discrepancies, I was understandably challenged for my view. Some people will appreciate being honoured in this manner, I was told.

I agree. Some people will be taken in by this exercise in bleaching the truth out of history. Just as many others, myself included, will not.

For veterans who have woken up this "Iraqistan" memorial will recall a time when we believed that the UK, and the British military, was fundamentally in the business of good causes rather than imperial adventures. A time which has passed.

For those of us who have come to realize what we were involved in our testament reads differently to that of the government, the military, arms firms or the Sun newspaper.

We will recall Afghanistan as what it was: a knee-jerk war against some of the poorest people in the world. A war in which we engaged initially to stay in with the United States and, after 2006, to recover our image in American eyes after utter failure in Basra.

Likewise we will recall the British role in Iraq as what it was: that of a junior henchman in the mother of all heists. And a failed heist at that.

On reflection, perhaps there is something to this flattering re-brand to delude future generations. Even if only ironically.

It may not be remotely based on what actually occurred in the wars but it captures precisely the new military bluster of the post-truth age combined with the established tendency of our leaders to overreach based on a cocktail of personal ambition, wishful thinking and faulty information.

http://www.stopwar.org.uk/index.php/new ... nd-reality

Amazing how the work on infrastructure rebuild and so on has been completely ignored by those obsessed with the military aspects of the conflict. So too the efforts by the likes of the Taliban to stop or destroy the work done.

If this guy is a former veteran then I think he spent his time in country with his eyes firmly closed, because any clown could see the work that was attempted by British and other allied forces, and NGOs who we supported.

Still, I suppose that too much nuance for the hard left to get their heads around. Lets talk about dropping bombs on civilians, until th Russians do it then its all quiet.

[OptimisticJock]

Did you actually read that?