 |
 |
||
|
|
|
 The Gardens of the DevilPosted on Feb 29, 2008By Robert Fisk Originally published in The Independent. The first time I saw one, my first instinct was to pick it up. It shone in the sunlight, bright green, something new and fresh amid the dry grass of the south Lebanon hills. The little cluster bomblet seemed to have been made to hold in the hand. No wonder the little children died. Israel rained more than a million bomblets into the orchards and fields of southern Lebanon in 2006 – after the ceasefire to the 34-day Israel-Hizbollah conflict had been announced. So far, post-war, they have killed more than 40 men, women and children. Some of the mine disposal men and women who turned up in Lebanon found that the cluster bombs had themselves been dropped on minefields left behind by the Israelis in 2000. And these minefields, in some cases, had been laid over old Palestinian minefields. And some of these minefields – and here the 20th century’s most titanic war threatens us yet again – had been inadvertently placed over carpets of mines dug into Lebanon’s red earth by French Vichy forces in 1941, as they awaited British and Free French invasion from Palestine. As usual, the Second World War turns out to be the foundation for so many of the Middle East’s present-day horrors. In Tripoli, they publish a “White Book” on Libya’s legacy from the 1939-45 war, the tens of thousands of mines buried in the sands around Tobruk and Benghazi by the Italians and Germans, the British and the Australians and New Zealanders and South Africans. Advertisement  Twenty years after the war – when at least 800 Libyan farmers and family members had already been blown up by mines – an Italian journalist was describing the continuing carnage during mine-clearance. “These mines are so sensitive that a light footstep is enough to make them jump into the air like a grasshopper – all we found of the two men were a few rags of flesh and clothing.” Egypt calls its own Second World War minefields “the Gardens of the Devil”, and they run from El Alamein to Mersa Matruh, east of the Libyan border. Add to these the vast minefields laid by Egyptian and Israeli forces in the eastern deserts in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 – the Israelis have maps of 5.5 million landmines they planted in Sinai and the surrounding area after 1967 – and you have a good idea how deadly, how poisonous the sands remain. As the Egyptian Mail pointed out last month, we in the West remember the dead of Alamein every year. But who remembers the dead of Egypt? And just for the record, although the British and Italians and Germans have all forwarded their ancient minefield maps to the Egyptians – and although the Egyptian army cleared 2,976 mines between 1983 and 1999 – there remain about 17.6 million landmines beneath the Egyptian coastal strip, according to the country’s clearance organisation. Since 1982 alone, 700 Egyptians have been killed by them and another 7,600 wounded. And while they die, our survivors grow older. When I wrote about the film Atonement a few weeks ago – with its graphic five minute tracking shot of the 1940 Dunkirk evacuation beaches, and the landmine destruction of Balham Tube station – I little realised how many memories it would awake. A lady from Scotland wrote to tell me how as a child during the Blitz she “regularly slept down the Underground – I missed the landmine which dropped in the Balham High Street, the resultant flood drowned many people [including Cecilia in Atonement]. I recall the Tube station being closed for a long time to clean [out] the bodies. I also remember seeing the tide mark high on the wall afterwards”. More dramatic was a letter from 90-year-old former Second Lieutenant Hal Crookall, a Dunkirk veteran in the East Yorkshire Regiment. In my article, I noted how the first sight of the Dunkirk beaches in the film provoked my cry of “Fuck me!”– and how these were the first words to be uttered by a young corporal in the movie a few seconds later. So imagine my shock – and the smile that spread over my face – when I read the following words from Mr Crookall. “Most of the men from my platoon were dockers from Hull. We had been left behind to fight rear guard actions, and had to make our own way towards the beach, which we did largely by following the noise made by the Navy’s guns and the shells screeching over our heads, and the noise of the Stuka bombers attacking the beaches. When we did finally find our way on to the beach and came over the sandhills to see the scene, most of my chaps said in broad Yorkshire: ‘Fooking ‘ell!’ which in some cases was abbreviated to ‘King-ell!’.” In 1943, Second Lieutenant Crookall was wounded in – of all places – the Libyan desert. Not by a mine – he and his soldiers placed sandbags in the bottom of their Bren carrier to prevent the mine blasts hurting them – but by a German shell splinter which penetrated the vehicle’s 3/8 inch plating and smashed into Crookall’s arm. He was invalided out of his infantry division, posted around the Middle East and ended up in Damascus. “My wound practically finished me off as a violinist,” he told me this week. “But I was in Damascus when Josephine Baker arrived to give a concert to the Free French and she asked me to accompany her. Then I played again.” After the war, Crookall returned many times to the Middle East, a guest of Ali Ayoubi, the son of a Syrian president, he says – I think he would have been the son of the Syrian prime minister. “My father had two bodyguards,” Crookall remembers Ali telling him. “[President] Assad has about 10,000!” In Libya and in Egypt, of course, the people of the desert have no bodyguards. The foundation of their lives remains the war that was fought before they were born and which is still killing and maiming them, just as it maimed Second Lieutenant Crookall 65 years ago. I suppose the moral can only be expressed in a cliché. In the Middle East, the Second World War has not ended.
Elsewhere: . CommentsAre you a Truthdig member yet? Login now, or register with Truthdig. Add Your Comment
|
HOME|Digs|Reports|Arts & Culture|Uncovered|Ear to the Ground|A/V Booth|Cartoons
Tags|Bazaar|Podcast|About Us|Contact Us|User Agreement|Privacy Policy|FAQ: Comments and Moderation 
A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
Copyright © 2009 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved. |
Gorbachev’s Sermon on the Mount
Email
Print
Share
BlinkList
del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Fark
Furl
Google
LinkedIn
Mixx
MySpace
NewsVine
NewsTrust
Propeller
Reddit
SphereIt
StumbleUpon
Technorati
TwitThis
YahooMyWeb
YahooBuzz
By Gadees, March 6, 2008 at 6:57 am #
(Unregistered commenter)
Your depiction of the situation as if Europe is out of reach to Jews.Who says Europe is free of Jewish influence,actually they haven’t left it, they are still the blood-suckers.
Report thisBy Douglas Chalmers, March 5, 2008 at 12:10 pm #
nrobi says: The war never ends, it just goes from one place to another, “they just take it on the road.”
I guess that’s why they called it “the roadmap”, uhh…
Report thisBy ekdar, March 5, 2008 at 11:29 am #
“the future, I think, will reveal that he is one of humanitys great witnesses”
No, he will be regarded as a spokesliar for genocidal Arab terror and remembered, if at all, for masquerading as a faux-journalist.
Report thisBy Douglas Chalmers, March 5, 2008 at 5:52 am #
Are you really interested? Or is full employment courtesy of the military-industrial complex a more urgent imperative, uhh?
Report thisBy Fadel Abdallah, March 4, 2008 at 11:36 pm #
Excellent post Weather, brief but very much to the point!
Report thisBy Bill Blackolive, March 4, 2008 at 4:23 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)
It is comprehended cluster bombs are for civilians.
Report thisBy Bill Backolive, March 4, 2008 at 4:15 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)
Cluster bombs are for civilians,and this is accepted.
Report thisBy Leefeller, March 3, 2008 at 8:19 pm #
Try and make a lucrative profit in peace, so I rest my case. Has it ever even been tried? Peace I mean.
Report thisBy nrobi, March 3, 2008 at 7:58 pm #
The war never ends, it just goes from one place to another, “they just take it on the road.” Israel and the US governments have made unsound and extremely poor decisions regarding the bombing of Lebanon, in that they used bombs that were outlawed by convention and treaty because of their lethal and powerful effects on children. To use these cluster bombs, opens up a morass of decisions that will end up harming us. For the US to continue making these illegal and immoral weapons, is without doubt the worst kind of moral indignity to others and our nation. Do not the people who manufacture this kind of weaponry, think with their brains? They cannot be thinking about the moral and legal implications of their illegal weaponry, when it falls from the sky and destroys a village, and also leaves behind little bomblets that will eventually explode in the hands of a child. What kind of sick and perverted person would actually manufacture this horrible and G-d forsaken weapon? Only the worst kind of people, those for whom greed is the operative and utmost vehicle of life. Those for whom treaties and conventions against this kind of weaponry mean absolutely nothing, they are the worst kind of people, they have no soul and heart. Can we as Americans, stand for this kind of manufacturing to go on in our country any longer? We must take a stand against these manufacturers and put them completely out of business and for good change the way we interact with our enemies, not by bombs and war, but through words and peaceful actions will we change the world.
Report thisBy thebeerdoctor, March 3, 2008 at 12:09 pm #
If you you have ever watched the Robert Fisk video interviews on Youtube, you see a heartbroken man who has seen way too much horror in this life. Although he considers his efforts a failure, the future, I think, will reveal that he is one of humanity’s great witnesses, who worked as best he could, to set the record straight.
Report thisBy cyrena, March 3, 2008 at 7:05 am #
Ah Fadel,
This is at the crux of so many of the conflicts in the world, including right here in the US of A..
If Arabs and Jews think about what white Europeans real intentions were and continue to be, they might wake up to the reality of the need to reconcile and put an end to the merchants of death not-so-humanistic plans for the mostly Semitic people of the Middle East.
Ive been trying to make this point to those right here at home, specifically as it concerns the people of color, but also the classes as they have been created here. In short, while they fight amongst themselves, and kill each other off, the ones who benefit most, have their work done for them.
The divide and conquer strategy is as old as the land. The West has intentionally perpetrated this in Iraq, and of course that was the plan from the beginning. And until a few decades ago, Jewish Americans seemed to understand that a lot better, when Jews were as despised as their darker colored African Americans. They dont seem to get that any more, having been divided from their own general interests by the much larger racist driven power tactics of the Western whites.
I don’t know if they’ll ever wake up. I don’t know if Israel will ever acknowledge that they’ve been sent off to their own “paradise’ only to have backed themselves further and further into a corner.
Report thisBy weather, March 2, 2008 at 2:31 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)
If Israel didn’t help engineer 9/11, they sure as Hell were the cause of it.
This link w/Israel has made America very sick.
Report thisBy PatrickHenry, March 2, 2008 at 12:26 pm #
The use of cluster munitions against civilian populations is heinious. Land mines are another problem.
If these items have a made in the U.S.A. logo on them then all the more shame on this nation. This is what the U.S. AID should be required to be used for, cleaning up our immoral memory.
Report thisBy whyzowl, March 2, 2008 at 3:52 am #
(Unregistered commenter)
If we all know that war is hell, then why don’t our leaders ever seem to have much of a problem getting a solid majority of Americans to support visiting hell upon other peoples—almost always based on the flimsiest, most highly dubious evidence imaginable? We would like to confer absolution upon ourselves—really, to flatter ourselves—by repeating the cliche that making war is “just human natue.” But it is not. It is in the nature of beasts who haven’t risen near to the level of being human yet, and probably never will. We will either claim our humanity for the first time, soon, or we will destroy ourselve through war and likely take our beautiful planet down with us. The odds are on the latter.
Report thisBy Douglas Chalmers, March 1, 2008 at 4:20 pm #
Abbas: Gaza attacks ‘a holocaust’ - The latest attacks mark the fourth day of Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip…
The Palestinian president has accused Israel of “international terrorism”, saying its assault on Gaza constitutes “more than a holocaust”.
Mahmoud Abbas’s comments on Saturday came as more Israeli air raids brought the total death toll over four days to 78 people, at least a third of which have been children, according to medical sources….
“It’s very regrettable that what is happening is more than a holocaust,” Abbas told reporters in Ramallah. “Children who are barely five-months old are being bombed by the Israeli army.”
“We tell the world to see with its own eyes and judge for itself what is happening and who is carrying out international terrorism.”
Abbas later requested an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss the Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip…..
Khaled Meshaal, the exiled Hamas leader living in Syria, also denounced the Israeli attacks against Gaza’s civilians as “the real holocaust”.
Children killed - Rana el-Hindi from Save the Children, speaking from inside the Gaza Strip, told Al Jazeera children were suffering greatly from the Israeli bombardment.
“In the last three days at least 19 children have been killed…. it’s a real concern for all organisations here,” she said.
“Most of the time, when we go into the field and talk to the children about their fears and concerns, they are always afraid of a new [Israeli] invasion to the Gaza Strip - and obviously the current situation is just ... what they fear.”
She said the number of children being hospitalised was increasing “day after day”.
Eissam Younis, director of the Al Mizan Centre for Human Rights in Gaza, told Al Jazeera that the Israeli army was “intentionally and systematically targeting civilians” and criticised world powers for their muted response.
“Israel puts itself above the law because the international community is always silent,” he said.
Missile attacks - Those killed in Saturday’s attacks included at least eight civilians, four of them women, said Dr Muawiya Hassanein, head of Gaza’s emergency services…...
Tariq Dardouna, a Palestinian resident trapped in his house in east Jabaliya, told Al Jazeera that Israeli forces targeted civilians.
“The Israeli army opens fire at everything in our area, including children and houses. There are injured children bleeding inside their house…”
Threat of invasion - There has been increasing domestic pressure in Israel to mount a full-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip. Ehud Barak, Israel’s defence minister, said on Thursday that “a major ground operation was real and tangible” and that Israel was “not afraid of it”......
Israeli troops have carried out near-daily raids into Gaza since Hamas took power there in June, while Palestinian fighters have launched frequent volleys of rockets and mortars at Israeli communities near the Gaza border, though the missile attacks have rarely caused injuries.
Report thisBy GrammaConcept, March 1, 2008 at 1:53 pm #
dear non credo…
please understand…
All war is always hell….is a simple statement regarding a monumentally tragic truth…and is, in no possible way, an excuse for anything…
War is hell…....
Report thisMay Peace Prevail.
By Leefeller, March 1, 2008 at 12:38 pm #
Death is the object of war, guess some people do not get it, except the dead.
Report thisBy Expat, March 1, 2008 at 12:01 pm #
^ This just goes on and on. Cluster munitions against civilians; just how is it we live with and justify this? Our humanity is slowly slipping away and we hardly notice.
Report thisBy Douglas Chalmers, March 1, 2008 at 2:58 am #
“The little cluster bomblet seemed to have been made to hold in the hand. No wonder the little children died…”
Israelis dropped them, make them pick the damned thing up, uhh!
But then, who is going to pick up all the ones that the USA has dropped?
Report thisBy Fadel Abdallah, March 1, 2008 at 12:06 am #
“In the Middle East, the Second World War has not ended.”
How true, Robert Fisk, is the above statement, with which you ended your tragically sad account on how the Middle East has been made the theater for using the West’s weapons of mass destruction.
Every time I hear about the violence in Iraq and Palestine my blood boils up with anger and hate for the legacy of Western wars and their colonial enterprises in the Middle East. Take, for example, the over sixty-year tragic situation in Palestine. The West hated so much the Semitic Jews and the result was the Holocaust. Then they continued hating them to the point that they devised the Balfour plan to get rid of the survivors and send them to Palestine under the pretext of helping them. But in fact, this was a racist imperialist plan whose real purpose was to get rid of the largest numbers of European Jews and plant them in other Semitic people stolen land in order to set up two Semitic groups against each other, in a perpetual conflict, while they continue to provide weapons of mass destruction to both sides, on the hope that they will finish each others.
If Arabs and Jews think about what white Europeans’ real intentions were and continue to be, they might wake up to the reality of the need to reconcile and put an end to the merchants of death not-so-humanistic plans for the mostly Semitic people of the Middle East.
Report thisBy GrammaConcept, February 29, 2008 at 11:34 pm #
is always hell..
Report thisBy weather, February 29, 2008 at 10:39 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)
This is your legacy, you must be proud - and just think, it only took less then 60 yrs. to seal your utter inelegance.
Go ahead, slide up and take a bow, you earned it.
Report this