Fanaticism and Conflict in the Modern Age (Cass Series--Military History and Policy)

FANATICISM AND CONFLICT IN THE MODERN AGE

What is fanaticism? Is the term at all useful? After all, one person’s fanatic is another’s freedom fighter. Throughout history there have been fanatics eager to pursue their religious, political or personal agendas. Fanaticism has fuelled many of the conflicts of the twentieth century, in particular the theatres of combat of the Second World War. More recently, religious fanaticism has bedevilled affairs in the Middle East and elsewhere. Is fanaticism becoming more fanatical in the new millennium? As the events of 11 September 2001 prove, fanaticism, however it is defined, continues to dominate international affairs. This volume presents new and established scholars writing on a range of subjects from the Dervishes of the 1890s to the terrorism and guerrilla wars of the post-1945 period. The volume covers the nature and philosophy of fanaticism, the connection between political ideology and fanaticism, and the relationship between fanaticism and war in the contemporary era. To illustrate these themes, the volume presents a broad range of case studies including the Dervishes in the Sudan in the 1890s, fanaticism in the context of the Pacific War, 1937–45, the 12th SS Hitlerjugend division in action in Normandy in 1944, the Germany army on the Eastern Front, and terrorism and guerrilla war after 1945. Matthew Hughes is Senior Lecturer in History at Brunel University. Gaynor Johnson is Senior Lecturer in History at Bolton Institute of Higher Education.

CASS SERIES: MILITARY HISTORY AND POLICY Series Editors: John Gooch and Brian Holden Reid This series will publish studies on historical and contemporary aspects of land power, spanning the period from the eighteenth century to the present day, and will include national, international and comparative studies. From time to time, the series will publish edited collections of essays and ‘classics’. ALLENBY AND BRITISH STRATEGY IN THE MIDDLE EAST, 1917–1919 Matthew Hughes ALFRED VON SCHLIEFFEN’S MILITARY WRITINGS Robert Foley (ed. and trans.) THE BRITISH DEFENCE OF EGYPT, 1935–1940 Conflict and Crisis in the Eastern Mediterranean Steven Morewood

WRITING THE GREAT WAR Sir James Edmonds and the Official Histories, 1915–1948 Andrew Green COMMAND AND CONTROL IN MILITARY CRISIS Devious Decisions Harald Hoiback LLOYD GEORGE AND THE GENERALS David Woodward

THE JAPANESE AND THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH ARMIES AT WAR, 1941–1945 Tim Moreman

MALTA AND BRITISH STRATEGIC POLICY, 1925–1943 Douglas Austin

TRAINING, TACTICS AND LEADERSHIP IN THE CONFEDERATE ARMY OF TENNESSEE Seeds of Failure Andrew Haughton

BRITISH ARMOUR IN THE NORMANDY CAMPAIGN 1944 John Buckley

MILITARY TRAINING IN THE BRITISH ARMY 1940–1944 From Dunkirk to D-Day Tim Harrison Place THE BOER WAR Direction, Experience and Image John Gooch (ed.) CAPORETTO 1917 Victory or Defeat? Mario Morselli POSTWAR COUNTERINSURGENCY AND THE SAS 1945–1952 A Special Type of Warfare Tim Jones THE BRITISH GENERAL STAFF Reform and Innovation 1890–1939 David French and Brian Holden Reid (eds)

GALLIPOLI Making History Jenny Macleod (ed.) BRITISH AND JAPANESE MILITARY LEADERSHIP IN THE FAR EASTERN WAR 1941–1945 Brian Bond and Kyoichi Tachikawa (eds) THE BAGHDAD PACT Anglo-American Defence Policies in the Middle East, 1950–59 Behcet Kemal Yesilbursa FANATICISM AND CONFLICT IN THE MODERN AGE Matthew Hughes and Gaynor Johnson (eds)

FANATI CISM AND CO N F LI C T IN T HE M O D E R N AGE

Edited by Matthew Hughes and Gaynor Johnson

FRANK CASS LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2005 by Frank Cass, an imprint of Taylor & Francis 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Frank Cass 270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Frank Cass is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2005 Matthew Hughes and Gaynor Johnson All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. The publisher makes no representation, expressed or implied, with regard to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and cannot accept any legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions that may be made. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Hughes, Matthew Fanaticism and conflict in the modern age / Matthew Hughes and Gaynor Johnson. p. cm. – (Cass series–military history and policy ; 19) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Fanaticism–History–20th century. 2. Military history, Modern–20th century. I. Johnson, Gaynor, 1963– II. Title. III. Series. BJ1535.F25H84 2004 303.48′4.–dc22 2004009881 ISBN 0-203-32058-1 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0–714–65716–6 (hbk) ISBN 0–714–68584–4 (pbk)

CONTENTS

Notes on contributors Series Editor’s Preface Acknowledgements

1

vii x xii

Introduction

1

Fanaticism in the modern era

7

BARRIE PASKINS

2

Dervishes and fanaticism: perception and impact

19

EDWARD M. SPIERS

3

Fanaticism, Japanese soldiers and the Pacific War, 1937–45

33

BEATRICE TREFALT

4

Fanaticism and the barbarisation of the Pacific War, 1941–5

48

CRAIG M. CAMERON

5

‘Unprecedented, merciless and unrelenting harshness’: fanaticism and brutalisation in Wehrmacht anti-partisan warfare in the Soviet Union

63

BEN SHEPHERD

6

Indoctrinated Nazi teenaged warriors: the fanaticism of the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend in Normandy, 1944

81

STEPHEN HART

7

Fanaticism and guerrilla warfare in the late twentieth century CHRISTOPHER C. HARMON

v

101

CONTENTS

8

Fanaticism: the Algerian experience

116

GEORGE JOFFÉ

9

Fanatics, mobs and terrorists: the dynamics of Orange parades in Northern Ireland

144

DOMINIC BRYAN

10 Religious and nationalist fanaticism: the case of Hamas

156

MEIR LITVAK

Bibliography Index

175 190

vi

CONTRIBUTORS

Dominic Bryan is Director of the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen’s University, Belfast and Chair of Democratic Dialogue, Ireland’s first think-tank. Dr Bryan is an anthropologist working on political rituals, public space and identity in Northern Ireland. His book Orange Parades: The Politics of Ritual Tradition and Control (London: Pluto Press, 2000) used theories of rituals to examine parades organised by the Orange Order in Ireland. He also works on issues around public order policing, human rights, ethnic politics and sectarianism, and has done comparative work in South Africa and the US. Craig M. Cameron is Associate Professor at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, where he has taught American military history since 1990. He is the author of American Samurai: Myth, Imagination and the Conduct of Battle in the First Marine Division, 1941–1951 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), which received the 1997 Distinguished Book Award from the Society of Military History. He is currently finishing a book manuscript entitled To Reason Why: Negotiating Authority in the Vietnam War. Christopher C. Harmon, a former advisor on foreign policy to a member of the House Armed Services Committee, is now Professor of International Relations at the Marine Corps University, where for three years he directed the core course ‘Theory and Nature of War’. He has published on revolutionary warfare, counter-insurgency and terrorism. His second book, Terrorism Today, was published in 2000 by Frank Cass, and he has since testified before Congress and been given the Distinguished Public Service Award by the US Department of State. Stephen Hart is Senior Lecturer in the War Studies Department, Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Prior to this, Dr Hart lectured at the International Studies Department, University of Surrey, and at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. He is author of Montgomery and ‘Colossal Cracks’: The 21st Army Group in Northwest-Europe 1944–45 (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 1999), and co-author of several works, including The German Soldier in World War II (London: Amber, 2000). He is currently working on a co-authored book on the last days of the Third Reich. vii

CONTRIBUTORS

Matthew Hughes is Senior Lecturer in History at Brunel University and editor of the Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research. Dr Hughes’s recent publications include Allenby and British Strategy in the Middle East (London: Frank Cass, 1999), Does Peace Lead to War? Peace Settlements and Conflict in the Modern Age (Stroud: Sutton, 2002) and Allenby in Palestine: the Middle East Correspondence of Field Marshal Viscount Allenby, June 1917–October 1919 (London: Army Records Society, 2004). George Joffé was formerly Deputy-Director at the Royal Institute of International Affairs and is now a Visiting Professor at King’s College London, where he teaches postgraduate courses on the geopolitics of the Middle East and North Africa. He teaches a postgraduate course on the international relations of the Middle East and North Africa at the Centre of International Studies Cambridge University, and also teaches modern Middle East history on the History Tripos. His research interests include the colonial history of Morocco and the contemporary history of Algeria and Libya. Gaynor Johnson is Senior Lecturer in History at Bolton Institute of Higher Education. Dr Johnson is the author of The Berlin Embassy of Lord D’Abernon, 1920–1926 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) and the editor of Locarno Revisited: European Diplomacy 1920–1929 (London: Frank Cass, 2004), Our Man in Berlin: The Diary of Sir Eric Phipps, 1933–1937 (London: Brasseys, 2004) and The Foreign Office and British Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (London: Frank Cass, 2004). She is currently writing a biography of Viscount Cecil of Chelwood. Meir Litvak gained his doctorate from Harvard University in 1991. He is currently Senior Research Fellow at the Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University. Dr Litvak is the author of Shi‘i Scholars of Nineteenth Century Iraq: The ‘Ulama of Najaf and Karbala’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), editor of Islam and Democracy in the Arab World (Tel Aviv: Ha-Kibbutz ha-Meuchad, 1997), and has published articles on modern Shi‘ism as well as on Palestinian nationalism and Islamic movements and ideology. Barrie Paskins is a philosopher by training who has worked in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London since 1971. Dr Paskins’ publications include The Ethics of War (London: Duckworth, 1979). Current projects include ‘The Idea of a Just War’, ‘Central Texts in the Literature of War’ that discusses selected authors from Homer to the Great War poet David Jones, and ‘Benevolent Animals: an Essay in Philosophical Anthropology’ that attempts to move fundamental debates beyond the impasse between utilitarianism and Kantian duty ethics. Ben Shepherd is Lecturer in History at Glasgow Caledonian University. Dr Shepherd completed his doctorate at the University of Birmingham. Recent viii

CONTRIBUTORS

publications include articles on the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front in the Second World War in German History and Journal of Contemporary History. His book entitled War in the Wild East: The German Army and Soviet Partisans published by Harvard University Press in October 2004. Edward M. Spiers is the Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of Leeds. He has written extensively on military history, including Haldane: An Army Reformer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1980), The Army and Society, 1815–1914 (London: Longmans, 1980), Radical General: Sir George de Lacy Evans, 1787–1870 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983) and The Late Victorian Army, 1868–1902 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992). He edited Sudan: The Reconquest Reappraised (London: Frank Cass, 1998) and has prepared another monograph entitled The Victorian Soldier in Africa (Manchester: Manchester Unniversity Press, 2004). Beatrice Trefalt lectures in East Asian history in the School of Liberal Arts at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales. Dr Trefalt researches postwar Japanese history and in particular popular and public memories of the Second World War as well as discourses of national identity. Her most recent publication is Japanese Army Stragglers and Memories of the War in Post-war Japan, 1950–1975 (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003). She has also written on the commemoration of war for the volume Nation and Nationalism in Japan (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002). Her current research project focuses on processes of repatriation in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

ix

SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

The impression is sometimes given that fanaticism is yet another ‘contemporary disease’ that afflicts our troubled world. The dawn of the twenty-first century has brought with it a keener awareness of the visceral hatreds and unreasoning obsessions that lurk beyond the frontiers of ‘the West’. Even before the events of 11 September 2001, public debates within Western societies were increasingly shaped by the prevalence of the excessively dedicated viewpoint; one-issue political causes repeatedly came to the fore; and governments were taking far greater notice of the activities of the obsessive adherents of groups, such as those determined to secure ‘animal’s rights’ and harry any business or research scientist that seemed to infringe them. When obsessive hatreds focus across frontiers and continents, the dangers are greater. The authors who contribute to this volume make it clear that fanaticism has had a long history. The term can be applied to many creeds and followers. Fanatics, however defined (and a number of contributors remark on the stubborn ambiguity of fanaticism), have invariably demonstrated a willingness to die in war; they have sometimes volunteered to sacrifice themselves in the service of a particular cause or ideology. Barrie Paskins suggests that fanaticism is best understood as ‘misplaced simplicity’. In the simple desire to ignore all dangers, fanatics have often been singled out and condemned by Western spokesmen because of this willingness to sacrifice their lives. No matter how much Western societies applaud and admire courage (President John F. Kennedy described courage in Profiles in Courage (1956) as ‘that most admirable of human virtues’), they deplore those who willingly forfeit their lives in what appear to be misguided or futile causes. In 1944 American commanders in the Pacific War could not believe that Japanese kamikaze pilots had actually volunteered for duty; they were unanimous in thinking that they must have been compelled to commit suicide. When it is so easy to dismiss hate-filled fanatics, it is a relief to find serious and thought-provoking analysis. I have learned a lot by reading the contributors’ searching inquiries into the meaning and causes of fanaticism. One theme has impressed me: the link between fanaticism and the young. All the energy and zest of youth, coupled with frustration or a desire to prove their zeal, can be poured into fanatical obsessions. War is, above all things, the province of youth. The nature of x

SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

the world we live in demands that we become far less ignorant about fanaticism. This book is the essential starting point for attempting to reduce that ignorance. Brian Holden Reid King’s College London

xi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This volume grew out of a British Academy-funded conference at the Research and Graduate College, University of Salford, in June 2002, organised in conjunction with Bolton Institute. For their support, the editors would like to thank the European Studies Research Institute at the University of Salford, Bolton Institute, Dr Ahmed Aghrout, Professor Martin Alexander, Dr Gerry Bryant, Mrs Wendy Dodgson, Dr Nikolas Gardner, Professor Erik Goldstein, Dr Paddy Griffith, Professor Brian Holden Reid, Professor John Keiger, Dr Matthew Seligmann and Mrs Mollie Temple. Finally, the editors are grateful for the support of Andrew Humphrys at Frank Cass for his help with this volume.

xii

INTRODUCTION Matthew Hughes and Gaynor Johnson

The etymological root of ‘fanatic’ is clear enough. The word derives from the Latin noun fa¯num meaning sanctuary or temple from which comes the adjective fa¯na¯ticus – a temple devotee who is orgiastic, inspired, frantic or frenzied. By this definition, the fanatic is ‘always profaning: attacking the temples, polluting the relics, defying the taboos, and cursing the gods of the “other” – shitting in the pope’s tiara, a commonplace in anti-Catholic engravings of the Reformation period’.1 In the English language, by 1525, the fanatic was ‘a religious maniac’, and by 1644, ‘a visionary, an unreasoning enthusiast’.2 The term was increasingly used as a hostile epithet applied to Protestant Nonconformists (or Dissenters).3 In continental Europe in the same period, the term emphasised religious and spiritual divergence and the sense of an aggressive, religious zealot – itself, of course, a term referring back to a Jewish ‘fanatical enthusiast’4 – who was filled with a personal passion that was so extreme as to be an illness.5 Thus, in France in the seventeenth century, fanaticism was ‘comme une maladie, contagieuse, difficile à guerir et dangereuse’.6 The overriding theme is of an irregular religious practice that is so extreme as to be an ‘illness’ afflicting its adherents. Depending on the dominant religion in any given society, the cause of the illness, the symptoms of which were fanatical behaviour, lay in a variety of dissenting religions, separate and distinct from the established church. In this respect, the exclusive qualities of so much of European religious life in this period can be neatly contrasted to New Age religions in Nigeria that are an amalgamation of traditional local and national worship mixing together Christianity, Islam and local metaphysical spiritualism – a combination that militates against fanaticism.7 In the Anglican world, Catholics were one target but it was the ‘unbridled Fury and Fanatical zeal of the Dissenters’ that dominated much of the discourse in the early modern period.8 The emphasis in England was very much on the threat from Nonconformity, as is shown by a publication from 1715 that linked together fanaticism and Dissenters as a menace to the state: This Uniformity of the two British kingdoms in Religious matters continued ‘till that remarkable Year of the Spanish Armado [sic], or Invasion, 1588, when the Separatists, Dissenters, Fanaticks, presbyterians 1

MATTHEW HUGHES AND GAYNOR JOHNSON

(or by what other Name soever you please to distinguish such a vile Brood) taking the Advantage of that Opportunity, as they always do when the state is embroiled or alarmed, pushed and petitioned for more Liberty.9 In 1715, the idea of ‘fake’ Nonconformist sects raising rebellion seemed a real threat.10 By 1842, any ‘fanatical’ danger in a more stable and less religiously charged Britain was being discussed in terms of religious dogma and Tractarian inconsistencies in the Bible.11 Non-Dissenters who practised their beliefs in an unusual way could also be labelled fanatics, including those from the lower classes who read their bibles a little too literally, as is shown by an 1835 account of the actions of the villagers of Water-Stratford in Berkshire, England in 1694: About a hundred and forty years ago, our ancestors had before their eyes a most humiliating proof of the length to which fanatical delusion may be carried. . . . On their first coming together, early in the spring of 1694, a few days before Easter, they threw their common property into a common stock. . . . They fully believed that when their own supplies should be exhausted, God would nourish and sustain them.12 On the Continent, religions seen to be a danger to the established order – be it Islam, Catholicism or Protestantism – were tarred with the brush of fanaticism. Islam was an obvious target. Voltaire’s philosophical play Le fanatisme ou Mahomet le Prophete (1743) portrayed Islam as a fanatical religion, a perspective that has significant contemporary resonance.13 However, as the threat from Muslim expansion into Europe faded in the late seventeenth century – to re-emerge in the late twentieth century – the Christian world increasingly looked in on its own fanaticism. With its emphasis on science and reason rather than religion, the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century combined with the liberalism of the nineteenth century to split and transform fanaticism into the generic form that it has taken in the modern age. On the one hand, the fanatic became an individual afflicted with some irrational, personal (and usually fairly harmless) quirk. Hence, the teetotaller’s lament in 1890: I know that when I was a young man serving my apprenticeship I was chaffed continually, and I know many others who have been jeered at because they were teetotallers. I have been told that no one should be a teetotaller except a confirmed drunkard . . . teetotallers have been called by all sorts of obnoxious names, and perhaps the bitterest and most commonly used term is that of styling them ‘fanatics’, and the doctrine they teach ‘fanaticism’.14 2

INTRODUCTION

This use of the term fanatic was contemporaneous with the spread of political fanaticism and ideology, a far more potent phenomenon and one associated with the rise in Europe in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries of extreme nationalism, fascism, nihilism and communism. The association of fanaticism with religion remained, but was usually tied in with cultural and racial differences associated with non-European societies, as is shown by the chapters in this volume on the dervishes in the Sudan and Japan in the Second World War. As in earlier periods, fanaticism was an explanatory tool for perceived alien behaviour patterns. It is tempting to differentiate the political fanaticism of the shock troops of the Left and Right in the twentieth century from the religious fanaticism of the early modern and medieval periods. But there is continuity here as well as change, both in the way states have manipulated the concept to target particular groups and in the motivating factors driving on the fanatic. The fanatical fervour of the Nazis is a case in point. The French historians Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre characterise Nazism as ‘rationalised fanaticism’15 but the roots of, for instance, the Nazis’ fanatical anti-Semitism can be traced back to an aggressive, evangelic Protestantism of the Reformation and the subsequent religious wars that it provoked.16 The subject of deeply rooted anti-Semitism in German society is highly controversial – as is shown by the furore caused by Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996) – but the intense debate suggests that racial antiSemitism in Germany was more than just an expression of changes in a modern capitalist society.17 Challenging this idea of continuity is the fact that fascism and communism in the twentieth century represented fanaticism by the majority (or most powerful) group in any given state as opposed to activity by a minority, fringe group. In this sense, fanaticism becomes a state rather than sub-state activity. The Nazis and Bolsheviks were atheist dissenters in a secular age, railing against liberal democracy. Moreover, the period after the First World War was exceptional in that it witnessed the collective slide into fanaticism of almost an entire continent – Europe.18 Even compared with the religious conflicts of earlier periods, this represented a remarkable and exponential growth in fanaticism, and reflected an unhappy symbiosis of political extremism and extreme politically based behaviour. In Germany, fanatical nationalism in the Second World War eventually destroyed any sense of rational analysis, replacing it with an acceptance of a final catastrophe, a recurring theme in fanatical behaviour patterns.19 Similar trends are discernable in Japan in the same period. This fatalism harks back to the millenarianism of earlier religious sects awaiting the inevitable Apocalypse, suggesting historical continuity and an eschatological endgame of fanatics and fanatical societies across a broad span of time and place. Indeed, Omer Bartov describes National Socialism in Germany as a ‘fanatic religion’ and the war on the Eastern Front in the Second World War as a new Thirty Years’ War, pitting the two secular religions of Nazism and Bolshevism in one gigantic struggle.20 As the war went against Germany, the fanatic, religious-ideological belief of the Nazis 3

MATTHEW HUGHES AND GAYNOR JOHNSON

provided the motor for carrying on the fight in the face of overwhelming odds and certain defeat to the bitter end.21 In this sense, the Nazis (and Bolsheviks) had turned their political ideologies into a religion, and with this there came the singleminded devotion of the religiously charged fanatic, thus countering Bloch and Febvre’s rather oxymoron concept of rational fanaticism. The triumph of liberal democracy over Nazism and Japanese militarism in 1945 meant that fanaticism of the Right moved out of the political mainstream. It also resulted in a redefinition or extension of what is meant by ‘fanatic’ and ‘fanaticism’, once again emphasising the sub-state actor. Thus, on a personal level, extreme, violent behaviour of bizarre contemporary cults and individuals such as Charles Manson, David Koresh and the Night Stalker has been called a modern manifestation of fanaticism.22 The result has been a series of spurious, salacious studies that have done little to prove that the aberrant behaviour of very unpleasant individuals is anything more than the result of a severe pathological/ psychological disorder that manifests itself in criminal behaviour. It is also used in a trivial sense to denote a single-minded individual obsessed with hobbies and the like. More significantly, the period after 1945 also saw fanaticism make a return to its pre-Enlightenment origins: governments identify certain sub-state minority groups, often religious in nature, as a threat to the state (as opposed to the 1930s and 1940s when other states were the threat). This volume highlights two such groups, perceived by governments as fanatical: guerrillas/terrorists and religious fundamentalists. For the guerrilla fighters in organisations such as Sendero Luminoso in Peru and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, fanatical behaviour is the function of radical politics rather than religion, and with the end of the Cold War, these fringe groups are very much the new political Dissenters. Meanwhile, religious fundamentalism – notably in the guise of Islam – has re-emerged with a vengeance as a fanatical threat to the established global order in a way unseen by any comparable groups in the medieval and early modern periods. The events of 9/11 have compounded the sense that we seem to be living in a Manichaean world and they dramatically highlight the association that some make between Islam and fanatical, violent behaviour such as suicide bombers. They also suggest a link between fanaticism and technology in the modern age that was impossible in earlier epochs. After all, the birth of powered flight and modern mass air travel made possible the destruction of the World Trade Center towers and the face of the Pentagon. In the context of the current war on terrorism does it mean anything to talk about fanatical behaviour or is this just another weapon used by governments to combat sub-state and, with the idea of the ‘axis of evil’, state opponents? Moreover, can we even talk of a fanatic in terms of a set of defining characteristics? It is true that fanatics across time have been sustained by a remarkable spiritual sustenance – of a religious or, later, political nature – that has been reflected in an extraordinary dedication to their cause and a willingness to endure immense suffering. Nevertheless, as this volume shows, many manifestations of fanaticism in the modern period have been part of a rational decision-making process by well4

INTRODUCTION

educated individuals who consciously use ‘fanatical’ violence. This has tended to be short-lived, possibly because the power of rationalism is too well entrenched and undermines the emotional convictions of educated people who might have been beguiled into fanatical belief by a personal or national crisis. This is certainly the case for the guerrilla fighters described by Christopher Harmon, although ideological extremism tempers this rational use of extreme violence. Again, as George Joffé shows, the terrible atrocities in Algeria in the 1990s can readily be explained in light of the course of Algerian history in the decades after independence in 1962. Indeed, even Usama bin Laden, as Michael Doran has argued, can be explained away as another practitioner of Realpolitik (whose politics of realism may or may not have the desired result).23 Thus, limited rational ends often belie the fanatical means employed, suggesting that fanaticism could be synonymous with opportunism. This is not always the case: the racially driven fanaticism of the Nazis and Japanese during the Second World War being an obvious counter example. Meir Litvak makes a similar point when he looks at the religious-ideological underpinning of Hamas, arguing that the violent behaviour of Hamas towards Zionism is based on a fanatical, uncompromising desire founded on religious dogma to destroy the Israeli state. Notwithstanding Litvak’s trenchant argument, the essays in this chapter show that much of what makes up a fanatic is very subjective and often represents the (mis)perceptions of the dominant power(s). This is not to say that we should tolerate an antinomian world without any sense of absolute values; or that we should ignore aberrant behaviour than seems fanatical by a society’s norms. It is more that fanatic and fanaticism can be just more labels applied to outsiders and ones that perhaps say as much about the judges as the judged.

Notes 1 Colas, 1997, 5. 2 See the entry for ‘fanatic’ in Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001). 3 The term ‘Dissenter’ was originally also used for Catholics but later came to be used solely for Protestants who had separated from the Church of England. 4 See definition for ‘zealot’ at http://www.oed.com/. 5 See, for instance, the entry for ‘fanatique’ in Le Grand Robert Langue Française. Dictionnaire Alphabétique et Analogique de la Langue Française de Paul Robert (Paris: Le Robert, 1985). 6 Haynal et al., 1980, 40. 7 Mbabuike, 1996, 401–33. 8 The Rise and Growth of Fanaticism: or, a View of the Principles, Plots and Pernicious Practices of the Dissenters, for Upwards of 150 Years, 1715, 7. 9 Ibid., 23. 10 Ibid., 43. 11 British Society for Promoting the Religious Principles of the Reformation, 1842, 6, 22. 12 Bransbury, 1835, 5, 10. 13 Laqueur, 1999, 97. 14 ‘Fanatics and Fanaticism: a lecture delivered by W.H. Quilliam at the Vernon

5

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15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Temperance Hall, Mount Vernon Street, Liverpool, under the auspices of the Liverpool Temperance League’ (Liverpool: Dobb, 1890), 4. Schöttler, 1996, 5–21. See Friedman, 1987, 3–30. Walz, 1995, 719–48. For Europe’s slide to the Right see Mazower, 1998. Bartov, 2001, 86. Bartov, 2001, 93. Bartov, 2001, 95. See also Fritz, 1996, 683–710. See, for instance, Lane, 1996. Doran, 2002, 177–90.

6

1 FANATICISM IN THE MODERN ERA Barrie Paskins

It is, perhaps, obvious to claim that fanaticism has played a prominent part in modern armed conflict. But the concept is complex, and shrouded in prejudice and stereotype. It is important to go beyond the popular adage that ‘one person’s fanatic is another person’s freedom fighter’. Might the word fanaticism be a merely a wholly emotive term? Does the suggestion that there have been too many fanatics in modern wars amount to making no factual claim at all, but is simply a way of expressing support for some (for example, freedom fighters), or loathing for others (dubbed fanatics)? This chapter will argue that fanaticism need not be an empty emotive word. It can mean something sufficiently definite to ensure that there are real historical questions to be asked concerning the place of fanaticism in modern armed conflict. We can usefully define fanaticism as ‘misplaced simplicity’ – a concept that can, with good reason, often be regarded as harmful. The harm it can do justifies the pejorative tone of the word fanaticism without reducing that word to a mere emotive expletive. In examining whether fanaticism can be referred to as misplaced simplicity, we unavoidably enter into several kinds of debate which are often disconnected. One very substantial debate concerns Carl von Clausewitz’s theory of war. In particular, his insistence that a tendency towards extremes is characteristic of, and fundamental to, modern warfare. War draws and drives all belligerents towards extremes and there is much to be said in support of his contention. Should we infer from this that war makes fanatics of all belligerents, and, by implication, that only pacifists can avoid fanaticism? If so, are we ruling in or out the thought that pacifists might be or become fanatical in some other respect? This chapter will argue that Clausewitz is not well served by foisting upon him the contention that war forces all belligerents into fanaticism. Instead, by defining fanaticism as misplaced simplicity, it is possible to ask questions about the place of something other than war’s necessary extremes among the causes and consequences of modern armed conflict. Seemingly very different from these questions are the first- and second-order definitional issues with which this chapter is largely concerned. Some first-order 7

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questions concern the variety of meanings that have been attached to the word fanaticism. A typical second-order question is what would result if the word was restricted to one of its established meanings, excluding other usages? Modern linguistic conventions suggest that there is no such thing as right and wrong verbal usage, so how can this process be achieved? Discussion of this second-order question needs to be enriched by comparison with other first-order questions. How should we define terrorist, suicide bomber, just war and illegitimate belligerent? Are these also terms through which it is possible to redefine the term fanatic, or are there no definitional tasks worth attempting that cannot be dealt with adequately through reference to a dictionary? This chapter will respond to this cluster of first- and second-order definitional issues by invoking the well-known idea of W.B. Gallie, who argued that some branches of politics are partly defined by essentially contested terms. In this case, certain important words do not have wholly agreed meanings which can be safely and adequately looked up in the dictionary. The word justice is an example of this. Contenders compete with one another to define it and, exasperating though this may be, no one in that polity can simply abandon debate about the word. The terms terrorist and, perhaps, suicide bomber are equally contested. To understand their principal meanings, and their importance, it is necessary to have a sense of the political context. The situation is not quite the same but somewhat similar regarding fanaticism. This is another term that is, or is close to being, essentially contested. The connections between fanaticism and essentially contested terms will emerge as the argument unfolds. At the outset, however, one point about this needs to be made explicit. This chapter will acknowledge contributions from both the Clausewitzian tradition of defining the nature of conflict and be responsive to the just war tradition. Some of the typical tensions that exist between realism in Clausewitz and the idealism of some versions of the just war idea find reflection in the following pages. One dictionary defines fanaticism as dangerous extremism. This is a useless definition, but one that is worth dwelling on for two reasons. First, because the word extremism alone is too vague to offer a meaningful definition. Is not courage apt to be extreme? Resolution, determination, decisiveness, ruthlessness – are not these a matter of going to extremes? Is it not true to claim that mistrust of all extremism is tantamount to a timid preference for moderation in all things that is very questionable as a guide for any kind of human life and hopeless for the understanding of armed conflict? There is so much truth in the saying ‘he who dares wins’ that extremism is simply too pallid a word to offer any worthwhile guidance in considering the relations between fanaticism and armed conflict. If the above-mentioned definition is correct then we are pitched into the very puzzling situation that modern armed conflict has no special connection with fanaticism because extremism is such a vague and inappropriate word. Second, the definition of fanaticism as dangerous extremism is at variance with Clausewitz’s thinking on the subject. Clausewitz has deep and far-reaching things to say about the relations between extremes and war, and we need to consider these 8

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in order to ask whether they are such as to leave no place for fanaticism in the causation and consequences of armed conflict. If Clausewitz was right about war then maybe fanaticism is a red herring. In On War, he wrote: I shall not begin by formulating a crude, journalistic definition of war, but go straight to the heart of the matter, to the duel. War is nothing but a duel on a larger scale . . . a picture of it as a whole can be formed by imagining a pair of wrestlers. Each tries through physical force to compel the other to do his will.1 Importantly, therefore, war is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will. Clausewitz continues: Force, to counter opposing force, equips itself with the inventions of art and science. Attached to force are certain self-imposed, imperceptible limitations hardly worth mentioning, known as international law and custom, but they scarcely weaken it. Force – that is, physical force, for moral force has no existence save as expressed in the state and the law – is thus the means of war; to impose our will on the enemy is its object. . . . Kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed: war is such a dangerous business that the mistakes which come from kindness are the very worst. . . . If one side uses force without compunction, undeterred by the bloodshed it involves, while the other side refrains, the first will gain the upper hand. That side will force the other to follow suit; each will drive its opponent toward extremes.2 War and a tendency to extremes are for Clausewitz so intertwined that it is not obvious that any thing other than war itself, any such thing as fanaticism, is needed or even admissable to explain the extremes of armed conflict. Clausewitz knew that war rarely reached the ultimate in extreme violence, because there were two factors that prevented it from doing so. One of these is what he termed friction. For example, a belligerent would bring all its resources to bear on the struggle to impose its will on the opponent. In messy reality, a great variety of complications prevent this from happening. The recruiting arrangements fail to bring in all the available manpower. Transport fails to get all the troops to the front in time. Units get lost. Weapons fail to work. Having compared war with physical force, Clausewitz continues the metaphor by referring to the ways that things go wrong as friction. Here at least there seems to be no controversy about his meaning. Everyone agrees that in practice the simplicities of war are complicated by innumerable practical imperfections. If war tends towards extremes, material imperfections are one way for it to fall short. 9

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Clausewitz is acutely aware that there is something else in addition to friction that often stops war from becoming extreme violence. This is that the belligerents have only limited political aims. They want to impose their will upon one another but this is not their only or their overriding objective. They also want to keep taxes down, to avoid bringing a powerful neighbour into the quarrel, to have forces available if necessary to fight two separate wars simultaneously, to avoid where possible the violation of norms which are cherished by influential constituencies, and so on. Clausewitz offers no single word or phrase to sum up this second factor which prevents war from reaching the limit of extreme violence. For the purpose of this chapter, this set of scenarios will be referred to as political limitation. As with friction, the possibilities of political limitation are endless. All wars, Clausewitz argues, are to be understood in terms of the interplay of these three things: (1) the inherent tendency of war to become extreme, restrained only by (2) friction and (3) political limitation. However well-meaning a belligerent may be, war is no place for moral niceties. But Clausewitz’s hypothesis is a theory of war not a theory of the state. Because his analysis is focused on the act of war, which drives to extremes those who are striving to impose their wills upon one another, it is readily applicable not only to war between states but to war at every level – state against non-state and pairings of non-state actors as well as interstate warfare. If we want to say that things have moved on, that the state is not what it was, we should not infer from this that Clausewitz is any less relevant than he used to be. The struggle to impose one’s will upon an opponent through armed force, and the opponent’s attempt to do the same, is the brutally simple central fact of Clausewitz’s analysis and his theory is so abstract and general that it is just as applicable to non-state actors as to states. Clausewitz’s theory is such as to leave little scope among the causes and consequences of war for anything that might be termed fanaticism. Once hostilities have begun, once the struggle of will against will is joined, the dynamic of war takes over and each belligerent is driven towards extremes by the inherent logic of war. This extremism is not fanaticism but the logic of war. If a role for fanaticism in the causation of war is to be found, it would have to be in one of three places: in the outbreak of hostilities, before the logic of war begins to work; in friction; or in political limitation. It is also important to note that Clausewitz as a historian, as well as a military strategist, believed that certain socio-political conditions make it more likely that wars will degenerate towards the limit of all-out absolute war. Specifically, he compares the relatively restrained conduct of eighteenth-century dynastic war with the violence of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (1792–1815). He thinks that the contrast might be traced in large part to the involvement of the people in the latter. If fanaticism is, as this chapter suggests, misplaced simplicity then it is necessary to investigate the extent to which the involvement of the people makes misplaced simplicity more likely, for example, because of the propaganda needed to motivate them to support the war. We might contrast such a view with a quite 10

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different one, not involving such fanaticism, according to which involvement of the people is really a matter of individuals seeing private, individual profit, for example, in the invasion of Russia in 1812. In this scenario, it is likely that Clausewitz, the historian, would incline towards the former, more collectivist explanation, but further discussion of this point does not fall within the remit of this chapter. What is more important in this context is Clausewitz’s universally applicable theory of war and the general idea of fanaticism. So what, assuming Clausewitz’s theory about the escalatory character of war, can it be useful to call fanaticism? The word’s etymology is interesting. In the modern European languages, fanaticism has a very specific connotation that it derives from and shares with classical Latin. In Chinese and Persian there seems to be no straightforward one-word translation. In Latin, fanaticus means inspired by a deity, enthusiastic. The Oxford English Dictionary gives numerous examples of this notion, all of them pejorative, from 1533 into the nineteenth century, drawing particular attention to the word’s application in the latter half of the seventeenth century to Nonconformists as a hostile epithet. Other examples include: 1600 ‘The men shaking and waggling their bodies too and fro after a fanaticall fashion’; 1633 ‘Those Phanaticall women of the Gentiles’; 1641 ‘A fanatic fellow . . . gave forth that himself was the true Edward’; 1659 ‘Papists, Atheists and fanatic persons’; 1659–60 ‘Be careful neither the cavalier nor phanatique party have yet a share in your civil . . . power’ (Monk); 1660 ‘A new word coined, within few months, called fanatics . . . seemeth well . . . proportioned to signify . . . the sectaries of our age’; 1660 ‘Since Lambert got out of the Tower, the Fanatiques had held their heads high’ (Pepys); 1732 ‘As fanatical as any Quietist or Quaker’ (the philosopher Bishop Berkeley, in Alciphron); 1774 ‘The cloisters . . . fell victims to fanatic fury’; 1780 ‘Henry IV of France . . . was unexpectedly murdered by a wretched fanatic’; 1806 ‘Dr G gave . . . hints how to treat fanatics, by using topical remedies and poultices’; 1850 ‘The Fanatic legions of the desert’ (Mahomet by W. Irving); 1859 ‘The man of one idea, who works at nothing but that . . . sacrifices everything to that; the fanatic in short’ (Charles Kingsley); 1876 ‘I call a man fanatical when . . . he . . . becomes unjust and unsympathetic to men who are out of his own track’ (George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, chapter 46, Daniel declaring that Mordecai is a decent sort of enthusiast rather than the narrow fanatical sort); 1883 ‘The Jews . . . were troublesome fanatics whom it was equally difficult to govern or destroy’ (Froude). Larousse gives first French usage to Rabelais in 1532. Duden claims that fanatisch was borrowed in the sixteenth century, as in English and French, from the synonymous Latin. So there is a pattern of usage that is not difficult to sum up. Speaking the word are enemies of enthusiasm, opponents of possession and passion, enlightenment people, anti-romantics. Anything that suggests possession by a god, such as the shaking and quaking alleged to have occurred in the English Civil War period, is seized upon, and anything that a later more secularised consciousness picks out as equivalent to divine possession will tend in European usage to be abused as fanaticism by opponents of enthusiasm. George Eliot is 11

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a latecomer to this company, drawing a finely humane distinction between enthusiasm (good) and fanaticism (bad). In Chinese there seems to be no straightforward translation. This is not surprising. In Chinese history before the nineteenth century, political action and other disruptions were never typically articulated through the temple. The Western experience, from Froude’s Romans onwards, of temple possession taking hold of people in ways that required the authorities to grapple with it as a disruptive factor in its own right, was not in Chinese consciousness enough of a thing to find its way into the language. In Persian, the nineteenth-century English–Persian Dictionary by Arthur Wollaston, published in 1842, suggests four words, which it transcribes as: muta’assib, khushk-dimagh, ta’assub, ‘asabiyah. Later attempts to compile a lexicon of the Persian language, such as that by Professor Lambton in 1954, give only the first of these, transcribed as mota’asseb. This phrase, in turn, when looked up in F. Steingass’s Persian–English dictionary, transcribes it as muta’assib, meaning ‘attached to one’s people; helping them; partial, prejudiced; zealous; bigoted; superstitious’.3 Steingass claims that the etymology of muta’assib is Arabic. If Lambton is right to point us to mota’asseb and if Steingass’s definition gives the correct gist of the word’s development, then it could be argued that in Islam there has never been any pejorative mileage in abusing someone for divine possession but that there has been ample reason to think of personal loyalty as too readily leading away from impartiality and thence towards injustice. Do the Persians know what fanaticism is? Do they have a word for it? The answer to these questions depends in the first instance on what the speakers of the much younger languages influenced by Latin mean by fanaticism. For an academic enquiry to assume unselfconsciously the abusive certainties of Berkeley, Froude and the rest is unacceptable. But what sense, if any, in the twentieth-century world, are we to give to the word fanaticism? What, if anything, is the primary target of the word fanaticism? People are called fanatical on the basis of what? Is it their beliefs, their attitudes or their actions that are fanatical? The term does not appear to apply to forms of religious worship. In the Oxford English Dictionary definition above, their opponents identify Quakers and Shakers as fanatics on the basis of their shaking and waggling their bodies (the 1600 quote) but these movements are treated as evidence, as symptomatic – the thing itself, the fanaticism, is thought to lie beyond. But where, and in what, is to be found the fanaticism? Recent philosophical thought has claimed that actions are caused by a combination of beliefs and so-called desires. A much-debated assumption is that there is, in principle, a distinction between beliefs and desires: beliefs are true or false, desires are something else, that is neither true nor false. How far we need to enter into this question for the purpose of this chapter remains to be seen. Certain specific points, however, are suggestive. When we are in a mood to speak unselfconsciously about fanatics, we tend to attribute to them two contrasting states of mind. They are, on the one hand, very emotional, possessed, and on the other hand, they are terrifyingly calm. Does this suggest that those who seek to define 12

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fanaticism are simply confused – projecting incompatible states of mind on to people that we dislike? A more likely possibility is that from the time of Cicero onwards, when the term fanaticus became part of western European language, temple possession had for us a two-faced character. It is not clear what is being dealt with because the fanatic is never a calm, quiet, detached philosopher (as Berkeley supposed himself to be), never a tranquil theologian content to discuss speculations as straightforwardly debatable beliefs. The clear-cut distinction which philosophy likes to take for granted between beliefs and desires totters. The whole calm edifice of rationality, the clear break between reason and passion, does not work. There is something uncanny behind the shaking and waggling of their bodies. Observing them closely, it is possible to notice calm but also extremely violent emotion. But it is unclear how it is possible to clarify further what is really going on. There is more than a speaker’s muddle here. But there is also another perspective. Since it is not possible to establish precisely when the word fanatic was partly tamed, it is not odd or eccentric to claim a fanatical passion for a hobby or devotion to the local football team, for example. The old Enlightenment rage has gone out of the pejorative use of this word. Just as the word Quaker has been tamed by the Society of Friends and made part of the society’s name, so fanatic has a domesticated usage. The suggestion here is that we would be wise to equate fanaticism with misplaced simplicity. First, take the example of the football fanatic. In every household there is a kind of politics to be played, in which a characteristic move is to ask ‘Who is going to visit Aunt Edna this weekend?’ One answer to this kind of question is to say, without further explanation, ‘Manchester City is playing at home’. There speaks the football fanatic. There is to be no discussion of the football fanatic’s desires in relation to the wishes of other members of the household. The fact is sufficient. Even here in the kitchen politics of any family there is that uncanny trembling of the philosophers’ contrast between belief and attitude. The fact is enough: simple as that. Such simplicity is, of course, misplaced. At home there are whatever reasons there are why this fanaticism really will not do. It is out of place. A historian of the family could readily try to retrieve these local considerations as to why such simplicity is out of place in that particular household, with its particular kitchen politics. There is no attempt, at least not initially, to apply this kind of single-mindedness to a wider context. There are reasons, ingredient in that household, why this is misplaced simplicity. Because misplaced simplicity is such a general fact in our lives, it has the potential to contribute something that Clausewitz does not rule out from an understanding of the causes and consequences of armed conflict. War, as Clausewitz insists, is politics by other means. In politics there is often scope for simplicity and simplification. Such simplicity is not always misplaced. There is a time to cut the Gordian knot and one mark of political leadership is the ability to get that right – to simplify the complexities of politics in the right sort of way. But the knot is not always to be sliced. There is such a thing as misplaced simplicity and it can be destructive and disastrous. Just as historians debate what in the local 13

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situation makes some examples of simplicity misplaced, so they will discuss which examples of political simplification are well done, which are examples of true and exemplary leadership. Once again, these are at any rate at the beginning of the debate likely to be concerned with local considerations, with what is done well and what is misplaced in the local circumstances. To equate fanaticism with misplaced simplicity is in line with the Charles Kingsley’s definition of fanaticism listed in the Oxford English Dictionary, discussed earlier. Kingsley claims that the fanatic is the ‘man of one idea, who works at nothing but that . . . sacrifices everything but that’. The definition of fanaticism offered in this chapter makes the opprobrium explicit – misplaced simplicity – and sets his phrase of ‘nothing but’ against an explanatory background – this is not random fixation but a thing which is a necessary part of politics. By the same token, this definition is also in line with the Persian definition of fanaticism as mota’asseb. Just as this phrase moves from ‘attached to one’s people, helping them to a fatal slide through partial, prejudiced, zealous and bigoted to superstitious’ so the definition offered here singles out the word fanatical as misplaced, inviting the historians to debate the local circumstances in which the word is used. This offers to add something to a predominantly Clausewitzian understanding of war. War is politics and in politics there is complexity and scope both for masterly simplification and for misplaced simplicity. Always and everywhere in conflict, according to Clausewitz, a significant factor, an independent variable, in determining what happened may well be what can be termed fanaticism. This is a very large issue. To keep within manageable bounds, it is necessary to contextualise the issue by considering briefly two other pieces of terminology whose meaning needs to be contested. The terms in question are the phrase ‘suicide bomber’ and the word ‘terrorism’. It is also appropriate to comment on a general tendency to evade issues that are all too well exemplified in such a saying as ‘one person’s fanatic is another person’s freedom fighter’. Suicide bomber is a phrase that evokes sharply conflicting opinions. One view is that it is a knowing misuse of language. Whatever their merits or de-merits, the people so called are typically not suicides. They are bravely if misguidedly engaged in extremely dangerous military missions which are very likely to end in their deaths and certain to end in their deaths if in their own terms successful. Currently, in the Middle East and elsewhere, they are undertaken against a cultural background which has no place, as ancient Rome and feudal Japan had, for noble suicide. In the eyes of their own people, they are martyrs and there may be belief that at death they will go straight to heaven, though we should remember that part of the word fanaticism’s force is that the clear-cut philosophers’ distinction between belief and attitude cannot be taken for granted where fanatics are concerned. Whether it is calmly and simply believed that they will go to heaven or whether this is their loved ones’ fervent but agonizingly uncertain hope is a question deserving careful enquiry in each particular case. Therefore, to call these people suicide bombers is to misclassify. They are no more suicides than the men who 14

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went knowingly to face almost certain death at the battle of the Somme in 1916. The motivation in the two cases is of the same kind. Both are engaged in politics by other means. For both, considerations of an afterlife are understandably urgent. It may of course be that in the one case as in the other there are individuals who do desire to die as suicides desire death, as desperate young men in American cities seek death through gun fights with the police. But it is wilful misrepresentation to call them suicide bombers, black propaganda to be avoided as such. This view is opposed by some who maintain that suicide is a purely factual term and it is simply a fact that these people are suicides. Such a claim needs to be squared with the pejorative force of referring to people as suicide bombers, and it may be worth noticing that one way to do this is to consider the underlying approaches of those who do and those who do not believe that there are profoundly important differences among different sorts of foreseen consequences of an action. Mainstream utilitarians, and English law, maintain that a person is responsible in the same sort of way for all the reasonably foreseeable consequences of his or her actions. If the agent’s death is a certain consequence of the action’s successful completion then it is simply a fact that one appropriate description of the deed is that it is suicide. Not everyone accepts the premise. In the just war tradition, for example, what is often claimed is that direct attacks on non-combatants are absolutely forbidden. There can be, according to this way of thinking, important differences between direct attacks and unavoidable side-effects. It can be appropriate to regard the latter as collateral damage. By the same token, it may be that the so-called bombers, like the martyrs of many historic religions, are not aiming at their own deaths, even if death is an unavoidable side-effect of what they are aiming to achieve. There is not space in this chapter to probe further into the important debates that attend upon this divergence between utilitarian and anti-utilitarian understandings of the nature of an action. For present purposes, what this brief discussion exemplifies is that the emotive force of common parlance may easily mask vital underlying disagreements. In this case, ordinary usage connotes disapproval of a kind that the utilitarians among us may well consider to be simply absent from their thinking. This is different from our discussion of the word fanaticism. To use suicide bomber reflectively, we need to acknowledge an underlying set of questions that are begged if we content ourselves with common parlance. To use fanaticism as referring to misplaced simplicity is not in anything like the same way to beg practically important questions. However firmly established the idiom suicide bomber becomes, its unreflective use should be resisted because the words have a clear and established meaning that is being wilfully abused. Unless the phrase is domesticated, as Quakers tamed the abusive word quaker, one is pointing to obvious facts in protesting that suicide bombers are nothing of the kind. Whether their targets are combatants or non-combatants, or located in the uneasy no man’s land between the two – perhaps where some Israeli settlers belong? – these latterday assassins are misnamed suicide bombers. If it is appropriate to debate the nature of their actions, it should be done explicitly in terms of underlying disagreements 15

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between utilitarians and their opponents. Some linguistic commentary is as simple as that. The situation was already much more complicated in regard to the wretched word terrorism before the outrage of 11 September 2001. As long ago as 1974, Paul Wilkinson’s Political Terrorism documented some 150 non-identical uses of the word. One could spend a very long time on it without anything like the fruits that are to be harvested from careful consideration of the word fanaticism. All lethal armed conflict is terrifying and meant to be so, so any connection between terrorism and terror is bound to be problematic, since the word is used to refer to some but far from all lethal armed action. One could try, if one wished, applying it to all non-state military action but no one these days seems to want to do that. We are no longer, if we ever were, such statists as to be minded to heap abuse on all nonstate military action; nor is it obvious how a statist could distinguish non-state terrorism (bad) from state-sponsored terrorism (presumably to be judged case by case on its merits). It is possible to take a high hand with the word and define it as meaning any direct attack against non-combatants by a non-state actor. This would have the merit of invoking an ethical category. But the West is by no means wholly committed to non-combatant immunity. From Nagasaki and Dresden in 1945 to our invulnerable second-strike capability against whatever population we choose to target, to the disregard at Camp X-ray of prisoner of war status for men, the West is not completely in favour of non-combatant immunity. Hence, a definition of terrorism that makes good sense ethically cannot be wished into the language by a private citizen who is neither a philosopher king nor a Confucius rectifying the signs. Just as a utilitarian should recognise that common parlance is against the claim that a suicide bomber is a suicide as a simple matter of fact, so an absolutist about non-combatant immunity has to recognise that the language we speak embodies no firm commitment to a principle that is constantly violated as a matter of the highest state policy. Between the impossibility of connecting terrorism with, on the one hand, terror, and on the other hand, ethical correctness, what can be said about the word terrorism? The word has multiple meanings that have long been manipulative and opportunistic. Since the World Trade Center attacks, the situation has deteriorated further. Terrorism now is whatever the president says it is. Except in terms of the narrowest and most short-term kinds of expediency, it is dangerous that policy is articulated through words with no meaning. Such usage can only encourage a tendency towards extreme pragmatism, doing next whatever seems a good idea at the moment. The controversy surrounding Camp X-ray is an obvious example of what this leads to. There are few alternatives other than to use the term so-called terrorism to emphasise that the unavoidable word is being placed firmly in inverted commas. But is it acceptable to condemn some words to a permanently woolly definition? How far should this go? Should every contentious term be put into inverted commas? Should freedom fighter go the way of terrorism? Therefore, should an attempt to define the word fanaticism be abandoned, accepting the destructive 16

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maxim that one person’s fanatic is another’s freedom fighter? Two complementary arguments can be made for resisting this tendency to give up on language. In the English language, there is a relatively small number of perfectly good words that express an attitude and do nothing else. We also have a much larger number and variety of words which are inherently evaluative and which we give up on at our peril. History is so much a matter of getting into past and present evaluations. It is so much a matter of thinking people’s thoughts after the event and trying to sift well-made from ill-made discriminations. It is therefore essential to treasure all the meaningful words that we can, cherishing rather than squandering the nice evaluations which are there in the language if only we have the wit to discern them. An excellent example of a perfectly good word that does nothing but express an attitude was given by Professor Bernard Williams in his 1965 inaugural lecture Morality and the Emotions. Consider the sentence ‘He’s broken his blasted tricycle again’. In that sentence, the word blasted is pure attitude. It indicates the speaker’s irritation. We can say ‘stick to the facts’, delete the word and produce a straightforwardly true or false factual statement: he’s broken his tricycle again. All this is very simple. Expletives such as ‘blasted’ in this sentence can be deleted if it is necessary simply to stick to the facts. But language users have many other purposes, however, and there is no reason whatever to want to purge English or any other natural language of its expletives. Things begin to get complicated when we consider terms such as suicide bomber and terrorist. These are not expletives which can be deleted leaving the factual meaning intact. There is something evaluative about them and, as suggested above, in these cases the evaluative something is a problem. It is a particular problem in each of these cases. Freedom fighter is different again. The important part of that term is the precious word freedom. About this there is much to be pondered in W.B. Gallie’s discussion of essentially contested terms.4 According to Gallie, there is a kind of politics which is constituted by argument about the meanings of certain words, of which freedom is a leading example. Anyone in that kind of political culture knows that the argument is ongoing and knows something of what it means for that argument to be both unavoidable and interminable. The historian must not be tempted to give up on such argument lest he or she allow the inwardness of that argument to be forgotten. Freedom fighter is not the same sort of term as terrorist because freedom fighter belongs to the great and indispensable, wearying but unavoidable argument about what freedom is – an argument outside which the historian is illadvised to seek to locate historical analysis. Terrorist is a different sort of word. In the nineteenth century, in Russian and then in other languages, it may have had a meaning worth insisting on. This chapter claims that such meaning as it has is to be found in the attack and defence of the phrase, so-called terrorism. Fanaticism is yet another kind of case. It is certainly an attitude word, and always has been since Cicero, and in English since 1530. It has been suggested that it is necessary to retain it for scholarly purposes on the understanding that it equates nowadays not with dangerous extremism but with misplaced simplicity. The argument made here for the latter has not been ethical. It has not intended to equate 17

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terrorism with non-state direct attacks on non-combatants, an equation that cannot be a definition because there is too much of a gap between ethics and language in this particular respect. The argument about fanaticism in this chapter has not been ethics but, in a sense akin to Gallie, is concerned with politics. For wherever there is politics, from the kitchen to the Security Council, there is a constant interplay between complexity and simplicity. There is always good simplicity and bad. Misplaced simplicity is often dangerous. In the kitchen, ‘Manchester City is playing at football’ can be fighting talk. And wherever there is armed conflict, wherever Clausewitz is right to stress that war is politics by other means, there the possibility of misplaced simplicity may be a worthwhile focus of historical enquiry.

Notes 1 2 3 4

von Clausewitz, 1976, 75–6, emphasis orig. Ibid. Steingass, 1978, 1162. Gallie, 1955–6, 167–98; cf. Beiner, 1983.

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2 DERVISHES AND FANATICISM Perception and impact Edward M. Spiers

Muhammad Ahmad, the Mahdi, followed the example of the Prophet and described his followers as ansar, or ‘helpers’. The British called them dervishes, a term normally applied to members of the Sufi orders, and frequently characterised them as fanatics inasmuch as they appeared excessively or unreasonably zealous in pursuit of the jihad, or holy war. The Mahdi, the ‘Expected Guide’, had summoned all true believers to forsake everything and join him in rebellion, promising to carry the jihad throughout the Sudan and on to Cairo and Alexandria, and thence to Arabia and the Mediterranean. He aimed to expel the Turks, crush all those who supported them, and thereafter worship in the mosques of Mecca and Constantinople.1 If these aims posed a challenge that the British, already ensconced in Egypt since the suppression of Arabi Pasha’s revolt (1882), could hardly ignore, so too did the uncompromising manner of the Mahdi’s pronouncements, the appeal of his religious teachings, and the depth of commitment he inspired, not least the willingness of the ansar to die in prosecuting the jihad. This commitment found reflection on the field of battle, whether in the storming of towns, in destroying Egyptian armies or in fearlessly challenging well-armed and disciplined British expeditionary forces. ‘Dervish fanaticism’ seemed to be one explanation for the tenacity and ferocity of the Mahdist revolt, especially when it appeared to be a declining force in the 1890s and the regime of Khalifa ‘Abdallahi, the Mahdi’s successor, seemed increasingly vulnerable. Nevertheless, the significance of fanaticism has been disputed, and its perceived impact in battle should not detract from the way in which the Mahdists were able to refine their military tactics and adapt their military organisation. Several scholars have disputed the significance of ‘dervish fanaticism’, particularly the associated depictions of the Mahdist state as steeped in bloodshed and oppression. Instead, they have emphasised the achievements of the Mahdiya in establishing forms of civil and military administration over a disparate array of tribes, within an area of nearly one million square miles, and over a period of 13 years.2 Norman Daniel even argued that ‘British contemporaries at first saw [the Mahdist] movement much as we see it to-day, as the religious expression of national feeling’.3 He quoted from interviews in the Pall Mall Gazette, both the 19

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claim of Major-General Charles ‘Chinese’ Gordon (before he had returned to the Sudan) that it was ‘an entire mistake to regard the Mahdi as in any sense a religious leader’ and the insistence of Sheikh Muhammad Abdu that the Sudanese were not peculiarly fanatical.4 Daniel also referred to several radical members of parliament, who characterised Mahdism as a nationalist desire for self-government and hence deprecated any British intervention in the Sudan. Although William Ewart Gladstone, as prime minister, would concede that the policy of non-intervention had to alter after the fall of Khartoum, he had once memorably described the Mahdists as a ‘people struggling to be free, and they are struggling rightly to be free’.5 Such sentiments, argued Daniel, constituted ‘early opinion, and opinion in England’. He claimed that the subsequent ‘legends’ of Mahdist barbarism, fanaticism and cruelty were only given any significant life in the early 1890s by the propagandist writings of Major F. Reginald Wingate, then director of military intelligence in the Egyptian Army. In this respect Wingate’s own work, Mahdiism and the Egyptian Sudan (1891), which sold poorly, was probably of less influence than the accounts of two escapees from Omdurman, Father Joseph Ohrwalder’s Ten Years’ Captivity in the Mahdi’s Camp (1892) and Rudolf Slatin’s Fire and the Sword (1896). Wingate, who assisted in the writing of both polemics, and in finding publishers for them, created a potent ‘propaganda line’ and, as a consequence, ‘the Mahdiya came to be regarded as cruel and barbaric’.6 While there is no doubt that Wingate chronicled (and exaggerated) the despotism, debauchery, depravations and decline of the Khalifa’s rule, thereby reviving interest in the Sudan and in the cause of avenging Gordon’s death,7 Daniel’s argument about British opinion in the early 1880s rests upon evidence from an extraordinarily narrow slice of parliamentary and press opinion. In fact, there were numerous politicians, churchmen, newspaper editors, military commanders and war correspondents who regarded the dervishes as fanatics. The Marquess of Salisbury was hardly alone in describing the ‘Arabs’ as ‘fighting in their own country, skilled in their own warfare, and animated by that formidable mixture of religious fanaticism and military spirit which the religion of Islam seems alone to have the secret of conferring upon its votaries’.8 Metropolitan and provincial newspapers reproduced many of the letters and proclamations of the Mahdi, indicating that he was determined to restore the Muslim faith to ‘its old glory’, to assure those who died in propagating this faith that they would be rewarded in paradise, and to threaten all non-believers with woe and damnation.9 In reports from the Sudan, including a lengthy account by James O’Kelly, MP, on behalf of the Daily News, the Mahdi was depicted as ‘a man thoroughly convinced of the divine nature of his mission’. To this Irish observer, the movement seemed ‘a curious admixture of religious, political and social fanaticism’ and one that was ‘distinctly Puritanical’, with followers urged to dispense with effeminate luxuries, to forsake the accretion of personal wealth, and even to abjure any intake of alcoholic liquor, coffee or tobacco. Just as the Mahdi exhorted his followers to pursue strict religious observance, so he denounced the Turks as ‘not true Mussulmen’ – moral degenerates who had to be destroyed ‘in due time’.10 20

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As the embodiment of a religious, political and military leader, the Mahdi enhanced his appeal as a ‘fighting prophet’.11 Although he fought in battles with the Egyptians, he still ascribed the Mahdist successes, not least the capture of Khartoum, to the power of prayer: ‘In this way’, argued the Evening Standard, ‘the Mahdi inspires the fanaticism of his adherents, and sets before them the supremacy of prayer in overcoming a walled city filled with armed foes’.12 If the Turks, and the forces of the Khedive, were the main enemies, any infidel who took their place was likely to encounter the same uncompromising opposition. The St James’s Gazette claimed that the Mahdists would ‘transfer to the new enemy all the associations of the old’; indeed, the Mahdi warned that any Muslims who leant assistance, or gave advice, to the English should be denounced as ‘apostates’ and should be stoned regardless of age, sex or position.13 Accordingly, many perceived the Mahdist movement as fundamentally aggressive and, more immediately, as a threat to Egypt itself. Sir Evelyn Baring (later Lord Cromer), British agent and consul-general in Egypt, writing in the wake of the annihilation of the Egyptian Army under Lieutenant-General Hicks at Sheikan plain, near el Obeid (5 November 1883), feared that any sudden evacuation of Khartoum and the northern provinces would bring: A fanatical population, flushed with religious enthusiasm and military success . . . to the frontiers of civilised Egypt. A considerable military force would be required to guard those frontiers. The fanatical portion of the population in Egypt, and especially in Upper Egypt, would scarcely look with indifference at the success of the Mahdi.14 Mahdists were also depicted as intrinsically cruel since they never offered any prospect of quarter for defeated enemies (unless they converted to their variant of Islam), but, on the contrary, threatened ‘the certain death which Mahomedan ferocity and fanaticism inflicts upon the vanquished’.15 Finally, Mahdism was seen as a particular threat to Christian forces. In March 1884 Osman Digna, the Mahdi’s commander in the eastern Sudan, warned RearAdmiral Sir William Hewett, VC, then the British commander in Suakin, ‘know that during the time of the Mahdi he will not accept bribes from you, and also will not leave you in your infidelity; so there is nothing for you but the sword, so that there will not remain one of you on the face of the earth’.16 Ultimately this clash of religions reached a climax in the killing of Gordon during the sacking of Khartoum (26 January 1885). Lord Salisbury described it as ‘the terrible fate of the Christian hero, Gordon’,17 and Lord Cromer later alluded to ‘The final scene, in which the civilised Christian faced barbarous and triumphant fanaticism’.18 When plans for Gordon’s memorial were being debated in March 1885, the Bishop of Salford expressed his anguish that the designated site would be in Port Said and not Khartoum: he feared any implication that ‘Khartoum is to be again given up to the rule of Mussulman fanaticism and Arab slavery’.19 21

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However, British observers recognised that not all the ansar shared the same depth of religious convictions as the Mahdi nor followed his precepts punctiliously. Baring agreed with Gordon and Lieutenant-Colonel J.D.H. Stewart, who accompanied Gordon to Khartoum, that the maladministration of successive Egyptian governments and the attempt to suppress slavery had fuelled discontent in the Sudan. Later he reckoned that some tribes near Suakin had appreciated the true character of ‘Dervish rule’ but had recoiled from opposing Osman Digna for fear of the consequences of ‘throwing off their allegiance to the Mahdi’.20 Even sheikhs, who were known to be profoundly pious, were thought to have joined the Mahdist movement from a mixture of motives. Sheikh Mohammad Tahir, an influential slaver from Damer, a small town near Berber, appeared to join the insurrection out of a combination of religious motives, resentment over interference with slavery, and a desire for vengeance as the Egyptians had driven members of his family into exile.21 There were also periodic reports of dissatisfaction among Mahdist tribesmen, and reports of extensive looting after battles and sieges, despite the prohibition of private plunder by the Mahdi and his injunction that all loot had to be surrendered to the bait al mal, or the Mahdist treasury. Although he had issued such an edict after the sack of el Obeid, the practice persisted; indeed, after the seizure of Tokar (22 February 1884), it was reported that the rebels did not immediately follow up their success ‘because they were loaded with loot from the pillage . . . and . . . that many of them had expressed an inclination to return to their homes with their booty’.22 Fanaticism, none the less, was perceived as an important impulse for most Mahdists on the field of battle, and, in describing their enemies as fanatical, British soldiers and war correspondents were making comparative as well as subjective judgements. Their views reflected the experience of the late 1870s and early 1880s when the British fought wars in quick succession against the Xhosa, Zulus, Boers, Egyptians and Mahdists. If few soldiers fought in all these campaigns, some fought in several of them and learned about the others from discussions with veterans and journalists. Percy Scrope Marling (3/60th Rifles and later mounted infantry) fought the Boers, Egyptians and Mahdists, all before his 23rd birthday, and gained a Victoria Cross at the bloody battle of Tamai (13 March 1884). As he remarked on his first encounter with Osman Digna’s warriors at the battle of El Teb (29 February 1884), ‘they are the pluckiest fellows I’ve ever seen . . . We shot & bayonetted all wounded as it was not safe to leave them as they speared or knifed everyone they could reach’.23 The British had fought many brave and disciplined foes but the Mahdists, often armed only with spears and shields, appeared to be quite distinctive. In writing about Arabs as warriors, a journalist (probably Bennet Burleigh) of the Daily Telegraph described how: Under the influence of certain powerful motives they rise easily to absolute heroism and none more potent than religious fanaticism. A romantic chivalry towards women makes the Arab prize very highly their 22

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approbation of his personal courage, and his poetry incites him to exploits of veritable knight-errantry . . . Indeed the Bedouin considers nothing manful but violence, nothing so honourable as war.24 The Sudanese confirmed the importance of these cultural precepts. Quite apart from the spiritual call and the readiness for martyrdom, the ansar came from a tribal background in which ‘a man was traditionally a fighter before everything else . . . [and] A great man in the Sudan was distinguished not by wealth or success, but by personal bravery.’25 Bennet Burleigh rightly perceived the significance of personal leadership as an inspirational factor in the morale, commitment and resolve of the Mahdist armies. As he wrote of the enemy at the second battle of El Teb, ‘It was easy to see how a few bold men can stimulate devotion. The Sheikhs and fanatics keep their followers’ spirits well up, themselves fighting among them’. 26 Many distinguished leaders either charged at the head of their men or fought and died with them in various battles: Wad al Nujumi died trying to rally his men at the battle of Toski (3 August 1889); Ibrahim al Khali, Ya’qub and ‘Uthman Azraq were among those killed in the charge at Omdurman (2 September 1898); and the Khalifa ‘Abdallahi perished at the battle of Um Dibaykarat (24 November 1899). With the leaders so conspicuously to the fore, the devoted and disciplined followers showed remarkable spirit in battle, irrespective of whether they were trained mulazimin (the only regular soldiers, who received pay and daily rations, including the jihadiya of Abu ‘Anja) or irregulars. The latter encompassed untrained fighters from all trades and tribes who filled the ranks of the Black Standard at Omdurman, or, if from the White Nile, the Green Standard; the Baggara – many of the mounted men from the cattle-owning tribes of western Sudan, whose daily occupations were hunting and fighting; and Osman Digna’s men from eastern Beja tribes, and in particular the Hadendowa, who in their local and individual fighting were accustomed to mounting surprise initiatives, infiltrating the enemy ranks, and then slipping away again.27 Whatever the tactics employed, men had to obey their commanders on the battlefield promptly and instinctively, and, in this respect, the fact that many of the young emirs and centurions came from leading tribal families ensured that Mahdists entered battle with traditional bases of loyalty reinforcing their religious commitment.28 In what sense, then, were the Mahdist armies perceived as peculiarly fanatical? Comparisons would be made with the Zulus, a redoubtable warrior nation, whose highly mobile and disciplined forces were capable of complex battlefield manoeuvres and whose regiments overwhelmed ill-prepared British forces (at Isandhlwana and Ntombe). The Zulus had less success, though, in attacking British squares at Khambula or Ulundi, and after hours of fighting tended to withdraw dispirited from the field of battle only to be ridden down by British regular and irregular mounted forces.29 At El Teb, wrote Burleigh, ‘The scenes have been a repetition of Ulundi – the Soudanese, the Transvaal veterans say, being fully as plucky as the Zulus’, but the comparison only applied to the dervish assault 23

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where ‘it was marvellous to see them come on, heedless and fearless of death, shouting and brandishing their weapons. To the right and left they fell, but those who survived, even when wounded, rushed on’.30 Courage aside, the Mahdists fought quite differently from the Zulus, usually attacking square formations at their weakest points (often the corners). John Cameron of the Evening Standard observed the two battles of El Teb, and in the first, fought by the Egyptian forces under Baker Pasha (4 February 1884), saw the disaster that followed when two companies of the Alexandria regiment failed to form their side of the square. The Mahdists poured in, panic ensued, and the miserable Egyptian soldiers refused even to defend themselves, but throwing away their rifles, flung themselves on the ground and grovelled there, screaming for mercy. No mercy was given, the Arab spearmen pouncing upon them and driving their spears through their necks or bodies.31 At the second battle, when facing a British square under Sir Gerald Graham, the Mahdists did not attack ‘in masses, but in groups of thirties and twenties, sometimes of threes and twos, sometimes alone’. They also used the bush to great effect, lying concealed until they rushed forward ‘with fanatical valour, often coming on till they fall dead almost at the muzzles of the rifles’.32 Moreover, the Hadendowa, unlike the Zulus and even more so the Egyptians, did not withdraw from battle dispirited and demoralised. When the British cavalry attacked the retreating tribesmen, they did not encounter ‘as at Tel-el-Kebir . . . a flying mass of panic-stricken fugitives’,33 but an enemy ready to use the bush-covered terrain to stand and fight, ‘stubbornly and gallantly, displaying as much courage as against the Infantry’. They often laid low – too low to be reached by cavalry sabres – and then tried to hamstring horses with their spears and cut and stab the troopers. Major Slade (10th Hussars), Lieutenant Probyn (9th Bengal Cavalry) and Lieutenant Freeman (19th Hussars) were all speared fatally, as were 17 troopers.34 At the subsequent battles of Tamai (13 March 1884) and Abu Klea (17 January 1885), the Mahdists broke into the British squares, exploiting dislocated formations in both actions and a jammed Gardner machine gun in the latter. In reporting on Tamai, the military and newspaper correspondents testified to the ‘native courage and religious fanaticism’ of the enemy; to a charge mounted ‘with reckless determination, utterly regardless of all loss’; and to tenacious fighting once inside the square: ‘Even when themselves badly wounded, it was this very recklessness of death on their part which made them so dreaded.’35 Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Charles Coveny, a Black Watch veteran of the Asante and Egyptian campaigns, observed that ‘I never saw such fellows to fight as those Hadendowa Arabs: they know not what fear is in most cases’.36 Yet commentators also recognised that this offensive zeal only maximised the element of surprise in Osman Digna’s tactics. In the early stages of the battle, he had used musket fire and a series of rushes towards the front line to lure companies of the Black Watch too far forward (and 24

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they were ordered to charge by Graham). Meanwhile, more Hadendowa lay concealed in a nullah, obscured by rifle-smoke, and, once a gap opened on the right flank leaving the York and Lancaster adrift, they crawled along the front under the muzzles of the British rifles and then swept round the right, attacking with remarkable speed and ferocity. One soldier aptly described both the spectacle and the impact: The half-naked black savages, having heads huge with lumps of woolly hair on end upwards and sideways, brandishing their spears and their curved sticks used as shields and clubs, dancing madly behind the retreating square, looked through the smoke like real demons. . . . The enemy had never surrounded the square, but persistently pushed it back in front and flanks – a form of tactics most favourable for their object of keeping us crowded up, narrowed, and unable to use our weapons.37 During the ensuing combat, the British forces certainly matched the dervishes in ferocity. Captain Andrew Scott Stevenson (Black Watch) described how his trusty claymore found its way to the hilt into several black devils. I clove a piece out of one of their heads just as one does an egg for breakfast . . . I was mad with rage and fury . . . I fought like a demon & only wanted to kill, kill, kill those awful plucky demons.38 Even so, the outcomes of both battles would be determined by the restoration of British fire discipline (with the unbroken 1st Brigade supporting the broken units of the 2nd at Tamai, while the camels inside the square fortuitously blocked the Mahdist incursion at Abu Klea). After both battles, in which significant losses were inflicted on the British, the Mahdists distinguished themselves by their mode of retreat. After Abu Klea, wrote Captain Lionel Trafford (Royal Sussex), ‘the Arabs’ were seen to be ‘retiring, not running but swaggering off’.39 Although the Mahdists coolly walked away after the battle at Tamai, the battlefield remained distinctly dangerous. Cameron described how ‘wounded natives . . . positively refused to accept quarter . . . and continued loading and firing at any who came near them, or thrust with their spears at those who passed by’. The unwounded, who lay concealed in the bush, were just as belligerent: whenever they saw an opportunity, they would leap to their feet and attack any soldier or soldiers who came by. ‘I saw one man’, added Cameron, ‘charge six Hussars, and fight so desperately that he was not despatched without great difficulty’.40 The individual qualities of the Mahdist soldier, not merely his bravery but also his stubbornness and ferocity in hopeless predicaments, struck British observers as peculiarly fanatical. This was hardly surprising as British soldiers were trained and disciplined to act as part of tight formations, firing by volley, and manoeuvring in line or by square. They were also motivated, at least partially, by small group 25

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loyalties (serving in companies, batteries or squadrons) and by regimental esprit de corps, whereas the Mahdist soldiers, despite their tribal loyalties and their service in larger formations known as rubs’, were also highly motivated as individuals. Having responded so passionately to the Mahdi’s exhortations, they were perceived as ‘a hundred times more warlike than the Egyptians’.41 The converse of the Mahdist refusal to accept any quarter was their furious assault upon their victims. At Tamai, Scott Stevenson was appalled by the sight of how ‘those horrible demons had cut and mutilated our poor fellows beyond recognition’, while, in the famous charge of the 21st Lancers at Omdurman, Lieutenant Frederick Wormald recalled that whenever Lancers fell from their horses, ‘they were hacked to pieces with savage brutality’.42 On a grander scale, this brutality involved the annihilation of enemy forces (such as Hicks Pasha’s and Baker Pasha’s armies) and the suppression of rebellious tribes. The latter included the Rufa’a tribe vanquished by Yunis Dekeim’s Army of the Blue Nile; the rich and once powerful Kababish tribe, and its chief Saleh Bey, crushed at the battle of Om Badr (17 May 1887); and the men, women and children of the Ja’alin tribe massacred by wad Ahmad Mahmud’s army at Metemma (1 July 1897). The brutality was evident, too, in the sacking of Khartoum, Sennar (19 August 1885) and Gondar (23 January 1888), where days of slaughter, pillage, and the abduction of women and children ensued.43 What seemed even worse, from a British perspective, than cruelty in the heat of battle, were the threats to inflict such cruelty in advance of attacks upon besieged towns and opposing forces. Having suffered severely in a precipitate attempt to storm the town of el Obeid (8 September 1882), the Mahdi preferred to wait in subsequent sieges until famine and disease had weakened the powers of beleaguered garrisons. At the same time, he and his commanders sought to demoralise opposing forces by sending letters (sometimes enclosing proof) that all hope of relief was lost or that massacre would ensue if they engaged in battle. This primitive form of psychological warfare, coupled with news or rumours of Mahdist massacres elsewhere, had considerable effect: Father Ohrwalder confirmed that when the Mahdi informed Said Pasha that his garrison at el Obeid could not be relieved because the nearby town of Bara had fallen, the news ‘caused the gloom to deepen over the doomed city’.44 Similarly, the Austrian Consul Hansal recalled how spirits fell in Khartoum when the Mahdi sent news that the steamers despatched by Gordon from the besieged city had been intercepted.45 Once Khartoum fell, the Mahdi informed Sir Charles Wilson, who was leading the advance party of the relief expedition, that his quest was in vain but promised safety for his men and himself if they surrendered. As he warned Wilson, Khartoum and all the neighbourhood thereof has been destroyed by the power of God Almighty, which no one can oppose. . . . If you do not wish to yield you shall be punished in this world and the next. It is known that victory is for the believers. You must not be proud of your steamers and many other things. . . . You must be quick or your wings will be cut.46 26

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The Khalifa and various Mahdist commanders employed similar tactics, with Osman Digna proving particularly effective in terrorising Egyptian forces in the early 1880s. The latter not only succumbed to their fears in battle but also dreaded going forth to engage the Hadendowa. When orders were given to advance, desertions multiplied and soldiers were seen crying ‘like children’. As one observer added, ‘They all imagine they are to be killed; and as no regiment that left this place has ever come back, they have some grounds for funk!’47 It was a measure of how far British training, discipline and leadership bolstered morale within the Egyptian army that it was able to confront the Mahdist forces at Toski unaided (save for a squadron of the 20th Hussars), and that the threats of wad al Nujumi on the eve of battle had scant effect. He promised to leave ‘none of you on the face of the earth who does not embrace our beliefs and meet the wishes of God’ but, in the ensuing combat (3 August 1889), the superior gunnery, disciplined volleys, and a combined assault of Egyptian infantry and cavalry overwhelmed the Mahdists.48 Though preoccupied with the courage, ferocity and intimidation of the dervishes, British observers recognised that the ansar were a highly disparate body, and that they were capable of tactical innovation. On the one hand, the Mahdist forces captured huge quantities of arms and ammunition from Egyptian garrisons and defeated armies (with some computations estimating the seizure of 15,000 Remington rifles and 90 Krupp guns); on the other hand, they pressed Egyptian soldiers who had surrendered or defected to them, and black soldiers from the southern Sudan, into their service. While some of the Egyptian and other European officers helped to drill and train the Mahdist forces, Egyptian gunners were required to operate the Krupp guns and other artillery.49 It was also apparent that some Mahdist armies learned from previous encounters and adopted new tactics: when Osman Digna faced another challenge from an expeditionary force under General Graham’s command in 1885, he sought to avoid the heavy casualties of the previous year by refraining from attacking squares and camps in the open. On the contrary, he sought to harass the British forces with night attacks, to draw them on to broken hilly ground, and to launch surprise attacks when they were at their weakest, that is, when they had halted and were in the process of constructing zaribas, as in the battle of Tofrek or McNeill’s Zariba (22 March 1885).50 Occasionally, the Mahdists either chose or were forced to fight on the defensive. At the battles of Kirbekan (10 February 1885), Ginnis (20 December 1885) and the Atbara (8 April 1898), they came under attack from British or Anglo-Egyptian forces. At Kirbekan, the Black Watch and South Staffordshires outflanked and attacked the rocky outcrops held by Manassir and Robatat tribesmen; at Ginnis the Camerons, 9th Soudanese and Egyptians cleared the village of Kosheh in house-to-house fighting; and at the Atbara, Kitchener’s Anglo-Egyptian forces overwhelmed Emir Mahmud’s entrenched army by a frontal assault. In explaining the defensive tactics at the Atbara, Major Ivor Maxse (Egyptian army) reckoned that ‘the rifle makes him adopt these tactics, not cowardice’.51 Captain Neville Cameron (Cameron Highlanders) disagreed. ‘The dervishes’, he wrote, ‘have lost nearly all that deep fanaticism of former years’,52 a view that 27

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reflected a widespread assumption that the revolt had lost much of its former zeal and support after the Mahdi’s death (22 June 1885). Although there were signs of the Mahdi becoming increasingly dissolute towards the end of his life, he still possessed a charismatic and religious authority that Khalifa ’Abdallahi could never possess.53 The Khalifa, although unchallenged as the Mahdi’s nominated successor, faced more daunting difficulties in seeking to establish the Mahdist state over a vast and inhospitable terrain, with little industry, a primitive agriculture, poor communications and no machinery of government. He would find, as the historian of Mahdiya argued, that ‘The flames of fanaticism can more readily be kindled than sustained’,54 especially when the country was ravaged by failed harvests and famine in 1889 and 1890, and suffered from periodic restrictions on external trade. When Yunis Dekeim governed the northern province of Dongola, he forbad trade with Egypt: ‘If they come from the north’, he wrote, ‘for the purpose of adopting Mahdism, well and good: if only with the worldly object of making money they should be prevented at once. . . . We have no need of goods, and our only object must be to harass and worry the enemies of God’.55 The Khalifa also encountered recurrent eruptions of tribal and regional dissent, including a revolt in Kordofan (1885–6), a religious rising under ‘Abu Gemaizeh’ in the far western province of Darfur, and persistent revolts among the Dinka and Shilluk tribes and others further south in Equatoria. As a former Baggara chieftain, he came to rely increasingly upon his own clansmen, bringing the Ta’aishi tribe from the western provinces into Omdurman and employing the Baggara generally to quell dissent. His rule became essentially personal and despotic, centralised on Omdurman, and supported by fierce repression. He continued to prosecute the jihad but with limited success, fighting huge and costly wars with Christian Abyssinia, and periodically challenging, without any success, the British and Egyptian positions to the north and east. As the European powers began to penetrate the Mahdist frontiers, with the Egyptian army seizing Tokar (February 1891), Italy capturing Kassala (July 1894) and the French and Belgians securing footholds in Equatoria and Bahr al Ghazal, the signs of decline were avidly chronicled by Wingate, Ohrwalder and Slatin. ‘Mahdism as a religious movement’, wrote Wingate, ‘has in large measure lost the fanatical ardour which made it so formidable, it has, nevertheless, become a barbaric power’.56 Father Rossignoli, another escapee from Omdurman after 12 years’ captivity, demurred. He argued that the discontent and division in Omdurman did not apply to the ‘fighting population, they are still fanatics, ready to forget all local quarrels and unite against any army, English or Egyptian, that comes up the Nile’.57 Lord Salisbury, the Conservative prime minister was also unmoved by Wingate’s propaganda. He may have wished to avenge the death of Gordon, and reckoned that Britain could not leave Egypt until the latter was free from the Mahdist menace, but he was never inclined towards precipitate action. Far from being concerned about the decline of dervish fanaticism, he only authorised the limited incursion into Dongola in 1896 following the pleas of Italy to relieve the Mahdist pressure on Kassala after the disastrous defeat of the Italian forces at Adowa.58 Even after 28

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the seizure of Dongola, and the victories of the Egyptian army at Firket (7 June 1896) and Abu Hamed (7 August 1897), Salisbury (and Cromer) only resolved to press ahead with the reconquest of the Sudan because of the precariousness of the forward positions. As Lord Lansdowne, the secretary of state for war, observed in December 1897, ‘If Mahmoud supported by the Khalifa makes a resolute attempt to “smash the Egyptian Army or what little there is of it at Berber” the position may become awkward.’59 By the end of 1897, Kitchener had already constructed his grand design, the Sudan Military Railway (with its accompanying telegraph), covering some 230 miles from Wadi Halfa to Abu Hamed. Aptly described as ‘the deadliest weapon’ ever used against Mahdism,60 the railway transformed the entire calculus of the campaign, enabling Kitchener to bring two British brigades, a flotilla of gunboats and all their logistical support into the heart of the Sudan, independently of season and the height of the Nile. If the nature of the terrain and the severity of the climate (rather than the prospect of facing the dervishes) determined the thoroughness of these preparations, Kitchener planned every aspect of the campaign with care and precision, including the extension of the railway to Atbara – 385 miles from Wadi Halfa. What he could not anticipate, however, were the battlefield tactics of the Khalifa when the two armies confronted each other at Omdurman (2 September 1898). The suicidal assault of the Mahdists in broad daylight against the massed Anglo-Egyptian firepower testified to the fanatical bravery of the ansar. As Corporal Skinner wrote in his diary, ‘nothing could possibly stand against such a store of lead, in fact no European would ever think of facing it in the daring way these fanatics did.’61 But the charge also reflected a choice within Mahdist counsels on the previous day between the aggressive preferences of Shakyh al Din, the son of the Khalifa, and the cautious advocacy of a night attack by Osman Digna and ‘Uthman Azraq. Shakyh al Din persuaded his father, arguing ‘Let us not be like mice or foxes slinking into their holes by day and peeping out at night’, but the Khalifa, though willing to agree, no longer had battlefield commanders of the calibre of wad al Nujumi or Abu ‘Anja to prepare such an assault. The Mahdists never prepared the first charge with sustained firepower in advance of the infantry carrying swords and spears, and then failed to co-ordinate the second attack on both flanks of Kitchener’s advancing army (so enabling Major-General Hector Macdonald’s Sudanese battalions to destroy each attack in turn).62 After some 15 years of episodic combat in the Sudan, British soldiers (and their accompanying war correspondents) had every reason to respect the courage and ferocity of the dervishes. In describing them as fanatical, they were neither demeaning their motives nor overlooking the tactical capacities of some of their commanders. In using the term they were also seeking to explain why these adversaries seemed so different from the many other foes that they had encountered in Africa, and why they proved so stubborn and resilient after a succession of defeats by a formidably armed, well-disciplined and organised enemy. Dervish fanaticism, in the sense of responding to the Mahdi’s spiritual call, was an explanation widely accepted by many British politicians, a wide array of metropolitan and provincial 29

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newspapers, and by many military and some spiritual leaders. Nor was it an exclusively British perspective: both a prominent French newspaper, Le Temps, and Austrian diplomats regarded the victory at Omdurman as ‘a triumph for the civilised world’.63 So dervish fanaticism was not a phenomenon contrived by Wingate and his fellow propagandists in the 1890s; on the contrary, their writings only carried credibility because of the impression created by the Mahdists in the early 1880s. It was not simply that Mahdism seemed a peculiarly potent movement able to undermine the Khedive’s rule in the Sudan, and threaten neighbouring countries, but also the way in which the Mahdists conducted themselves before, during and after military engagements. If this behaviour derived from a fanatical, religious motivation, coupled with tribal loyalties, cultural norms and resolute leadership, it had its greatest impact in the context of battle. It seemed to inspire the Mahdists and terrify ill-disciplined enemies. Yet this phenomenon was also perceived as a transient influence, one that diminished in intensity after the Mahdi’s death and tended to ebb and flow during the Khalifa’s repressive rule, culminating in the spectacular charge at Omdurman. Quite fittingly, Kitchener, as the Sudan’s first governor-general after the battle of Omdurman, insisted upon an absolute respect for orthodox Muslim feeling as distinct from the ‘unorthodox fanaticism’ of heretical Mahdism.64

Notes The author should like to thank the owners and custodians of various manuscript collections for the permission to quote from copyright material: The Marquess of Salisbury, The Marquess of Lansdowne, the British Library, the National Army Museum, the Black Watch Archive, West Sussex Record Office, Gloucestershire Record Office and A.J. Maxse. 1 ‘Letter from the Mahdi’, Morning Post, 10 March 1885, 5; ‘The Recent Proclamation of the Mahdi’, Hereford Times, 28 March 1885, 15; Theobold, 1951, 34; Holt and Daly, 2000, 85. 2 Holt, 1977, 264–6; Holt and Daly, 2000, 97. 3 Daniel, 1966, 416. 4 ‘Chinese Gordon on the Sudan’ and ‘Sheykh Mohammed Abdu: A Conversation with an Egyptian Fellah’, Pall Mall Gazette, 9 January 1884, 11 and 7 August 1884, 2. 5 Parliamentary Debates, 3rd Series, Vol. 288 (12 May 1884), col. 55 and Vol. 294 (19 February 1885), cols. 873–8; see also Daniel, 1966, 420–3. 6 Daniel, 1966, 423–5, 426–32; Daly, 1997, 19, 42–8, 69–78. 7 Hill, 1955, 97–103; Johnson, 1982, 285–310. 8 Parliamentary Debates, 3rd Series, Vol. 300 (12 August 1885), col. 1860; see also E.D. Steele, ‘Lord Salisbury and the “False Religion” of Islam, and the Reconquest of the Sudan’, in Spiers, 1998, 11–33. 9 ‘Proclamation of the Mahdi’, Yorkshire Gazette, 24 March 1885, 5; ‘A Letter from the Mahdi’, Somerset County Gazette, 10 May 1884, 8; ‘Letter from the Mahdi’, Morning Post, 10 March 1885, 5. 10 ‘The Mahdi and His Men’, Daily News, 29 April 1884, 5. The special correspondent is identified in ‘The Mahdi and his Movement’, Weald of Kent News, 3 May 1884, 4. See also ‘Letter from the Mahdi’, Evening Standard, 10 March 1885, 6; ‘The Mahdi’s

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11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37

Manifesto’, Salisbury Journal, 28 March 1885, 2; and on the accuracy of these understandings, Theobald, 1951, 43–5. ‘The Mahdi and his Movement’, p. 4. ‘The Fall of Khartoum’, Evening Standard, 13 February 1885, 5. ‘The Second Lesson and After’, St James’s Gazette, 14 March 1884, 3 and ‘A Letter from the Mahdi’, Scotsman, 16 January 1885, 5. Sir E. Baring to Earl Granville, 3 December 1883, in P[arliamentary] P[apers], ‘Further Correspondence respecting the Affairs of Egypt’, C.3844 (1884), LXXXVIII, 130 and The Times, 11 March 1884, 11. Manchester Weekly Times, 16 February 1884, 4. Rear-Admiral Sir W. Hewett to the Secretary to the Admiralty, 10 March 1884 in PP, ‘Further Correspondence’, C 3969 (1884), LXXXVIII, 147. ‘Lord Salisbury at Knightsbridge’, The Times, 21 May 1885, 8. The Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1908), Vol. 2, 13; see also ‘General Gordon’, Highland News, 16 February, 1885, 2. ‘Letters to “The Standard”’, Evening Standard, 23 March 1885, 8. Cromer, 1908, 2, 62; Baring to Granville, 3 December 1883, PP, ‘Further Correspondence’, C.3844 (1884), LXXXVIII, 129; Public Record Office, FO 78/3668, Extracts from Lieutenant-Colonel Stewart’s Diary, 14–18 February 1884 and FO 78/3668, Telegrams from General Gordon, 10 March 1884. ‘Osman Digna’, Daily News, 21 March 1885, 5–6. ‘The Soudan Rebellion’, Liverpool Mercury, 23 February 1884, 5; ‘Letter from the Mahdi, the Troops at Suakim’, Yorkshire Gazette, 14 March 1885, 4; ‘The Fall of Tokar’, Western Mail, 25 February 1884, 3; Wingate, 1968, 55–62. Gloucestershire Record Office, D 873/C110, Marling MSS, P. Marling to his father, 3 March 1884. ‘Arab Warfare’, Daily Telegraph, 1 March 1884, 3. Zulfo, 1980, 95. ‘British Victory at El Teb’, Daily Telegraph, 3 March 1884, 5. Zulfo, 1980, 95–6; see also ‘The Khalifa’s Last Stand Compelled Admiration’, Cheltenham Chronicle, 16 December 1899, 6. Zulfo, 1980, 96. Knight and Castle, 1994, 82, 89. ‘British Victory at El Teb’, 5. ‘Soudan Rebellion’, Evening Standard, 3 March 1884, 8; see also ‘The Disaster in the Soudan’, Manchester Examiner and Times, 7 February 1884, 8. By 1898, British forces prepared to counter this fighting zeal by converting their ammunition into dum dum bullets for use at the Atbara and Omdurman, E.M. Spiers, ‘Campaigning under Kitchener’ in Spiers (ed.), 1998, 58, 62. ‘The Great Battle’, Evening Standard, 3 March 1884, 8. ‘The Battle at Trinkiat’, Western Mail, 3 March 1884, 3. ‘The Great Battle’, 8; see also ‘Letter from a Pontypridd Soldier’, Western Mail, 27 March 1884, 3; ‘British Victory at El Teb’, 5; The Times, 3 March 1884, 9; see also Keown-Boyd, 1986, 27–8. ‘Great Battle in The Soudan’, Evening Standard, 14 March 1884, 8; ‘The Battle of Tamai, or Tamanieb, General Graham’s Despatch’, Manchester Guardian, 4 April 1884, 8; ‘Battle of Tamai’, Daily Telegraph, 14 March 1884, 7. B[lack] W[atch] A[rchive], Balhousie Castle, 0204, Lieutenant-Colonel R.C. Coveny, ‘Letters from Egypt and the Soudan’, 9 June 1884, 10. Lt-Col Coveny was killed by the Mahdists at the battle of Kirbekan (10 February 1885). ‘Notes from Egypt’, Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, 12 April 1884, 5; see also The Times, 14 March 1884, 10, Edinburgh Courant, 14 March 1884, 4, ‘Great

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38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

Battle in the Soudan’, Western Mail, 14 March 1884, 3 and ‘The Battle of Tamai, or Tamanieb’, 8. BWA 0641, Captain A. Scott Stevenson to his wife, 16 March 1884; and BWA 0204, Lieutenant-Colonel Coveny, ‘Letters from Egypt and the Soudan’, 9 June 1884, 11–12. West Sussex Record Office, RSR Mss 1/85, Captain Lionel Trafford, ‘A Diary of the Sudan Campaign, 1884–5’, 18. ‘Great Battle in The Soudan’, Evening Standard, 14 March 1884, 8; Edinburgh Courant, 15 March 1884, 4. Edinburgh Courant, 14 March 1884, 4; see also ‘The English in Egypt’, Dorset County Chronicle and Somersetshire Gazette, 20 March 1884, 10. BWA 0641, Capt A. Scott Stevenson to his wife, 16 March 1884 and ‘Lieut. “Fritz” Wormald’s Graphic Account of the Lancers’ Charge at Omdurman’, (Dewsbury) Reporter, 15 October 1898, 5. Wingate, 1968, 194, 238–9, 334, 337, 339; Ohrwalder, 1892, 250–1; ‘The Fall of Khartoum’, Scotsman, 18 February 1885, 7; ‘The Horrors of the Fall of Khartoum’, Weald of Kent News, 16 May 1885, 7; H. Keown-Boyd, 1986, 137, 180. Ohrwalder, 1892, 64. ‘Gordon’s Last Days in Khartoum’, Weald of Kent News, 18 April 1885, 5. ‘The Mahdi’s Letter to Sir C. Wilson’, Evening Standard, 25 March 1885, 8. ‘Another Massacre’, Dover Telegraph, 23 April 1884, 7. Wingate, 1968, 419–20, 429–32. ‘Great Battle in the Soudan’, Hereford Times, 24 January 1885, 2 and ‘The Mahdi’s Military Resources’, Scotsman, 9 March 1885, 5. ‘Osman Digna’s Night Attack’, Liverpool Echo, 10 March 1885, 4; ‘The Battle at Hasheen’, Daily News, 21 March 1885, 5; ‘Suakin, 1885, Field Operations’, Royal Engineers’ Journal, Vol. 16 (1886), 97–101; Barthorp, 1985, 1–10. West Sussex Record Office, Maxse Mss 367, Major F.I. Maxse to his father, 1 May 1898; see also Keown-Boyd, 1986, 75–9, 117–19, 189–202. National Army Museum, Cameron MSS, Acc No 8305/55, Capt N. Cameron to Sir W. Cameron, 5 June 1898. Ohrwalder, 1892, 177–83; Wingate, 1968, 257–8. Theobold, 1951, 141. ‘The Dervishes and Trade’, Bradford Observer, 29 July 1896, 5. Wingate, 1968, 491 and 466–9; Ohrwalder, 1892, 455; Slatin Pasha, 1896, 406. ‘The Nile Expedition’, Western Morning News, 11 April 1896, 8. Hatfield House Muniments, Salisbury MSS., Vol. A113, nos. 8, 12 and 48, Lord Salisbury to Cromer, 13 March, 1 April 1896 and 7 May 1897; Sanderson, 1965, 243–4. British Library, Lansdowne MSS, Ms 5/49, Lord Lansdowne to Salisbury, 21 December 1897. Steevens, 1898, 22. National Army Museum, Acc 7909/15, Skinner diary, 2 September 1898. Zulfo, 1980, 152–3, 162, 180–1, 217–20. J.F.V. Keiger, ‘Omdurman, Fashoda and Franco-British Relations’ and F.R. Bridge, ‘The Reconquest of the Sudan: an Austro-Hungarian Perspective’, in Spiers, 1998, 168–9, 187. H.H. Kitchener, 1986, 237–40.

32

3 FANATICISM, JAPANESE SOLDIERS AND THE PACIFIC WAR, 1937–45 Beatrice Trefalt

The portrayal of the Japanese soldier of the Second World War as a fanatic is one of the more enduring images of the war in Asia and the Pacific. It has become embedded in popular memories of that war in the nations that suffered Japanese aggression and fought Japan in Asia. Fanaticism has continued to provide a staple explanation for the behaviour of Japanese soldiers whenever atrocities such as the 1937 massacre at Nanking, the 1945 massacre at Manila, or the treatment of Allied prisoners of war are revisited. Fanaticism also provides a readily accessible reason for the fact that until the mid-1970s Japanese soldiers were regularly found hiding in former battlefields, unwilling to accept that the war was over.1 During the war, fanaticism also provided for many the only reasonable explanation for behaviour that seemed irrational: Japanese troops, again and again, engaged in hopeless and doomed attacks against a much better armed enemy, and suffered staggering losses. Their readiness to die rather than surrender became as notorious as their brutality towards their captured enemies: such crazed behaviour, it was thought, stemmed from devotion to the emperor and to the ancient code of the warrior, the bushido. Actual experiences on the battlefield or in areas under Japanese occupation meshed easily with propaganda that dehumanised the Japanese enemy, and shaped an image of Japanese soldiers as fanatics that continues to have strong and often emotional resonance in the countries that fought Japan.2 Explanations of the behaviour of Japanese troops that centre on fanaticism are attractive in their simplicity. Fanaticism – or religious fervour to an extreme degree – apparently either makes impossible the use of logic and reason, or allows only flawed logic and reasoning to intervene in individual, or even national, decisions. The Japanese soldier who joins his battalion in an attack that he certainly must know is doomed is thus motivated less by reason than he is by his extreme devotion to his cause, his fanaticism. Hence, it is unnecessary to consider the reasons for his behaviour, since, as a fanatic, he was not influenced by reason. Despite its simplicity, however, the notion of fanaticism is, for those studying the behaviour of Japanese soldiers at least, an unsatisfactory basis for explanation for several 33

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reasons. First, it tends to be ahistorical: it fails to explain why and when Japanese soldiers became fanatics – if they did – and why and when they stopped being fanatics (was it on 15 August 1945, upon demobilisation and repatriation, or later?). Second, it is much too general. It fails to explain why, if some Japanese soldiers were fanatical (and recognised as such by their comrades), others clearly were not: they remained cynical, throughout their careers as soldiers, about the military ethos and their supposed relationship to the emperor. Third, to rely on fanaticism alone to explain the behaviour of Japanese soldiers simply leaves unexamined the basis of their motivations and the foundation of their world view, not only in the propaganda of their own government, but in their own relationship to their country, to the notion of patriotic sacrifice, and to the understanding of their duty. This chapter questions and complicates the notion of fanaticism as it has been applied to the Japanese soldiers of the Second World War. It does so by revisiting, first, well-established arguments that show that the persistence of the image of Japanese soldiers as fanatics is a result of wartime propaganda, that is itself based on older and more established notions of Orientalism. The image of the Japanese soldier as a fanatic is tainted with the kind of racism that is still often applied to perceived enemies of a different culture or ethnic background. Second, this chapter examines the propaganda of the Japanese government and the place in the soldiers’ training of the emperor, of bushido, of a modern military tradition and of the ‘cult of the fallen soldier’. Third, it examines the propensity of Japanese soldiers to fight to the death, and considers in particular the no-surrender ethos and its impact on the behaviour of soldiers. The scope of this chapter precludes a discussion of Japanese atrocities: other authors have discussed these in detail.3 The image of Japanese soldiers as fanatics was an important part of wartime propaganda. Fanaticism implies robot-like behaviour that dehumanises soldiers; it makes them perhaps incurably irrational. Needless to say, in the context of war, it is crucial to portray both the enemy and the enemy’s cause as fundamentally wrong. Joanna Bourke has shown that dehumanising the enemy is one way of doing this, but that it is just as important to keep the enemy human in order to fuel the kind of righteous indignation that would become so central to maintaining Allied troop morale.4 John Dower has argued that wartime propaganda surrounding the Japanese enemy was itself strongly informed by much older racist discourses on Asian people, and by the traditions of Orientalism.5 Inherent in Orientalism is the dichotomy between ‘self’ – the ‘West’ – and ‘other’ – the ‘East’. Discourses of Orientalism portray the West as rational, masculine and logical, and the East as irrational, illogical, feminine and intuitive.6 Dower has correlated wartime images of Japanese with such assumptions of ‘otherness’, and has described not only the extensive animal imagery used in connection with Japanese people during the war (monkeys, vermin, rats, sheep), but also the pseudo-scientific academic discourses that gave the Japanese national character the attributes of childishness, mental illness, inferiority complexes, neuroses, abnormality and so on.7 Wartime propaganda portraying Japanese soldiers thus built on the readily available vocabulary of the West to describe Asian people. Their image as fanatics during 34

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the war thus had a solid basis in much older images of a unique, inferior and undifferentiated mass of people whose behaviour was, and forever would be, beyond the comprehension of rational and civilised whites. Like all orientalist views, however, images of the Japanese before and during the war were ambiguous: the alleged uniqueness or special character of the Japanese made them admirable as much as it made them contemptible. And much of that ambiguity centred on Japan’s military abilities. As Jean-Pierre Lehman has shown, from the Meiji Restoration of 1868 onwards, and especially in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), Western understandings of the Japanese shifted between open admiration for the extent of Japan’s transformation and modernisation since the fall of the Shogunate, and open fear of the menace of an Asian military superpower. The famous Knackfuss drawing of the ‘Yellow Peril’, commissioned by Kaiser Wilhelm in 1895 and sent to his cousin the Tsar as a present, clearly illustrates these concerns: allegorical figures representing Western nations worriedly witness the arrival of the ‘east’, represented by a figure of the Buddha, over a scene of fire and devstation.8 And when Japan emerged victorious from the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, the West’s mixed feelings about the emerging Asian power were not resolved, but further exacerbated. David Wells and Sandra Wilson have highlighted how attitudes to Japan’s victory over Russia ranged from disgust and fear to open admiration. Indian and Vietnamese nationalists, in particular, found great encouragement in the fact that an Asian nation had beaten one of the European great powers.9 An important component of the image of the Japanese overseas, particularly from the Russo-Japanese War onwards, was their allegedly deep-seated militarism. Martial values were understood to be completely embedded in Japanese traditions and culture, and it was this long history of martial valour that made Japan so very dangerous. Dower, again, has noted the repeated emphasis of the ‘samurai’ tradition in wartime propaganda films: not only were atrocities linked to the warrior code, but the martial traditions of Japan were sometimes contrasted with the perceived – and worrying – ‘softness’ of Western countries.10 The West had first learnt about bushido (code of the warrior) with Nitobe Inazo¯’s highly influential (if since questioned) analysis of Japanese culture in his 1900 book Bushido: The Soul of Japan.11 Tellingly, the book was written and published in English before it was even published in Japanese, and Nitobe is therefore credited with ‘inventing’ the tradition for both a Western and a Japanese audience, a point to which we will return. The book was reprinted and published in several other languages, including Japanese, during the Russo-Japanese war. The supposedly unique Japanese military culture provided an explanation for Japan’s modernisation and its defeat of Russia.12 As Japan embarked on territorial expansion in China from 1931 onwards, its image as a possible military menace acquired a new dimension, that of ruthlessness and disregard for the rules of war. The indiscriminate bombing of Chinchow in 1931 and Shanghai in 1932 provoked much international condemnation. 13 The brutality that accompanied the capture of Nanking in 1937 provoked even more. 35

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The raid on Pearl Harbor in 1941 added a dimension of treachery and underhandedness. From the Japanese execution of the American pilots of the Doolittle Raid of 1942 onwards, the publicity accorded to Japanese atrocities further supported the notion that they were particularly brutal fighters.14 By the start of the war in the Pacific, then, the notion of bushido, and the inherent and ruthless militarism of Japanese culture, had become an integral part of the alleged fanaticism of Japanese soldiers. A selection of essays published in 1943 under the title How the Jap Army Fights provides numerous examples of such discourses. Quoting from an article published in the Army Quarterly by a (possibly) French correspondent, Robert Leurquin, covering Japanese actions in China in 1937, Lieutenant-Colonel Paul W. Thompson presented the character of Japanese officers as follows: His courage and conception of honour are far more inspired by a warring passion than by a real and realistic understanding of the necessities of the craft of arms . . . The Japanese is more of a warrior than a military man, and therein lies his weakness. The difference may be a subtle one, but it does exist: the essential quality of the warrior is bravery; that of the military man discipline.15 The implication that there is more rationality in ‘discipline’ than ‘bravery’ is clear. (In fact, the same Leurquin also noted the ‘feminine and emotional quality of the [Japanese] race, which makes the Japanese lose control of their nerves’.)16 Further, much of the reporting on the war presented the notion that the warrior tradition was a deep-seated and ancient part of Japanese culture and one that had influenced all Japanese people regardless of class for centuries: it was still affecting Japanese soldiers even despite the enormous changes brought on by the Meiji Restoration in 1868 (and despite the fact that only a minuscule proportion of conscripts would have had warrior-class ancestors). John Scofield, for example, wrote for the American Rifleman in 1941: ‘the Army has always ruled Japan. For something like twelve hundred years the little yellow men of the Mikado have existed under a military dictatorship – conscription itself is at least a thousand years old.’17 Dower has shown how extensively this notion of the ‘age-old traditions of the samurai’ was used to portray the Japanese soldiers as ‘disciplined killer’ in Allied propaganda: it was also central to Frank Capra’s documentary ‘Know your enemy – Japan’, which was not completed until the war was nearly over and was not released.18 As well as each Japanese soldier’s supposed deep connection with the traditions of the warrior class, another central ingredient for the alleged fanaticism of Japanese soldiers was their seemingly unquestioned devotion to the emperor. To give only one example, the 1943 publication, How the Jap Army Fights, contains a photograph of three exhausted and sleeping Japanese soldiers. The caption reads: ‘but even fanatic devotion to the Emperor is subject to the weakness of the flesh 36

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as witness the three soldiers in this picture [. . .]’.19 The source of this alleged fanaticism was not just the emperor’s position as the supreme commander of the armed forces, but the fact that he combined this with his symbolic leadership of Japan’s state religion, Shinto. The wartime portrayal of Japanese soldiers as fanatics thus had a strong basis in orientalist and ambiguous images of Asian people and cultures. By the Second World War, these images had become supplemented by notions of militarism, ruthlessness and devotion to the emperor. Any nation engaging in total warfare must enlist the full co-operation of its citizens; in order to do so it must not only foster a sense of loyalty and duty in the citizenry, but it must also justify its actions by turning any interests – economic, strategic or otherwise – into ideals of freedom and justice. If the behaviour of Japanese soldiers, fanatical or not, is to be understood, we must consider how the Japanese government justified the war and trained its soldiers. It emphasised deep and unwavering loyalty to the emperor; it constantly referred to the uniqueness of the Japanese ‘race’ and its traditions; and it increasingly portrayed the war in Asia as a holy war. Japan was contributing to ‘the construction of a just world peace’, and this was ‘the ideal and mission ordained by Heaven for the Japanese race’.20 In many ways, Japanese wartime propaganda echoed Western propaganda on Japan. Indeed, as Dower has argued, Allied wartime propaganda against Japan was so successful and long-lasting because it was able to make extensive use against Japan of ‘many of the Japanese government’s own cherished words, shibboleths, images and values’.21 The Japanese army did not, needless to say, aim to create uncontrollable fanatics out of its soldiers: what was needed for a modern army was well-trained, obedient and loyal soldiers, and most of all, soldiers prepared to kill and be killed in the line of duty. Central to the process of soldier training and socialisation were the emperor and bushido, which, as we have seen, became the two aspects of Western propaganda that most constantly supported the notion that Japanese soldiers were fanatics. But there were two other important aspects to Japanese military mentality: constant reference to a modern and glorious military tradition, and a well-established national ‘cult of the fallen soldier’. Interestingly, these aspects of soldier socialisation were peripheral in Western wartime propaganda on Japan, if not ignored entirely, probably because they were less mystical and ‘oriental’, and more readily comparable to the West’s own modern traditions of warfare, warfare training and commemoration. The religious and mystical aspects of the emperor and bushido were thus more readily useful in portraying Japanese soldiers as fanatics. The Emperor, needless to say, stood at the forefront of Japan’s supposedly ‘divine’ mission: he was himself, according to myth, a descendant of the gods; he was infallible, sacred, the symbolic father of the entire population, and the supreme commander of the army and the navy. He was a central figure in the life of the soldier: propaganda constantly emphasised the supposedly personal nature of the relationship between soldiers and the emperor. Troops were told that their cigarette 37

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rations were a present from the emperor, and during the fighting in Manchuria in 1932, the empress sent parcels to soldiers at the front, visited injured soldiers at the hospital and donated artificial eyes and limbs to those who had been maimed at war.22 When devotion to the emperor is held up as an important basis for the alleged fanaticism of Japanese soldiers, it is generally portrayed in religious terms, and in terms of this personal relationship between the soldier and the emperor. However, the emperor was more than anything a national and patriotic symbol, and the soldiers’ devotion to the emperor can therefore readily be equated with patriotism. When soldiers said they were ready to die for the emperor, they meant that they were ready to die to safeguard their nation, a feeling that is not particularly unique to Japanese culture, and by Western standards, not particularly fanatical. Indeed, the West venerates the same readiness in its own memorials to fallen soldiers. While many Japanese soldiers probably did not distinguish between the idea of the nation and the idea of the emperor, some explicitly made the distinction and remembered fighting for their nation rather than for the emperor.23 It was only relatively recently, after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, that the emperor had become a national symbol. Takeda Kiyoko has shown that while the Meiji ruling élites relatively quickly agreed not to give the emperor more than a symbolic role in the government, they explicitly cultivated for the broader population an image of the Emperor as sovereign and all-powerful.24 In intellectual circles, the exact meaning of the 1890 constitution, and the extent of imperial sovereignty, continued to be discussed well into the 1930s.25 But for the general population, the Meiji government’s public relations machine had so successfully advertised the emperor’s presence and his supreme authority that by the beginning of the twentieth century, there would have been few in Japan who were not aware of his position and of his role as the ultimate authority and the ‘father of the nation’. Carol Gluck has described the process by which the image of the emperor became inextricably enmeshed in people’s lives in the Meiji period, not least with the promulgation of the Imperial Rescript of Education of 1890, which was rehearsed in schools everyday, and which enjoined Japanese children, among other things, to be ready to ‘offer yourself courageously to the State’. The newly created sense of national identity relied on notions of the family-state: the emperor was the father of the nation, the citizens his children, and the relationship between them one of respectively benevolence and obedience and respect.26 The training of soldiers, needless to say, reflected this understanding of the nation state, and the supposed proximity of soldiers to the Emperor – since he was their commander-in-chief – elevated their status enormously as defenders of the national good. Bushido was certainly also important in Japanese propaganda, as it was in Western propaganda on Japan. In the training of soldiers, bushido was particularly associated with the shame of surrender, and with the reluctance of Japanese soldiers to become prisoners of war. However, contrary to what was hammered into the heads of Japanese recruits (and contrary to what was readily assumed in Western propaganda), there was little that linked modern Japanese conscripts to 38

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the ‘code of the warrior’. Bushido as it was used in the modern Japanese army was an ‘invented tradition’ of recent origin, which like the mythical position of the emperor made recourse to the past to legitimise and justify change. There are so many myths associated with bushido that they take some disentangling. First, it is important to note that bushido was codified as the ethics of the military ruling class (the bushi or samurai) during the long peace of the Tokugawa period (1600–1868), when warriors were slowly transformed from a class of sword-wielding soldiers to brush-wielding bureaucrats. Earlier elements of warrior behaviour (like loyalty, courage, strength) were certainly incorporated into bushido: as Conrad Totman points out, the readiness of the warrior to die in battle was recast for the bureaucrat as the basis of incorruptibility.27 The bushido’s emphasis on frugality was particularly useful in giving the bureaucratic warrior class a rationale for the restricted lifestyle that their increasingly meagre official stipends allowed them. Even as it was codified in the seventeenth century, then bushido had little to do, in practice, with military men. Japan’s modern army, created in the Meiji period, was based on the conscription of commoners and explicitly excluded those of the former warrior class. General conscription was introduced in 1872, in the same year as the abolition of the class distinctions of the Tokugawa period that had made bearing arms the sole prerogative of the warrior class. The architect of the modern Japanese army, Yamagata Aritomo, toured Europe between 1869 and 1870 to find a model for Japanese military forces: he was impressed by the Prussian army, and in particular, the emphasis put on its apolitical role. It is for that reason that he explicitly sought to exclude the samurai class from the new army, since it was in his view too politically minded.28 The incorporation of bushido ethics into the modern military force reflected a concern common to the whole of the Meiji nation-building exercise: the necessity to incorporate Western technology without losing a sense of morality, or indeed, a sense of Japanese national identity. These concerns are clearly reflected in the Imperial Rescript to soldiers and sailors, drafted by Yamagata and by philosopher Nishi Amane, and presented to the army and navy ministers by the emperor in 1882.29 The Rescript enjoined conscripts to eschew political activism, to be austere, loyal to the nation, righteous and courageous: according to Hackett, ‘the rescript helped to form the basis of the official popular ideology: duty and loyalty to the emperor, the spirit of courage and sacrifice’; a ‘compound of the traditional samurai ethic and imperial nationalism’.30 Conscripts from the lower classes should therefore be taught not only Western military drill, but the notions that had, supposedly, directed the behaviour of the tiny percentage of the population that was the warrior class in the Tokugawa period. The links between the original bushido and the alleged fanaticism of Japanese soldiers are difficult to make. Yuki Tanaka has argued that the version of bushido that was increasingly embraced in the military from the 1920s onwards was corrupted and bore little relationship to the original seventeenth-century code. Tanaka further makes the point that bushido does not justify atrocities, or cruelty 39

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to prisoners of war (as, he implies, it is often assumed among commentators on atrocities); bushido is after all a moral code based primarily on righteousness and tolerance.31 The clearest link between the soldiers’ alleged fanaticism and bushido might well be found in the ‘no-surrender’ doctrine of the Japanese military. During the Second World War, the ‘no-surrender’ doctrine, and the notion that Japanese soldiers preferred to die than to be taken prisoner, often became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as we will see in the last section of this chapter. The Field Service Code of 1941 famously enjoined soldiers to: Meet the expectations of your family and home community by making effort upon effort, always mindful of the honour of your name. If alive, do not suffer the disgrace of becoming a prisoner; in death, do not leave behind a name soiled by misdeeds.32 While conscripts were told that this was a practice stemming from the mists of time, it was only with the revision of Japanese military codes in 1908 that withdrawing, surrendering or letting oneself be captured actually became illegal.33 During the Russo-Japanese War, both sides had taken prisoners of war. The revision of the codes in the wake of the war is an indication both of the impact of the Russo-Japanese War on military understandings of spiritual versus material strength (a point to which we will return), and perhaps also of the impact of Nitobe Inazo¯’s internationally acclaimed discussion of bushido. It was in 1932 that the ‘shame of capture’ first became immensely popularised, when a certain Major Kuga immediately committed suicide upon release as a prisoner of war from Chinese hands. Kuga was hailed as a national hero and a true patriot.34 The extent to which the ‘no-surrender’ doctrine affected the behaviour of Japanese soldiers will be discussed in a later section. As suggested earlier, the loyalty to the emperor and to codes of the warrior is possibly so central in discourses of Japanese soldierly fanaticism because it contains the kind of mystical aspects that are easily associated with overenthusiastic and irrational fervour. Two less often explored and slightly more prosaic components of the Japanese soldiers’ world view are the military traditions of victory that emerged out of the Russo-Japanese War and the role of the ‘cult of the fallen soldier’. The Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 had an enormous impact on the domestic political and cultural sphere in Japan. As Sandra Wilson has shown, it fuelled myths of national invincibility and myths about the nature of military strength.35 Coming close on the heels of victory against China in 1894–5, the victory over Russia had, by the late 1930s, become a leitmotiv in discourses of military prowess. As the Japan Times and Advertiser’s editorial stated on 15 December 1942: ‘Japan has never lost a war in her history, and she will surely win the one which she is fighting’.36 What was forgotten, by the 1930s, was that the Japanese victory over Russia had not been as clear-cut as was later remembered: 40

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Japanese forces had suffered tremendous losses in the war, and the government welcomed the peace treaty with Russia knowing that its military was exhausted.37 The Japanese population, however, had been largely kept ignorant of the large cost of the war and welcomed the peace treaty not with celebrations but with riots, accusing the government of treason.38 Victory over Russia also fuelled myths about the nature of Japanese military strength. The war was cast as a battle between David and Goliath: Japan had had a ‘decisive’ victory because, despite inferior material strength and weaponry, it could rely on superior strength of spirit.39 The emphasis of spiritual over material aspects meant that, in the increasingly jingoistic discourses that accompanied the deterioration of international relations in the 1930s, soldiers rehearsed constantly the notion that even with defective guns or inferior manpower, their spiritual superiority would let them win battles, as had allegedly happened in the RussoJapanese War. The Russo-Japanese War also contributed significantly towards the growth of a ‘cult of the fallen soldier’, to use a concept explored by George Mosse in the case of interwar Europe.40 The commemoration at the national level of the soldiers’ sacrifices was, again, a relatively recent invention, dating not surprisingly from the time a ‘modern’ sense of Japanese national identity was created in Meiji times. The famous and controversial commemorative Shinto shrine, Yasukuni, was erected in 1869, just a few months after the Meiji Restoration, and was given its current name in 1879. The Yasukuni shrine honoured those who had given their lives for the nation, and it assumed an increasingly central position in Japanese public life as Japan fought, and won, its first modern wars with China in 1894–5 and with Russia in 1904–5. By 1895, the shrine, and the museum attached to it in 1882, had become important instruments in the dissemination of information and propaganda about the military; they also elevated the soldier’s sacrifice for the nation to new and greater levels. By the 1930s, the celebration of the fallen soldier had become central to public life: the Imperial couple visited the Shrine regularly to express the nation’s gratitude to the war dead; the day of the Yasukuni festival became a national holiday, and regular visits to Yasukuni became part of the curriculum of schoolchildren from 1933 onwards.41 Thus, sacrifice for the nation in times of war had become increasingly popularised as the highest honour of citizenship before the Second World War – in Japan as well as in other industrialised countries. The entire population was taught these notions of sacrifice and patriotic duty at school and in ceremonies of public life.42 As the sense of national crisis deepened in the 1930s, the population was mobilised for war through a variety of existing national associations: youth groups, women’s organisations, neighbourhood organisations, associations of reservists and so on.43 Obviously, conscripts were further exposed to these ideas during their military training, where, according to Kazuko Tsurumi, isolation, a lack of privacy, exhausting physical training and constant humiliation by senior soldiers turned conscripts into men who ‘ceased to act voluntarily and, instead, acted out of fear and terror’.44 Censorship and 41

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thought-control measures, in place since Meiji times, made it unrealistic for soldiers or the general population to question the tenets of either military or national ideology. Although some people did question these tenets, the fact is that pre-war and wartime Japan was characterised by a great uniformity of opinion due, according to Wilson, ‘not to fear and repression’ but to ‘a general consensus on major political and foreign policy issues’.45 In short, then, emperor worship and the code of the bushido (however far from its original) were part of the soldiers’ training and would certainly have affected their mentality and their behaviour. But there was little in that training that predisposed Japanese soldiers to fanaticism. The emperor represented the nation, and so devotion to the emperor could be translated as patriotism. This predisposed Japanese soldiers to fanaticism as much as misguided or extreme patriotism might predispose anyone to fanaticism. Bushido represented a ‘tradition’ that, although invented to be sure, at least provided a link to a past that must have seemed particularly distant considering the extent of Japan’s transformation in the Meiji period, and that provided the antidote to a perhaps bland and uniform modernity for both a Japanese and a Western audience. The allegedly special nature of the Japanese spirit was particularly highlighted in the victory over Russia in 1905, a victory that was central to an increasingly significant (in times of national crisis) and glorious military tradition. This military tradition emphasised the superiority of the Japanese spirit – a spirit that was publicly celebrated in the commemoration of fallen soldiers. The commemoration of fallen soldiers inextricably linked the emperor, the state, the citizens and the sacrifice of the soldiers within the boundaries of state religion. Patriotism and a pride in national identity, belief in the validity of national aims, and the commemoration of national victories and of the sacrifice in war of fellow citizens – these are crucial elements of all modern nation states, not just of pre-war and wartime Japan. They do not automatically turn soldiers into fanatics. The fact is, however, that Japanese soldiers often chose death over surrender. The ratio of surrendered to dead personnel within Japanese army ranks was low compared with that prevalent in Western armies, and Japanese military personnel often engaged in hopeless attacks that were doomed to fail. To the great horror of those who first witnessed such events, particularly on Saipan (1944) and Okinawa (1945), civilians also seemed to think that death was their only option. As tragic as it was for all participants in the conflict, there was nevertheless a logic behind the propensity of Japanese soldiers to fight to the death; it can be explained rationally. It is difficult to generalise the degree to which Japanese soldiers believed or questioned the paradigms that supported their own wartime propaganda. While these paradigms had been relentlessly drummed into the heads of conscripts from the time they were at school to the time they left for the battlefield with their unit, not all soldiers accepted them unconditionally. Some veterans remember mouthing them out of an instinct for self-preservation; others despised the jingoism of military propaganda but fought for a Japanese victory in a war that was in their eyes justified.46 Yet others seem to have believed sincerely both in Japan’s 42

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invincibility and in the ‘shame of surrender’. That minority of Japanese soldiers who killed themselves upon hearing of the Japanese surrender might have been, indeed, fanatically devoted to these ideals; the nearly eight million soldiers who were peacefully demobilised between August and September 1945 were not. It is important to keep in mind that although the speed of Japanese expansion in the first few months of the war had been surprising, within a few months Japan was fighting defensive rather than offensive battles. The greatest proportion of Japanese troops were fighting in China throughout the war, but it was not in China that the outcome of the war was decided, but in the Pacific. Japanese supply lines to their colonies overseas had been cut by mid-1943, and it is noteworthy, as Dower shows, that only one in three of Japan’s military casualties died in combat: the other two succumbed from malnutrition, exhaustion and disease.47 The Allied strategy of island-hopping towards the Japanese mainland made Japanese resistance on the way increasingly desperate: and although battles in Burma, New Guinea, the Philippines and parts of Indonesia (especially on islands like Morotai) were extremely costly, it is the names of islands like Guam, Tinian, Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa that bring to mind famous ‘last ditch’ battles. These apparently proved once and for all that all Japanese soldiers and civilians were fanatics and that, ultimately, the use of the A-bomb was justified. On Guam, for example, only 1,200 men out of a force of 20,810 survived to be repatriated after the war.48 Such extensive losses were not unusual: famously, more than 110,000 soldiers and at least 95,000 civilians died on Okinawa.49 The nature of the Allied advance and of the Japanese defence in itself, then, explains the kind of desperation that led to suicidal battles. The creation of the Tokko¯tai – the ‘Special Attack Corps’ or kamikaze is another example of this desperation and, needless to say, further contributed to the image of Japanese soldiers as fanatics.50 The ‘no-surrender’ ethos contained in the famous Field Service Code of 1941 was important in creating the conditions whereby, on most battlefields, the ratio of deaths to surrender was in inverse proportion in the Japanese army to what it was among Allied troops. More Japanese soldiers chose death over surrender. The memoirs of Japanese veterans highlight the pervasive nature of this ethos.51 This is not to say, of course, that all those who died by their own hands or in desperate and doomed attacks sincerely believed in the shame of surrender; rather, they understood that there were no other options. First, surrender was extremely difficult to achieve, both because of the Allies’ suspicion of surrendering Japanese and because, on one’s own side, any attempt to surrender would be construed as desertion, a crime punishable by death. Second, and related to this first point, there were pervasive rumours on the Japanese side that surrendering Japanese soldiers would be tortured and killed by the Allies. Third, the majority of Japanese soldiers thought that if they did become prisoners of war and survived to the end of the war, they would never be able to return home since they had disgraced themselves and their families by failing to live up to the ethos of the army. It is difficult to ascertain exactly how many Japanese willing to surrender were actually killed by the Allies. Although Allied atrocities, for obvious reasons, are 43

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not remembered as well as Japanese ones, both Dower and Bourke show that incidents where surrendering Japanese were killed were not rare.52 Certainly, operational constraints often made it impossible to take prisoners, since nobody could be spared to guard them. At the same time, as Dower points out, the ‘nosurrender’ ethos had worked against the Japanese side in this regard: a Japanese soldier who surrendered could well blow himself up and take some of his captors with him, as had happened often enough.53 But the expectations on both the Allied side and the Japanese side also became self-fulfilling, as Colonel Milton Hill, who fought on Bataan, wrote in 1943: It is also generally true that a Jap will fight to the death rather than be take prisoner. [. . .] At close quarters the fighting was usually to the death on both sides. We didn’t take many prisoners ourselves largely for the reason that the Jap soldier preferred to die.54 ¯ ka Sho¯hei, who became Japan’s foremost war story-teller in the post-war period, O had himself become a prisoner of war in the Philippines. In Furyoki (Diary of a Prisoner of War), first published in 1949, he recounted for his readers how difficult it had been for him to surrender. He wanted to surrender but he had to avoid being killed both by his own side, and by the enemy. Indeed, O¯ ka made the point that if he had been within distance of a gun when his captors found him asleep in the jungle, they might have shot him just to be on the safe side.55 It is perhaps not surprising that most of the Japanese taken prisoner were captured when they were unconscious or too ill to move.56 Those Japanese soldiers who might have witnessed the killing of surrendering comrades would have found confirmation of what they had been told by their own commanders: that surrender would inevitably mean an unbearably painful and gruesome death. Detailed stories of Allied atrocities circulated both within the ranks of the army and within the Japanese civilian population, as Dower has ¯ ka also remembered, in Furyoki, how his own high command spread shown.57 O grisly stories of Allied atrocities among the troops. He attributed the need to distribute such stories to the army leadership’s lack of confidence in the soldiers’ understanding of the shame of surrender.58 An Allied translator and interpreter service research report compiled in 1944 noted that more than four in five of those taken prisoner had fully expected to be killed by their captors, and were surprised to find themselves alive.59 Whether or not Japanese soldiers believed that surrendering was shameful, they knew that it was illegal and unpatriotic, and that it would bring shame upon themselves and their families. Only one in three prisoners held in the south-west Pacific area thought that they would ever be able to return home: their disgrace was such that they preferred their families to think that they were dead.60 As it was, the Japanese military command did not accept the existence of prisoners of war and ignored International Red Cross communications on the matter. In any case, most prisoners of war gave false names to their captors in order to avoid detection.61 44

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Families of prisoners of war were told that they had died or were missing in action, and the returning prisoner of war’s encounter with his own grave is a leitmotiv of post-war repatriation and reintegration.62 As much as soldiers like O¯ ka Sho¯hei scorned the notion of the shame of surrender, it was in some cases deeply ingrained. Post-war Japan was confronted with the depth of some soldiers’ indoctrination when Yokoi Sho¯ichi was found hiding in Guam in 1972. Although Yokoi had an inkling that the war was over, he had hidden for 28 years because he was ashamed to return home, having survived a battle where most of his comrades had died. In other words, though he had not been captured, he felt the shame of the deserter, akin to that of the prisoner.63 In the months that followed the Japanese surrender, holding camps where demobilised soldiers awaited repatriation simmered with the tensions between those who had surrendered individually before the end of the war and those who had surrendered on the orders of superiors after 15 August. O¯ ka provides one of many possible illustrations when he tells of a memorable encounter in the prison camp after the surrender. As ‘old’ and ‘new’ prisoners meet each other, a hysterical sergeant shrilly orders O¯ ka and his comrades to kill themselves immediately to atone for their shame. O¯ ka and his mates shrug him off, but not before telling him in no uncertain (and perhaps less polite) terms to ‘pull his head in’.64 Some Japanese soldiers clearly viewed others as fanatics. These tensions were not resolved immediately in the wake of the war: some veterans have reported that veterans’ associations were sharply divided along those lines well into the 1960s.65 In conclusion, then, the label of ‘fanaticism’ does little to explain the behaviour of Japanese soldiers. In the West, it perpetuates what are often racist assumptions about east Asian people. On the whole, it precludes a serious engagement with the history of pre-war and wartime Japan. It is noteworthy, on this point, that ‘fanatics’ are not always just former enemy combatants: they can also be those who, in the past, fought for something that is now reviled in their own country. In Japan, where the war occupies a highly ambiguous place in post-war memories, the term ‘fanatic’ has often been used to refer to war dead and veterans, a situation that has made the integration of veterans into the post-war nation difficult. The survivors of the Special Attack Corps or kamikaze, the former ‘heroes of the nation’, found themselves labelled as ‘special attack degenerates’ or ‘kamikaze Fanatics’.66 A soldier who did not return from Guam until 1951 reported being regularly rejected for employment because he was considered a ‘loony from the South Seas’ (nanpo¯ boke).67 Veterans in general have deplored, in the post-war period, having the sacrifices of their comrades demeaned as ‘useless deaths’.68 In this case as well, the label of ‘fanaticism’ can preclude a meaningful investigation into the motivations of those who fought for Japan in the Second World War – and the failure to conduct this investigation is something for which people both within and outside of Japan continue to castigate the post-war Japanese nation.

45

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Notes 1 Trefalt, 2003. 2 I am grateful to the participants of the War and Fanaticism Conference held at Salford in June 2002 for their invaluable comments on this paper. 3 Japanese atrocities have been re-examined at regular intervals since the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. An early post-war examination was Lord Russell of Liverpool’s famous The Knights of Bushido: A Short History of Japanese War Crimes, 1958. See also Tanaka, 1986; Dower, 1986; Bourke, 1999; Hondo, 1999; Li et al., 2002. 4 Bourke, 1999, 152–3, 231–2, 237–8. 5 Dower, 1986, 147–180. 6 E. Said, 1978. 7 Dower, 1986, 152–5. 8 Lehman, 1978, 149. 9 Wells and Wilson, 1999, 14–17. 10 Dower, 1986, 20, 51, 157. 11 Nitobe, 1905, see also Howes, 1995. 12 J.F. Howes and G. Oshiro, ‘Who was Nitobe?’ in Howes, 1995, 13; C.H. Powles, ‘Bushido: its admirers and critics’, in Howes, 1995, 107; R. Pandey, ‘Traditions of War Literature in Medieval Japan: A Study of the Heike Monogatari’, in Wells and Wilson, 1999, 44. 13 Wilson, 2002, 25, 82–3. 14 Dower, 1986, 49–50. 15 R. Leurquin, ‘The Japanese Punitive Expedition in China’, The Army Quarterly, London, April 1938, quoted in P.W. Thompson, ‘Behind the Fog of War: A Glance at the History and Organisation of the Jap Army’, in Thompson et al., 1943, 13. 16 Leurquin quoted in Thompson, ‘Behind the Fog of War’, 14. 17 J. Scofield, ‘The Japanese Soldier’s Arms and Weapons’, in Thompson et al., 1943, 23. 18 Dower, 1986, 15–19. 19 Thompson et al., 1943, illustration IX. 20 Okubo¯ et al., 1951, 233–4, quoted in Tsurumi, 1993, 5. 21 Dower, 1986, 30. 22 Fujo shimbun, 6 March 1932, 2; 20 March 1932, 2; 2 April 1932, 2; 16 April 1932, 2. 23 See, for example, Sakai Saburo¯’s memories in Cook and Cook, 1992, 142. 24 Takeda, 1988, 2. 25 In 1935, constitutional scholar Minobe Tatsukichi was accused, though never charged, with lèse-majesté for his until then well-accepted view that the emperor was one of the organs of the state. See R.J. Smethurst, ‘The Military Reserve Association and the Minobe Crisis of 1935’, in Wilson, 1970, 1–23; Miller, 1965. 26 Gluck, 1985, 73–101. 27 Totman, 1981, 153–4. 28 Hackett, 1971, 82–3. 29 Hackett, 1971, 86. 30 Ibid., 86–7. 31 Tanaka, 1986, 206–8. 32 Quoted in Cook and Cook, 1992, 264. 33 Ienaga, 1979, 186; see also Tanaka, 1986, 209. 34 Ienaga, 1979, 49; see also Young, 1998, 75–7. 35 S. Wilson, ‘The Russo-Japanese War and Japan: Politics, Nationalism and Historical Memory’, in Wells and Wilson, 1999, 182–8. 36 Quoted in Shillony, 1981, 136.

46

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37 S.P. MacKenzie, ‘Willpower or Firepower? The Unlearned Lessons of the RussoJapanese War’, in Wells and Wilson, 1999, 30–40. 38 Wilson, 1999, 179–83. 39 Ibid., 182–3. 40 Mosse, 1990. 41 B. Trefalt, ‘War, Commemoration and National Identity in Modern Japan, 1868–1975’, in Wilson, 2002, 115–34. 42 For a discussion of the rise and wane of nationalistic images in textbooks, see for example Wray, 1978, 69–86. 43 Smethurst, 1974; Smith, 2001; Wilson, 1995, 295–314; Garon, 1993, 5–41; Havens, 1978. 44 Tsurumi, 1970, 119. 45 Wilson, 2002, 40. 46 See, for example, the discussion by former veterans in the Shu¯ kan shincho¯, 12 February 1972, 34–5, 38–9. 47 Dower, 1986, 297. 48 Trefalt, 2003, 122. See also Dower, 1986, 297–9. 49 Ko¯seisho¯ shakai engokyoku engo goju¯nenshi henshu¯ iinkai, 1997, 118. 50 See, for example, Axell and Kase, 2002. 51 For accounts by Japanese soldiers, see Cook and Cook, 1992, but also Gibney, 1995; Tamayana and Nunneley, 2000. 52 Dower, 1986, 62–3; Bourke, 1999, 185–6, 295. 53 Dower, 1986, 64. 54 M.A. Hill, ‘Lessons of Bataan’, in Thompson et al., 1943, 109, 111. 55 O¯ ka, 1952, 357–8. 56 ATIS (Allied Translator and Interpreter Service) Research Report 76 (4 April 1944), Australian War Memorial. 57 Dower, 1986, 61–2. 58 Sho¯ei, 1952, 353. See also ATIS (Allied Translator and Interpreter Service) Research Report 76 (4 April 1944), Australian War Memorial. 59 ATIS (Allied Translator and Interpreter Service) Research Report 76 (4 April 1944), Australian War Memorial. 60 Ibid. See also Carr-Greg, 1978, 201–3. 61 On Japanese prisoners of war in Cowra, see also Asada, 1970; Gordon, 1978; Clarke, 1994. 62 See for example Dower, 1999, 60; Trefalt, Japanese Army Stragglers, 33. 63 Trefalt, 2003, 115–16. 64 O¯ ka, 1952, 363. 65 Interview with Guam Veterans’ Association member, Shu¯ kan josei jishin, 19 February 1972, 53. 66 Hagomoro Society of Kamikaze Divine Thunderbolt Corps Survivors, 1973, 58–9. 67 Shu¯ kan gendai, 17 February 1972, 34. 68 Nitta, M., ‘Eirei to senyu¯ kai’ in Takahashi, S. (ed.) Kyo¯do¯ kenkyu¯ : senyu¯ kai, Tabata shoten, 1983, 222–4 quoted in Takahashi, 1988, 149–52.

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4 FANATICISM AND THE BARBARISATION OF THE PACIFIC WAR, 1941–5 Craig M. Cameron

Fanaticism is a vaguely defined label often used to describe the behaviour of certain kinds of enemies, and which serves to remove any sense of obligation to observe limits on the conduct of war against them. In the context of the United States during the Pacific War, the Japanese were characterised as a fanatical enemy with two key consequences. First, in operational terms, the label helped promote a barbarous ferocity that was distinct from American soldiers’ behaviour in Europe. Indoctrination of soldiers and marines exploited concerns about Japanese fanaticism. The resulting esprit de corps girded troops for the rigours of ground combat with a suicidally tenacious enemy, but it also promoted behaviours that might be viewed on the surface as similarly fanatical. Second, when American society described as fanatical not just the Japanese military but the entire culture, its judgement, in effect, removed a fail-safe on the means that might be employed to defeat this implacable enemy. With very muted dissent and without having to provide elaborate justifications, US military and political leaders were able to set any formal or tacit policies in place – ignoring American battlefield atrocities, adopting unrestricted submarine warfare immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack, and conducting unrestricted air campaigns that had genocidal overtones. General acceptance of Japanese fanaticism removed the wartime protections ostensibly shared among civilised societies. Historically, American culture has relied on particular labels to define two categories of enemies against whom generally accepted limitations on violence need not be applied. The first category is those deemed ‘savages’, that is, lacking the basic attainments of civilisation as measured and understood by dominant Western sensibilities. Those who did not know or appreciate the rules formally or informally limiting the nature of warfare could not expect American combatants to be bound by them except as expressions of moral and cultural superiority – as circumstances and inclinations permitted. This label and the attendant attitudes shaped wars with native American tribes going back to the Powhatans and Pequots right through to the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. At the turn of the twentieth 48

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century, the label was also applied to Filipino guerrillas fighting against American rule after 1898, and helped account for the public’s widespread disregard of wellpublicised American atrocities and acceptance of operational policies, including reconcentration, that had inflamed relations with Spain in response to Valariano Weyler’s handling of Cuban revolutionaries.1 The second label, fanatical, although it tacitly recognised a level of civilisation denied with savages, suggested a deliberate renunciation of its beneficence, reasonableness, and the rationality that allowed civilisations to coexist. Whereas savages could not be held accountable for failing to follow values that they had not yet learned, fanatics carried special responsibility because they deliberately ignored or rejected those values. In American perceptions, which assumed a universally shared understanding and measure of civilisation and reason, fanatics consciously drew on primal savagery, primitive religious beliefs, or some other regression to pre-civilisation ideas and behaviours. Such back-sliding not only excused any measures taken in response, but this renunciation of civilised values permitted, or even mandated, some form of retribution or punishment. The groundwork for wartime understanding of Japanese fanaticism could be seen in pre-war characterisations of the Japanese. Portrayals of the bushido of Shintoism, alongside emperor worship, gave rise to a bifurcated view of the Japanese as modestly refined savages or feudalistic atavists possessed merely of the outward appearance of modern civilisation. A particularly virulent article entitled ‘False Gods – False Ideals’ echoed this view in a 1944 issue of the Marine Corps Gazette in which the author wrote: Beneath the trappings of modernity the Japanese people have remained what they always were – barbarians. Japanese conduct is the result of savage, warlike racial traits shaped to a code of barbarism now being employed in a program of conquest and world rule.2 Such a perspective, coupled with anti-Asian racism, also explains the condemnation of the Japanese as a whole, whereas there was no particular perception of fanaticism among the Italians at all, and in the case of the Germans, Americans tended to reserve the label for staunch Nazis and the Waffen SS.3 Americans easily found in Japanese wartime behaviour justification for labelling them as fanatical. Four years before Pearl Harbor Sinophilic publisher Henry Luce had provided vivid coverage of the Sino-Japanese war (1937–45) including enduring images from the rape of Nanking in 1937. He also stirred up public outrage, somewhat ironically in retrospect, over Japanese aerial bombardment of Chinese cities, which was small scale but highly visible. Details of the Bataan death march of 1942 were not widely known before 1943, but by then they only reinforced the stereotypes of the Japanese as cunning, treacherous and bloodthirsty. Correspondents hurried into print books about the early military campaigns, especially Guadalcanal, that reinforced stereotypes of fanatical Japanese behaviour. The suicidal stands of Japanese island defenders gave way to the formalised Shimpu 49

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units beginning with the Philippines campaign. Better remembered by the label kamikaze, these units’ organised suicide attacks reached a horrific peak of destructiveness in April and May 1945 during the Okinawa campaign, killing as many American sailors in eight weeks as had died throughout the four-year battle of the Atlantic.4 These images conveyed a sense of Japanese fanaticism on two levels. First, the Japanese seemed bounded by no rules ostensibly observed by more civilised nations: they made war on civilians, not just soldiers; they treacherously violated basic protocols, most spectacularly with the sneak attack at Pearl Harbor, but also in countless small incidents violating flags of truce, offering false surrenders or attacking medical personnel attempting to help them; they brutally mistreated prisoners; and they committed widespread and deliberate atrocities. For all these reasons, Americans felt that they need not observe the same martial standards as they extended to their European enemies. On an individual level, many refused to take prisoners, finished off wounded enemies, or took various anatomical trophies, and not necessarily from corpses. As one marine later commented, ‘the fierce struggle for survival in the abyss . . . eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all’.5 The second characterisation of Japanese fanaticism held that, whether at the level of the individual soldier or of the nation as a whole, the Japanese seemed unwilling to acknowledge defeat or the futility of continued resistance. Only death would bring an end to resistance, long after any reasonable hope for success was gone. This was proven time and again in the island-hopping campaigns after 1942, and in the summer of 1945 this die-hard resistance posed the great dilemma for President Harry S. Truman and his advisors as they pondered the best means to end the war. Regardless of numerical or material inferiority, Japanese soldiers fought doggedly, and whatever the balance sheet of comparative casualty statistics, American soldiers knew the dangers of assaulting Pacific islands and of burning and blasting their desperate defenders. Americans considered Japanese people as a whole incapable of recognising the inevitability of defeat or the hopelessness of their situation and therefore inherently irrational. ‘It is almost incredible’, complained an editorial in the Indianapolis Star, ‘that even the Oriental mind can be so lacking in understanding as to prefer national hara-kiri to surrender and an opportunity for national survival’.6 Conventional restraints on the application of violence would be meaningless if the Japanese could neither comprehend nor accept an opportunity to escape personal or national destruction. The implications of these perceptions shaped the Pacific War from the level of the individual soldier to highest national policy. It spurred the natural search for the most effective means of killing the enemy as the only way to bring an end to resistance. However, given that such resistance was not bounded by what Americans recognised as rational measures of propriety or proportionality, the means employed need not be limited either. Ultimately, large-scale, technologically driven, industrialised killing was seen as the best means of prosecuting this war of 50

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annihilation. Along with this, however, came the fear and anger of those who had to invest the time, effort and resources, and risk their lives, because the enemy would not accept the inevitable outcome. Coupled with racist dehumanisation, this made for a potentially unbounded conflict. Virtually by definition, given its pejorative connotations, it is not possible for a society to see in its own soldiers fanatical behaviour. Society denounces fanaticism seen in others, but it typically accepts a broad range of justifications or excuses for fanatical behaviours among its own members, thereby placing their actions under a different label. What was tolerated or even praised by American society in the Second World War differs from the somewhat higher standards of restraint expected of post-Vietnam military conduct, but even so, it is hard to find examples of American soldiers in any war who crossed so far over the line in terms of fanatical or even outright criminal behaviour that society simply rejected them.7 The actions in battle of some marine Medal of Honor recipients provide notable examples of tremendous bravery, tenacity and often sacrificial dedication. On Guadalcanal, Platoon Sergeant Mitchell Paige directed his machine-gun section in the night-long battle of the Matanikau until all his men were killed or wounded, and toward morning he led a counterattack to regain his original position. He later described his actions and feelings at that moment: I guess I was so wound up that I couldn’t stop. . . . I picked up the machine gun and without noticing the burning hot water jacket, cradled it in my arms. . . . The total weight was about 150 pounds, but the way I felt I could have carried three more without noticing it. . . . the skirmish line came over the nose [of the ridge], whooping like a bunch of wild Indians. We reached the edge of the clearing where the jungle began and there was nothing left to holler at or to shoot at.8 First Lieutenant William Deane Hawkins went on a killing spree at Tarawa with a flamethrower and satchel charges until finally succumbing to his many wounds. And on Peleliu, Private First Class Arthur J. Jackson, ‘stormed one gun position after another, dealing death and destruction to the savagely fighting enemy in his inexorable drive against the remaining defenses and succeeded in wiping out a total of twelve pillboxes and fifty Japanese soldiers’.9 The distinction between American heroism and Japanese fanaticism on this level may be no more than one of national allegiance. But this begs the question of what distinguishes fanatical behaviour, which connotes deliberate, consistent and long-term behaviour, from what might be better termed battle rage, berserk behaviour that is situational and temporary, and which crops up among Americans in all combat theatres. Even among the grisly trophy-seekers, who deliberately turned their backs on values of compassion and human decency, there is little to convey fanaticism, as opposed to simple racial hatred and morbid curiosity. Coming closer to a meaningful distinction of fanatical behaviour is the example of US marine commander Lewis B. Puller. ‘Chesty’ Puller remains the paragon of 51

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marine virtues: aggressive, fearless, tenacious and self-reliant. But he also had critics who characterised him as overzealous, unimaginative and callous. His violent hatred of the Japanese helped to drive him in combat with little regard for the human costs, to the Japanese or his own men. As a colonel commanding the 1st Marines on Peleliu, that aggressiveness led him to push his regiment in bloody, effective fighting that cost 500 casualties on the first day, 1,100 by the end of day two, and by the time it was withdrawn after just seven days of brutal combat, the regiment had suffered 56 per cent casualties – its 1st Battalion, 71 per cent losses. Puller himself was dazed but defiant. The boundary separating élan from fanatical foolhardiness has often been difficult to discern in battle.10 Fanatical behaviour among Americans is not to be found in atrocities comparable to their Japanese enemies, in the expressions of their determination in battle, or even in their racial enmities, but rather in their relationship to the killing. Correspondent Ernie Pyle, who moved from Europe to coverage of the Pacific theatre in early 1945, conveyed clearly the greatest distinction American GIs made between their enemies in Europe and the Pacific: ‘In Europe we felt our enemies, horrible and deadly as they were, were still people. But out here I gathered that the Japanese were looked upon as something subhuman and repulsive; the way some people feel about cockroaches or mice.’11 By the end of the war, slaughter of these fanatical, racially inferior or subhuman enemies on an institutional level, and in many cases on an individual basis, became an impersonal matter to be addressed essentially as an industrial process. In marine operational reports from the Okinawa campaign, ‘processing’ is the ubiquitous term used to denote the systematic reduction of prepared Japanese positions. Combat hinged on application of massive amounts of fire-power backed by vast logistical support. Crushing the main Japanese defences on Okinawa depended less on such traditional martial skills as marksmanship than, for example, on engineering abilities in rigging up hoses and machinery to pump streams of napalm around Japanese positions in Wana draw, which were then set ablaze with white phosphorous grenades.12 Knowing first-hand the bloody, slogging nature of relentless, impersonal combat against unseen enemies, some Americans wished to bring the killing and carnage more out into the open. So-called ‘banzai’ charges were, on one level, a welcome sign of a garrison’s last gasp, and slaughtering surviving defenders in their headlong assaults was, relatively, far easier than their slow, bloody, systematic annihilation in well-prepared defensive positions. A marine machine-gunner on Peleliu lamented the disappearance of such tactics after Saipan and the piles of smoking corpses that accompanied such charges: ‘I like to see them stacked up like cordwood. Then you get the feeling you’ve done something.’13 The apotheosis of American fanaticism was not to be found on the island battlefields of the Pacific but in the skies above Japan and the unfolding US strategic bombing campaign. What Michael Sherry has labelled the triumph of technological fanaticism reached its full form in the systematic fire-bombing of Japanese cities in the spring and summer of 1945, and culminated with the two atomic bombings in August 1945. Militarily and symbolically, this aspect of 52

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the Pacific War embodies precisely the sort of American fanaticism that has awed and frightened the world throughout the Cold War and after: the capability and willingness to wield with limited discrimination and impersonal cold-bloodedness weapons of massive destructive power. There were three key elements underpinning this fanaticism: the industrialised scale of destruction, the emphasis on scientific and technological solutions to complex problems, and the high degree of impersonal bureaucratic abstraction in the planning, conduct and recollection of the bombings.14 The United States’ contribution to the Second World War has frequently been characterised more in measures of industrial production and matériel than its actual fighting abilities.15 Indeed, one of the legacies of the First World War, and not just in the United States, was the need for greater planning of economic mobilisation to support the mass conscript armies in the field, and no nation proved capable of matching the productive capacity of the US arsenal of democracy. As historian William H. McNeill observes, ‘War, in short, became well and truly industrialized as industry became no less well and truly militarized.’ Whether with marines ‘processing’ Japanese defences on Okinawa or in the spectacular growth of American aviation industries, McNeill’s twin generalisation was amply borne out by events.16 Doctrinal fanaticism of First World War generals for the offensive and of admirals for a climactic clash of battleship navies was matched in the interwar period by the single-minded devotion among air power advocates to Giulio Douhet’s idea that there was a cheaper, quicker, and more decisive alternative to the massive bloodletting of a major ground war.17 Strategic bombing fitted perfectly with American cultural notions of Yankee ingenuity, industrial prowess and confidence that equated technology with progress.18 The US doctrine of daylight precision bombing could not be tested initially, because the technological capabilities had not yet been created. Command technologies dominated the evolution of air power to a degree seen nowhere else, and this explains the speed with which science and industry were drawn into a massive military–industrial complex. But one of the results of this fusion was that scientists at times effectively usurped military and political leaders in establishing policy. The development of new capabilities sometimes dictated doctrine, rather than the other way around.19 In the Pacific, the main instrument of American aerial vengeance, and the ultimate embodiment of American technological prowess and ideology was the B-29 Superfortress. The B-29 was the largest, heaviest and most expensive operational bomber of the Second World War, superior to any other in speed, ceiling, range, defensive armament and bomb load. Despite many technical problems, the aircraft was an engineering marvel, with a pressurised cabin, remote-controlled turrets and an array of sophisticated on-board systems. Requiring 27,000 pounds of sheet aluminium, over 1,000 pounds of copper, 11 miles of electrical wiring and 600,000 rivets, simply placing the aircraft into mass production required enormous resources that stretched the aviation industry to its limits. At industrial plants in Omaha, Wichita, Renton and Seattle, the Boeing company alone employed a 53

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peak of over 87,000 workers. Constant design modifications added to the cost, complexity and time of production, but prodigious efforts saw monthly production reach a high in July 1945 of 375 aeroplanes. The total cost of the programme is estimated to have been $3.7 billion, making the average cost of the 3,943 bombers delivered through June 1946 $930,000 each.20 By the time the joint chiefs of staff approved Operation ‘Matterhorn’, the strategic bombing campaign against Japan, in April 1944, the first operational B-29s were staging through Karachi and Calcutta on their way to newly constructed Chinese bases. It would take another nine months to work out production problems, improve the training of aircraft and ground crews, and build up the number of aircraft with full logistical support for an all-out campaign. But once begun, the ferocious aerial assault worked with devastating speed and effectiveness. The centrepiece of United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) doctrine, daylight precision bombing, was largely abandoned in the campaign against Japan. About two-thirds of the B-29 missions were area bombing attacks against cities using incendiaries.21 The decision to shift to fire-bombing drew from several sources, including the power of lobbyists, allied encouragement and operational frustrations. The Army Chemical Warfare Service, the National Defense Research Committee and the petrochemical industry all had vested interests in the successful research to produce practical incendiary bombs, which were carefully tested against detailed model towns. The British were enthusiastic supporters of incendiary bombing: Prime Minister Winston Churchill had spoken to the US Congress in May 1943 of the desirability of ‘laying the cities and other munitions centres of Japan in ashes’.22 And Air Marshal Arthur Harris had put on a spectacular demonstration against Hamburg, which, if it failed to reconcile Americans’ discomfort in renouncing daylight precision bombing and utilising incendiaries for indiscriminate area destruction, nevertheless drew the Eighth Air Force, based in Great Britain, further into the murky realm of redefining military necessity. This was despite the objections of some, like Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who urged the president to use only precision bombing because he ‘did not want to have the United States acquire the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities’.23 The shift away from pre-war doctrine was easier, faster, and more complete in the campaign against Japan. Conventional daylight precision bombing had run into a number of operational difficulties not encountered over Germany, including very high winds that blew bombers off course and bombs off target. Low-level bombing could not be undertaken in daylight because of vulnerability to Japanese air defences, and so the shift to night-time area bombing with incendiaries carried a certain internal logic. Major-General Curtis LeMay, the architect of the shift from daylight precision bombing to night-time incendiary raids, also justified area bombing by arguing that machinery was dispersed throughout residential neighbourhoods and could be destroyed only through the new methods.24 At much lighter cost in aircrews and aircraft, Americans inflicted far greater destruction on Japan in a shorter period of time than the combined Allied bomber offensive achieved against Germany. The bombing campaign against Japan 54

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stretched over roughly 15 months, but most of the tonnage dropped was concentrated into only the last six months; over 22 months Germany was hit by nine times the tonnage dropped on Japan. Strategic bombing destroyed 79 square miles of German cities, including 10 square miles in Berlin and 9.7 in Hamburg. By comparison, destruction in the city of Nagoya amounted to 12.4 square miles, 16.4 in Osaka and 56.3 in Tokyo. All told, the United States destroyed 178 square miles of Japanese cities.25 Explanations of the shift to night-time area bombing based on tactical requirements or operational limitations shared a suspicious congruence with the personal attitudes expressed by some of the strategic bombing planners. Major-General Haywood Hansell, for example, although he effectively sacrificed his career in his unsuccessful efforts to make daylight precision bombing work, confided in his diary that it was a ‘universal feeling’ that the Japanese were ‘subhuman’. General Henry H. Arnold, visiting the Philippines in 1945 and seeing evidence of Japanese atrocities, found himself in complete agreement with Manila residents who expressed ‘no feeling of sparing any Japs . . . men women or children’, but rather a desire to use ‘gas, fire, anything to exterminate the entire race’. Again dissenting from these views, Stimson warned President Truman against thinking that Japan was simply ‘a nation composed wholly of mad fanatics of an entirely different mentality from ours’.26 At the same time as American leaders attempted to remove remaining strategic and operational restrictions on their campaign of aerial destruction against Japan, they also struck at targets in Japanese-occupied territories with few of the concerns for loss of civilian life or indiscriminate destruction that had earlier restrained similar operations over German-occupied Europe. There was a degree of discussion and hand-wringing about strikes on targets in France or Belgium that was effectively missing in the cases of the Philippines, China or Formosa. The firebombing of Hankow in December 1944, for example, fell under none of the operational explanations usually presented for air strikes on the Japanese home islands, nor did the almost complete destruction of five out of the 11 principle cities on Formosa and major destruction inflicted on another four. ‘[T]he casual nature of the destruction that took place in Asia’, concludes Michael Sherry ‘was shaped not simply by operational considerations or even by the enemy’s nature and the lust for revenge it aroused, but by the lower value Americans put on Asian lives whatever their nationality or allegiances’.27 The problem confronting American policy-makers in the summer of 1945 arose from their growing consternation at having failed to force Japanese capitulation. There was a growing sense of desperation among USAAF leaders anxious to prove the efficacy of strategic bombing, but they were running out of meaningful targets. They returned several times to larger cities and targeted towns with populations as small as 38,000. They had inflicted massive destruction, untold human carnage and suffering, and yet had not brought ultimate victory. The absence of raw materials and fuel had reduced industrial capacity even before bombers levelled factories, killed or ‘de-housed’ workers, and thoroughly disrupted 55

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remaining production. Famine also threatened by the end of the war as per capita calorific consumption plummeted.28 By any measure, US leaders understood in their calculus of modern industrialised war, Japan was beaten, and General Carl Spaatz, when he took command of the new US Army Strategic Air Forces in the summer of 1945, thought ‘that unless Japan desires to commit national suicide, they should quit immediately’. And yet the nation continued to fight.29 In the weeks before the tests in Alamogordo in New Mexico proved the efficacy of the new weapon of mass destruction, debates surfaced about an already proven one – poison gas. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had vowed to resort to gas warfare only as a retaliatory measure, but after his death military leaders, including Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, reconsidered that policy. All the same rationalisations that would be heard in support of using the atomic bomb emerged in these discussions: that it would save American lives; that it was no less inhumane than methods already seen in the fire-bombing raids; and that the public could be sold on the idea if ‘properly’ presented. A columnist in the Atlanta Constitution, comparing the use of poison gas to incendiaries and high explosives, wrote in analogy, ‘In putting a sick monkey to death, or a dog, you don’t pour burning gasoline on him or blast off his limbs one at a time. Far easier to give him a shot of gas. Why not treat the Japanese monkeys the same way?’ To forestall the likelihood of public resistance, an Army study produced for Marshall in June 1945 went so far as to suggest that for ‘public and governmental acquiescence to Army use of gas warfare, it might prove necessary to stage some sort of incident to be cited as reason for beginning gas warfare’. And an Army briefing paper written on the eve of the Potsdam conference argued that because of the Pearl Harbor attack and widespread atrocities, Japan had ‘forfeited her rights to treatment as a civilized nation’. This debate was shelved about the same time as news emerged of the successful test of the atomic bomb. Use of this new weapon of mass destruction was not feared to carry the moral repercussions of gas warfare with the American public or international opinion, and if the new super-bomb failed to end the war, this alternative would still be available.30 The logic that dictated the systematic fire-bombing of 66 Japanese cities and the reconsideration of gas warfare made the decision regarding the atomic bomb reasonably easy and straightforward. The question Truman faced after VE Day in May 1945, while still adjusting to his role as wartime commander-in-chief, was not so much whether to use the available means against Japan, including the atomic bomb, but how to do so with the greatest effect. The fruits of the Manhattan Project were certainly going to be used. The most expensive and largest scale weapons development project up to that time cost $2 billion, employed 120,000 people at 37 research or production facilities, and drew on many of the world’s top physicists. For the director of the Manhattan Project, Major-General Leslie Groves, lead scientist, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and many others, the focus was on solving dayto-day technical problems rather than wrestling with any larger moral qualms. It was a distinct minority, like Eugene Rabinowitz and Leo Szilard, who encouraged discussion of moral dimensions, although with no discernable influence on any 56

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policy decisions. In a journal entry, possibly written more for posterity than the moment, Truman noted that he had told Secretary Stimson to use the bomb ‘so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic’, he wrote, ‘we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old capital [Kyoto] or the new [Tokyo]’. The distinction he sought to make was not self-evident to many.31 Development of the atomic bomb and, from its inception, the overall United States strategic bombing campaign against Japan were also characterised by an impersonal remoteness from the destruction wrought. The Twentieth Air Force was unique in being under the direct command of USAAF Chief of Staff General Hap Arnold in Washington, DC. Operational details were left in the hands of Major-Generals Haywood Hansell and Curtis LeMay in their Pacific headquarters, but targeting and assessment were carried out half-way around the globe. One aspect that contributed to the horrors of Nazi genocidal policies was the seeming ease with which those policies were bureaucratised. Individuals could shrug off their participation as simply one insignificant part of a much larger and impersonal process that removed them from facing the consequences of their actions. An official defence of the Manhattan Project emphasised that the bomb ‘had been created not by the devilish inspiration of some warped genius but by the arduous labor of thousands of normal men and women’.32 Americans never adopted the overt ideological fanaticism of the Nazi regime, but terrifying in its own way, they constructed a much more effective mechanism capable of carrying out such policies. The massive, newly constructed Pentagon quickly came to symbolise the growing bureaucratisation of war and the continuing eclipse of charismatic field leadership by managers adapting aspects of industrial and labour management techniques to another arena of national endeavour. The United States became a producer and exporter of large-scale killing with the same methods and success it had brought to other forms of industrial production and competition.33 The American public was even more insulated than its military bureaucrats. Geographically remote from the nearest fighting, Americans were eager to believe advertisers’ promises that the gleaming new military technologies would quickly be redirected into a cornucopia of products for domestic consumption. An almost blindly optimistic and antiseptic view of a quick clean war was sufficiently prevalent throughout much of society as to worry the administration and cause the Office of War Information to seek acceptable ways to bring selective realities home to the public. On no other single issue has selective American recollection been more obvious than the use of atomic weapons. The dominant American memory of Hiroshima has always been the image of the mushroom cloud as photographed from above: discussion of what happened underneath that cloud is even today largely taboo. 57

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Contesting such insular perceptions in collective historical memory has proved highly contentious and unsuccessful. To mark the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombings, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC developed plans for an exhibit that was to include the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, as well as exhibition materials from the Hiroshima Peace Museum. A storm of controversy erupted in 1994 as Air Force and veterans’ organisations in particular charged that the planned exhibit was an indictment of the policies and the men who carried them out. Displaying a young girl’s lunch box, for example, was seen as making a false appeal to emotions that inherently reflected poorly on the pilot and crew. After heated debates, Congressional intercession and major personnel changes, the exhibit was stripped of meaningful content, offering instead a hollow celebration of the war machine, the wingless Enola Gay, and some conventional justificatory references to Pearl Harbor and fierce island fighting. The resulting bloodless overview was designed to avoid offending flag-wrapped superpatriots of various stripes who wanted no heretical perspectives to intrude on the orthodox interpretation regarding America’s selfless and honourable crusade.34 As in 1945, Americans continue to view aerial bombardment through a one-way mirror with a mixture of arrogance, complacency and callousness, which only spasmodically rebounds upon itself when fears of their own potential vulnerability intrude, as with the Soviet development of inter-continental ballistic missiles or with terrorist attack. And, as is characteristic of fanaticism, the response is not to rethink the basic assumptions, but to redouble efforts to uphold or enforce them. Although Americans tended to assume that fanaticism arose from the deliberate abandonment of reason or restraint, it is more accurate to suggest that fanaticism is often a response to very different models or measures of reason and rationality. Fanaticism has often served as a conscious, deliberate and even pragmatic response to desperate circumstances. Whether looking at the Japanese reactions to technologically better equipped ground forces from the battle of Nomonhan, fought against the Soviet Union in 1939, through the Pacific battlefields of the Second World War, the German response to the demodernisation that accompanied operations on the Eastern Front and tenacious Soviet resistance, or in contemporary times the disparities between Palestinians and the Israeli Defence Forces, historically, the adoption of extreme behaviours represents one of the few responses available to compensate for matériel weaknesses that are beyond redress. Renewed emphasis on spiritual, ideological or racial superiority allowed combatants to prolong resistance by, in effect, substituting a different measure of the short-term results. By 1939 the Japanese high command knew that the army would never receive equipment sufficient in quantity and quality to compete effectively with Soviet or US ground forces. As historian Edward J. Drea summarises: the greatest lesson from the Nomonhan experience was the magnificent display of traditional spiritual power as the basis of modern warfare. Naturally, firepower would have to be increased to complement this spiritual power, but the Japanese continued to rely on intangible factors 58

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to win battles. As infantry they were excellent, but as soldiers fighting in a modern war they were an anachronism, as the Pacific War would ultimately demonstrate.35 The United States stands in stark contrast to these other examples because it enjoyed tremendous material superiority over its enemies and so gave rise to a very different kind of fanaticism. In a revealing perspective published shortly before the Japanese surrender, a Life editorial claimed that the Japanese ‘remain psychologically undefeated. The Japanese mind – so closed yet keen, so antlike yet inspired – is a sort of feudal atom which the 20th Century must find a way to split.’36 If all of humanity’s problems could be recast in technological terms, the American scientific and industrial communities would solve them through a series of Manhattan Projects. Americans assumed that only the United States possessed the capabilities to undertake such efforts, and by extension, their technological superiority would offset their enemies’ numerical superiority. The depth of shock felt in 1949 when the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb or again in 1958 when Sputnik sent tremors of fear through American society were proportional to the public’s sense that its technological superiority might be effectively challenged. American hubris peaked in the Vietnam War, which had humiliatingly demonstrated that the most technologically advanced capabilities could not provide solutions to all problems.37 What McNeill calls ‘the irrationality of scientific and managerial rationality applied to warfare’ took deep root in the United States during the war – and persists up to the present.38 Truman hinted at the underlying issue when he noted, ‘I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries and when morals catch up perhaps there’ll be no reason for any of it.’39 To preserve their increasingly fragile sense of security and limit the human costs of conducting wars, Americans turned to technological and industrial solutions: scientific research and development were coupled with unmatched industrial capabilities and sophisticated managerial skills. This rising military–industrial complex was directed according to an impersonal, ever-growing bureaucracy that was geographically and psychologically removed from the forces it directed and their destructive results. That process of abstraction in some ways represents the heart of American fanaticism: reliance on technology for simplistic solutions to complex problems, and arrogance about the superiority of this entire cultural orientation and American direction of the resulting power. Fanaticism on the part of the enemy required ruthless application of force, which in turn redoubled indoctrination efforts to reinforce resistance. This ruthless logic suggested that kamikaze pilots or murderous SS troops became increasingly fanatical in proportion to the growing hopelessness of their situations. In the American case, a comparable dynamic was at work, but one that attempted to deny crude emotional or ideological appeals in favour of rationality, science and industrial technology. Americans’ fanaticism was driven in part by concern over whether their best efforts would serve to prevail, and in part by efforts to distance themselves from the ugly destructive realities for which they were responsible. 59

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They hid, with little self-awareness or concern, behind an obscure language of euphemism, understatement and jargon. As one unhappy veteran expressed it, The damage the war visited upon bodies and buildings, planes and tanks and ships, is obvious. Less obvious is the damage it did to intellect, discrimination, honesty, individuality, complexity, ambiguity, and irony, not to mention privacy and wit. For the past fifty years the Allied war has been sanitized and romanticized almost beyond recognition by the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant, and the bloodthirsty. It is in such recesses that American fanaticism is hidden and denied.40 The United States mobilised a massive war machine in the Second World War that faced very few operational restrictions. Cultural labels applied to characterise the Third Reich and the Japanese Empire cleared most of the obstacles to unfettered use of any weapon at hand. President Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to avoid poison gas was made with public opinion in mind, but the development and stockpiling of such agents continued with military advice on the subject focused on cost–benefit analyses. The United States developed a capability to carry out large-scale, systematic genocidal policies, whether against fanatics or, as earlier, against savages. Society had created the basis for rationalising leaders’ decisions had they seen fit to order the use of that exterminationist capability. That leaders refrained from doing so owes to a variety of influences among decision-makers and in society drawing from sources largely antagonistic to the amoral, impersonal, bureaucratised scientific–industrial approach that dominated the war effort. As seen in editorials, religious sermons or ethics debates among Manhattan Project scientists, strains of liberal humanism that had historically expressed misgivings about the evolution of the nation still exercised a restraining influence, but that influence seemed to some more tenuous than ever. Whatever the misgivings, new genies were continually uncorked and turned loose, both tributes to and indictments of a sometimes fanatical vision of technological progress. Film director Stanley Kubrick’s satirical 1962 portrait of this vision run amok with Dr Strangelove continues to strike an uncomfortably resonant chord with some viewers. Ronald Schaffer found in the testimony of Admiral Ralph A. Ofstie before the House Armed Services Committee in October 1949 a sharp critic of strategic bombing and the whole set of political and military assumptions that underlay it: Strategic bombing, the admiral contended, with its ruthless, barbaric methods, threatened the moral standards of American society. The United States should not employ military techniques that robbed it of self-respect while adding virtually nothing to its security or the security of its allies. It must cease to follow an erroneous doctrine of atomic air war. ‘Must the Italian Douhet continue as our prophet,’ he asked, ‘because certain zealots grasped his false doctrines many years ago and refuse to relinquish this discredited theory in the face of vast costly experience? Must we translate 60

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the historical mistakes of World War II into a permanent concept merely to avoid clouding the prestige of those who led us down the wrong road in the past?’41 Coming just a few months before Paul Nitze codified all of those ideas in what would become a 40-year blueprint of US Cold War policy as contained in NSC 68, the answer clearly was yes.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

6 7

8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15

16 17 18 19

Drinnon, 1980, 46–61, 307–32; Welch, 1974, 233–53. Tolischus, 1944,14–21. Dower, 1986, 16–22, 33–5. Tregaskis, 1943; Hersey, 1943; Wolfert, 1943; Sherrod, 1943 and later 1945. For examples, see Gallant, 1963, 297; Clark, 1989, 42; Hersey, 1943, 20–1. For a vivid description of a marine gouging out gold teeth from a wounded Japanese soldier, see Sledge, 1981, 120–3 (portion quoted from 123). On Shimpu units, ‘a more dignified reading of the characters for “divine wind”’, see Spector, 1985, 440. On comparative US naval casualties, see Cameron, 1994, 168. Cited in Chappell, 1997, 47. Noteworthy in the editor’s language is the notion of the Japanese committing suicide without any mention of US agency as killer or perhaps simply euthanasia. This generalisation encompasses the My Lai massacre, for which there was no substantive accountability, and more recently the dynamics of social judgment and reconciliation were placed into motion with allegations about atrocities at No Gun Ri from the Korean War. Even where the label fanatic was more easily applied, as with radical abolitionist John Brown, he would become an icon of martyred crusader for Union soldiers. McMillan, 1949, 111. The version of this episode that appeared 27 years later in Paige’s memoir was edited to convey a much less feverish image; Paige, 1976, 154. McMillan, 1949, 454. Cameron, 1994, 148–51. Pyle, 1945, 5. It is worth noting the week-long torrential rains in late May effectively neutralised American material advantages and created the sort of demodernisation described by Omer Bartov on the Eastern Front, albeit of short duration. Cameron, 1994, 176, 181–3. Davis, 1961, 58. Sherry, 1987, 251–5. Van Creveld, 1982, probably best encapsulates the critique of the US Army’s success as drawing on overwhelming material superiority to compensate for relatively marginal tactical abilities; this has in turn spawned numerous efforts at revision, notably coming from active duty, reserve, or National Guard officers, to emphasise army tactical prowess; for example, Doubler, 1994; Bonn, 1994; and, achieving greater balance, Lewis, 2001. McNeill, 1982, 356–60 (portion quoted from 358–9). P.A. Crowl, ‘Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Naval Historian’, Michael Howard, ‘Men against Fire: The Doctrine of the Offensive in 1914’, and D. MacIsaac, ‘Voices from the Central Blue: The Air Power Theorists’, in Paret, 1986. Adas, 1989, 402–18. Moy, 2001.

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20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

Werrell, 1996, 74–5, 78–82. Ibid., 226. Cited in Sherry, 1987, 226–7. Cited in Schaffer, 1985, 167. Sherry, 1987, 171–3. Werrell, 1996, 227. Schaffer, 1985, 153–4, 167. It is noteworthy that LeMay did not seem to bear particular racial animus; the strategy was for him one of impersonal, non-moral pragmatism, Sherry, 1987, 272. Sherry, 1987, 284–5. Japanese per capita consumption had dropped to 1,680 calories by August 1945, less than half the US average for 1941 of 3,400; Werrell, 1996, 234–6. Crane, 1993, 140. An unofficial Army apologist for AAF doctrine and operations, Crane dismisses in a footnote the effects of the atomic bombs as last among ‘[o]ther important shocks’, n. 59, 186. All quotations cited in Chappell, 1997, 93–6. Schaffer, 1985, 174, 181. Cited in Sherry, 1987, 352. Porter, 1994, 279–82. Linenthal and Engelhardt, 1996; Hogan, 1996. Drea, 1981, 90. Cited in Chappell, 1997, 149. Gaddis, 1997, 97–101, 240–1. McNeill, 1982, 360. Cited in Schaffer, 1985, 173. Fussell, 1989, ix, 13–19, 289. Schaffer, 1985, 196.

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5 ‘UNPRECEDENTED, MERCILESS AND UNRELENTING HARSHNESS’ Fanaticism and brutalisation in Wehrmacht anti-partisan warfare in the Soviet Union Ben Shepherd

On the evening of 29 December 1942, we started our operation in a village. There were no partisans in this village . . . We then moved on to another village . . . We shot about 70 people. Among them also women, old people and children. And then we burnt down the village . . . We then proceeded to the third village. We didn’t come across any partisans there. But we still burnt down the village and shot around 50 people. Even women and children.1

So ran the testimony of a Wehrmacht soldier on trial before a Soviet court in Minsk in 1946 for atrocities committed in the course of anti-partisan warfare during the Second World War. Popular views still hold that the German Wehrmacht amassed an exemplary fighting record during the Second World War, untainted by association with the odious fanaticism of National Socialism – the uniquely murderous blend of anti-Semitism, anti-communism and social Darwinism which inspired the ‘war of extermination’ the Third Reich waged against the peoples of German-occupied Europe. Yet National Socialist ideological conviction did indeed permeate the Wehrmacht leadership, and led it to try and shape the conduct of its rank-andfile troops accordingly. It began this endeavour with an extensive programme of indoctrination well before the war started. It followed it up during the war itself with a succession of directives intended to strengthen and harness the troops’ ideological fervour against the Reich’s ‘racial and political enemies’. Nowhere was the viciousness of such directives more pronounced than during the Third Reich’s ‘ideological crusade’ that it unleashed in June 1941 against the ‘Jew-Bolshevik’ leadership and ‘sub-human Slavic hordes’ of the Soviet Union. 63

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And, as the above quote suggests, perhaps no other aspect of the war in the east was likelier to stoke the desired ruthlessness than the anti-partisan campaign in the German-occupied Soviet Union. For Nazi propaganda could capitalise on covert, underhand partisan fighting methods to depict both partisans, and the civilians who ‘treacherously’ supported them whilst ostensibly co-operating with the German occupation authorities, as the most despicable incarnation of Bolshevik subhumanity. The anti-partisan campaign, then, involved much more, of an infinitely more sinister nature, than military operations against genuine partisans. As well as encompassing widespread, merciless terror of the civilian population in general, it also was used as a means of targeting and netting Jews and communist functionaries, depicting them as a particularly potent threat to security in the German rear. From late 1942, finally, it encompassed the increasingly extensive economic plunder of villages, indeed entire regions, deemed susceptible to partisan influence. But this chapter shows that attempts by Hitler and senior Wehrmacht officers to put the anti-partisan campaign at the ‘cutting edge’ of ideological warfare were in practice only partially successful. This is not to deny that the campaign exacted often staggering degrees of brutality and destruction against the civilians of alleged ‘bandit-friendly’ villages and regions. Nor is the aim here, in any way, somehow to justify or excuse such actions. But it needs to be recognised that the causes of actual brutality had considerably less to do with the infernal one-off blend that was National Socialist fanaticism, and considerably more to do with more commonplace causes of counter-insurgency brutality. These include the fear of ruthless partisan methods, distrust of a native population by military formations serving in a strange land, and the frustration such formations are likely to feel when they are not properly trained or resourced for the task entrusted to them. Belief in Nazi ideology almost certainly helped legitimise and intensify the brutality that resulted. But in the majority of cases it was not the main cause. If anything, however, the fact that the devastation and carnage the Wehrmacht’s anti-partisan campaign wrought were so great makes the relatively more ‘ordinary’ nature of their causes even more disturbing. The chapter focuses primarily on the conduct of the middle-level officers who were in charge of the Wehrmacht security divisions that prosecuted the antipartisan campaign in the central sector of the occupied Soviet Union. During the past 20 or so years, historians have uncovered a picture of Wehrmacht culpability in rapacious economic plunder of the occupied territories, the genocide of the Jews, the murder of political prisoners, the mass death of Soviet prisoners of war, and an ‘anti-partisan’ campaign of which civilians bore the brunt far more than partisans themselves.2 Nowhere was Wehrmacht involvement in the Third Reich’s ‘war of extermination’ more pronounced, or more extensive, than in the war against the Soviet Union. The war against the Soviet Union was to be no ordinary war. Hitler identified the ‘carriers of Bolshevism’, the Soviet Union’s ‘Jew-Bolshevik intelligentsia’, as a bacillus to be eradicated. The entire Russian landmass was to be to Germany what India was to the British Empire – a vast, economically fertile expanse ripe for exploitation and colonisation. The bulk of its Slavic population, regarded in 64

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the social Darwinist terms beloved of Nazi ideology as a mass of subhumanity, was destined for extermination, subjugation and helotry. Of course, the Soviet Union would need to be defeated utterly, by the most ruthless means, if such ambitions were to come to fruition. ‘The war against Russia’, as Hitler himself said, ‘will be such that it cannot be conducted in a chivalrous fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, merciless, and unrelenting harshness.’3 The troops, then, would need to be bolstered ideologically for the task that lay ahead of them. Accordingly, before the invasion, codenamed Operation Barbarossa, which the Third Reich unleashed in June 1941, had even begun, the Wehrmacht leadership was centrally involved in drawing up a series of directives intended to foster a mentality of ideological fanaticism in the troops. The flood of ‘criminal orders’ that emerged both before and during the campaign was saturated in Nazi ideological language that sought to promote an especially ruthless prosecution of warfare. They were not so much orders than a series of brutal Guidelines intended to infuse the troops’ conduct with the desired ruthlessness. The Guidelines for the Conduct of the Troops in Russia, issued in May 1941, sought to consolidate the mentality that could justify such ruthlessness in the first place. ‘Bolshevism is the mortal enemy of the National Socialist German people’, they proclaimed. ‘It is against this subversive world-view and its carriers that Germany is fighting. This battle demands ruthless and energetic measures against Bolshevik agitators, irregulars, saboteurs, and Jews, and the total eradication of any active or passive resistance.’4 The Barbarossa Decree, issued six days later, denied civilians the protection of military courts, and directed that all attempts by ‘enemy civilians’ to ‘interfere’ with military operations be countered with the utmost severity. Battalion commanders or officers more senior in position were instructed to execute reprisals against any village from which German troops had been fired upon. ‘Acts committed by Wehrmacht personnel or followers against enemy civilians’, it declared, ‘even if the act is a military crime or offence, may go unpunished’.5 Still worse was to come the following year: the Armed Forces High Command’s directive of December 1942, issued at Hitler’s instigation, actually forbade Wehrmacht courts from prosecuting soldiers guilty of ‘excesses’ against civilians during anti-partisan operations. It also urged ‘the most brutal measures . . . against women and children also’.6 Senior officers’ participation in drawing up these directives was more than willing. The explanation for this lies in the formative experiences and influences to which many had themselves been subjected – experiences and influences that led them to identify strongly with the Nazi cause.7 First, in a reaction against the Treaty of Versailles, there was a shared desire for rearmament, national aggrandisement and territorial expansion. The treaty, imposed on Germany by the victorious Allies in 1919 after the First World War, condemned the country to huge war indemnities, loss of colonies in Africa and the Pacific, acceptance of the responsibility for causing the war in the first place and, particularly cruelly for the officer corps, the gutting of Germany’s military capability. 65

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Officers also believed that National Socialism, with its attempt to appeal to all sections of German society, could provide the ideological backbone that would rally mass support for a future war. Such support would be of a kind which Germany’s military government had failed to muster during the First World War. National Socialism’s stress on dissolving class barriers and instead forging a racially based ‘national community’, together with its practice of propaganda and indoctrination as a means of promoting it, would, many generals hoped, provide that missing, unifying psychological bolster. A year after the Nazis attained power, General von Blomberg, Hitler’s minister for war, stressed the centrality of the national community idea within the Wehrmacht’s belief system. A commitment to nationalism is the clear basis of all military activity. We must not forget, however, that the ideology which shaped the new State is not only nationalist but national socialist. National Socialism derives the basis for its actions from the vital necessities of the whole nation and from the duty of working together for the totality of the nation. It is founded on the idea of the community of blood and fate of all Germans. There is no dispute about the fact that this law is and must remain the basis for the service of the German soldier.8 Indeed, the directives the Wehrmacht leadership issued just before and during the campaign against the Soviet Union sought to build on the Nazi indoctrination of the Wehrmacht’s rank-and-file which the Wehrmacht leadership had itself been disseminating since the Wehrmacht’s founding in 1935.9 The seizure of living space (Lebensraum) in the east, moreover, was a form of territorial expansion that for many officers resonated especially strongly. Officers’ enthusiasm for the concept of Lebensraum was partly a legacy of a long-standing urge to ‘go East’, which the Kaiser’s army had actively pursued during the First World War.10 Such ambitions had found their apogee in the Treaty of BrestLitovsk in March 1918, which ended the war between Germany and Russia. Mixed in with German imperialist ambitions were older notions of racial superiority over Germany’s Slavic eastern neighbours, and of Germany’s mission to conquer and civilise their lands. As far back as the eighteenth century, writers such as Forster, Reitemeier and Treitschke had vilified the ‘Sarmatian brutality’ and ‘notorious uncleanliness’ of the Slavs, celebrated Germany’s ‘pitiless racial struggle’ against them, and preached the virtues of Germany’s mission to civilise them.11 For officers who, during the First World War, had seen action on the eastern front first-hand, the appeal of such a mission was likely to be especially strong. For many such officers, notions of Slavic inferiority had been reinforced by their experience of what they saw as the primitiveness of living conditions in the areas of Poland and Russia where they served. One officer serving in Russia in 1918 described it as a ‘lumbering, living corpse, riddled with every kind of disease’.12 Another particularly susceptible group of officers was that which hailed from the Baltic region or eastern Germany. These areas had, over the centuries, endured 66

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traumatic confrontation against the ‘Asiatic hordes’, most recently during the Russian invasion of East Prussia in 1914. Gottard Heinrici, a leading field commander in the next war, wrote of the ‘blind destruction and mindless annihilation, of a kind we never would have thought possible’ which the Russians perpetrated on that occasion.13 Although testimonies to Russian savagery were often grossly exaggerated, they testify both to the strength of anti-Slavic prejudice and to the extent to which the intensity of wartime conditions exacerbated it. Anti-Semitism too was a feature of the German officer corps’ mentality well before the advent of National Socialism. The imperial German period showed signs that wider societal anti-Semitism was combining with the officer corps’ aristocratic, élitist self-image to generate hostility towards what many officers saw as the urban, decadent, money-minded Jew. Greater integration of Jews into German society during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was viewed in many circles as symbolising the erosion of old certainties by the forces of social change and disruption.14 The fall of the imperial regime in 1918 heralded the liberal democratic regime of the Weimar Republic, a regime towards which the conservative, authoritarian officer corps was distinctly cool. In such a context, the republic’s further extension of social and political rights towards Jews was seen as further evidence of such erosion. Werner von Fritsch, who during the 1930s would become the Army’s commander-in-chief, wrote that ‘Ebert [the president of the Republic], pacifists, Jews, democrats . . . and the French are all the same thing, namely the people who want to destroy Germany’.15 More acute than anti-Semitism during the interwar years was the officer corps’ anti-Bolshevism. The reasons for this originated in the period immediately preceding and following Germany’s defeat in 1918. It was during this period that, in the eyes of most senior officers, the armed forces and society were infected by the Bolshevik poison. Spreading disgruntlement, defeatism and talk of revolution, Bolshevik subversives inspired by the success of the Russian Revolution were seen to have engineered a haemorrhaging of national discipline and morale already weakened by pacifist liberal democratic ideas. This had led to the collapse of the home front in 1917–18, mutiny in the armed forces and the near-disintegration of the established order. Bolshevism, then, was a pestilence to be countered and destroyed.16 The fact that some prominent Bolsheviks were also Jews further helped ensure that many officers developed a view of the enemy in which the Jew and the Bolshevik shared the same face. Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, regarding the Soviet Union in 1935, wrote of the ‘devious machinations of the mainly Jewish [Soviet] commissars [which] recall the nightmare beginnings of the communist regime’.17 Furthermore, the fighting that took place between 1918 and 1920, both across and outside Germany, between the army and right-wing vigilante Free Corps units on the one side and Bolshevik revolutionaries on the other, intensified the antiBolshevism of many officers. Heinz Guderian, fighting with the Free Corps against Bolsheviks in the Baltic region, described for example in a letter to his wife how ‘the Bolsheviks lord it all over the place and cavort like beasts’.18 67

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The susceptibility of the men who commanded the Wehrmacht security divisions in the Soviet Union – generals commanding, and their division-level operations and intelligence officers – to the institutional mentality of the Wehrmacht officer corps should not be taken for granted. They were a mixture of regulars and reservists, who had undergone military service at varying lengths and, due to events like the diminution of Germany’s armed forces after the First World War, with varying degrees of interruption. They hailed from a range of socio-economic backgrounds, and spanned an age range far more diverse than that of their younger front-line colleagues. For all these reasons, they had been subjected to the National Socialist influence present in the officer corps to varying extents.19 By the same token, however, their susceptibility should not be underestimated. Quite apart from anything else, the contrast between such apparent Nazi achievements as full employment, the foreign policy successes of the 1930s and the spectacular run of military successes in the Blitzkrieg campaigns of 1939–40 contrasted very favourably, for very many Germans, with the economic and political weakness and chaos of the Weimar years. And the anti-communist, anti-Slavic and anti-Semitic sentiments outlined above were in any case far from restricted to the officer corps; indeed, their prevalence in German society, particularly amongst the middle classes, was something on which Nazi propaganda was able to build.20 When it came to anti-partisan warfare specifically, moreover, the German officer corps’ historical experience provided even greater impetus for ruthlessness. The ideological convictions that increasingly characterised so much of it were wedded to pitiless military attitudes towards guerrillas and potentially guerrilla-supporting populations. These attitudes dated back to experiences of armed civilians and the hysterical way in which the military imbibed them during the Franco-Prussian War and, more recently, the German advance through Belgium and northern France in 1914. They ensured that the perennially disparaging view of underhand guerrilla warfare which conventional military establishments harbour was particularly obdurate in the case of the German military.21 Officers’ subscription to National Socialist ideology brought these brutalising influences together, encouraged them and intensified them. This suited Hitler, for it fitted his conception of the first principle of occupation security: the enforcement of submission through fear.22 Between the outbreak of war in September 1939 and the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, this plethora of brutalising influences grew increasingly pronounced and intertwined. A staging post to the brutality of counter-insurgency warfare in the campaign against the Soviet Union came during the Wehrmacht’s invasion of Poland in 1939. Here many Wehrmacht commanders lashed out with impunity at the slightest resistance, driven by a combination of contempt for guerrillas and the civilians who might be supporting them, and racially based derision for Germany’s Slavic neighbours. By Poland’s surrender in early October, the Wehrmacht had executed 16,000 civilians.23 General Max von Schenckendorff, who decided, independently of higher command, on a rota of ten hostages shot for every German killed, was just one officer who subscribed to unprecedentedly harsh 68

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anti-guerrilla doctrine with thoroughness and enthusiasm.24 Moreover, the brutality the Wehrmacht meted out against civilians during this campaign undoubtedly lowered inhibitions towards the exercise of violence as an instrument of military security generally. Given this vicious pedigree, it at first seems quite reasonable to assume that the combination of anti-Bolshevism, anti-Semitism, anti-Slavism and contempt towards both guerrillas and any civilians who might conceivably be supporting them, was central to hardening Wehrmacht units’ treatment of the population and their prosecution of anti-partisan warfare during the campaign against the Soviet Union. For it seems that nothing other than the fanaticism which these prior influences and experiences spawned, and which the Wehrmacht leadership was intent on imbibing its troops with, can explain the staggering contrast between the relatively paltry level of casualties the Germans themselves suffered in anti-partisan warfare and the far greater levels of killing they inflicted. Certainly, the ‘partisan’ death tolls the Germans recorded during the anti-partisan campaign far exceeded both the number of partisan weapons captured and the death tolls their own troops suffered. Both relationships indicate that a huge proportion of recorded partisan dead were in fact non-combatants. The contrasting figures for some individual operations seem to beggar belief. Operation Bamberg, carried out during spring 1942 by the 707th Infantry Division, inflicted a death toll of over 4,000 ‘partisans’ at a cost to the Germans of seven dead and eight wounded.25 The 201st and 286th Security Divisions executed a series of operations in the PolotskVitebsk region of northern Byelorussia between August 1942 and February 1943 which were only a fraction less brutal. The 286th, for instance, at a cost to itself of 54 dead, generated a death toll approaching 3,000 during Operations Griffin, Lightning and Winter Forest.26 It is difficult to establish exactly how much of the killing comprised unarmed civilians, genuine partisan accomplices or actual partisans. But no such reservations can detract from the fundamental picture of a campaign of ruthless brutality claiming very large numbers of non-combatants’ lives. And the ideological conviction that, for some officers at least, underpinned such killing, was chillingly expressed by the commander of the 707th Infantry Division, General von Bechtolsheim. In 1941, he declared that ‘(t)he Jews, the spiritual leaders and carriers of Bolshevism and the communist idea, are our mortal enemy. They are to be exterminated.’27 In 1942, he spoke of the ‘criminality’ inherent in the general population, ‘consciously grown and nurtured here for a quarter of a century. All are guilty, young and old, men and women, and not just any individual sector of society. So the battle must be carried out with the utmost ruthlessness!’28 Such utterances induce a shudder, and clearly point to a strong and virulent ideological fanaticism on the part of this particular officer. Yet, inconceivable though it may at first seem, it is too simple to assert that the majority of the brutality across the Wehrmacht’s anti-partisan campaign as a whole stemmed from this source. For one thing, the limitations of the official Wehrmacht documents which are the mainstay of research in this field are such that it is usually difficult to 69

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quantify the exact impact ideology had on the motives of particular middle-level units and their officers.29 What does seem clear from the available evidence, however, is that whilst ideology did play a role, an array of other motivations fuelled brutality more decisively. Other motives included careerism. By allowing certain freedom of action, the orders the Wehrmacht leadership issued to its units provided opportunity, by demonstrating a capacity for harsh and effective action, for personal advancement.30 This appeal to careerist as well as ideological sentiment was a central part of the National Socialist ‘leadership principle’, which held that carrying out the Führer’s will more thoroughly and ruthlessly than one’s colleagues was an excellent means of achieving promotion. But when it came to anti-partisan warfare, careerist rivalry took place not just at individual level, but at institutional level also. Both the Wehrmacht, and the still greatly more ruthless SS, provided extensive assistance to one another in matters of rear area security. The Einsatzkommando and Sonderkommando units of the SS Einsatzgruppen, for example, collaborated with the Wehrmacht’s own Secret Field Police in screening and executing partisan suspects. Yet the SS and Wehrmacht were also vying for the Führer’s favour, and for the extra troops, resources and administrative power which it could bring them.31 Second, by urging singular ruthlessness from its security units before the campaign had even started, the Wehrmacht leadership was seeking somehow to ‘square the circle’ between the vastness of the occupied Soviet Union and the meagreness of the forces which they had committed to the task. Essentially, a handful of substandard reservist formations, trained and equipped to a degree considerably less thorough than their front-line comrades, were charged with both prosecuting active anti-partisan operations and carrying out the passive security duty of guarding the routes and installations of communication and supply to the front against partisan attack.32 The long-term pacification of the occupied rear, the Wehrmacht leadership believed, was best assured by prioritising frontline units at the expense of those in the rear. This would hasten the Soviet Union’s expected swift collapse, relaxing the situation at the front automatically, and releasing plentiful front-line troops for long-term occupation. The Wehrmacht leadership believed that, until this happened, such resistance as its security forces might face was best overcome by terrorising the population into acquiescence.33 ‘In the East’, maintained Hitler, ‘harshness today means lenience in the future’.34 In the event, of course, both Hitler and the Wehrmacht leadership woefully overestimated the ease with which Russia could be defeated, and the plentiful reinforcement of rear area security never took place. The troops charged with rear area security certainly employed terror, then, but, deprived of the necessary resources, never so far that they were able to master their situation. And during 1941 it was the sense of frustration and helplessness that resulted from this, rather than a base of ideological fanaticism, which was the primary cause of Wehrmacht security units ratcheting up the terror. 70

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There is in fact much evidence that, during the eastern campaign’s victorious early months in summer 1941, Wehrmacht anti-partisan units to a large extent refrained from terrorising the population in the way directives like the Barbarossa decree had urged. The German Second Army, for example, declared in mid-July that, ‘whilst the troops must conduct themselves in the east as masters, they must also avoid any actions that might damage the trust the population places in the German Wehrmacht’.35 The fact that, some ham-fisted local improvisation aside, there was as yet no Soviet partisan movement to speak of, was a significant factor in this; many Wehrmacht units, it seems, felt there was no need to risk alienating the population, thereby sacrificing a quiet life, by attempting to terrify it into not supporting the partisans if there was no partisan movement as yet to speak of. ‘Everywhere, as far east as Vitebsk, Orscha, and Mogilev’, Einsatzgruppe B reported in early August, ‘the popular mood is pro-German. Everywhere there is antipathy towards the Bolshevik regime.’36 Clearly, years of oppression and ruinous agricultural policies under the Stalin regime had reaped a harvest of anti-Stalinist sentiment which, had the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union been conducted on a more benevolent basis, the German occupation authorities as a whole might have cultivated to considerable effect. Quite apart from anything else, more active cooperation from the population would have greatly eased the task of administering and securing such a vast occupied region. It should be noted that, if there was a general absence of indiscriminate terror at this stage, of victimising terror there was plenty. When it came either to identifying culprits for such insurgent attacks as did take place, or selecting reprisal victims, Jews and communist functionaries were singled out. Yet here, too, ideological belief was only one possible motive for such victimisation. Firing up the troops by directing their actions against ‘hate figures’, dividing and ruling, or using Jews and communists in order to impress the population with the German capacity for terror were others motives which, cold-blooded in their ruthlessness though they were, were ruthlessly pragmatic rather than ruthlessly ideological.37 Perhaps the major motive was summed up most succinctly by Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, who now commanded the Seventeenth Army in the Ukraine. ‘Collective reprisals’ he decreed, should not be indiscriminate. As long as there is no firm evidence that the Ukrainian population is responsible for an attack, the village headmen should in the first instance be required to select Jewish and communist inhabitants [for reprisal] . . . Jewish members of the Young Communists should be singled out particularly as culprits for all sabotage acts and bandit activity. And part of Stülpnagel’s calculation as to the likely effect this would have on the populace was the ‘population’s widespread dislike of Jews’.38 It was in September 1941 that the already under-resourced Wehrmacht occupation forces first encountered the increasingly obdurate circumstances and 71

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mounting ‘pressure to perform’ from their superiors that would cause them to brutalise their conduct of security more widely. During this stage of the German invasion, the Wehrmacht was advancing into areas that were sufficiently far east for the Soviet authorities to have had time to throw the nucleus of some more effective kind of partisan movement together. They also had had time to evacuate the region’s industrial capacity and workers and administrative personnel. The chaos this dealt to the regions’ social and economic infrastructure led, among other things, to severe dislocation of the region’s food supply.39 Hordes of hungry refugees, together with Red Army fugitives cut off by the German advance, roamed the German rear. The Germans feared that they might eventually become the nucleus of a future partisan movement.40 Potential for increased partisan activity, and native support for it, also stemmed from the fact that the general rapacity of the German occupation authorities was fuelling the first stirrings of popular realisation that life under the Germans might be harsher than life under Stalin.41 Sure enough, the period also saw a rise in partisan activity. The rise was slight, but unmistakable;42 in any case, it was enough to alarm commanders weaned on the Wehrmacht’s institutional guerrillaphobia and in charge of forces that were already under strength. Hence, for example, the alarmed reaction of General Pflugbeil, commander of the 221st Security Division, to an increase in attacks as early as the end of July: These incidents show that these parts of the division’s jurisdiction can not in any way be considered pacified, and must be approached by the troops with the greatest possible watchfulness . . . Enemy actions against the troops must be countered immediately with the harshest measures . . . I make every unit commander responsible for ensuring that the troops be reminded of this repeatedly.43 Alarm grew more acute still as the security forces’ already paltry resources in men and equipment were poached for the front as Red Army resistance stiffened. It was these developments, more than ideological fanaticism, that prompted security commanders in the central sector to issue ever more draconian orders for the ‘mopping up’ of elements in the rear which posed the threat of potential partisan activity. General von Schenckendorff, now commander of the rear area of the German Army Group Centre, urged his security divisions to ‘prevent the movement of refugees by whatever means’.44 Such orders often made great play of the ‘Jew-Bolshevik menace’ in the German rear. Field-Marshal von Reichenau, commanding the Sixth Army in the Ukraine, stressed that ‘the soldier must have complete understanding for the necessity of the harsh but just atonement of Jewish sub-humanity. This has the further goal of nipping in the bud rebellions in the rear of the Eastern Army which, as experience shows, are always plotted by the Jews.’45 But if the central sector of the occupied Soviet Union is a good guide, it was conditions in the field, not anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism, that were the main 72

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determinant of which groups the Wehrmacht’s security divisions actually directed their fury against. Throughout autumn and winter 1941, the pattern is unmistakable: security divisions whose resources were most stretched, or who faced sudden increases in partisan activity, lashed out against the population with the greatest impunity.46 The groups that bore the brunt were far less Jews than fugitive Red Army soldiers, refugees and the inhabitants of villages suspected of aiding the partisans.47 The 221st Security Division escalated the killing in its jurisdiction at the very point, in mid-September 1941, at which the size of its jurisdiction was greatly expanded, and it suffered a simultaneous diminution of its fighting strength as several of its strongest units were despatched for front-line duty.48 The reports of the 403rd Security Division showed considerable contempt for the population – its operations officer described the population at the beginning of August as ‘natural slaves’49 – but this contempt did not translate into escalating brutality until the divisions’ circumstances deteriorated markedly. In October, it lost 1,700 of its troops to duty elsewhere and faced an increase in partisan activity.50 The directive it issued on 11 October ordered ‘collective reprisal measures against any village where either co-operation with the partisans is uncovered or ammunition or weapons are found’.51 Numerous ‘pro-partisan’ farms and villages were burned down in the weeks that followed.52 In 1942, the failure to defeat the Soviet Union in 1941 and the recent entry of the United States into the war on the Allied side posed serious implications for Germany’s ability to conclude the war on anything like acceptable terms. In the new situation, many within the occupation authorities and the National Socialist regime itself came to believe that the occupation of the Soviet Union must plunder the country for labour and resources even more extensively than before if the German war effort were to be properly supplied.53 Of course, this new injection of viciousness made occupation still more difficult; increasingly brutal, rapacious policy could only alienate a population whose co-operation the Germans, though they so often failed to see it, now needed more than ever. By spring 1942, there was burgeoning outrage at the often intolerable requisitioning levels, the mass deaths, through hunger and neglect, of Soviet POWs, and the plight of refugees. The often arrogant, heavy-handed and racially disdainful behaviour of the German soldiers in the population’s midst intensified such odium.54 Meanwhile, the gradual recovery of the Red Army after its initial shattering defeats in 1941 heightened the priority of German front-line troops even further. This inevitably meant that, some inadequate reinforcements aside, Wehrmacht rear area forces were deprived even further of the quantity and quality of men and equipment they needed increasingly desperately. The fact they were further denuded of their own troops, packed off to the front to help stem the Soviet offensives of winter 1941/2, was a further handicap. Of the 25 territorial battalions active in the rear area in May 1942, General von Schenckendorff judged that 11 possessed zero fighting worth.55 All these factors enabled partisan groups to establish themselves amongst the population more securely, founding a base from which they would later strike out 73

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and inflict mounting disruption upon German supply, administration, and economic exploitation. Their success shows clearly in the mounting disruption they wrought. Cases of rail sabotage, for example, rose from 30 in April 1942 to 208 in August. During the same period, clashes between partisans and Germans rose seven-fold.56 In the face of all this, it was the mainly substandard territorial and guard battalions, together with improvised native militias on whom the Germans were increasingly reliant, that were now compelled not only to guard supply lines and other installations, but also to carry out active security operations against the partisans. The diminution of German forces, in both quantity and quality, made the emergence of an increasingly active partisan movement an even more frightening prospect. ‘Listing all the individual attacks, all the disturbances inflicted by the partisans and bandits upon rear area security, would take up pages’, maintained the 203rd Security Division in April.57 In many areas, Einsatzgruppe B reported in June, ‘the lack of sufficient security forces means that it is not always possible to prosecute the partisan war with the necessary severity’.58 Many officers, of an already ruthless disposition, were bound to respond to the new rules of engagement by preaching even greater severity as the key to victory in the partisan war. ‘The fight is to be executed ruthlessly’, declared the 207th Security Division, stationed in northern Russia. ‘It is a question of exterminating partisans, not taking them prisoner – unless this is necessary for gleaning information.’59 The security forces lacked the troops to occupy areas susceptible to partisan control for any length of time. Instead, they favoured large-scale operations conducted to ‘cleanse’ a particular area within a few days. The course of a typical large-scale operation was a blueprint for carnage.60 With some troops assigned to holding the perimeter of the designated area to prevent the enemy from breaking out, the rest would advance to a central point, combing the area for partisans as they went whilst vetting the villages for ‘suspect elements’, stripping them of much of their food supply so as to deprive the partisans of it, and ‘resettling’ much or indeed all of their populations. That was the theory, at any rate. The reality was that the daily ‘target areas’ often were far too large, the terrain they encompassed far too difficult, to be combed realistically within the time available. Any combination of frustration, pressure for visible success, a belief that decimating the potentially partisan-friendly population was a legitimate means of combating the partisans, and the pre-existing guerrillaphobia and racial contempt nurtured further by the criminal orders, may have played a role in the brutality that so often followed.61 The point, however, is that ideological fanaticism was far from enough on its own to fuel it; the pressure of circumstances the Germans faced was crucial. In 1942 and 1943 also, the clearest determinant of the level of brutality a unit meted out seems to have been the amount of partisan activity it faced. For it was the visibility of the partisan threat that determined how much reinforcement a unit could expect and, consequently, its opportunity for carrying out the kind of largescale operation outlined above. 74

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The 201st and 286th Security Divisions faced a particularly active partisan movement in the Vitebsk-Polotsk region of north-western Byelorussia. In order to cope with the demands of a particularly troublesome and strategically important sector, these units were granted a significantly high level of manpower, at least for limited periods. It might not be enough to attain an effective long-term presence across its jurisdiction, but it was enough to execute large-scale operations and, consequently, kill civilians en masse. By contrast, the 221st Security Division and the 203rd Security Division, units which conducted themselves with considerably more restraint than either the 201st or 286th, faced a vastly different situation in which a comparatively less active partisan movement ensured that their Army Group Centre superiors provided them with considerably less manpower, and therefore considerably less opportunity for bloodshed. In the five months between the beginning of July and the end of November 1942, the 221st Security Division reported that it had killed 687 partisans, at a cost to itself of 182 dead and 207 wounded.62 This is a massive disparity by any reckoning, one that indicates that the indiscriminate killing of civilians went an enormous way to fuelling it. Yet the 201st killed 864 ‘partisans’ in combat, and condemned a further 245 to a quick dispatch from the Secret Field Police, in September 1942 alone. Just 99 rifles, pistols and machine-guns were yielded from the entire 1,100 plus body count. The 201st itself, meanwhile, suffered eight dead and 25 wounded.63 Operations Snow Rabbit, Lightning Ball and Thunderbolt, conducted by the 201st during the early months of 1943, between them killed over 6,500 ‘partisans and accomplices’ for the loss of 159 dead.64 The 201st’s particular relationship with the SS increased both the opportunity and inclination for ruthlessness further. The greater opportunity lay in the extensive assistance rendered by Einsatzkommando 9 of Einsatzgruppe B. In Operation Lightning Ball, for example, Einsatzkommando 9 and Secret Field Police units killed 1,204 people whom the 201st had handed over to them.65 This sort of assistance relieved the 201st of an ‘awkward’ choice between expending scant time and resources in committing its own troops to guarding ‘suspect, non-able-bodied elements’, or endangering the troops’ discipline by giving them orders to butcher such captives. Instead, the Einsatzkommando could dirty its hands with the task. The greater inclination is likely to have stemmed less from greater fanaticism than from careerism and institutional rivalry. For the SS was not just the Wehrmacht’s facilitator in anti-partisan warfare; it was its rival also. SS units operated in the Vitebsk-Polotsk region in far greater numbers than they did in the 221st’s area. There were seven major Wehrmacht-led operations and three SS-led operations in the region between August 1942 and June 1943.66 The presence of such units may well have generated a particularly direct institutional rivalry and career pressure for all anti-partisan commanders in their vicinity. Thus may the 201st’s officers have felt spurred to an even more zealous display of ‘necessary’ ruthlessness. Indeed, General von Schenckendorff had himself used the presence of the particularly infamous SS Cavalry Brigade in the German rear to prod his security divisions to more ruthless action in 1941.67 The 221st Security Division, 75

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by contrast, neither enjoyed such levels of manpower or Einsatzgruppe assistance, nor felt the brutalising pressure of such rivalry.68 From late 1942, finally, the Wehrmacht’s anti-partisan campaign attained a further ruthless dimension, this time generated by economics. With no end to the war in sight, the Reich’s need for foodstuffs and labour from the occupied east was increasingly desperate. But it was growing progressively harder to provide them without estranging the Soviet population even further – something of which, by this time, the Wehrmacht leadership was becoming increasingly aware.69 The partisans themselves, meanwhile, controlled ever-larger amounts of arable land. The agricultural section of Economic Inspectorate Centre reported that the partisan situation was preventing the requisitioning of: 160 herds of cattle at approximately 600 heads of cattle each, 44 batches of potatoes of 500 potatoes each, and 150 batches of grain at 150 tons each. This is calculated as equivalent to the supply of an army of 300,000 men with bread for one year, meat for three months, potatoes for four months.70 Brutal economic calculation dictated that the burden fall as far as possible on the so-called ‘bandit areas’.71 Reich-Marshal Göring’s directive of 26 October 1942 was significant in setting the pace: 1

2

When combating partisans and clearing partisan-infested areas, all livestock to hand is to be removed to a safe area, and the food reserves likewise cleared away to deprive the partisans of them. The entire male and female workforce which may be liable for labour service is to be forcibly recruited and taken to the plenipotentiary for labour, to be used either in the rear areas or the homeland. Children are to be specially accommodated in camps to the rear.72

Such measures would further meet the ‘military’ aim, towards which the large-scale operations had worked to some extent already, of depriving the partisans of food and shelter.73 The culmination of this process, during 1943, was the widespread creation of ‘dead zones’. These were areas which the Germans, having given up trying to hold on to them in the face of partisan pressure, pillaged, evacuated and devastated so that the partisans at least were denied their economic benefit.74 At all stages in the Wehrmacht’s anti-partisan campaign, then, the causes of brutality were less unique to the Third Reich, and less attributable to National Socialist conviction, than one might at first think. The overriding development seems to be one of burgeoning, brutalising frustration in the face of the difficulties that the Wehrmacht’s security troops faced. Careerism and institutional rivalry played a role also. From late 1942 an ever more pronounced economic dimension was added. 76

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It must be reiterated that this is to take nothing away from the remarkable brutality that characterised so much of the campaign, or the degree of suffering the native population underwent. It is clear, however, that ideological fanaticism was far from being the only force at work. But this is not to say that its effect should be underestimated. Given the drawbacks of the sources pointed out earlier, it is not possible to pinpoint the precise role National Socialist conviction played in fuelling the brutality. Nor is it possible to pinpoint the precise extent of that role. It is nevertheless worth remembering the prevalence of anti-communism, anti-Semitism and antiSlavism within both the German officer corps and German society in the years leading up to the invasion of the Soviet Union, and the brutalising potential of their fusion with the officers corps’ singularly harsh doctrine of counter-insurgency warfare. Given that the disparities in German and ‘partisan’ dead are so vast, it seems likely that the degree of ideological conviction that emerged from these elements legitimised and accentuated the brutality – directed as it was against ‘JewBolsheviks’ and ‘Slavic sub-humans’ – which the Wehrmacht security forces’ circumstances engendered and unleashed. There can be no doubt that, given these circumstances, a military institution with a more humane, far-sighted outlook would have striven, as some of its individual elements indeed did, to ease its situation by cultivating the occupied population’s support far more assiduously. Instead, terror and exploitation enjoyed a rein far freer than a more enlightened security policy would have allowed. Whilst it was the pressures of the situation, not ideological fanaticism, which played the central role in generating terror on the ground in the first place, National Socialist ideology eased the process by which Wehrmacht security troops became embroiled in prosecuting it.

Notes 1 H. Heer, ‘The Logic of the War of Extermination’, in Heer and Naumann, 2000, 92–119, quotation from 119. The quotation comes from ‘court proceedings relating to atrocities committed by German fascist insurgents in the Byelorussian SSR, 15–19 January 1946 (Minsk Trial), Minsk 1947, 262–3’ (ibid., endnote 1). 2 On the debate’s development from the late 1940s up to the mid-1980s, see Schulte, 1989, Introduction. 3 Bullock, 1990, 640–1. 4 Oberkommando der Wehrmacht/Wehrmachtführungsstab/Abteilung L (IV/Quartiermeister), 19 May 1941, Anlage 3. Richtlinien für das Verhalten der Truppe in Russland. Reprinted in W. Wette and Überschär, 1984, 258–9. 5 Oberkommando der Wehrmacht/Wehrmachtführungsstab/Abteilung L (IV/Quartiermeister), 14 May 1941. Betrifft: Ausübung der Kriegsgerichtbarkeit im Gebiet ‘Barbarossa’ und besondere Maßnahmen der Truppe. Reprinted in Wette and Überschär, 1984, 251–3. 6 Reprinted in Müller, 1980, 139–40. 7 B.R. Kroener, ‘Strukturelle Veränderungen in der Militärischen Gesellschaft des Dritten Reiches’, in Prinz and Zitelmann, 1994, 267–96. 8 Noakes and Pridham, 2001, 31.

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9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Messerschmidt, 1969. Liulevicius, 2000. Burleigh and Wippermann, 1991, 23–8. Wilhelm, 1991, 147–8. J. Hürter, ‘ “Freischärler” – “Banden” – “Horden”. Erfahrungen späterer Wehrmachtsgeneräle mit irregulärer Kriegführung 1914–1920.’ Paper at the conference of the German Committee for the Study of the Second World War, 29 June 2001. Burleigh and Wippermann, 1991, 359–60; U. Herbert, ‘Extermination Policy: New Answers and Questions about the History of the “Holocaust” in German Historiography’, in Herbert, 2000, 1–52, here 17–24; Kitchen, 1968, 37–48. Carsten, 1966, 203. Streit, 1997, 50–9; Idem., 1991, 242–55. Krausnick, 1985, 192. Hürter, ‘Freischärler’. On the need for a nuanced approach to the officer corps and the Wehrmacht generally, see R.-D. Müller, ‘Die Wehrmacht – Historische Last und Verantwortung. Die Historiographie im Spannungsfeld von Wissenschaft und Vergangenheitsbewältigung’, in Müller and Volkmann, 1999, 3–35; T.J. Schulte, ‘The German Soldier in Occupied Russia’, in P. Addison and Calder, 1997, 274–83. Browning, 1992, Conclusion; Kershaw, 1983; idem., 1989; Peukert, 1993. Howard, 1961, 250–1; Horne and Kramer, 2001. M. Mazower, ‘Military Violence and the National Socialist Consensus. The Wehrmacht in Greece, 1941–44’, in Heer and Naumann, 2000, 146–74. Rossino, 2003, 86–7. Ibid., 126–9. Gerlach, 1999, 885–93. Ibid., 899–901. Ibid., 619. Ibid., 611. Bartov, 1986, 16–34; B. Shepherd, German Army Security Units in Russia, 1941–1943: A Case Study (University of Birmingham, PhD, 2000), Chapter 2. The full texts of the directives are reproduced in Wette and Überschär, 1984, 251–4, 258–60. On SS anti-partisan warfare, see Gerlach, 1999, 921–63; K.-M. Mallmann, ‘“Aufgeraümt und abgebrannt”. Sicherheitspolizei und “Bandenkampf” in der besetzten Sowjetunion’, in Mallmann and Paul, 2000, 503–20; Mulligan, 1988, Chapter 11. On the ‘Category Three’ infantry divisions to which the security divisions belonged, see Müller-Hillebrand, 1954, 68–72. For an overview of the workings of German military administration in the Soviet Union, see A. Toppe et al., German Military Government (Historical Division, US Army Europe, 1948. Manuscript P-033). Cooper, 1979, 37–40; J. Förster, ‘Die Sicherung des Lebensraumes’, in Boog et al., 1998, 1227–8. Kershaw, 2001, 356. Förster, 1988, 1235. US National Archive, College Park, Maryland (USNA), film T-175/233. Der Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und SD, 5 August 1941. Ereignißmeldung 43, p. 8. All primary source references are USNA unless otherwise specified. For discussion of these motives, see Shepherd, 2004, Chapter 2. Förster, 1988, 1236–7. T-175/233. Der Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und SD, 9 July 1941. Ereignißmeldung 17, idem., 5 August 1941. Ereignißmeldung 43, 8; Gerlach, 1999, 371–85.

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40 T-315/1884, file 16182/3. Sicherungs-Division 286 Ia, 7 November 1941. Betrifft: Partisanentätigkeit, 1. 41 T-175/233. Der Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und SD, 5 August 1941. Ereignißmeldung 43, 8. 42 Förster, 1988, 1238 ff.; Shepherd, 2004, Chapter 3. 43 T-315/1667, file 16748/10. Sicherungs-Division 221 Ic, 31 August 1941. Betrifft: Kollektivmaßnahmen. 44 Gerlach, 1999, 877–8. 45 Bartov, 1992, 130. 46 Shepherd, 2004, Chapter 3. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 T-315/2206, file 15701/3. Sicherungs-Division 403 Ia, 6 August 1941. Erfahrungen aus dem Osteinsatz, 3. 50 T-315/2206, file 15701/3. Sicherungs-Division 403 Ic. Tätigkeitsbericht, September, October 1941. 51 T-315/2206, file 15701/3. Sicherungs-Division 403 Ia, 11 October 1941. DivisionsBefehl 24, p. 2. 52 Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, Freiburg-im-Breisgau (BA-MA), file RH 26-403/1. Sicherungs-Division 403 Ia, 12, 18, 23, 27 October 1941. Kriegstagebuch, 15 March–20 November 1941. 53 Mulligan, 1988, Chapter 11. 54 J. Hoffmann, ‘Die Kriegführung aus der Sicht der Sowjetunion’ in Boog et al., 1998, 893; Wilenchik, 1984, 209. 55 T-501/15, file 24693/3. Rückwärtige Heeresgebiet Mitte Ia, 31 May 1942. Beurteilung der Lage im Heeresgebiet Mitte, 1. 56 T-501/27, file 31491/6. Rückwärtige Heeresgebiet Mitte Ia. Monatsberichte, April–August 1942. 57 T-315/1586, file 29186/3. Sicherungs-Division 203 VII. Lagebericht, 16 April 1942, 3. 58 T-175/235. Der Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und SD, 19 June 1942. Meldungen aus den besetzten Osgebieten 8, 8. 59 ‘Durchführungsbefehl des Kommandeurs der 207. Sicherungsdivision zur Anweisung des Befehlshabers des rückwärtigen Heeresgebietes Nord vom 29.3.42 über rücksichtslose Partisanenbekämpfung, 31 März 1942’ reprinted in Müller, 1980, 120. 60 Gerlach, 1999, 898–913. 61 For a list of major anti-partisan operations in the area of present-day Belarus from 1942 to 1944, see Gerlach, 1999, 899–906. 62 T-315/1681, files 35408/1 and /2. Sicherungs-Division 221 Ia. Monatsberichte, July–November 1942. 63 T-315/1584, file 29196/2. Sicherungs-Division 201 Ia, 17 July 1942. Abschlußbericht, Unternehmen Luchs, Anlage 1; Sicherungs-Division 221 Ia, 5 October 1942. Abschlußbericht, Unternehmen Blitz, Anlage 1. 64 Gerlach, 1999, 899–901. 65 Ibid., 901, 904 (for qualification of the reliability of the figures), 1012–15. 66 Ibid., 899–902. 67 BA-MA, RH 22/225. Rückwärtige Heeresgebiet Mitte Ia, 5 September 1941. ‘Anweisung für SS-Kavallerie Brigade’. 68 Shepherd, 2004, Chapters 5, 7. 69 Gerlach, 1999, 975–1036. 70 Ibid., 898.

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71 ‘Bandit’ being the official designation for partisans after July 1942. 72 Der Reichsmarschall des Großdeutschen Reiches, V.P. 18727/6/3, gezeichnet: Göring. Reprinted in Müller, 1980, 134–5. 73 H. Umbreit, ‘Das unbewältigte Problem. Der Partisanenkrieg im Rücken der Ostfront’, in Förster, 1992, 130–50, here 144. 74 Gerlach, 1999, 1010–36.

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6 INDOCTRINATED NAZI TEENAGED WARRIORS The fanaticism of the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend in Normandy, 1944 Stephen Hart

Today, the Waffen-SS is infamous as the élite, politico-military vanguard of Hitler’s Nazi movement that spearheaded many German military operations during the Second World War. In reality, the Waffen-SS was a conglomeration of disparate formations, few of which actually fitted the popular perception of a force manned by indoctrinated, fanatical, blue-eyed, blond-haired Aryan Nazi supermen. But there was one unique SS formation that to a considerable extent fitted this perception – the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend (‘Hitler Youth’). The Germans raised this élite division from 16- and 17 year-old Hitler Youth movement volunteers as part of the general mobilisation undertaken after the disaster experienced at Stalingrad in 1942–3.1 During March 1943, voluntary recruitment filled most – but not all – of the division’s establishment of 20,516 personnel, and so coercive recruiting ensued, including the induction of 500 ethnic German Hitler Youth members.2 In the ensuing weeks, veteran personnel transferred from the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte to fill most of the division’s establishment strength of officers and a small proportion of its authorised NCO cadre. Indeed, the SS High Command conceived the Hitlerjugend as a sister formation to the Leibstandarte.3 After completing its working-up, the division first saw combat on 7 June 1944 in Normandy, where its personnel manifested their fanatical commitment to Nazism in an impressive offensive spirit, a notable defensive resilience, and in the perpetration of war crimes such as the murder of unarmed Allied prisoners. To investigate the division’s fanaticism, this chapter will examine the nature of the Hitler Youth movement, the unusual training regimen that the division’s personnel experienced, the impressive combat performance the Hitlerjugend delivered in Normandy, and the war crimes its personnel committed. The Hitler Youth was originally a voluntary movement, but by 1939 it had become compulsory for all German children aged between 10 and 18 to join the 81

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organisation. The movement existed to serve Hitler’s totalitarian ends by moulding the unsullied spirit of Germany’s youth into the most fervent instrument of the Nazi Reich.4 To achieve this, the movement sought to weaken the ties these youngsters felt to their families, the church and the past, and to replace them with bonds of unquestioning obedience to the present – the Nazi New Order – and to their new god, the Führer. Consequently, the Hitler Youth movement trained Germany’s youth for the forthcoming struggles of the Nazi cause both physically – through competitive sports and outdoor pursuits – and mentally – through political indoctrination.5 The latter ‘political education’ inculcated Germany’s youth with five key Nazi ideas: that the German people were racially superior to their enemies; that each race was locked in a bitter struggle for survival; that war was the ultimate arbiter of this struggle; that war spiritually enriched the individual; and that the latter only mattered as an instrument of the state. This latter creed was epitomised by the slogan displayed at Hitler Youth training camps: ‘We are born to die for Germany.’6 In addition, after the outbreak of war in September 1939, the Hitler Youth movement increasingly focused its activities on explicit rather than implicit pre-military training.7 In May 1943, the first young recruits for the Hitlerjugend Division joined the Waffen-SS and began their formal military training under the guidance of their formation commander, SS-Brigadeführer (Maj.-Gen.) Fritz Witt. At barely 36 years old on D-Day, Witt was probably the oldest person in the division.8 At the start of the divisional working-up period, the German High Command perceived these potential young soldiers as immature recruits, and this led the SS to train them rather differently from its other personnel and to impose unique conditions of service on them. For example, the teenagers received enhanced high calorie food rations to boost what the SS instructors considered to be their modest levels of physical robustness. In addition, the SS authorities banned the teenage recruits from drinking alcohol, from smoking either cigarettes or tobacco, and from having sexual relationships (with females, of course) until their 18th birthday. Indeed, in lieu of the standard army alcohol ration, the teenagers received a sweet ration.9 The suspicions held by the higher SS authorities concerning the military immaturity of Hitlerjugend soldiers, however, steadily declined as their training programme progressed. Eventually, on 16 March 1944 – after 10 months of training – Witt felt able to state that his command was now almost combat-ready; consequently, he announced officially that his boys had been ‘transformed into young men who know the military craft’.10 Witt marked this key rite of passage from boyhood to manhood by replacing his young soldiers’ sweet rations with ones of cigarettes or tobacco. Yet through some perverse logic, the German authorities continued to believe that, while these teenagers were old enough to kill the enemy in hand-to-hand combat, they were somehow not old enough either to drink alcohol or enjoy sexual relationships. Given the youth of his recruits, Witt’s training programme instigated a highly unusual command ethos that promoted the development of a particularly close relationship between these soldiers and their officers and NCOs. His standing 82

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orders required his unit leaders to assume, within the parameters of military discipline, a fatherly attitude to their young soldiers, and even made his platoon commanders live in the same rooms as their troops. In addition, Witt’s policies fostered a command atmosphere within which many of the division’s young recruits came to regard their junior NCOs – many of whom were only in their early twenties – as surrogate older brothers. Indeed, given that for many of these youngsters this was their first period of protracted separation from their parents and families, it is not surprising that they came to regard their officers and junior NCOs as surrogate fathers and elder brothers, respectively.11 The unusual closeness of these bonds was demonstrated repeatedly during the Normandy campaign, when young Hitlerjugend soldiers took significant risks to rescue the corpses of their fallen leaders from the battlefield, despite encountering heavy enemy fire.12 The close attachment that Hitlerjugend troops had for their officers seemed to have applied even to battalion and regimental commanders, figures who in other military formations might be more remote. Again, the relative youth of these officers – most were in their early thirties – no doubt helped foster such ties. To his soldiers, for example, 34-year-old battalion commander SS-Sturmbannführer (Major) Bernhard Krause was simply known as ‘Papa’. Similarly, SS-Sturmbannführer Kurt ‘Panzer’ Meyer, commander of SS-Panzergrenadier Regiment 25, was ‘loved and honoured by his young troops’.13 By this point of the war, Meyer’s reputation as a ruthless, daring, perhaps even reckless, leader – a Draufgänger, or ‘thruster’ in modern military parlance – had been well established within the German armed forces. Back in the spring 1941 Balkans campaign, for example, Meyer had once sought to restore offensive momentum to a Leibstandarte attack by dropping primed grenades behind any soldiers who lagged behind.14 In mid-1943, however, Meyer epitomised the unusual command ethos that existed within the Hitlerjugend when he reacted surprisingly leniently to a case of desertion. After the teenaged deserter had been apprehended, Meyer decided not to court martial the lad; instead, after discovering that the youngster had been extremely homesick, Meyer merely charged him with the lesser crime of going absent without leave. Meyer’s punishment was simply to cuff the recruit firmly around the ears, and point out that this was what the young lad’s father would have done had he been there.15 What in retrospect is hardest to comprehend is how these officers effectively reconciled this fatherly leadership ethos with the robust SS training regimen that they imposed on the division. Recruits recalled that Meyer was a strict disciplinarian, and the rigour with which the division was trained is attested to by the fact that up to 3 April 1944, some 15 of its recruits had died, mostly in training accidents.16 The training programme that Witt developed went hand-in-hand with the unusual leadership ethos he fostered. This training regimen kept formal drill to a bare minimum, thus freeing up extra time for additional physical exercise to bolster the robustness of these young men. Witt’s training programme also placed great emphasis on field exercises, including live-fire battle inoculation sessions, during which individual field-craft skills, particularly camouflage techniques, were tested to the full. Despite being hampered throughout 1943 by chronic shortages 83

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of NCOs, equipment, ammunition and petrol, all but two of the division’s subunits had reached full combat readiness by late May 1944.17 The division’s working-up programme also included substantial periods of ideological training that was designed to transform each of Witt’s youngsters into ‘a convinced carrier of our ideology . . . who lives according to the fundamentals of the SS as a fanatic warrior’.18 In addition to these timetabled sessions, leaders regularly held informal discussions with their men to reinforce these ideas. Much of this ‘political education’ reinforced the familiar themes espoused during the seven years that many of Witt’s soldiers had already spent in the Hitler Youth. This ideological training, moreover, also inculcated Witt’s troops with new and more recent ideas: that if these troops exerted greater will they could reverse the deteriorating war situation; that the Western Allies would shoot captured SS soldiers; and that the terrible suffering inflicted on German civilians by Allied strategic bombing needed avenging on the battlefield.19 Meyer, for example, told his soldiers that when the hardships of war weakened their resolve they should think of their ‘burned mothers and sisters’.20 The division’s senior commanders certainly believed that the anxiety created among the recruits by the daily sight of Allied bombers passing overhead toward the Reich reinforced the power of such propaganda; that several young soldiers received news during the divisional training phase that a family member had been killed by Allied bombing, no doubt hardened the attitudes of the young recruits toward Allied service personnel.21 The training regimen that the division’s teenaged recruits experienced also sought to imbue them with the fervent belief that they were ‘the elite of German youth’ upon whom the latter’s honour depended.22 In mid-1943, the Führer was well aware that the Hitler Youth teenagers then already serving in the Hermann Göring division had fought ‘fanatically’; he thus expected that the similar personnel then being trained in the Hitlerjugend division would perform equally admirably on the battlefield. Indeed, Hitler predicted that the division’s combat performance would leave the enemy ‘struck with wonder’.23 While recognising the marked potential in these teenaged soldiers, the division’s veteran commanders none the less understood the harsh realities that lay ahead of them. When these highly motivated but combat-inexperienced soldiers finally became locked into the forthcoming struggle against the Allied Second Front, Meyer warned his young troopers, they would find the onslaught of the Western Allies’ Matérielschlacht – attritional war of matériel –‘very hard’ to bear.24 This chapter will now turn to examine the division’s combat performance during the summer 1944 Normandy campaign. The aim is to give some brief examples of the division’s offensive determination, its defensive steadfastness, and its perpetration of war crimes. The division’s first experience of combat was on the attack, for as its spearheads moved up to the invasion front on 6 June, it was ordered to mount a counter-strike the next day that would throw the Allies back into the sea. During the night 6–7 June 1944, Meyer’s spearhead units reached the still porous German line on a 3-mile sector from Franqueville to Epron. Meyer immediately conceived and verbally ordered a counter-attack plan in which his 84

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three panzergrenadier battalions, backed by armour and artillery, would strike north at 1600 hours on 7 June toward Cambes, Galmanche and Authie.25 At 1400 hours, however, Meyer observed that the powerful Canadian task force now striking south from Authie toward Carpiquet airport had left its eastern flank unprotected; this represented a fleeting tactical opportunity that Meyer knew he had to seize. Reacting swiftly, Meyer abandoned his carefully orchestrated assault plan and – without consulting divisional commander Witt – ordered SS-Sturmbannführer (Major) Karl-Heinz Milius’ III Battalion, plus its supporting armour, to strike this exposed flank in an impromptu assault.26 Milius’ grenadiers pressed their initial attacks and, with the benefit of surprise, soon secured success, surrounding the enemy forces deployed in Authie and pressing forward a further mile north to threaten the village of Buron. As the latter battle developed, Milius’ forces stormed Authie, but bitter Canadian resistance smashed several massed German assaults. The SS soldiers swiftly adjusted their tactics, however, and subsequently small fire-and-movement squads infiltrated between the Canadian positions, gradually weakening the latter’s cohesion. At 1600 hours, Milius’ grenadiers crushed the last Canadian resistance in Authie, but the struggle for Buron raged for hours until the Canadians withdrew.27 Milius’ teenagers had acquitted themselves well in their first battle – a bitter struggle between two evenly matched forces – by halting the Canadian drive on Carpiquet and driving the enemy back two miles. In the process they had destroyed 25 tanks and inflicted 305 casualties on the enemy, including the taking of 200 prisoners. This success, however, had only been secured with the heavy cost of 134 casualties plus nine panzers lost.28 Any inexperienced attacking force lacking marked numerical superiority that secures its objective with a favourable casualty exchange rate of 2.3:1 must be said to have achieved an impressive tactical victory. The aggressive command ethos that the 33-year-old Kurt Meyer strove to instil into his regiment may be one of the factors behind the marked offensive determination displayed by Milius’ soldiers during this attack. In spring 1944, for example, Meyer instituted draconian policies within his command which were designed to generate an ethos of offensive momentum. He instructed his troops that if they saw ‘that an NCO or an officer is acting in a cowardly way in that he is sending you up front and he hangs back himself’, that they had ‘the right to shoot this coward’. The threat of summary execution no doubt reinforced the inclination already displayed by Meyer’s subordinates to develop an aggressive forward leadership style. The consequences of this policy were evident during the actions fought on 7 June, both in the tactical successes gained that day, and in the death of battalion commander, Hans Scappini.29 Similar offensive élan was also evident in the first action fought by SSObersturmbannführer (Lt-Col) Wilhelm Mohnke’s SS-Panzergrenadier Regiment 26. Before dawn on 8 June, the 33-year-old Mohnke threw his battalions piecemeal into the fray as they arrived at the front, even though no supporting armour had yet arrived. At 0500 hours, the soldiers of 34-year-old SS-Sturmbannführer (Major) Bernard Siebken’s II Battalion attacked toward Putot-en-Bessin, located one mile 85

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to the north. In spite of their lack of tank support, and despite encountering very intense Canadian defensive fire that included artillery strikes, Siebken’s inexperienced grenadiers nevertheless vigorously pressed their assault. One Canadian soldier recalled that the enemy came inexorably toward him, neither taking evasive action nor going to ground despite the hail of defensive fire they encountered, until both sides were locked in a desperate close-quarter battle within the village itself.30 Throughout the morning Siebken’s grenadiers effectively infiltrated around the Canadian positions until at 1330 hours, with Putot virtually surrounded, the few surviving defenders fought their way out. Siebken’s soldiers had proved their mettle in this bitter encounter, inflicting 265 casualties, including 150 prisoners, on the enemy at a cost of 98 casualties.31 The division’s highly motivated teenagers clearly exerted an immediate impact on the Normandy campaign, which was as yet still in a fluid situation. Yet it should be remembered that these troops were not the supermen of Nazi mythology who could defy basic military realities. These attacks marked the high point of the offensive success the division achieved in Normandy, and even this fell well short of the teenagers’ expectation that they would single-handedly throw the Allies back into the sea. Some of the division’s attacks that day, moreover, were less successful than the missions described above. While Mohnke’s attack toward Norrey-enBessin all but surrounded the village, for example, the resolute Canadian defence kept it in Allied hands. The bitter reality of the Normandy campaign, furthermore, was that German attacks at best achieved only modest success against the often determined resistance they encountered and the copious firepower and manpower resources that the Allies could, given sufficient time, bring to bear. Such success as the Germans did achieve, moreover, was often short-lived. Late on 8 June, for example, a Canadian battle group backed by two entire field artillery regiments counter-attacked Siebken’s exhausted forces in Putot and eventually forced them to withdraw from the village they had captured just a few hours earlier.32 Indeed, in the following days the Hitlerjugend proved incapable of exploiting these early successes as further Allied reserves arrived on French soil, and soon the division had no choice other than to move over to a defensive posture. Given that the Hitlerjugend remained on the defensive between 12 June and the end of the Normandy campaign in late August, it is not surprising that the chief manifestation of its fanaticism became an impressive degree of defensive resilience. One form that this took was that small groups of surrounded Hitlerjugend soldiers nevertheless managed to hold out for days despite facing overwhelming Allied pressure. The most famous incident of this phenomenon occurred after Canadian forces captured Falaise on 18 August 1944. Some 60 Hitlerjugend soldiers enacted a desperate 48-hour last stand in the Ecole Supéreure, until repeated Canadian attacks overwhelmed them; just six grenadiers were captured alive.33 A similar, but less well-known, incident occurred earlier, during the night of 8–9 June, when Meyer’s 15th (Reconnaissance) Company stormed the village of Bretteville-l’Orgeilleuse. During this bitter action, SS-Untersturmführer (Second Lieutenant) Reinhold Fuss’ platoon fought their way into the village, only to find 86

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themselves surrounded in a church when enemy counter-strikes drove back the rest of the battle group. A subsequent Canadian attack forced Fuss and his remaining four soldiers out of the church, but these survivors hid in a nearby cemetery for the next six days while Canadian troops patiently awaited their surrender: Fuss had to persuade one grenadier not to commit suicide rather than be captured. But the others refused to contemplate surrender and spent the six days digging a hole through the cemetery’s stone wall with a bayonet. When the hole was complete, Fuss and two of the grenadiers slipped through it one dark night, and evaded several enemy patrols to reach German lines; behind them they left two comrades who were by then too weak to move.34 Intact Hitlerjugend units that still formed part of a coherent defence also regularly offered resolute resistance to Allied attacks, particularly so during the ‘Epsom’ offensive of late June. This threatening attack toward the Odon River, designed to outflank the key city of Caen from the west, compelled Witt to commit all his available reserves to a series of desperate defensive stands. Powerful creeping barrages forced the SS troops to go to ground, and when the barrage had passed over them they found themselves locked into close combat with the ‘furious Scotsmen’ of the British 15th Division.35 Although Allied forces finally captured Cheux after a bitter struggle, a small group of isolated Hitlerjugend soldiers nevertheless held out in the ruins for a further three days.36 In nearby Mouen, Meyer’s favoured 15th Company was decimated in its tenacious attempt to stem the British assault, a loss that moved Meyer to lament that while his teenagers had ‘not learnt how to live,’ they ‘know how to die’.37 Nearby, moreover, SS-Oberscharführer (Sergeant) Ernst Behrens recalled how SS-Pioneer Pelzmann’s rifle-fire killed 30 British soldiers as they tried to storm his one-man forward observation post. After Pelzmann had run out of ammunition he climbed out of his foxhole and allegedly said to his captors, ‘I’ve gotten enough of you; Now you can kill me’; at which point, according to Behrens, a British soldier shot Pelzmann dead.38 The ferocity of these battles is evidenced both by the almost 50 per cent casualty rates that some British battalions suffered, and the Hitlerjugend Division’s losses of 1,240 personnel during six days of combat. If the Allies had continued to inflict this casualty rate on the division, it would have been wiped out in under three months.39 This fierce resistance also encompassed individual acts of courageous self-sacrifice. During the battle for St-Manvieu on 26 June, 24-year-old SSUnterscharführer (Corporal) Emil Dürr witnessed British artillery fire knock out all of his anti-tank guns. According to German reports, as British armour overran the battalion command post, Dürr unsuccessfully engaged a flame-throwing tank with a Panzerfaust. Although now wounded in the chest, Dürr approached the vehicle a second time and disabled its track with a second Panzerfaust. He then retrieved a magnetic mine, staggered back to the tank while still under heavy fire, and placed the device on the vehicle before seeking cover. The magnetic charge, however, dropped off the tank, so Dürr picked it up and held it against the tank until it exploded, destroying both the vehicle and himself in the process.40 87

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For his exploits, Dürr posthumously received the coveted Knight’s Cross, an award so exceedingly rare for non-officers that Dürr was one of just 82 SS NCOs and soldiers awarded it during the entire war. In addition, two other recipients from this total of 82 also hailed from the Hitlerjugend Division, which thus received in under one year of combat, 11 per cent of all the Knight’s Crosses awarded to nonofficer SS personnel.41 That 15 of the division’s personnel received Knight’s Crosses in just 11 months of combat provides further evidence of the individual fanaticism evident within the formation. Indeed, the Hitlerjugend came ninth in the ranking of SS divisions by their number of Knight’s Cross recipients, being beaten only by formations that had been raised much earlier in the war. However, like other élite Waffen-SS formations such as the Leibstandarte, Das Reich, and Totenkopf Divisions – the battlefield prowess of the Hitlerjugend was inextricably bound up with the morally repugnant behaviour of some of its personnel.42 The division fired its first round in combat on 7 June 1944 in Normandy and yet within hours of this very first taste of battle, the division’s personnel had already began to earn themselves a terrible reputation for their treatment of Allied prisoners of war. Indeed, during the 144-hour period, 7–12 June 1944, in contravention to the existing rules and norms of war, Hitlerjugend personnel murdered at least 155 unarmed Allied prisoners in 35 separate incidents.43 These atrocities fall into two distinct forms – the murder of prisoners by front-line troops either during or soon after the heat of battle, and the subsequent murder of prisoners held at headquarters behind the front line, carried out at the behest of Hitlerjugend officers. Some 62 of these deaths fit the ‘heat of battle’ typology, whereas the remaining 93 fall into the category of officer-instigated atrocities. Given limitations of space, this essay will now outline briefly some typical examples of these war crimes. Some 18 of these ‘heat of battle’ atrocities, involving 47 of the 62 Allied personnel killed during this type of incident, occurred on 7– 8 June, during the division’s very first taste of combat. The very first murder occurred at 1615 hours on 7 June, just after the fighting that had raged around Authie had subsided, and involved an SS soldier from Milius’ III Battalion of Meyer’s SS-Regiment 25. As Milius’ exhausted grenadiers mopped up the last Canadian resistance near the Authie–Cussy Road, they initially took no notice of the corpse of a fallen Canadian NCO. But Lance Corporal Mackay was not dead, just temporarily unconscious, and within minutes he came to and saw an SS trooper order a nearby wounded Canadian soldier to stand up. As Private Lorne Brown struggled to stand, the SS soldier shoved him down on to the ground, and while holding the Canadian down, stabbed him repeatedly until he was dead.44 A few minutes later, three of Milius’ soldiers approached a group of eight prisoners who were being held in the main street of Authie and shot them at point-blank range. One of the executioners then dragged a corpse into the middle of the road so that German armour could run over the body. Unbelievably, some time later a French civilian, Maurice Guilbert, witnessed a Hitlerjugend tank repeatedly drive forward and back over the corpse crushing it into the road. Some days later Guilbert could only recover the ‘body’ 88

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with a shovel because German tanks had by then reduced it to a pulp ‘unrecognisable as human remains’.45 During the period 7–12 June, Hitlerjugend troops also murdered 93 Canadian prisoners of war in 13 incidents of ‘officer-instigated’ atrocities. Indeed, the unlawful actions of just four Hitlerjugend officers implicate them in 89 of these 93 murders. These officers were SS-Obersturmbannführer (Lt-Col) Wilhelm Mohnke, commander of SS-Panzergrenadier Regiment 26, SS-Sturmbannführer Kurt Meyer, commander of SS-Regiment 25, SS-Sturmbannführer Bernhard Siebken, commander of the II Battalion of Mohnke’s regiment, and 27-year-old SS-Sturmbannführer Gerhard Bremer, commander of SS-Reconnaissance Battalion 12.46 The worst such atrocity was the murder of 35 Canadian prisoners near Fontenay-le-Pesnel at 2100 hours on 8 June. Eight SS soldiers were escorting 40 prisoners from Siebken’s headquarters to Mohnke’s nearby regimental command post when an unidentified officer – probably Mohnke himself – intercepted the column, berated the NCO in charge and gave him new orders. The escorts then marched the captives to the edge of a nearby cornfield, ordered them to sit, and then opened fire. In the ensuing massacre, 35 prisoners died, but five managed to escape into the cover of the adjacent cornfield. Unfortunately for the Allies, neighbouring Wehrmacht units soon recaptured the five escapees, and thus eyewitness evidence concerning this atrocity did not reach the Allies until after the end of the war.47 Another form that this officer-instigated murder took was the execution of prisoners who had refused to divulge tactical intelligence during interrogation. On the afternoon of 8 June, for example, Gerhard Bremer personally interrogated two sets of three Canadian prisoners at his Chateau d’Audrieu headquarters. After Bremer had unsuccessfully interrogated each group, SS-Scharführer (Sergeant) Stun and two troopers took them into a nearby wood, and executed them, almost certainly in accordance with Bremer’s orders.48 A similar pattern of brutality also occurred that day at Meyer’s Ardennes Abbey headquarters. At 1200 hours, SS soldiers brought in seven Canadian prisoners, who were unsuccessfully interrogated by an unidentified officer before being called out into the chapel garden one by one and shot dead. The military court that tried Meyer in December 1945 found him guilty of complicity in these murders as he was known to have been at the headquarters at the time. However, the court did not convict him of directly ordering the executions, despite the compelling witness testimony of SS-Schütze (Private) Jan Jesionek, one of the 500 ethnic Germans inducted into the division. Jesionek stated that when Meyer saw the prisoners he said out loud, ‘What shall we do with these prisoners, they only eat up our rations?’ and then added, ‘In future no more prisoners are to be taken!’49 The key question that needs to be addressed is why did some Hitlerjugend personnel display such battlefield fanaticism as to perpetrate these appalling war crimes? The chief problem in answering this question is that, not surprisingly, it has proven difficult to obtain reliable and accurate evidence from Hitlerjugend personnel; without these data, a definitive answer to this question will remain 89

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elusive. Given this methodological difficulty, the motivations that this analysis offers below should only be regarded as tentative ones. That Hitlerjugend personnel displayed such a fanatical commitment to the Nazi cause that they murdered Allied prisoners was probably due to a combination of two or more of the following eight overlapping factors: the extreme political indoctrination of Hitlerjugend soldiers; the breakdown of their military discipline; the puncturing of their racially inspired sense of invincibility; their initial combat stress reactions; the military inconvenience caused by the large number of prisoners taken; the impact that incendiary German propaganda had on their attitude to prisoners; the circulation of news alleging Allied atrocities against German prisoners; and, finally, the existence of policies instigated by ruthless and brutalised veteran officers that denied quarter to surrendered enemy personnel. The first factor was the extent to which these teenagers had been indoctrinated prior to joining combat on 7 June 1944. The years of ‘political education’ that Hitlerjugend soldiers had experienced in the Hitler Youth movement, reinforced by the indoctrination experienced during the division’s working-up period, clearly created highly motivated, ruthless Nazi devotees; this individual fanaticism, of course, may have been further reinforced by the overwhelming atmosphere of commitment to Nazism that flourished within the division. Given this reality, it seems probable that some of the division’s personnel may have possessed a predisposition to commit such brutalities – or obey orders to commit such war crimes – against enemy personnel that they loathed. The destruction wrought on the German homeland by Allied bombers no doubt only hardened these antipathies. But this factor alone only sheds some light on these murders, for it does not explain why many other Hitlerjugend soldiers, from the very first hours of combat, not only regularly took prisoners but also treated them correctly according to the rules of war. In all probability, the 155 murders that did occur arose because this general background predisposition among Hitlerjugend personnel combined with other more immediate motivational issues. A second motivating factor that, in particular, may have been a catalyst for the initial ‘heat of battle’ murders committed by Milius’ grenadiers at Authie and Buron, was the breakdown of unit discipline. According to eye-witness testimony, the spontaneous murder of Private Brown triggered the adrenaline-fuelled rage that lurked, ready to explode, within Milius’ exhausted soldiers, who subsequently descended into an undisciplined orgy of violence. Battalion commander Milius, furthermore, was one of only a handful of Hitlerjugend officers who not only lacked much combat experience, but who had also been assessed as possessing weak leadership skills. If Milius had been present and had exercised strong leadership during the late afternoon of 7 June, he might have steadied the rage of his soldiers, but – unlike many of the division’s veteran officers – he exerted little ‘grip’ on his troops as these terrible events unfolded. Whether he would have stopped the killings had he been present, of course, remains a moot point.50 The potentially sobering influence of middle-aged, experienced, battle-wise NCOs – the sort of ‘lynch-pin’ personnel upon which army units of all nationalities 90

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have historically relied so heavily – may also have held Milius’ excitable and inexperienced troops in check and prevented their descent into a post-combat blood-letting. Yet there was only a small number of ex-Leibstandarte NCOs that met this description within the Hitlerjugend. Indeed, the undesirable realities of the division’s NCO cadre made the formation unique among the German ground forces of the Second World War. First, the division suffered from a chronic lack of NCOs, having a shortfall of 2,192 such personnel from its establishment of 4,575, this shortage amounting to a staggering 48 per cent of its authorised strength. Second, most of the NCOs that the Hitlerjugend did possess were indoctrinated yet combat-inexperienced former Hitler Youth leaders in their early twenties. 51 The fact that the division’s numerically small NCO cadre combined the characteristics of combat inexperience, youth and extreme ideological motivation, no doubt contributed to the propensity of the division’s personnel to commit war crimes. It is no coincidence that Hitlerjugend NCOs, in the absence of orders from superior officers, personally initiated four of these 35 atrocity incidents, amounting to 17 deaths, and were involved in a further four such events.52 Third, the reaction of SS soldiers to the unexpectedly determined resistance displayed by the Canadians defending Authie and Buron may have contributed to the 34 ‘heat of battle’ murders Milius’ troops committed during 7 June. The impressively resolute Canadian resistance seems to have dented the self-perception of many Hitlerjugend soldiers, inculcated during their training, that they were part of an invincible élite division that alone could drive the Allied invaders back into the sea. When determined Canadian resistance shattered this illusion within hours of the Hitlerjugend joining combat, this triggered an emotional backlash from some of Milius’ troops. On the other hand, at this point in the campaign, these soldiers obviously still believed that German forces would eventually repulse the Allied invasion, and this may have encouraged such atrocities because the perpetrators had no expectation of being brought to justice – hence the failure to conceal many of their crimes. Again, it seems significant that the atrocities all but ceased after 12 June, just as it was beginning to dawn on the defending German forces that the Allied bridgehead in Normandy might not be wiped out. While the issue of a spontaneous emotional reaction to punctured self-belief sheds light on the murders committed by Milius’ troops on 7 June, it does not convincingly account for many of the subsequent ‘heat of battle’ atrocities. In contrast, these murders – which include four seemingly spontaneous incidents involving the shooting of nine Canadian prisoners near le Mesnil-Patry and les Saullets on 11 June – seem to have been motivated more by the hatred that these indoctrinated soldiers felt toward their opponents than by punctured self-belief.53 The stress reactions that Milius’ ‘green’ troops experienced after their first intense introduction to the trauma of combat may also have contributed to their propensity to commit war crimes that day. Interestingly, all of these 34 murders occurred soon after the fighting had subsided, even though presumably some opportunities for such brutality had existed while the battle still raged. Indeed, 91

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some Canadian prisoners who witnessed these crimes concluded that they had been committed by exhausted but hyped-up soldiers who had just come crashing down from the adrenaline rush that they had experienced during the fighting. When the above four factors came together during the late afternoon of 7 June, some of Milius’ exhausted and combat-stressed soldiers – their indoctrinated belief in their own invincibility now broken, and lacking the steadying influence of either their commander or experienced NCOs – ran amok and killed 34 of their prisoners. The reason why only some of Milius’ soldiers reacted in this brutal way but not others, is perhaps explained by the well-known truism that every soldier experiences each ‘engagement in a different way’.54 A fifth factor behind the murders perpetrated by Hitlerjugend personnel in Normandy, particularly the 93 officer-instigated ones, was the military inconvenience caused by the high number of Canadian prisoners – over 400 – that the division took during the fluid military situation of 7–9 June. This volume of prisoners burdened the division’s already overstretched supply network – hence Meyer’s alleged complaint that captives ‘only eat up our rations’.55 This volume of prisoners also made it feasible for brutalised Hitlerjugend officers to order the murder of some of these captives without compromising the gathering of vital military intelligence. After 12 June, however, as the front solidified and the Germans went over to the defensive, Hitlerjugend soldiers only rarely found themselves in tactical situations where they either encountered surrendering Canadian soldiers or could take Allied soldiers prisoner. This sudden rapid decline in the number of Canadian prisoners taken by the division, of course, was also due to the growing Canadian recognition that their opponents were often inclined to murder surrendered enemy personnel. The massive decline in the number of prisoners taken by the Hitlerjugend after 12 June sheds significant light on the declining incidence of the execution of Allied prisoners in this period. A sixth factor that may have made some Hitlerjugend soldiers inclined to murder enemy prisoners was the powerful impact that German propaganda exerted on them. Thanks to the stories recounted by the former Leibstandarte veterans in the division, the atrocities inflicted on SS prisoners by the Soviets were already familiar to Witt’s teenagers. Moreover, in an attempt to enhance the resolve of its soldiers, divisional propaganda repeatedly asserted that the Western Allies would treat Hitlerjugend prisoners similarly. SS-trooper Alfred Helzel acknowledged how widespread this perception was when he admitted that ‘we believe[d] that the English units would not take prisoners from us’.56 No doubt, Meyer’s exhortation that the men of his 15th (Reconnaissance) Company should not fall alive into enemy captivity reinforced his soldiers’ fear of the enemy. Indoctrinated Hitlerjugend soldiers, therefore, inflicted these brutalities on helpless Canadian prisoners because they erroneously believed that Allied troops would treat them in exactly the same way. Seventh, even if some SS soldiers were so sceptical of these Nazi propaganda stories that they were not inclined to murder Canadian prisoners, their attitude may well have changed after 8 June, once news of alleged Allied atrocities against 92

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German prisoners began circulating within the division.57 One well-known accusation, that made by Captain Count Clary-Aldringen, relates to a reconnaissance undertaken on 8 June near Cristot by Panzer Lehr Division personnel, including Colonel Luxemburger, his adjutant Clary-Aldringen and Major Zeissler. Suddenly, British soldiers mounted in two scout cars that had penetrated the German lines surprised the group and took them captive, after which they allegedly beat Luxemburger unconscious and bound him to a scout car as a human shield. As the British patrol withdrew, they allegedly fired at the remaining eight prisoners, killing them all except the wounded Clary-Aldringen who survived to reach the positions held by the Hitlerjugend. German anti-tank guns then knocked out the scout cars, inadvertently killing Luxemburger in the process.58 Whatever the truth behind the allegation, what really mattered, from the perspective of this study, is that many Hitlerjugend personnel chose to believe this allegation.59 Indeed, it seems likely that this allegation contributed to Mohnke’s decision to order the execution of three wounded Canadian prisoners at his le Moulin farm headquarters during the early morning of 9 June 1944.60 The combination of these teenage soldiers’ preconception that the Allies would not take SS prisoners and the subsequent allegations of Allied mistreatment of captives, may have contributed to some of them denying quarter to Canadian soldiers during 9–12 June. Ironically, the teenagers’ erroneous belief that the Allies would execute SS prisoners, soon became a self-fulfilling prophecy: for when the Canadian soldiers realised that Hitlerjugend personnel were killing their prisoners, some of them were so enraged that they retaliated with similar behaviour. To some personnel on both sides, therefore, this struggle became a grudge match in which there was little scope for much quarter. Indeed, the disgust felt about the behaviour of Hitlerjugend personnel seems to have extended right to the top of the Allied High Command. On 25 August, for example, after being captured the previous day, the 30-year-old commander of SS Panzer Regiment 12, SSObersturmbannführer (Lt-Col) Max Wünsche, was brought before Montgomery himself; according to Wünsche, the British general allegedly said to a subordinate, ‘we will treat German prisoners in accordance with the Geneva Convention, but not the SS’, who would be treated ‘for what they are – political vermin, political dirt’.61 What emerged during the first half of June 1944, therefore, was a growing cycle of reciprocal violence. The inadvertent consequence of this development was that it buttressed the already impressive defensive resilience displayed by Hitlerjugend personnel, many of whom preferred to fight to the death rather than be captured. Indeed, the Allies certainly took relatively few Hitlerjugend soldiers alive, either because of this phenomenon, or perhaps because in some cases vengeful Canadian soldiers shot SS personnel as they attempted to surrender. During the Allied ‘Totalize’ offensive of 7–10 August 1944, for example, Canadian forces captured 1,327 prisoners, yet despite the dominant role that the Hitlerjugend played in this battle, just eight of these prisoners hailed from the division.62 Hitlerjugend troops also displayed similar fanaticism during their defence of Hill 168 on 15 August 93

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1944, the second day of the II Canadian Corps’ ‘Tractable’ offensive. The assaulting Canadian infantry observed that many of the enemy eschewed opportunities to surrender and thus died fighting at their posts. In one instance, when the Canadian infantry overran an enemy slit trench, an SS trooper allegedly put his pistol into his mouth and took his own life rather than be captured.63 The last of these eight interconnected explanations for the murder of unarmed Canadian prisoners was the existence of officer-instigated policies or demi-official understandings that denied quarter to surrendered enemy troops. This factor alone accounts for at least 89 of the 93 ‘officer-instigated’ murders. After his conviction by a Canadian military court, Meyer stated that these atrocities – of which he originally claimed to have been ignorant – ‘were not committed by the young soldier’ but rather by divisional officers who ‘due to five years of war, had . . . become brutalised’.64 Notwithstanding Meyer’s sophistry in claiming that he was not one of these brutalised Ostkämpfer (eastern front veterans), his comment confirmed what Allied investigators had already suspected. Some of the division’s veteran Leibstandarte officers – notably Meyer, Mohnke, Bremer and Siebken – were so full of Osthärte (‘Eastern Hardness’) that they had implemented, or attempted to implement, unit-wide policies that denied quarter to captured Allied soldiers. In December 1945, the prosecution presented compelling evidence for the existence of such an understanding, if not a formal policy, within Meyer’s SSRegiment 25 during his war crimes trial. SS-Schütze (Private) Jan Jesionek testified that his company commander, SS-Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Horst von Büttner, had told his men that ‘our company takes no prisoners’, while SS-Schütze Horst Heyer described a similar exhortation made on D-Day itself.65 Jesionek also described how at a speech given during spring 1944, Meyer had stated that because Germany’s ‘Vengeance’ rocket weapons were not ready, his soldiers should take out Germany’s reprisals on British prisoners. The military court that tried Meyer convicted him of incitement to murder for exhorting his men to deny quarter to the enemy. However, it acquitted him of direct responsibility for the 18 murders committed at his Ardennes Abbey headquarters during 7–8 June, as the prosecution failed to prove either that the existence of such a policy had directly caused these murders to occur or that Meyer had directly ordered the executions. The court, however, did find him guilty of the charge of complicity in the murders, having concluded that he must have known that the crimes had occurred and did nothing to investigate them.66 Other evidence suggests that Wilhelm Mohnke was at least complicit in, if not directly responsible for, the murder of three Canadians prisoners brought into his headquarters at 1630 hours on 11 June. Mohnke personally interrogated the prisoners and soon grew angry, presumably because the prisoners would not divulge any useful intelligence. Then an SS military policeman marched the prisoners – in full sight of Mohnke – into a meadow just 275 metres away and killed them.67 Put simply, certain Hitlerjugend soldiers murdered their prisoners because superior officers told them to do so, and at least in one case, Allied courts 94

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acquitted the actual executioners on the ground that they had simply obeyed orders.68 Although some teenagers, like SS-Private Alfred Helzel, later claimed they disagreed with these orders, there is little evidence that Hitlerjugend soldiers questioned such instructions at the time.69 The role of officers as instigators of these murders is crucial because it remains clear that many Hitlerjugend soldiers did take prisoners despite the exhortations to the contrary. After all, it was only because these soldiers had taken so many prisoners on 8 June that an unknown officer – in all probability Mohnke – felt compelled that evening to intercept a column of 40 captives and order them executed by small-arms fire. Given the probable existence of officer-instigated policies of denying quarter to enemy prisoners within certain Hitlerjugend units, it perhaps seems surprising that some of the division’s soldiers did take prisoners in contravention of these understandings. Long after these events occurred, Hitlerjugend soldiers enounced three main reasons why they did not always follow their superior’s exhortations to deny quarter to the enemy: they feared that the Allies would react by denying quarter to them; they believed that the taking of prisoners was crucial for the gathering of intelligence; and last, as Alfred Helzel pointed out, some of them not only felt that such orders were incorrect, but – crucially – believed that their superiors would not punish them for failure to implement such understandings.70 While this analysis has focused on the brutality evident within part of the Hitlerjugend’s officer corps during combat operations, it should be noted that such moral turpitude also manifested itself in the execution of reprisal actions in response to attacks by resistance forces. During early April 1944, the Hitlerjugend redeployed from Belgium to Evreux in France. Late on 1 April, as a train carrying elements of SS-Reconnaissance Battalion 12 approached Ascq station near Lille, it found itself under attack by resistance fighters. Although the guards repelled the attack without suffering any casualties, the officer in charge, SS-Oberstürmführer (Lieutenant) Walter Hauck, oversaw a search of Ascq that produced many dozens of suspects, 77 of whom were then allegedly shot on his orders.71 In this ruthless response to ‘partisan’ attack, the Hitlerjugend displayed a brutality that, sadly, was evident in other élite Waffen-SS formations, including Das Reich Division.72 Given the scale of the brutality displayed by the Hitlerjugend toward Allied prisoners up to 12 June, it initially seems rather odd that the incidence of such crimes declined so quickly after that date. Some circumstantial evidence does exist to suggest that during late June and early July, Hitlerjugend soldiers murdered a small number of disarmed Canadian prisoners in several separate incidents, but after mid-July apparently this behaviour was not repeated.73 Of course, there remains the possibility that a handful of Hitlerjugend soldiers occasionally still committed such war crimes, in that they killed isolated Canadian soldiers at the very moment they surrendered, on the assumption that these atrocities would probably remain undistinguishable from other genuine combat deaths. 74 However, it does seem that as the Normandy campaign unfolded during June and July 1944 the four key Hitlerjugend officers who had ordered or encouraged their 95

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subordinates to execute their prisoners ceased the implementation of such policies, and the individuals who had spontaneously murdered Allied prisoners in the heat of battle did not repeat these excesses. It seems that three factors came together during this period to change the division’s previous behaviour toward surrendered enemy personnel. The first reason behind this altered behaviour related to the changing nature of the battlefield environment after 12 June. During the initial actions of 7–10 June, the battlefield remained fluid, but after the 12th it soon stabilised into a situation where the Germans thereafter remained on the defensive. This new tactical context made it rare for Hitlerjugend soldiers to find themselves in situations where they could take prisoner significant numbers of enemy troops. Tellingly, in the 30-day period that followed 9 June 1944, Milius’ III Battalion, SS-Regiment 25, for example, secured the paltry figure of just three Allied captives.75 This dearth of prisoners put a premium on getting tactical intelligence out of them, which may have made SS officers more inclined to keep captives alive, at least until they had been interrogated. In addition, the small numbers of prisoners involved also did not significantly inconvenience the already over-stretched divisional logistical resources. A second factor behind the declining incidence of Hitlerjugend atrocities after mid-June was that its personnel increasingly feared reciprocal Allied brutality against them if they were captured. This fear grew during July when its personnel heard further anecdotal allegations concerning supposed Canadian reprisals against their comrades.76 Crucially, as the division remained on the defensive after 12 June, and subsequently was being driven back by Allied offensives, it was now perhaps more likely that its personnel would become prisoners of the Allies rather than vice versa. As long as these circumstances pertained, denying the enemy quarter made little sense, because any reciprocal violence might account for more SS lives lost than Canadian prisoners dispatched.77 Beginning to treat Allied prisoners in accordance with existing international law was one way in which the division could distance itself from its appalling reputation and thus, perhaps, save some of its more unfortunate personnel from spontaneous Allied battlefield vengeance. Clearly, therefore, the fanaticism displayed by Hitlerjugend personnel was not so overwhelming that it could not be tempered by self-interested pragmatism. A third factor that sheds light on the declining number of war crimes that the Hitlerjugend committed was the growing fear experienced within the division that the perpetrators of these crimes might one day face Allied justice. In early June many gung-ho Hitlerjugend soldiers, completely taken in by their Nazi indoctrination that they were invincible Aryan super-warriors, believed that the Allied invasion would be thrown back into the sea. By holding this view, Hitlerjugend personnel consequently believed that the risk of Allied judicial punishment was negligible and hence there was no need to conceal evidence of these murders. Increasingly from mid-June onwards, however, the division’s soldiers must have realised, however reluctantly, that the war was not going well, and that those who 96

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had carried out such crimes might eventually find themselves facing enemy justice. This fear of judicial punishment received a powerful boost during mid-June after Allied aircraft dropped leaflets over the divisional sector warning that the perpetrators of war crimes would relentlessly be brought to justice. During this period, moreover, Hitlerjugend soldiers found it increasingly hard to retain the battlefield in the face of powerful Allied attacks. This tactical reality made it virtually impossible for them to conceal any war crimes that had been committed, and this may have dissuaded some individuals from carrying out such brutalities. From mid-June 1944 onwards, these three factors – the dearth of prisoners taken, the fear of Allied battlefield reprisals, and anxiety about eventual judicial proceedings – between them seemed to have changed the behaviour exhibited toward Allied prisoners by the division’s brutalised officers and highly indoctrinated soldiers. These factors combined to reduce significantly, albeit perhaps not entirely eradicate, the incidence of war crimes committed by its personnel. The combined influence of these factors would seem to indicate that the battlefield fanaticism displayed by Hitlerjugend personnel was not so overpowering that pragmatic self-interest could not be brought to bear to ameliorate such behaviour. This in turn would suggest that of the eight overlapping factors behind the atrocities committed during early June that were discussed earlier, the most powerful influences were short-lived emotive ones: namely, the breakdown of Hitlerjugend personnel’s military discipline, the puncturing of their sense of invincibility, and their initial combat stress reactions. The material presented above has highlighted how the youth of its soldiers, the nature of its NCO cadre, and its atypical training all made the 12th SS Panzer Division a unique German military formation. The Hitlerjugend comprised many ideologically indoctrinated, well-motivated but combat-inexperienced young soldiers and junior NCOs led by a small cadre of ruthless, battle-hardened former Leibstandarte officers and senior NCOs. Given these characteristics, during the Normandy campaign the division unsurprisingly managed to display noticeable offensive élan and defensive steadfastness despite facing a powerful Allied opponent. Yet perhaps inevitably, what came with these admirable military qualities was a brutality that manifested itself particularly in the murder of many Allied prisoners of war. Given their years of ideological training and the powerful influence exerted on them by their ruthless veteran officers, it is not surprising that some of these teenagers displayed a fanatical commitment to the Nazi cause which sometimes included the spontaneous killing of their captives. Most of the murders, however, were instigated by a small number of brutalised former Leibstandarte officers. Indeed, despite all the degenerate influences that had surrounded them for so long, many Hitlerjugend soldiers nevertheless regularly took enemy prisoners and treated them correctly. Whether this was motivated by naked selfinterest, in the sense of avoiding enemy reprisals, or because these boy soldiers had not been entirely transformed into murderous Nazi fanatics, remains a moot point. Whatever the truth of this last issue, it remains clear that many of the teenage personnel fielded by the singular German formation that was the Hitlerjugend 97

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division fulfilled Fritz Witt’s chilling demand that they lived – and in many cases died – ‘according to the fundamentals of the SS’ as ‘fanatic warrior[s]’.78

Notes 1 Luther, 1987, 12, 26; Meyer, 1982, Vol. I, 11. 2 On 6 June 1944 the division remained short of 144 officers and 2,192 NCOs, but this was compensated for by a surplus of 2,300 other ranks deployed in additional, non-establishment, sub-units. This left the division with 20,540 personnel against an authorised strength of 20,516. The division that joined combat on 7 June, however, was only 17,000 strong, as some personnel remained either in uncommitted sub-units that had not completed their training or in the replacement battalion at Arnhem; Meyer, 1982, I, 17. 3 On D-Day, 14 of the 16 most senior Hitlerjugend commanders had previously served in the Leibstandarte; Public Record Office, Kew, (henceforth PRO), War Office (WO) files, 235/597, Record of the Proceedings (Revised) of the Trial by Canadian Military Court of SS Brigadeführer Kurt Meyer held at Aurich, Germany, 10–28 December 1945, Volume II (Part 1), 617, Meyer’s Answer 2844. From spring 1944, the Hitlerjugend and the Leibstandarte served together in the new I-SS Panzer Corps; Luther, 1987, 60. 4 In 1933, Hitler said ‘I begin with the young. We older ones . . . are bearing the burden of a humiliating past. But my magnificent youngsters! With them, I can make a new world’; Lewis, 2000, 7–8. 5 Luther, 1987, 13. 6 Lewis, 2000, 47–52. 7 From March 1942 onwards, the Hitler Youth established 226 Military Instruction Camps in which its members underwent basic military training; Koch, 2000, 236, 238–9. 8 Krätschmer, 1982, 117; Yerger, 1999, 330–9; von Preradovich, 1985, 214. 9 PRO, WO235/597, Meyer Trial, Vol. II (Pt. 1), 627, Meyer’s Answer 2896. 10 Luther, 1987, 78. 11 Knight’s Cross recipients, SS-Unterscharführer (Corporals) Emil Dürr and Fritz Eckstein, for example, were respectively 23 and 21 years old on D-Day; Krätschmer, 1982, 734, 748. 12 Luther, 1987, 63, n19, citing T-354/154/3797992-3, Witt Kdr. Tgb. Nr 237/44, Sonderbefehl 12 April 1944. For Krause, see Meyer, 1982, I, 29, n6, Report by Karl Friedrich Hahn to author, 23 January 1969. 13 Luther, 1987, 73. 14 Meyer, 1994, 33. Another famous instance of Meyer’s leadership occurred at 1130 hours on 8 August 1944, during the II Canadian Corps’ ‘Totalize’ offensive. After encountering German infantry streaming south in disarray down the Caen–Falaise road, Meyer stood alone but resolute on the road, brandishing a carbine, and through this display of inspirational leadership rallied these stragglers to form new defensive positions around Cintheaux; PRO, CAB 106/1047, British Army of the Rhine Battlefield Tour of ‘Totalize’, 1946, 101, Account by Brigadeführer Kurt Meyer; Meyer, 1994, 157–8. 15 Ibid., 73–4, n. 33. 16 Luther, 1987, 64, n. 22, citing BA-MA, Zustandbericht 12SS PzD, 3 April 1944. 17 The division’s mortar and anti-tank battalions had received their equipment so late that they were not combat-ready by D-Day, and consequently remained uncommitted to the Normandy front-line; Meyer, 1982, I, 26, and II, Appendix 3, Order of Battle, 1 June 1944.

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18 Luther, 1987, 71, n. 27, citing T-354/156/3800397-8, 12 SS PzD Abt IIa, Die weltanschauliche Schulung in der SS-Pz-Div Hitlerjugend, 22 November 1943. 19 Luther, 1987, 72. 20 PRO, WO 235/597, Meyer Trial, Vol. II (Pt. 1), 626, Answer 2887, Meyer’s account of his speech to the 15th Company, SS-Regiment 25, at le Sap, spring 1944. 21 Meyer, 1982, I, 28. 22 Speech by Reichsjugendführer Arthur Axmann, May 1943, cited in Luther, 1987, 33–4, n. 19. As early as 13 February 1943, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had informed Axmann that the division would be of ‘the same value as the Leibstandarte’; Meyer, 1982, I, 11. 23 Hitler’s comments at a military conference, 26 July 1943, cited Luther, 1987, 59, n. 6. 24 PRO, WO235/597, Meyer Trial, Vol. II (Pt. 1), 625, Answer 2866, Meyer’s le Sap speech, spring 1944. 25 Margolian, 1998, 42–5. 26 Meyer, 1982, I, 82. 27 English, 1991, 209–10. 28 Meyer, 1982, I, 82–4, Verlüstlisten II/12 PzAbt, III/25 PzGr Regt; Margolian, 1998, 42, n. 56. 29 Meyer did not even except himself from this threat, PRO, WO 235/597, Meyer Trial, Vol. II (I), 626, Answer 2886, Meyer’s le Sap speech, spring 1944; Meyer, 1982, I, 81. 30 Luther, 1987, 157, n. 23, citing Questionnaire by George Lacouvee; Margolian, 1998, 75–9. 31 Meyer, 1982, I, 50, n. 15. 32 Stacey, 1960, 135–6. 33 Lucas and Barker, 1978, 121–4; Carell, 1962, 268. 34 Meyer, 1982, I, 101–4, n. 43, Report to Author by Reinhold Fuss, 9 March 1980. 35 Ellis, 1962, 278; St Manvieu was defended with ‘great determination’, see PRO, WO171/466, War Diary, 15th (Scottish) Division, June 1944. 36 Meyer, 1982, I, 106–12; PRO, WO171/466, War Diary, 15th (Scottish) Division, June 1944. 37 Meyer, 1994, 138. 38 Meyer, 1982, I, 183, n. 10, Report to Author by Ernst Behrens, 6 January 1972. 39 Meyer, 1982, I, 229, n. 7. 40 Krätschmer, 1982, 748–9; Carell, 1962, 215. 41 The entire Waffen-SS only received 465 such decorations; Krätschmer, 1982, 728–9, 731–4, 748–9, 812, 818, 853, 1003. 42 Hastings, 1981, 182–201; Sydnor, 1977, 106–9, 295. 43 Margolian, 1998, passim. 44 PRO, WO 219/5048, War Crimes: Report of the Court of Inquiry re. Shooting of Allied Prisoners of War in the Vicinity of le Mesnil-Patry, les Saullets, Buron and Authie, 7–11 June 1944, 206–13, Exhibit 34, Testimony of LCpl Mackay, 208; Margolian, 1998, 58–9. 45 PRO, WO 219/5048, War Crimes Report, 103, and Exhibit 3E, Deposition of Maurice Guilbert; Margolian, 1998, 59–61, 112–13; Sayer and Botting, 1989, 157. 46 Margolian, 1998, passim. 6 June 1944 is the reference point for all ranks and ages listed in this chapter. 47 Sayer and Botting, 1989, 163–5. 48 The second group included a stretcher bearer with a Red Cross armband; Margolian, 1998, 82–5. 49 PRO, WO235/596, Meyer Trial, Vol. I (II), Answer 1378. 50 PRO, WO219/5048, Authie War Crimes Report, 206–13, Exhibit 34, Testimony of LCpl Mackay, 208.

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51 52 53 54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

77 78

Luther, 1987, 57–8. Margolian, 1998, 61–2, 86–7, 114–15. Ibid., 112–14. PRO, WO235/597, Meyer Trial, Vol. II (I), 626, Meyer’s Answer, 2866. PRO, WO 235/596, Meyer Trial, Vol. I (II), 297–306, Answer 1378. PRO, WO235/597, Meyer Trial, Vol. II (I), 520, Answer 260. This belief was also widespread in the Wehrmacht. On 15 August, for example, Canadian soldiers in Sassy ordered two young German prisoners to dig graves for the bloated bovine corpses that littered the village. Believing that the Canadians were making them dig their own graves prior to being executed, the German prisoners began to cry and refused to move; PRO, WO179/2947, War Diary, North Shore Regiment, 1944. Such rumours have received some anecdotal support in that an unidentified Allied able seaman, for example, claimed that on D-Day Canadian troops murdered six German prisoners; Foster, 1986, 302, n. 6. Meyer, 1982, I 96–7; Margolian, 1998, 95, 99–100; Foster, 1986, 353, n. 22. PRO, WO235/570, Case 352: the le Mesnil-Patry Case, Siebken Petition; Ritgen, 1979, 109. Ritgen called into question the accuracy of parts of the allegation, because the allegedly murdered Zeissler subsequently received a mention in dispatches. Yet Hitlerjugend personnel had killed 115 prisoners prior to their knowledge of the alleged Clary massacre; Margolian, 1998, 58–96 passim; Foster, 1986, 323. Meyer, 1982, I, 353, n. 17, Report by Wünsche to author, 22 January 1980. PRO, WO179/2694, War Diary, GS Branch, HQ II Canadian Corps, August 1944, Intelligence Summaries 28–32, 8–12 August 1944. PRO, WO179/2969, War Diary, 1st Canadian Scottish, 1944. PRO, WO235/598, Meyer Trial, Vol. II (II), 856. PRO, WO205/596, Meyer Trial, Vol. I (II), 297, Jesionek’s Answers 1344–7. Corroborating evidence included WO235/597, Meyer Trial, Vol. II (I), Alfred Helzel’s Answers 268–9; WO235/595 Meyer Trial, Vol. 1 (I), 38, Torbanisch Affidavit. PRO, WO205/598, Meyer Trial, Vol. II (II), Verdict, 822. Sayer and Botting, 1989, 168–9. PRO, WO235/796, Deputy Judge Advocate-General File: The Trial of Siebken, Schnabel, Albers and Bundschuh, 28 August–9 November 1948, passim. The ‘shooters’ Bundschuh and Albers were acquitted. PRO, WO235/597, Meyer Trial, Vol. II (I), 509, 520. Ibid., 520. Meyer, 1982, II, 560. On 10 June 1944 at Oradour-sur-Glane, 562 unarmed civilians died in a ‘reprisal’ action mounted by Das Reich soldiers; Hastings, 1981, 182–201. Margolian, 1998, x. The Allies readily identified the deaths that took place at the various Hitlerjugend unit headquarters during 7–9 June as atrocities because it was known that no combat had taken place in these areas around the known time of death. Margolian, 1998, 119. Concerning the Meyer Trial, over which he presided, Maj.-Gen. Harry Foster later commented that ‘not one of us sitting on the bench could claim clean hands in the matter of war crimes’ and that ‘our troops did some pretty awful things to the Germans’; Foster, 1986, xxii, 334–5. See the Pelzmann incident, Meyer, 1982, I, 183, n. 10. Luther, 1987, 71, n. 27.

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7 FANATICISM AND GUERRILLA WARFARE IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY Christopher C. Harmon

While ‘fanaticism’ may seem an elusive term, some steps toward a characterisation are possible. It involves great energy, single-minded direction and a lack of any restraint or moderation. It is characterised by extremes of effort and fervour of intensity. It can be physical, mental or spiritual. Many kinds of personal fanaticism are harmless to a society, such as an obsession for a hobby that outgrows all bounds and comes to twist one’s personality. Some sorts of fanaticism may appear proximate to virtue: the religious fervour of an ascetic or a spiritual teacher may seem odd to contemporaries yet venerable in the eyes of later ages. For a political or social leader, there may be an evident obsession with an eccentric vision of national destiny that defines the whole adult life. Another example of such fanaticism could be professional: irrationally fierce commitment to ‘quality’ by someone overseeing an industry’s production. By themselves, none of these demand outside political regulation, and none should cause war. On the other hand, fanaticism in war is not only dangerous but difficult to define because war involves the most extreme efforts and emotions. Veterans know as well as Carl von Clausewitz that war brings forth primal hatreds, driving men to extremes, making fanaticism difficult to separate from the war itself. The fact that the use of logic and calculation can even enhance the power, influence and technique of the fanatic – consider what a ‘liberal’ education abroad did for several senior leaders of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge movement – further complicates our understanding of fanaticism.1 Certainly, no one should be astonished by fanaticism. It is a recurring theme of conflict in the modern era and one that cannot be dismissed as entirely abnormal, or wholly without any moralistic vision, or proof of insanity. But if the line between the legitimate uses of force versus violent fanaticism is, at times, unclear, it is also true that the two can be separated. Moreover, the separation between what is acceptable and what is unacceptable is worth striving to maintain, not least because it helps to contain the widespread damage that war does.2 History may be full of wars, but it is also replete with examples of martial 101

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restraint, wars avoided, treaties honoured, certain weapons disdained, quarter given when sought, atrocities avoided and war crimes punished. Thus, while fanaticism often accompanies war, it is not the human norm. In a very real sense, to deny the need for study and definition of ‘fanaticism in war’ would be to abandon nearly all distinctions surrounding violence and its participants. This lapse would have many ill-effects, including dragging legitimate self-defence down into the sump of savagery, leaving the earnest citizen soldier on a practical and moral par with the most heartless terrorist. The purpose of this chapter is to look at the association between fanaticism and guerrilla struggles in the late twentieth century, taking certain case studies to help us understand fanaticism in the contemporary era. It is common for today’s successful guerrilla groups to have Internet web sites, and this is true of the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka. An item from Tamil Eelam News appearing on the Internet (in Tamil) on 13 April 1996 detailed the following attack by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) on Colombo’s sea port: Three rapid attack craft and three supply ships belonging to the Sri Lankan Navy were damaged in this historic offensive launched by the Black Sea Tigers at 0130 yesterday morning. Nine Black Sea Tigers, including two women . . . embraced martyrdom from the LTTE side while carrying out this successful surprise attack. . . . This attack was a joint operation of the Black Sea Tigers, the Sulojan diving squad, and the Ankayarkanni diving squad of the Black Sea Tigers. Swimming underwater the Black Sea Tiger frogmen attached bombs to the ships and blasted them at 0130 in the morning. At the same time, a speedboat of the Black Sea Tigers entered the port swiftly and attacked the buildings in the port complex with rocketpropelled grenades. . . . At that time, there was fierce fighting between the Black Sea Tigers and Sri Lankan naval forces inside the harbor area. . . . [The report named the Tamil participants, including those who ‘embraced martyrdom,’ saying all had marched into the citadel of the enemy for the sake of the liberation of Tamil Eelam]. . . . The fact that the Sea Tigers can penetrate the enemy’s security zone with weapons in groups and launch offensives has frightened the Sri Lankan authorities. A correspondent from Colombo reports that the nightmares of Sri Lankan authorities have come true.3 Undeniably, there is courage in this assault on armed naval vessels during an ongoing low-intensity war. It offers examples of military skill and careful planning that its perpetrators can see as a success. For many, such a martial attack also evades critics who might dismiss LTTE as rank terrorists. Terrorism is the deliberate abuse of the innocent for political ends, frequently outside a mutually acknowledged state of war.4 While the Tamil Tigers understand and use terrorism, they have also for almost two decades carried out highly successful guerrilla attacks against the soldiers of the government of Sri Lanka. Seen thus, the April 1996 naval attack is 102

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part of an ongoing campaign for a Tamil homeland ruled by LTTE. It fulfils a politico-military strategy and accompanies other strategies: propaganda, systematic world-wide fund raising, terrorist bombings in public areas of Sri Lanka, the organisation of shadow governments in so-called liberated zones, and, recently, peace talks with the Sri Lankan state.5 The fanaticism of the LTTE Black Sea Tiger suicides is neither unfathomable nor insane and many would say that they have shown phenomenal dedication in the service of an identified political end. It is true that their objective, or end-state, is dictatorial, and that such Marxism-Leninism has largely been an inhumane failure where tried in the past, but there is a Tamil Tiger end-state, and it is comprehensible.6 Others – modern guerrilla groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, Fatah in Palestine/Israel, Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) in Peru, the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland and the LTTE – have enjoyed partial success by mixing the violent and fanatical with cool calculation and strategies to achieve their political ends. So what makes guerrilla groups fanatical? The following characteristics are not unusual or unique to guerrilla organisations but they are manifestations of fanaticism and, taken together, they help us understand the role played by fanaticism in many late twentieth-century guerrilla wars. First, there is the role played by suicide attacks. Through the 1970s, observers imagined that military suicide attacks had ended with the Japanese kamikaze pilots of the Second World War. But the method was revived for low-intensity conflict by Muslim militants when they assaulted the US Marine Corps barracks in Beirut and the USS Cole in port in Yemen. Meanwhile, in Sri Lanka, as noted above, suicide attacks against military forces have for years been a feature of land and sea forces of the LTTE. In April 1995, the year before the incident related above, four combat swimmers entered Trincomalee Harbour and blew themselves up against naval vessels, killing 12 sailors.7 This was not an isolated incident: the LTTE attacked ports on both sides of the Palk Strait that separates India from Sri Lanka. There was also a concern about aerial suicide attacks by guerrillas or terrorists, reflected in a Canadian report of May 2000 on the LTTE, that detailed the group’s training with small aircraft, including gliders.8 This fear of airborne attacks was also prevalent in the Middle East where radical organisations had been training with small aircraft and hang-gliders, largely for use against Israel. Among the most adept of these radical groups was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC), run by a former army captain from Syria’s armed forces, Ahmed Jibril.9 Another often forgotten series of unconventional suicide attacks on military personnel has come from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Before it renamed itself in 2002, the PKK carried out several suicide bombings, including one attack using an apparently pregnant woman who, during a Turkish military parade, stepped out into the passing column of soldiers. When she died, so did nine Turks, and 20 more were wounded.10 These cases are reminders that suicide bombings are not patented by Hamas or Islamic Jihad, the groups most famously associated with suicide assaults. 103

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Second, there is the question of the methods of killing used by certain groups. The way in which a murder or deliberate maiming11 occurs can be another manifestation of fanaticism. Whereas international and traditional laws of war bar inflicting ‘unnecessary’ suffering or use of ‘treacherous’ means of taking down a military opponent, the irregular nature of guerrilla war and armed strife in the service of revolution encourages ruthless means designed to frighten others. A classic example of this phenomenon came with the Algerian war for independence in the late 1950s. Opening the conflict in November 1954, most Algerian insurgents in the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) and the Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN) fighting against France avoided attacks on civilians, preferring police or military targets. However, the insurgents soon expanded their range to include Europeans and Algerian civilians opposed to FLN control of the nationalist movement. The preferred method was execution with ‘the big smile’ or ‘Kabyle smile,’ a deep cutting of the throat from ear to ear.12 This vicious trademark of the FLN returned in the ugly fighting of the 1990s between the Algerian government and Islamist radicals. Similarly, the Sendero Luminoso guerrillas in Peru expressed their own fanaticism with the machete. The choice made for an especially painful and slow death and one designed to reach a wider audience; an exemplary dismemberment evoking humanity’s deepest fears. Sometimes a Sendero victim was killed with multiple stab wounds, by a large group, all of whom took turns inflicting the cuts. Not only is the death horrible but all the participants in this grisly act are psychologically bound together. Sendero’s once powerful leader, Abimael Guzman Reynoso, offers a different explanation. He claims to lead ‘the most economical people’s war on earth’13 and discourages cadre from wasting bullets. Thus he might say that economy, not savagery, explains the profligate use of the machete in his revolution.14 Third, there is the use of children. The systematised employment of young people in modern guerrilla war is a notable characteristic of modern fanaticism. ‘Blooding’ young recruits to the Khmer Rouge sometimes occurred in gatherings in which the children were directed to pursue some unchallenging animal, such as a chicken, and tear it to pieces with their bare hands. Today, children have been brought into the fighting on most continents and the United Nations estimates that some 300,000 children are active combatants in regular and irregular armies around the world.15 Children are completing military training in Pakistani madrassas religious schools in disturbingly high numbers; they are drafted or kidnapped into Central and South American wars; certain girls have been made sex slaves for the male guerrilla fighters with the Islamist Abu Sayyaf group fighting on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. One expert on child warriors finds their use ‘endemic’ in Abu Sayyaf and certain other groups; while in Colombia, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) has in place a well-considered system for educating, shaping and using the thousands of Colombian children under its control.16 When a Sri Lankan army offensive recaptured the Tamil capital of Jaffna in late 1995, the battered LTTE sought to compensate by bringing youngsters into its 104

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guerrilla army. A rebel leader, Thamil Chelvam, coldly told the Sunday Observer: ‘The only way we could stop the military offensive is by increasing our strength, and this is possible only if all those who are above 14 join us.’17 Soon the LTTE Tigers introduced special units of ‘Tiger Cubs’. The children could be used on deception operations, to carry out a surprise attack or to weigh on the conscience of adults in Sri Lankan forces fighting against them.18 They were often sent into frontal attacks and seemed to go as willingly as the countless young Iranians who made First World War-style assaults against entrenched Iraqi positions in the 1980s. The cries of these children when shot were morally excruciating for the trained Sri Lankan adult soldiers arrayed against them in the fighting. This offers a classic example of evil trying to transfer moral guilt from itself to the victims and the citizen-audience, a commonplace method of theatrical terrorism. The Sri Lankan government discovered LTTE uniforms of a special small size with built-in, internal pockets for explosives that were obviously designed for suicide attacks. Jane’s Intelligence Review closed an article on the large numbers of child warriors with the conclusion that the ‘experiment of motivating children as combatants has been a highly successful one. The LTTE has been able to enhance its performance in battle by deploying child units. Therefore it is likely that other contemporary groups will now emulate the success of LTTE.’19 While it is difficult to know what moves guerrillas to the kinds of excesses adumbrated above, there is enough first-person testimony, and analysis and description by others, to aid considerations. An admiration of the personality of guerrilla leaders helps explain the strength and the violence of many guerrilla organisations. Few critics doubt the immense charisma which both Fidel Castro and Che Guevara have had on those around them and few question the fact that their personalities drew in thousands of ordinary Cubans in the late 1950s. By contrast, it may be the relative personal weaknesses of Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega which explain why, when communist bloc support was withdrawn after 1989, his ruling Sandinista Party pitched into decline. The central role of a superior leader is evident in both the rise of powerful guerrilla groups and their fall: when Abimael Guzman and the Kurdish leader Abdulla Ocalan were taken to prison, their very different guerrilla organisations declined rapidly into near-irrelevance.20 An intellectual love of action is another prime factor underpinning fanatical behaviour. Abimael Guzman of Sendero Luminoso is not alone in having a bookish engagement with revolutionary activity. Guzman and his ilk are often moved to action by the arguments they read, such as the published exhortations by thinkers and publicists such as Vladimir Lenin, or the Existentialist and Marxist Jean Paul Sartre who published essays in direct support of Franz Fanon and certain European terrorist groups. It would seem that some of the answer lies in psychology: for the bookish as well as the bold, there is always something to be found in the excitement of action. A professional criminal, or a sports car driver, or a guerrilla revolutionary is often drawn to a need for action. Fanatical attraction to activity at the expense of thought can have great appeal to persons of certain types, including the nihilistic, the immature and the young. 105

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Below the level of senior leadership the rank-and-file guerrilla is typically a much younger person. The JVP (Janata Vimukthi Peramuna) – once an important Sri Lankan terror organisation – found that a ‘particularly fertile group for recruitment proved to be rural youth’. Three-quarters of those detained by the authorities combating a JVP terror campaign in 1971 campaign were aged from 16 to 25.21 Older people are typically attracted to stability more than drama and action. Guerrilla armies are well aware of such simple psychology and the part this plays with their younger recruits. This is the same reason why regular armies prefer young men: young enough to lust for action, yet are mature enough to have a modicum of judgement, but not so much that it undercuts boldness. The strategy and the spirit of Che Guevara’s ‘focoism’ were in action – roving military and political groups, in ceaseless action, stirring the pot of revolution. Indeed, excessive action, at the expense of sound political work, is a leading reason for the repeated failure of focoism outside Cuba. ‘Action’ is also a word figuring prominently in the titles of terrorist groups – a fact that one should not ignore. The early theoretician of Latin American undergrounds, Carlos Marighella, was a leader of Brazil’s National Liberating Action. This focus on action repeats itself in European guerrilla groups: ‘Direct Action’ in France, in Italy the ‘Revolutionary Action Movement’ and the ‘Partisan Action Groups’, and in Corsica both the ‘Corsican Revolutionary Action’ and ‘Action for the Rebirth of Corsica’. Revenge is another important motor for extreme behaviour. Female guerrillas or suicide bombers have been recruited after being victims of rape by government forces. With political coaching, the desire for revenge of a female rape victim can be used to devastating effect. Indian investigators reported that the young Tamil woman ‘Dhanu’ who bent down in apparent homage before the Indian leader Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 and then detonated explosive charges strapped to her body had been raped by Indian soldiers during India’s intervention in Sri Lanka.22 The Sinhalese JVP, for its part, had a strong spirit of revenge over special privileges that Tamils were reported to have enjoyed under British rule. As British rule came to an end, some majority Sinhalese and Buddhists believed that their time had come. They took to the streets and the JVP nearly brought the island state to its knees.23 Revenge has many other sources: from governmental abuse, to corruption or neglect, to a sense of rank injustice.24 Hatred of foreign occupation is a continuing source of fanaticism in war. Clausewitz, observing Russians and Spaniards under Napoleonic rule, described ‘a people in arms’ (partisans) for whom the unifying element was passionate indignation. War elicits deep-seated hatreds and this is especially true with invasions by foreign soldiers. Indeed, as Clausewitz noted, the partisans’ passion against the French was a peculiar strength. Similarly, the military occupation of areas as diverse as Northern Ireland, the Palestinian territories and Chechnya is a primary cause explaining why many join irregular guerrilla units, and why they show such stamina (and often a willingness to become ‘martyrs’) in the face of overwhelming odds. A hunger for power among competing guerrilla groups also provides a key 106

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explanation for fanaticism in low-intensity conflicts. One could say much for political changes desired by various Tamil groups of the 1970s and 1980s, for example, but what does one say of the Tamil Tigers’ murders and attempted murders of moderate Tamil politicians or competing Tamil radicals? Outside Sri Lanka, few know of the miniscule People’s Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE) – in part because long ago the LTTE made strong efforts literally to drive it into the ground. These two groups’ leaders were once arrested for trading shots at each other in the street. Another small Marxist group, the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation, was outfought in spring 1986 battles in Jaffna that left several hundred TELO fighters dead; some who surrendered were burnt alive by the Tigers.25 Of the many possible causes for the fanaticism of some guerrillas, two of the most important are rooted in logic, or at least calculation: strategic decision-making and ideology. These are connected and vital for understanding fanatical behaviour because both help to determine the actions of guerrilla forces. First there is the issue of choice. The British historian, Alistair Horne, identifies the meeting at which the Algerian FLN made its important decision to make widespread terror a tool of strategy.26 The FLN’s guerrilla war against the French began in 1954 but the decision to institute a terror campaign came some two years later when the FLN’s political and military leadership gathered in the mountains of Soummam. For three weeks they debated a number of issues, including the question of the use of terror attacks. They decided upon a strategy of deliberate murders of innocent civilians. This was a calculated decision: the man most responsible for arranging the conference, Ramdane Abane, believed that ‘One corpse in a [dinner] jacket is always worth more than twenty in uniform.’ This decision opened the door to the synchronised terror attacks in the capital, Algiers, that started a few weeks later and which are well-depicted in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1965 film La Battaglia di Algeri.27 In the Middle East, another example of rational strategic decision-making leading to terror is Yasser Arafat’s use of small guerrilla groups that are linked to his mainstream Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). For Arafat, these groups supplement the PLO’s work and while he denied any connection to the ‘Black September’ organisation – responsible for the attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972 – one of its members was his brother-in-law, Hasan Salamah, while the leader of the Munich operation, Abu Daoud, flatly recommended its success in nationalist terms by saying that ‘Munich put the Palestinian cause inside every house’. Other groups associated with Arafat include Force 17, begun as his personal security service but which then branched out into terrorism and commando operations. Rational calculation was also behind the actions of the Palestinian al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, formed in late 2000 following Ariel Sharon’s much-publicised walk to al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. A Council on Foreign Relations paper states: ‘While the group initially vowed to target only Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, in early 2002 it began a spree of terrorist attacks against civilians in Israeli cities.’28 The move to suicide attacks 107

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was a strategic choice. It came at a time when Arafat’s position in the polls was slipping badly because he was being outflanked by more radical Palestinian groups. Thus, al-Aqsa leaders, who swear loyalty to Mr Arafat, and are on the payrolls of Arafat’s Palestine National Authority, were a useful adjunct to Arafat’s mainstream politics.29 This was a choice of the sort that guerrilla leaders often make. A second rational and rationalising factor in most guerrilla groups, and something vital for understanding the fanaticism of many guerrilla groups, is ideology. Ideology is a powerful tool and what many guerrillas say and write underscores an ideological commitment. It is the view here that rather than beginning from the assumption that ideology is a mere screen for other motives, or an excuse for self-interest, it is wiser to take the gunman’s words seriously. When a guerrilla announces his/her views in public these should be closely examined. For an organisation to grow and become a serious movement it must elaborate its views. These views may be limited to the desire for certain changes. For instance, the policy objectives of the Zapatistas in Mexico suggest limited means, as well as ends. More often, guerrilla groups have ‘unlimited war’ objectives and a desire to replace the central government and take power themselves. They elaborate their view of the world, either by wholesale adaptation from ideological predecessors, or by an original synthesis of their own. Ho Chi Minh was ideological, though not a very original theoriser, compared with his models, Lenin and Mao Zedong, both of whom were strikingly original thinkers. Meanwhile, Abimael Guzman is a fierce and serious thinker, and Sendero was his creation, ideologically and practically. He taught and politicised young schoolteachers, who themselves taught tens of thousands of Indians and peasants in Peru. A majority of the guerrilla groups that succeeded in the post-1945 era have been overtly ideological with nationalism, communism, or some mix of the two, being in the forefront of their struggle. Nationalism remains a standard ideological strand in guerrilla groups, while Maoist communism also enjoys some successes today (as in Nepal). The ideology most in the news today, militant Islam, accounts for important guerrilla actions and, of course, for that most multinational of terror groups, al-Qa‘ida. Among guerrilla groups, the LTTE and Peru’s Shining Path merit special mention. The two movements have as many differences as similarities. Differences begin with culture and geography. The Tamil group is a national-separatist group, while Sendero would take power over an entire country and state. LTTE has flourished while Shining Path shrank dramatically after 1992, only recently showing glimmers of revival. But there are also similarities. Sendero is best known for terrorism but has also been adept at guerrilla war, if not quite as adept as LTTE. Both groups’ cadre show remarkable dedication and deep indoctrination; both organisations represent extreme forms of communism and enunciate ‘unlimited’ objectives which easily and naturally lead into fanatical behaviour. Sendero Luminoso provides an interesting case study of guerrilla warfare and fanaticism, suggesting that in certain cases fanaticism is a direct consequence of extreme ideology manipulated by mercurial and tyrannical guerrilla leaders. When 108

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it began operations in 1980, the clandestinely and broadly organised insurgency had its roots in the rural poverty of Peru where the government presence was weak. In this period, Peru was one of the few recognised states in the world wherein calorific intake for large numbers of people was in decline, by one quarter in some poorer areas. Cynthia McClintock, who did much of the best early work in the US on the insurgency, explains the rise of the revolutionaries by reference first of all to ‘absolute economic decline and a real threat to subsistence’.30 This was not helped by the Peruvian government’s uninterest in rural matters. During the cycle of civilian and military governments that directed affairs in Peru in the two decades leading up to 1980, there was considerable talk of agricultural reform. But action was notable only in some areas and in the poorest highland regions the government effected almost no improvement. As a result, citizens’ views in these areas began to change as they became more indignant and often hostile to central authorities. Unsatisfied peasants soon turned to supporting agricultural or political parties with radical programmes. While electoral support for Marxist parties had been almost non-existent in the early 1960s in the southern highlands, in the 1978 elections almost forty per cent in some southern departments voted Marxist.31 If the Peruvian government had no answers, Abimael Guzman Reynoso did. He is unquestionably a fanatic and the main elements of that fanaticism are now well visible. One feature is his charisma – a feature of many great leaders, not just fanatics. He was a mesmerising and popular teacher, followed devotedly by women and men alike. A Marxist at the university where he taught observed that his lectures were boring when read but chillingly charismatic when delivered orally. This colleague, who later became a congressman, observed that Guzman ‘was a fanatic who had the power to fanaticize others’.32 Guzman was also a brilliant organiser. Recruiting began with patience and proceeded with skill, meaning that there would be few defections until after the leader was captured. Indoctrination was extremely intense and the self-criticism sessions – to which all were subjected except the supreme leader – were exhausting and merciless. The combination produced fanatics, not mere followers. Organisational cell structures, so common in post-Second World War guerrilla organisations, limited counter-intelligence problems, as did ideological faith within the movement. It helped that the governmental response against Sendero was initially feeble. At first, national authorities dismissed a true movement and organisation as mere banditry – one of the oldest mistakes in counter-insurgency. In fact, a protracted organisational and preparation phase involved remarkably little violence. After years of this, guerrilla actions escalated to violence to which the government responded with military measures and some economic reforms, all done with insufficient intelligence on the insurgency. Not until about 1991, when the Peruvian secret service Dincote was thoroughly focused on insurgents, were real results forthcoming. The seizure of Guzman, when it came in September 1992, was the result of patient police work in intelligence on the home ground of Lima’s suburbs.33 Guzman embodied strong fanatical ideas, well-embedded in Maoism, and a devout apostle of the Chinese leader. He made two trips to China just before and 109

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during the Cultural Revolution in 1965 and 1969. Unlike Mao Zedong, Guzman had the advantage of a formal education, including two doctorates in philosophy and law. Perhaps only such an intellectual could successfully preach so foreign a doctrine in the jungles of Peru, where Indians and peasants knew nothing about China, let alone such actors in Guzman’s intellectual drama as ‘the Guomindang’ or ‘rightist deviationists’ such as Deng Xiaoping. Slogans about these and other related things were actually daubed in red on walls in Peru. But Guzman’s deep understanding of Maoism, and his knowledge of how it had bridged theory to practice, led him to overcome formidable challenges. His commitment to the cause, displayed with intensity and learning, made a wholly foreign doctrine palatable to uninitiated Peruvians. In a 12-hour interview with his own party paper published in July 1988, Guzman discussed his essential ideas.34 Nearly inconceivable to much of mainstream Western social science, they were, however, consistent with his thought and help explain his success story to that point – a point at which one-third of the country of Peru had come under the control of his guerrillas. The self-titled ‘Chairman’ praised ‘red power’ and spoke of the ‘New Power’ sweeping Peru. He said that ‘the ideology of the proletariat’ is ‘the great creation of Marx’ and is ‘the highest world outlook that has ever been or ever will be seen on Earth’. When he mentioned Stalin, it was with approval. He said that ‘our Party serves the revolution [and] our class [and] the international proletariat . . . the world revolution’, about which his organisation was ‘fervent’. He stated that Marx, Lenin and Mao all taught that violence is an iron law of history, to which there were no exceptions. He also quoted the early twentieth-century Peruvian Socialist Party chief, Jose Carlos Mariategui, to the effect that revolution is ‘bloody’ and ‘Power is seized through violence and is defended with dictatorship.’ He proclaimed himself to be the newest phase of Communist thought – now said to run from Marx through Lenin to Mao Zedong and directly to himself, Chairman Gonzalo. He depicted Marxism as absolute truth which must be applied to the concrete conditions of Peru, which was his historical role. Guzman’s fundamental and fanatical political ideas were communicated with striking success to his Peruvian followers. Shining Path’s fanaticism also showed itself in the strong propensity for violence against other Peruvians, especially poor indigenous Indians, and while foreign enemies existed, they were not the usual targets of Sendero. The insurgency always emphasised terrorism, including indiscriminate attacks to shock the polity, wellaimed attacks to kill individuals and mass attacks upon communities that formed militias or otherwise dared to exclude the Shining Path. In such a socio-political struggle, Guzman ignored any international law of war or ideas of parties hors de combat. Children were also to be mobilised. According to a 1988 Sendero document entitled ‘The PCP Calls on the Masses to Struggle for Power’, children ‘must be encouraged to participate in the popular war. . . . They are the future [and] must change their ideology and adopt that of the proletariat.’ A RAND Corporation analyst noted that Sendero worked hard at propagandising children in its liberated zones and in re-educating ‘orphans of the revolution’, adding that it was ‘not 110

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unusual for individuals in their early teens to be found participating as junior partners in armed operations against government forces’.35 A Canadian Franciscan, Friar Mariano Gagnon, missionary to the Ashaninka Indians east of Lima, wrote in his memoir that ‘One of Sendero’s tactics was to place children in the vanguard of an attacking force.’ As village defence militias would often have booby-trapped approaches in times of danger, this meant that ‘if the terrorists encountered a booby trap, they would not lose soldiers’. Gagnon described an assault on 14 August 1990 by Maoist Sendero Luminoso guerrillas against the Indian village of Tzibokiroato. Townspeople saw Ashaninka and Quechua children and women moving towards them – these were a screen behind which came 30 Sendero guerrilla veterans. After the assault succeeded, the children and women took part in the plunder of the Indian camp.36 While Sendero has on more than one occasion used villagers as an unwilling military force, Guzman’s only public words on the matter are for condemning Peru’s armed forces for supposedly doing so themselves, putting ‘the masses’ in the forefront of infantry attacks and ‘using them as shields’.37 To political fanatics, adults who are apolitical are nearly valueless individuals. They should be co-opted; if that is impossible, they may be killed. In Sendero’s eyes, the apolitical are a standing reproof to the required polarisation of society. There must be deepening divisions between the progressive revolutionaries and their reactionary enemies, and the polarisation of all is a necessary stage of struggle. Apolitical persons are deemed lost souls, missing out on the great human dramas of their own day. Terrorists and their apologists, from the old Left’s Herbert Marcuse to the new racist Right of William Pierce have depicted apolitical citizens as stupid and bovine. Moderates may try to distinguish peace from intervals of war; for fanatics, there is no peace, there are no non-belligerents and there can be no non-aligned. This extremism is apparent in the treatment of progressive political and social rivals. As with the in-fighting among the revolutionary parties at the time of the Russian Revolution, there is a real relish in saying and printing unrestrained and fierce things about sectarian opponents. This is a language suggesting violence and political hatred that has logic but little prudence and no openness to compromise. A thing is not said expecting a reasoned reply, less a rebuttal; a thing is always said declaratively. Words are stakes, driven into the earth. Abimael Guzman treats most communist opponents with derision, especially Soviets and ageing communist Chinese élites. Although once an admirer of Castro and Che, he came to ridicule the latter. He also had serious differences with the Peruvian communists of Tupac Amaru, depicted by Guzman as fundamentally flawed and part of the revisionist and socio-imperialist movement in the Marxist world. At the same time, democratic politicians, while a different sort of opponent, were dismissed as weak. They were to be ridiculed for their adherence to parliament – ‘parliamentary cretinism’ is one revealing combination of words from Guzman, also used for a former friend who had decided to run for parliament.38 This contempt became visible early on in Guzman’s career, at least as early as his second dissertation in law, in which he openly criticised bourgeois concepts of liberty and 111

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equality, concepts deemed useless to poor people. For Guzman, elections were ‘controlled by the manipulation of electoral law and by the economic forces behind the press and media’.39 Theory matched practice: Senderists never competed for elected seats in government; indeed, what occasioned the first Sendero attacks was the successful reintroduction of democracy in Peru in 1980 after five years of military rule. On other occasions, the same democratic government in Peru would be vilified as evil and powerful. The government even appears as ‘genocidal’ – a phrase that Guzman repeatedly used. Democracy could be ‘the blackest, most rotten of reactionaries’ while also being ‘fascist’.40 The practice of the Sendero movement was irrationally to call ‘fascist’ both the leftist military government of the late 1970s and the soft democratic civilian ones preceding and following it. The least understandable attacks are on those who wanted to help the poor of Peru. Ideologues such as Guzman could not abide ‘reformers’ who worked to improve conditions for people living on the margins of society for this only served to defuse the inevitable that must come before the old political and economic structures would be destroyed. In this context, terror was used as a purposeful shock tactic against targets that had nothing to do with the government. Maria Elena Moyano was a shanty town deputy mayor who had founded an organisation of soup kitchens for the poor. Her aims included getting each child a glass of milk per day. She was a feminist, a leftist and an opponent of Sendero because of its willingness to use force and brutality. In February 1992, Shining Path assassins shot Moyano at close range in front of witnesses, pulled her body into a school playground and then dynamited it. This ferocity was far from unique and Sendero had denounced relief work two years earlier. As Simpson notes, the result was a programme of planned assassinations: four women, four children and a man had been murdered for helping to distribute milk to the young . . . the head of a local Catholic charity and two foreign aid workers died. Four agricultural experts and two peasants working in alpaca husbandry were murdered, together with four Japanese horticulturalists.41 This then culminated in the death of Maria Elena Moyano. It would seem that, for the fanatical ideologue, progress must not undermine the passion for revolt, and no one could be allowed to show that an open society, or capitalism, can address social evils. Sendero arguments attempted to clear the way, morally and politically, for violent action. It may be that circumstances call for precise attacks that avoid innocent deaths; at other times, the circumstances call for mayhem, in order to disorient and frighten the public and prove to the citizen that government is impotent. But the ends justified the means employed, whatever these might be. Asked about terrorism, Guzman replied straightforwardly that while the bomb may 112

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be questionable when flung by an individual in an isolated act, as deployed by a revolutionary authority the bomb ‘is becoming an essential weapon of the people’ and ‘a weapon of combat for our class’.42 Guzman’s ruthlessness reflected a complete lack of conscience and a determination that an allegedly humane end could justify any imaginable means. In practice, up to 1992, this meant the willingness to oversee the murder of thousands of Peruvian civilians and the persecution and torture of many more. An important Sendero propagandist, Luis Arce Borja, published an estimate that one phase alone of the long people’s war, the central ‘strategic equilibrium’ phase, would cost one million lives.43 This helps us understand why massacres by these Maoist fanatics came to be commonplace. Over 60,000 Peruvians are now thought to have died from all causes (government and Senderist) in this insurgency. In theory, guerrilla war may be limited in its objectives, such as securing greater autonomy for an ethnic minority. Moderate states may make reasonable use of guerrilla forces in war. Guerrilla tactics are no proof of fanaticism, let alone inhumanity. But certain modern guerrilla wars at the end of the twentieth century have displayed a savagery that is striking. Their fanaticism was the fusion of many elements, above all ideas, strategic choice and leadership.

Notes 1 This is only partly intended to amuse; see Harmon, 1992, 15–45. 2 If Clausewitz was the theorist who best laid bare the ‘primal hatreds’ and escalatory nature of war, and cautioned readers about false humanitarianism, it was that same veteran and thinker who argued that it is the responsibility of government to decline war where inappropriate, to keep war within the bounds of political purpose, and to abandon it when it ceased to be cost-effective. There are thus several dimensions to Clausewitzean thought on whether war should have limits. 3 Tamil Eelam News, 13 April 1996, as translated and reproduced in Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 10 June 1996, 80. 4 A longer definition, and perhaps the best, is by the Jonathan Institute, 1979: ‘Terrorism is the deliberate and systematic murder, maiming, and menacing of the innocent to inspire fear for political ends.’ Netanyahu, 1986, 9. 5 In late February 2002, LTTE chief Velupillai Prabhakaran signed a cease-fire with the government, and peace talks are to follow. The New York Times, April 9, included an Agence France-Presse photo of this recluse. A further story appeared in the Washington Post, 11 April 2002. 6 As a Tamil pensioner put it, ‘The Tigers have successfully drawn attention to our grievances. Yet at the same time, the remedy they are prescribing is worse than the disease itself.’ Quoted by McGowan, 1992, 324. 7 Washington Post, 14 July 1995. Soon thereafter the Sea Tigers seized a civilian vessel, the Irish Mona, used it as a decoy to attract Sri Lankan naval vessels, and then engaged those in battle; by one account 30 Sea Tigers and 21 Sri Lankan Navy men died; Washington Times, 31 August 1995. For later, more thorough coverage of Sea Tigers, see the two articles in the March 2001 Jane’s Intelligence Review. 8 P. Chalk, ‘Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam’s (LTTE) International Organisation and Operations – A Preliminary Analysis’, a Canadian Security Intelligence Service publication, Commentary No. 77, 17 March 2000, 9 and note 48; www.csis-scrs.gc.ca/ eng/comment/com77_e.html.

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9 Harmon, 2000, 165. 10 New York Times, 3 July 1996; Pinkerton’s Risk Assessment Services, 14, 19 (9 May 1997). 11 Among the groups which can claim that at least some of their targets are military is the Provisional IRA, which has over time evolved elaborate methods of punishment beatings, torture, and calculated crippling. 12 Among other sources is Horne, 1978, 112. 13 Guzman Reynoso, 1991, 49. Other sources indicate that this 12-hour interview occurred on 15 July and was published in the Shining Path newspaper El Diario on 24 July 1988, and then republished repeatedly. 14 Guzman might say it; we need not accept it. Specifically, a machete can instantly kill by beheading, and that does occur, but sometimes the method preferred is slower. 15 The 300,000 figure refers to persons under the age of 18, and derives from a UN Report of the Expert of the Secretary-General on ‘The Impact of Armed Conflict on Children’, 26 August 1996, and supplemental sources referenced by P.W. Singer of The Brookings Institution, 2001–02, manuscript copy distributed by the Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities in a seminar on ‘Child Soldiers – Implications for US Forces’, Quantico, Virginia, 11 June 2002. 16 P.W. Singer, speaking at the aforementioned conference. (It may aid some readers to know that this man is not the Peter Singer who is a controversial ethicist teaching at Princeton University.) 17 Quoted in the Washington Post, 27 November 1995. 18 Opening the conference on ‘Child Soldiers’ (see above) US Marine Corps Brigadier General William Catto took note of the appalling situation a responsible adult soldier finds himself in when approached by an enemy with an automatic weapon who is also a child: ‘There is no Marine, and no soldier, sailor or airman, who wants to kill a 14 year-old.’ Peter Singer added that in Sierra Leone the rogue militia ‘West Side Boys’ enjoyed an initial advantage due to the moral scruples of a Royal Irish Regiment peacekeeping squad they encountered. The squad commander refused to fire on boys with AK-47s, and so they were held hostage by the young Africans for two weeks. The SAS had to liberate the Irish unit. In doing so, they killed 150 of the West Side Boys (while losing one soldier). 19 A superior article on fanaticism and late twentieth-century war, this essay by Rohan Gunaratna appeared in six pages of Jane’s Intelligence Review, July 1998. The sentences quoted appear on p. 37. He and the New York Times’ John Burns have both written that the LTTE’s child warriors wear the cyanide capsule; but Burns reports that many children, though wounded, decline to bite the capsule. 20 Since Guzman’s arrest in September 1992, Sendero’s strength has dropped from some 10,000 members to as few as 200. Since the jailing of Ocalan, PKK has gone quiet, and then announced a change in its name to the Democratic Republic Party; Washington Times, 20 February 2002. 21 Marks, 1996, 182. 22 This incident and others involving female guerrillas and terrorists are discussed in Harmon, 2000, 212–21. 23 Apart from Marks, one may see a dramatic story by S. Coll, ‘Silence in the Killing Zone’, The Washington Post Magazine, 16 January 1994, adapted from his 1994 book On the Grand Trunk Road. Steven Coll became managing editor of the Washington Post. The JVP leader, Rohan Wijeweera, was captured by Sri Lankan security forces and killed in 1989 and his movement disappeared. 24 Stern (1999) believes revenge so important a motive in terrorism that she builds the word into her definition. Abdel Karim Aweis of Fatah and the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade says his motive in one case was revenge; New York Times, 9 May 2002.

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25 Marks, 1996, 228. 26 Horne, 1978, 154. 27 For many years the film has been shown annually to majors at Command and Staff College, Quantico, VA. 28 Courtesy of Lt.-Col. Carl Shelton, USMC, this is a briefing sheet called ‘Terrorism Q and A’ from the CNN website www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2002/cfr/stories/al.aqsa.martyrs/index.html. 29 See the New York Times story on Abdel Karim Aweis, above; he had been with Fatah’s Black Panthers and the General Intelligence branch of the Palestine Authority. 30 C. McClintock, ‘Peru’s Sendero Luminoso Rebellion: Origins and Trajectory’ in Eckstein, 1989, 65. Simon Strong, the British journalist, writes of ‘the grinding poverty, the absence of schools and medical posts, the malnutrition and forty-five year life expectancy’ of the province of Ayacucho, which in Quechua means ‘Corner of the Dead’, 1992, 29. 31 McClintock, 1992, 75. 32 Strong, 1992, 31. 33 A vivid description of the tracking and arrest of Guzman may be found in Simpson, 1993, 107–25. Late in 1992, President Fujimori disbanded the counter terrorism assets of Dincote and apparently refocused intelligence personnel on his own political opposition, which yielded as much disaster as the earlier effort had yielded success. One of many accounts of this is by A. Bolivar, ‘The Return of Shining Path’, E-Notes of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (Philadelphia, PA), 5 April, 2002. But this article title may be too pessimistic; certainly, inadequate evidence is offered for it. 34 The diverse quotations and references in my paragraph are from Guzman Reynoso, 1991. 35 McCormick, 1990, 13. 36 Gagnon, 1993, 275–6. 37 Guzman Reynoso, 1991, 43. 38 Strong, 1992, 40. 39 Ibid., 26. 40 Guzman Reynoso, 1991, 48. 41 Simpson, 1993, 48. 42 Guzman Reynoso, 1991, 33. 43 L.A. Borja, ‘The Prospects of Power in Peru’s People’s War’, Brussels, 24 April 1991, as quoted in La Republica (2 November 1991).

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8 FANATICISM: THE ALGERIAN EXPERIENCE George Joffé

Over the past decade, Algeria has been wracked by intense violence as a result of a crisis which started in October 1988 with massive riots, followed by three years of confused political and economic reforms in a new, formally democratic environment. In December 1991, the situation, however, was irredeemably worsened by the interruption of the legislative electoral process, which was supposed to introduce a multi-party parliament under a new constitution enacted in 1989. This, in turn, was followed by the army-backed coup in January 1992 which laid the ground for what became a virtual civil war in which the most appalling brutalities were committed, ostensibly in the name of Islam, justified by a narrow-minded intolerance and fanaticism, so extreme that the violence itself seemed profoundly irrational. There was, however, a rationale for what occurred, which had its origins in the contested nature of the Algerian state. This kind of apparent fanaticism was no stranger to Algeria, for the country had been conceived in violence, as a result of the French occupation of what was to become Algeria between 1830 and 1848, together with the subsequent annexation of France’s new conquests to metropolitan France and its refusal to relinquish its prize after the Second World War. Independent Algeria was born through an eight-year-long war marked by an intense violence that ended in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Algerians.1 Yet the achievement of independence did not resolve the contradictions within the independence movement created by this war, contradictions which were to replicate themselves after the crisis of December 1991 and January 1992 over the electoral process. Nor has the renewed violence and fanaticism been solely the prerogative of the clandestine opposition during the past decade. Indeed, many observers consider that the Algerian army has been its major instigator, creating terror and alienating the population from the opposition. It is important to bear in mind the causes and pattern of events leading up to and following the October 1988 riots in what was then a one-party state governed by an army-backed regime through the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale or Jabhat al-Tahrir al-Watani). They were induced, in part, by a collapse in world 116

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oil prices in 1986 which had severely affected Algeria’s export revenues. Since most consumer goods, including between two-thirds and three-quarters of the food supply, were imported, the population as a whole suffered a severe decline in living standards when the government decided to compensate for the shortfall in export revenues by reducing imports in order to minimise the deficit on external account. Algerians had, in effect, been living with economic hardship since the war of independence, which had ended in 1962, and the new wave of austerity did not sit well with popular attitudes. The Algerian people were also induced to take action because the political system had lost its legitimacy, originally created by the revolutionary war, whilst the FLN’s claim to embody the aspirations of Algerians – a complex amalgam, partly forged by the FLN’s own coercive behaviour during the war and stretching from committed Muslims to miniscule secular, commercial and intellectual élites – was also destroyed. This ‘popular sovereignty’ had been undermined by the coup d’état masterminded, with army backing, by Ahmed Ben Bella, Algeria’s first independent president, immediately after the Evian Accords of March 1962 brought the conflict with France to an end.2 This generated the critical contradiction in Algeria’s political life in that, although defined by a series of constitutions, it has, in reality been conditioned by the role of the Algerian army within the state as the ultimate political arbiter. Since achieving independence, Algeria has experienced four different formal constitutions, together with a long period in which government under a formal constitution was replaced by a more charismatic system, ostensibly stemming from the moulding of the Algerian state in a revolutionary crucible but, in reality, depending on presidential hegemony over the state.3 Yet the lineaments of the independent state also reflected the difficult and violent conditions under which it had been conceived, so that its constitutional structures still bear the hallmarks of the debates that governed the evolution of the war of independence, particularly the Soummam Congress in August 1956 and the Tripoli Programme of May 1962. In addition, its political structures have also been influenced by the 1964 Algiers Charter, the 1976 National Charter debate, the 1984 Family Code and the informal discussions which led to the Sant’ Egidio Accords in January 1995. All these constitutional and juridical projects reflected the dual socio-political legacy that colonialism imposed on Algeria’s sense of identity.4 Indeed, until 1988, Islam was very much the silent partner in constitutional debate, even though its role in fostering resistance to France had been vital and Muslim activists had been among the first in Algeria to demand a basic change in the relationship between France, although the secular and radical Etoile Nord-Africaine had launched a call for independence amongst Algerian migrants in France four years earlier.5 Nor was the role of Islam uncontested during the colonial period. Ferhat Abbas, a famous Algerian intellectual, made this clear in 1936 when he wrote: Had I discovered the Algerian nation, I would be a nationalist and I would not blush as if I had committed a crime . . . However, I will not die for 117

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the Algerian nation, because it does not exist. I have not found it. I have examined History, I questioned the living and the dead, I visited cemeteries; nobody spoke to me about it. I then turned to the Koran and I sought for one solitary verse forbidding a Muslim from integrating himself with a non-Muslim nation. I did not find that either. One cannot build on the wind.6 This ideological contradiction embraced a second as a result of the way in which Algeria achieved independence: namely, that the European tradition of emancipation then was itself reinterpreted in terms of the radical socialism that informed many African and Asian national liberation movements. This meant that Islam, often seen as an expression of private, transcendent experience, was not part of the radical public sphere controlled by the state, whereas national identity expressed as citizenship was. Thus, the two aspects of personal identity within an independent Algerian state were linked as ‘paired adherences’, but the private aspect was subordinate to the public sphere.7 Since, in reality, the FLN achieved its massive popular support largely because it was perceived as being Islamic in inspiration, particularly among the rural population, the subsequent Algerian state had to pretend to an Islamic tradition that increasingly sat at odds with its preferred socialist alternative, a difficulty that was reflected in its constitutional instruments.8 Yet these were not the only dualities that have underlain the constitutional process in Algeria. A third involved the allocation of political power within the FLN and its associated institutions, as they were transformed from a revolutionary movement into the administration of a state.9 Although the Soummam Congress had established two principles that were to guide the FLN’s struggle for independence, namely the ‘primauté du politique sur le militaire’ and the ‘primauté de l’intérieur sur l’extérieur avec le principe de co-direction’, the eventual outcome of the war was to reverse them.10 As independence approached in the summer of 1962, the GPRA (Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Algérienne) sought to reassert its authority over the FLN by trying to downgrade the importance of the ALN (Armée de Libération Nationale) which had taken little part in the military struggle, being marooned in Tunisia and Morocco and which, under the Tripoli programme, was to be reformed as a national popular army, bringing under its wing the guerrilla forces of the wilayas. Ranged against its efforts was a political bureau formed by the CNRA (Conseil National de la Révolution Algérienne – an FLN organisation) during the discussions in Tripoli that had produced the Tripoli Programme the previous May, together with the ALN and a minority of the wilayas. This was led by Ahmed Ben Bella who used the government–military crisis to become president with the army’s backing, thus marginalising the GPRA.11 The outcome of this struggle, at the very start of independence, was, in effect, to make the Algerian army, whether the ALN or its successor, the Armée Nationale Populaire (ANP), into the ultimate arbiter of political power in Algeria. In effect, Ben Bella’s actions in seeking presidential power reversed the principles established in the Soummam conference and set the pattern for the role 118

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of the Algerian army within the political process in Algeria thereafter, a pattern that still continues today. The army thus became the ‘shame-faced sovereign’, in that it expressed sovereign power within the Algerian state, rather than – as the constitution affirms – the people, but seeks to conceal its authority behind the fiction that it is a servant of the people, itself the true sovereign power.12 In addition, in so far as a constitution is an enabling act for the construction of a system of the rule-of-law, unless the formal political domain sanctioned by the constitution prevails over military power, the exercise of legitimate political power – essentially through the hands of the military leadership – is inevitably impossible for the state becomes arbitrary and unaccountable. However, while the first generation of independent Algerians was prepared to tolerate present austerity for the promise of future prosperity, alongside the practice of revolutionary power, their successors in a country where the population was increasingly youthful (currently over 60 per cent of the population is under the age of 30) were increasingly reluctant to do so. A significant proportion of young people was also increasingly reluctant to accept the severe public morality imposed by Islamic tradition, together with revolutionary austerity, so that interest in Western fashion, social liberalisation and global youth culture became increasingly strong aspects of a political rejection of the Algerian revolution by youth. Others tended to turn towards Islam as a means of confronting and condemning the arbitrary power of the state, as well as rejecting the secular aspirations of their peers. Continued poor housing and growing unemployment separated the poorest from those privileged through membership of the single political party and those who benefited from service to the state (which controlled over 60 per cent of the economy) or within the private sector. These general circumstances were supplemented by specific political problems. The Chadli Bendjedid regime, which had succeeded the Boumedienne regime in 1979, had attempted to encourage economic liberalisation in order to overcome consumer resentment and galvanise the stagnant economy without granting concomitant political liberalisation. The result had been an ever more tense social and political scene, particularly after serious rioting in April 1980 when demands for cultural representation by the country’s significant Berber minority had developed into country-wide protests over issues of freedom of expression and political liberalisation. Young people often embraced the Berber issue as a paradigm for their own sense of alienation, and during the 1980s Berber music became a powerful voice of popular political dissent. By the end of the decade, it had been supplemented by rai – a modernised version of traditional popular music originating in western Algeria. This group of alienated youth, linked to the wider demotic culture created by the increasing globalisation of the modern world, stood alongside the Francophone élite in opposition (particularly over the Berber issue) to another group, spanning the generations but predominantly youthful, of those – increasingly disadvantaged – Algerians educated solely in Arabic. Arab speakers also tended to be far more conservative and thus to support traditional attitudes towards public 119

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morality and the growing influence of a clandestine Islamist movement in Algeria. They also rejected the inherent separatism of the Berberist movement, calling for a united Arabo-Islamic Algeria instead. The Bendjedid regime sought to mobilise the Islamist opposition against those who supported the Berber protests and secular political liberalisation. In reality, the government’s actions in this respect merely created an ever more divided society. In the public domain, French continued to be the language of commerce, administration and high culture, with the result that Arabophone Algerians felt increasingly marginalised. The government of President Chadli Bendjedid, despite allowing a very cautious degree of political liberalisation compared with the era of his charismatic predecessor, President Houari Boumedienne, continued to manipulate this cultural confrontation and, as a consequence, between 1980 and 1986 there was a series of confrontations between pro-Berberist and pro-Arabist supporters, particularly in the universities where the Islamist movement that was developing in Algeria was putting down increasingly strong roots. At the same time, potential social and political problems were intensified since the modernist, educated Francophone élite was also marginalised by a regime that endlessly sought to capitalise on the symbols of the revolution 20 years earlier and, by its own repressive policies, devalued the very symbols it sought to exploit as evidence of its own legitimacy as a government. Riots in Constantine in 1986 expressed frustration at the worsening economic crisis – caused by the Saudi-inspired collapse in oil prices that year which, together with the collapse in the value of the American dollar, meant a 20 per cent decline in Algeria’s all-important oil revenues, particularly as the government then compressed imports to compensate for reduced revenues, despite the hardship to the population – but also provided the first major platform for the country’s nascent Islamist movement, which had emerged in the early 1980s after repression during the previous decade. Yet Islam had been one of the earliest strands of resistance to French colonialism in Algeria and thus enjoyed considerable popular support. It is against this background that the crisis in October 1988 should be seen. Although the actual cause of the riots that confronted the regime is still disputed, there is little doubt that the widespread riots that followed reflected massive popular disaffection. The regime’s response, believed to have been introduced against considerable scepticism inside the army, was to introduce a multi-party political system and generalised political liberalisation. The president, Chadli Bendjedid, seems to have calculated that, in such a fragmented political environment, the ability of the presidency to dominate the political scene would be enhanced so that it would essentially remain in control. As part of this process, a new constitution was drawn up and the army was persuaded to abandon its traditional role, becoming instead the guarantor of the state’s territory and constitutional order.13 By early 1990, there were more than 40 political parties operating in an arena of genuine political liberalisation and among a population informed by a press freed of censorship. Among the new political parties was an umbrella Islamist organisation, created by a charismatic preacher, Ali Belhadj, and an Islamist activist 120

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from Algiers University, Abassi Madani. Both emerged from the revived, albeit illegal Islamist movement that had developed during the 1980s and, unlike their fellows, were determined to seize the new political opportunities offered by the constitutional changes to play a direct role in formal political life. The surprising feature was that the government and the presidency allowed the new party, the FIS (Front Islamique du Salut – Jabha Islamiyya li’l-Inqadh), to register as a formal political party, as it did not conform to the requirements of electoral law which forbade mention of religion, region or ethnicity in a party’s name or programme. Clearly, the presidency saw the FIS as a convenient lever against the traditional hegemony of the FLN and thus as a weapon in its attempt to fragment the political scene. The presidency’s mistake emerged in June 1990 when the FIS won a spectacular victory in the municipal elections, the first to be held under the new constitution.14 In the wake of the legislative elections, the presidency sought to emasculate the FIS by redesigning electoral boundaries, an initiative that provoked outrage within the FIS which organised a general strike in June 1991. This, in turn, provoked the Algerian army which feared that the presidency was losing control of its radical democratic experiment and intervened to break up the strike, arresting the two paramount FIS leaders in the process and eventually putting them on trial in front of a military tribunal in Blida where they were sentenced to 12 years each in prison. This renewed army intervention was a warning to the presidency that the army command would return to political life if it could not control the political process. The proof of the presidency’s failure was to come in December 1991, when the much delayed legislative elections were held. The FIS won 188 of the available 232 seats in the National Assembly outright in the first stage of a two-stage election, and was expected to win eventual control of the assembly, but its share of the votes cast had dropped significantly and its share of the overall available votes had fallen to only 25 per cent of the total. The decline in its share of the vote in no way reassured the army, which feared that the FIS, as Algeria’s major Islamist political party, would win the elections outright and convert Algeria into an Islamic state. 15 It interrupted the electoral process and, within a month of the aborted elections, it had forced the president from office, replacing him with a figure from the revolutionary past, one of the chefs historiques who had been in exile in Morocco since 1964, Mohamed Boudiaf. The FIS was banned two months later and, within a year, the Islamist movement had become a clandestine one and organised open hostilities with the army-backed regime. One of the clandestine groups, the Mouvement Islamique Armé (MIA), later to become the Armée Islamique du Salut (AIS – Jaysh Islamiyya li’l-Inqadh), specifically directed its attacks against the security forces; the other, the Groupes Islamiques Armés (GIA – Jama‘a Islamiyya Muslaha) turned on the population, announcing in 1994 that it would attack foreigners, security personnel and civil servants, and Francophone intellectuals. In the years that followed, up to 1999, official figures admitted that 100,000 persons died – the true figure is probably closer to 150,000, while up to 20,000 121

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persons ‘disappeared’ whilst in custody.16 Although the death rate, which ran at around 1,000 persons a month, fell in the wake of the election of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika in April 1999 and a partial amnesty declared between June 1999 and January 2000, violence still continues, both through the GIA, which has not disbanded, although it was disabled by the loss of its leader, Antar Zouabri, in mid-February 2002, and another group that split off from it in 1997 and has adopted the former AIS agenda of targeting the security forces – the Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat (GSPC – Jama‘a al-Salafiyya li’dDaw‘a wa’l-Jihad).17 The GSPC has entrenched itself in its strongholds around Skikda and Collo in the east of the country and in Kabylia in the centre but is also present in the desert south of Algeria – the first time that this region has faced any significant threat. The feature, however, which has excited universal horror, however, has been the appalling ferocity and brutality that has characterised the conflict, for which the clandestine opposition has been held primarily responsible. It has been seen by many observers as being irrational and fanatical, although few convincing arguments have been advanced to explain such behaviour. The picture, furthermore, is rendered more obscure by the fact that much of the brutality can be laid at the door of the armed forces and security forces. Indeed, the sad fact is that the majority of the civilian losses in this conflict may have been caused by security-force action.18 The 180,000-strong armed forces themselves are backed up by a 25,000-strong gendarmerie which comes under military authority and a mass of paramilitary militias, the Gardes Légitimes de Défense, also known as the ‘patriotes’ and the Gardes Communales which include some 200,000 men under the control of local authorities and 90,000 men under the ministry of the interior, respectively.19 The intelligence function is provided primarily by the ubiquitous securité militaire service (now known as Direction des Renseignements et de la Securité – DRS), formally under the control of the interior ministry but in reality under the control of General Mohamed ‘Toufik’ Mediène, which is completely unaccountable for its actions and has always been so. The regime, too, is dominated by the army, with three generals – Mohamed Lamari, Mohamed Mediène and Mohamed Touati – controlling the civilian government, with the support of the grandees of the regime, retired generals Khalid Nezzar and Larbi Belkheir.20 The importance and arbitrary power of the military and the security services cannot, therefore, be underestimated. The quintumvirate mentioned above has made and broken presidents ever since 1991 – Chadli Bendjedid (1979–92), Mohamed Boudiaf (1992), Liamine Zeroual (1994–8) and, perhaps, Abdelaziz Bouteflika (1999–2004) – and have, at will, redrawn Algeria’s constitutional system with the current version being adopted in 1997. Since 2001, they have been contemplating a further reconstruction of the political scene, involving a suspension of all political activity for three years and then a managed restructuring of the political parties within a secular governmental system. Now, however, they claim that they do not want to be involved in the day-to-day management of the past and will withdraw to the barracks. Nobody really believes this but there may be less 122

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direct meddling in political decisions although they did influence the outcome of the April 2004 presidential elections. The reality of power, in short, will remain with the army command. This absolute power is at its most acute within the security services which are notorious for their abuse of human rights.21 It is also clear that the authorities maintain an acute and unchangeable hostility towards the various Islamist movements in Algeria. The FIS, of course, continues to be banned and has virtually disappeared as an organised party. Its proposed replacement, the Wafa party, was banned, even though it met every requirement of the latest electoral law at the start of 2001 and was led by a highly respected former minister of education and foreign affairs, Ahmad Talib Ibrahimi. It has now been allowed a semi-legal status and its leader may stand for president in the 2004 presidential elections. Yet, in reality, only one such movement from the pre-crisis period, the Harakat al-Mujtama‘a is-Silmi (HMS – the Movement for a Peaceful Society, originally known by the acronym HAMAS), effectively Algeria’s branch of the Egyptian Ikhwan Muslimin (Muslim Brotherhood) – is still allowed to operate as a legal political party and then only because of its moderate position. Furthermore, on occasions, its members have also been arrested and severely ill-treated by the security forces, and its former leader and founder, Mahmoud Nahnah, one of the founders of the Algerian Islamist movement in the 1980s who died in July 2003, was also victimised. In 1995, he was allowed to stand in the presidential elections of that year but he was excluded from the 1999 presidential elections as unqualified to be a candidate, although the criteria for a candidacy to be accepted had been the same in both cases. Furthermore, his exclusion was also based on information that was untrue, relating to his role in the independence struggle for Algeria, an error that was only publicly corrected after his death. He had faced a major threat to his position beforehand since, in November 2001, he had admitted supplying up to 30 groups of Algerian volunteers to the mujahidin in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Since it is illegal for political parties and leaders to entertain relations with foreign governments, Nahnah faced the threat of crippling legal action although, in the event, nothing was done, probably because the publicity in itself was felt to have adequately discredited him. His party suffered heavily in the legislative elections on 30 May 2002 in which the Kabyles did not vote – a similar boycott was imposed by the archs on the local elections on 10 October 2002. The other formerly legal Islamist movement, the Hizb an-Nahda, was broken up in April 1999 during the presidential elections which brought Abdelaziz Bouteflika to power as president.22 The Hizb an-Nahda was a moderate Islamist movement, founded in Constantine in 1980 by Abdallah Djaballah.23 It was inspired by the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, although, unlike HAMAS, it was not formally linked to this movement. Although it enjoyed good relations with the FIS after 1988, it continued to be a separate party and embraced political pluralism. In the wake of the army-backed coup in 1992, it was allowed to continue an autonomous legal existence but was subject to continual pressure to support the regime. This became particularly strong after January 1995, when it declared itself 123

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to be opposed to the Zeroual presidency’s plans for a new constitution which emerged in 1996. Eventually, in the run-up to the presidential elections in April 1999, it split as a result of a government-backed initiative within the party’s central committee and now no longer exists as a viable political force. Its militants are often viewed by the regime as FIS sympathisers and treated accordingly. Djaballah himself created a new Islamist party, the Mouvement pour la Réforme Nationale (MRN), also known as al-Islah, but faced great difficulties in view of official hostility. In a personal vote for Djaballah during the legislative elections in May 2002, however, his party was returned to the parliament as the largest Islamist movement there. It is, however, in the clandestine Islamist movement that Algerian political fanaticism is conventionally said to be located. To understand this, the origins and development of the Islamic movement in Algeria need to be investigated, so that the drivers towards violence, if any, can be identified. The conventional view is that the virtual civil war of the past 12 years has been the consequence of the threat to established government posed by a political movement based on the exclusivist principles of political Islam which succeeded in winning a substantial majority of the vote in democratic elections. As a result of its fears about the implications of such a victory, not least because the movement, the FIS, had threatened to reform the Algerian constitution along sectarian lines, the army stepped in as the guarantor of the constitution and aborted the democratic process. The state then faced a virtual Islamist insurrection which it has only recently controlled. There is an alternative story, in which the incompetence and corruption of the established political and military élite, because of its access to economic benefit sustained through political repression, is also effectively a mafia. Because of its wide links to the French army in which many of its senior officers served, it is also popularly considered to be the hizb fransa (Party of France). This generated a populist response, choosing the most available and appropriate cultural and ideological paradigm, that of Islam, to express its outrage and then faced official and violent repression as a result. The virtual civil war that followed was predominantly a populist response to such repression which has now degenerated into a stalemate in which any opportunity of genuinely democratic government has been lost by the intransigence of the ruling élite and the alienation of the mass of the population. As a result, Algeria faces a prolonged period of repressive government shrouding itself in a democratic veil – the ‘façade democracy’ of which many Algerians complain – in which human rights abuses continue unabated, as does populist violence. However, in so far as the Islamic paradigm is seen – largely incorrectly – as the core of the problem rather than as a symptom of it, the nature of the Algerian Islamist movement is essential to an understanding of this complex conundrum.24 Political Islam in Algeria has a long history. It developed as a consequence of the wider Islamic response to European colonialism and technological superiority that had to be confronted in the nineteenth century, as the Ottoman empire decayed. By the 1860s, this response had become codified into the Salafiyya movement, 124

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promoted by Jamal al-Afghani, which argued that Muslims should look into the traditions of early Islam, typified by the Rashidun caliphate, to find the inspiration through which to meet the intellectual and technological challenge of the West. His ideas, which were inherently a modernist response to the shock of European intervention in the Islamic world, were immensely influential and were popularised throughout the Arab world by individuals such as Mohammed Abduh in Egypt. In Algeria, they inspired the first wave of the use of Islam as a rallying point in trying to rebuild a sense of political and moral autonomy within the context of French settler colonialism there, in the wake of the visit by Mohammed Abduh to Algeria in 1903. The Algerian islah (reform) movement began in the 1920s under Shaykh Abdulhamid Bin Badis who had been inspired by Mohammed Abduh and was codified in the Association des Oulémas Musulmans Algériens, committed to reforming Islamic practice in Algeria in order to assert a sense of Algerian identity based on being an Islamic society within the context of the wider Muslim community, in contradistinction to the secular assimilationism of intellectuals such as Ferhat Abbas who was quite prepared to accept integration of Algeria into France, provided that Algerian personal and religious status could be preserved. The nascent Islamist movement in Algeria, therefore, was also an expression of Algerian particularity. In this respect it differed from the very similar Islamic reform movement created in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, the Ikhwan Muslimin (Muslim Brotherhood) which also drew its doctrines from the earlier Salafiyya movement but now set them within a specific political context.25 A further reason for its creation was the missionary activity in Algeria, encouraged by Cardinal Lavigerie and by the ‘White Fathers’ – a Trappist order – that was particularly active during the 1920s and 1930s and was seen by Muslims as an attack on Islam itself.26 Furthermore, most converts were made in Kabylia, among the Berber population there, as part of France’s policies of dividing Berber and Arab populations in Algeria. The Trappists maintained a presence in Algeria in the wake of independence in 1962 but do not now proselytise. They now engage in providing social services, particularly in their monastery in Tibherine – which is where the 1996 massacre of seven of their number took place.27 Under the independence agreement, the 1960 Evian Accords, Christianity and Christian sites are protected in Algeria and the best tangible evidence of the Christian presence in the country is provided by the church of Notre Dame de l’Afrique, just outside Algiers where many of the Berber converts are commemorated. This coincidence of Berbers with conversion to Christianity has added to a popular conviction in the Arabophone parts of Algeria – picked up by the extremist religious groups – that Berbers are not true Muslims.28 The reform movement sought to re-Islamise Algerian society through social work and reviving religious practice, rather than through active political commitment – which would have been impossible in the colonial context. However, although Ben Badis died in 1940 and was succeeded by Shaykh Bachir al-Ibrahimi, the father of Ahmed Taleb Ibrahimi, the current leader of the Wafa party, the 125

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Algerian reform movement soon became caught up in more overtly political activity as Algerian nationalism came ever more openly into conflict with the French colonial authorities. After the Sétif massacres in 1945, which marked the beginning of the overt struggle against French colonialism, secular nationalist movements filled the political arena and the Islamic movement was marginalised, but it continued to enjoy a wider dimension of support throughout Algeria as the natural vehicle for the expression of Algerian collective Muslim identity. Thus, although marginal in political terms, its significance for nationalist ideology was paramount and the FLN that became the vehicle of the war against France explicitly claimed to be an Islamic movement as well as a movement for national liberation. In the wake of the war for independence, which ended in 1962, socialist ideas dominated Algeria’s new collective political life. However, the role of Islam was never far away and the new ruling élite, particularly after the 1965 coup which brought the army commander Houari Boumedienne to power, made space for a formal Islamic role within the state. Education was often placed in the charge of ministers known for their piety and commitment to Islamic values, and the role of Islam in the new Algerian identity – as an Arabo-Muslim state – was supported. At the same time, the slightest hint of Islamic political interest was stamped on and a formal political role for Islamic thinkers was marginalised. An Islamic association was, nevertheless, permitted and the Al-Qiyam organisation was established in the early 1960s by Malek Bennabi and Mohammed Khider, one of the nine chefs historiques of the Algerian revolution. It was subsequently suppressed by the Boumedienne regime which brooked no rivals for power, even implicit ones, but which adopted much of its social agenda.29 The Islamic movement, however, became a rival within the decade because of two factors. One was the push by the Boumedienne regime for the arabisation of Algerian collective administrative and intellectual life. One of the consequences of French colonialism had been to make French, rather than Arabic, the administrative and intellectual language for the country and, as part of the process of nation-building, there was a conscious programme to reverse this. The arabisation programme, however, required a large number of teachers that Algeria did not possess, so Egyptian teachers were brought in instead. They brought with them the Ikhwan Muslimin, so that the first appearance of the Muslim Brotherhood as a coherent organisation in Algeria dates from this time, under the name of the Jama‘at al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin (The Association of Muslim Brothers). The movement had to make itself felt against the indigenous Algerian Islamic movements that had very similar agendas to its own and that harked back to the original Association created by Ben Badis in 1930, as well as to the principles of the Salafiyyist movement. Indeed, Algerians themselves never really distinguished between the Brotherhood and movements such as those that now developed from the old Al-Qiyam which had finally been banned in 1970. The new movements, known in Algeria collectively as the Ahl ad-Daw‘a (The People of the Call), now emerged in opposition to the powerfully centralised state that the Boumedienne 126

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regime had created and, up to the end of the 1970s, quietly amassed their support base within the population, particularly among the urban poor and lower middle classes. Indeed, as popular discontent mounted with the Algerian experiment in political and economic development towards the end of the 1970s, the Islamist movement received ever-greater support, in part augmented by the relative leniency shown to it by successive governments. At the same time, its popularity was increased by the arabisation programme undertaken in the late 1970s and early 1980s to counter the persistence of French as the major language and culture for Algeria. However, those who were Arabophone in terms of education and training found themselves disadvantaged in terms of employment and isolated in terms of culture because of the continued dominance of French as a commercial language and because of the role that France continued to enjoy in Algeria’s wider cultural context. They were therefore drawn towards the authenticity of an Islamic alternative – something which was encouraged by the fact, as mentioned above, that many of the teachers employed in the Arabisation programme were Egyptian and linked to the Ikhwan Muslimin. By 1984, the movement had its own leaders – Shaykh Nahnah, subsequently the leader of HMI-Hamas, and Shaykh Sahnoun (who died in December 2003), alongside Shaykh Soltani, who died in that year. Although his death, at his home where he was held under house arrest, had been kept out of the news media, within a few hours the surrounding streets were flooded with 25,000 mourners, indicating the depth of support that already existed in the capital for the Islamist movement. It also had its own ideologues. Shaykh Soltani had published a popular attack on the Boumedienne regime, and Malek Bennabi was also widely known as Algeria’s theoretician of the Islamist movement throughout the region. And the movement had its martyrs, which further increased its social prominence. In the wake of the Berberist riots of April 1980, clashes between Berberophone and Arabophone students in Algeria’s universities, had resulted in deaths and arrests, particularly in 1981 and 1982. The government responded to these incidents with considerable brutality, sentencing those involved to long prison terms. At the same time, the authorities also continued to try to placate Islamist supporters, appointing officials who were sympathetic to the underground movement and its values to senior positions in government, especially in ministries connected with religious issues, and encouraging the widespread construction of mosques. Since, in Algerian law, mosques came under state control only when their construction was completed, many Islamic activists left new mosque buildings deliberately uncompleted so that they could be used as centres for education and propaganda outside official monitoring and control. By the end of the 1980s, a majority of mosques was uncontrolled, a situation which persisted up to 1992, when the new post-coup regime brought in regulations that ended this anomaly. In addition, the authorities tried to adjust Algerian legislation to match Islamist concepts of public morality and social order. Thus, in 1984, the Chadli Bendjedid regime introduced new family legislation which undermined the independent status 127

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of women and reinforced their normatively inferior role in accordance with more conservative interpretations of shar‘ia religious law. During the 1980s, government ambivalence towards the Islamist movement allowed the movement to garner more popular support, particularly in poor urban areas where the level of youth unemployment was as high as 30 per cent of the youth labour force (and 60 per cent of the Algerian population were below the age of 30). In 1986, as mentioned above, in a precursor of the 1988 riots, trouble broke out in Constantine. Islamists did not initiate the disturbances, which had begun among students protesting at living conditions; but, by their end, Islamists were prominent in controlling and directing the rioters and they emphasised the need for the public segregation of men and women, particularly in the context of student residences where conditions had been at the root of the disturbances. At the same time, the more extreme members of the Islamist movements began to question the legitimacy of the Algerian state on the grounds that the FLN had originally capitalised on Algeria’s Islamic heritage to justify its call to arms against French colonialism. Yet this legacy and source of legitimacy had been abandoned once Algeria became independent, so that the FLN had no right to claim a revolutionary legitimacy that was properly reflected in the vision of the Islamic movement. They also had the experience of the struggle in Afghanistan against Soviet occupation in the 1980s, which had been led by extremist Islamist groups with American and Saudi support. In the mid-1980s, therefore, a clandestine group, led by Mustapha Bouyali – a former FLN militant during the war for independence and subsequently a gendarme – emerged in the Blida-Boufarik area and launched attacks on the security apparatus of the Algerian state. Although the group was eliminated in 1987, some members of the FIS and subsequently founder-members of the armed clandestine Islamist resistance after the army-backed coup in 1991–2, a fact which will be discussed further below. By 1988, therefore, although the Islamists were as surprised as the government when the riots that brought Algeria’s single-party state to an end exploded, they were ready to reap the rewards. Some leaders, such as Shaykh Sahnoun and, initially, Shaykh Nahnah, were determined to avoid direct political involvement. They formed the Rabita al-Islah wa’l-Irshad (The Movement for Reform and Guidance) as a national association designed to influence the political process without taking direct part in it. Others, however, led by Abbassi Madani, who had been an FLN activist during the war for independence, were determined to seize the opportunity. One of the results was the creation of the FIS in 1989. It was the subsequent success of the FIS that persuaded Shaykh Nahnah to reform the Islah wa’l-Irshad into a formal political party, first known as Hamas and subsequently as the HMI, after the electoral law was changed in 1997 to exclude political parties that referred, inter alia, to religion or language in their platforms or names. Shaykh Sahnoun refused to join him in the formal political arena. As mentioned above, the FIS was not the only Islamist political party. Hamas, however, sought to participate in the formal political scene as, in effect, Algeria’s own branch of the Egyptian Ikhwan Muslimin, for Shaykh Nahnah had formal links 128

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with the Egyptian organisation’s international branch. An-Nahda, which was created in the Constantinois (the High Plateaux region of central Algeria which extends to Sétif), had a carefully worked out programme that sought to Islamise political life in Algeria and which was also based on the ideas of the Ikhwan Muslimin, but also accepted the democratic option. It was not, however, prepared to collaborate with the regime. In this respect it had been very different from Hamas, whose leader stood in the 1995 presidential elections. The Hamas party also enjoyed minor governmental representation as a result of its co-operation with the regime, while the an-Nahda movement suffered continual harassment and the arbitrary arrest of its cadres for refusing to comply with regime demands for cooperation until it decided to accept the constitutional reforms introduced in 1997.30 The FIS although it was certainly concerned with political action was, however, something more than an Islamist party. Unlike the others, it sought to create a movement that brought together as many members as possible, whatever their specific political platforms, and which, furthermore, challenged the claim of the FLN to embody the legitimate inheritance of the Algerian revolution. As was often said in Algeria, ‘The FIS is the son of the FLN’. As part of this broad appeal, it attracted adherents of three major Islamist currents to its banner: the Salafiyyists who had been the backbone of the original Islamic movement; the Djazar’a group, sympathisers with the ideas of Malek Bennabi who sought a specifically Algerian Islamist solution, unlike the universalism of the Salafiyyists; and the Afghanistes, Algerians who had fought with the Mujahidin in Afghanistan during the war against the Soviet Union, as well as a much larger number who sympathised with the Mujahidin and their neo-Salafiyyist ideas.31 In this respect, the FIS was quite different from an-Nahda or Hamas. Since each of these groups had a different agenda, it is not surprising that the FIS found it very difficult to evolve a specifically Islamist political programme. No detailed economic programme was ever suggested; much of the platform as put forward for the 1990 municipal and 1991 legislative elections was concerned with public order and public morality. Otherwise it was devoted to an attack on the corrupt values and practices of the old FLN regime and of the consequences of secularism and French influences in Algeria. It should also be borne in mind that much of the growth in FIS support occurred during the crisis over Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and, although the movement had relied on the Gulf states for part of its original financial support, the movement quickly divined the popularity of pro-Iraqi sentiment among the population and exploited it. As discussed earlier, despite the legal creation of the FIS, its party platform contravened the new electoral law that expressly banned political movements based on language, region or religion. Nevertheless, its wide political base ensured that it rapidly became a mass movement, claiming for itself the revolutionary legitimacy that had, until then, been the prerogative of the FLN and the Algerian army. After the first round of the legislative elections in December, it was clear that the FIS would be able to form a government and, much to the anxiety of the regime, it 129

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threatened, too, to call for an Islamic state in Algeria. It would have had more than the necessary two-thirds majority in the assembly necessary to legislate changes to the constitution to achieve this. This situation immediately brought it into head-on collision with the fundamental tenets on which the Algerian state had been based and revived fears among the country’s military leadership that Algeria’s revolutionary ideals, and their vested interests in the status quo, would be threatened. The army had been an integral part of the Algerian regime up until 1988 – indeed, it had, in effect, been the regime. In the wake of the riots and in view of Chadli Bendjedid’s promise to reconstruct the Algerian state under a strong presidency within a multi-party political system in 1989, in which the army would have the role of guaranteeing the integrity of the state, the army had officially withdrawn from politics but retained the right of intervention if it believed the constitutional position to be threatened.32 As described above, this it did, temporarily, in June 1991 and in a more definitive form in December 1991, despite FIS attempts to avoid a confrontation. The FIS tried to respond to the changed political circumstances in the wake of the first army intervention. One faction of the movement sought to find an accommodation with the regime to avoid further repression, even if that meant the loss of its political programme. The other faction was determined to maintain its political role as guaranteed under the constitution and fight the promised legislative elections on that basis. At an important party conference in Batna towards the end of the year, the compromisers were trounced and the party elected Abdelkader Hachani, the former prominent Djezar‘a member, as its leader. The compromisers eventually accepted positions in government in the aftermath of the coup, as they abandoned the FIS in the wake of government hostility. Yet, even then, fears about the regime’s intentions over the legislative elections persisted among those who rejected compromise and it was only two weeks before the actual vote that the FIS decided that it would actually fight the elections. Its fears were to prove to be fully justified as the army was determined not to accept any outcome that gave the FIS a prominent political role in the future. Thus, in the aftermath of the first round of the electoral process in December 1991, the army simply aborted the electoral process, turned out the president and appointed its own collective presidency. The army also turned against the FIS, determined to eradicate it from political and social life. By the beginning of March 1992, the FIS had been declared illegal and, by the middle of the year, there were isolated outbreaks of violence. Up to 12,000 FIS militants were arrested and interned in prison camps in the Sahara for varying periods of up to two years. Within the year, clandestine violence had become widespread and extended to urban areas, with the Islamist opposition controlling considerable areas of the country. Violence, in any case, was eventually to become the currency of real political debate in Algeria, both for the governing regime and for the clandestine opposition derived from the FIS. This situation continued up until the end of the 1990s and, despite attempts by the Bouteflika regime to find a basis for national 130

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reconciliation after the presidential elections in April 1999, continues to be the case up to the present day. The real danger to public order in Algeria, however, developed after the armybacked coup in January 1992, particularly when clandestine Islamist resistance emerged in 1993. The civilian population soon faced a particular danger, not from the FIS or its successors, the MIA and the AIS, which sought to force the new regime to restore the electoral initiative disrupted by the coup, but from the GIA. Both movements, however, in so far as they espoused violence, looked back to an earlier paradigm, the Bouyali movement in the 1980s, which had been created by a former FLN activist and mujahid from the war for independence, Mustapha Bouyali. Mustapha Bouyali had considered that the FLN had betrayed its trust and that an authentic Islamic solution was the only way forward for Algeria. He, therefore, organised a group in the maquis and mountains around Blida, to offer a challenge of violence against the state. Although he was killed in 1987 and his followers were imprisoned, his reputation was to inspire those who, in 1992, believed that violence was the only way forward. Indeed, some of his lieutenants were to lead the new groups, particularly the GIA. The GIA was commanded by a series of leaders who became steadily more extreme in their views and policies, and were progressively eliminated by the army, whilst, at the same time, suspicions steadily grew within the Islamist movements that it had been profoundly infiltrated by the military security system, the DRS. Its origins are located in the army-backed coup in 1991 and the subsequent repression of the Islamist movement. Locating the outbreak of violence is difficult: some authors point towards an incident in February 1992 when six policemen were killed in the casbah of Algiers, others argue that it was an incident in Guemmar, close to the Tunisian border, when a border post station was attacked in November 1991, a non-commissioned officer was killed and arms were stolen. Thirty persons were killed in a subsequent army operation to track down those responsible. Whatever the actual incident, the first sign of an organised Islamist opposition was the spontaneous development of isolated armed cells throughout the country. The nucleus of the new movement appeared, however, in the Algiers region when Mansour Miliani, a former Bouyali activist, took over a group of Afghanistes in January 1992. Miliani had originally been close to Ahmed Chebouti, another Bouyali activist who had also been arrested when Bouyali was killed and who had also been released from prison by President Bendjedid after the October 1988 riots. Ahmed Chebouti rejected the extremist vision of the Afghanistes, supporting the FIS objective of restoring the electoral process. He eventually became a foundermember and leader of the MIA that subsequently became the AIS. Although Miliani himself was arrested in July 1992, after actions including an attack on the Amirauté in the heart of Algiers the previous February, the group survived because it linked up with a second group of activist youth who sympathised with its views and objectives. This group, created by Mohamed Allal, who was killed in September 1992, effectively took over the leadership of the combined group 131

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under the name of the GIA and led by Abdelhak Lyada who had originally been a member of Allal’s group. By this time, the breach between the GIA and the MIA, led by Ahmed Chebouti, was complete, after the failure of an attempt at unifying the clandestine Islamist opposition in September 1992. Instead, the group went its own way, rejecting any suggestion of fusion with the MIA except on its own terms. The MIA, however, continued to broaden its contacts and, in March 1993, it formed links with other independent organisations, including Said Mekhloufi’s Mouvement pour un Etat Islamique (MEI). The GIA itself continued a violent anti-FIS and MIA campaign and began a series of high-profile attacks, coupled with threats against the security services, government servants, school teachers, Francophone intellectuals and foreigners. In 1993 it publicly warned these groups that they were at risk and began a campaign of violence against them. Abdelhak Lyada was arrested in July 1993, to be followed as leader, after a confused power struggle, by Djaafar al-Afghani and, in February 1994, by Cherif Gousmi. Despite the rapid turnover in its leadership, the group continued to be distinguished by the violence and high-profile nature of its attacks and this attracted much support, particularly from the autonomous urban-based groups that began to emerge, linked to the trabando networks. Its hostility towards the FIS constantly increased, with strident attacks on FIS and MIA leaders and threats against them. By May 1994, the GIA was at the height of its power and attracted support from yet other autonomous groups and from the more activist FIS members who sought more effective ways of confronting the regime. This brought under its wing the MEI, the FIDA (Front Islamique du Djihad Armé) and former FIS leaders such as Mohamed Said and Abderrazak Rejam. The MIA, in response to this development, reformed itself under Mansour Mezrag into the AIS, recognising the GIA as its major threat. However, with the death of Cherif Gousmi in September 1992, the new-found unity fell apart as a result of the growing extremism of the GIA itself.33 The movement became even more intolerant of dissent, ever more fanatical in its claims and actions and increasingly targeted the FIS itself. Between September 1993 and November 1994, the new head of the GIA, Djamal Zitouni, eliminated putative rivals, including most of the FIS leaders who had rallied to him. By now, there were intense suspicions that the GIA was heavily infiltrated by the DRS and that most of its high-profile operations were directed by the regime to discredit the Islamist movement overall. Indeed, in the past two years there have been several accounts from participants in the regime’s anti-terrorist operations, suggesting that the GIA had been ‘turned’ and was effectively now a counter-terrorist operation, integrated into the military strategy of the regime.34 The result was that many of the groups that had allied themselves with the GIA in 1994 now broke away in disgust at its internecine violence and the increasing extremism of its rhetoric and actions. The breakaway groups, many of whom sought links with the AIS instead, included the MEI, the Mouvement Islamique pour la Dawa et le Djihad (MIDD), under Mustapha Kertali, and the Ligue 132

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Islamique pour la Dawa et le Djihad (LIDD), under Ali Benhajar. The latter two groups only coalesced later from individuals who had split off from the GIA in disgust – the MIDD in July 1996 and the LIDD in February 1997. These groups joined the AIS and when, in October 1997, the AIS declared a unilateral ceasefire with the army, they followed suit and took advantage of the civil concord law in January 2000 to end the armed struggle against the regime. Zitouni was killed in July 1996 and was succeeded by Antar Zouabri until he, too, was killed in midFebruary 2002.35 Under Zouabri, the extremism and violence of the GIA became completely indiscriminate, leading to the horrific massacres of 1997 and 1998 – although, once again, great care must be exercised over these incidents as it is clear that the greatest beneficiary from them was the Algerian state. There is considerable indirect evidence of state involvement and some direct evidence as well, which is discussed below. First, however, it is necessary to consider what was the intellectual and doctrinal justification for these practices. In essence, the group has carried on the tradition of the extremist groups that go back to ‘Afghaniste’ and extreme neo-Salafiyyist traditions of one branch of the Islamist opposition created in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The original GIA had argued that the Algerian state was irredeemably tyrannical (taghut) and arrogant (hughra) and had to be replaced by force through its destruction, an attitude that was easily distorted to authorise the programme of indiscriminate killing. Before this happened, however, in an attempt to disrupt and weaken the state, the GIA leadership warned in 1994, as mentioned above, that it would target civil servants and security force personnel, together with foreigners and Francophone intellectuals, particularly journalists. Over 70 journalists have died since 1994, together with almost as many foreigners, while over 400 schools have been burned to the ground, with many of their teachers killed. The total cost to the Algerian state of this damage, quite apart from the loss of life, is estimated at around $20 billion. The numbers of civil servants who died are not known, but the many false road blocks, manned by GIA militants – often within urban areas because police control was so weak – provided an ideal opportunity for ‘exemplary punishment’ of those whose identity cards revealed them to belong to one of the forbidden categories. Military personnel and persons working for the Algerian armed forces – even if not undertaking military service – were preferred targets. Foreigners, too, were selected targets, largely because they were kufar, infidels, and disturbed the uniformity of Islamic practice that the GIA sought. The few converts to Christianity in the country were particular targets because of Islamic views over apostasy.36 The GIA also went on to argue that many Algerians themselves were corrupted by their own history and that it was legitimate to eliminate such corruption because they were apostate. The group’s activities degenerated into apparently mindless violence in a series of horrific massacres in 1997 and 1998, notable for a complete failure on the part of the authorities to intervene and for intense suspicions that there had been official complicity in some of these incidents – both to discredit the Islamist opposition and for reasons of personal gain. The original justification for this mass violence lay in the generalised ideology adopted by the extremist 133

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mujahidin in Afghanistan and is closely linked to the concept of jihad – usually understood to mean ‘holy war’. In fact, the word comes from the Arabic ‘to strive’ and in its original meaning reflected the quest for inner purification. In its original meaning, it is also linked to the concept of ijtihad, the tradition of innovative thought in Islam, within the context of Islamic doctrine, to expand and adapt Islamic practice and understanding to new contexts. A subsidiary meaning also meant the struggle, first to extend the world of Islam – the dar al-Islam – and, second, to defend it. The concept of jihad as defensive struggle was adopted by the neo-Salafi movement in Afghanistan as part of their construction of an ideology to justify violence. It is in this respect that the neo-Salafi movement differs from its august predecessor, the Salafiyya. The Salafiyya sought to develop philosophical and intellectual principles from the corpus of early Islam, without the accretions of later practice and intellectual activity in order to relate to and exploit the modern world. The neo-Salafi use of jihad, however, has become a technique to exclude that world on the basis of the argument that the early Islamic precursor was itself the ideal that the contemporary world should seek to emulate. In the early years of the war in Afghanistan, this concept was refined by Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian graduate from the al-Azhar mosque-university in Cairo who was based in Peshawar.37 He argued that jihad in circumstances such as those in Afghanistan, where a nonMuslim state had disrupted the unity of the umma by direct intervention, was an individual duty upon Muslims that they could not avoid. Moreover, there was also a more far-ranging collective duty on Muslims to defend Islamic society from the attacks upon it from outside. The individual obligation was incumbent on all Muslims and could not be avoided; the collective duty could be taken over by any group that wished to do so and thus excuse the rest from having to take part. In addition, since neo-Salafis only accept the doctrines of the Qur’an and the practices of the Islamic community that had actually experienced the guidance of the Prophet Muhammad – the rashidun period of the first four rightly-guided caliphs – their objective must be to reintroduce that world through jihad. This means that, although they tend to adhere to the interpretations of Islam of the Hanbali madhab or school of Islamic law because it is the strictest of the four Sunni schools, they do not formally accept any particular school at all and engage in ijtihad on the basis of the rashidun period alone.38 This use of ijtihad is unusual and results in the consequence that all neo-Salafi actions are buttressed by fatwas, religious decrees from recognised learned students of Islamic law that thereby legitimise and authenticate their actions. The most important consequence of this here is the use made of Ibn Tayymiya’s arguments excluding Mongol leaders who converted to Islam from the Muslim community on the grounds of their unwillingness to accept the full doctrinal and legal corpus.39 In other words, those who do not totally adopt Islam cannot be considered to be Muslims – a view that is at variance with the orthodox mainstream whereby inclusion is based on the acceptance of the five ‘pillars’ of Islam. For the neo-Salafis, however, this has led to the view that Muslims who do not accept their 134

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doctrines are apostate and therefore excluded from the community. Indeed, they can be treated as kufar, infidels, and because of their apostasy (taqfir or irtidad), they can be killed. The GIA has accepted the most extreme of these interpretations and has adapted it to its own purposes. It not only considers the Algerian state arrogant (hughra) and tyrannical (taghut) but it considers that Muslims who refuse the collective duty of jihad against it to be apostate (irtidad). It has a particular dislike of the Francophone and secular segment of the Algerian population that embodies values directly opposed to its own ideals. They may thus be killed – this is the justification for the appalling massacres of recent years. It has to be said that this approach is rejected by all clandestine groups in Algeria except those specifically included inside the GIA. They reject this doctrinal argument, as they do Cherif Gousmi’s fatwa justifying the abduction of women and their subsequent sexual abuse as legitimate for persons engaged in jihad. It also raises the question of the degree to which the GIA’s use of the instrument of the fatwa is justified, as GIA leaders cannot claim the status of being ‘alims, the only persons who may legitimately issue a fatwa. In fact, of course, the GIA’s extremism is intolerable even inside a neo-Salafi context and the final breakaway from the group, led by Hassan Hattab in December 1997 underlined this, for this group, as its name makes clear – the Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat (GSPC) – is certainly neo-Salafi in inspiration yet rejected the GIA’s doctrinal justifications. In any case, as detailed below, the case arguing for the exploitation of the GIA by the Algerian security services for counter-terrorist purposes, is difficult to deny. In addition, many other groups, ranging from maverick ‘Patriote’ militias settling old scores or seeking personal benefit to simple criminal gangs may also on occasion claim adherence to the GIA and justify themselves by an appeal to an Islamist rhetoric to justify their purely criminal activities. There have even been suggestions that the worst of the massacres, such as that in Bentalha, were motivated by a desire to clear land to be privatised, in order to force up its price for figures within the regime who could argue that it was now land cleared for construction. Other autonomous groups actively follow the agenda of the GIA, although they have no direct linkage with its command structure, even if they co-ordinate their activities and communicate with it. This is particularly prevalent in suburbs and urban peripheries where civil security has always been weak and where a significant proportion of the population is unemployed or in the informal economy. Indeed, these informal economic links have formed the basis for support networks for terrorist groups, providing material support and information, and for actual networks in urban areas which both carry out terrorist actions in urban areas and control local populations through violence and fear. More than half of the population below 25 years old is unemployed and overall unemployment rates run at an officially admitted 30 per cent. Many unemployed people are engaged in trabando (officially tolerated smuggling) and criminal gangs claiming to be part of the GIA, as well as genuine local Islamist groups, have captured control of such activities and, as a result, impose their own order on local 135

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districts, particularly in the outer suburbs of major towns, through violence.40 The phenomenon is particularly prevalent in the Blida plain area behind Algiers, and in the ring of suburbs around the city, partly because the local population, particularly the rural peasantry, although among the poorest groups in Algeria, have a particularly intricate and feud-ridden social structure. Although such groups, which claim and are generally recognised to be part of the GIA, were the subject of intense security force attention after 1995 and were subdued after 1998, they now appear to have re-emerged in the wake of the Law of Civil Concorde (which provided for a partial amnesty between June 1999 and January 2000) and are extremely vindictive. The situation is complicated by the fact that there is evidence that the original GIA was infiltrated by the Algerian army’s military security service, the DRS, under the command of General Mohamed ‘Toufik’ Mediene. This is the most secretive part of the army structure and the least accountable and has, virtually since its creation by Lakhdar Ben Tobbal during the war of independence between 1954 and 1962, exercised a dominant and sinister influence over the political process in Algeria. The result has been that, since the mid-1990s, many of the GIA’s activities have been indirectly controlled by the security services and have been used to discredit the movement overall. There has also been evidence of direct exploitation of these Islamist groups, often for personal advantage. This was particularly evident after 1994, when land privatisation proposals, required by the IMF economic restructuring programme, resulted in violent land clearances especially on the edges of major towns where land values increased because of potential building demand.41 There is also growing evidence that the army was engaged in counter-intelligence operations that involved the killing of civilians, camouflaged as killings by Islamist groups as well as punishment killings of large numbers of civilians. The worst massacres occurred in 1997 and 1998 in the outer suburbs of Algiers and Blida. Many foreign governments are aware of these unsavoury links and, as was revealed during the Regina v. Sofiane Kebilene, Farid Boukemiche and Sofiane Souidi case in February 2000, the army has been massively implicated in human rights abuses against the civilian population. Evidence of its activities has appeared in France in a book written by a former Algerian army officer, Habib Souaidia, entitled La Sale Guerre, which was published in February 2001 by Editions La Découverte in Paris. This study confirms the arguments of the many independent witnesses, including the author of Qui a tué à Bentalha?, Nesroulah Yous, and the contributors to An Inquiry into the Algerian Massacres, published by Hoggar Press in Geneva in 1999, who have made similar claims, as well as evidence provided by a group of former army officers based in Madrid who have repeatedly warned of the army’s culpability for such actions over the past five years, the Mouvement Algérien des Officiers Libres (MAOL). Further information has emerged from a new book, by Hisham Abboud, a former Securité Militaire officer – La mafia des généraux, published by Editions J. C. Lattès in Paris in February 2002. Yet another publication, directly concerned with the activities of the DRS, has recently been published in France: Chronique des Annnées de Sang by Mohammed Samraoui. 136

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Ironically, the credibility of Souaidia’s revelations has been enhanced by the media campaign, backed by the government and the army and launched in Algeria and France, to discredit it, together with the consequent libel case between him and Khaled Nezzar, the former defence minister and the man responsible for the 1992 coup. The case was heard in June 2002 and the tribunal had already made it clear early in the proceedings that there would be no penalty against Souaidia for libel, as ‘these matters touch upon history’, in the words of the presiding judge. The formal sentence on 27 September 2002 made it clear that Habib Souaidia had won an effective victory. The accusations made against Khaled Nezzar, therefore, continue to stand unopposed, despite his own set of memoirs, recently published and entitled Les mémoires du Général Khaled Nezzar. He has also been savaged by Hisham Abboud in his own publication earlier in the same year. There have also been well-substantiated claims that 73 army officers, arrested for suspected sympathies with the Islamist movements, were secretly executed in early March 2001 to avoid any repetition of Habib Souaidia’s revelations.42 This event was followed up by a well-concealed private visit to France by the army chief-of-staff, Mohamed Lamari, to reassure French leaders that all was still in order and that the executions were simply a necessary precaution. The reality is that Algeria is still a repressive state in which the rule-of-law does not exist but where power is exercised in a purely arbitrary fashion, thus endangering anybody who falls foul of the authorities. The counterpart to this has been, of course, that violence has re-emerged, both in rural areas and in towns. The evidence of the past three years suggests that the structure of fanaticism and violence is now well-entrenched in Algerian society. In addition to the various groups based in the countryside – the GSPC and the GIA – there are now complex urban networks as well. Many of these, particularly in the outskirts of towns, are based on the old trabando smuggling networks.43 They have extensive local knowledge, have often penetrated the local administration and the police and also have good contacts with neighbouring networks – there is therefore a highly effective information network running through Algerian urban life, often with contacts to groups operating in the countryside and even to support networks abroad. Some of them run protection rackets; others virtually operate a parallel administration in the areas in which they operate, even though the security forces appear to be formally in control. These structures have immense potential for future violence and represent the underlying failure of the security regime introduced by the Algerian authorities over the past decade. For the many people who supported the FIS or were members of it but who reject the violence of the armed groups, there has been no political outlet for many years. They have been able, it is true, to support either the HMI or an-Nahdah and its counterpart, al-Islah but for many of them this is inappropriate – the HMI is seen as a pro-regime party, as is an-Nahdah in the wake of the 1999 split, whilst alIslah is predominantly an eastern Algerian creation. They have been denied the alternative of the Wafa party, as mentioned above, although the issue has now become a factor in the ongoing struggle between the presidency and the army, for 137

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the army recently allowed the party to reoccupy its offices in Algiers, although Yazid Zerhouni, the interior minister and an ally of the president continues to refuse to register it.44 Nor is this approach simply reserved for the Islamists; a similar secular movement, designed to be a genuine opposition party alongside such movements as the FFS (the Front Démocratique), founded by a former premier, Sid Ahmed Ghozali – was also refused registration. In fact, the hostility of the Algerian authorities to the FIS continues unabated despite the fact that its overt political infrastructure inside Algeria has long since disappeared. Today, the formal movement exists only in exile in European cities where there are significant Algerian expatriate communities. It has no known links with any of the clandestine groups inside Algeria, although some of them have their own logistics networks in Europe. The external FIS has recently been radicalised, however, as the old moderate leadership under Rabah Kebir in Germany which has been suspected of wishing to compromise with the regime in order to rejoin the political order in the capital has been pushed aside by a group that recognises the role of the armed struggle in Algeria itself. In September 2002, at a special party congress in Belgium, Rabah Kebir was replaced as leader by this faction who proposed Mourad Dhina in his place. He is a longstanding FIS member, based in Geneva, who is not prepared to compromise the FIS’s original objectives for the sake of personal status – an accusation frequently levelled against Rabah Kebir. Although he has been refused political asylum in Switzerland, he has been given permission to reside there and, even though the Algerian government made representations to the Swiss government in the wake of the congress for his immediate extradition – not the first time that it has raised this request – the Swiss authorities refused to agree. They have, however, instructed Dhina not to engage in any political activity. The FIS in exile, therefore, may have been radicalised as a result of its bitterness over its continued exclusion from the Algerian political scene, but it cannot effectively articulate its policies or its attitudes. It has, none the less, over the years played a major role in affecting the kinds of choices political activists inside the country have made. Its general influence over the MIA and the AIS was extremely important in deciding the movements’ attitudes towards the GIA. It continued to maintain close links with the major opposition parties inside Algeria, particularly the FLN until its secretary-general, Abdelhamid Mehri, was replaced by Boualem Benhamouda in 1996, and with the FFS under Hocine Ait-Ahmed. It was this linkage that enabled it to respond to the initiatives of the Sant’Egidio Community in Rome in November 1994 and January 1995. These initiatives generated the Rome Accords which outlined a political solution to the Algerian crisis in which all parties, including the Algerian regime, would have had a role to play. It also played a significant role in the unilateral ceasefire organised by the AIS with the Algerian army. In fact, the political leadership of the FIS abroad objected to the truce, not because it wished violence to continue but because it feared – correctly as matters turned out – that the regime, by engaging in a purely military arrangement, would not allow for it to be expanded into a political initiative which might have led 138

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to a viable compromise. This anxiety over the unwillingness of the regime to compromise with its political opponents reflects the hallmark of the crisis in Algeria. That is that the regime and, behind it the army, has been quite unwilling to consider any compromise that hinders its own hegemony over the political scene. It is this consideration that made the oft-quoted distinction between ‘conciliateurs’ and ‘éradicateurs’ within the regime – between those who apparently sought compromise and dialogue with the Islamic opposition and those, supported by secular political parties, who rejected any idea of dialogue – a false one. In the final analysis, neither side was really prepared to compromise the regime’s hegemony of power for the sake of a negotiated political solution. This was, of course, the factor that also ensured that violence was the ultimate test of political power – and the reason why there is still no solution. The leadership has had its own internal organisational problems, largely reflecting the contested position of Rabah Kebir as its official spokesman. He had been appointed to this position in 1993, after a FIS exile conference in Tirana but was supposed to act within a collegiate structure that was subordinate to the clandestine leadership still in Algeria – a situation which replicated the powerstructure of the FLN during the war of independence. This he completely failed to do, acting unilaterally on many occasions, as for example when he met an American ambassador without party agreement, congratulated the Algerian president, Liamine Zeroual, after his election or, later, independently of the party, supported the AIS’s unilateral truce. This came to a head in late 1994, when Kebir appointed the hay‘a, a committee of 12 persons to act as the legitimising body of the FIS in exile. The personal tensions within this body led to two members leaving it on the grounds that Rabah Kebir was not prepared to operate in a collegiate fashion – Ahmed Zaoui and Anouar Haddam. In the wake of their departure, Rabah Kebir issued a statement to the effect that ‘two members of the committee had left for “another organisation”’ – a statement which was immediately interpreted at the time as meaning that they had joined the GIA although, in reality, the reference was to the creation of an alternative leadership for the FIS abroad. This was just the time when the GIA was gathering in other former FIS leaders and clandestine groups, just before it began systematically to eliminate them the following year, including two major FIS figures, Mohamed Said and Abderrazak Rejam. Anouar Haddam, as a result, was detained in the United States on the grounds that he was now engaged in a terrorist organisation, whilst Ahmed Zaoui was viewed by the Belgian authorities in the same light. In December 2002, he was detained in New Zealand on an international arrest warrant issued by the Algerian government which has condemned him to death in absentia on the basis of erroneous information from Belgium. It is interesting to note that, today, nine of Rabah Kebir’s supporters on the hay‘a have now left the committee and only three remain. They, together with Rabah Kebir himself, refused to consider attending the September 2002 congress at which his past behaviour led to his dismissal as the FIS official spokesman. 139

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In essence, the potential for political violence in Algeria has not been reduced by the decade-long civil war. Its specific driver was the failure of the Algerian state to sustain its legitimacy as the embodiment of Algerian popular aspirations in the wake of the war for independence. Violence became, in short, the only mechanism by which the dispute between the state and those who contested its legitimacy over that legacy could be resolved. Yet, in so far as the state itself had been conceived through violence and terrorism – the FLN had not hesitated to use violent coercion in constructing the movement that actually won the war of independence – both sides in this new struggle adopted the weapons of the past. Thus the kind of extreme violence and fanaticism that has characterised the recent civil war was enshrined in the struggle for independence and replicated when violence became the only means to solve the core political dispute over legitimacy, even if it was also justified by manipulating neo-Salafi doctrine to authorise terrorist violence against the population on the grounds of its mass apostasy. This was the other discourse that was introduced into the struggle by the nature of the clandestine opposition to the state. In so far as the GIA, in particular, adopted an extremist form of Islamist argument justifying the destruction of opposition to its ideas, the process of extreme, fanatical violence was also superficially legitimised, despite its discord with the fundamental principles of orthodox Islam. Yet this was not simply a doctrinal issue but one also influenced by Algeria’s specific historical experience, for the arguments used by the GIA profoundly distorted the original neo-Salafi discourse.45 Even within the clandestine Islamic opposition in Algeria, the GIA’s extremism was considered unacceptable, even if similar techniques might on occasion have been used during the war for independence, hence the growth of the GSPC. Nor can the potential role of the Algerian security services in infiltrating the GIA be underestimated, given the circumstantial evidence of death-squads masquerading as Islamic extremists that has emerged in recent years, as well as suggestions that much GIA activity was actually directed by the DRS. In short, all these developments must be seen against the other crucial social and historical factor, the traditional role of violence inside Algerian society, as described by Luiz Martinez. The informal legitimisation of violence as a path to wealth and power that forms part of pre-colonial tradition and that has been replicated in the transformation of trabando networks into smuggling and protection rackets often legitimising their illegality by appeal to an Islamist rhetoric are an essential background to the violence and fanaticism of the past decade. Their activities are a sad reflection of the failures of effective state formation in Algeria and the persistence of informal alternatives that replace the legitimate monopolisation of violence by properly constituted states with violent coercion. Thus this discourse becomes the tacitly accepted and acceptable way in which political relations are articulated in times of crisis. Until an effective and legitimate state is constructed in Algeria, there will be no reason for this to change and the outlook will be grim.

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Notes 1 The FLN has always claimed that at least one million Algerians died but most scholars today would concur with Benjamin Stora in setting total losses at 500,000; Stora, 2001, 111. 2 Indeed, Roberts argues that this coup was inevitable precisely because of the way in which the revolution had evolved for, in reality, military power gained hegemonic control over political authority which was then consigned to a civilian political arena that was ancillary to military activity; Roberts, 1998, 22–4. 3 For a personal account, see Yousfi, 1992, 85–93. 4 Adamson, 1988, 87. 5 It had been the ‘ulama’ in the Association des Oulémas Musulmans Algériens that had been formed in 1931 under the leadership of Shaykh Abdelhamid Ben Badis who first suggested the slogan ‘Islam is our religion. Algeria is our country. Arabic is our language’, thus identifying three important principles subsequently absorbed into the ideology of the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale – the body that led and organised the struggle for independence); Ageron, 1991, 94–5. 6 Cited in Horne, 1977, 49. 7 Appiah, 1992, 236, quoted in Adamson, 1998, 86. 8 The explicitly socialist role in the ideology of the future Algerian state was decreed in the Tripoli programme, drawn up jointly by M’Hammed Yazid, Abdelmalek Temam, Mohamed Harbi, Redha Malek, Mustafa Lacheraf and Mohamed Benyahia, although, as Harbi points out, they each had different concepts of what ‘socialism’ might mean. 9 Alongside the FLN as the embodiment of the revolutionary struggle, the most important ones were the Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN), particularly its Etat Major, the six autonomous wilaya guerrilla forces, the Conseil National de la Révolution Algérienne (CNRA) and the GPRA. 10 ‘Proces-Verbal du Congrès de la Soummam’, in Harbi, 1981, 160–7. 11 See Chaliard and Minces, 1972, 23–4; Ruedy, 1992, 190–4. 12 In that the revolution, the basic constitutive act of the Algerian state, was carried out ‘par le Peuple et pour le Peuple’ (Article 3 of the 1963 constitution); Roberts, 1998, 22–3. 13 Stone, 1997, 58–101. 14 It won a crushing victory, gaining control of 856 of Algeria’s 1,541 municipal councils and 31 of 48 provincial assemblies. It gained 55 per cent of the vote, completely humiliating the FLN, which gained only 32 per cent of the vote and won control of 487 municipal councils and 14 provincial assemblies. It also soon began to make radical changes in local administration that increased its popularity, including providing cheap food and provisions through the new ‘Islamic souks’. 15 For a detailed history of the FIS, see Willis, 1996. 16 The CIPU report for Algeria (2000) suggests that the correct figure is 20,000 but the Ligue Algérienne pour la Défense des Droits de l’Homme, which is organised by the highly-respected human rights lawyer, Ali Yahia Abdennour, argues that the true figure is double this total. The confirmed figure, notified to the Algerian authorities is 7,200 cases, of which 4,000 are in the Algiers area alone. 17 The amnesty lasted from 13 June 1999 until 13 January 2000. All of the AIS submitted and the Algerian authorities claimed that up to 5,500 persons submitted in total. Other resources, however, argue that the true figure was closer to 1,500–2,000. In October 2002, the Algerian army claimed that 6,000 persons had submitted under a previous amnesty law and only 386 persons under the civil concord legislation, although the Algerian president did grant a separate amnesty to the AIS on 11 January, 2000 and subsequently released up to 5,000 political prisoners.

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18 For comments on the nature of the security response to Islamic violence over the past decade, see: Abboud, 2002; Yous, 2000 and Bedjaoui, et al., 1999. 19 The ‘Patriote’ militias were created in the mid-1990s as a paramilitary adjunct to the security forces and placed under local authority control. In 1998 there were 5,000 such groups and 52 private security forces as well (Rapport de la Délégation du Parlement Européen, May 2001). As such, they have also become on occasion the shock troops of local notables exploiting their new-found power for personal advantage and benefit. 20 General Khaled Nezzar was defence minister in the last Chadli Bendjedid government and responsible for dismissing the president in January 1992 as he masterminded the coup and was one of those that set up the post-coup regime. General Belkhai was interior minister and, after the assassination of President Mohamed Boudiaf in June 1992, was forced into retirement. General Mohamed Lamari was the army commander and wielded much of the real power in Algeria. General Smain Lamari is in charge of military security and is very close to General Mohamed Mediène. General Mohamed Touati is seen as the intellectual of the regime and is currently military adviser to the president. Access to this group comes through the Taman System–Berber system of representation of individual, sectional and lineage interests within the central village or tribal council, the arch. A good analysis of earlier groups is Abboud, 2002. 21 In addition to the ubiquitous military security system, now known as the Direction de Renseignements et de Sécurité (DRS), which is absolutely unaccountable to any recognised authority and is the real ‘heart of darkness’ of the regime, there is also the general military security service under General Smain Lamari, who is no relation to the former army commander. 22 Bouteflika was the preferred candidate of the generals and had been Algerian foreign minister for 14 years, between 1965 and 1979. Although Liamine Zeroual had promised that the elections for his successor would be ‘free and fair’, they were marked by massive fraud organised by the army and the regime. As a result, six of the seven presidential candidates stood down the night before the election and only 23 per cent of the electorate turned out to vote. Bouteflika obtained less than half the vote and has thus been elected by less than 10 per cent of the electorate. 23 See the analysis by Willis, 1998. 24 See Volpi, 2003. 25 See E.G.H. Joffé, ‘The Islamist threat to Egypt’, in Chapman, 1996. 26 Despite a century of proselytism, there had only been around 1,000 converts in Algeria itself, even though French citizenship was available on conversion because of the application of French personal status laws which did not recognise ‘Muslim’ as a religious status. Algerian Jews, under the Décret Crémieux, were entitled to automatic French citizenship; Berque, 1967, 221. 27 There is growing evidence that the responsibility for this event lay with the military security services of the regime, the DRS. Ahmed Zitouni, the third leader of the GIA, is suspected of being a security service plant and of having undertaken actions to discredit the Islamist movement overall, such as the murder of the monks at Tibherine. See Bedjaoui, et al., 1999. 28 The textual justification for this is drawn from the fourteenth century ‘alim, Ibn Tayymiya, who argued that the Mongols could not be considered true Muslims because, although they had converted to Islam, they did not observe the full corpus of Islamic Shar‘ia law. In other words, to be a Muslim, one had to accept the complete corpus of belief – and language. 29 See Roberts, 1998. 30 See Willis, 1998. 31 The Djazar‘ists, whose most important leader was the late Shaykh Sahnoun and most of whose members were part of the Algerian intellectual and professional élite, argued

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32 33

34 35

36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

fundamentally that Algerian society would have to mend its own faults before effective Islamic politics would be possible. It therefore initially opposed the proposal for a specifically political movement. Its membership formed the core of the Rabita and Shaykh Sahnoun, for example, never joined the FIS although many Rabita members did once the FIS was formed. Until then, the army’s role had been to guarantee the Algerian revolution – a commitment that had allowed it effectively to usurp the governmental process, particularly under the Boumediènne presidency. Cherif Gousmi is particularly remembered for his role in justifying the abuse of women by the Islamist opposition. This is, in fact, one of the areas of Islamist behaviour that has caused the greatest tension inside Algerian society and has ensured ongoing strife. The justification for such behaviour, which is otherwise alien to Sunni practice, is that GIA members face death through jihad and are therefore entitled to sexual satisfaction, provided it is conducted in due form – through temporary marriage. See B. Izel, J.S. Wafa and W. Isaac, ‘What is the GIA?’, in Bedjaoui, et al., 1999. According to army reports on 8 February 2002, Antar Zouabri and two companions were killed in a house in Boufares. His replacement is Rachid Okapi, known as ‘Abu Tourab’, and the decease of his predecessor has not, in any case, diminished the determination of the GIA, although its activities have diminished in 2003. Apostasy is considered a sin in Islam, with only the possibility of conversion under compulsion being allowed for, since this is assumed not to involve true conversion. Repentance is possible, however, but a second act of apostasy is irredeemable; Sheriff, 1985, 84, 95. See the discussion of Maududi’s ideas in Peters, 1996, 107–8. The others are the Hanafi, Malaki and Shafi schools. There is a fifth, the Ja‘fari which is specific only to Shi’a Islam. Ijtihad is the use of independent reasoning to respond to a particular situation but within the confines of recognised and accepted Islamic doctrine. See the analysis given in Faraj, 2000, 24–35. Martinez, 2000. The proposals were never enacted into law and the issue is still a critical one in Algeria today. Agricultural land is now to be leased, not sold, despite pressures for its privatisation, particularly from the IMF. Nord-Sud Export 420, 11 May 2001. See Joffe, 2002. El Watan 13 September 2003. See Bozzo, 1997.

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9 FANATICS, MOBS AND TERRORISTS The dynamics of Orange parades in Northern Ireland Dominic Bryan

The police struggle to contain loyalist violence and rioting by both sides and have to deal with the fanatics of the Continuity and the Real IRA: within the last week, the security forces stopped republican dissidents planning a 150lb bomb.1 What deal is possible for Israel with fanatics who seeks the destruction of the Israeli state by means of their own deaths.2 Representatives of the minority Muslim community threatened to use force to stop a temple to the god-king Ram being built on the site of the Babri Mosque, which was torn down by a mob of Hindu fanatics in 1992.3 There seems no end in sight to ETA’s ‘armed struggle’, short of Madrid caving in to its demands for independence. Last Saturday’s Correspondent on the BBC shone new light on ETA’s violent resurgence and its fanatical faith to a cause most Europeans regard as at best quaint and at worst dangerously utopian.4 A senior RUC officer has watched C company’s [UDA] trajectory from skinheads to sectarian assassins: ‘The community on the Shankill is reaping what they sow. These boys were once just an ordinary gang of thugs who were then elevated into defenders of the people. Now they are turning on their own people. They are not just motivated by drugs, that’s facile. Intelligent drug dealers don’t draw attention to themselves by going to armed displays and starting feuds with the UVF. These people are fanatical loyalists who want the war to start again.’5

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The events in New York on 11 September 2001 have changed the political makeup of the world. Not because the use of suicide bombers is anything new; far from it. Muslim ‘extremists’ in 1983 detonated a bomb in Beirut killing themselves along with 241 American and 58 French soldiers, Hezbollah used suicide bombs in Lebanon in the 1980s, Hamas used them between 1994 and 1996 in Israel and the West Bank as did the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Turkey between 1995 and 1999 and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka. In 1998, suicide bombs that killed nearly 300 civilians also seem to have been used at the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.6 Suicide bombers are not new. The fundamental reason that events on 11 September 2001 changed the political make-up of the world is because they created ideological space for simplistic categorisations of divisions in the world and the resulting conflict. Most obviously it allowed a claim that there are ‘terrorists’ who use illegitimate violence and there are those who are against ‘terrorism’ and who use legitimate violence. The terrorist is frequently described as a fanatic. The definitions of a fanatic often revolve around religion, suggesting someone highly motivated by a particular belief system, as is shown by the following definitions: A person affected by excessive enthusiasm, particularly on religious subjects; one who indulges wild and extravagant notions of religion. Fanatics are governed rather by imagination than by judgment. Pertaining to, or indicating, fanaticism; extravagant in opinions; ultra; unreasonable; excessively enthusiastic, especially on religious subjects; as, fanatic zeal; fanatic notions. Marked by excessive enthusiasm and often-intense uncritical devotion.7 To be a fanatic suggests more than being obsessive, something many ordinary people are guilty of. To be a fanatic suggests that people are so driven as to be a danger to themselves and those around them. Yet there seems to be a strange contradiction in the idea of fanaticism. Under the definitions commonly used, the fanatic is neither deranged nor psychologically ill. The activities of a fanatic are ones that appear to be made out of choice, out of free will. This is true even though a suicide bomber might suggest that s/he has no choice; that s/he is doing God’s work. The person described as a fanatic seems to take the values of their society or belief system to the extreme. In spite of this, the media are also keen to see fanatical perpetrators of violent outrages as ‘mad’. Thus, the fanatic is both crazed and rational at the same time. Clearly, we can study the use of the term fanatic in the context of discourses on politics. But is it a useful sociological category? Does it have any explanatory potential? Or, as this chapter will suggest, does it tell us more about the people who are using the term? Does it suggest a lack in our own understanding of the activities we describe as fanatical? This chapter examines a group of ordinary people in the United Kingdom whose behaviour appears fanatical. While India has its dispute over the temple at Ayodia, and Jerusalem the clash over the Temple of 145

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the Mount, in Britain and Ireland there is Drumcree Church. Since 1995, the dispute over the right of Protestant Orangemen to return from their church service through Catholic housing estates sitting astride the Garvaghy Road has probably directly cost six lives, cost at least £150 million pounds in policing, required major changes to legislation, led to three Parliamentary enquiries and three publicly funded enquiries and forced many people in Northern Ireland to change the way they organise their lives in the summer of each year. Anyone visiting Belfast in the second week in July will now find it a virtual ghost town. Is Northern Ireland in July the place to look for fanatics? One of the more noticeable aspects to the conflict in Ireland between Irish nationalists, demanding the island of Ireland be united into a Republic and British unionists, loyal to the United Kingdom and the Crown, has been that violence takes place during particular periods of time. Furthermore, different forms of violence can be distinguished at different times. These forms vary between organised military and paramilitary violence conducted both by groups and by the State, crowd violence that arises from parades and demonstrations, the gathering of large numbers of people, to violence conducted against churches and other important symbolic buildings and monuments. The different forms of violence can reach intense levels and then dissipate or perhaps lead to other forms of violence. It is clear, for example, if we look over the last 200 years, that the summer months have become the focus for violence. This has some relationship to the symbolic and ritual events surrounding parades, particularly the parades of the Protestant Orange Order. The relationship is not simple as there have been long periods when levels of violence have been low, and places where Orange parades have never led to violent confrontations. However, this form of public ritual behaviour has constantly provided an arena for intense violent confrontations.8 On Sunday 8 July 1995, in Portadown, County Armagh, the RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary) decided that because protesters, made up from a residents’ group from the predominantly Catholic estates that straddle the Garvaghy Road, were blocking the route they would stop brethren of the Orange Order and re-route them. The district master of No.1 district of the Orange Order in Portadown, Harold Gracey, made the instant decision that they would not move until they were allowed through. News quickly spread to the 50,000 Orangemen and many thousands more of their supporters who started to gather on the fields around the church at Drumcree. The police brought up reinforcements and a stand-off developed. That evening there were violent clashes between supporters of the order and the police. The following Monday evening attacks had already started on the police when the Reverend Ian Paisley MP who, incidentally, the broadly unionist Belfast Telegraph evening newspaper once described as ‘the Mad Mullah’ (12 July 1966), stood on a platform erected behind the church and spoke to the crowd: We are here tonight because we have to establish the right of Protestant people to march down the Garvaghy Road and our brethren of the Orange Institution to exercise their right to attend their place of worship and leave 146

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that place of worship and return to their homes. That is the issue that we are dealing with tonight and it is a very serious issue because it lies at the heart and foundation of our heritage. It lies at the very heart and foundation of our individual spiritual life and it lies at the very foundation of the future of our family and of the Province that we love. If we cannot go to our place of worship and we cannot walk back from that place of worship then all that the Reformation brought to us and all that the martyrs died for and all that our forefathers gave their lives for is lost to us forever. So there can be no turning back. It is easy to say that but that demands that every one of us is prepared to make the necessary sacrifice. And there’s a sacrifice to be made by us all and if we don’t make that sacrifice our cause will be lost. And if it is lost in Portadown, it is lost, our cause, our country and our future, brethren is gone from us and we better remember that tonight. [. . .] The first thing we must know this and let no one forget it, if we don’t win this battle, all is lost. So it is a matter of life and death. It’s a matter of Ulster or the Irish Republic.9 In a passionate speech, Paisley did ask people not to break the law but he also warned that ‘the police are going to be pressurised over the Twelfth of July right across the Province’.10 As Paisley was speaking, more people headed down towards the police lines and the levels of violence increased. Later, Paisley tried to intervene but the police came under concerted attack. The following day a mediated agreement allowed the Orangemen to take their preferred route down the Garvaghy Road. Minutes later local MP, David Trimble, and Ian Paisley walked through jubilant supporters in the streets of Portadown, hand-in-hand in victory. The events of 1995 were just a taste of what was to come. The following year on 7 July the stand-off was repeated. This time Orangemen gathered at the fields in smaller numbers, while organising parades all over Northern Ireland and blocking many roads. Violence erupted at the interfaces between Protestant and Catholic areas in Belfast. The seaports and for a time the international airport in Antrim were closed by protesting Orangemen. People were stopped from reaching hospitals and essential services. It became clear that even the massive resources of the RUC and British Army were stretched, as is illustrated by the pictures of a few British soldiers pathetically trying to keep crowds apart on the Ormeau Road by holding their hands up, like King Canute trying to stop the tide. At Drumcree, there were confrontations every night and hooded paramilitaries created roadblocks at points around Portadown. On the evening of 7 July, a Catholic taxi driver was shot dead by the loyalist paramilitary group the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). On the 9 and 10 July, a thousand extra troops were flown into Northern Ireland. By the 10 July, 90 civilians and 50 police officers had been hurt, the police firing 662 plastic baton rounds. By the morning of 11 July, Chief Constable Hugh Annesley had had enough and was forced to reverse his decision. The parade went down the Garvaghy Road as police battled to keep protestors off the road. Violence flared 147

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in nationalist areas and in Londonderry (Derry) a man was killed when a British Army armoured car hit him. Not only have the years that followed not delivered a resolution, but no one has even successfully persuaded the Portadown Orangemen to meet with the residents’ group. In 1997, the parade was forced down the road but from 1998 the Parades Commission, created the previous year under new legislation, re-routed, and effectively banned, the parade from the Garvaghy Road. This time the security forces were prepared, erecting huge barriers at Drumcree, digging ditches and filling them with water and putting rows of barbed wire across fields right around the Garvaghy Road area. In the days preceding, ten Catholic churches in different parts of Northern Ireland had been attacked. At the stand-off, violence increased night after night. On the third night young loyalists were seen scaling the huge barrier and taking part in hand-to-hand fighting with police officers. Few who were present will ever forget the scenes at night: a medievalstyle encampment on one side and futuristic ranks of riot police, attired like Robocop, on the other. One film buff said it was Barry Lyndon meets Apocalypse Now. . . . In my presence, a protester who was not wearing an Orange sash informed a member of the RUC across the Drumcree Canal, as the moat dug beside the barricade became known, that he would ‘cut the throats of his wife and children’. At the barricade itself, thugs taunted soldiers with indecent homophobic jeers and suggestions.11 Parades, roadblocks and violence started all over Northern Ireland. On the evening of 11 July 1998, during a protest in Ballymoney in north Antrim, a house was attacked with petrol bombs. Three young brothers, Richard, Jason and Mark Quinn, burnt to death. There remain many rumours that the attack had other motivations than simply sectarian fanaticism but in the context of the Drumcree stand-off that is how it was understood. It had the effect of forcing mainstream unionists and Orangemen to scale down the protests. Most Orangemen pride themselves as being respectable and law-abiding citizens. Even they were struggling to maintain this in the face of such an act. In the years that have followed, the Parades Commission has continued to re-route the Drumcree parade. In theory at least, the original protest, from 1998, is still taking place. District Master Harold Gracey moved a caravan on to the site and took up residence. In practice, there are no Orangemen in the field during the week. However, a protest parade has been held every Sunday since July 1998. The protest following the annual Drumcree parade has developed a familiar pattern. On the Sunday of the church parade, large crowds gather on the hill. As night falls, violent attacks take place on the security forces. As the violence increases, support for the protest decreases. In essence, the protest loses respectability. What became most obvious in 2000 was that paramilitary involvement was increasing. Johnny ‘Mad Dog’ Adair appeared at Drumcree with other members of the loyalist paramilitary group the UDA (Ulster Defence Association) and was then filmed at 148

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an event held by the LVF (Loyalist Volunteer Force) which had broken away from the UVF. A few nights later, shots were fired at the security forces at Drumcree. On the day of the Drumcree parade, District Master Harold Gracey made a point of suggesting that everyone was welcome at the protest. This was taken to mean that paramilitaries would not be turned away. The people who were conspicuous by their absence were senior Ulster Unionists. David Trimble, so prominent in 1995 and 1996, has not turned up since. These changes allowed the newspapers to create an exaggerated picture of what was happening to Orangeism: Having literally been hijacked by thugs, the organisation normally associated with staging symbolic parades by more than 1,500 lodges, can no longer claim to represent the Protestant middle ground. Overnight, Orangeism has been transformed into a paramilitary force, its image now synonymous with violence. In the popular mind, the reins of power have been seized by terrorist factions who are pursuing their own evil agendas.12 So are we dealing with fanatics? No one is stopping Orangemen from having their church service, or even returning from church. They are being stopped from a particular route but not stopped from parading. During the year, there will be dozens of parades in Portadown. This author’s first experience of the stand-off at Drumcree in 1995 will live with him for the rest of his life. He stood with Orangemen and watched ‘the battle’ unfold. Cheers went up when a police officer was stranded in the field and set upon by a group of young men. The officer struggled to get back to the safety of the lines of retreating RUC officers and lost his helmet in the process. And yet at least one of the Orangemen with the author had been a part-time police officer. These were people claiming loyalty to the Crown attacking the Royal Ulster Constabulary. At another point, a group of Orangemen and their supporters attempted to outflank the police and reach the Garvaghy Road. Quite what would have happened had the police lines been broken will never be known. Would the police or army have opened fire on loyalists? Would loyalists have rampaged through the estates around the Garvaghy Road? In the heated atmosphere that evening, anything was possible. A friend of the author’s recounted the bizarre end to the Orangemen’s attack when a quick-witted police officer fired a baton round at one of the cows in the field and started a stampede which sent the loyalists running back over the field. At one point, the radio reported that the Orangemen were to be allowed through. People started dancing around the field. As is so often the case in these situations, this was just a rumour. In spite of having spent the previous five years studying the Orange Order, the author found it difficult to comprehend what he was watching. Phrases like mad and fanatical went through his mind just as they cross the headlines of the papers. What was taking place seemed to be ‘extravagant in opinions; ultra; unreasonable; excessively enthusiastic, especially on religious subjects’. Yet whilst the press 149

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could dismiss some of the actions as those of thugs, the author knew the people taking part to be ‘respectable’, reasonable. The answers to what were taking place did not lie in outing those individuals taking part as in some way not normal or mad. Indeed, they seemed to be driven by a belief in certain values strongly held within their community. These were not people peripheral to a community but at the heart of it. Explanations for this particular form of conflict are not found in demonising the participants but in understanding the context in which the events are taking place. Here, there are three factors that must be considered. First, Orange parades play a central symbolic role in the identity of unionists in Ulster and many (though by no means all) in the Protestant community. They are central to identity politics in Northern Ireland. An apparent attack upon a parade, particularly a church parade, is understood in a much broader sense than simply as an issue of freedom of assembly. It is easily constructed by unionist politicians as a further attack upon a British, Protestant way of life by Irish republicans and the Catholic Church. Since the Garvaghy Road residents’ coalition was organised by a republican ex-prisoner and a Jesuit priest this ideological construction was obvious. It did not require a great speaker like Ian Paisley to make these points, although few could have made them more effectively. There is, of course, a mass of evidence exploring the strength of ethnic and national identification for driving extremely violent actions.13 Moreover, in the case of both republicans and loyalists in Northern Ireland, they ideologically present themselves as the victim even whilst taking part in violent attacks upon the other. Second, what makes identification to the parade so strong is that it is viewed as ‘traditional’. A parade is a type of ritual that gives the impression of defying time, of linking the past with the present.14 It is the moment that an Orangeman gets to wear ‘the Sash my father wore’. There is plenty of evidence which shows that the parades have been constantly changing, adapting to new political and sociological circumstances, but that they are understood by participants to be unchanging. 15 They are viewed as a way of unifying the Protestant community of the past with that of the present. Third, and most obviously, the parades take place within the context of the communities in Northern Ireland displaying a great sense of ethnic territory. Urban and rural areas are marked and understood as being Catholic/nationalist or Protestant/unionist. The Garvaghy Road area of Portadown is perceived as a nationalist territory in a town that, after Londonderry (Derry), is probably the most important in unionist perceptions of history. Portadown was the site of a massacre of Protestants in 1641 and the Orange Order was founded in the town of Loughgall, down the road, in 1795. Portadown is the most Orange of Protestant towns. The Drumcree Church parade is believed to date back to 1807. Place and space is imbued with history and this is marked out in territory. Historically, parades have played a central role in defining public space. If an Orangeman is restricted from walking ‘the Queen’s highway’ in Portadown then, people like Ian Paisley argue, the control of the whole of Ulster appears under threat. 150

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These factors give some ideological background to why the issue of walking the Garvaghy Road offers the circumstances for such violent protest. However, it is not only the ideological status of the event that provides the dynamics of what is taking place but also the nature of ritual itself and the shifts of power within the event. Anthropologists have explored the role of rituals in politics.16 Individuals taking part in a ritual, subject themselves to rules – to the authority of the ritual. There are effectively rules with sanctions attached that give certain individuals some power over others. Ritual forms are therefore ways of institutionalising power. Whilst each ritual has ‘rules’, each ritual event is unique and actors within it can change the course of the event by breaking the rules or redefining the ritual within the rules.17 As mentioned above, the power and control of the event reveals itself in a claim to ‘tradition’. A traditional ritual is important because it offers those involved in it the opportunity to legitimise their political position. In the case of Orange parades, this means claiming the legitimacy of defending Orangeism and, therefore, it is believed, Protestantism. Through much of the 1950s and 1960s, this was unproblematic for the Orange Order. A unionist landed and business élite controlled both the Orange institution and the government of Northern Ireland. More radical and fundamentalist outsiders such as Ian Paisley could effectively be excluded. Ian Paisley left the Orange Order in 1962 after a dispute with senior Orangemen. He later accused certain Orange chaplains as having a ‘Romeward’ trend in their philosophy.18 But from the mid-1960s, hegemonic control within unionism, both institutionally in the form of the Ulster Unionist Party, but also ideologically, started to collapse. The Orange Order, which had previously presided over broad unity, now had to deal with increasing fissures with unionism as a more moderate form of Ulster unionism appeared under Prime Minster Terrance O’Neill in response to the civil rights movement’s challenge to the established order. Violence ensued from 1969 and the Orange institution was torn between ‘respectable’ support for the state, in effect a status quo that no longer existed, and the demand from hard-line members that it conduct the defence of Northern Ireland against violent Irish republicanism. And therein has been the problem for the Orange Order ever since. A diverse Protestant community became matched by divided unionism ranging from those supporting cross-community politics and a civic vision of Northern Ireland to the fundamentalist politics of Paisley and sectarian violence of loyalist paramilitaries. Evidence from the Life and Times Survey suggests increasing disillusionment among Protestants with the present political situation, and conversely increasing Catholic confidence.19 Ignoring positive developments in processes such as the Belfast Agreement, Protestants prefer to focus discussion on the rising Catholic population and the inevitability of a united Ireland. Even those in the Ulster Unionist Party supporting the Belfast Agreement concentrate on what they appear to be losing. The issue of parades has clearly influenced the sense of defeat that a relatively large number of Protestants feel. The Orange institution has officially opposed any form of paramilitary violence 151

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and claimed to support the police and law and order. Yet since the 1970s Orange lodges increasingly marched with ‘Blood and Thunder’ bands carrying paramilitary flags. These working-class bands are independent of the Orange Order and most of their members are not Orangemen.20 During the 1980s, the police became less willing to give access to increasingly more assertive parades and confrontations.21 The parades, formerly events of state, were now finding themselves in opposition to the police. In addition, the large events had become contested. Different forms of unionism struggle to take political legitimacy from what was taking place whilst large ‘Blood and Thunder’ bands introduced the symbolic language of paramilitarism into the parades. In short, the parades became a contested site within Ulster unionism. Because the Orange parade – representing popular Orangeism – combines a heady mixture of politics, religion, communal gathering, and cultural tradition, it also provides a vehicle for the wide range of unionism, Protestantism and loyalism. Within this social and political environment, control over the parades by mainstream unionism has been lost. And, finally, not only do the parades, with their appeal to a broad section of unionism, provide a ritual site of legitimacy through which more extreme and hard-line loyalists can actively work but the actual physical activity of gathering large numbers of people together provides a physical site. The dynamics of crowds gathering together and the relationship of the crowd to the social identities of those making up the crowd offer insights as to why flashpoints of moments of violence take place.22 People do not become irrational within the crowd; rather they make some very rational decisions within the context of a series of collective identities and senses of belonging.23 While members of the Orange Order organise protests that create a sense of unity, they are unable to control what takes place. Disillusionment with the political situation, divisions within unionism, discourses that mix religious and political struggle, poor relations with the police and an organised, confident and articulate Irish nationalism, provide the environment within which those that others might describe as ‘fanatics’ thrive. To describe an act of violence as the act of a fanatic is to disguise our understanding of what has taken place. It acts in the same way as the word ‘mob’ has been used in references to the crowd. The activities of a ‘mob’ and a ‘fanatic’ are both understood as purposive. A mob is driven by a loss of rationality or by ‘a mind’ lost to the apparent psychology of the crowd or a particular ideology. The ‘fanatic’ on the other hand is credited with rationality but loses her/himself in the internal rationale of a particular ideology. Both ‘the mob’ and ‘the fanatic’ threaten the social order and are depicted as unacceptable. When used in popular discourse, they are usually part of a political project which avoids attempting to understand why a particular act has taken place. They do not demand enquiry into the context of the activities but rather demand action by authorities. To understand the acts that have taken place they should be viewed in the terms and contexts in which they were undertaken. Stanley Tambiah has explored collective violence in South Asia, trying to examine why people can become involved in murder and destruction. Whilst he draws heavily upon notions of crowd 152

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consciousness from theorists such as Le Bon, he is nevertheless able to begin to understand why certain acts take place. Some of these have striking resonance for understanding the violence in Northern Ireland. The following is a quote from Seth Mydans in the New York Times dated 29 July 1987: The rioting began in the early morning when thousands of political supporters of the former Prime Minister, Sirima Bandaranaike, carrying small black plastic flags, joined 150 monks in Orange robes who sat in the shade of a sacred Bo Tree near the market place. The men with black flags stopped passing buses and forced their passengers to join them. Speaking into a hand held microphone, the monks urged the crowd to protect the nation from division and warned of an eventual takeover by India. As the monks spoke, the police suddenly opened fire with small canisters of tear gas, and the day’s running battle began.24 Tambiah suggests ways in which identity politics interacts with crowd violence, the way rumours are used and how the activities of the crowd are ideologically constructed, but in particular he looks at what takes place as ‘purposive action’.25 Among others, David Waddington has looked at crowds and demonstrations in the UK, going even further in highlighting the agency of individuals in crowd situations and arguing that it is possible to understand violence as rational action.26 On 20 November 2003 suicide bombers attacked the British Consulate and the offices of the HSBC bank in Istanbul killing 27 people. British prime minister, Tony Blair, at a joint press conference with US president, George Bush, remarked on the activity of fanatics: Yesterday, as some of you will have heard, the President of the United States delivered a powerful telling speech extolling the virtues of freedom, justice, democracy and the rule of law, not just for some people but for all the peoples of our world. Today the fanatics of terror showed themselves to be callous, brutal murderers of the innocent, and the contrast could not be more stark. There may be some who think that Britain would gain from standing back from this struggle, even some who believe that we, and the United States, and our allies have somehow brought this upon ourselves. Let us be very clear. America did not attack al Qu’eda on 11 September, al Qu’eda attacked America, and in doing so attacked not just America, but the way of life of all people who believe in tolerance, and freedom, justice and peace.27 The British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, described the perpetrator as ‘fanatics, full of hatred’.28 These comments were made when little is know of who organised the attacks in Turkey, their connection to al Qa’ida or the relationship of the attacks to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and its subsequent occupation. The assumption is simply that their activities ‘oppose freedom’, as defined by President Bush.29 153

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Northern Ireland since the late 1960s has been the site of many actions that can easily be viewed as ‘fanatical’, the activities of ‘mobs’, of ‘animals’ and of ‘terrorists’. Yet so many aspects of crowd activity – especially violent behaviour and apparent religious and political zeal – derive from forms of human behaviour found in everyday society. In particular, identity politics in the form of ethnonationalist demands reveals itself to be a powerful motivator. However, it is only in particular circumstances that those activities come to be described as ‘fanatical’. Suicide bombers are apparently fanatical; soldiers who went over-the-top at the battle of the Somme in 1916 are not seen as fanatical, even though they were facing almost certain death. Indeed, to be more provocative, could we describe all soldiers willing to die for their country as rather fanatical? Are they not ‘marked by excessive enthusiasm and often-intense uncritical devotion?’ This chapter has attempted to offer possible ways of understanding behaviour that, to many, appears fanatical. When witnessing the behaviour of Orangemen or loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, it is easy to succumb to the view that these actions are irrational or mad or fanatical. Similarly, the activities of Irish republicans can be viewed in the same way. But to resort to such descriptions leads us no nearer to understanding the actions of people who are not clinically ill. To describe someone as a fanatic says more about our own lack of understanding of what is taking place and our need to dismiss fanatical violent actions as aberrant behaviour. An exaggerated sense of community values can drive people to fanaticism but to use the term fanaticism tends to suggest that no further understanding of that behaviour is really required. Just as football hooligans are described as ‘animals’ or the suicide bomber described as ‘mad’, the description of the fanatic forms part of discourse that exists within our society to dismiss, or ‘out’, violent activities which we do not want to view as deriving from our ‘normal’ social world. The concept of the fanatic is not sociologically useful as a description of behaviour. It is, however, sociologically interesting when we look at what form of behaviour we choose to describe as fanatical. This tells us as much about ourselves as it does about the action being described.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Ruth Dudley Edwards, Daily Mail, 24 October 2001. Kevin Myers, The Irish Times, 7 December 2001. The Irish Times, 9 January 2001. Henry McDonald, Observer, 24 December 2000. Henry McDonald, Observer, 27 August 2000. Sprinzak, 2000, 66. http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=fanatic. See Jarman, 1997; Bryan, 2000; Farrell, 2000; Hirst, 2002. Fieldnotes. Fieldnotes. Deaglán de Bréadún, The Irish Times, 13 July 1998. Irish Examiner, 13 July 2000.

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13 See, for example, Tambiah, 1996; Ignatieff, 1998; Kaufman, 2001. 14 See Connerton, 1989, 41–71; E. Tonkin and D. Bryan, ‘Political Ritual: Temporality and Tradition’, in Boholm, 1997, 14–36; Jarman, 1997. 15 See Bryan, ‘Orange Parades’, in Fraser, 2000. 16 See Kertzer, 1988; Bloch, 1986; Tambiah, 1996, 221–43; Bryan, ‘Orange Parades’, 11–28 for an overview. 17 Humphrey and Laidlaw, 1994. 18 Moloney and Pollak, 1986, 51–5. 19 http://www.ark.ac.uk/nilt/. 20 N. Jarman, ‘For God and Ulster: Blood and Thunder Bands and Loyalist Political Culture’, in Fraser, 2000, 158–172. 21 Jarman and Bryan, 1996. 22 Waddington, 1992. 23 Reicher, 1996, 535–53. 24 See Tambiah, 1996, 272–3. 25 Ibid., 216–17. 26 Waddington, et al., 1989. 27 http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page4871.asp. 28 http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page4871.asp. 29 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3225508.stm.

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10 RELIGIOUS AND NATIONALIST FANATICISM The case of Hamas Meir Litvak

The Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Harakat al-Muqawama alIslamiyya), known by its acronym Hamas, is a clear case of ideological fanaticism as far as its perception of the Middle Eastern conflict, demonisation of the enemy, its aspired end-goal and the means to achieve it are concerned. These are manifested in its commitment and advocacy totally to destroy the state of Israel by armed struggle and in the eschatological significance it gives to the eventual extermination of the Jews in addition to the glorification of martyrdom among its own fighters. Concurrently, due to political and military constraints under which it operates, Hamas is occasionally obliged to follow a somewhat more pragmatic policy, while making it clear that these tactical considerations by no mean undermine its maximalist strategic goals. Hamas was established in December 1987, at the beginning of the Palestinian uprising (Intifada) against Israel, as the military wing of the Muslim Brothers’ (MB) movement in Gaza. Ever since their emergence in Egypt in 1928, the Muslim Brothers called for the revival and rejuvenation of Islam, for return of the Muslim masses to Islam and for a more activist and politicised version of religion. The means to achieve these goals were religious propagation (da‘wa) and the mobilisation of the Muslim masses for religio-political activity through a network of social and welfare institutions which the movement had set up. Thanks to this combination of grass-roots activism and ideology, the Muslim Brothers have become the most important popular religious movement in the modern Middle East with branches in most Arab countries. The Muslim Brothers had always advocated an uncompromising stance against Zionism and the Jews. They solicited funds and aid to the 1936–9 Palestinian rebellion, and sent volunteers to help the Arab war effort in 1948. Following the 1948 Arab defeat by Israel, the Muslim Brothers viewed the loss of Palestine as a major symptom of the broader malaise of the Muslim world. Consequently, while they advocated the eventual destruction of Israel, they maintained that the spiritual preparation of the Muslim masses through the return to Islam was the essential 156

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precondition for any confrontation with Zionism. Once that was achieved, they were certain that the Arabs and Muslims would defeat Israel and Zionism and regain all of Palestine. The move to military activism by the Palestinian Muslim Brothers, which broke away from the past Muslim Brothers’ approach, was largely in response to pressures by younger, more radical activists, and of the fear that unless the movement took part in the struggle against Israel, it would be marginalised by the mainstream Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in the future Palestinian state that was believed to be in the offing. Significantly, all other Muslim Brothers’ movements in the Arab world have accepted and given their blessing to this new policy. By establishing Hamas as a distinct organisation, the Muslim Brothers hoped to avoid possible Israeli retaliation against their network of social and religious institutions employed for the propagation (da‘wa) of their Islamic message.1 Within a few months after its establishment, Hamas published its major ideological and canonical text, the Hamas Charter (mithaq). In the subsequent months and years a stream of other publications expanded the movement’s ideological message. With the passing of time, Hamas emerged as a distinct core military and political wing that subordinated the previously central da‘wa apparatus of the Muslim Brothers. Unlike the MB organisations in other Arab countries that were engaged in the propagation of the Islamic religious message in their societies and in political activity vis-à-vis Arab governments, Hamas was both a religious and national movement fighting a foreign enemy and operating in competition with other Palestinian nationalist organisations. Whereas Hamas’ views on the need to reinstate Islamic law and morality were not original but part and parcel of a broader Islamic resurgence in the Middle East, it was in its capacity as a national movement – whose ideology was suffused with religious symbols and values – that ideological fanaticism emerged. It is when religion endows nationalism with a Manichaean view of the world and with absolutist, or what is perceived to be divine, justification that fanaticism can thrive. This fanaticism was probably enhanced by the increasing frustration of Palestinians in general, and of the Islamists in particular, that emerged from the ongoing clash with Israeli rule. The religious idiom has always played an important role in the evolution of Palestinian nationalism and in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In the past, however, it was mostly the nationalist Palestinian élites – the notables during the British Mandate and the Fatah movement since the early 1960s – that employed Islamic symbols and themes in order to mobilise popular support for the national cause, whose aims were largely political and secular.2 Various Arab rulers have also used Islam as an instrument for their policies in the conflict. The rise of political Islam in the Middle East and particularly within the Palestinian national movement, presents a change from past patterns, as Hamas is primarily a religious movement whose nationalist world view is shaped by its religious ideology. In addition, the religious perspective as articulated by Hamas contributes to the perception of the conflict in uncompromising totally dichotomous terms, and thereby provides the motivation for resorting to extreme measures of struggle. 157

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Another possible cause for extremism is the perceived threat to Palestinian Muslim culture or social mores as a result of excessive exposure to the more secular and Western-oriented Israeli society, or to Western cultural influences in view of the greater presence and involvement of Western organisations in that country. While foreigners may marvel at the fact that the Palestinians were among the most Westernised Arabs, for Hamas such developments seemed a threat rather than a blessing.3 Consequently, there has been marked consistency in the ideology of Hamas during its 15 years of existence in its perception of the conflict, in its demonisation of the enemy, that is, Zionism, Israel and the Jews, in glorification of holy war (jihad) and martyrdom (shahada), and in advocating an extreme endgoal of the conflict. Furthermore, a clear radicalisation is discernable in the resort to extreme measures of warfare, culminating in suicide bombing against the civilian population. Concurrently, as a political movement, which aspires to lead the Palestinian people and eventually supplant the PLO and the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the Palestinian territories, Hamas occasionally had to prefer short-term political considerations over its long-term strategic goals. It avoided a full-head confrontation with the PA forces fearing it would be crushed militarily, and it was often attuned to popular moods and the level of support for its military activities. Consequently, it was willing temporarily to restrain its activities due to short-term political considerations, while preparing itself for new rounds of struggle and without conceding its long-term and maximalist strategy of eliminating Israel and eventually the Jews.4 The first pillar of Hamas’ ideology is the emphasis on the ‘Islamic essence’ of the Palestinian cause (Islamiyat al-qadiyya al-Filastiniyya) and of the PalestinianIsraeli conflict. Hamas, therefore, criticises the PLO for portraying the conflict as one between Palestinian nationalism and Zionism, as misconstruing the problem and the way to its solution. Like other Islamic movements, Hamas traces the roots of the tragedies and defeats that have befallen the Muslims in general and the Palestinians in particular in the modern age to the abandonment of Islam and the turning towards ‘the idols’ of westernisation. Reflecting this deep-seated predicament, the Hamas charter states: The Islamic Resistance Movement found itself at a time when Islam has disappeared from life. Thus rules shook, concepts were upset, values changed and evil people took control, oppression and darkness prevailed, cowards became like tigers: homelands were usurped, people were scattered and were caused to wander all over the world, the state of justice disappeared and the state of falsehood replaced it.5 The religious essence of the conflict means that it is first and foremost a ‘war of religion and faith’, between Islam and Judaism and between Muslims and Jews, rather than one between Palestinians and Israelis or Zionists. The Jews ‘made their religion their nation and state’, Hamas activists Mahmud al-Zahar explained, 158

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and they have ‘declared war on Islam’. As such, the struggle is portrayed as an unbridgeable dichotomy between two absolutes. It is a historical, religious, cultural and existential conflict between faith and unbelief, between ‘truth and falsehood’, between the true religion which supersedes all previous religions, i.e. Islam, and the abrogated superseded religion, Judaism. It is a war between good personified by the Muslims who represent the party of God (Hizballah) against ‘evil incarnated . . . the party of Satan’ (hizb al-shaytan) represented by the Jews. Consequently, it is an ‘existential battle and not just a dispute over borders’ (ma‘rakat wujud wa-la hudud).6 In this view, the struggle revolves around the Islamic – rather than Arab or merely Palestinian – identity of Palestine, something that the Jews seek to obliterate. Likewise Israel, the Jews and the various international organisations which serve as a cover for them, strive to eliminate or at the least denigrate Islam. Thus, the charter claims that the Jews seek to destroy al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site for Muslims, and build in its place their ‘so-called’ temple. As proof of the Jewish hostility and intentions against Islam, Hamas reminds all Muslims that when the Israeli soldiers captured Temple Mount in Jerusalem during the 1967 War, they supposedly declared: ‘Muhammad is dead, and his descendants are all women.’(Muhammad mat wa-khalafa banat), thereby denigrating his manhood.7 The alleged threat to al-Aqsa has proven to be a highly successful rallying point for popular mobilisation of the Palestinian masses throughout the Palestinian-Israeli conflict starting from the 1929 riots to the September 2000 confrontation that was therefore named Intifadat al-Aqsa (the Aqsa uprising).8 Unlike the non-Islamist Palestinian groups, Hamas makes no distinction between Judaism and Zionism, and uses Zionists and Jews synonymously and interchangeably. Judaism is a ‘religion that stipulates racism and hostility towards others in its books and incites to usurp unjustly Palestine under the slogan of the Holy Land’. Zionism, according to this view, simply transforms these Jewish ideas into reality. Only rarely does Hamas distinguish those Jews that are actively opposed to the Jewish occupation of any part of Palestine from the Zionists, but without sparing them from the fate of all other Jews at the conclusion of the conflict. Thus in pictures and caricatures describing Israelis or Zionists, Hamas often shows ultra-orthodox Jews with their traditional East European dress even though such ultra-Orthodox Jews originally had been non-Zionists, thereby fusing both categories. The usage of such pictures also points to the assimilation of European anti-Jewish stereotypes and their application to Israelis.9 Equally important, Hamas regards the struggle against Israel as part of a broader religious war waged between Islam and Western civilisation: the latest and most fateful phase of the relentless onslaught waged by Western imperialism and culture against Islam since the time of the Crusades. Because of their support for Zionism, both the capitalist West and the Communist East were regarded as one entity in this context. Thus, Hamas officials denounced the American attack on Afghanistan following the 11 September 2001 attack and the oppression of the Muslims in Kashmir as part of an overall Western offensive against Islam carried out in the 159

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service of Zionism, to finish the task that Zionism had failed to do.10 In addition, Hamas publications portray the Jews as instruments of the West or, alternatively, as the power that controls and manipulates the West. The United States, for instance, was described as a servant of Israel and as seeking to subjugate the Arabs according to the Jewish plan.11 Every conflict involves justification of the self and the demonisation of rivals and enemies, or in Hamas’ case the Jews as the ‘enemies of God and of humanity’. Such an accusation, in the words of Bernard Lewis, applies to all enemies of Islam since, if according to the Koran the fighters in the war for Islam are fighting in a holy war ‘in the path of God’ and for God, then their opponents are fighting against God and are, therefore, His enemies.12 However, such depiction is used more forcefully and more often against the Jews in view of their explicit castigation by the Koran. Thus, citing Surat Al-‘Imran (the Family of ‘Imran, verses 109–11), the Hamas Charter explains that the Jews ‘suffer, because they disbelieved the signs of Allah, and slew the prophets unjustly; this, because they were rebellious, and transgressed’. Nor did the Jews ‘spare any effort to develop plans and plots to destroy human life since God’s anger came upon them’.13 The portrayal of the Jews as powerful arch-enemies and conspirators against Islam departs from traditional Islamic depictions of the Jews that are associated with cowardice, degradation and wretchedness. It has become a central element in Hamas’ ideology and an important theme in the writings of all Islamist movements in the Middle East as part of a broader need to explain the current crisis of the Muslim world. It is particularly difficult within this context to explain Jewish or Zionist success vis-à-vis the Muslims since, according to Islamic tradition, the Jews were destined to humiliation and subjugation to Muslims after they had rejected the message of the Prophet. It is one thing for Muslims to be defeated by a superpower such as the United States, or to be subjected to non-Muslim rule in India, and a completely different situation to be defeated and ruled by the Jews, who had been an inferior minority in the past under the Muslim empire, and who are a small minority in the modern Middle East. The only way to explain this cognitive dissonance is to magnify the power and evil of the Jews, and thereby help to explain Muslim weakness.14 The modern anti-Jewish animosity of Islamic movements goes much further than Islamic tradition. Although Muslims have always viewed Islam as a superior religion, superseding Judaism, they did not consider Judaism as a heresy which required eradication as long as it did not challenge Islam’s rule. Historically, Muslims regarded Christianity as a greater threat than Judaism, and devoted greater attention to it in their polemical literature.15 However, due to the conflict with Israel, Judaism rather than Christianity has become the prime enemy for the Islamist organisations, drawing inspiration from anti-Jewish utterances in the Koran and from modern European anti-Semitism.16 A good example of this type of vilification is the Hamas Charter, which provides a picture of the Jews and Judaism which is based on the notorious anti-Semitic tract, the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’. Article 22, for instance, describes the 160

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Jews as controlling the world media with their money and as having established secret organisations throughout the world – such as the Freemasons and Rotary Club – ‘for the destruction of societies and the fulfilment of the goals of Zionism’. The Jews have ‘caused revolutions all over the world’, from France in 1789 to Russia in 1917 ‘in order to fulfil their goal’. Likewise, ‘with their money, they seized control of the imperialist powers and pushed them to subdue many countries in order to squeeze their resources and spread their corruption’. The Jews are also said to hold important positions all over the world which they use to promote the Zionist cause. Thus, many Jewish professors, it is argued, are working in Western universities in order to dominate them. The same is true for the world of the media, which explains why foreign books and newspapers are ‘generally subservient to the Jewish position’.17 Almost every issue of the Hamas organ, Filastin al-Muslima (FM) contains articles enumerating the evil deeds and character of the Jews based on an analysis and exegetes of specific suras (chapters) from the Koran. Salah al-Khalidi, who wrote many of these articles, interpreted Surat al-Baqara (the Cow chapter), to cite one case, as seeking to ‘explain the secret of their perversion, to warn the Muslims against them’, and to ‘awaken the Muslims to confront and fight’ the Jews.18 In many of its publications Hamas employs harsh derogatory descriptions of the Jews, often taken from the Koran, such as ‘blood suckers’, ‘brothers of apes’, ‘killers of the prophets’, ‘human pigs’, ‘warmongers’, ‘the descendants of treachery and deceit’, ‘butchers.’ They are a ‘cancer expanding’ in the land of Palestine, ‘threatening the entire Islamic world’. They are ‘spreading corruption’ in the land of Islam. ‘Deceit and usury are stamped in their nature’, and they are all ‘thieves, monopolists, usurers’. The reason for their crimes is their attitude towards the others as ‘goyim’ (gentiles) – i.e., as animals.19 Hamas also accuses the Jews of fomenting wars: ‘there is no war going on anywhere, without them [the Jews] having their finger in it’. They ‘were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state’. Indeed, it was the Jews, in this view, who instigated the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council to enable them to rule the world through these organisations.20 Of special significance are the wars which the Jews have waged against Islam from the time of the Prophet. Accordingly, the Jews opposed the Prophet from the moment he arrived in Medina, in a desperate effort to prevent the spread of Islam, rejecting his generous offers and distorting his message. They tried to harm the Islamic umma (nation) and dominate it, because it was the ‘new international force bringing an authentic civilising and godly program to mankind’.21 These assertions are intended to show that the present conflict with Israel is the direct continuation of these past struggles. Thus, according to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz al-Rantisi, Hamas’ leader in Gaza killed by Israel in April 2004, the Jews are practising today the same tactics they had used against the Prophet Muhammad, 161

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unjustly shedding the blood of the Palestinians, just as they had wrongfully shed the blood of the (Biblical) prophets in the past.22 More recently, Hamas writers explain that when the Ottoman Sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid II (r. 1876–1908) rejected the Jewish offers to salvage his country financially in return for permitting Zionist activity in Palestine, the Jews instigated the 1908 revolution in the Ottoman Empire. They carried it out through members of the Crypto-Jewish Dönme sect who infiltrated the Committee of Union and Progress (Young Turks) movement that toppled the Sultan, the last truly devout Muslim ruler.23 Even worse, the Jews initiated the outbreak of the First World War, which led to one of the greatest calamities that had befallen the Muslims in the modern period: the destruction of the Ottoman empire, the last great Muslim empire, and the abolition of the caliphate, the symbol of Islamic political and religious unity. The war also enabled the Jews to secure the Balfour declaration from the British government supporting a Jewish national home in Palestine, while, at the same time, the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire into mini-states (duwaylat) prevented the Muslims and Arabs from confronting the Zionists.24 The accusations against the Jews contain a paradox: on the one hand, Hamas claims that the Jews are not a people at all, as they lack any objective attributes of nationhood. Rather, they are an amalgam of totally disparate groups with nothing in common among them except their religion. On the other hand, the movement contradicts itself by insisting that Jews throughout the world share the same eternal characteristics and aspirations, and that they strove to attain their goals throughout the centuries under a unified leadership. Among the most extreme accusations made by Hamas against the Jews and Zionists are those equating them with the Nazis and the denial of the Holocaust. Hamas argues that Israel’s actions exceed those of the Nazis, and that ‘the Jews represent Nazism in its most criminal form’.25 Yet, following the Stockholm conference on the Jewish Holocaust, held in late January 2000, Hamas put out a statement on its official website asserting that the conference had A clear Zionist goal, aimed at forging history by hiding the truth about the so-called Holocaust, which is an alleged and invented story with no basis. . . . The invention of these grand illusions of an alleged crime that never occurred, ignoring the millions of dead European victims of Nazism during the war, clearly reveals the racist Zionist face, which believes in the superiority of the Jewish race over the rest of the nations. This attempt to focus on an ‘alleged story’, Hamas charged, ignores the suffering of Palestinians and disregards the massacres committed by the Zionists against them. Hamas urged all ‘the free scholars of the world’ to ‘expose the crimes of global Zionism’ against the Palestinians and not to fear ‘the Jews and their ideological terrorism’ through which ‘they shut mouths and prevent objective, unbiased scholars from revealing the Zionist claims as lies’.26 Rantisi went further by denying the Holocaust, while accusing the Zionists of 162

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collusion with the Nazis and describing them as worse than the Nazis. He praised various ‘thinkers and historians’ such as Roger Garaudy, Gerd Honsik and David Irving – all accused of being Holocaust deniers – who had ‘exposed the fallacy’ of the Holocaust and who were duly persecuted by the Zionists. Concurrently, he maintained that ‘the Zionists were behind the Nazis’ murder of many Jews,’ with the aim of intimidating and forcing them to immigrate to Palestine. But afterwards, they ‘organized great propaganda campaigns, to cash in on their blood’. Furthermore, he claimed that the Nazis ‘received tremendous financial aid from the Zionist banks and monopolies’, prior to their seizure of power and that ‘this great financial aid helped the Nazis build the military and economic force it needed to destroy Europe and annihilate millions’. ‘When we compare the Zionists to the Nazis’, Rantisi concluded, ‘we insult the Nazis – despite the abhorrent terror they carried out, which we cannot but condemn. For Hamas, the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis against humanity pale into insignificance when compared to the Zionists’ terror against the Palestinian people’.27 The second major pillar of Hamas ideology is the sanctification of Palestine as a holy Islamic land and as an inalienable religious endowment. This assertion is based on several elements, the most important of which is God’s choice of al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem as the place for the ascension of the Prophet Muhammad to heaven (al-Isra’ wal-Mi‘raj) and as the first qibla (direction of prayer) for the Muslims. The sanctity of al-Aqsa, ‘the pearl of Palestine’ and of Jerusalem is extended to Palestine as a whole, which is repeatedly called the ‘land of al-Isra’ and Mi‘raj’. The Isra’ and Mi‘raj, Hamas maintains, distinguishes Palestine from all other Islamic lands and made it the inheritance of all Muslims. God has chosen al-Aqsa Mosque for Muhammad’s ascension to heaven ‘in order to tie this blessed land to the Prophet’. In no other capital city in the world, states a Hamas handbill, ‘did an event like the Isra’ and wal-Mi‘raj take place except in Jerusalem, so that it would be the sister of Mecca and Medina in history, so that the Muslims will know that abandoning Jerusalem is tantamount to abandoning Mecca and Medina’.28 The combination of this concept with the belief in an unbridgeable religious struggle leads to the inevitable conclusion that any negotiation with the enemy is a ‘concession of principle, and granting recognition to murderers and usurpers on rights which are not theirs over land in which they had not been born’. Neither the Palestinians nor the Arabs, neither the present generation nor any generation in the future, Hamas claims, have the right to give up even an inch of land or to accept an alien entity in Palestine, since that would mean giving up part of their religion. Recognising the ‘false Jewish entity’, a ‘document for history’ addressed to the Fatah movement stated, is tantamount to a ‘betrayal of God, his messenger and of the faith’. All ‘so-called peaceful solutions’, it adds, are illusions and a waste of time, and are merely an additional way for the infidels to impose themselves over the believers.29 Hamas rejected the arguments raised by various Palestinians and Arabs on the need for a compromise with Israel based on ‘so-called realistic’ reasoning. Musa Abu Marzuq, a member of Hamas’ political bureau, chided those Arab leaders who 163

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signed peace agreements with Israel for failing to understand that once Israel gets the chance it will attack those countries and will attempt, once again, to occupy their lands. The Palestinians chose resistance since ‘real peace can only be obtained through the annihilation of Israel’.30 In a similar vein, Khalid Mash‘al, head of Hamas’ political bureau, explained that the Palestinians had the right to every inch of the Palestinian land, be it the Gaza Strip, the West Bank or the lands occupied in 1948, without Jews having any right to it. Since Israel was an invader, it was inevitably doomed, as it was not possible for any government to survive through aggression. He rejected as insignificant Israel’s survival for more than 50 years saying that ‘many colonialist empires’ had emerged through aggression and oppression against the rights of different nations, but were eventually vanished. The Crusaders survived in Palestine for 200 years, he pointed out, but eventually their ‘invasion came to an end and our nations regained their lands and their rights’. Israel was not an exception to this rule, and its existence, too, would come to an end. Elsewhere, he added, since Jews had several citizenships and came from various countries, they should return to their home countries.31 Ibrahim al-Muqadima, a senior Hamas activist in Gaza (killed by Israeli forces in February 2003), attacked those Palestinians who were willing to settle for a state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as defeatists. He rejected their contention that the balance of power favoured Israel, insisting that the Palestinian struggle aimed precisely at changing this situation, in accordance with God’s words in the Koran that God does not change people unless they transform themselves. He rejected as naïve and impractical the suggestion that acceptance of a state in part of Palestine would enable the Palestinians to continue their struggle thereafter. In such a case, he said, Israel and the United States would insist on concrete guarantees to protect Israel’s security and the whole world would support Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians since it would appear as defending itself against so-called Palestinian terror. Giving up part of Palestine, he warned, would serve as a precedent that would encourage Israel to seize more Arab territory to realise its dream of a Jewish state ‘from the Nile to the Euphrates’. The Palestinian struggle for complete liberation was based on historical rights and the rights of future generations who would never understand nor forgive the present generation if it gave up their rights. The Muslim nation was alive and resourceful, and once it would reawaken neither Israel nor anyone else would be able to challenge it, he concluded.32 Hamas did offer an alternative to the Jews, insisting that the only option for real peace was for them is to surrender and agree to live as a protected minority under benevolent Islamic rule. ‘Peace and quiet would not be possible’, it warns, ‘except under the rule of Islam’. It is the duty of the followers of other religions, it adds, to stop disputing the sovereignty of Islam in this region, because if non-Muslims should ever take over the region there will be nothing but carnage, displacement and terror. Islam, on the other hand, confers upon everyone his legitimate rights.33 For Hamas, since the Jews obstinately rejected its generous offer, instead choosing to wage war on the Muslims, the only possible option facing the Palestinians 164

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and other Muslims was holy war (jihad) against them. Moreover, since the Jews have usurped a Muslim land, the jihad against them is a defensive one, and is transformed from a collective duty (fard kifaya), which any number of Muslims can fulfil for the entire community, into a personal duty (wajb ‘ayn) incumbent upon every able-bodied Muslim in the world. Hamas conceded that its own jihad was insufficient to defeat Israel in the near future and, therefore, described it as linked to three circles: the Palestinian, the Arab and the Islamic. Each of these has a role and an obligation to fulfil, and once Muslims approach jihad in this way, victory was assured.34 Hamas saw the 11 September 2001 attack on the United States and the subsequent American response in Afghanistan as vindication of its world view regarding the religious-political struggle between the Muslim world and the West, and as an example of America’s inherent hostility to Islam. The initial reactions by Hamas officials to the attack, particularly those given to Western audiences, stressed Hamas’ opposition to hurting innocent victims – adding, however, that the United States should also ask why it had provoked so much hatred. They agreed that killing American civilians was a crime, but expressed anger at the world’s silence for the alleged death of one million Iraqi children due to United States-led sanctions against Iraq or supposed Israeli massacres of Palestinians. Concurrently, some of the reactions to Arab audiences expressed some satisfaction that the ‘American giant’ was exposed in its weakness and stood ‘completely helpless’.35 Such discrepancy was not unique, as Hamas often conveyed more pleasant and appealing messages to foreigners and more straightforward ones to its own constituencies. Shortly afterwards Hamas officials shifted their criticism solely to the United States, blaming it for the hatred it elicited throughout the world. Rantisi charged the United States with oppressing and ‘looting the resources’ of the poor nations and with ‘rejecting their rights for sovereignty’. He explained that Usama bin Laden, who was behind the attack, turned against the United States because of American ‘hegemony on the resources of our Arab and Islamic nation’, and its support for Israel. He also repeated bin Laden’s threat that there would be no security in the West as long as both policies would continue.36 Concurrently, Rantisi, Shaykh Ahmad Yasin, the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas (killed by Israel in March 2004), and other spokespeople contended that Zionism was behind the 11 September attack, because Israel feared the growing influence of Muslims in the United States, and because Israel was the one state that ‘ended up gaining’ from it, in view of the enmity against Islam and the Muslims which it elicited. As a proof of Israel’s role, Hamas official Isma‘il Abu Shanab (killed by Israel in August 2003) reiterated the widespread allegation among Islamists circles that ‘4,000 Jews working in the World Trade Centre failed to report to their work on the day of the incident’, under instructions of the Israeli government.37 Hamas condemned the United States’ attack on Afghanistan as an unjustified offensive against Islam and the Muslims as a whole, warning the United States that it would have to confront the wrath of Hamas and all Muslims. Yasin interpreted 165

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President Bush’s phrase of a ‘crusade’ against terror as truly reflecting America’s basic hostility towards the Muslim peoples and its desire to impose its rule over them. Pointing to the crash of the United States space shuttle Columbia on 1 February 2003, Rantisi concluded that the United States would be destroyed like all the empires that had preceded it, as revenge by God.38 The Hamas-affiliated Society of Palestine Clerics (Rabitat ‘Ulama’ Filastin) issued a religious ruling describing American actions in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East as a war on Islam disguised as a war on terrorism. Being a war against God, the ruling stated, it was destined for defeat. The ruling declared the United States a terrorist state in view of its support for Israel, and prohibited any alliance or co-operation with it against any Muslim state being ‘one of the gravest crimes against God, and a betrayal of God and his Messenger’.39 Although Hamas denied any link with bin Laden’s al-Qa‘ida organisation, it showed increasing understanding, with the passage of time, of al-Qa‘ida’s animosity towards the United States, and even appreciation of its audacity. Thus FM did not publish articles openly condoning the attack on the United States, but increasingly showed sympathetic pictures of solidarity demonstrations with bin Laden all over the Muslim world. Likewise, when told that Israel equated him with bin Laden, Rantisi replied that it was ‘great honour for him’. In a somewhat different vein, ‘Atallah Abu al-Subh, a columnist for the Hamas weekly al-Risala, wrote a ‘public letter’ to ‘Anthrax’ following the deadly attack of anthrax letters in the United States during October 2001, expressing his admiration to Anthrax that ‘despite your wretchedness, you have sown horror in the heart of the lady of arrogance, of tyranny, of boastfulness’, the United States. 40 Thus, while Hamas apparently did not have operational links with al-Qa‘ida, it certainly did not have any moral or ideological reservations from its actions or from the use of biological warfare against the enemies of Islam. The idea of jihad and martyrdom for Islam has always been highly regarded by the Muslim Brethren. The major difference between the brethren and their political rivals was the relative importance of the various kinds of jihad – spiritual, social or military – as well as the right time and authority to declare one. As mentioned above, the shift toward military jihad, which was taken only after the outbreak of the Palestinian Intifada against Israel in 1987 represented a major departure from the traditional position of the Muslim Brethren.41 The most effective form of jihad, which Hamas practiced since 1994, was suicidal bomb attacks on (mostly) civilian targets in Israel. Such attacks were first employed in the Middle East by the Shiite Hezbollah organisation in Lebanon following the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and were later adopted by Palestinian and other Middle Eastern organisations.42 Scholars disagree as to the direct cause that prompted Hamas to launch suicide operations. Some, including Hamas spokespeople, point to the massacre of 29 Palestinians in Hebron on 25 February 1994 by a Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein, as the trigger. On the other hand, as early as 1992 a Hamas publication extolled suicide attacks, promising that they would be carried out once the technical capability was achieved. Moreover, the first suicide attack, albeit against a military 166

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target, took place on 16 April 1993, prior to the Oslo Accords and to the Hebron massacre. In other words, the ideological motivation had been built up for a long time through religious justification. It was given the push towards realisation as a result of political event, outside the movement’s control, the increasing sense of threat to the movement and its chances to pursue its ideological strategic goals from a successful implementation of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. What it needed was the acquisition of the operational capabilities and the trigger, the Hebron massacre, which would make such attacks popular in Palestinian public opinion.43 Hamas’ publications continuously extolled suicide attacks acts as the epitome of martyrdom (shahada’). Citing passages from the Koran, the hadith (Traditions of the Prophet), and from Muslim jurists, Hamas writers differentiated between ordinary suicides (intihar) and the martyrs (shahid pl. shuhada’) who died for the sake of God in the war against the infidels, stressing God’s love for them. Elaborate eulogies on each suicide bomber appeared in Hamas’ written and electronic publications, describing the operation in which the martyr was killed and the casualties he inflicted upon the enemy. Each eulogy cited the Koranic passages that those who sacrifice themselves for God are not really dead, but remain alive in heaven. More significantly, perhaps, Hamas’ children’s magazine, al-Fatih, carries in each issue the story of the life and death of such a shahid, and the will that he signed before his death. In most of these wills, the martyrs called upon their families and friends to rejoice at their coming martyrdom and for them to follow their example. Mothers of martyrs were quoted as expressing pride and joy at their son’s deeds. Pictures of the suicide bombers were distributed as posters, often with the passage that the act of martyrdom was actually the betrothal marriage of the martyr with the land of Palestine. Likewise, participants in Hamas rallies occasionally dressed their children in suicide bombers’ attire with simulated explosive belts strapped to their bodies, to demonstrate their readiness to sacrifice them for the struggle’s sake.44 Hamas’ spokespeople conceded that they could not stand up to Israel in a direct military confrontation and that the Palestinians suffered heavier casualties than the Israelis. They insisted, however, that the Palestinians had demonstrated greater perseverance and higher morale than the Israelis and, therefore, that they could sustain higher casualties. They criticised those who complained that such operations were tantamount to collective suicide of the Palestinian people, pointing to the successful struggle waged by Hezbollah in Lebanon, despite the heavy casualties of the Lebanese, which eventually forced Israel to withdraw unilaterally from Lebanon in 2000. Whereas the Israeli army in Lebanon collapsed, martyrdom operations enhanced the morale of the Palestinians, thus enabling them to continue their jihad.45 Moreover, Hamas officials boasted that, in addition to heavy economic losses, the suicide operations inflicted fear in the hearts of the ‘Zionist occupiers’, who were even afraid to come out of their houses. Their lives had been turned into ‘hell’, many wished to flee the country and, they claimed, more than a million Israelis 167

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had fled since 2000. As the martyrdom operations had shattered the Zionist ethos of establishing a safe haven for Jews, the Israelis began to question the future existence of their state. Taking pride in the heavy casualties inflicted on the Israelis, Hamas officials declared that martyrdom operations achieved strategic deterrence (tawazun ra‘b – literally ‘balance of fear’) against Israel, since Israel had no equivalent response. The Israelis ‘crave life’, Shaykh Yasin explained, ‘while we are not afraid of death. We seek death for the sake of God, and the day one of us dies for the sake of God is a day of joy for us.’46 Prior to the 2003 American-led war in Iraq, Rantisi called upon the Iraqi people to establish an army of suicide fighters to fight the coming invasion. He explained that the battle in Iraq was a test of wills between Muslims and their enemies. ‘In order to defend the homeland from the terrorist Crusader attack’, he claimed, there was a need to recruit people who ‘yearn for Paradise, and the shortest way to Paradise’ and God through death. ‘The enemies of Allah and the enemies of this people are cowards’, he stated, as they ‘crave life’. Moreover, martyrdom operations will terrify and demoralise them, thereby contributing to their defeat. We should see the ‘joyful and satisfied faces’ of the mothers in Iraq when they ‘part from the fruit of their loins, who go off to the realms of honor, the realms of martyrdom’, he concluded.47 Expressing these sentiments from the receiving end, the mother of one Hamas martyr stated in a newspaper interview: I am a compassionate mother to my children, and they are compassionate towards me and take care of me. Because I love my son, I encouraged him to die a martyr’s death for the sake of Allah . . . Jihad is a religious obligation incumbent upon us, and we must carry it out. I sacrificed Muhammad as part of my obligation.’48 The Palestinian jihad, according to Hamas, had wider political and religious ramifications besides the liberation of the homeland, which would influence the entire Muslim world. The failure of the Muslim nation to assist its brethren in Bosnia, Chechnya and other places all over the world, the Hamas author Mukhlis Barzaq warns, stems from its failure to regain Jerusalem and its defeat by ‘those destined to degradation and misery’. The nation will not be able to rise up and resolve any Islamic problem, he concluded, until it was able to ‘eliminate the cancer planted in its heart, Palestine’. Ending the jihad would demoralise the Muslim masses and would enhance the domination of the corrupt leaders over the oppressed people under the illusion of peace. Continuing the jihad, on the other hand, will encourage the Muslims to change the political status quo in their countries. In addition, based on past Muslims victories, the Hamas jihad would develop and enhance the military capabilities of the entire Muslim nation in its other struggles as well. Just as the Jews acquired modern weapons, so should the Muslims do the same and ‘thereby become masters of the world’ (emphasis added).49 More importantly, Hamas endowed the jihad against Israel with religious and spiritual qualities, declaring that it is fighting in order to defend the Muslim person, 168

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Islamic culture and Muslim holy sites, first and foremost among them al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. It seeks to establish the ‘state of Islam,’ and ‘hoist Allah’s flag’ over all of Palestine.50 The struggle against the Jews serves as a crucible and as a spiritual revolution that would restore the Palestinian people back to their Islamic identity. For Hamas, history, from the times of the Crusades, has shown that the Islamic nation unites only around Palestine. The loss of Palestine was the beginning of the nation’s collapse and disintegration, and the liberation of Palestine is a necessary precondition for its cultural revival and progress. Moreover, humanity everywhere, oppressed by American imperialism and Zionism, looks forward to the defeat of these forces as the first step toward its liberation. There is no future for this nation and this region, one Hamas writer concluded, except by liberating Palestine and by removing the Zionist state which constitutes the obstacle to Arab and Islamic revival.51 Moreover, Hamas has endowed the jihad against the Jews with eschatological significance. The messianic element is relegated to secondary importance in the ideology of modern-day Sunni movements, as they are much more interested in establishing Islamic states here and now. However, because Hamas’ main preoccupation is fighting a national-religious enemy, and possibly as a means to stave off calls for a compromise among the Palestinian masses, it resorts to messianic symbolism. Thus, the jihad against the Jews is a prerequisite for fulfilling God’s promise to establish His rule over the earth. Citing the tradition (hadith) of the Salt-bush, the Hamas Charter states that the final hour will not come until the day when the Muslims will fight the Jews and kill them.52 Lest the meaning of this passage remains unclear, Barzaq pointed to the fact that the Prophet had killed more Jews than any other infidels during his wars. The Prophet revealed in a ‘firmly established Tradition’ (hadith) how the Jews should be handled if they betray the Muslims, and he ordered his followers to carry it out without any feelings of sorrow for this ‘detested group’. He made it clear that the fate of the Jews should be ‘complete killing, total extermination and eradicating perdition (al-qatl al-tam wal-ibada al-kamila wal-fana’ al-mahiq)’. Perhaps equally significant, considering its intended readership, is the editorial in al-Fatih, Hamas’ children’s publication, appealing to the children of Iraq to pray to God and ask him ‘O God exterminate the Jews the tyrannical the usurpers’ (Allahuma, ahlik al-yahud al-zalimin al-mughtasibin).53 Like every ideological movement, Hamas faced the need to reconcile the discrepancies between pure ideology and political realities. Various Hamas activists acknowledged that the movement’s ultimate goals were unattainable in the foreseeable future, since Israel, enjoying the support of the Western world, was still too strong. In addition, acknowledging that the majority of Palestinians in the territories were tired after years of struggle, they supported at least a short-term political compromise with Israel. Nor could these activists ignore the wishes of their more conservative traditional middle-class followers who supported the idea of Islamising Palestinian society and of an Islamic Palestinian state, but were less committed to the notion of an all-out jihad. Under such circumstances, unnamed 169

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figures in Hamas admitted that a call for a prolonged and difficult jihad could appeal to, or be heeded by, only a select group of dedicated activists rather than the majority of the Palestinian population.54 Consequently, on various occasions since the 1993 signing of the IsraeliPalestinian Declaration of Principles (the Oslo Accords), Hamas leaders made a distinction between full-fledged peace (sulh) with the Jews, which they regarded as a crime, and a temporary armistice (hudna). It is lawful for the Muslims, they explained, to accept such an armistice if the enemy is powerful while the Muslims are weak and need time to prepare and recover their strength. Most jurists, Ahmad Yasin said, believe that such an armistice should not exceed 10 years, the period which the Prophet accepted in his agreement with the people of Mecca at Hudaybiya in CE 628. They were willing to accept such an armistice provided that Israel withdrew unconditionally back to the 1967 borders and gave the Palestinians absolute freedom to determine their fate and future. Yet they insisted that such a truce would not mean giving up Palestinian claim and rights for all of Palestine. A Palestinian state on part of Palestine was acceptable provided that it advanced the strategic goal of liberating all of Palestine.55 Hamas expressed confidence that, while the struggle against Israel might be difficult and prolonged, the Muslims’ victory was preordained by God. Thus, Imam (prayer leader) Khalid Tafish, a senior Hamas activist from Gaza, concluded that it was ‘written in the Koran, with no possibility of mistaking the interpretation’, that the ‘Jews must be destroyed twice in terrible wars’. The first one took place in ancient Babylon during Nebuchadnezzar’s war in 587 BCE, while the second was about to take place.56 In a chapter of his book, God’s Promise from Khaybar to Jerusalem, unambiguously entitled ‘The Jews Are Our Servants and Slaves and their Land Belongs to the Muslims’, Barzaq recounts the story of Muhammad’s victory over the Jews of the Khaybar oasis in Arabia as a lesson for present-day Muslims. Following his victory, the Prophet decreed that the Jews – men, women and children – as well as their possessions would became the property of the Muslims, who could dispose of them in whatever way they wanted. If such was the historical case, he explained, that a territory which had belonged to the Jews and for which they had fought had become Muslim, then it is even more obvious as far as the holy Islamic land of Palestine is concerned. It should serve as a lesson, he warns, never to allow the Jews to overturn God’s words and to rule over Muslims. Therefore, he assured his readers that victory over the Jews was a divine pledge to the Muslims, and its outcome will be ‘the total end of their existence’.57 Yasin himself expressed his confidence that Israel would disappear by the year 2027 with the passage of two-generational cycles since 1947, the UN partition of Palestine and in 1987 the outbreak of the Islamic Intifada. Mahmud al-Zahhar, another Hamas leader in Gaza, explained in September 2001 that the divine dictum would be achieved by temporal means, since within 30 years the Palestinians would become the majority in the land. Equally important, by that time the Arabs and Muslims would acquire weapons of mass destructions, such as chemical, biological 170

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and nuclear capabilities, which would undoubtedly be used against Israel once the Muslim world would reassert itself and join the struggle.58 The main argument of this paper is that the ideology and measures employed by Hamas do indeed place it within the category of fanaticism. The roots of this fanaticism stem from the conflation of ethnic nationalism and religious radicalism, which are reinforced by harsh political circumstances. This fanaticism is evident in Hamas’ articulation of the conflict in absolutist terms as a religious war between the parties of God and Satan, in its advocacy of an extremist solution – i.e., the destruction of the state of Israel – and in the glorification of suicide bombing or martyrdom operations as religious acts endowed with deep spiritual meaning. More importantly, there can be no other way to describe a movement which 60 years after the Second World War advocates repeatedly and in unequivocal terms the physical elimination of an entire people. These expressions of fanaticism by Hamas’ leadership and in the movement’s publications should not be dismissed as mere rhetoric, as they serve to inculcate a state of mind among the movement’s activists and followers as well as socialise a younger generation of Palestinians. And even if they were pure rhetoric, the willingness of young Palestinians to carry out suicide attacks is a significant indicator of the effect of this discourse. The horrors of the twentieth century have proved that too often fanaticism of the word leads to fanaticism of the deed. Movements and leaders who advocate and implement a fanatic ideology need not necessarily be devoid of any rational thinking. If rationalism refers to the synchronisation between means and goals, then heaven is a worthy reward for martyrdom operations and saving Islam is worth the price the Palestinians are paying in the struggle. Equally important, even leaders of fanatic movements can on occasion give priority to tactical needs or constraints if they believe that these would serve their long-term strategic goals. What matters is the long-term process and the balance between the two. Only time will tell whether Hamas will adhere to its rigid ideology, or whether broader developments in the Arab-Israeli conflict will eventually compel it to adopt a more flexible and less fanatic approach.

Notes 1 For general studies on Hamas, see Abu Amr, 1994; J.F. Legrain, ‘The Islamic Movement and the Intifada’, in Nasser and Heacock, 1990, 175–90; Ahmad, 1994. 2 For such uses, see Johnson, 1982. The case of Shaykh ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam, the preacher from Haifa, who was the first to resort to armed struggle against the Zionists and the British under the banner of a holy war is closer to a millenarian religious movement than to a secular movement using religion; see Johnson, Chapter two; Kupferschmidt, 1987, 187–9, 240–7; Porath, 1977, 265–7. 3 See Charles Liebman’s statement that it was precisely the breakdown of Jewish society in the modern period due to growing secularisation that weakened its capacity to check extremist impulses, 1983, 79. 4 For an analysis of Hamas’ occasionally pragmatic course of action, see Mishal and Sela, 2000. 5 Hamas Charter, article 9; http://www.palestinecenter.org/cpap/documents/charter.html.

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6 Ibrahim Quqa to al-Anba’ (Kuwayt), 8 October 1988; ‘Hiwar shamil ma‘a qiyadat Hamas’, ‘Filastin al-Muslima (FM)’ April 1990; ‘Shi‘arat harakat al-muqawama alIslamiyya Hamas’, Ila Filastin, February 1990; ‘Haqiqat sira‘ina ma‘a al-yahud’, Nida’ al-Aqsa, January 1989. 7 Hamas Charter, article 28; Hamas Handbill 65, October 1990. 8 On the use of the alleged threat to al-Aqsa in 1929, see Porath, 1977, 258–73. 9 FM, April 1990, 25–6. 10 Al-Jazeera TV, Doha, 8 October 2001 – BBC-Summary of World Broadcast (SWB); Palestinian Information Centre web site in Arabic, 15 November 2001. 11 Hamas Handbills 10, 24, 71, 72; ‘al-bayan al-thani lil-harakat al-islamiyya’, FM, March 1991. 12 Lewis, 1990, 47–60. 13 Hamas Charter, preamble; FM, November 1990, 52. For anti-Jewish expressions in the Koran, see also Surat al-Baqara (The Cow), verses 44, 55, 61, 70, 87 120, 247; Surat Al-‘Imran (family of Imran), verses, 74, 120; Surat al-Ma’ida (The Table), verses 13–14, 17, 41–5, 64, 67, 85, 112–15, 167; al-Anfal (Spoils of War) verses, 55–6. 14 For the spread of anti-Jewish sentiments in the Arab world, see Haim, 1955, 307–12; Lewis, 1986; Yadlin, 1989; Nettler, 1987. 15 Lewis, 1981, 33. 16 ‘Abd al-Fattah al-‘Uwaysi, Tasawwur al-ikhwan al-muslimin li-qadiyat Filastin (Cairo, n.d.), 25. 17 Hamas Charter, article 22; FM, January, April 1990. 18 Salah al-Khalidi, ‘Hadith surat al-Baqara ‘an al-yahud’ I, FM, July 1995; idem., ‘Kawashif Koraniyya lil-ghawamid al-yahudiyya’, I-II, FM, December 1993, January 1994. 19 See Handbills 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 14, 16, 30, 31, 32, 33, 65, 78, 87. The handbills are found in Mishal and Aharoni, 1994; al-Sawa‘id al-Ramiyya, May 1990; ‘Hadhihi akhlaqiyat bani Sahyun’, Sawt al-Aqsa, 15 November 1990. By contrast, some scholars in alAzhar, the leading Islamic institution in the Middle East, recommended the terms pigs and monkeys should not apply to present-day Jews, see http://www.alwatan.com.sa/daily/2003-03-14 cited in http://www.memri.org. 20 Hamas Charter, article 22. 21 FM, ‘Hiwar’, April 1990. 22 Rantisi, ‘Idha malaka al-sahayina quwa qatalu al-abriya li-tahqiq mukhattatihim alkhabith’ in http://www.rantisi.net. 23 ‘Madkhal ila al-qadiyya al-filastiniyya’, in http://www.palestine-info.com. The accusation relies on the fact that one of the CUP leaders, Tal‘at Pasha, apparently came from the Dönme sect, which had split from Judaism by the seventeenth century. In addition, the CUP themselves opposed Zionism. The story, however, elicited the conspiratorial imagination of others as well, see Kedourie, 1971, 89–104. 24 ‘Abd al-Hafiz ‘Alawi, ‘Nazarat tahliliyya fi al-waqi‘ al-‘arabi al-islami, 1: mazahir al-du‘f fi al-waqi‘ al-‘arabi al-islami wa-asbabiha’, FM, July 1994. 25 Hamas Charter, articles 20, 31. Other such statements include: ‘the Nazism of the Jews encompasses all of them’, ‘the Nazi Jews’, ‘Jewish Nazism’, ‘Nazi Zionism’, see, for example, Handbills 5, 6, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 25 and 65. 26 Paz, 2000. The original article appeared in Arabic in Hamas official website, http://www.Palestine-info.org, and was not translated to English, presumably because the editors realised it could harm Hamas’ reputation among non-Arabs. 27 Hamas’ weekly al-Risala (Gaza), 21 August 2003 28 Handbills 8, 10, 17, 37; Salah ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Khalidi, ‘Mustaqbal al-yahud fi Filastin kama tuhaddiduhu surat al-Isra’’, FM, September 1991. For further discussion of this issue, see Litvak 1996, 500–22.

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29 Hamas Charter, articles 11, 13; ‘Wathiqa lil-ta’rikh’, in FM, September 1989; Harakat al-muqawama al-Islamiyya Hamas: hadha huwa mawqifuna min al-taswiyya’, FM, July 1991; Handbills 8, 28, 30. 30 Abu Marzuq to Iranian TV Network 1, 28 October 2000, in Summary of World Broadcasts (SWB). 31 Hamshehri (Tehran), 23 December 2000; Der Spiegel, 5 November 2001, 139. 32 Ibrahim al-Muqadima, ‘Na‘m min al-bahr ila al-nahr’, in http://www.rantisi.net. See similar arguments by Ibrahim Abu al-Hija’, ‘La nakba li-sha‘ab yuqaddimu alshuhada’, in http://www.rantisi.net. 33 Hamas Charter, article 31. Islamic law guarantees security of life and property as well as religious freedom to those who surrender to its rule peacefully (sulhan). See similar statements by Hamas founder and leader, Ahmad Yasin, as well as others. See Liberation, al-Safir, 31 July in US Foreign Broadcasting Information Service Day Report (DR); Stern, 7 August (DR); al-Musawwar, 8 August; al-Dustur, 17 August; Jerusalem Post, 17 October 1997. 34 Hamas Charter, articles 14, 15; ‘Wathiqa lil-ta’rikh’, in FM, September 1989. 35 Rantisi to al-Quds (Jerusalem), 14 September and to Daily Telegraph, 24 September; Yasin to ABC (Madrid), 18 September; Abu Marzuq to AP, 28 September; ‘The American Earthquaque in September’, FM, October 2001. 36 Rantisi in al-Quds, 14 September, and to Al-Jazeera TV, 8 October 2001 (SWB). 37 Rantisi to Al-Jazeera TV, 8 October 2001 (SWB); Yasin to ABC (Madrid), 18 September 2001 (DR); Isma‘il Abu Shanab to Palestine Information Center 20 September 2001, in http://www.Palestine-info.com. Such claims of Jews masterminding the attacks are not rare in the Middle East as a whole, see ‘A New Anti-Semitic Myth in the Middle East Media: The September 11 Attacks Were Perpetrated by the Jews’, Memri Special Report 8, September 10, 2002 in www.memri.org. 38 Yasin to ABC (Madrid), 18 September 2001 (DR); Rantisi to Al-Jazeera TV, 8 October 2001 (SWB) and to FM, October; Palestine-info.com, 8, 11 October; Christian Science Monitor, 12 October; and FM, November 2001 which was mostly dedicated to condemnations of US policy; Rantisi, ‘Ya layta Amrika ta‘tabir wama azunnuha fa‘ilah’, 2 February 2003 in http://www.palestine-info.info/arabic/palestoday/readers/articles/rantese/2003/2-203.htm. 39 FM, October 2001. 40 Al-Majalla (London), 23–29 December; FM issues from November 2001 onward. Rantisi to al-Sinara (Nazareth), 13 June 2003; al-Risala, 1 November 2001. 41 On the Muslim Brethren’s concept of jihad, see Mitchell, 1969, 215–16; on the Palestinian Muslim Brethren position on jihad, see Cohen, 1982, 205. 42 During the years 1994–6 Hamas activists carried out several suicide attacks which led to the death of 107 Israeli citizens and the injury of dozens of others, see Litvak and Rekhess 1996, 146–9. During the more recent Palestinian-Israeli confrontation in 2000–3 more than 850 Israelis were killed in suicide attacks. 43 Kurz and Tal, 1997. 44 For a few among the many such articles, see Ibrahim al-‘Ali, ‘Learning from the Correct Tradition’, parts 1–3, FM, October–December 1995, October–November 2002. See eulogies in Hamas official website, www.palestine-info.com, as well as in al-Fatih 1 (September 2002) to 13 (September 2003). For the pictures, see FM 2000–2003. 45 Mash‘al to al-Majd (Amman), 15 January 2001; Rantisi to al-Sharq al-Awsat, 3 February 2001; Yasin to al-Dustur (Amman), 29 September and to FM, November 2001. 46 A. Muhammad Mustafa to Mashad Khorasan (Mashad), 22 August 2001; Maha ‘Abd

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47

48 49 50 51 52

al-Hadi in FM, September 2001; Anon, ‘Kata’ib al-Qassam tafrudu twazun al-ra‘b ‘ala al-‘adu al-sahyuni, FM, November 2001; Yasin and Zahhar to FM, November 2001. http://www.palestine-info.info/arabic/palestoday/readers/articles/rantese/30-1202.htm, 30 December 2002; www.Memri.org Special Dispatch 457, 9 January 2003. It is ironic that several Hamas leaders sent their own sons abroad during the 2000–3 confrontation, apparently to avoid sending them on suicide operations. The refusal of Rantisi’s wife to have her son recruited to such attacks, aroused indignation in Palestinian public opinion, see Ha’aretz, Itim, 1 August 2002; al-Hayat (London), 1 October, 2002; www.Memri.org: Special Dispatch 426, 8 October 2002. Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, 5 June 2002. It is totally irrelevant whether or not the mother truly believed in her statement or was forced to pronounce it. What matters is the message that Hamas wanted to convey. M. Barzaq, Al-wa‘d min khaybar ila al-quds’ (n.p., 2000) in Hamas’ official website http://www.palestine-info.com; I. Muqadima, ‘Na‘m min al-bahr ila al-nahr’, in http:// www.rantisi.net Al-Qadiyya al-filastiniyya bayna mithaqayn: al-mithaq al-watani al-filastini wamithaq harakat al-muqawama al-islamiyya Hamas (Kuwait, 1990); Hamas Charter, articles 6, 9, 15 and 33; ‘Wathiqa lil-ta’rikh’, FM, September 1989; Handbill 25. ‘Abd al-Hafiz ‘Alawi, ‘Filastin al-Thawabit’, FM, March 1995; Handbill 82. Hamas Charter, articles 13, 9 and 7; Handbill, 82. According to Islamic tradition the Jews will flee from the Muslims on that day and when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O ‘Abdullah (slave of God), there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree (saltbush) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.

53 Barzaq, Al-wa‘d min al-Khaybar’, Chapter 8; al-Fateh, 8 in www.al-fateh.net. 54. Ha’aretz, 12 November; 24, 31 December 1993; FM, January 1994. 55 Al-Wasat, 1 November 1993; Yasin to FM, March 1995; Yasin to al-Hayat al-Jadida, 4 January; Khalid Mash‘al to al-Majd, 15 January; Zahar to al-Dustur, 19 February; Yasin to al-Dustur, 29 September 2001. 56 La Stampa (Turin), 14 October 2000 (DR). 57 M. Barzaq, al-Wa‘d min al-Khaybar, Chapter 2 at http://www.Palestineinfo.com. The ‘supplications’ to God to exterminate the Jews and Christians are shared by many present-day Islamist spokesmen in the Middle East, so much so that the Kuwaiti minister of religious endowments, Ahmad Baqir, and deputy Saudi minister for religious affairs, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz al-‘Ammar, urged their cessation on http://www. islamonline.net/Arabic/news 30 April and 15 May 2002; al-Sharq al-Awsat, 29 December 2002. 58 Rekhess and M. Litvak, 1999, 203; Zahhar to FM, September 2001.

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189

INDEX

Abane, Ramdane 107 Abbas, Ferhat 117–8 Abboud, Hisham 137 ‘Abdallai, Khalifa 19, 23, 28 Abdu, Sheikh Muhammad 20, 125 Abu Hamed, battle of 29 Abu Sayyaf 104 Abyssinia 28 Action for the Rebirth of Corsica 106 Adair, Johnny 148–9 Adowa, battle of 28–9 Afghani, Djaafar al 132, 133 Afghani, Jamal al- 125, 129, 131 Ahl ad-Daw‘a 126 Ahmad, Muhammad 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 26, 28 Ahmed Jibril 103 Ait-Ahmed, Hocine 138 Algeria 5, 116–40; cultural revolution 119–21, 133–4; war with France 104, 107 Algerian Family Code 117 Algerian National Charter 117 Algiers Charter 117 Allal, Mohamed 131–2 Amane, Nishi 39 Amaru, Tupac 111 American Army Strategic Air Force 56, 57 Anglicanism 1 ‘Anja, Abu 23 Annesley, Hugh 147–8 ansar 27, 29 anti-communism 63, 68, 69, 71, 72–3, 77 anti-Semitism 3, 63, 64, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72–3, 77, 156–71 Arab-Israeli conflict 171 Arafat, Yasser 107, 108

Aritomo, Yamagata 39 Armée Islamique du Salut 121, 131, 132, 138 Armée de Libération Nationale 104, 118 Armée Nationale Populaire 118 Army Chemical Warfare Service 54 Arnold, Hap 57 Arnold, Henry 55 Aryanism 81, 96 Asanti campaign 24 Association des Oulémas Musulmans Algiériens 125 Atbara, battle of 27 Atomic warfare 56, 57, 58, 59 ‘axis of evil’ 4 Ayodia, dispute over temple of 145 Azraq, ‘Uthman 23, 29 Azraq, Ya’qub 23 Azzam, Abdullah 134 Badis, Abdulhamid Bin 125, 126 Baggara 23, 28 Balfour Declaration 162 Bandaranaike, Sirima 153 Banna, Hassan al- 125 banzai charges 52 Barbarossa Decree 65 Baring (later Lord Cromer), Evelyn 21, 22, 29 Bataan death march 49 Batna conference 130 Bechtolsheim, General von 69 Behrens, Ernst 87 Beja tribes 23 Belfast Agreement 151 Belgium, invasion in 1914 68 Belhadj, Ali 120–1 Belkheir, Larbi 122 Bella, Ahmed Ben 117, 118–19

190

INDEX

Conseil National de la Révolution Algérienne 118 Constantine, riots in 120, 128 Corsican Revolutionary Action 106 Coveny, Robert 24 Cuba, war with the United States 49 cultural revolution 110

Bendjedid, Chadli 119, 120, 122, 127–8, 130, 131 Benhajar, Ali 133 Benhamouda, Boualem 138 Bennabi, Malek 126, 127, 129 Berkeley, Bishop 11, 12 Bey, Saleh 26 Black Sea Tigers 102, 103 Black September 107 Blair, Tony 153 Blitzkrieg 68 Blomberg, General von 66 Boers 22 Bolshevism 3, 64, 66–77 Borja, Luis Arce 113 Boudiaf, Mohamed 121, 122 Boumedienne, Houari 119, 120, 126–7 Bouteflika, Abdelaziz 122, 130–1 Bouyali, Mustapha 128, 131 Bremer, Gerhard 89, 94 Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of 66 Britain 1, 2; dervishes 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30; Northern Ireland 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154; Palestine 156–7; Second Gulf war 153; southern Africa 22; Sudan 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30; Turkey 21 Brown, Lorne 88, 90 Burleigh, Bennet 22–3, 24 Bush, George W. 153, 166 bushido 33–41, 49

Daoud, Abu 107 Das Reich division 88, 95 Da‘wa 156, 157 Dekeim, Yunis 26, 28 democracy, and fanaticism 4, 7, 53, 124 ‘Dhanu’ 106 Digna, Osman 21, 22, 23, 24, 27, 29 Din, Shakyh al 29 Dincote 109 Dinka tribe 28 Direct Action 106 Direction des Renseignements et de la Securité 122, 131, 132, 136, 140 Djaballah, Abdallah 123, 124 Djazar’a group 129, 130 Dongola, seizure of 29 Dönme sect 162 Doolittle raid 36 Dresden 16 Drumcree Church, 146, 147, 148, 149 Dürr, Emil 87, 88

Cameron, Neville 27–8 Camp X-ray 16 Canadian army, in the Second World War 84–97 Castro, Fidel 105, 111 Chebouti, Ahmed 131, 132 Chelvam, Thamil 105 China, invasion by Japan 35–6, 40, 49 Chinchow, bombing of 35 Christianity 1, 2 Churchill, Winston 54 Cicero 13, 17 Clary-Aldringen, Count 93 Clausewitz, Carl von 7, 13, 18, 101, 106; definition of fanaticism 9–11, 13, 14, 18 Cold War 4 Committee of Union and Progress 162 communism, and fanaticism 3, 4, 103, 109, 110, 111 Confucius 16

Ebert, Friedrich 67 Economic Inspectorate Centre 76 Einsatzgruppen 70, 71, 75, 76 Einsatzkommando 70, 75 Eliot, George 11–2 English Civil War 11 Enlightenment 2, 4, 13 Enola Gay 58 Etoile Nord-Africaine 117 Evian Accords 117, 125 Falaise, capture of 86 fanatic, definition 1–19, 45, 48, 50, 101–6, 145, 151, 153–4, 156, 158, 171 fanaticism, and communism 3, 4, 103, 109, 110, 111; definition 1–14, 16, 45, 48–51, 53, 74, 101–13, 145, 151–4, 156, 158, 171; democracy 4, 7, 53, 124; fascism 3, 4, 8, 33–9; guerilla warfare 4, 7, 8, 102–13, 145; ideology and religion 3, 4, 7–14, 16–17, 19–20, 25, 28–9, 33–9, 45, 49–54, 64–7, 71, 74, 102–113, 121–30, 133–4, 145–54, 156, 158–67, 171; nationalism 3, 4, 7–9, 11,

191

INDEX

16, 19–20, 28, 33–9, 45, 49, 51, 53–4, 59–60, 67, 102, 104–7, 109, 110–13, 151–3, 158–60; nihilism 3; politics 3, 7–10, 16–17, 19– 20, 28, 33–4, 49, 54, 101–13, 145–54, 171; war 7, 9–11, 15–16, 28–9, 33–9, 45, 50–3, 59–60, 64–7, 106–7 Fanon, Franz 105 fascism, and fanaticism 3, 4, 8, 33–9 Fatah movement 103, 157 Fatwa 134 Field Service Code 40 Filastin al-Muslima 161, 166 Firket, battle of 29 First World War 3, 15, 53, 65–8, 105 France, war with Algeria 104, 107, 116–22, 127, 133 Franco-Prussian war 68 free corps 67 Freeman, Lieutenant 24 French Revolution 161 French Revolutionary Wars 10 Fritsch, Werner von 67 Front Démocratique 138 Front Islamique du Djihad Armé 132 Front Islamique du Salut 121, 123, 129–32, 138–9 Front de Libération Nationale 104, 118, 120–1, 126, 128–9, 138–40 Fuss, Reinhold 86–7 Gagnon, Mariano 111 Gandhi, Rajiv 106 Gardes Communales 122 Gardes Légitimes de Défense 122 Garvaghy Road 146–7, 148, 150, 151 Gemaizeh,‘Abu 28 Geneva Convention 93 Germany 3, 66, 81–97; American policy towards 54; Eastern Front in Second World War 63–77; Hitlerjugend 81–97 Ghozali, Sid Ahmed 138 Ginnis, battle of 27 Gladstone, William 20 Goldstein, Baruch 166 Gondar, fall of 26 Gordon, Charles 20, 21, 26, 28 Göring, Hermann 76, 84 Gousmi, Cherif 132, 135 Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Algérienne 118 Gracey, Harold 146, 148, 149 Graham, Gerald 24, 25, 27

Groupes Islamiques Armés 121, 131–3, 135–7, 139–40 Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédiction et la Combat 122, 126, 133–5, 137, 140 Groves, Leslie 56 Guadalcanal, battle of 49, 51 Guderian, Heinz 67 guerilla warfare, and fanaticism 4, 5, 102–13, 119, 145 Guevara, Che 105, 106, 111 Guilbert, Maurice 88–9 Guomindang 110 Guzman, Abimael 104, 105, 108–13 Hachani, Abdelkader 130 Haddam, Anouar 139 Hadendowa tribe 23, 24, 25, 27 Hamas Charter 157, 160–1, 169 Hamburg, destruction of 55 Hamid II, ‘Abd al- 162 Hanbali school of Islamic law 134 Hankow, firebombing of 54 Hansell, Haywood 55, 57 Harat al-Mujtama ‘a is-Silmi 123 Harris, Arthur 54 Hattab, Hassan 135 Hauk, Walter 95 Hawkins, William Deane 51 Hebron massacre 167 Heinrici, Gottard 67 Helzel, Alfred 92, 95 Hewett, William 21 Heyer, Horst 94 Hezbollah 103, 145, 159, 166, 167 Hicks, Lieutenant-General 21 Hill, Milton 44 Hirohito, Emperor 37, 38 Hiroshima, atomic bomb attack 57 Hiroshima Peace Museum 58 Hitler, Adolf 64, 66, 68, 70, 81, 82 Hitlerjugend 81–97 House Armed Services Committee 60 hizb al-shaytan 159 Hizb an-Nahda 123 hizb fransa 124 Ibrahimi, Ahmad Talib 123, 125–6 Ibrahimi, Shaykh Bachir al- 125 ideology, and fanaticism 3–4, 7–14, 16–17, 19–20, 25, 28–9, 33–9, 45, 49–51, 53–4, 64–7, 71, 74, 102–13, 121–30, 133–4, 145–56, 158–67, 171 ijtihad 134

192

INDEX

Kordofan, revolt of 28 Koresh, David 4 Krause, Bernhard 83 Kuga, Major 40 Kurdistan Workers’ Party 103, 145

Ikhwan Muslimin 123, 125, 126, 127, 128–9 Imperial Rescript of Education 38, 39 intercontinental ballistic missiles 58 International Monetary Fund 136 International Red Cross 44 Intifada 156, 159, 166, 170 Iraq, second Gulf war 153 Ireland, Northern 46, 147–154; Drumcree Church 146, 147, 149; Garvaghy Road 146–7, 148, 149, 150, 151 Irish Republican Army 103 Irving, William 11 al-Islah 137 Islah wa’l-Irshad 128 Islam 1, 2, 4, 116–18, 120–6, 128, 132, 134–40, 145, 156, 158–63, 165, 167–9, 170–1 Israel 5, 156–71 Israeli Defence Forces 58 Iwo Jima, battle of 43 Jackson, Arthur J. 51 Jama ‘at al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin 126 Japan 3, 4, 5, 14, 33, 42, 43, 53, 55, 57; China 35–6, 40, 49, 54; fanaticism 33–40, 43–4, 48, 50–6; militarism 35–9, 41–2, 43, 50; Pearl Harbor 36; prisoners of war 44, 45; Russia 35, 40–1, 42; Second World War 4, 5, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 48, 49–50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57 Ja’alin tribe 26 Jesionek, Jan 89, 94 Jewish Holocaust 162–3 jihad 19, 28, 103, 134–5, 158, 165, 166, 168–9 jihadiya 23 Kababish tribe 26 kamikaze 43, 45, 59, 103 Kassala, capture of 28 Kebir, Rabah 138, 139 Kenya, attack on American embassy in 145 Kertil, Mustapha 132–3 Khali, Ibrahim al 23 Khalidi, Salah al- 161 Khartoum, fall of 20, 21, 26 Khider, Mohammed 126 Khmer Rouge 101, 104 Kirbekan, battle of 27 Kitchener, Lord 27, 29, 30 Klea, Abu 24, 25

Laden, Usama bin 5, 165, 166 Lamari, Mohamad 122, 137 Lansdowne, Lord 29 Lavigerie, Cardinal 125 Law of Civil Concorde 136 League of Nations 161 Lebensraum 66 Leibstandarte 81, 83, 88, 91, 92, 94, 97 LeMay, Curtis 54, 57 Lenin, Vladimir 105, 108 Leurquin, Robert 36 Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam 102, 104–5, 107–8, 145 Ligue Islamique pour la Dawa et le Djihad 132–3 Loyalist Volunteer Force 149 Luce, Henry 49 Lyada, Abdelhak 132 MacDonald, Hector 29 Madani, Abassi 121, 128 Mahdi 19–28; compared with Zulus 23, 24 Mahdiism 19–20, 22–3, 25–8 Mahmud, Emir 27 Manassir tribe 27 Manchuria, Japanese occupation of 38 Manhattan Project 56, 57, 59, 60 Manila, massacre of 33 Manson, Charles 4 Marcuse, Herbert 111 Mariategui, Jose Carlos 110 Marighella, Carlos 106 Marling, Percy Scrope 22 Marshall, George C. 56 Martinez, Luiz 140 Marx, Karl 110 Marzuq, Musa abu 163–4 Mash‘al, Khalid 164 Matanikau, battle of 51 Matérialschlacht 84 Maxse, Major Ivor 27 Mediène, Mohamad 122, 136 Mehri, Abdelhamid 138 Meiji Restoration 35, 36, 38, 39, 41 Mekhloufi, Said 132 Meyer, Sturmbannführer Kurt 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 92, 94 Mezrag, Mansour 132

193

INDEX

Om Badr 26 Omdurman 20, 23, 26, 28, 30 O’Neill, Terrance 151 Operation Bamberg 69 Operation Barbarossa 65, 68, 70–7 Operation Griffin 69 Operation Lightning 69 Operation Lightning Ball 75 Operation Matterhorn 54 Operation Snow Rabbit 75 Operation Thunderbolt 75 Operation Winter Forest 69 Oppenheimer, Robert 56 Orange Order 146–54 Orientalism 34 Ormeau Road 147 Ortega, Daniel 105 Osaka, destruction of 55 Oslo Accords 167, 170 Ostkämpfer 94 Ottoman empire 124–5, 162

Miliani, Mansour 131 Milius, Major Karl-Heinz 85, 88, 90, 91, 92, 96 Minh, Ho Chi 108 Mohnke, Lieutenant-Colonel Wilhelm 85, 86, 89, 94, 95 Mouvement Algérien des Officiers Libres 136 Mouvement Islamique Armé 121, 131–2 Mouvement pour la Dawa et le Djihad 132–3 Mouvement pour la Réforme Nationale 124 Mouvement pour un Etat Islamique 132 Moyano, Maria Elena 111 mujahidin 123, 129, 133–4 mulazimin 23 Muqadima, Ibrahim al- 164 Muslim Brothers 156, 157, 166 Mydans, Seth 153 Nagasaki 16 Nagoya, destruction of 55 an-Nahdah 129, 137 Nahnah, Mahmoud 123, 127, 128 Nanking, capture of 35–6; massacre 33, 49 Napoleonic wars 10 National Defense Research Committee 54 National Liberating Acting 106 nationalism, and fanaticism 3–4, 7–9, 11, 16, 19–20, 28, 33–9, 45, 49, 51, 53–4, 59–60, 67, 102, 104–13, 151–3, 158–60 Nazism 3–4, 5, 49, 63–6, 68, 70, 73–4, 77, 81–97; American attitude to 54, 73; New Order 82–4, 88–9 New Age religions 1 Nezzar, Khalid 122, 137 Nicholas II, Tsar 35 Nigeria 1 Night Stalker 4 nihilism, and fanaticism 3 nonconformity 1, 2, 11 Nomonhan, battle of 58 Normandy, invasion of 81–90, 92–7 Nujumi, Wad al 23 el Obeid, sack of 22, 26 Oclan, Abdulla 105 Office of War Information 57 Ofstie, Ralph 60 Ohrwalder, Joseph 20, 26, 28 O’Kelly, James 20 Okinawa, battle of 42, 43, 50, 52, 53 Olympic Games, at Munich 107

Paige, Mitchell 51 Paisley, Reverend Ian 146–7, 150, 151 Palestine al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade 107 Palestine Authority 158 Palestine Liberation Organisation 107, 157, 158 Palestine National Authority 108 Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (HAMAS) 5, 103, 123, 127–9, 145, 156–8, 160–71 Panzer Lehr division 93, 97 Parades Commission 148 Partisan Action Groups 106 Pasha, Arabi 19 Pasha, Baker 24, 26 Pasha, Hicks 26 Pasha, Said 26 Pearl Harbor 36, 48, 49, 50, 56, 58 Pentagon 4 People’s Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam 107 Pepys, Samuel 1 Pequots tribe 48 Peramuna, Janata Vimukthi 106 Peru 4, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113 Peruvian Socialist Party 110 Pflugbeil, General 72 Phillipines, war against the United States 49, 50, 55 Pierce, William 111 politics, and fanaticism 3, 7–10, 16–7,

194

INDEX

19–20, 28, 33–4, 49, 54, 101–13, 145–54, 171 Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine 103 Portadown massacre 150 Potsdam conference 56 Powhatans tribe 48 Probyn, Lieutenant 23 Protocols of the Elders of Zion 160–1 Puller, Lewis B. 51–2 Pyle, Ernie 52 Al Qa’ida 108, 153, 166 Al-Qiyam 126 Quakers 12, 13, 15 Quinn brothers 148 Rabelais 11 Rabinowitz, Eugene 56 Rabita al-Islah wa’l-Irshad 128 Rai music 119 Rantisi, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz al 161–2, 165–6, 168 Rashidun caliphate 125 Red Army 72, 73 Reichenau, Field Marshal 72 Rejam, Abderrazak 132, 139 Religion, and fanaticism 1, 3–4, 7–20, 25, 28–9, 33–9, 45, 49–51, 53–4, 64–7, 71, 74, 102–13, 121–3, 124–30, 133–4, 145–54, 156, 158–67, 171 Revolutionary Action Movement 106 Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia 104 Robatat tribe 27 Roman Catholicism 1 Rome Accords 138 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 56, 60 Rossignoli, Father 28 Royal Ulster Constabulary 146, 149 Rufa’a tribe 26 Russia (Soviet Union, 1917–1989) 11, 35, 40, 67, 68; atomic weapons 59; Eastern Front in Second World War 63–77 Russian Revolution 67, 111 Russo-Japanese war 35, 40–1, 42 Sahnoun, Shaykh 127, 128 Said, Mohamed 132, 139 Saipan, battle of 42, 52 Salafiyya 124–5, 129, 133, 134, 135, 140 Salamah, Hasan 107 Salford, Bishop of 21

Salisbury, Third Marquess of 20, 21, 28, 29 Samraoui, Mohammed 136 Samurai 39 Sandinista guerillas 105 Sant’ Egidio Accords 117 Sartre, Jean Paul 105 Scappini, Hans 85 Schenckendorff, Max von 68, 72, 73, 75 Scott Stevenson, Andrew 25, 26 Second World War 3, 33, 37, 40–5, 48–60, 63–77, 81–97, 116, 161, 171; Canadian forces 84–97; Eastern Front 3, 58, 63–77, 81; Germany, 3–5, 63–77, 81–97; Japan 4, 5, 33–8, 41–5, 48–60; Pacific 43–5, 48–60; United States 73 Sendero Luminoso 4, 103–5, 108–9, 110–11, 112 Senner, fall of 26 September 11 2001 4, 16, 145, 153, 159–60, 165 Sétif, massacres 126 shahada 158 Shakers 12 Shanab Isma‘il Abu 165 Shanghai, bombing of 35 shar’ia 128 Sharon, Ariel 107 Shiite muslims 166 Shilluk tribe 28 Shimpu units 49–50 Shintoism 37, 41, 49 Shogunate, fall of 35 Sho¯hei, O¯ ka 44, 45 Sho¯ici, Yokoi 45 Siebken, Bernard 85–6, 89, 94 Skinner, Corporal 29 Slade, Major 24 Slatin, Rudolf 20, 28 social Darwinism 63, 65, 66, 67 Society of Palestine Clerics 166 Soltani, Shaykh 127 Somme, battle of the 15, 154 Sonderkommando 70 Souaidia, Habib 136, 137 Soummam Congress 117, 118 Spaatz, Carl 56 Spain, relations with the United States 49 Spanish Armada 1 Sri Lanka 4 St. Manvieu, battle of 87 Stalin, Joseph 71, 110 Stalingrad, battle of 81 Stewart, J.D.H. 22

195

INDEX

Stimson, Henry 54, 55, 57 Stockholm conference 162 Straw, Jack 153 Stülpnagel, Karl-Heinrich von 67, 71 Stun, Sergeant 89 Sudan 3, 23; British policy towards 19–30 Sudan Military Railway 29 Sufi 19 suicide bombers 8, 14–16, 145, 154, 167 Szilard, Leo 56–7 Ta’aishi tribe 28 Tafish, Khalid 170 Tahir, Sheikh Mohammad 22 Tamai, battle of 22, 24, 25, 26 Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation 107, 145 Tamil Tigers 4, 102, 103, 104, 107, 108 Tanzania, attack on American embassy in 145 Tarawa, massacre 51 Tayymiya, Ibn 134–5 el Teb, battles of 22, 23, 24 Temple of the Mount, clash over 145–6 terrorist, definition 8, 14, 15, 16, 17 Thompson, Paul 36 ‘Tiger Cubs’ 105 Tobbal, Lakhdar Ben 136 Tofrek, battle of 27 Togugawa period 39 Tokar, seizure of 22, 28 To¯ kko¯ tai 43 Toski, battle of 23, 27 Totenkopf division 88 Touati, Mohamed 122 Tractarianism 2 Trafford, Lionel 25 Trimble, David 147, 149 Tripoli Programme 117 Truman, Harry S. 50, 55, 56, 57, 59 Turkey, British policy towards 21 Ulster Defence Association 148–9 Ulster Unionists 147, 149, 150, 151, 152 Ulster Volunteer Force 147, 149 Um Dibaykarat, battle of 23 United Nations 104, 161, 170 United Nations Security Council 18, 161 United States, Cuba 49; Japan 36, 48–9, 51–9; Middle East 164–6; military

strategy 53–5, 153; Nazi Germany 54; Philippines 49, 55; Second Gulf war 153, 160; Second World War 52–3, 55–60, 73; Vietnam war 59 Versailles, Treaty of 65 Vietnam war 51, 59; American involvement in 59 Voltaire 2 Wafa party 123, 137–8 Waffen SS 49, 59, 70–1, 81–9, 93–8 war, and fanaticism 7, 9–11, 15–6, 28–9, 33–9, 45, 50–1, 53, 59–60, 64–7, 106–7 Wehrmacht 63–6, 68–97 Weimar Republic 67, 68 Wells, David 35 Weyler, Valariano 49 wilayas 118 Wilhelm II, Kaiser 35 Wilson, Charles 26 Wilson, Sandra 35 Wingate, Reginald 20, 28, 30 Witt, Fritz 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 92, 98 women, as fanatics 106 World Trade Center 4 Wormald, Frederick 26 Wounded Knee, massacre of 48 Wünsche, Max 93 Xhosa 22 Xiaoping, Deng 110 Yasin Shaykh Ahmad 165, 167, 170 Yasukuni shrine 41 Yous, Nesroulah 136 Zahhar, Mahmud al- 158–9, 170 Zaoui, Ahmed 139 Zapatistas movement 108 Zariba, battle of 27 Zedong, Mao 108, 110, 113 Zeissler, Major 93 Zerhouni, Yazid 138 Zeroual, Liamine 122, 124, 139 Zionism 5, 156–71 Zitouni, Djamal 132 Zouabri, Antar 122, 133 Zulus 22, 23; compared with Mahdi 23, 24

196