A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand

One of the enduring themes of the current multifarious problems in the Middle East relates to the Arab Street. Whether it’s a problem in Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, or Kuwait and so on and so forth, this mythical Arab Street pops up again and again. People warn of the Arab Street, they are scared of the Arab street, make plans to placate or control the Arab street. What is going on? Just what's this street all about? The Arab street is a catch all phrase for the Arab nation, a supranational structure based on a common identity, common language, common history and common culture. Roughly speaking, this Arab nation takes in every Arab around the world, mostly Muslims, but also includes Christians and other minorities. In terms of states, it runs from Algeria to Egypt, up to Lebanon and Syria, and includes the Gulf States of Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait and others. Lets see the reasons behind the concept of the Arab Nation/Street. It is obviously based on the Arabic language, which is spoken in all of these countries. While they all have a common language, the so called "Classical Arabic", each country’s usage of Arabic has distinctive characteristics, which can be termed as something like a dialect plus. To take an example, Baghdad Bob, before the Iraq War, was a master of invectives, expletives and insults to the Coalition Leaders and troops. In particular, he called the Americans as "Alooj", a term which denotes a herd of stinky marshland and mud dwelling donkeys. There were many other things he called them, but the funny thing is, the insults he used were not that common in most other Arab nations and the non Iraqi Arabs needed somebody to translate those words.

The history is also common, mostly going back to the fact that almost all these countries were ruled directly or indirectly by the Ottomans. The Ottomans had a long reach and they did rule the above mentioned countries, one time or the other. Once you add in the fact that the ruling Ottoman monarch was also the Caliph, so the remote countries, if not ruled by the man wearing the kingship ’crown’, were ruled by the same man wearing the spiritual leader ”turban’. Yes, it is true that they all attained independence from the Ottomans in different times and the European colonial rule was different in each, but it was all predicated on Ottoman rule. The concept of Arab Nationalism in the post Ottoman era can be traced back to an Ottoman Intellectual named Sati' al-Husri in the early part of the last century. Arab nationalism for al-Husri represented a route out of colonialism as well as a route to greater territorial unity as it provided the basis of creating a community that could repel the British, French, Italians, and so on, as well as undo the divisions that had been implemented. Unfortunately little of his works were translated into English. The irony is that it took an Ottoman intellectual to give birth to the successor of the Ottoman empire, the Arab Nation; his Arabic was very basic and fragmented and finally, he took most of his ideas from 19th century German idealism and philosophical thought.

Think what happened to the German idealism which gave birth to "Volksdeutsche" (The German Nation). It was exactly the same idea which Sati' propounded. Just like the Hungarian or Czech German was ethnically, culturally, linguistically and historically same as the Bavarian German; the idea was that a Berber or a Maronite Christian or a Yemeni tribesman or an Egyptian fellah would be totally fungible and be ethnically, culturally, linguistically and historically the same. The next push towards Arab Nationalism was given by the Nasser, the President of Egypt in the latter half of the last century. Oh Boy! Based on all reports, he was a silver tongued orator, some may unfairly even call him a demagogue. But he managed to pull Arab countries together to an extent that was last seen during Selim I and Suleyman el Fateh (fateh standing for the opener, in terms of opening up territories) and also known as Suleyman the Magnificient, the famous Ottoman Emperor during the mid 1500's. Of course, Suleyman got these regions together to rule over them, while Nasser got them together to wage war with Israel and to establish himself as the ‘Father’ of the Great Arab Nation. Even to the extent that Egypt and Syria decided to subsume their individual national identities into one short lived country. Why short lived? Because of one earth shattering event, the 1967 Israeli Arab War.

1967 saw the stake driven through the heart of this concept of an Arab Nation or Street. A secular Arab Street was buoyed up by the bombastic words of its leaders, both religious and political and went to war, backed up by the thought of hundreds of millions of Arabs, united in one gigantic wave of resolve, driving the Jews into the sea. Too bad that Israel looked at the glint in the Arab eye, the foam on the corner of the Arab mouth and thoroughly trashed the entire Arab Nation. Even the partial victory of 1973 could not turn the tide and therefore the concept of Arab Nationalism took a deep, nay fatal, wound. It has been festering ever since. Before we go further into what happened afterwards, we have to take a slight detour into the Arab League construct.

The Arab league was the attempt to form the political personification of the Arab Nation, right after World War II. See the history pages on the official Arab League website for a fascinating, torturous and deeply convoluted explanation of how the League came into being.

http://www.arableagueonline.org

This is where the hopes and aspirations of an Arab Nation came to naught. Ideally speaking, this League would be the crown which would round off the Arab Nation. During the negotiations to set this up, words like "Federal", "Confederation" and "Union" were sprinkled around liberally. For those of a political science bent of mind, they will immediately note that these words stand for a distinct political entity. For the layman, the League was negotiated and set up to be like an Arab World Government. Many a slip between the cup and the lip. It ended up as a pure talking shop and after 1967, it was reduced to an impotent talking shop. Watch the current imbroglio around the aborted Arab League summit to see the proof. So much for a secular Arab Super state!

Please note that I haven’t mentioned Islam. Based upon what I have read, it’s important factor, but not as important at all. You see, there are significant population chunks which are not Muslim in the Arab lands. The Copts in Egypt and the Maronite Christians in Lebanon, Assyrians in Iraq, Druzes in Palestine and Lebanon, all are Arabs, even though they are of a different religion. Why do I say that? I say that because in my opinion, there is a much bigger fault line running through the Arab Nation than a different religion. This fault line lies in the Sunni-Shia differences. If one recalls, the Ottomans never could manage to get their grubby little mitts on Iran, which is a Shia dominated country. For the last century and especially after the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the schism between Shia and Sunni grew greater as far as the Arab Nation is concerned, rather than the differences between the Muslims and Christians. The reaction to the other major religious group in that area, Judaism, is totally different, but that is further complicated by the Israeli/Palestinian imbroglio.

Another way of looking at how the Arab street is fungible is to look at how it reacts to external events. It’s quite significant that the Arab Nation does seem to react in a similar fashion. Sheikh Yassin's assassination had similar protests in many Arab countries. The declaration of Israel's independence had a significantly more violent impact, with whole legions of various Arab countries declaring war on Israel. When Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel, everybody who was anybody in the Arab Street and Nation turned on Egypt. Heck, even Egyptians turned against Anwar Sadat and he had to pay for this with his life. Same thing happened with Jordan. When Israel opened up a trade office in the UAE, the reaction was the same. Let me give you an example, look at the online English language newspapers in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and perhaps UAE. Look at their reactions to international events, such as the Iraq War, Yassin's assassination, etc. etc and you will see how similarly they react.

Rather contradictory, no? On one side, the Arab League has proved to be a spectacular failure, but the links, similarities and synergy between the Arab people in various countries is still present. It’s just not me, don’t take just my word for it. Look up the UNDP Arab Human Development Report. The group of Arab Intellectuals who wrote this report base their entire report on the premise that the Arab Nation exists although spread out over several countries. So what do we end up with? We end up with a group of people, who belong to one nation, but are divided up into distinct states. There is a very thin layer of official contact, but cross cultural relations are very low, books are not moved across borders, plays are mostly banned and music in many countries is anathema. TV Channels are breaking down the boundaries, but the culture portrayed by the various TV channels is a virtual one, a made up one, something which only exists in the scripts. What else is there?

This is where religion comes in. Islam is the growing link. There is a worrying drift into religion being the common denominator rather than the culture, history and language. See the issues in Egypt and Lebanon with their Christian minority. See the visceral, mainly Muslim reaction to the Iraq War, Sheikh Yassin's assassination and 9/11. A point to be noted here; and I reiterate that this is strictly my opinion based on my readings; is that prior to the 1973 war, the minorities were fully supportive of Arab aims, for example during the 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 wars, the various minorities such as Druze, Maronite Christians, Copts etc fully supported, joined up for the fighting and demonstrated in support of the Arab aims. Unfortunately, in the recent years, this cross religious support has been reduced dramatically. Based upon my conversations with my friends and colleagues in that region, it seems that the minorities are no longer explicitly in support of such events, but would rather hunker down and hide. Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and UAE show signs of this. No firm proof of this but perhaps PEW will carry out a poll on this as none has been done about this so far. I can only ascribe this to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism across the region and the obvious decay of official governance structures in these countries. Not even one Arab country can be called as ‘free’, and most are autocratic in nature. Egypt is still under wartime emergency laws, for decades after the wars were over. Most of the gulf countries and few others are autocracies. Syria, Algeria and Sudan are ruled by despotic regimes. Somalia and Lebanon have imploded, so on and so forth. More and more Islamic groups are actually providing social services and even security (Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, etc.), thereby taking over a big part of the role of the state.

What now? What in 10 Years? What's the future? Will the Arab Street and Nation turn into something like the European Super-State? Will the Arab Nation turn into a hugely bigger theocracy along the lines of Iran? Will George Bush's "crusade" to increase the democratic coefficient of the Arab nations bear fruit? If you ask me, it will not be like the European Super-State, the religion will not allow this to happen. It may well be a strange structure of a theocratically ruled partial democratic bunch of countries. Francis Fukuyama, eat your heart out!

All this to be taken with a grain of salt!

Of Great Buildings And Greater Men ..

English poetry is not my cup of tea, I have to admit. I don’t understand it, and it always gives rise to a mental image of a pale, wan person talking about daffodils and stuff like that. I had to read English poetry in my school days and after spending years reading and analysing daffodils and frisky clouds, it was with a sense of relief that I gave up on it. Never mind the time that I went up to the Lake District, seeing the dratted daffodil fields where Wordsworth wrote his poems, little knowing how his words would be the torment of thousands of schoolboys down the ages. But there was one poem which stuck in my head, and that was Percy Bysshe Shelley's immortal words:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

The first thing was the word Ozymandias and the second was the image of vast, buildings, almost inhuman works, which survived centuries. The name itself, Ozymandias, is such as heavy name. It’s a name which evokes an image of a big man, a man with "great deeds" attached to him, a name which is redolent of sagas sung in torch-lit halls, and the confident arrogance of a man who bestrides the world and is not afraid to show his might.

In his book, "Chronicle of the Pharaohs", Peter A. Clayton, sums up Ramses II very nicely, stating that: "During his long reign of 67 years, everything was done on a grand scale. No other pharaoh constructed so many temples or erected so many colossal statues and obelisks. No other pharaoh sired so many children. Ramesses' 'victory' over the Hittities at Kadesh was celebrated in one of the most repeated Egyptian texts ever put on record. By the time he died, aged more than 90, he had set his stamp indelibly on the face of Egypt."

It was still just a poem to me untill I got the opportunity to actually gaze at the old fellow himself at the Museum in Cairo, one of the few rulers who have earned the epithet “the great”. There he was laying in his glass coffin, shrivelled up, with some wisps of hennaed hair, a long patrician face, delicate bone structure, an aquiline nose. Ramses II, one of the greatest kings known to man, an avid builder who erected colossal temples and statues from one end of the Nile Valley to another. The man who laid down Abu Simbel and the Ramesseum and rebuilt Abydos, Karnak, Luxor. The man who followed in the footsteps of Imhotep who conceived and directed the building of the step pyramid at Saqqarra, and Cheops who had the first Great Pyramid constructed and we are still just talking about Ancient Egypt.

There is something greatly evocative when watching these huge silent ancient buildings. I have to admit that the Great Pyramids were big and awe-inspiring, but they didn’t really grab my attention. The Great Pyramids are crowded with tourists (of which I was one), they are nestling right next to Giza city, and the Sphinx looks really mangy to me. In addition, seeing a 20th century row of houses with a taxi rank next to these millennia old pyramids was jarring. Yes, very stupendous, but modern man has mucked it up.

On the other hand, the step pyramid at Saqqara is something which was more personal to me. It was about 4PM in the afternoon, luckily it was empty and I was standing in the courtyard in front of the crumbling step pyramid, with the whispering sound of the hot winds over the sand and huge stone columns. One just had to close one's eyes to be transported back in time. A time of men with huge imagination and great vision. A time when the Gods walked the earth. If one concentrated hard, one could almost hear the sounds of the overseers bellowing, the rustle of fine linen, the tinkling of anklets, the crunch of leather sandals on sand particles on stone floors, the rhythmic chanting to Hapi, smell the perfumed beeswax trickling down necks, the aroma of spiced meats and feel the warm wind in your hair. One feels tiny, one feels connected to the community of humans and one feels inspired by the deeds of our ancestors and feels one with the ancients.

You stand in front of them and wonder at the huge amount of effort that these men have put in. From the Taj Mahal in Agra to the Red Fort in New Delhi, Ranthambor, the largest fort in the world, the Great Pyramids in Mexico, Mad Ludwig's castles in Germany, The Parthenon in Athens, the Coliseum and Pantheon in Rome, the Great Wall and the Forbidden City in China, Alhambra in Granada, the soaring cathedrals in so many European Cities, to the Saint Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, all are awe inspiring. This is not to say that big buildings are not built in more modern times, the Pentagon, the skyscrapers in the world's financial cities, the Louvre in Paris, Hermitage in Leningrad/St. Petersburg, the various parliamentary buildings such as Westminster in London, the Bundestag in Berlin, Washington, New Delhi; the opera house in Sydney and many more One sees new nations and states almost always wanting to create a stonking big building to house their national representatives. Look at Scotland's House of Representatives, its big (I think its ugly, but that's my opinion), massively over budget too, but did anybody ever think of saying, hey, why don’t we just meet in the pub? Oh, No! They want their imposing buildings, Sir. Look at Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London. For a man called as Red-Ken, because of his communist/ socialist past, he loves his strange new building and adores sitting on his throne and throwing his weight about. One would have expected a man of the people to be more humble and not to muck around with grandiose buildings, but there you have it, our hero with the feet of clay.

Big buildings like these are symbols of a culture, attributes of a people, of their history and drive. They define how the people look at themselves and how others look at them. They represent what the civilisation, the culture is all about. They arise because some men and women want to leave a mark on history and what better way to do that than to build a huge monument? Look at the list of monuments which are listed up there, most have been driven by one person or at most two. They have the vision, the imagination, the force, the desire and the resources to give birth to something which people admire and love over decades and centuries. These big buildings start to define the culture and become symbols of its people. Why do you think Osama Bin Laden went after the Pentagon and the Twin Towers?

The funny thing is, one regrets to see that people seem to have gone out of the vision fad, pulled down by the ankle biters. Let me give you an example. The Millennium Dome in London, cost £750 million, and people moaned that that money could have been used to provide 1000000 teachers, it could have set up 4 hospitals, it could have paid for 20 nursing homes, or 2000 miles of roads, and so on and so forth. (I made up the numbers here, but you get the idea). I have been there and I tell you, its brilliant. Look around to see how human ingenuity has brought us a marvel of human engineering, architecture and vision. But given the great British tradition of whining, people think that it's useless and a symbol of wasted national resources. What rot! It’s great, and if I was Tony Blair, I would turn it into a permanent showcase for British Engineering and Industry, hold exhibitions there rather than at Birmingham, show off British aerospace, motor racing, bio technology, petroleum, and so on and so forth. Lovely place! But what have these ankle biters done? Dragged it down, squelched it into the mud and now I think they are thinking about creating an amusement park in there. Pah!

Let me tell a story. After seeing Saqqara, Pharaoh Cheops starts thinking about building a Great Pyramid for his tomb and his chief architect goes, "Ra, it will take 30 years of hundreds of thousand of workers working full time to erect this". The Pharaoh says, "Excellent, I will have one of those pyramids please, get cracking". Next morning, he is sitting down at the breakfast table and reading the Daily Egyptian and reads that this amount of manpower could be better used to build hospitals, roads, dig canals and stuff. His spin doctors are moaning at him about how the tax paying public thinks this is such a bad idea. Curved Palmtree and Green Oasis, the then-equivalent of OXFAM and Greenpeace take out rallies, wrap banners around the blocks of stone and Al-Swampy is seen sitting up the quarry protesting against building the pyramid. The World Wildlife Fund is moaning about 2 species of sand beetles whose habitats will be destroyed by the building of the pyramid, while he hears the Hittites are planning to raise a resolution at the UN protesting against the pyramids and a joint World Bank/IMF report expresses concern about the fiscal deficit increasing in Egypt because of the pyramid. The Pharaoh throws up his hands and says, “Sod this” and goes on to make a little house on the prairie in an environmentally sustainable way, with lighting provided by solar cells. Then after 6000 years I arrive at Giza, look around, sniff and walk away thinking, boy, those ancient Egyptians were a bunch of sad unimaginative gits. Thank God the Pharaoh didn’t listen to these ankle biters and men of little vision and we now have a building which entire mankind can be proud of.

Why do people flock to these places? Why would somebody build something like this? Why is such an interest in these historical monuments? All these questions point to a deep seated desire of humans for the noble, the awe-inspiring, the fascinating. These buildings, the sheer vision and the labour involved, appeals to something deep inside of us, brings us closer to the ancients. I leave the details to the shrinks, but I would ask, where have these dreams disappeared to now? Why have we become such small minded cynical people? Oh! For another Ramses or Imhotep.

All this to be taken with a grain of salt!

A Soldier Is A Soldier Is A Soldier?

What is the difference between a soldier, a mercenary, a terrorist, a policeman and a para-military soldier? We laymen usually have a pretty clear picture of what these different types of people do. A soldier is employed by the state, has a uniform, wages war based on the government's directive, is restricted by international laws and treaties and owes his allegiance to the state. A para-military soldier is slightly less than a soldier, usually only deployed for internal security duties and in certain cases, may be assigned some ancillary soldier-like duties such as border patrolling, and helping civil authorities to enforce and maintain law and order when ordinary police are unable to handle it alone like in times of riots, insurgency, natural disasters and the like. The para-military and policeman also owe their allegiance to the state. Terrorists on the other hand belong to groups which, because of religious, militancy, crime, separatism, etc. are strictly non-state in nature. They owe their allegiance to an ideology or a leader. The mercenary though occupies a strange place in the continuum of armed forces. He doesn’t fit the usual descriptors. He may wear a uniform, but not of any state and is used for many purposes, with his main objective usually being monetary compensation, he holds allegiance to the person who is paying for his services.

Mercenaries have had a bad reputation for a long time. The Carthaginian Army almost purely consisted of mercenaries and they gave the professional, state directed Roman Army and its legions a good run for their money during the Punic wars. Mercenary companies were common in Europe and Asia all through history because of the need to find soldiers fighting for pure money rather than "noble" reasons such as patriotism or humanitarian motives. Yes, soldiers are paid (usually underpaid even), but they are not supposed to fight for money, but rather for a cause, the protection of civilians, and the nation. Over the past 2000 years, mercenary companies have formed a significant part of most of the world's armies. In the middle ages in Europe, Swiss mercenary corps were considered so lethal and dangerous that even the Pope decided to hire them for his protection. The attraction of mercenaries is that they are completely yours for as long as you can pay them. Talk about outsourcing wars!

Africa in the 1960's and 1970's was chock a block with mercenaries in Congo, Biafra and Sudan. The Seychelles, Maldives and Comoros had mercenary armies overthrowing governments almost wily nilly. "Mad" Mike Hoare, Christian Tavernier and Bob Denard were almost household names back then. Fredrik Forsyth wrote an international bestseller "The Dogs of War" based on mercenaries in Africa, exposing the world's shadowy arms market at the same time. Many attempts were made to control the use of mercenaries as a result. Examples are: Article 47 of the 1977 Additional Protocols of the Geneva Conventions; the Organisation of African Unity’s Convention for the Elimination of Mercenarism in Africa, also of 1977; and eventually the UN’s International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries of 1989. I am afraid all of these were completely useless. For those who are interested in perfect examples of stupid legislation, do look at Article 47 of the Geneva Convention. Its such a classic example of the paraphrased statement "the road to bad laws is paved with good intentions". By the time you struggle through the definition of mercenaries and deal with the various conditions, criteria and exclusions, the only person you will find fitting the definition of a mercenary will be a chimera or your dog (and he wouldn’t complain, just wag his tail at you while you accuse him). By the way, most of the countries haven’t even ratified these agreements. Only 11 out of 200 odd countries have ratified the UN agreement. Interesting or what?

It becomes even more complex as we dig deeper into the actual functions carried out by these people. Look at a company supplying food, water and ammunition to a country's troops as in Iraq. Or a company that fly’s or ships troops to a battle zone. Or a private security company used to supplying guards for a POW camp. So are these companies’ employees all mercenaries? What if the private company is used to provide security for commercial property in a foreign country (as by BP in Columbia)? What if the private company is hired to provide training to a country's armed forces as in many places in Africa? What then? Difficult to make a judgement, eh?

How about the people who flocked into Iraq to fight the coalition forces during Gulf War 2 last year? They came from Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, the Gulf countries, Syria, and many other countries. They weren’t paid, they weren’t wearing uniforms, they were private individuals who crossed the borders to fight with the Iraqi's for personal or ideological reasons. Most were completely useless, ended up as cannon fodder or were captured very soon and locked up by the Americans. This kind of almost spontaneous joining up is quite common in Arab History and unfortunately, while it sounds good when one is setting out to fight, they are usually inadequate, untrained, and incapable of fighting systematically and are mostly only used for propaganda purposes.

Funny comparison here, the world's communists, liberals, republicans and socialists flocked to form the International Brigades during Spain's Civil War in the 1930's. People came from Canada, USA, UK, France, Poland, Italy, Germany, Hungary etc to join up to fight the fascist enemy. Almost 60,000 volunteers joined up into Battalions named, amusingly enough, as Abraham Lincoln Battalion, British Battalion, Connolly Column, Dajakovich Battalion, Dimitrov Battalion, Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, George Washington Battalion, Mickiewicz Battalion and Thaelmann Battalion. 10,000 of these international volunteers died during the civil war and it has to be admitted, their contribution has never been acknowledged by the world, mainly because the concept of “foreigners” fighting another's war makes governments very nervous indeed. If one wants to see evidence of this, just look at the way history has treated the foreigners who signed up to fight for Nazi Germany. A Waffen-SS combat unit, Britisches Freikorps, was even created with Englishmen who wanted to fight for Germany against the UK and the Allies. Funny how these men, whether in Germany, Spain or Iraq, are looked upon differently by different people at different times.

So where do these mercenaries come from? The United Kingdom is famous for being a source of retired soldiers willing to put their skills out for hire. France, USA, Russia and South Africa are also countries which have a large group of highly skilled soldiers for hire. All perfectly legitimate and advertised, not any underground secretive thing. They have international magazines related to this activity. One common characteristic is that quite a lot of the mercenaries come from the special forces of the various countries. Once one thinks about it, it seems logical indeed. Special Forces works in small teams, usually very autonomously, specialise in small localised operations and generally operate outside normal rules of warfare. In addition, they retire unusually early, at 35-40 years of age. So here you have a guy, trained to his eyeballs, able to kill using a toothpick, accustomed to working in the dark and outside the rules, disposed of on a civilian street with nothing to do. Some manage to get back into civilian life, but I can't see them being a bank clerk or a security guard for a warehouse after the excitement of belonging to the Special Forces. So guess what? The life of a mercenary beckons with seductive dulcet tones and many succumb to it.

Let's take a closer look at some interesting cases. We all grew up knowing and hearing about the Gurkhas. Gurkhas are Nepalese civilians who are known as fanatically brave and loyal soldiers. Besides being hired by the Nepalese army, also the British and the Indian Army employs Gurkhas and they have a long and honourable history of serving both. Interesting history behind how they started. Long ago when the British were ruling India, they had a spat with Nepal and at the conclusion of hostilities, the British were so impressed by the ferocity of these soldiers, that they decided to include them within their army. The Indian Army, after independence, carried on with this tradition. Nobody will call them mercenaries, but they do fight for a foreign power, fight for money, have a stronger allegiance to their regiments and fellows than to their employer, but are uniformed and governed by rules and regulations of the respective armies. The Gurkhas were also hired by the Sultan of Brunei as he didn’t trust his native troops. Many Gurkhas were also part of a private company, ‘Gurkha Security Guards’, which was involved in Sierra Leone.

Another famous company based in the UK, is Executive Outcomes. It has had spectacular success in Angola, protecting oil installations and equipment, providing and training, men for the Angolan army, and has been widely credited for finally making peace possible in the poor benighted country. This company was also heavily involved in Sierra Leone starting from 1995, helping to protect the diamond mines and the existing government against the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). Mind you, they were acting like a full fledged armed unit, with helicopter gun ships and all. (Guess where they got this equipment from?). The company has provided military training, expertise, arms and ammunition, protection of industrial property and also armed conflict in various shapes and forms in Malawi, Mozambique, Botswana, Madagascar, Algeria, Kenya, Uganda and Sudan.

The prevalence of private companies and use of mercenaries by states reminds me of a quote by A. Framer, "Under every government the last resort of the people, is an appeal to the sword; whether to defend themselves against the open attacks of a foreign enemy, or to check the insidious encroachments of domestic foes. Whenever a people... entrust the defence of their country to a regular, standing army, composed of mercenaries, the power of that country will remain under the direction of the wealthiest citizens." While I am conscious of the fact that western powers will slowly cede control over usage of armed force to private companies and mercenaries, it will not be a good step. Look around in the UK and USA, prisons, quartermaster, training, logistics, and other security / armed force units are already being outsourced. Another few decades and it is not inconceivable that the governments and even the UN might reach for private companies to sort out their problems requiring armed forces (something like what happened in the middle ages – forward into the past!!) We don’t like our own soldiers to die, but don’t seem to mind paying others to die instead. What a sad indictment of us!

All this to be taken with a grain of salt!

The Cold Hands Of Death

While idly looking out of the Tower Bridge Walkway during one of the typically staid financial market cocktail evening receptions, my eyes fell on the spotlighted HMS Belfast which is moored off the south bank of the River Thames in London. HMS Belfast, a light cruiser of WW2 fame is a rather well known London attraction, although not of the same stature of the nearby London Eye or the Tower of London. It is painted in a jagged random pattern of white, grey and pale blue. The idea was that it would merge into the background during the Artic Convoys. I snuck out of the reception and even though it was quite chilly, I walked down the Tower Bridge, past the weird looking pod of a building, housing the London Mayor's office and stood looking at the cruiser from the quay. It is, of course, much bigger closer up yet not as big as some of the US Carriers, which are monstrous. Still, pretty big. Walking up the slippery walkway, I made my way up to the cruiser's foredeck and ambled up to one of the pom-pom stations on the starboard side. The night was pretty quiet and I was sitting there, letting my thoughts wander, as one does when one finds a bit of time to switch off during one's hectic city life. My thoughts roamed down strange pathways, thinking about the men and cold places that they are forced to endure, specially during wartime.

I remembered one of my teenage heroes, Captain Vallery. Alastair MacLean created him for the crew of the HMS Ulysses, a fictional light cruiser in a book of the same name. I must have read it around the time I was 11 or 12 and I can still remember vividly. At about 11 in the night, I came to the part where Captain Vallery dies and the admiral was announcing his death over the PA. This is embarrassing and I have only told one person about this episode, but when I read this part, I got a lump in my throat and some tears came dangerously close to tumbling from my eyes. For a boy of that age, to actually cry reading a book, was the pits, my masculinity was threatened massively. A quick dash of the hand to the eyes, a rapid clearing of the throat, a quick flip of 3 pages and that embarrassing episode was over, but the Captain remained one of my heroes. You know why? The men who served on the ships (both civilian and military) of the Artic Convoys were faced with some of the most excruciatingly painful periods of service that man has ever faced in WW2 and still rose to heroism and even beyond to greater things. Captain Vallery was in charge of such a band of men, serving on a light cruiser such as HMS Belfast, and despite the men being driven up to and frequently beyond their limits of endurance, managed to keep the ship in fighting trim and commanded respect and love of his men.

While it is a fictional account of Convoy FR77 to Murmansk, some words in the first chapter of the book are enlightening. I did manage to rummage through the piles of my books and succeeded to extricate the book and the doctor of the ship talks about 6 reasons why the men were driven close to mutiny. Fear, suspense and hunger are the three outriders of the Three Horsemen of WW2 which are cold,lack of sleep and exhaustion. I don’t think I will ever be able to do justice to the heartrendingly stark and brutal description and I wouldn’t even try. So completely wimping out, I will quote about two factors, the lack of sleep, "…That finely drawn feeling with every nerve in your body and cell in your brain stretched taut to breaking point, pushing you over the screaming edge of madness….Its the most exquisite agony in the world"; and cold, "….Do you know what its like when the wind, 20 below zero, comes screaming off the Polar and Greenland ice-caps and slices through the thickest clothing like a scalpel?...where even a torch battery dies out in the intense cold…A miserable world, a wet world, but always and predominantly a white world of softness and beauty and strangely muffled sound."

While sitting on the pom-pom, I could see the tiddly heater on the left of the seat. I tell you, I have no idea how those guys kept warm. The Artic Theatre of WW2 was one of the most dangerous, cruel and thoroughly painful for all concerned. Excluding Norway, the theatre mainly related to the convoys of food and materials which the allies shipped to Russia. Convoys would form of ships gathering from all over the English Ports, then the Navy would join in from Scapa Flow in Scotland. Then the convoy would start moving north east, up over Norway and down to Murmansk in Russia. The Germans, for some reason, would want to stop them. Forget about the natural hazards, the U-Boat wolf packs, the squadrons of bombers, long range Condor aircraft and the Germany Navy were all wanting to stop these convoys. Amongst the various German Navy vessels, Tirpitz, a fast battleship was so fearsome, that even rumours of it coming out were enough to scare the living daylights of the British Admiralty and the fleet. Quite a lot of people have heard the story of Convoy PQ17. This convoy got scared that the Tirpitz had sailed from its Norwegian berth and it scattered. Out of 36 ships which originally sailed, only 2 made it to Murmansk. As a result, more than 153 seamen died, more than 100,000 tons of cargo, more than 400 tanks, 210 aircrafts and 3,300 other vehicles were sent to the icy depth of the Arctic seas.

I digress. In the 4-5 years of the artic war, if one sees the British newspapers and opinions of the day, there were so many people in opposition to the artic convoys. Reasons ranging from why help the Russians when we need the food and materials more, the artic theater's propensity to chew and spit out men and ships was attacked because other theatres were begging for the man and ships, humanitarian aspects of the men's suffering was raised, and so on and so forth. Mind you, the Russians were a spectacularly ungrateful lot, whining away at the allies for more men and materials on one hand, and treating the sailors in Murmansk as if they were infected with a deadly disease (free world, capitalism….). 50 odd years on, Scapa Flow is a rusting forgotten harbour, Murmansk has couple of rotting memorials, while the rusting hulks and decayed bones of those thousands of seamen and sailors litter the seabed from the North Sea to the seas around Murmansk, and the men are forgotten. The biggest memorial is HMS Belfast, with its Artic camouflage paint, moored in the middle of the River Thames. What IS remembered faintly is that the Artic convoys were vital to defeat the Nazi's, they provided the first front and the flower of German youth lay dead in the vast steppes of Russia, killed using the same materials which the Allies shipped over at so tremendous a cost.

There is another small theatre of war currently underway. A tiny piece of land, compared to the immensities of the Artic Theatre, but the rest of the conditions are the same. I refer, of course, to the Siachen Glacier in India, where India and Pakistan are grappling over who controls the Siachen Glacier and surrounding mountains. The jawans, who are fighting there, suffer from similar conditions as I described before. It is bitterly cold, fear is ever present, hunger is rife, sleeping is tough, walking 10 meters is a pain, equipment breaks down frequently because of the intense cold and nature kills 10 times more people than the enemy. You may be surprised to read that the soldiers up there suffer from hunger. From the Indian side, the approaches are so tough, that every morsel of food, every cartridge of ammo, every shred of clothing has to be airlifted over. The weather being what it is, flights are restricted and the supply chain is challenging to say the very least. Up there in the freezing heights where temperatures can reach minus 50 degrees centigrade, the breath freezes, bodily functions are near impossible, lungs fill up with water and your next step could be down a crevasse or slipping off a thousand meter high cliff. Despite these nightmarish conditions, these men have been in that hellhole for the past 15-20 years, fighting a war and batteling nature at the same time, obeying commands which seem incomprehensible when faced with such treacherous conditions.

Fifty years into the future, will there be a huge artillery piece used in Siachen, stuck in the middle of one of the major roads in Bhopal or Delhi? Where another idiot like me will be standing there, having a contemplative smoke, looking at the piece of weaponry and trying to commemorate the men who operated the long range gun. Perhaps comprehend their emotions, their pain and fear. The wild eyes, the counter battery fire, steam freezing on their bodies, hunger, exhaustion and endurance. Trying to work out the motives behind sending these men to a hell beyond comprehension. I suspect the person in the future may not understand the individual sacrifice, but could dimly understand why these soldiers and artillerymen did what they did. Perhaps it would be a variation of the great game in those frigid heights, perhaps it would be protection of the boundaries or of vulnerable plains, perhaps it would be a nebulous concept such as ‘Honour’. Wondering whether somebody would behave like I did, I turned away from the pom-pom, flipped the cigarette into the river and murmured a silent word of thanks to those long dead sailors, a word of long delayed and possibly inconsequential recognition for them suffering hell so that we could live in a world safe from oppression and aggression, or so they thought.

All this to be taken with a grain of salt!