The Irish in Foreign Armies : REMEMBRANCE

national | anti-war / imperialism | feature

Tuesday October 07, 2008 16:47

by Pat Muldowney

lest.weforget at live dot ie

Lest We Forget: WAR CRIMES

Remember this?

The Remembrance season is approaching. We will be called upon yet again to show maturity, to support reconciliation, to advance peace --- by participating in ceremonies which celebrate aggression, violence and war crimes!.

Mayo "Peace" Memorial

Four years ago a participant in one of the greatest war crimes in history was honoured in Mayo by a minister of the Irish government. Sergeant Major Cornelius Coughlan (Victoria Cross) of the Gordon Highlanders was praised by Defence Minister Michael Smith for his role in putting down the so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857, which Indians call their First War of Independence. Minister Smith praised Coughlan, along with sixty other brave Irishmen, as he put it, who were awarded the Victoria Cross during the military campaign that followed the Indian Mutiny.

A letter published after the 1857 fall of Delhi in the 'Bombay Telegraph', and subsequently reproduced in the British press, testified to the scale of the massacres carried out by British troops: 'All the city people found within the walls (of the city of Delhi) when our troops entered were bayoneted on the spot, and the number was considerable, as you may suppose, when I tell you that in some houses forty and fifty people were hiding. These were not mutineers but residents of the city, who trusted to our well-known mild rule for pardon. I am glad to say they were disappointed'.

Fanatical blood-lust saturated the Empire. Charles Dickens said: 'I wish I were commander-in-chief in India ... I should proclaim to them that I considered my holding that appointment by the leave of God, to mean that I should do my utmost to exterminate the race.'

A book published last year (War of Civilisations: India AD 1857, by Amaresh Misra, a writer and historian based in Mumbai) argued that up to 10 million Indians, and not the 100,000 acknowledged by Britain, were slaughtered over a 10 year period in revenge for the so-called 'Mutiny'. In India this period of acute terror was called 'the Devil's Wind'. Being blown to pieces at the mouth of a cannon was regarded by the British perpetrators as one of their more humane methods of slaughter ('instant death to the victim, salutary terror to the onlookers who had body parts sprayed all over them').

What would we say if a Dutch or Bosnian government minister today were to honour one of their many countrymen who, as volunteers in the German army, were decorated by Hitler for their role in similar Nazi extermination in the Ukraine in 1942?

On October 7, President McAleese will endorse in our name the Mayo Peace Park.

We are told this 'Peace Park' will honour those Mayo people who fought in foreign armies and foreign wars in the twentieth century. So if they participated in the extermination of half a million Filipinos by the American Army in 1902 we honour them. Or the incineration of a hundred thousand defenceless civilians in Dresden in 1945, or the obliteration of Hiroshima in the same year. Or the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968. Or the razing of Fallujah in 2004. Or any of the innumerable other criminal acts for which we as a people gave no authorisation and had no responsibility.

Is Mayo about to sleepwalk into yet another war crime commemoration similar to its celebration of the rape of Delhi by Cornelius Coughlan and his colleagues in the British Army?

Remembrance Ceremonies

Major Remembrance ceremonies are being organised for the beginning of November. To sugar the pill, genuine peace-keeping operations endorsed by the Irish democracy will be conflated with warfare in foreign armies by Irish individuals, without any reservations being expressed about whether the killing that such people did was in a just cause.

The Remembrance ceremonies are being marketed as indicators of the new-found maturity of the Irish. We are told that celebration of killing has something to do with reconciliation.

Surely reconciliation means drawing back from violence and killing? Does reconciliation mean going out to kill people in some country with which Ireland had no quarrel? Do we not want to be reconciled with those who were killed by Irish people in foreign armies?