Fra The Guardian i dag, om soldater og andre engler. Viser nytten av å
eskalere konflikter, og gir bakgrunn for å verdsette Tony Blairs
oppfatninger om kollektiv serbisk skyld.
Knut Rognes
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Killing is thrilling
Soldiers have acted with barbarity throughout history. Remember that when
our boys call the Serbs 'evil'
Decca Aitkenhead
Monday June 21, 1999
The Guardian
Before we grow too numb to such tales, here is another short account of
what soldiers and police did to a man they suspected of belonging to a
rebel army. They dragged him from his bed at 4.30am, shot at his screaming
wife and baby, and marched him to barracks where they made him run barefoot
across broken glass and barbed wire between two lines of military police
who beat him. They tied him up with a bag over his head, and beat him
repeatedly; a week later, 17lb lighter, he was photographed naked and sent
to a camp, where he soon learned how lucky he had been. Other detainees had
been beaten in the kidneys and testicles, bent over electric fires, anally
raped with objects, burnt with matches, urinated on, deprived of sleep,
assaulted with electric cattle prods and terrorised by Russian roulette
played with blanks.
The victim of this torture was not a Kosovan Albanian but an IRA suspect,
Kevin Hannaway, interred in the early seventies, and the men who beat and
abused him belonged to the very army currently helping to liberate Kosovo.
Less than a generation after torturing IRA suspects, British troops are
discovering Serb police stations refashioned as crude torture chambers, and
it is as if they cannot believe their eyes. A corporal who rescued two
sisters from Serb paramilitary rapists last week said afterwards, "The men
in that building were the worst scum." A trooper from 1 Para said, "I just
don't understand how people could treat other human beings like this? They
must be sick in the head."
How indeed. It is the obvious question, although one that suggests an
awfulness so chill that, in a way, the idea that anyone could give a cogent
answer is almost worse than our daze of incomprehension. But it is
necessary for the Nato powers to be able to provide an answer, in order
that they can organise the random horror into a political framework in
which we can locate some sense. And so it is that every Nato leader is
repeatedly assuring us that the rape and the torture and all the sick
abandon in Kosovo are the unique consequences of ethnic cleansing, a creed
conceived by a monster in Belgrade. There is a Serb canon in which torture
chambers are possible - even inevitable - and a western canon in which they
are not. Ethnic cleansers become sadists; we do not. Serbs are barbarians,
and our boys are disciplined peacekeepers.
This account may be immensely reassuring, but that is as much as you can
say for it. A new book, An Intimate History of Killing, has revealed some
uncomfortable truths about our boys, by publishing extracts from letters
sent home by Allied servicemen in both world wars, and Americans in
Vietnam. In one, a first world war officer described seeing enemies' bodies
exploding and hearing their screams as "one of the happiest moments of my
life"; another described sticking a bayonet in a man as "gorgeously
satisfying"; another wrote of "big masturbations!" after a good killing.
Many men experienced a huge sexual thrill in killing - "It was like the
best sex ever", "I had a hard on" and so on - and there were endless
accounts of comrades committing rape and atrocities - and sometimes even
confessions by the letter-writers themselves.
These were not men corrupted by the mad creed of ethnic cleansing. Nor were
RUC officers in the 1970s, and yet by June 1978 an Amnesty International
report had concluded that "Maltreatment of suspected terrorists by the RUC
has taken place with sufficient frequency to warrant establishment of a
public inquiry." A year later, a doctor confirmed that during his three
years attending Castlereagh barracks, he treated countless detainees for
punctured ear drums and broken bones. For what it is worth, I've witnessed
more mindless, casual, violent cruelty among squaddies after a good night
in the pub than I have yet to encounter in any other British men.
However unimaginable the atrocities of Serb paramilitaries and police seem,
and however much we wish to believe that normal people like us could not
commit them, the ugliest truth is that soldiers all over the world have
done things that would make your blood freeze. Brutal sadism is not a state
of mind exclusive to men made bad by ethnic cleansing - it is the horribly
ordinary condition of militarised men made monstrous by war.
The distinction is an important one. Those of us who are angrily intolerant
of the Serbs still dismissing evidence of their soldiers' atrocities as KLA
propaganda should remember that the RUC chief in 1977 publicly accused IRA
prisoners of harming themselves to discredit the police, and that a
programme dealing with the 1978 Amnesty report was banned from being
broadcast. The account of Kevin Hannaway's torture comes from Gerry Adams'
autobiography, and that is still reason enough for many Britons to blithely
dismiss it as pure lies; likewise, veterans groups have denounced An
Intimate History of Killing as feminist propaganda. We all construct our
history according to what we are willing to believe, and the Serb people
are no different; just as there is no Serb monopoly on atrocity, nor do
they have a monopoly on distorting history. Just last week, as Nato's
forensic experts were sifting their way through Kosovo in pursuit of war
criminals, we were promising anonymity to the soldiers involved in the
Bloody Sunday massacre.
Inevitably, you must wonder whether barbarism is the natural condition of
man let loose, or the depraved state of man when corrupted by violence.
However interesting the question may be, it matters very little right now.
What matters is that we recognise that all military men are capable of
inhumanity under the right - or wrong - circumstances, and that it is our
absolute moral imperative to prevent those circumstances developing again
in Kosovo.
Supporters of the war have been flourishing evidence of Serb atrocities
with such extravagance of glee as to teeter on indecency. What they choose
to ignore is that it was militarised normality - the normalisation of power
by might - that legitimised and encouraged these acts of inhumanity. If we
militarise the Balkans indefinitely, we risk reinforcing the very
conditions which help breed the violence we are supposed to be defeating.
The trooper from Para 1 was confident enough about his role last week:
"this is why we are here," he said, "to make sure this can never happen
again." But the more triumphalist our faith in our own military justness,
the less willing we may be to acknowledge the danger of a less honourable
aftermath. It is interesting that Americans have come closest to
confronting their own servicemen's cruelties in Vietnam, a war whose wisdom
and justice they hold in the greatest doubt. A belief that Nato's war
against Serbia was just should not be allowed to obscure our understanding
of what may well be yet to come.
Our press have been unsure in what light to cast the two ex-British
soldiers found last week fighting for the KLA. One had lost count of the
number of Serbs he had killed; "I didn't see them as people - they were
just targets. I felt nothing when they fell," he said, and his remarks were
generally reported sympathetically. British troops are of course assumed to
be self-disciplined - more responsible than that pair of plucky, if a
little wayward, have-a-go heroes. But what will happen when our troops grow
impatient with Kosovan acts of violent revenge, or grow to despise the KLA
renegades, or begin to hold proud Serb civilians responsible for their
soldiers' deeds?
The corporal who saved the sisters from Serb rapists was perfectly candid
about his feelings towards the men. "My inclination would have been to take
them around the back and kill them."
© Copyright Guardian Media Group plc. 1999
http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/Print/0,3858,3876747,00.html
eller
http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,3029,59915,00.html
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