Killing Is Thrilling
By Decca Aitkenhead
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."