Monday, February 05, 2007
Soapbox reborn
I've just posted on my other blog for the first time in about 18 months. This was my first blog in fact. I might do this more often for things of a more current affairsy, polemical nature, in the spirit of the blog's name Soapbox Cabaret which was the name of my song'n'dance political-satirical review from 1999-2000. I shall still endeavour to post here once a week though.
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Today in 1993 there are still Iraqis and Kurds who remember being bombed and machine-gunned by the RAF in the 1920s. A Kurd from the Korak mountains commented, seventy years after the event: *They were bombing here in the Kaniya Khoran...Sometimes they raided three times a day.* Wing Commander Lewis, then of 30 Squadron (RAF), Iraq, recalls how quite often *one would get a signal that a certain Kurdish village would have to be bombed...*, the RAF pilots being ordered to bomb any Kurd who looked hostile. In the same vein, Squadron-Leader Kendal of 30 Squadron recalls that if the tribespeople were doing something they ought not be doing then you shot them.*
Similarly, Wing-Commander Gale, also of 30 Squadron: *If the Kurds hadn't learned by our example to behave themselves in a civilised way then we had to spank their bottoms. This was done by bombs and guns.
Wing-Commander Sir Arthur Harris (later Bomber Harris, head of wartime Bomber Command) was happy to emphasise that *The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means in casualties and damage. Within forty-five minutes a full-size village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.* It was an easy matter to bomb and machine-gun the tribespeople, because they had no means of defence or retalitation. Iraq and Kurdistan were also useful laboratories for new weapons; devices specifically developed by the Air Ministry for use against tribal villages. The ministry drew up a list of possible weapons, some of them the forerunners of napalm and air-to-ground missiles:
Phosphorus bombs, war rockets, metal crowsfeet [to maim livestock] man-killing shrapnel, liquid fire, delay-action bombs. Many of these weapons were first used in Kurdistan.
Excerpt from pages 179-181 of Simons, Geoff. *Iraq: From Sumer to Saddam*.
London: St. Martins Press, 1994.
Sir Edmund thanks for your response. I was looking at some of that material the other day, including descriptions of individual encounters and imaging Sid being in the middle of it. Of course this occupation of Iraq was also the first time that a colonial territory was controlled using air-power rather than a substantial ground force. (Churchill's way of saving money, despite the fact that it still cost £750 million pounds in the 1920's - the equivalent of £10 billion today).
The observation that the locals were "savages" still seems to be the opinion of the occupying forces. Strange how short our memories are, it's not so much a case of history repeating itself as being continuous.
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