The West
Must Confront Its Own Past
By Professor Nazeer
Ahmed
CA
What the world demands from
the West is respect. The modern dialectic between
the West and other civilizations is colored by
the often bloody history of colonialism. Centuries
of domination and exploitation has fostered in
many parts of the world an abiding distrust of
the West. On the other hand, attitudes of superiority
persist in pockets of Europe and America.
The present must come to terms with the past for
a meaningful dialogue across cultural, national,
ethnic and civilization divides. Mere slogans
and platitudes will not do. In this article we
recall but a few of historical events that are
all too familiar to our readers and which may
have shaped their perceptions of the West.
It was the year 1799. On a hot summer day in May
of that fateful year, British troops stormed Srirangapatam,
the capital of Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore.
The sultan, alone among the princes and potentates
of South Asia, had successfully resisted the advance
of the British Empire for forty years. Tippu fell
in battle, as a valiant soldier fighting for his
people. That is well known. What is less known
is the looting that followed.
When the news of Tippu’s death was confirmed,
British troops fell on the city. Looting continued
through the night. It was not until late in the
following morning that the mayhem was stopped.
The British, known for their pomp, organized a
state burial for the sultan, then turned again
to the business of looting.
The state treasury had more than 150,000 gold
coins. These were distributed among the troops.
Next it was the turn of the royal belongings.
Tippu’s gold throne was melted down, divided
into small lots and the officers haggled over
the size of their lot. The only item that was
spared was the jewel studded huma bird that had
graced the throne. It was packaged and sent off
to London for the royal collections.
The loot of Srirangapatam was not unique. Similar
episodes were repeated both before and after the
fall of Mysore.
When the kingdom of Oudh fell in 1762 after the
Battle of Buxor, Warren Hastings, the governor
of Bengal embarked on an extortion spree to fatten
up the coffers of the East India Company. He demanded
all the gold and diamond jewelry from the Begums
of Oudh. When the Begums refused, they were confined
to their homes and starved until they surrendered
their belongings.
In 1857, when the Sepoy uprising in India failed,
and the British marched victoriously back into
the capital, they expelled the entire population
of the city for six months. More than fifty thousand
people were hanged so much so that every street
of Delhi looked like an execution chamber.
It was the year 1919. The First World War had
ended and a large number of Punjabi troops fighting
for the British had returned home. Woodrow Wilson’s
rhetoric of democracy and freedom had caught their
imagination. But alas! Returning home from war,
they discovered that the rhetoric of freedom did
not mean freedom for India. Instead, the British,
determined more than ever to hang onto their Indian
colony, passed the infamous Rowlett Act, reminiscent
in so many ways of the draconian anti-terrorist
laws passed by modern nations. Its purpose was
to prevent any organized movement for Indian independence.
Protests ensued. One such peaceful demonstration
was in Jallianwalla Bagh in the Punjab. Thousands
gathered to hear the local leaders. Unknown to
them a contingent of British troops, under the
direction of one General Dyer, waited for them.
Without warning, they shot point blank and massacred
thousands of men, women and children.
The story is familiar. If you wish to discover
the ancient heritage of a country, your best option
is to visit one of the great museums in London,
Madrid, Paris or Rome. Therein you will find the
most valuable artifacts of a nation, from Egyptian
mummies to the gold coins from Samaria. Perhaps
the only major country that escaped large scale
looting was Turkey. The Turks managed to hold
their own against the West until the First World
War and then waged a successful battle to retain
their independence and carve out a homeland for
themselves.
The British were not alone in the imperial game.
France, Italy, Russia and Holland were co-players.
The French gained control of the Algerian coast
in 1840 when the Ottomans, weakened by continuous
warfare with Russia and Austria, could not defend
their far flung possessions. By the time Sultan
Abdul Hamid ascended the Ottoman throne (1876),
French control of most of West Africa was complete.
Substantial French colonization of the Algerian
coastline followed. By the end of World War II,
more than a million French were settled in Algeria,
claiming it to be a part of France.
Weakened and exhausted by Hitler’s war (1939-45),
the European powers could not hold on to their
colonies. When the Algerians, like the Indians
and the Indonesians, made a demand for independence,
the French who had just been liberated from Nazi
occupation (1940-45), unleashed their guns on
the hapless Algerians. In 1945, over fifty thousand
Algerian demonstrators were slaughtered by French
gunfire in Setif and Guelma. Over the next fifteen
years, from 1945 until Charles De Gaulle gave
up the Algerian colony in 1962, more than one
million Algerians, almost five percent of the
total population, was butchered by the French.
The Italians, under Mussolini, invaded Ethiopia,
brutally occupied Addis Ababa and forced Emperor
Haile Salassie into exile. Resistance was mercilessly
crushed and the treasures of the land carted away
to Rome.
The Dutch were defeated and evicted from Indonesia
by the Japanese during WWII. Following the surrender
of Japan (May 1945), the Indonesians under the
leadership of Sukarno declared their independence.
The Dutch were not going to give up their colonies
so easily. The Dutch navy, backed up by the British
navy, bombarded Jakarta, landed troops, and reoccupied
the islands. A bloody war of liberation followed.
Thousands were killed. It was not until 1948 that
the Indonesians were victorious and the Dutch
finally packed up and went home.
The Russian occupation of Central Asia and the
Caucasus was even more brutal. Starting with the
decade of the 1850s the Czarist armies made relentless
war on the Khans of Samarqand and Bukhara in Central
Asia, and on the Chechens and Daghistanis in the
Caucuses. Resistance was stiff. The exploits of
Shaykh Shamyl of Dagestan against the Russians
are legendary. Nonetheless, the superior power
of the Russians finally prevailed and all of these
areas came under Czarist occupation. What followed
was a century of cultural and national suppression
until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992.
The lands of Central Asia gained their independence
but Chechnya and Dagestan remain under Russian
control to this day.
The American historical experience with non-European
peoples has been equally tragic. The elimination
of Native Americans and the Atlantic slave trade
were so monstrous in their human impact that they
are a painful sore in the collective conscience
of humanity. More recently, the selective internment
of Japanese Americans during WWII was a reminder
that ethnic distrust is a living reality. Notwithstanding
this background, perceptions of America around
the world were free of the stigma of colonialism
until 1945. This was in spite of the American
occupation of the Philippines and Cuba after the
Spanish-American war of 1896. American colonial
rule in the Philippines was so benign that many
in the islands genuinely liked the Americans.
As for Cuba, Fidel Castro would not stand a chance
if the Americans had treated the island with a
little more respect than a playboy resort to be
ruled by Battista and his henchmen.
The Second World War thrust the United States
on to the center stage in world affairs. As a
nation dedicated to democratic ideals and an open
society, the emergence of the US brought hope
to large sections of Afro-Asia and Latin America.
The expectations evaporated as the United States
got involved with geopolitics and soiled its hands.
The Vietnam war, the not so secret American role
in the overthrow of Mussaddaq of Iran, perceptions
of partisan role of the US in the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict and scores of interventions around the
world have destroyed much of the goodwill that
America enjoyed. The Iraq war is an ongoing tragedy
about which it is too early to form a historical
perspective.
Even a cursory survey of colonialism and its legacy
of distrust must include non-Western empires as
well. The Japanese occupation of Korea and China
was brutal and cruel beyond description. The atrocities
committed by the Japanese forces continue to mar
international relations in the eastern Pacific
to this day. It was the intervention of Japan,
starting with Manchuria after the Russian-Japanese
war of 1904, and the social havoc caused by military
occupation (1931-45) that prevented the success
of the modernizing, democratic reforms introduced
by Sun Yat-Sen (1867-1925). Ultimately, it pushed
China in the direction of a Communist takeover
in 1948.
A shrunken world has brought the former colonizers
and the colonized closer together. Thousands of
angry African men roam the streets of Paris and
unemployed Asian youth saunter around in London.
They may not know history but history has a way
of getting into your blood. It is passed on through
a mother’s milk. Memories shape attitudes.
Grievances of the present are magnified by memories
from the past. Those concerned with civil unrest
and the evolution of democratic, civil societies
must come to terms not only with social conditions
of the present but also perceptions of the past.
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