Tweet
Robert Fisk: We can't tell the victims to leave mass graves in peace
Saturday, 18 June 2011
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-we-cant-tell-the-victims-to-leave-mass-graves-in-peace-2299328.html
The Syrians say they discovered a mass grave this week containing the
bodies of murdered soldiers outside a town called Jisr al-Shughour.
"Armed gangs" are to blame, according to Syrian state television.
Well, maybe. Or perhaps they were killed by their colleagues for
refusing to open fire on unarmed anti-Assad demonstrators. But all the
world's a mass grave. Why, only a few miles north of Jisr al-Shughour,
the Syrian fields are still strewn with thousands of bones and bits of
skulls; all that is left in just this one location of the one and a
half million men, women and children who were murdered in the 1915
Armenian holocaust. Then there's there's a place called "Barbara's
Pit" near a town called Lasko where the mass grave, only 66 years old
this time, contains perhaps 1,000 skeletons about whom no one really
wishes to talk.
The investigation has been going on for two years now, a darkly
political, deeply fearful inquiry because this mass grave is in
Slovenia and contains the victims of Tito's victorious partisans, the
pro-Nazi Croat Ustashe militia and their families, anti-communist
Cossacks as well, perhaps, a few Hungarian collaborators no doubt,
certainly some anti-Tito Serb Chetniks and their wives and fathers and
brothers and children and nieces. Handed over to Tito's forces by us,
the Brits, at the end of the Second World War, at the point of a
bayonet; screaming with fear, they were, cutting their throats in the
trains that took them back into Yugoslavia from the safety of Austria,
women and children hurling themselves to their deaths off the
carriages as they passed over river gorges.
We didn't want to have the communists infect Austria, you see. We
wanted peace with Tito. Our own PoWs had to be returned to us. So we
helped the killers to perpetrate the massacres that left perhaps
100,000 corpses rotting in the 600 mass graves of Slovenia. Most can
never be identified, although Lljubljana's brave little government
promises to dig up every one.
Some were, no doubt, war criminals, tools of the Nazis who ruled
Croatia and gobbled up Bosnia and part of Serbia in 1941. There were
extermination camps in the Ustashe's brutal "nation". But there are
children's shoes in the mass graves and many of the bodies appear to
have been executed naked. Women were among them. Small shoes still
cover the lower part of femurs. The first writer to reveal the secrets
of Barbarin rov, Roman Leljak, was charged by the police with
"desecrating" a tomb. The real culprit - the head of the local mass
murderers in 1945 - was a member of the First Slovene Division of
Tito's "People's Defence". The slaughter lasted from May until
September 1945, four months after Hitler's death, when even the
Japanese war was over.
Mass graves are opened, I was told by a Serb colonel's wife during the
Balkan wars, to pour more blood into them. But opening a few graves at
Katyn - containing the corpses of thousands of Polish officers and
intellectuals murdered by Stalin's NKVD, uncovered by the Nazis,
denied by the Soviets and by the West for decades because it wanted to
keep its relations with Stalin's butchers, until the new Russia itself
told the truth - led to a strange new trust between Moscow and Warsaw
with even ex-KGB man Putin bowing before the slaughter field.
Do these corpses matter now that most of their relatives - and their
murderers - are dead? Memorialising individual deaths in war started
only in 1914. Save for the glorious leaders, the Wellingtons and the
Napoleons and the Nelsons, mass graves awaited all who fell in battle.
The French dead of Waterloo were shipped off to England to be used as
manure on the fields of Lincolnshire. If war is judicial murder, I
suppose they suffered a crueller fate than the Chetniks and Cossacks
and Ustashe and their families in 1945 whose graves are at least known
even if their identities will always be anonymous.
Where we can, we do now identify the dead. The vast 1914-1918 war
cemeteries and the graveyards of the Second World War define our
craving for individualism amid barbarism. Yet mass graves lie beneath
every crossroads in Europe; from the war of the Spanish succession to
the Hundred Years War, to the Franco-Prussian war, from Drogheda to
Srebrenica and, of course, to the ash pits of Auschwitz. In 1993, I
visited the remains of the Treblinka extermination camp in Poland just
after a gale had unearthed trees from the ground. In the roots of one,
I found human teeth. Known unto God.
There's a mass grave only two miles from my home in Beirut - of
Palestinian victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacre whom I watched
being buried, only a few of whose names I know - and which will never
be reopened. Not in our lifetime. And there are mass graves - of
perhaps 30,000 Iraqi dead - buried alive by US forces in the 1991 Gulf
War, unmarked, of course.
I'm not sure where the search should end. Who would deny the relatives
of the dead of Srebrenica - whose principal killer at last resides in
the Hague - the chance of praying at the graves? Who would turn their
backs on the mass graves of Buchenwald? Or the frozen hills of bones
that mark the burial of the 350,000 Leningraders who starved to death
in 1941 and 1942?
I am reminded of that great American poet, Carl Sandburg. "Pile the
bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo," he wrote. "And pile them high
at Gettysburg/And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun./Shovel them
under and let me work... I am the grass,/Let me work."
Saturday, 18 June 2011
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-we-cant-tell-the-victims-to-leave-mass-graves-in-peace-2299328.html
The Syrians say they discovered a mass grave this week containing the
bodies of murdered soldiers outside a town called Jisr al-Shughour.
"Armed gangs" are to blame, according to Syrian state television.
Well, maybe. Or perhaps they were killed by their colleagues for
refusing to open fire on unarmed anti-Assad demonstrators. But all the
world's a mass grave. Why, only a few miles north of Jisr al-Shughour,
the Syrian fields are still strewn with thousands of bones and bits of
skulls; all that is left in just this one location of the one and a
half million men, women and children who were murdered in the 1915
Armenian holocaust. Then there's there's a place called "Barbara's
Pit" near a town called Lasko where the mass grave, only 66 years old
this time, contains perhaps 1,000 skeletons about whom no one really
wishes to talk.
The investigation has been going on for two years now, a darkly
political, deeply fearful inquiry because this mass grave is in
Slovenia and contains the victims of Tito's victorious partisans, the
pro-Nazi Croat Ustashe militia and their families, anti-communist
Cossacks as well, perhaps, a few Hungarian collaborators no doubt,
certainly some anti-Tito Serb Chetniks and their wives and fathers and
brothers and children and nieces. Handed over to Tito's forces by us,
the Brits, at the end of the Second World War, at the point of a
bayonet; screaming with fear, they were, cutting their throats in the
trains that took them back into Yugoslavia from the safety of Austria,
women and children hurling themselves to their deaths off the
carriages as they passed over river gorges.
We didn't want to have the communists infect Austria, you see. We
wanted peace with Tito. Our own PoWs had to be returned to us. So we
helped the killers to perpetrate the massacres that left perhaps
100,000 corpses rotting in the 600 mass graves of Slovenia. Most can
never be identified, although Lljubljana's brave little government
promises to dig up every one.
Some were, no doubt, war criminals, tools of the Nazis who ruled
Croatia and gobbled up Bosnia and part of Serbia in 1941. There were
extermination camps in the Ustashe's brutal "nation". But there are
children's shoes in the mass graves and many of the bodies appear to
have been executed naked. Women were among them. Small shoes still
cover the lower part of femurs. The first writer to reveal the secrets
of Barbarin rov, Roman Leljak, was charged by the police with
"desecrating" a tomb. The real culprit - the head of the local mass
murderers in 1945 - was a member of the First Slovene Division of
Tito's "People's Defence". The slaughter lasted from May until
September 1945, four months after Hitler's death, when even the
Japanese war was over.
Mass graves are opened, I was told by a Serb colonel's wife during the
Balkan wars, to pour more blood into them. But opening a few graves at
Katyn - containing the corpses of thousands of Polish officers and
intellectuals murdered by Stalin's NKVD, uncovered by the Nazis,
denied by the Soviets and by the West for decades because it wanted to
keep its relations with Stalin's butchers, until the new Russia itself
told the truth - led to a strange new trust between Moscow and Warsaw
with even ex-KGB man Putin bowing before the slaughter field.
Do these corpses matter now that most of their relatives - and their
murderers - are dead? Memorialising individual deaths in war started
only in 1914. Save for the glorious leaders, the Wellingtons and the
Napoleons and the Nelsons, mass graves awaited all who fell in battle.
The French dead of Waterloo were shipped off to England to be used as
manure on the fields of Lincolnshire. If war is judicial murder, I
suppose they suffered a crueller fate than the Chetniks and Cossacks
and Ustashe and their families in 1945 whose graves are at least known
even if their identities will always be anonymous.
Where we can, we do now identify the dead. The vast 1914-1918 war
cemeteries and the graveyards of the Second World War define our
craving for individualism amid barbarism. Yet mass graves lie beneath
every crossroads in Europe; from the war of the Spanish succession to
the Hundred Years War, to the Franco-Prussian war, from Drogheda to
Srebrenica and, of course, to the ash pits of Auschwitz. In 1993, I
visited the remains of the Treblinka extermination camp in Poland just
after a gale had unearthed trees from the ground. In the roots of one,
I found human teeth. Known unto God.
There's a mass grave only two miles from my home in Beirut - of
Palestinian victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacre whom I watched
being buried, only a few of whose names I know - and which will never
be reopened. Not in our lifetime. And there are mass graves - of
perhaps 30,000 Iraqi dead - buried alive by US forces in the 1991 Gulf
War, unmarked, of course.
I'm not sure where the search should end. Who would deny the relatives
of the dead of Srebrenica - whose principal killer at last resides in
the Hague - the chance of praying at the graves? Who would turn their
backs on the mass graves of Buchenwald? Or the frozen hills of bones
that mark the burial of the 350,000 Leningraders who starved to death
in 1941 and 1942?
I am reminded of that great American poet, Carl Sandburg. "Pile the
bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo," he wrote. "And pile them high
at Gettysburg/And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun./Shovel them
under and let me work... I am the grass,/Let me work."