ABS CBN News, Philippines
Aug 12 2004

Celebrating Warsaw

On August 1, 1944, the people of Warsaw rose up against their Nazi
occupiers on what they thought was the implicit signal of the arrival
of an Allied army (Soviet) on the opposite bank of the Vistula river
bordering the Polish capital on the east. Overhead US and British
warplanes flew sorties that would suddenly stop as the Warsaw
uprising was slowly, relentlessly and meticulously exterminated. Nazi
Germany was losing the war, but it had in the Polish capital some of
the best and most brutal fighting units of its war machine.

Half a century later, another people, the Kurds, rose up against
another oppressor, Saddam Hussein, on the explicit signal of an
Allied army (US) stationed across the border (Kuwait). To be sure,
the Kurds, as a race, were not as noble as the Poles, for they had
joined in the rape and slaughter of Armenian women and children.

But, like the heroic agony of the Warsaw uprising, that of the
Kurdish revolt would only be watched and never helped by those most
strongly positioned to save it and even make it prevail.

The Soviet Army in 1944 preferred to stay on its side of the river,
until the German war machine had ground Warsaw to rubble — making it
the most devastated city in World War II, followed only by Manila
which was destroyed by the American war machine — and cut down the
flower of the Polish nation so that no natural leader would arise to
oppose the Soviet occupation of that sad country.

Thus did Saddam Hussein in 1991 devastate the lands of the Kurds and
exterminate the Kurdish uprising which the United States encouraged
and then abandoned. So brave were the Polish militants — of whom
200,000 were killed — that even the Nazis could not forbear but to
render them honors, calling their resistance one of the bravest acts
they had ever witnessed.

Now, the greatest war machine since the fall of Nazi Germany stands
poised to devastate the city of Najaf, where scores of Iraqi
militants have vowed to make a final stand against the invaders of
their country. Like the Poles in Warsaw before them, the Iraqis in
Najaf have been urged by the US to lay down their arms or face
extinction. Like the Poles before them, the Iraqis have accepted
their doom.

The Polish uprising lasted two months; the Iraqi resistance continues
one year after the defeat of the country was proudly announced on the
deck of an aircraft by the American commander in chief. Two months,
one year — but then US armed forces in Iraq pack far more wallop
than the Nazi armies in Poland. The US is fighting a pre-World War I
colonial war with the weapons of World War IV, having improved its
weaponry exponentially since the end of World War III, otherwise
known as the Cold War.

The anniversary of the Warsaw uprising was barely noticed and was
marked only by the publication of an exhaustive but finally
exhausting and unreadable volume by the British historian Norman
Davis. But now comes a more fitting memorial to hopeless bravery: the
forthcoming extermination of Najaf. The only irony would be that the
Poles are with the Nazis this time, so to speak, except that the
Poland of today bears no resemblance to yesteryear’s sad and noble
country of the same name.