THE IMPERIALIST DRIVE
Al-Ahram Weekly, Egypt
July 19 2007
While it would appear that formal colonialism largely ended in the
last century, the imperial impulse entered the new millennium in
altered forms, writes Ayman El-Amir
One is often tempted to believe, even through a sheer lapse of
memory, that colonialism and the long trail of generations that
fought it is something of the past, now dead and buried in history
books. Yet nearly three- quarters of all member states of the United
Nations today have become independent sovereign countries in the
past half century through struggles of self- determination. French
President Nicolas Sarkozy has, during his recent visit to Algeria,
declined to apologise for the atrocities France committed during its
130-year-long occupation and exploitation of Algeria. It is a strong
reminder that colonial attitudes remain a bitter reality and that
despite the promise of globalisation, colonialism in its varied forms
still poisons the lives of many around the world. Colonial powers,
old and new, owe the peoples they conquered and colonised not only
formal apologies but also reparations.
There was a trend during the colonial era among dominated peoples to
pretend, by way of desperate resignation, that their colonial rulers
were more benign than others. They thanked their lucky stars that
the British administration, for example, was less brutal than the
French who, in turn, were more merciful than the Portuguese. As four
centuries of imperialism and colonialism have proven, the atrocities
and consequences of the colonial era have belied the claim of "the
white man’s burden" of extending the benefits of Western civilisation
to the "primitive savages" they conquered.
The fact is that colonial powers plundered the wealth of future
nation- states, displaced tribal populations, carved up territories,
sowed the seeds of future inter-state and tribal conflicts, reduced
the indigenous population to a sub-human status and enslaved them.
When the conquerors finally departed, they left virtually nothing in
place to help colonised peoples develop independent governance or a
meaningful political community. The legendary statesman Kwame Nkrumah,
the first president of Ghana, eloquently put it this way: "It is far
easier for the proverbial camel to pass through the needle’s eye, hump
and all, than for an erstwhile colonial administration to give sound
and honest counsel of a political nature to its liberated territory."
Historically, the colonial experience leaves no doubt that all its
protagonists sought to create a subject race of colonised peoples.
Together with suppressive military power, the cultivation of this
sense of inferiority facilitated the plundering of the colonial
territories’ resources and the subjugation of their peoples. In Egypt,
for example, the racist undertone of colonial rule was reflected
in Lord Cromer’s memoirs, Modern Egypt. As the British proconsul
in Egypt from 1882 to 1907, Cromer denigrated Egypt’s centuries-old
civilisation and multicultural tradition as "barbarous", "coarse",
"cruel" and "lacking in harmony". His prescription for the Egyptians
was to abandon their crude cultural heritage, Pharaonic, Christian
and Arab, and try to aspire to the superior ways of the civilised
European colonialist. Brutal force and racist subjugation were the
hallmark of colonial occupation and administration wherever invading
imperial armies set foot.
The French, like other colonialists, have a good few brutal acts
to apologise for, such as the Setif massacre in Algeria. There are
different accounts of the incident, which started on 8 May 1945 when
a march by Algerian tribes in Setif and Guelma in Constantine against
French and European settlers — the pièds noire, who were celebrating
VE Day (the day when Nazi Germany surrendered) — turned into a
pro-independence uprising. French retaliation was swift and vengeful.
French troops using artillery and bomber-aircraft strafed the local
population incessantly for two full weeks. French estimates initially
put the casualty figure at 1,500 dead. But French historians later
revised the figure upward to between 15,000 and 20,000 dead.
Post-independence Algerian governments estimated the death toll at more
than double that figure — 45,000 dead in what President Abdul-Aziz
Bouteflika recently called the beginning of genocide by the French
occupation forces against the Algerian people.
This and other atrocities, for which the French refuse to apologise,
have cast a dark shadow of shame over France’s 200-year-old claim
of being one of the chief architects of universal human rights
standards. France’s reluctance to apologise for the brutalities
of its colonial rule in Algeria has also held up the conclusion of
a negotiated treaty of friendship and cooperation between the two
countries.
British colonialism had its share of acts of genocide too, whether
in the suppression of the Kikuyu tribes revolt in Kenya in the 1950s,
the starvation of millions in India, or the Opium Wars against China
in the mid-19th century, to name but a few. The 1960 UN Declaration
on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples
was a watershed landmark ending the centuries-old colonial era. Soon
afterwards the US was involved in the Vietnam War that ended more
than a decade later, leaving behind tens of thousands of American
casualties and millions of Vietnamese dead, maimed or terminally ill by
chemical defoliants. Like France, Britain and other colonial powers,
the US never offered an apology to the Vietnamese people nor was it
condemned for war crimes.
Colonialism in all its abominable forms, whether direct military
conquest or settler colonialism, has crept into the 21st century. Its
cruelties are daily played out in Iraq and Palestine for the world
to see and despair over. The US is fighting a losing war of colonial
greed in Iraq while Israel, like apartheid South Africa of yore, is
the epitome of 19th century settler colonialism, given the respectful
mantle of statehood. During the 20th century, and despite the formal
ending of old-style colonialism, old and new colonial powers adopted
a new crusade against a new enemy: the threat of communist expansion.
Towards the end of the century, communism collapsed too and a new
world order based on US hegemony, supported by ragtag allies seemed
to take hold. The new cause is the US-proclaimed global war against
terrorism. While the cause is genuine, in so far as no one would like
to be sitting in a coffee shop, on a plane or a school bus, or in a
movie theatre next to a terrorist replete with a belt of explosives,
it has become a mixed bag of hidden agendas. US-led imperial ambition
armed with the threat of military force has stymied legitimate national
liberation struggles. Because the US-Israeli alliance sought to besiege
and liquidate the Palestinian national liberation struggle, classifying
its actors as "terrorists", the blanket definition of terrorism lumped
together many groups to the extent that terrorism, often senseless,
became the only salvation for a desperate people, irrespective of the
worthiness of the cause. It also marks the failure of more than two
decades of UN-sponsored negotiations seeking a fair and legitimate
definition of terrorism that does not ostracise national liberation
struggles. Old-style colonialism has mutated, and so too the struggle
against it, becoming what Russian President Vladimir Putin called
"the scourge of the 21th century". Despite the global spread of the
US armada, in both physical military might and covert operations,
there does not seem to be an end in sight.
It is probably high time to abandon the lost cause of the new world
order and go back to the UN. Colonial powers, old and new, should
strive to rectify their past and redeem themselves as a means of
building a just and peaceful future. The UN could establish a formal
but voluntary "Book of Apologies" for all powers that committed
atrocities against peoples that once came under their domination —
Africans, Asians and Armenians included. It may not cost them anything
close to the estimated $61 billion post-war Germany paid to Israel
under allied pressure as "reparations, restitution and indemnities",
in the words of Chaim Weizam, for the atrocities committed by the Third
Reich against Jews, but it may help clear the past and build a better
future, both in terms of human relations and international trade.
The 19th century Irish-British playwright George Bernard Shaw put
it this way: "A conquered nation is like a man with cancer: he can
think of nothing else."
* The writer is a former correspondent for Al-Ahram in Washington,
DC. He also served as director of UN Radio and Television in New York.
–Boundary_(ID_7tgWfPKpcp4NzXSEV5ztOA)–