Robert Fisk: all the world is a mass grave
June 18, 2011 – 12:42 AMT
PanARMENIAN.Net – All the world is a mass grave, Robert Fisk says in
an article he titled `We can’t tell the victims to leave mass graves
in peace.’
`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,’
Fisk says.
`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.’
`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,’ he continues.
`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.’
Fisk concludes, `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?’