Nowherelands: Lost Countries of the 19th and 20th Century
Lucy Hughes-Hallett (2013)
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- Bu səhifədəki naviqasiya:
- At the Epicentre of Evil
- Hal Gold (2004): Unit 731: Testimony Simon Winchester Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi (1987)
- Mortal Sins in an Impenetrable Rainforest
- Hy V. Luong (1992): Revolution in the Village. Tradition and Transformation in North Vietnam 1925-1988 Aage Krarup Nielsen (1939)
- Childhood Paradise in the World’s most Dismal Place
Lucy Hughes-Hallett (2013): The Pike: Gabriele D’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War Alceste de Amris & Gabriele D’Annunzio (1920): La Carta di Liberata del Carnaro Cabiria (1914): Script Gabriele D’Annunzio, directed by Giovanni Patrone There we found a town that has the quality of a dream, a bad headachy dream. Its original character is round and sunburnt and solid, like any pompous southern port, but it has been hacked by treaties into a surrealist form REBECCA WEST 1925 to
1945 ININO THE SOUTH SHETLAND ISLANDS THE CHANNEL ISLANDS TANGIER INTERNATIONAL ZONE SASENO HATAY
TANNU TUVA MANCHUKUO
At the Epicentre of Evil The macabre experiments Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele performed on prisoners at Auschwitz in the Second World War have made him a byword for humanity at its most evil. Even so, his activities pale in comparison with the scenes that played out in the East Asian country of Manchukuo some years earlier. Few were aware of what lay ahead when the new state first saw the light of day in early spring 1932, the year after the Japanese invasion of Chinese Manchuria. Chinese historians later insisted on referring to Manchukuo as ‘the false Manchurian state’, because it was clearly nothing but a Japanese puppet state right from the start. Nonetheless, it gained recognition from El Salvador and the Dominican Republic. They were soon followed by the future axis powers, German and Italy, as well as Vatican City, which had lots of missionaries in the area. Manchukuo was the size of Sweden, and stretched from the sub-Arctic areas along the river Amur in the north to the fertile plains down by the Bohai Gulf in the south. Here, the border with China coincided with the end of the Great Wall that had been built between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries to keep out the Mongolian hordes. Until the 1900s, the area had been a purely agricultural district, divided up into prefectures controlled by the Chinese emperor. The inhabitants lived in villages that had grown up without any overarching plan. The straw roofs had generous cornices to protect the outer walls against the periodic downpours. And the light walls were filled with thin panels and sliding doors, making it easy to open up large areas of the walls on hot summer days. Still, any modern European would be surprised by the total lack of insulation, given the often-harsh winters. But the people of Manchukuo had their own strategy. When the cold set in, they retreated instead to smaller rooms in the centre of the house. The sitting places on the floor here were warmed with wood-fired heating and they kept their outer clothing on. With the construction of the Manchurian railway at the end of the 1800s, many of the villages along the route were expanded into towns, and sometimes big cities. Polish and Russian engineers contributed to the planning, adding a European touch to things. The urbanization that had already taken place gave Japan a flying start. The population of the new state quickly grew from thirty to fifty million, mainly as a result of Japanese immigration. And the propaganda claimed that collaboration across the Sea of Japan would contribute to peace between the brother nations. In line with this, my stamp depicts a peaceful crane gliding airily across the water. But at the lower edge – right above the field of text in Hanzi script – we can see a glimpse of the flagstaff of a naval vessel. There is little doubt that the mineral resources were the first thing to stir Japan’s interest, especially the large iron ore deposits. To give the project an air of greater legitimacy, the former Chinese emperor, Pu Yi, was brought in as head of state. He was frail and hollow-chested. His round horn-rimmed glasses dominated his face and had to be balanced out by a grand uniform, laden with epaulettes, silk ribbons and medals. Pu Yi probably didn’t exactly thrive in the role, which mostly involved signing Japanese decrees and cutting ribbons at steelworks, road bridges and railway platforms. Nonetheless, he remained in power until the Russians took over after Operation August Storm, the major offensive in the final phase of the Second World War. Pu Yi tried to flee to Japan, to hand himself over to the Americans, but was captured by the Red Army and sent to Siberia. Later he was returned to China, and ended his days as a sworn Maoist, if we are to believe Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1987 film, The Last Emperor. By then, he had also managed to write his autobiography, From Emperor to Citizen, in which he frankly acknowledges his guilt: ‘I shamelessly became a leading traitor and the cover for a sanguinary regime which turned a large part of my country into a colony.’182
At six foot, the project director, General Shiro Ishii, towered above most of his countrymen. Like Pu Yi, he wore round horn-rimmed glasses but he appeared much more in harmony with both body and soul. He was always well dressed, his hair neatly pomaded, and although he may have been slightly self-centred he was still well liked by his colleagues. Admittedly, there was the odd slip with heavy drinking and his nightly raids on the local geisha house, but he was still respected and even more beloved as a result.183 The facility was set up in Pingfang, a treeless plain just south of the provincial town of Harbin. Here, 150 rectangular concrete buildings, large and small, were built over an area of 6 km2. The buildings included a Shinto temple to ensure the spiritual wellbeing of the employees, as well as schools for their children. Every morning Shiro Ishii commuted in his armoured limousine from Harbin, where he lived with his wife, seven children and servants in a mansion that dated back to an earlier Russian era – an idyll his eldest daughter later described as being straight out of Gone with the Wind.184 The core of the experiments was testing on living people. This included the removal and modification of brains and intestines, injections with horse’s blood, testing in gas chambers, pressure chambers and centrifuges, but most importantly of all, systematic testing of contagious biological substances. Experiments were carried out with anthrax, typhus, dysentery and cholera, as well as a selection of lesser known but similarly horrific plague bacteria. The chosen carriers of infection were flies, which were bred in several thousand specially made containers. The subjects of the experiments, mainly Chinese and Russian civilians, were referred to as ‘timber’ and included children, women and old people. In all, more than ten thousand of them died in Pengfang. Nobody survived. In addition, more than one million people died elsewhere, for instance when infection-bearing flies were released over Chinese cities. On one occasion, soldiers planted hundreds of paratyphoid-infected cakes around Nanking185, then suffering a famine.
In 1945, Manchukuo was reincorporated into China, and today constitutes the provinces of Liaoning, Jilin, Heilongjiang and parts of Inner Mongolia. Few visible traces of Unit 731 remain, but beneath the hill broods one of the world’s most horrific chemical dumps. For now, it seems to be stable. But the combination of severe temperature increases and more intense rainfall in the Harbin area over the century may waken the sleeping vampire. Hal Gold (2004): Unit 731: Testimony Simon Winchester & Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi (1987): From Emperor to Citizen The Autobiography of Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi Haruki Murakami (1999): The Wind-up Bird Chronicle The Last Emperor (1987): Script Mark Peploe, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci I shamelessly became a leading traitor and the cover for a sanguinary regime which turned a large part of my country into a colony PU YI
Mortal Sins in an Impenetrable Rainforest From 1932 onwards, Inini issued its own stamps in the form of French Guianan issues with an overprint. Mail delivery in the area was minimal, and nobody wanted to put more effort into it. When Inini ceases to exist as a separate colony in 1946, crate-loads of unused stamps are left. These are eventually distributed to collectors all over the world. My stamp is probably one of these, nicely steeped in fungal spores and jungle damp, I hope, after lying in an attic in St. Elie, St. Laurent or Cayenne for several years; not as good as a postmarked stamp, but nearly. I lick the back of the stamp carefully and my mouth fills with a cloying, bittersweet taste. Promising. French Guiana lies in an area of heavy rainfall just north of the Equator. A little way inland from the coast, the whole place is overgrown with impenetrable rainforest, and goods and people must be transported in small boats along a network of rivers. The first colonists were drawn there by gold. Countless expeditions set out to find the golden city of El Dorado, which, according to legend, was towards the west of this area. And gold was found, albeit in more modest quantities – although still enough to ensure that gold mining would remain the principal industry up until the present day. The American travel writer Hassoldt Davis visited the area and told of his meeting with a Creole gold-digger, Fanfan. One night he dreamt that a headless woman pointed out a place by the bank of the Petit Inini River. She was holding out a gold nugget the size of a watermelon. After the dream was repeated the following night – and this time the woman was furious – Fanfan persuaded his friends to go with him. He found the tree the woman had pointed out and after just a couple of minutes’ digging, it was as if he’d struck a head down there. It turned out to be the legendary ‘La Grand Pépite’ nugget.186 Most of the gold digging was illegal activity, some of it involving high levels of violence. The baroque fact that the area was simultaneously being used as a penal colony imbued the whole thing with an almost apocalyptic atmosphere of mortal sin, temptation and repentance. As early as the French Revolution, troublemakers were being exiled to Guiana, and from the middle of the 1800s, a good many prisons were built here. They were placed along the coast and were to be used for both French convicts and agitators from the colonies. One well-known example is Devil’s Island, where prominent nuisances such as Alfred Dreyfus and, later, Henri Charrière were held – although admittedly the latter managed to escape in a sack of coconuts in 1941 and went on to write a book about it.187 It probably all became a little too one-sided because at the very beginning of the 1900s, the colonial administration started looking for other means of support. And the decision was taken to use the inland areas of French Guiana primarily for agriculture, forestry and controlled gold mining. To make these efforts more efficient, the interior was made into a separate colony in 1930. It was assigned a governor, in Saint Elie, and named Inini after a tributary of the much larger Maroni River, which forms the border with Surinam in the west.
The Indians knew the natural environment, but it was seen as a hopeless project to use them to clear roads and build railways in Inini. The workforce must obviously be brought in from the outside. True to tradition, prisoners were used on this occasion too. On 3 June 1931, the steamer La Martinière arrives with 523 Annamites188 from Indochina after thirty-five days at sea. All of them have been jailed for rebellious activity against the French colonial bosses. One of them is Nguyen Dac Bang from a village in the Son Duong district in the far north of Vietnam, close to the border with China. ‘We arrived at our penitentiary home upstream from St Laurent within a few weeks of our departure from Cayenne. The river was beautiful with hundreds of islets along the stream.’189 Nguyen and his fellow-prisoners are set to work at once building prison camps and clearing the land to grow their own food. After that, they are sent out to work on various road and railway projects. It rains every day and the temperature rarely falls below thirty degrees. Many die of malaria, but the situation could have been worse. Nobody starves. The camps are not enclosed because the jungle is seen as good enough insurance against escape, and in between their shifts, the prisoners can hunt and fish as much as they like. But there’s no question of their returning home once they’ve served their sentence. Under the Doublage Act they must remain in the country for a period equivalent to the length of their sentence if it is shorter than eight years, and for the rest of their lives if it is longer than that. Admittedly, they are given both land and domestic animals by the French authorities, and even get help bringing their wives and children over from Indochina. But they are not allowed to leave. Eventually world war breaks out in Europe; Inini drifts into a new status, as a colony of the German-friendly Vichy regime in France. One night, Nguyen manages to escape and over the course of several weeks he makes his way to British Guiana in the north. There, he seeks asylum by promising loyalty to General de Gaulle’s Free France. Eventually he opens a Franco-Oriental restaurant in the port of Georgetown and marries a local woman. The Inini project was a fiasco from beginning to end. Little land was ever cleared and the few railway lines and roads that were built quickly disintegrated. And today we can count ourselves lucky that it was so, because the jungle here is extremely biodiverse, with more than 1,200 types of trees as well as myriad other plant species and animals such as howler monkeys, pumas and tapirs. It is said that the biodiversity on a single hectare of land here is greater than in the whole of Europe.190 [1931: Archer from the Kalina tribe. Overprint on a stamp from French Guiana from 1929.] French Guiana ceases to be a penal colony in 1946 after growing protests in the homeland. By then, more than eighty thousand prisoners had served their sentence here. The country is still French, although the fairly undiplomatic term ‘colony’ has been abandoned in favour of ‘départment d’outre-mer’, and it is divided into arondissements, as if we were in central Paris. Hy V. Luong (1992): Revolution in the Village. Tradition and Transformation in North Vietnam 1925-1988 Aage Krarup Nielsen (1939): Helvete hinsides havet: En straffanges opptegnelser fra Guyana Henri Charrière (1971): Papillon Papillon (1973): Script Henri Charrière and Dalton Trumbo Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner We arrived at our penitentiary home upstream from St. Laurent within a few weeks of our departure from Cayenne. The river was beautiful with hundreds of islets along the stream NGUYEN DAC BANG
Childhood Paradise in the World’s most Dismal Place Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, from 700bc, describes Odysseus’s journey home from the Trojan War. Along the way, he sails past the island of Ogygia, home to a nymph called Calypso, who is the daughter of the Titan Atlas. She captures the ship and puts the warriors on a diet of bread and water for seven years. Historians are unanimous in the view that much of the Odyssey is based on actual events, and Ogygia is said to be identical to the little island of Saseno by the mouth of the Adriatic Sea.191 One objection to this must be that Saseno has absolutely no water sources. How even a nymph could survive there, let alone in the company of Odysseus and his thirsty crew, is a mystery. But although the island is dry as a bone and correspondingly barren, it has always been coveted. Long before modern times, it was already occupied by pirates – perhaps a more sober term for a nymph – then later by great powers such as Turkey, Greece and England, and repeatedly by Italy. Its location just outside the Bay of Valona (the Bay of Vlorë in modern-day Albania) gave it full oversight of shipping through the Otranto Strait, like a kind of Adriatic Gibraltar. In 1914, the island was being guarded by a dozen poorly equipped Greek soldiers. They surrendered without a struggle when blue-clad, plume-hatted Italian Bersaglieri troops landed one evening late in October. The lack of water was an important reason why the invading force quickly continued to the mainland, where it also occupied the port of Valona, now the port of Vlorë. Valona was recaptured by the Albanians in 1920, and in the years that followed, the Italians on Saseno had to content themselves with the slightly flatter water brought in barrels from the Salento peninsula on the boot of Italy to the west. Saseno measures less than 6 km2 and emerges from the sea like the back of a mangy brown camel, its two humps rising to a height of just over 300 m. On the western side, the Otranto Strait is met by steep cliffs, while the coast facing Albania in the east is calmer, with a narrow, stony shore between two sheltered bays. St Nicholas Bay in the north was viewed as the best, and was equipped with a mole and a quay. And a naval base was soon built here, initially for small motor torpedo boats. The base was reinforced with a flotilla of submarines after Mussolini took power in Italy in 1922 and declared, in good, old-fashioned Latin, that the Mediterranean was Mare Nostrum – our sea.192 U-boats were viewed as a crucial component of this strategy. My stamp bears a portrait of King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, with a well-groomed moustache and a courageous gaze. But the image is misleading, because he is generally known to have been a shy and reserved person. He disliked politics and kept his distance from it. One of the few exceptions to this was the cautious support he offered Mussolini, who spent the following years pretty much wreaking havoc at will. The plain, simple overprint of ‘Saseno’ was only used in 1922. After that, they switched to regular Italian stamps. My specimen was most probably used on a letter from a marine to his family back home. The censor made sure it didn’t include any descriptions of exhausting patrols in rough seas north along the Balkan coast. The sender, for his part, probably also avoided mentioning his ill-fated trysts with a soldier in the neighbouring barracks. But perhaps he told them about the swordfish they caught just off Corfu. They’d used a rotten mozzarella as bait and the fish had bitten right away. In the end, it’s all about missing people, homesickness and unbearable boredom. For many conscripts, Saseno was the most dismal place in the world. One person who took a quite different view was Rina Durante. She moved to the island as a three-year-old with her mother, father and three sisters – the only civilians among 1,500 soldiers. Her father was the commanding officer and they lived in a little house on the top of the southern hump, far away from the barracks – she said it was like those towers you only read about in romantic novels. Rina Durante went on to become a notable journalist and author. She was a socialist and feminist who sympathised with the student radicals of 1968. She constantly harked back to her childhood experiences on the island, monochrome yellow in the summer when the broom was in flower, ‘like a gold nugget in the azure sea.’193 She recalled the rich, if specialized, fauna: the brown European copper skink, the Dalmatian wall lizard and the green Balkan lizard, rarely more than 20 cm long. She remembered the wire-haired cat she got from a sailor and was allowed to keep despite her father’s stern objections. She remembered the sisterly love and bathing trips with diving. Rina loved Saseno, which the family had to leave in the end when the Second World War began in 1939. For a period from 1943, the Germans took over the island, which was then captured by Albanian forces a year later and renamed Sazan. During the early years of the Cold War, the Soviet navy established a major U-boat base here. This was later enlarged with the addition of a factory producing biological and chemical weapons. After a rapid cooling in relations between the Soviet Union and Albania, the base was closed in 1961. After that, the Albanians ran the facility themselves for several years, with support from China. Nowadays, the quay in the bay of St. Nicholas has a little coastguard base, managed jointly by Albania and Italy. Up on the nearest hump lie the remains of a group of faded yellow military buildings in functional style, and here and there some much more intact specimens of the specially constructed Albanian bunkers for civilians, thousands of which can be found elsewhere on the mainland. And everywhere, scattered about at regular intervals, are piles of rusting scrap metal, interspersed with mounds of gas masks from Soviet weapon experiments. [1922: Specimen with overprint on an Italian stamp from 1906 bearing a portrait of King Victor Emmanuel III.] The island looks more dingy than ever, and things can only get worse. Forecasts indicate that the southern Adriatic will see a severe reduction in rainfall. At the same time, the temperature is set to rise at least five degrees over the course of this century. Soon, there’ll be nothing left but a cloud of dust. This wouldn’t be a problem for Greek gods, and would almost certainly be good enough for Rina Durante, who wanted, above all else, to see her island again. She made repeated attempts, even after the Iron Curtain had descended, but was always rebuffed because of the island’s military significance. Even so, some years after Rina’s death, the author and filmmaker Caterina Gerardi – a close friend of Rina’s – managed to get permission to land there. She took a film crew with her and used the material in a documentary about Rina’s childhood. Yüklə 463,42 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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