Nowherelands: Lost Countries of the 19th and 20th Century
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- Bu səhifədəki naviqasiya:
- Kenzaburō Ōe (1970): Okinawa Notes Gregory Smits (1999)
- SOUTH KASAI
- Miserable Balubas and Precious Minerals
- Eric Packham (1996): Freedom and Anarchy Gunnerius Tollefsen (1963)
- THE SOUTH MOLUCCAS
Claudio Magris (2001): Microcosms Jan Morris (2001) Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere La Ragazza di Trieste (1982) Script and direction, Pasquale Festa Campanile Horse chestnuts, planes and firs
leaves float and into which the birds disappear and sink like stones CLAUDIO MAGRIS ABOUT THE CITY PARK
Systemic Suicide A visitor to the island realm of Ryukyu229 will be astonished by all the languages. There are at least six of them, and they are barely intelligible among themselves, let alone to the Japanese in the north. He will also hear about life in the villages through mild winters and hot, humid summers. And he will be led from the beach up to the terraces of sugar cane, sweet potato and tobacco. And be shown huge camphor trees and, a little further off, the mulberry trees that are the silkworms’ grazing grounds. On a fine day, it is difficult to imagine the tropical cyclones that can appear without warning, laying waste to whole islands. And it is quite impossible to tell that it was right here that the Japanese built suicide into the system during the Second World War – it catches you quite off guard. Ryuku spans several degrees of latitude from Japan in the north to Taiwan in the south, forming a chain of more than a hundred volcanic islands on an arc between the shallow East China Sea in the west and the much deeper Philippine Sea, out towards the Mariana Trench in the east. For several hundred years, the archipelago was an independent kingdom. In the 1800s, China and Japan battled for control, which ultimately went to Japan in 1879. The Japanese divided Ryukyu into the prefectures of Kagoshima and Oshima in the north and Okinawa in the south. The border was placed between the Amami Islands and Okinawa, the largest island in the whole archipelago. This takeover marked the beginning of a brutal regime. The Japanese aimed to sweep aside all that remained of local culture, and Japanese was imposed as the sole language in the schools. But they also cleared up in a more practical sense. Among others, they introduced the Indian mongoose – a feline bundle of fur with razor-sharp teeth – to control the massive snake population. However, the plan went awry when the mongooses turned out to be almost as keen on other species. And since they themselves had no natural enemies on the island, they rapidly became pests themselves.
The Americans had counted on the people of Ryukyu welcoming them as liberators. Instead, they met with civil resistance that was greater and more entrenched than at any other place in the war to date. It turned out that Japan’s years-long indoctrination campaign had succeeded: the islanders now felt they were Japanese and acted accordingly. Others claim the whole thing was the result of alarmist propaganda. Over a prolonged period, Japanese pamphlets, newspapers and radio broadcasts had presented the Americans as barbarians. They were – according to these reports – utterly merciless. They raped first and killed afterwards, almost by nature. On one of the mangrove-covered Yaeyama islands in the south, whole populations flee up into the mountains. After several weeks more than half of them are dead from starvation and sickness. And on Zamami, one of the Kerama Islands, almost an entire village commits collective suicide after just two days. On Okinawa, masses of young women throw themselves off the black cliffs on the south of the island. Others go actively into battle. These include several hundred schoolgirls as young as fifteen. They call themselves the princess lilies (hime-yuri) and work as field nurses. On Okinawa, almost all of them die. And those who are not killed in battle also commit suicide here, generally in groups. One of the princess lilies told of her experiences afterwards: We had undergone strict Japanese education, so being taken prisoner was the same as being a traitor. We were taught to prefer suicide to being taken prisoner.230 The mass suicides are generally carried out using hand grenades and, with a few exceptions, they are ordered by Japanese officers. This is comprehensively documented by Kenzaburō Ōe, later a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, in his essay ‘Okinawa Notes’.231 In 2005, two Japanese war veterans tried to have Ōe’s claims dismissed as fabrications, but lost their case. To some extent, it was true that the Americans often behaved badly. Rapes did happen and many civilians were killed in the battles. The American soldiers excused themselves saying that the civilians were fighting out of uniform, an argument that would later be repeated during the protracted Vietnam War. By the time the battle for Okinawa was over in summer 1945, more than 150,000 of the island’s civilians had lost their lives. That is equivalent to one-third of the island’s original population. When Japan capitulated shortly afterwards, it became necessarily to clarify the future administration of Ryukyu. The USA had already raised the problem a couple of years earlier with the Chinese, who envisaged a solution that would involve them as well. However, it didn’t get beyond the talking stage. The USA decided to keep the original prefecture of Okinawa for itself. This was eventually formalized in the peace treaty between Japan and the Allies in 1952. The American dollar is introduced as the monetary unit, and cars have to drive on the right-hand side. Stamps are also issued – first in 1948 – but the motifs and text have clear local associations. My stamp from 1957 portrays a flying goddess, an apsara, who, according to Buddhist mythology, entertains humans with beauty and flute music. It is postmarked Naha, which was the largest city on Okinawa for several centuries before being blown to bits in the final phase of the Second World War. After a rapid reconstruction, Naha now looks like the spitting image of a town in the American Midwest, with a sprawling mix of building styles and shrieking billboards along a wide main street with a tangle of telephone wires dangling on either side – while an almost continuous cortege of shining, oversized vehicles roars back and forth.
education, so being taken prisoner was the same as being a traitor. We were taught to prefer suicide to being taken prisoner ANONYMOUS WOMAN
Miserable Balubas and Precious Minerals When Belgium’s King Baudouin drove an open-topped limousine from the airport to the ceremony that would formally dissolve the Congo as a Belgian colony, he had his elegant if useless ceremonial sword stolen. The thief seized it right out of his lap then leapt proudly over the car bonnet and ran away. The king was irritated and wanted to get the whole thing over and done with as quickly as possible. Even so, he couldn’t resist the temptation of praising his uncle King Leopold II, who had ruled what was known as the Free State of Congo with legendary brutality in the 1800s. Patrice Lumumba, later president of the Congo, was enormously provoked and is said to have responded brusquely: ‘We are no longer your monkeys.’232 In 1959, the Belgian Congo provided ten per cent of the world’s copper, fifty per cent of its cobalt and seventy per cent of all industrial diamonds. No wonder, then, that Belgium fought back when the Congolese elite united to demand national sovereignty with immediate effect in spring 1960. But since Belgium had signed a UN treaty some years before that clearly stated the principle of independence, there was no way out of it. In the weeks that followed, the new country was to be consolidated. The Congo was huge, and much of it was impenetrable jungle. More than two hundred languages were spoken within its borders, and there were at least as many ethnic groups. None of this was reflected in the way the previous colonial government had divided up districts and power structures. Trouble was inevitable. Katanga Province quickly breaks away, declaring itself autonomous, and is followed by South Kasai on 8 August 1960, led by Albert Kalonji. He is the chief of the powerful Baluba tribe and calls himself a king, mulopwe. His administration is militaristic and authoritarian. Members of other tribes are frozen out. Opposition politicians are assassinated or sent into exile. The capital is established in Bakwanga, today’s Mbuji-Mayi, close to some large diamond deposits that were discovered around the turn of the century. Over the following weeks, Balubas from the whole region come flooding in, often forced to flee by vengeful members of the Lula tribe. Until as late as the 1800s, the Balubas had ruled their own tribal area between the Lualaba and Lubilash Rivers, but had been split up by Leopold II’s soldiers and colonial bureaucrats at the beginning of the 1900s. So by the beginning of the 1960s, the Balubas are living in widely scattered villages, although they still keep things running smoothly and are almost astonishingly well organized. There is nothing here to justify the Scandinavian use of the term ‘full baluba’ (whose rough meaning in English is ‘total chaos’), although it undoubtedly originated from the name of this ethnic group.233 Everything revolves around a single village street lined on either side by rectangular houses made of compressed earth bricks. The roofs are made of corrugated metal sheets to keep out the tropical rain. And in front of the entrances hang colourful pieces of fabric that not only evidence surplus income and hospitality but also tell you who lives in that particular house. The children play together in the village street – remarkably quietly. They usually play copying games. The girls practise carrying things on their heads and play families. The boys make bows and go hunting in the back gardens. The air is fresh with the smell of foliage and herbs. What they encounter in Bakwanga is water shortages and crumbling buildings. The city has no roads, electricity or sewage system. And the soil is barren, at best good for eking out some cassava root. The result is severe outbreaks of kwashiorkor, a deficiency disease whose familiar symptoms are swollen faces and bloated bellies. Children are the hardest hit and they die in large numbers. Christian missionaries had been active in the Kasai area since the turn of the century. Norwegian Gunnerius Tollefsen had travelled into the area in a flat-bottomed riverboat with a Danish skipper. It had taken a strong man in the prow with a bamboo pole to find a route between the treacherous sandbanks. Now, Tollefsen was despairing over descriptions of the Balubas as a violent people, and insisted on giving his own view: ‘In fact, the Balubas are a peaceful people, more open to the evangelical message than many other tribes in the Congo.’234 Together with his fellow-missionaries, he was instrumental in having a planeload of Norwegian dried cod sent to the people of the Kasai region at Christmas in 1960.
In the meantime the central government in the Congo, with President Lumumba at its head, decided to destroy the breakaway state of South Kasai once and for all. They asked the UN to help out. The organization was already on hand in the area with peacekeeping forces, but drew the line at the use of active firepower. Next, the Soviet Union was contacted, and proved more than willing to provide air transport for the Congolese government troops in autumn 1961. During the battles that followed, three thousand Balubas were killed and several hundred thousand put to flight. Kalonji was taken prisoner, but later managed to escape, and re-establish a provisional administration. He eventually gave up in October 1962.
At the same time, slowly but surely, the country is being emptied of gold, diamonds and other valuable minerals. From the edges of the forests around the many remote airstrips, the local people observe quiet negotiations between strangers before small white planes are quickly emptied of packages containing clothes, medicine and money, and take off again for Dubai, Brussels, Hong Kong and London, heavily laden with minerals.236 Eric Packham (1996): Freedom and Anarchy Gunnerius Tollefsen (1963): Men Gud gav vekst. En pionermisjonær ser seg tilbake M. W. Hilton-Simpson (1912): Land and the Peoples of the Kasai What I found fascinating in the Congo was the mix of the absurd and the deadly serious, the horrific and the beautiful, the innocent and the evil, the mean and cowardly and the generous and noble, the terrifying and the hilarious ERIC PACKHAM
Spices and Terrorism It’s the crack of dawn on 2 December 1975. A small group of men has boarded the packed passenger train, each carrying a long package wrapped in colourful festive wrapping paper decorated with images of Santa Claus and Zwarte Piet. Just after the village of Wijster, they unwrap their weapons and pull the emergency brake. The train stops in the middle of a field. The engine driver is shot at once. And over the days that follow, several hostages are killed, then thrown out and left lying on the ground. It is unclear at first what the kidnappers want, but eventually it emerges that the aim of the action is to raise awareness about the South Moluccas.237 The South Moluccas is a group of islands in the Banda Sea between New Guinea and Sulawesi. They have a history of being the most coveted islands in the area. This is because they were the only source of certain spices, mainly nutmeg and cloves. Once these arrived in the European market, they were worth their weight in gold. The Portuguese, who were the first Europeans to arrive in the 1500s, faced constantly challenges from the other colonial powers. Through a combination of diplomacy and raw might, the Dutch East India Company eventually came out on top, and gained a monopoly on all spice exports from the archipelago. The Dutch went to work methodically, streamlining and controlling their spice cultivation. Some islands were only for nutmeg, while others were reserved for cloves. The locals were chased off the land, which was taken over by officials from the Dutch company who ran the business using imported slaves. This lasted until the mid-1800s, when the market gradually shrank. Plants and seeds had been smuggled out, resulting in competing plantations on the Seychelles and Madagascar. In addition, the Europeans had developed a taste for other types of spices from India and Africa. After the company went bankrupt, the Dutch state took over the area as a colony. It was merged with the rest of the large archipelago known as Dutch India, which stretched from the Malacca Strait to Australia. After an interlude under Japan, which occupied the area during the Second World War, the Dutch took over again in 1945, aiming to continue with business as usual. They were quickly challenged by local leaders, who demanded full autonomy and launched a war of liberation. After international pressure, the Netherlands gave up in 1949. The peace treaty stated that the whole archipelago should be organized as a federation of autonomous states. This was the profound wish of many of the regions, including the South Moluccas. The powerful leaders on the large island of Java, in the far west, saw things differently. They had no intention of complying with the treaty; instead, they established the Republic of Indonesia as a centralist model for the whole area. Until further notice, they would take charge of all positions of leadership. But the fact that they were also Muslims was the main reason why the South Moluccas declared full independence as the autonomous republic of Maluku Selatan on 25 April 1950. Despite the brutal excesses of the Dutch in the area, large numbers of the indigenous population had been Christianized over several centuries during which the region had been a successful mission field for Dutch Calvinists. In addition, the Netherlands had been careful to conscript large sections of the male population into its colonial army. Now those soldiers had been demobilized overnight, but they still felt loyal to the Dutch throne. The same went for their leader, Chris Soumokil, who had trained as a lawyer in the Netherlands. But he and his colleagues lacked the underlying expertise in state administration. Moreover, the soldiers’ discipline had rapidly evaporated after the Dutch officers went home. ‘There were three adjutants, Sopacua, Tahapary and Siwabessy, the rest were sergeant-majors, sergeants and corporals. None of them wanted to serve under another, each of them thought they were better.’238 Even so, the South Moluccas manage to establish a functioning administrative centre on Ambon, a little island in the north of the archipelago, due south of the much bigger and pretty much deserted island of Seram. Both are densely overgrown right down to the shoreline and on Seram, the mountains tower to heights of 3,000 m. They issue their own stamps: overprints on 1949 stamps from the Dutch colonial administration. The motif on my stamp, a solid house with several gables, is from Sumatra and has little to do with the South Moluccas. Here, the houses are built of bamboo and palm leaves, and look much more temporary. This is because the soil on the islands is so poor that the villages have to be moved constantly. This is embedded in the culture: it is time to move when a given number of the village’s inhabitants have died of old age or other causes. It is rare for more than twenty years to pass between each move, and after this period, a curse of equivalent duration is placed on the site. This is why the Dutch have always failed in their efforts to establish more permanent housing in the area.
The Dutch, who had supported the federal model, offered the soldiers and their families temporary refuge in the Netherlands. In all, 12,500 South Moluccans took them up on the offer. All were convinced that this was a provisional solution and that they would eventually return. Once in the Netherlands, the South Moluccans were installed in remote camps that had previously been used to imprison Nazis. Here they lived cut off from Dutch society with their own schools, and no efforts whatsoever were made to integrate them. There was no question of Dutch citizenship, either. Because the Dutch also took it for granted that the South Moluccans would go home, one way or another, although it was quite out of the question that this would involve any re-conquest of the South Moluccas.239
After three years in prison, he was executed. The South Moluccans in the Netherlands responded by establishing their own government in exile. Nonetheless, increasing numbers of them were also beginning to doubt the likelihood of re-conquering the South Moluccas. Slowly the frustration grew, along with a sense of being locked into an unbearable situation. After 1970, the Netherlands experiences a number of more or less savage terror actions. It starts with an attack on the home of the Indonesian ambassador and continues with the hijacking of the train in Wijster. Here, the terrorists give up after twelve days, in part because of some nights of severe frost and in part because it is rumoured that the Indonesians have started exacting reprisals on the Moluccans. Later, a further attempt is made on another train, this time in May. In addition, a school and a town hall are attacked, and several people are killed. The terrorists achieve nothing whatsoever. It goes from one fiasco to the next. It eventually becomes clear to the Dutch authorities that there is no avoiding integration. The internment camps are closed. Most of the South Moluccans are given Dutch citizenship and the terror attacks fade away. Even so, the government in exile remains intact to this day, and regularly elects new presidents. Although nobody now believes there is any chance of a return to the South Moluccas, there is always a bit of sabre-rattling when the opportunity arises. When the Indonesian president was scheduled to travel to the Netherlands on a state visit in 2010, the president in exile, John Wattilete, issued a demand that he should be imprisoned for war crimes. This was, of course, refused by the Dutch authorities, but the Indonesian president got cold feet and called off the visit. Yüklə 463,42 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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