3

OLD ARGUMENTS, NEW DEATHS

Bangladesh: ‘We can kill anyone for anything’

Pakistan was formed so that Muslims in the former colony of India could have a nation of their own, free from Hindu oppression. After partition, however, ethnicity supplanted religion as a source of conflict. Pakistan soon demonstrated that Muslims were fully capable of oppressing other Muslims.

Pakistan was the deformed offspring of a botched settlement. Two largely Muslim regions, separated by 1,600 kilometres of Indian territory, were made into a single nation. The two regions differed markedly in language, ethnicity and culture. There was no logical capital city, no established bureaucracy of government. The workforce was rent asunder when thousands of skilled Hindus decanted to India. Administration of the two separate ‘wings’ was dependent upon the fickle goodwill of India. The economy was heavily reliant upon jute production at a time when worldwide demand was in decline.

East Pakistan had the larger population, but was dominated by the more developed West, where government, banking and commercial interests were concentrated. With dominance went a sense of ethnic superiority; easterners justifiably complained of racial prejudice by politicians and employers. The mongrel state limped from crisis to crisis, with regional disharmony punctuated by violence. Given the weakness of democratic institutions, it is entirely understandable that Pakistanis developed a taste for military rule.

In October 1958, with easterners in rebellious mood, Governor General Iskander Mirza placed Pakistan under martial law and appointed General Mohammed Ayub Khan prime minister. Keen for ‘a clean break with the past’, Ayub promptly exiled Mirza to London – a military coup in all but name. Martial law continued until 1962, enough time for Ayub to purge civilians from key government positions, replacing them with hand-picked soldiers. His solution to regional animosity was a highly centralized government. To this end, a new constitution vested immense authority in the executive, while hobbling the legislature. Antagonism nevertheless continued to fester. Political parties, deprived of influence, turned into organs of discontent. In East Pakistan, the Awami League was the mouthpiece for Bengali anger. Ayub, realizing that the region was a powder keg, made some conciliatory gestures, promising not to import ‘foreign’ administrators and reserving half of his Cabinet for easterners. In addition, Dacca was made a ‘second capital’ and seat of the National Assembly. To Bengalis, however, this smacked of tokenism reminiscent of colonial days.1

In 1963, the Awami League chairman, Huseyn Suhrawardy, died, opening the way for the firebrand separatist Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Mujib, as he was known, turned the party into a vehicle for Bengali liberation. He argued that Pakistan’s recent economic growth, achieved by the sweat of easterners, had benefited westerners alone. That claim held enough truth to constitute a powerful rallying cry. There was no escaping the fact that Bengalis were desperately poor. Foreign aid, administered from Karachi, was spent mainly in the West. While maldistribution had more complex causes than simple animosity, the fact that the animosity existed made disparities all the more corrosive. Mujib, the quintessential populist, loved simple explanations. The word ‘colony’, however inappropriate, peppered his diatribes.

In 1966, Mujib threw down the gauntlet by launching his Six Points programme, a form of autonomy so profound that only foreign and defence policy would remain the purview of central government. Equally alarming was the fact that the proposal did not refer exclusively to the division between East and West, but rather envisaged devolution wherever ethnic or religious diversity dictated. West Pakistanis rightly worried that it would lead to the fragmentation of their region, thus allowing the more homogenous Bengal territory to emerge as the most powerful unit. When the proposals were rejected, Mujib encouraged his followers onto the streets. After a general strike in January 1968, he was arrested, further ratcheting tension.

Ayub was simultaneously rocked by a threat from within his own government. The highly ambitious Zulfikar Ali Bhutto used his fiefdom at the foreign ministry to showcase his credentials as a nationalist determined to defend Pakistani integrity. His resignation from the government in June 1967, and subsequent establishment of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), was a challenge both to Ayub and to Mujib. Bhutto’s strident populism enflamed nationalist sentiment in West Pakistan, pressuring Ayub to be tough with the Bengalis. While Mujib’s supporters rioted in support of local autonomy, Bhutto’s agitated for exactly the opposite. The only thing the two movements had in common was their disdain for Ayub.

With the country spiralling out of control, Ayub resigned on 25 March 1969, handing power to General Yahya Khan. On assuming office, Yahya promised to hold elections on 7 December 1970. Eager to placate the Bengalis, he decided that 162 of the 300 seats in the National Assembly should be awarded to East Pakistan. Aware of the popularity of the Awami League in East Pakistan, westerners looked on with considerable trepidation.

While there is never a good time for a cyclone, November 1970 was certainly the worst possible moment. On the 12th, a devastating storm ravaged 8,000 square kilometres of Bengal’s coastal lowlands, killing 250,000 people. Yahya’s response was at best incompetent, at worst cynical. Only one military transport plane and three small aircraft were mobilized during the first week of the crisis. ‘We have a large army,’ Mujib complained, ‘but it is left to the British Marines to bury our dead.’ He questioned why emergency aid from abroad had arrived more quickly than from West Pakistan. Joining the chorus, Bengali newspapers complained of ‘gross neglect, callous inattention, and bitter indifference’. ‘There have been mistakes, there have been delays,’ Yahya admitted, ‘but by and large I’m very satisfied that everything is being done and will be done.’2

Bengalis found Yahya’s satisfaction an insult. ‘The feeling now pervades,’ Mujib concluded, ‘that we must rule ourselves. We must make the decisions that matter. We will no longer suffer arbitrary rule by bureaucrats, capitalists, and feudal interests of West Pakistan.’ While there is no doubting Yahya’s incompetence, it has to be said that Mujib was not above turning personal tragedy into political advantage. He was, after all, behind the Awami League’s decision to launch a general strike during the crisis, which inevitably hindered relief efforts.³

Less than a month later came the election. Ayub’s appeal for national unity fell on deaf ears in the East. Mujib won all but 2 of the region’s 162 seats. In the West, Bhutto’s PPP did well, winning 81 of 138 seats, but that still meant an outright majority for the Awami League.

Bhutto summarily announced that he would not countenance a Mujib government committed to implementation of the Six Point programme. On that issue, he had the formidable weight of Yahya behind him. Mujib countered by proposing a double premiership – he would rule the East, Bhutto the West. That proposal, tantamount to secession, was unacceptable to those who still believed in the integrity of Pakistan. When Mujib’s proposal was rejected, rioting erupted throughout Bengal. In early March, Yahya postponed indefinitely the convening of the National Assembly, appointed General Tikka Khan military governor of East Pakistan and moved troops into the area. Undaunted, Mujib told his followers to turn Pakistan’s ‘Republic Day’ (23 March) into their own ‘Resistance Day’.

Bereft of solutions, Yahya opted for terror. ‘Kill three million of them,’ he told his generals, ‘and the rest will eat out of our hands.’ On 25 March 1971 three West Pakistani battalions attacked targets in Dacca. They had no strategic purpose other than slaughter. ‘Killing on a mass scale is underway,’ the Daily Telegraph reported. ‘The shelling of the capital, Dacca, has been cold-blooded and indiscriminate although there was almost no sign of armed resistance.’4

Tikka’s troops methodically worked their way through a shopping list of targets. At the top were Bengali soldiers, police and paramilitary forces. Next came potential soldiers – boys as young as fifteen were slaughtered. Then came those identified as leaders – officials of the Awami League, students, academics and professionals. Finally, there were Hindus – the ‘vermin’ blamed for polluting East Pakistan. Eliminating them would, it was thought, allow East Pakistanis to accept that their identity was Muslim, not Bengali. Racism gave justification to indiscriminate killing. East Pakistan ‘[is] a low lying land of low lying people’, said the senior general A.A.K. Niazi. Since the sole purpose of the campaign was to kill, soldiers enjoyed immense freedom. ‘We can kill anyone for anything,’ one boasted. ‘We are accountable to no one.’⁵

‘It became a crime to be a Bengali,’ one resident remarked. ‘The soldiers would say “Are you Bengali” and if you were, you would be killed.’ In order to conceal the barbarity, Tikka expelled foreign journalists from the country. Press reports had therefore to be scraped together from whatever information leaked out. Witnesses told journalists of ‘a veritable bloodbath’ conducted by ‘utterly merciless’ troops. While exaggeration inevitably resulted, the slaughter was undoubtedly enormous. ‘The word massacre applies’, Time reported on 12 April.

Opposed only by bands of Bengali peasants armed with stones and bamboo sticks, tanks rolled through Dacca . . . blowing houses to bits. At the University, soldiers slaughtered students inside the British Council building. ‘It was like Chengis Khan,’ said a shocked Western official who witnessed the scene. Near Dacca’s marketplace, Urdu-speaking government soldiers ordered Bengali-speaking townspeople to surrender, then gunned them down when they failed to comply. Bodies lay in mass graves at the University, in the old city, and near the municipal dump.

At the university, one witness hid in a tree and watched while students and lecturers were herded into an enclosure and then slaughtered. The soldiers then directed bystanders to carry the bodies to the football ground. ‘They were ordered to dig a huge grave. The Pakistani soldiers told the eight or nine bearers to sit down. After a while they were ordered to stand and line up near the grave. The guns fired again and they fell next to the bodies of my friends.’ At the jute mill where she worked, Ferdousi Priyabhashinee witnessed a diabolical method of execution. Victims were ‘taken to a jute-cutting machine, which looks like a guillotine . . . [Soldiers] put the man under the sharp blade . . . and within a couple of seconds, he was beheaded. This barbaric act continued one after another.’6

Various reports suggest that 15,000 were slaughtered in Dacca within three days. In the face of international outrage, Yahya was unrepentant. The ‘rebellion’, he claimed, was the work of ‘mischief-mongers, saboteurs and infiltrators’ and had to be crushed. The purpose of the operation was to protect Bengali Muslims from their Hindu oppressors. ‘When one fights, one does not throw flowers,’ he added. Tikka chimed in, dismissing newspaper reports as ‘wildly exaggerated’, while claiming that the death toll in Dacca on the first day had not exceeded 150.⁷

After rampaging through Dacca, Pakistani forces spread out across the country. In July, a World Bank mission reported widespread devastation; villages had ‘simply ceased to exist’. ‘They’re nothing but butchers,’ one witness told a reporter for the International Herald Tribune. ‘They wiped out whole villages opening fire at first light and stopping only when they got tired.’ At Hariharpara, killing assumed a daily ritual. Victims from surrounding towns and villages were gathered to await execution at sundown. Lashed together in groups of six or eight, they were taken to the riverbank and forced to wade into knee-deep water. ‘Then the rifles opened up. And the firing and the screaming shattered the hot night air until dawn.’ In the morning, village boatmen were ‘forced to . . . haul the bodies out to midstream, where they were cut loose to drift downriver’.⁸

At Shohagpur village, every adult male was killed. ‘When the army was gone, there was not a single man left to bury the dead,’ one woman recalled. In such situations, women became helpless prey. Concentration camps provided immense opportunity for sexual abuse. Rape was an assault not just against an individual woman, but a systematic attack upon her family and her village. Geoffrey Davis, an Australian doctor who arrived in Bangladesh shortly after the war, treated West Pakistani soldiers held in Comilla prison. They claimed that the order to rape had come from Tikka, ‘so there would be a whole generation of children in East Pakistan that would be born with the blood from the West’. For six months, Davis performed as many as a hundred abortions a day.9

While the actual number raped is difficult to determine, partly because of the stigma attached, the lowest estimates range around 200,000. The journalist Aubrey Menen investigated one case involving a nineteen-year-old Hindu woman, recently married. A truckload of six soldiers arrived outside her home late one evening.

Two went into the room that had been built for the bridal couple. The others stayed behind with the family, one of them covering them with his gun. They heard a barked order, and the bridegroom’s voice protesting. Then there was silence until the bride screamed. Then there was silence again, except for some muffled cries that soon subsided.

In a few minutes one of the soldiers came out, his uniform in disarray. He grinned to his companions. Another soldier took his place . . . And so on, until all of the six had raped the belle of the village. Then all six left, hurriedly. The father found his daughter lying . . . unconscious and bleeding. Her husband was crouched on the floor, kneeling over his vomit.

Menen eventually located the victim in a shelter for rape victims in Dacca. She doubted that she would ever be able to return to her village. Her husband had shunned her, and her father was too ashamed to see her.¹⁰

Separated from her family in the first few days of war, Ferdousi Priyabhashinee fell under the control of Bengalis wishing to bargain with their invaders. For nine months she was used as currency in the sexual exchange. ‘I . . . felt that nobody in the world was more helpless than me . . . I felt that my body was not mine, and it seemed to be decomposed.’ When soldiers discovered that her brother was a resistance fighter, she was brutally tortured. ‘At one stage, I stopped replying to any of their questions. I told them, “Please kill me. Don’t torture me in this way”, but unfortunately it was not my fate to be killed by the Pakistanis.’11

The international community made a show of moral outrage, but otherwise stood aside. The big, constraining fear was that the conflict would escalate into a general war between India and Pakistan. That had Cold War implications, since the Indians were friendly with the Soviets, and the Pakistanis with China and the US. America’s willingness to turn a blind eye – a policy officially called ‘massive inaction’ – annoyed her consul in Dacca. In a telegram headed ‘Selective Genocide’, Archer Blood complained: ‘We are mute and horrified witnesses to a reign of terror.’ When evidence of the slaughter evoked no suitable reaction in Washington, Blood again complained. ‘Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities . . . we have chosen not to intervene, even morally.’ A short time later he was removed from his post.¹²

The US had armed Pakistan in the interests of maintaining an ally in the area, but then had to watch while American arms were used to slaughter Bengalis. Nixon was reluctant to stop the shipments since the threat of Indian intervention remained. ‘The Indians are no goddamn good,’ he told his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger on 4 June 1971. Kissinger agreed. ‘Those sons-of-bitches, who never have lifted a finger for us, why should we get involved in the morass of East Pakistan? . . . if East Pakistan becomes independent, it is going to become a cesspool . . . they have the lowest standard of living in Asia . . . They’re going to become a ripe field for Communist infiltration.’ Nixon called the Indians a ‘slippery, treacherous people’ – what they really needed was ‘a mass famine’. ‘They’re such bastards,’ Kissinger added. The International Herald Tribune thought that White House policy ‘defies understanding’. What the paper did not realize was that Yahya was America’s unofficial link to Beijing. As Kissinger confided to Nixon, it was necessary to ‘buoy up Yahya’ until relations with China were formalized.13

The Awami League had meanwhile proclaimed the independent republic of Bangladesh. Western commentators, digesting stories of endless massacre, held little hope for the new nation’s survival. What journalists failed to notice, however, was that the massacre sowed a ferocious desire for revenge. In the midst of the slaughter, the Mukti Bahini liberation forces managed to regroup. A vicious war of attrition ensued. Using their knowledge of the terrain and local support, guerrillas methodically recaptured rural areas, forcing the West Pakistanis back into the cities. Reprisals were swift and brutal. Captured soldiers, or those who had supported them, were publicly beheaded.

Some 10 million frightened Bengalis had by this point flooded into India, the largest refugee crisis in history. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi rightly complained that ‘no prosperous country’ or any of the ‘upholders of democracy has tried to help the . . . refugees’. With the crisis threatening to overwhelm her country, she waited until early December and then struck with overwhelming force. On 4 December, Indian troops, backed by the Mukti Bahini, moved on Dacca. ‘This is India’s biggest and final war against us,’ Yahya told his troops. ‘So far Pakistan has acted with supreme patience. We have tolerated enough. The time has now come to give a crushing reply to the Indian aggressors.’ Bluster, however, proved no substitute for military might. The far superior Indian Army swept the Pakistanis aside in just ten days. Before Dacca was surrendered, however, the Pakistanis indulged in one last act of barbarity. On 19 December, around a hundred physicians, professors, writers and teachers were murdered in a field outside Dacca. ‘All the victims’ hands were tied behind their backs and they had been bayoneted, garrotted or shot,’ reported the New York Times.14

Yahya, having optimistically sent his troops to war, could not possibly survive their humiliation. He yielded to Bhutto, who in turn released Mujib from prison, where he had been held since the first days of the war. The latter became the first prime minister of Bangladesh in January 1972. One of his first acts was to declare the rape victims ‘Beerangana’ – war heroes. He urged that strictures pertaining to female chastity should be relaxed so that the women could be re-integrated into society. In particular, he hoped they might provide a ready source of brides for the Mukti Bahini. In fact, however, custom could not easily be erased. Freedom fighters argued that they deserved better than ‘damaged’ goods. Others demanded that the government should provide large dowries, since the women’s families were not likely to do so. Because the government was too poor, good intentions dissolved into tragic neglect. Ostracized in their new nation, many rape victims emigrated to Pakistan, ending up amongst those who had once abused them. ‘We know about the courage of the freedom fighters during the war,’ Priyabhashinee reflected, ‘but I did not see the same courage among them after the country was freed from the occupation forces.’¹⁵

The death toll during the 267 days of the Bangladeshi Liberation War probably exceeded 1 million, and might have been double that. An accurate figure remains elusive because every estimate carries the taint of politics. But who died, at whose hands, is difficult to determine. What is clear is that the war does not conform to the simple image of ruthless aggressor vs innocent martyr that journalists once reported. The conflict was multi-layered – East Pakistan vs West Pakistan, Muslim vs Hindu, secessionist vs loyalist, Pakistani vs Indian. At every level, atrocity occurred. The torment continues because no semblance of closure has been achieved. The vast majority of the perpetrators, especially those at the top, walked free. It is now a ritual in Bangladesh, acted out every March and December, to lament that evil went unpunished.

Belfast: Bloody Sunday

Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom, but culturally it is not English, nor Irish, nor British. It is a place divided against itself where two antagonistic ethnic groups struggle to coexist. Mutual distrust fuels a sense of distinctiveness, which in turn fuels distrust, in an ever-repeating pattern. Past is present, old scores are never settled and history is perpetually re-enacted in real time. With hatred deep and memory bitter, agreement until recently remained elusive and violence therefore inevitable. Time was measured by tragedy – the ever-lengthening list of dead.

Under the terms of the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, the six counties of Northern Ireland were granted a devolved government, consisting of a bicameral parliament which from 1932 was headquartered at Stormont, 6 miles east of Belfast. In truth, Stormont was an elected dictatorship, a Protestant quango loyal to the Crown, but, more importantly, dedicated to its own interests. The cohesiveness and dominance of Unionists in Northern Ireland ensured a stranglehold on power.

Cohesiveness was continually reinforced by the culture of Unionism. Protestants sensed not only a religious divide, but also an ethnic one. They felt themselves a different race. Catholicism seemed a ‘foreign’ religion, a popish plot that threatened to destroy the ‘self-contained island of eternal existence’ that Unionists had built. Antagonism was buttressed by exclusive organizations: the Unionist Party, the Orange Order and the Apprentice Boys. Rituals of differentiation, such as the annual Orange marches, reinforced the politics of separation. Like a tomcat marking territory, Orangemen marched to assert dominance.16

Bigotry kept the working class divided. Instead of devoting energy to trade unions or social welfare, Protestant workers concentrated instead upon hating Catholics. Orange organizations and rituals allowed them to feel a sense of superiority in relation to their Catholic counterparts. They had no wealth to pass on to their offspring, but they could bequeath bigotry. Thus, with each passing generation, feelings of exclusivity were distilled. Unionism brought empowerment – the more extreme the prejudice, the greater the sense of exclusivity. Protestant workers failed to realize that, by colluding in bigotry, they conspired in their own emasculation.

Stormont, the Unionist David Trimble eventually admitted, was ‘a cold House for Catholics’. Between 1921 and 1972, Northern Ireland was ruled by six prime ministers, all of them Unionists and members of the Orange Order. All but three Cabinet ministers during that period were Orangemen. Catholics could vote, but votes never translated into power. They were effectively disenfranchised, not just because the government was always Unionist but because Unionist power was used to perpetuate Catholic subjugation. They were, in effect, outsiders living inside the province.17

Protestant dominance at Stormont was replicated at local levels, further enfeebling the Catholic minority. Due to a system of gerrymandering, political representation did not accurately reflect population. ‘Derry . . . was roughly two-thirds Catholic; one-third Protestant,’ the civil rights activist Eamonn McCann explained by way of example. ‘But the Protestants were able to elect twelve people onto the Council, the Catholics only eight. The way this worked was simple: the city was divided very carefully into three wards. The vast majority of the Catholics were crowded into one ward which returned eight councillors.’ To further the enfeeblement, only ratepayers could vote in provincial elections, thus leaving renters of private housing disenfranchised. Around 250,000 people fell into this category, most of them Catholic. To compound this iniquity, Unionist councils allocated public housing disproportionately to Protestants. Since council house tenants could vote, this further cemented Unionist hegemony.¹⁸

Political power was naturally translated into economic power. Businesses were disproportionately owned by Protestants, who favoured those of their faith when hiring. In 1967, 99 per cent of the workers at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast were Protestant. Similar discrimination affected the distribution of jobs controlled by local councils. For example, though Catholics outnumbered Protestants in Tyrone, they did not control the local council. As a result, less than 4 per cent of the staff employed at council offices in 1969 were Catholic. Northern Ireland Catholics were twice as likely to be unemployed as Protestants of the same class.19

Law enforcement buttressed the religious divide. The Royal Ulster Constabulary was essentially a Protestant paramilitary force that strengthened an iniquitous system of religious privilege. Its authority was enhanced by the Special Powers Act, a relic of the First World War which allowed arrests without warrants, internment without trial, draconian restrictions on political expression, and virtually unlimited powers of search. While the RUC was tacitly Protestant, the Special Constabulary (or ‘B Specials’) was officially so. Membership in the Orange Order was a prerequisite of selection.

For over forty years the Catholic minority passively endured disenfranchisement and poverty. The Irish Republican Army persistently tried to turn discontent into revolutionary fervour, but with little success. The pattern of passivity was broken, however, in February 1967 with the formation of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. NICRA set out five broad aims:

1.	To defend the basic freedom of all citizens.
2.	To protect the rights of the individual.
3.	To highlight all possible abuses of power.
4.	To demand guarantees for freedom of speech, assembly and association.
5.	To inform the public of their lawful rights.

None of these demands, nor the grievances that inspired them, were specific to Catholics. That was intentional – NICRA strove to break away from sectarian politics. It recognized that while Catholics were undoubtedly discriminated against, so too were all workers in Northern Ireland, whose quality of life suffered in comparison to the UK as a whole. The group believed that the best way to correct iniquities was to remove the religious identifications that confused them. Toward that end, NICRA refused to be drawn on the issue of sovereignty. ‘We were very adamant that the national question, the constitutional question, would not be part of what we were about,’ Ann Hope, the former NICRA secretary, reflected. ‘We were not asking for the end of partition, what we were asking, very consciously asking for, was reform in Northern Ireland.’20 This sense of unity was demonstrated when, in the early days, Catholics and Protestants marched side by side, carrying signs which read ‘British Rights for British Citizens’.

Appearances were, however, deceptive. While NICRA’s broad platform was non-sectarian, the same could not be said for its specific aims. Imbedded within the group’s literature were five other demands peculiar to Catholics. These included the institution of ‘one man one vote’ in council elections, an end to gerrymandering, fair allocation of public housing, anti-discrimination legislation, and the repeal of the Special Powers Act. The granting of these demands, however justified, would imply a surrender of authority by the Protestant community. Despite its genuine attempt to appear non-sectarian, NICRA could not completely camouflage the Catholic nature of its grievances.

NICRA embodied the Sixties culture of protest, taking heart from the American civil rights movement. Another example of transnational resonance was People’s Democracy (PD), a Sixties-style left-wing student movement that emerged at Queen’s University Belfast. PD, like other European student groups, was Trotskyite and, like campus militancy everywhere, was impatient, volatile and often immature. The PD leader Michael Farrell recalled ‘a real feeling of revolution’. It was ‘just like Wordsworth and the French Revolution: “A joy to be alive, to be young was very heaven.” . . . Things happened very, very fast.’ In contrast to other Sixties student movements, however, grievances never became abstract – PD members lived the injustice they protested and therefore remained focused. Style never overwhelmed substance.²¹

Stormont reacted with calculated torpor to the pressure applied by NICRA and PD. The attorney general, Edward Warburton Jones, scornfully rejected demands for a human rights bill, because he ‘quite simply did not believe that there was any discrimination worth talking about in Northern Ireland’. When Prime Minister Terence O’Neill proposed some rather superficial reforms, his friends accused him of appeasement and his Catholic enemies of condescension. The failure of his modest attempt at reform revealed how sturdy were the obstacles to progress. Change was alien to the Unionist community; reform proposals, no matter how mild, inspired deep paranoia, expressed in a tendency to dig trenches.22

A new mood of Protestant extremism was profoundly expressed in the emergence of the Reverend Ian Paisley. While the line between religion and politics had long been blurred in the province, Paisley erased it, using the pulpit to advance a bigoted political crusade and using politics to reinforce sectarianism. More than any Unionist before him, Paisley placed the social and political concerns of the Protestant working class of Northern Ireland into a religious context, convincing them that their hegemony conformed to God’s wishes.

Paisley realized that hatred was more easily stoked if the religious divide was reinforced by ethnicity. He therefore encouraged followers to believe that Catholics were essentially sub-human. Lending support was the Protestant Telegraph, which missed no opportunity to report on the ‘Roman hovels’ of the Lower Falls area of Belfast. One report told of ‘squalid’ and ‘verminous’ housing and conditions so vile that an inspector, ‘overcome by the stench of a room being used as an open lavatory’, had to receive medical attention. ‘The “great unwashed” is an epithet applicable hygienically and spiritually to the natives of the Lower Falls,’ the paper concluded. Believing Catholics a lesser race justified their maltreatment. Often, a Paisley sermon would be followed by an orgy of Protestant violence, which perpetrators believed righteous. Neither the political nor the legal authorities intervened to curb Paisleyite provocation, for the simple reason that he served the cause of Unionism so perfectly. Stormont’s power was all the more secure with Paisley as its Rottweiler.²³

On 5 March 1968 a NICRA march in Derry met a brutal response from the RUC and B Specials, armed with batons and water cannon. In January 1969, at Burntollet, Paisleyites and B Specials ambushed a PD march from Derry to Belfast. The RUC, supposedly deployed to protect the marchers, joined in the attacks. Clearly, if peaceful protest had become dangerous, the prospects for change were bleak. Activism did not, however, wane. ‘Baton charges and hosing machines do not kill the earnest desires of second-class citizens to promote their civil and human dignity,’ the Irish News warned. That might have been true, but the policy of non-violence was difficult to maintain in the face of brutal reprisals. In July 1969, 15,000 Apprentice Boys announced their intention to march through Derry. Stormont, by its inaction, effectively sanctioned an act of provocation. Catholics in the city, still bitter about Burntollet, were no longer wedded to passivity. Crude barricades were erected around the Bogside ghetto and over 1,000 gallons of petrol were siphoned for the manufacture of Molotov cocktails. For two days, Derry burned.24

O’Neill had by this stage been forced from office by Protestant paranoia. The by-election in his Bannside seat was won by Paisley, who gained a new pulpit from which to preach. Meanwhile, the violence in Derry prompted the new prime minister, James Chichester-Clarke, to request the deployment of British troops in order to restore stability. The soldiers were at first welcomed by Catholics, on the assumption that they would protect them from Protestant violence. As the Irish News reported on 16 August 1969, the Catholic community ‘knew that this force would be impartial’. Optimists hoped that British troops would provide the stability necessary for reform to proceed. The British, however, were less sanguine. Lieutenant General Sir Ian Freeland warned on 18 August that ‘the honeymoon period could finish in a matter of hours’.²⁵

An uneasy peace nevertheless prevailed for the first year of the deployment. Some clashes between Catholic protesters and British troops did occur, but these were isolated and easily contained. A change in mood, however, became apparent in June 1970 with the election of a Conservative government at Westminster. The fact that the Tories were generally sympathetic toward Unionism inspired new bravado among Orangemen and fresh despair among Catholics. On 3 July a curfew was imposed in the Lower Falls, coinciding with a search for weapons by the army. After some weapons were found, rioting broke out. CS gas, fired to disperse the crowd, instead acted like petrol on a bonfire. For thirty-six hours, violence ruled Belfast. By the time quiet was restored, five people were dead, all killed by British troops. The honeymoon was over.

The Catholic community concluded that Unionist bigotry was now being reinforced by British military power. In this situation, NICRA’s non-violence seemed pointless. Frustration inspired a significant number of Catholics to look for salvation in the previously discredited IRA. NICRA deeply regretted but fully understood this development. The IRA offered a simple solution to a complicated problem. ‘Violence,’ it argued, ‘had to be met with violence.’26

The IRA’s renaissance allowed Stormont to act without pretence of restraint. Oppressing Catholics had required some circumspection; confronting terrorists did not. The new prime minister, Brian Faulkner, asked the Catholic community to understand that the state was ‘at war with the terrorist and in a state of war many sacrifices have to be made and made in a cooperative and understanding manner’. In truth, this meant that Catholics were supposed to acquiesce in the trampling of their civil liberties. Under Operation Demetrius, the police and courts deployed the full force of the Special Powers Act. Internment was liberally used against those suspected of IRA involvement. The aim was to enfeeble the IRA. That failed, but the process was very effective in radicalizing ordinary citizens.²⁷

Against an increasingly violent background, NICRA continued its campaign. On Sunday, 30 January 1972, a march in Derry’s Bogside was met with a hail of bullets from trigger-happy British paratroopers. Why precisely they felt the need to fire upon unarmed, peaceful protesters has never been adequately explained. Fourteen men, half of them under the age of nineteen, were killed. The following day, the PD activist and MP Bernadette Devlin physically attacked Home Secretary Reginald Maudling in the House of Commons. ‘It was our Sharpeville,’ she remarked, ‘and we shall never forget it.’28

In addition to the fourteen dead, Bloody Sunday had two other casualties. The first was non-violent protest. The Catholic community could no longer turn the other cheek when British soldiers were murdering peaceful marchers. Sympathy for the IRA increased massively, and recruitment rose accordingly. The province was now gripped by guerrilla war. As if to signal a new phase, three days after Bloody Sunday the British consulate in Dublin was burned to the ground.

The second casualty was Stormont. The British government decided that the province was incapable of self-government. The parliament was suspended and the affairs of the province were henceforward assumed by the Northern Ireland Office. Ulster became Britain’s problem in a way that it had not been before. The violence was easily blamed on the IRA, for the simple reason that terrorists rarely have opportunity to explain. That was especially true after the IRA extended its campaign to the mainland. Fear of the IRA precluded an understanding of the Catholic predicament. The end of Stormont did not therefore mean the end of oppression.

Radicalized by injustice, frustrated by intransigence, Devlin demanded not change, but destruction. ‘If we are serious – and I have never been more so – in our efforts to end the poverty, the greed, the hatred and fear within our society, then we must destroy the system that creates it, and build the Socialist Republic of Ireland.’ Sentiments of that sort were spoken by many a Sixties radical, but seldom with such deadly intent. ‘Today I realize that just as our present society is a way of life, so, too, is its destruction, and its destruction is my way of life . . . Yesterday I dared to struggle. Today I dare to win.’²⁹ However admirable and eloquent Devlin’s defiance, it is hard to ignore the tragedy it wrought. In a struggle wedded to absolutes, every English person became an enemy. That logic inspired the bombs placed in two Birmingham pubs, which killed 21 people and injured 182 on 21 November 1974.

Historians don’t usually speak of inevitabilities. A close examination of the provenance of any problem usually reveals roads not taken, crucial decisions not made, and errors committed. All those are apparent in the evolution of the Troubles, but it is nevertheless difficult to see real alternatives to what transpired. Northern Ireland is a mass of twisting roads, all leading to exactly the same calamity.

The Middle East: Yom Kippur

‘We are fighting for the sake of peace,’ claimed Egyptian President Anwar Sadat shortly after he launched a surprise attack on Israel in 1973. In the confused logic of the Middle East, it seemed entirely reasonable to go to war in search of peace.30

In the Six Day War of 1967, Israel swept aside Egypt, Syria and Jordan, taking the Sinai peninsula, the Golan Heights and the West Bank as the spoils of victory. David Ben-Gurion, first president of Israel, argued afterwards that all the conquered lands, except Jerusalem, should be returned to the Arabs, otherwise generations of Israelis would suffer terribly in defending them. Good sense, however, shrivelled in the bright sunshine of victory. Most Israelis equated land with security.

The reputation of Gamal Abdel Nasser, then the Egyptian president, suffered terribly as a result of defeat. He had cast himself as the leader of all Arabs, the man who would destroy Israel. Despite his failure, he remained determined to prove that this was a mere chapter in the Middle Eastern story, not its conclusion. The Israelis, on the other hand, were bent on proving the opposite. The war, therefore, settled little. Both sides continued to fight, by whatever means.

Nasser died in 1970 and was replaced by Anwar Sadat. He was ‘Nasser’s poodle’, a man most Egyptians disparaged. Sadat believed that Nasser’s policies had placed Egypt in a straitjacket, inhibiting the quest for peace and prosperity. Socialism was therefore jettisoned, as was Egypt’s close relationship with the Soviet Union. The expulsion of 17,000 Soviet advisers was specifically calculated to impress the US, whose help Sadat craved. He was also prepared to break with other Arab nations over the question of Israel. An agreement was offered on the principle of land for peace – if Israel would withdraw from the occupied territories, Egypt would renounce war. The Israeli Cabinet summarily rejected that offer.31

Israeli intransigence placed Sadat in a cul-de-sac. The economic regeneration he desired could not be effected in an atmosphere of continuous conflict. In a meeting on 20 May 1973, Muhammad Ismail, Sadat’s national security adviser, confessed to his American opposite number, Henry Kissinger, that, ‘Every time we step forward . . . we are still in the middle of that morass, it is very frustrating.’ According to one of Ismail’s staffers, Kissinger replied: ‘Don’t expect to win on the negotiating table what you lost on the battlefield.’ The Egyptians took that as a reminder of the Clausewitzian maxim that war is a continuation of policy by other means. While Kissinger denies that account, the Egyptians nevertheless came away feeling that something profound had to be done to alter the status quo. A sudden, dramatic victory in a limited war, Sadat decided, might force Tel Aviv and Washington to take seriously his desire to negotiate. As Major General Hassan El-Gretli, Egypt’s chief of operations, later explained, the aim was ‘to break the political stalemate in the Middle East . . . by . . . altering the strategic balance of power’.³²

Sadat had reason to believe that he could succeed where Nasser had failed. Supplies of Soviet weaponry remained healthy but, more importantly, Egyptian forces had learned from their 1967 defeat. Incompetent generals had been cashiered, and tactical training had improved. Sadat could also draw comfort from the fact that Syria seemed a formidable ally. Her new president, Hafiz Assad, was determined to recover the Golan Heights. The Russian desire to maintain a toehold in the Middle East meant that Syria became the Soviets’ new client state. A flood of weaponry eventually provided Assad with a significant material advantage on the Golan front.

Within Israel, opinion was deeply divided over the issue of land for peace. The prime minister, Golda Meir, felt that Israel should retain Gaza and East Jerusalem, but might negotiate over other areas. Hardliners like Menachem Begin of the Gahal Party and the warhorse Ariel Sharon, on the other hand, rejected any surrender of territory. Their intransigence was reinforced by a belief in Israel’s military invincibility. Given Egypt’s humiliation in 1967, it seemed unlikely to them that she would again resort to war. The Egyptian military, they assumed, remained in disarray and was further hobbled by the withdrawal of Soviet assistance. What the hardliners failed to appreciate, however, was that the 1967 victory had complicated Israel’s strategic situation. Conquest had increased the points of vulnerability.

Israeli strategy depended on being able to anticipate, and therefore pre-empt, threats to her security. When questioned about the possibility of an Egyptian surprise attack, Director of Military Intelligence Major General Eli Zeira confidently told Meir: ‘I am sure we will know about it ahead, and we will be able to [react] . . . a number of days in advance.’ Hubris, however, clouded judgement. Because Israeli leaders refused to accept that Egypt posed a threat, they failed to recognize indications to the contrary. As one former intelligence official reflected: ‘You cannot suspect a stupid enemy of deceiving you . . . because the mere fact that he can deceive you makes him smarter than you, an idea that was completely unacceptable.’33

The Arabs, Zeira argued on 24 April 1973, could not escape the logic of their own limitations. ‘I think that in coming years . . . [they] do not estimate that they can win a war against Israel.’ Evidence that Egypt was planning an attack was therefore rejected outright. Eleven clear-cut warnings of war were received during September and all were ignored. ‘We simply didn’t feel them capable,’ Zvi Zamir, the chief of Mossad, later admitted. He did not change his mind until midnight on 5 October, when an intelligence source indicated attack was imminent. Instead of the few days’ advance warning Israel required, she got just a few hours.³⁴

At 08.05 on 6 October, Meir met Defence Minister Moshe Dayan and General David Elazar to discuss options. Dayan still doubted an attack. Elazar, on the other hand, advocated pre-emptive strikes. Meir had to weigh the apparent sensibility of that advice against the likely reaction of the United States. ‘If we strike first, we won’t get help,’ she warned. The room went quiet while she deliberated. ‘No,’ she concluded, ‘I don’t want . . . to spend the rest of my life explaining why we struck first . . . We will not strike first.’ ‘It was a hard decision,’ the Israeli ambassador to Washington, Simcha Dinitz, later reflected. ‘But it was right,’ Kissinger told him. He later admitted that, if Israel had attacked, America would not have contributed ‘so much as a nail’.35

In stark contrast to 1967, modest aims increased the likelihood of Egyptian and Syrian success. The goal was no longer to destroy Israel. Egypt wanted simply a limited victory which would eradicate the illusion of Israeli invincibility and force her to negotiate. Assad, likewise, wanted only the Golan Heights. Given the preparation that went into the attack, and the failure of Israel to take seriously the threat, both goals were eminently realizable.

On 6 October 1973 most Israelis were quietly observing Yom Kippur. Then, shortly after 14.00 hours, sirens screamed. In a perfectly orchestrated assault on the Sinai, 250 Egyptian aircraft hit Israeli airfields, SAM sites, radar installations, tank concentration areas, artillery positions and command posts. Around 95 per cent of targets were hit, at the loss of just five aircraft. At the same time, 2,000 Egyptian guns pounded Israeli positions in a fearsome barrage lasting fifty-three minutes. Bound for the airport when war erupted, Dinitz ‘saw young boys taken from the synagogues. Right out of the synagogues. They were folding their talises, and getting their revolvers. It was a very dramatic sight.’³⁶

Israeli hopes rested on the Bar Lev Line, a wall of concrete, sand and steel stretching 160 kilometres along the Suez waterline, designed to hold back an Egyptian onslaught until reserves could be mobilized. In the event of attack, oil was to be pumped into the canal and ignited, creating a wall of fire. Egyptian engineers had, however, come to terms with the Bar Lev Line. Prior to the attack, frogmen blocked the pipes through which oil was to be pumped. High pressure hoses then carved breaches in the wall of sand. Under cover of the artillery barrage, Egyptian commandos crossed the canal in rubber dinghies, armed with portable anti-tank weapons and guided missiles. Sharon later admitted that the Bar Lev was Israel’s Maginot Line. It was ‘a fundamentally wrong defense perception . . . no more than fortified bunkers with little ammunition. Due to their location and weakness, they had little value and were a dangerous burden.’37

‘The attack on Sinai’, Time reported, ‘was carried out with a finesse and synchronization that not even most Arabs suspected that the Arabs possessed.’ In less than four hours, Egypt moved 32,000 men across the canal, with fewer than 300 killed. In stark contrast to 1967, brand-new SAM air defences cut Israeli fighters to shreds. By the morning of the 7th, the Israelis had lost 300 tanks and 30 aircraft. The Egyptians advanced 4 or 5 kilometres, capturing the important town of Qantara on the 8th. Counter-attacks were brutally repulsed. ‘The Egyptians were fighting well, not running away,’ an Israeli tank colonel noted with conspicuous surprise. ‘Our tactic the first two days was, as usual, to move forward, move forward. But as we advanced, we hit a wall of hundreds of missiles, tanks and heavy guns.’³⁸

‘We are heading for a catastrophe,’ Dayan told Meir on the second day. He called for nuclear weapons to be readied, in the form of thirteen 20-kiloton battlefield devices. Debate still rages over whether Israel would actually have used the weapons – the move might simply have been designed to frighten the Americans into helping. If that was indeed the aim, it worked perfectly. The US responded with Operation Nickel Grass, a commitment to replace Israeli losses, to the tune of $2.2 billion. ‘Without you, I don’t know where we would have been,’ Meir later told Kissinger. ‘It was more than I could ever have dreamed.’ The Americans paid dearly for their benificence – spurred by King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, the Arab petroleum-producing nations imposed an oil embargo on the United States which was not lifted until 17 March 1974.³⁹

Israel’s panic was exacerbated by her awareness that she was heavily outgunned on the Golan Heights. Against her 2 brigades, 11 artillery batteries and 180 tanks, Syria mobilized 5 divisions, 188 batteries and 1,300 tanks. Israelis fought with fierce determination, but could not achieve the impossible. Within six hours, the first line of defence was overrun, and a Syrian tank brigade was passing through the Rafid Gap, bound for Nafah, the Israeli Divisional Headquarters.

With Israeli reserves flooding into the Golan Heights, the tide began to turn on the 8th. By the 10th, all Syrian units had been pushed back to or beyond their original starting point. The Israelis now faced a dilemma: whether to transfer troops from the Golan Heights to the Sinai front or to use them for an offensive into Syria. Meir feared that, if she moved her troops, the war might end before they achieved anything positive. Feeling that Israel needed an undisputed victory to use as political leverage, she ordered a push into Syria. Over the next three days, the Israelis captured 50 square kilometres of Syrian territory and drew within artillery range of Damascus.

On the Sinai, Sadat had made his point. ‘It doesn’t matter if the Israelis eventually counter-attack and drive us back,’ one Egyptian journalist remarked. ‘What matters is that the world now no longer will laugh at us when we threaten to fight. No longer will it dismiss our threats as a lot of bluff and bluster. It will have to take us seriously.’ Agreeing with that assessment, Sadat was inclined to call a halt, but the Syrian debacle forced his hand. Unwilling to let his ally fail, he ordered attacks to continue, in an effort to ease the pressure on the Syrians. This meant that Egyptian forces strayed beyond the range of their air defences, suddenly changing the temper of the fight. Israeli aircraft attacked Egyptian columns with impunity, cutting them to ribbons.40

Sharon counter-attacked on the 15th, quickly penetrating to the banks of the canal. A gigantic bridge was manoeuvred into position, allowing tanks to cross late on the 17th. With Israeli forces just 60 kilometres from Cairo, Sadat welcomed a UN ceasefire resolution, calling for the fighting to cease at 18.52 on the 22nd. That resolution arose from an agreement Kissinger had forged in Moscow the previous day. Since a technical problem prevented the Israelis from being informed of that agreement until four hours after the fact, Kissinger told Dinitz that ‘we would understand if . . . [you] required some additional time for military dispositions before cease-fire takes effect’.41

Unbeknownst to Kissinger, the Israelis were bent on annihilation. They had the Egyptian Third Army trapped in an impossible position east of the Suez Canal. Under pressure from hawks hovering around her, Meir allowed her forces to violate the ceasefire. When Kissinger met her in Tel Aviv at 13.35 on the 22nd, he gave her the green light to do so. ‘You won’t get violent protests from Washington if something happens during the night, while I’m flying,’ he said. ‘Nothing can happen in Washington until noon tomorrow.’ He did not realize that Meir had in mind the destruction of the Third Army. ‘You . . . didn’t tell me what you intended,’ he later complained. ‘I had no reason to think twelve more hours, twenty-four more hours, were decisive . . . Then you took on the Third Army after the cease-fire.’⁴²

Sadat rightly felt betrayed. Kissinger had assured the Egyptians, on the 21st, that ‘as the fighting ceases, the US will use its influence to secure a lasting peace in the Middle East on a basis just for all parties’. Yet here he was allowing the Israelis to continue fighting. ‘We were asked to comply with the ceasefire resolution with the full understanding of the effectiveness of the joint guarantees,’ Sadat complained to Nixon on the 23rd. ‘The Egyptian Government will consider the US Government fully responsible for what is happening.’ He urged the US to intervene, ‘even if that necessitates the use of force’.⁴³

The Soviets were meanwhile growing increasingly impatient with Nixon’s inability to control his ally. ‘We would like to believe that . . . everything will be done in order that the Security Council decision . . . will be implemented,’ Brezhnev remarked on the 23rd. ‘Too much is at stake, not only as concerns the situation in the Middle East, but in our relations as well.’ In a note to Nixon sent late the next day, he called for a UN peacekeeping force, consisting of Russian and American troops, to be inserted between the opposing armies. ‘I will say it straight that if you find it impossible to act jointly with us in this matter, we should be faced with the necessity urgently to consider taking appropriate steps unilaterally.’ Seven Soviet airborne divisions were placed on alert. Under no circumstances could the US countenance such a development. ‘We were determined to resist by force if necessary the introduction of Soviet forces into the Middle East regardless of the pretext on which they arrived,’ Kissinger later explained.44

Nixon, in the depths of despair over Watergate, was drinking heavily and taking sedatives. The Brezhnev note arrived after he had dragged himself to bed. Kissinger and Alexander Haig, the chief of staff, briefly debated waking him. He was ‘too distraught’, they concluded; ‘he would just start charging around’.⁴⁵ Instead, they sent a somewhat conciliatory response to Brezhnev in Nixon’s name, while simultaneously urging Sadat not to push for Soviet help. Rather crucially, they also changed the Defense Condition (DefCon) from four to three, ‘the highest stage of readiness for essentially peacetime conditions’. The Soviets, taken aback, decided the issue unworthy of global nuclear war. ‘It was our strategy to deliberately overreact,’ Kissinger aide Peter Rodman later admitted. ‘You had to scare them off.’⁴⁶

‘Let’s not broadcast this all over the place,’ Kissinger advised Haig, ‘otherwise it looks like we cooked it up.’ When Nixon awoke the next morning and learned of the momentous decisions made in his name, he congratulated his aides on ‘a hell of a job’. That was an accurate assessment. The US now found itself in the perfect position to derive diplomatic advantage from the war. With the Soviet Union effectively neutralized, the US was now the only power capable of preventing the Third Army’s destruction. ‘The events of the last two weeks have been on the whole a major success,’ a smug Kissinger told his staff. ‘We are really in the central position . . . the fact of the matter is that any rational Arab leader now has to know that whether he hates us, loves us, despises us, there is no way around us. If they want a settlement in the Middle East, it has to come through us.’ Exercising that influence, Kissinger told Dinitz that under no circumstances should the Third Army be destroyed.⁴⁷

Sadat was only too eager to play ball. His foreign minister, Ismail Fahmy, met Kissinger and Nixon on 29 October and made it clear that Egypt wanted improved relations with the US. As a measure of his sincerity, Sadat conceded that a resolution of the Palestinian issue would no longer be a precondition of peace. In other words, Egypt would not allow Nasser’s illusion of Arab solidarity to impede progress.

Meir proved more cantankerous. When she visited Washington on 1 November, she protested that destruction of the Third Army was appropriate retribution for Egypt’s aggression. Kissinger wanted a withdrawal to positions extant when the ceasefire went into effect, but she demurred. ‘We didn’t start the war!’ she shouted. ‘Nor did we lose. Now we get these demands.’ In a subsequent meeting, Nixon gave Meir a blunt warning: ‘If the ceasefire breaks down and we have another deadly round, how much we could do is very much open to question . . . Of course, I could leave you to the UN.’ The next day, Kissinger and Meir reiterated the same arguments, with increasing bitterness. ‘You’re saying we have no choice,’ Meir lamented, her voice shaking. Kissinger repeated that the US would cut Israel loose if she attacked. ‘You’re saying we have to accept the judgement of the US,’ she grunted. ‘I’m telling you to face the facts,’ he retorted. That turned out to be enough. Kissinger realized that Meir needed to be able to tell the Knesset that her hand had been forced.48

After a whirlwind week of diplomacy, Kissinger saw Sadat in Cairo on 7 November and obtained his agreement to a six-point plan to end the war based roughly on UN proposals already tabled. The Israelis grudgingly accepted the plan on 11 November. A week later, both sides began to withdraw their forces. Negotiations with Assad proved much more complicated, extending well into the new year. It was, however, eventually agreed that Israel would retain the Golan Heights, but that a demilitarized zone would separate the two sides.

‘It was a very difficult war,’ Sharon later reflected. ‘It was a great victory of the forces that fought in the battlefield.’ Those forces were, however, hobbled by ‘the failure of the higher command in the rear’. Losses, including around 2,200 dead, were heavier than for any conflict in Israel’s history. Serious mistakes were made at every level of command and panic, heretofore unknown, had been apparent. A

nation known for its vigilance had been caught unprepared. Some leaders paid dearly for their mistakes, but in truth failure was ubiquitous. The war shattered the myth of a nation so blessed as to be invincible.49

For Israel, the Yom Kippur War proved a rite of passage. The settlement revealed painful truths about her dependence upon America. The facts of failure were difficult to swallow, but swallowing them allowed a healthier realism to prevail. As Kissinger remarked, the war had resulted in ‘a realization . . . that this cockiness of supremacy is no longer possible; that like other countries in history, [the Israelis] now have to depend on a combination of security and diplomacy’. Perhaps the most significant result of the war, for Israel, was the way opinion polls afterwards revealed a desire not for revenge, but for negotiated peace, even at the cost of territory.⁵⁰

Sadat’s war should be judged by its first two days, for in that time he gained precisely what he sought. ‘However the battle might end,’ Time commented, ‘it was already clear that the Arabs had never fought better against the Israelis. No longer were they so likely to be dismissed as powerless and posturing giants too weak to defeat the tiniest of neighbors.’ In place of Nasser’s febrile bluster, Sadat had delivered hard results. His willingness to use his newly established credibility to make a clean break from the past showed admirable insight and courage. The Nasser era was clearly over, brought to an end by a man once considered a lightweight.⁵¹

Vietnam: Peace with Honour?

‘There’s no way to win the war,’ Nixon privately confessed nearly a year before becoming president. ‘But we can’t say that, of course . . . we have to seem to say the opposite, just to keep some degree of bargaining leverage.’ For four years, Nixon tried to fool the North Vietnamese into thinking he sought victory. Hanoi, however, was not easily duped. The politburo simply waited for Nixon to turn into the person he was elected to be: a peace president. While they waited, thousands died acting out Nixon’s charade. ‘How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?’ Lieutenant John Kerry asked the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 22 April 1971. No one replied.52

The Tet Offensive of January 1968 was a turning point in the war, but did not hasten peace. Though communist strength was sapped, their will remained formidable. In contrast, the Americans still possessed the strength, but lacked the will. This dynamic implied protracted disengagement. Rather like two tired boxers in the final rounds of a match, both sides could still inflict pain but could not deliver a knockout blow.

The People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF, or Viet Cong) paid dearly for the Tet disaster. They expected a decisive victory but encountered instead annihilation. One veteran who defected in 1970 revealed that ‘the men were tired of fighting, afraid of death, and felt they were losing the war’. A local party official confirmed that cadres had ‘lost confidence . . . in the revolutionary capability of the people’ and were ‘doubtful of victory’.⁵³ Soldiers were told that victory would come ‘not suddenly but in a complicated and tortuous way’.⁵⁴

The depletion of the Viet Cong brought scant advantage to the United States, however, since the enemy was far from beaten. The communists could still rely on the crack troops of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), professional soldiers from the North heretofore held in reserve. ‘The North Vietnamese have access to sufficient manpower to meet their replenishment needs . . . for at least the next several years,’ the National Security Council advised Nixon on 21 January 1969. The NSC warned that the North would still be able to ‘launch major offensives’.⁵⁵

Americans had lost faith in the war, but had no idea how to end it. Nixon insisted that the US could not simply cut and run. A humiliating withdrawal would, he feared, compromise America’s ability to carry out her foreign policy goals. He wanted ‘to end the war as quickly as was honorably possible’, but honour and speed were contradictory. ‘I’ve been saying, “an honorable end to the war”, but what the hell does that mean?’ he privately confessed during the presidental campaign. He nevertheless assumed he could master this dilemma. ‘I’m not going to end up like LBJ, holed up in the White House afraid to show my face in the street,’ he boasted. ‘I’m going to stop that war. Fast.’56

Formal peace talks, mired in acrimony since March 1968, offered little hope of breakthrough. Nixon tried another route, sending Kissinger to Paris for secret talks with the North Vietnamese diplomat Le Duc Tho. Desperate to get these talks moving, he applied pressure in an unorthodox way. ‘Measures of great consequence’ would be taken, if progress was not apparent by 1 November 1969. Confident that his reputation preceded him, Nixon felt no need to elaborate. ‘I call it the Madman Theory,’ he told his aides. ‘I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that “for god’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry – and he has his hand on the nuclear button” – and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.’⁵⁷

Nixon intentionally encouraged the belief that he might actually push for complete victory. Operation Duck Hook drove this point home. A programme of retaliatory actions to be taken if negotiations stalled, it included intensive bombing of urban areas, destruction of dykes, mining of rivers and harbours, a ground invasion, and nuclear strikes. Though supposedly secret, the plan was carefully leaked to Hanoi. ‘Once the enemy recognizes that it is not going to win its objectives by waiting us out,’ Nixon told a press conference in September 1969, ‘then the enemy will negotiate and we will end this war before the end of 1970.’⁵⁸

Hanoi remained unimpressed. The politburo stuck to its own agenda, known as danh va dam, dam va danh (‘fighting while talking, talking while fighting’). Pressure on the battlefield was designed to make Americans desperate for peace, while formal peace discussions eroded their will to fight. Nixon’s troop withdrawals, more than his hollow threats, confirmed the wisdom of this strategy. By the end of 1969, cuts of 110,000 troops had been announced, with a promise that at least as many would leave during 1970. This sent a clear message to the communists that they need only wait patiently for the last American to leave. Annoyed that his bluff had been called, Nixon blasted Hanoi’s ‘absolute refusal to show the least willingness to join us in seeking a just peace . . . it is convinced that all it has to do is to wait for our next concession, and our next concession after that one, until it gets everything it wants’.59

That elusive honour complicated the peace process. ‘A nation cannot remain great if it betrays its allies and lets down its friends,’ Nixon warned Americans on 3 November 1969. To cut and run would ‘result in a collapse of confidence in American leadership not only in Asia but throughout the world . . . Far more dangerous, we would lose confidence in ourselves . . . inevitable remorse and divisive recrimination would scar our spirit.’ Nixon’s solution was to buttress the South Vietnamese ally – a strategy called Vietnamization. Henceforth, ‘the primary mission of our troops’ would be ‘to enable the South Vietnamese forces to assume . . . full responsibility for the security of South Vietnam’. If the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) could be strengthened, while communist forces were weakened, a stalemate might result and a settlement similar to that forged in Korea might result. Privately, Kissinger admitted that the administration wanted a ‘decent interval’ between American withdrawal and ARVN defeat. Nixon, however, had difficulty abandoning his desire to destroy. As late as June 1971, he was still looking for ways to ‘level that goddamn country’.⁶⁰

Vietnamization had, in truth, been going on since November 1967. Nixon, however, took an existing policy and magnified it with money, to the extent that ARVN commanders called it the ‘US Dollar and Vietnamese Blood Sharing Plan’. By the beginning of 1972, South Vietnam had 120 infantry battalions, 58 artillery battalions, 19 battalion-sized armoured units, 1,680 naval craft, over 1,000 aeroplanes, and 500 helicopters. Its air force was the fourth largest in the world. Police and militia units added another 670,000 men to overall troop strength. Bigger did not, however, mean better. The ARVN suffered from the same problems that had always plagued it, namely a lack of commitment, expressed in an alarmingly high desertion rate. The ordinary soldier’s loyalty was steadily eroded by the corruption of his officers and government. It was difficult to serve leaders who cheated and stole from their people. A 1969 Senate report identified a classic Catch-22: Vietnamization was essential to keep the government of Nguyen van Thieu in power, but ‘if [his] . . . government remains in power . . . Vietnamization will fail’.61

Vietnamization went hand in hand with pacification, which, put bluntly, meant killing communists, by whatever means. While Nixon, in his more lucid moments, accepted that a communist victory was inevitable, he still wanted them to pay dearly for it. This explains why the ‘peace president’ widened the war by sending troops into Laos and Cambodia, the aim being to root out Viet Cong sanctuaries and to cut the Ho Chi Minh trail. ‘This is not an invasion of Cambodia,’ Nixon insisted to those confused by the action. An illegal operation was justified by assigning it a noble purpose. ‘If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation . . . acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions around the world.’⁶²

Pacification brought an intensification of covert operations – assassination, torture and other ‘black ops’. The most notorious programme was called Phoenix, an effort begun in 1967, with help from the CIA. It entailed paying the South Vietnamese to do things civilized Americans were not supposed to do. Trained agents were inserted into over 300 villages, in order to root out communists. Funding was provided by the Americans, but the agents answered to the Republic of Vietnam, which meant that Phoenix became yet another manifestation of Saigon venality. The sadistic thugs who administered the programme were more interested in financial reward than genuine counter-insurgency. Rewards of up to $11,000 for a live communist opened the floodgates of fraud. Entirely innocent villagers were kidnapped and offered a stark choice: pay a hefty ransom or face exposure as a communist. Communist cadres joined the fun by pretending to be supporters of the Saigon regime, informing on their enemies, and then collecting the reward. The official policy, namely that ‘it was better to detain the suspect than to free the criminal’, encouraged massive miscarriages of justice. Thousands were captured (and killed), but few were actually communists. The net effect was alienation – ‘to create new Viet Cong rather than to “root out” established operatives’, one CIA agent admitted. Critics pointed out that America was employing torture and assassination to pursue her moral mission. ‘I sometimes think we would have gotten better publicity by molesting children,’ an American official confessed in 1972.63

Pacification severely weakened the enemy, but it did not encourage confidence in the Saigon government. Peasants, as always, maintained an attitude of attentisme – they sat on the fence. An American study in 1972 concluded that less than 20 per cent of peasants wanted American troops to stay, even though it was widely understood that their departure would allow the communists to triumph. The communists of the National Liberation Front were hated, but so too was the Saigon regime. The two sides competed in cruelty and corruption, with peasants caught in the middle – exiles in their own country.

As the 1972 election approached, Nixon’s boast about a quick end to the war seemed a cruel joke. Negotiations had stalled and Vietnamization was a sham. The only good news was troop withdrawals – only 50,000 Americans remained by June 1972. Withdrawals also heartened the North Vietnamese, however. They rightly concluded that, since the momentum was inexorable, there was no reason to cooperate at the peace talks. On 26 January 1972, Kissinger accused Hanoi of holding out for a peace settlement ‘in which the probability of their taking over is close to certainty’. That was precisely the strategy, but complaining about it did not alter its effectiveness.⁶⁴

Nixon’s efforts to disengage had been unsuccessful because he found it impossible to give up on victory. ‘If we fail,’ he remarked in March 1971, ‘this country will have suffered a blow from which it will never recover and become a world power again . . . You can’t fail after staying through six years . . . We’ve got to win. And by winning . . . I mean assuring a reasonable chance for South Vietnam to live in peace.’ Desperate and frustrated, Nixon shifted to great power diplomacy. He and Kissinger decided that, if deals could be struck with the Soviet Union and China, the importance of Vietnam to great power relations could be reduced and an acceptable settlement would be easier to achieve.65

Much to the dismay of Hanoi, the Chinese were susceptible to Nixon’s flirtation. In March 1971, Zhou Enlai informed Hanoi that, since the war was nearly over, Vietnamese problems would no longer be allowed to impede an improvement of Sino-American relations. In July, Kissinger visited Beijing and told Zhou that the Vietnam war was ‘history . . . our problem now is how to end it’. He added that, ‘Our position is not to maintain any particular government in South Vietnam . . . If the government is as unpopular as you seem to think, then the quicker our forces are withdrawn the quicker it will be overthrown. And if it is overthrown . . . we will not intervene.’ The Chinese responded by pressuring the Vietnamese to accept a compromise.⁶⁶

Diplomacy with the Soviets was less fruitful. Nixon and Kissinger failed to take into account that they needed agreement more than the Russians did. This gave the USSR the upper hand, which they used cleverly. The Soviets gained some lucrative trade deals and, more importantly, détente made them feel more secure on their European frontier. The Americans, while benefiting from détente, did not get a solid commitment from the Soviets to pressure Hanoi to end the war. The main problem with the Nixon/Kissinger triangular diplomacy was that it did not take sufficient account of Sino-Soviet rivalries. Deals with both sides merely intensified the distrust each felt for the other. Hanoi benefited handsomely from this rivalry. While Nixon achieved improved relations with the Soviet Union and China, the aid both countries sent to North Vietnam actually doubled from 1971 to 1972. North Vietnam was like the spoilt child who cleverly manipulates his parents’ messy divorce.

In March 1972, Hanoi decided its hour had come. With American troop levels severely reduced, the time seemed ripe for a final push. The Nguyen Hue (or ‘Easter’) Offensive, launched on 30 March, was a three-pronged attack on major South Vietnamese cities, involving 125,000 troops, supported by hundreds of tanks. On hearing of the attack, Nixon went ballistic. ‘We are not going . . . [to] be defeated by this little shit-ass country,’ he spat. ‘I intend to stop at nothing to bring the enemy to his knees.’ Kissinger agreed that the US should ‘blast the living bejeezus out of North Vietnam’. Air squadrons and carrier forces, headed for home, were ordered back to implement Operation Linebacker, a bombing campaign that dwarfed anything previously inflicted on the North. ‘The bastards have never been bombed like they’re going to be bombed this time,’ Nixon promised. While Hanoi and Haiphong were spared, other cities were literally wiped off the map. Most Americans, unable to summon Nixon’s anger, struggled to understand.67

ARVN forces were initially forced to retreat, but then, in early May, the PAVN advance slowed. Devastated by American air power, the communists were pushed back, with prodigious losses. Probably 75,000 soldiers were killed, and 700 tanks destroyed. The result suggested that the ARVN could hold its own and that Vietnamization was working. That was certainly the message Nixon conveyed, but in truth the deciding factor in the battle was American air power, an asset that would soon disappear. Kept under wraps by Washington was the growing evidence that the South Vietnamese peasantry were abandoning attentisme and throwing their weight behind the revolution – out of self-preservation if nothing else. The Americans were powerless to stop that development, since they were headed for the door. In mid-August, just before the Republican convention opened in Miami, the last American combat soldier left Vietnam.

The combined effect of severe losses in the Easter Offensive and the certainty that Nixon would be re-elected made the Vietnamese more malleable in the peace talks. Hanoi accepted a proposal for a tripartite council, to consist of representatives of the Saigon regime, the communists and neutral elements. A euphoric Kissinger announced that ‘peace is at hand’. An angry Thieu, however, vetoed the deal, accusing Kissinger of being more interested in a Nobel Prize than in the fate of South Vietnam. ‘[Thieu] has chosen to act the martyr’, Kissinger screamed, ‘but he hasn’t got what it takes! If we have to, the United States can sign a separate treaty with Hanoi. As for me, I’ll never set foot in Saigon again . . . This is the worst failure of my diplomatic career!’ Nixon sympathized but felt he could not abandon his ally on the eve of the American election. Kissinger was ordered back to Paris, where talks soon stalled. He railed at the way ‘a little fourth rate power like Vietnam’ had treated him. ‘They’re just a bunch of shits. Tawdry, filthy shits.’68

Nixon, in agreement with that assessment, decided that the time had come to teach those ‘shits’ a lesson. His confidence magnified by his landslide election victory, he ordered airstrikes on 19 December. The notorious Christmas bombing, or Linebacker II, was designed to get a ‘message through to Hanoi’. For twelve days, North Vietnam was attacked incessantly – by night with B-52s and F-111s, during the day with tactical strike aircraft. ‘This is your chance to use military power to win the war,’ Nixon told Admiral Thomas Moorer. ‘If you don’t, I’ll consider you responsible.’ In all, 1,369 sorties dropped around 20,000 tons of bombs in the Hanoi–Haiphong area. Anger carried high cost – the US lost twenty-six aircraft, including fifteen B-52s. Twenty-nine crewmen were killed, and thirty-three captured.⁶⁹

Joan Baez was on a humanitarian mission to Hanoi, along with a group that included retired Brigadier General Telford Taylor. It seemed safe to go since the war was almost over. Then came the bombs. ‘It was like thunder, the kind of thunder that rolls and rolls,’ she later wrote. ‘I realized with shame and horror that to pray for the planes to go away was to pray that they would drop their bombs somewhere else.’ Just after Christmas, the group visited American prisoners at a POW camp. ‘I don’t understand,’ one of them said, while holding up a large piece of shrapnel that had almost killed him during the night. ‘What don’t you understand?’ Baez asked incredulously, since this man was, after all, a pilot. ‘Kissinger said peace was at hand, isn’t that what he said?’ ‘That’s what he said,’ a now tearful Baez replied. ‘Maybe he didn’t mean it. They lie a lot.’⁷⁰

Nixon assumed that the American people would not ‘give a damn’ about his lies. He was wrong. At home, bewilderment blended with anger. The journalist James Reston dubbed Linebacker II ‘war by tantrum’, while the Washington Post argued that Nixon ‘has conducted a bombing policy . . . so ruthless and so difficult to fathom politically as to cause millions of Americans to cringe in shame and to wonder at their President’s very sanity’. Apparently, that was the image Nixon wanted to convey. An old strategy had been reprised. ‘The Russians and the Chinese might think they were dealing with a madman,’ he explained to a reporter. They would ‘force North Vietnam into a settlement before the world was consumed by a larger war’. Granted, talks did resume, in part because of the bombing. In truth, however, the North Vietnamese returned to Paris because they knew they would get, at the very least, the terms offered in October. In other words, the bombing achieved nothing.71

On 9 January 1973, both sides agreed that reunification of Vietnam would be ‘carried out . . . through peaceful means on the basis of discussions and agreements between North and South Vietnam, without coercion or annexation by either party, and without foreign interference’. The vague wording made the settlement acceptable to Washington and Hanoi, but not to Saigon. Thieu felt betrayed. He objected especially to the fact that PAVN troops would be allowed to remain in the south of Vietnam, with triggers cocked. Nixon had, however, given up on trying to please Thieu. All he would offer was his word that, if Hanoi violated the settlement, he would ‘respond with full force’ – a direct contradiction of what Kissinger had told Zhou. ‘You can count on us,’ the president insisted. Thieu was left with the cold comfort of a Nixon promise.⁷²

Hanoi was delighted. Officials privately admitted that the settlement provided ‘a great opportunity for revolutionary violence, for gaining power in South Vietnam . . . and for making great leaps in the balance of forces’. No one, certainly not the Americans, expected Hanoi to behave. The settlement was acceptable to Washington because it allowed that illusive ‘peace with honour’ Nixon had promised in 1968. Kissinger privately admitted that, with a little luck, the South Vietnamese might ‘hold out for a year or two’. The original reason for the war, namely to maintain the integrity of a non-communist South Vietnam, had long been abandoned. All the Americans wanted was the ‘decent interval’ – a settlement that would allow them to withdraw while the Thieu government remained intact. Few really cared if his regime lasted. Nixon’s greatest success lay in transforming Vietnam into a country of no real importance.73

The remarks of an American Legion commander aptly summarized American reaction. ‘There’s nothing to celebrate,’ he said, ‘and nobody to celebrate with.’ The Nixon administration spent four years in search of peace with honour, sacrificing over 20,000 American lives in the process. Nixon hoped to preserve American dignity, yet that dignity was compromised by the methods he used – the lies, deceit, bullying, bombing and torture. He brought American troops home, but their homecoming was hardly joyous. Given the malaise which afflicted the US after Vietnam, it is not certain that the delay was worthwhile, nor that Nixon achieved his purpose. The extra years of war, and the additional sacrifice, did not establish a country at peace with itself.⁷⁴

South Africa: Biko

‘Why do you call yourself black, when your skin is brown?’ a white South African judge once asked Steve Biko. ‘Why do you call yourself white, when you are actually pink?’ he shot back. That response perfectly encapsulated Biko’s activism. His philosophy was rooted in the concept of internal oppression – that blacks were subjugated by their own sense of inferiority. The strength of apartheid, he believed, lay in the psychological effect it had in causing blacks to conform to racist stereotypes. He was the perfect person to instil confidence in his fellow blacks, since he had no lack of it himself. Being black, he insisted, ‘is not a matter of pigmentation – being black is a reflection of a mental attitude’.75

The Bantu Education Act of 1953 was designed to prepare blacks for a life of back-breaking labour, not to offer them an escape from that fate. But while limits could be placed on what was taught, it was impossible to limit what might be learned. From an early age, Biko sought liberation through education. ‘He read everything he could lay his hands on,’ a fellow student recalled. ‘As a medical student, he could debate with me, an English major, the finer points of literary criticism of Shakespeare and the novels of George Eliot. He understood the politics of decolonisation in Africa and India. He had insight into the anti-imperial wars throughout Africa and in Vietnam. And he had a critical understanding of the politics of the civil rights movement in the United States.’ The journalist Donald Woods was immediately impressed by his ‘quick brain, superb articulation of ideas and sheer mental force’. During his career, Woods interviewed many prominent political figures, but ‘Steve Biko . . . was the greatest man I ever had the privilege to know’.76

Biko’s participation in the apartheid education system did not imply surrender to its values. He was expelled from his first school because of ‘anti-establishment behaviour’ – or, more precisely, outspoken opposition to apartheid. That did not, however, stop him from gaining admission to the University of Natal Medical School – specifically, the segregated faculty designed to train black doctors for the black community. In Natal, his political activism continued, through the vehicle of the National Union of South African Students – a multiracial group. Before long, however, the domination of NUSAS by white liberals caused Biko to conclude that it had little to offer the black population. Blacks, he argued, ‘are tired of standing at the touchlines to witness a game that they should be playing. They want to do things for themselves and all by themselves.’ An unbridgeable chasm developed between white liberals and the blacks they hoped to help. ‘It [became] increasingly difficult to find any common ground,’ Raymond Whittaker, a NUSAS activist, recalled. ‘To the horror of the well-meaning whites . . . their black counterparts began to accuse them of holding back the cause of black empowerment through paternalism and unconscious racism.’ Biko resigned in 1969 and formed instead the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO). Its slogan summed up his philosophy: ‘Black man, you are on your own.’⁷⁷

The apartheid system was perhaps never as formidable as during the 1970s. International condemnation was strident but ineffectual. Economic prosperity gave South Africa the confidence to ignore protests, safe in the knowledge that the world would continue to want its cheap produce, minerals and wine. An efficient and heavily funded security system kept internal opposition in check, with occasional unrest sparking brutal repression. The dire poverty suffered by black workers sapped their will to resist, while middle-class blacks cleverly played the system.

‘The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor’, Biko argued in 1971, ‘is the mind of the oppressed.’ The strength of apartheid, he felt, lay in its ability to persuade blacks to accept subservience. The system produced ‘a kind of black man that is man only in form’. As a result of this dehumanization, ‘the black man has become . . . a shadow of man, completely defeated, drowning in his own misery, a slave, an ox bearing the yoke of oppression with sheepish timidity’. SASO trumpeted the new radical doctrine of Black Consciousness – what Biko called the ‘cultural and political revival of an oppressed people’. Blacks were encouraged ‘to judge themselves’. Freedom came in liberating oneself from white values. ‘The first step,’ he argued, was ‘to pump back life into his empty shell; to infuse him with pride and dignity, to remind him of his complicity in . . . letting evil reign supreme in the country of his birth.’ This meant being proud of blackness. ‘By describing yourself as black,’ he argued, ‘you have started on the road to emancipation, you have committed yourself to fight against all forces that seek to use your blackness as a stamp that marks you out as a subservient being.’78

By 1971, Biko was ready to extend Black Consciousness beyond the universities and into the oppressed communities, where feelings of inferiority were cancerous. He figured prominently in the establishment of the Black Peoples Convention (BPC), which brought together around seventy activist groups, all concentrating on concrete social projects designed to energize the oppressed. This activism caused his expulsion from medical school, a not unexpected development that confirmed his destiny as a full-time rebel.

In contrast to white liberals and most middle-class blacks, Biko did not advocate integration. As his colleague Bennie Khoapa explained, ‘integration is irrelevant to a people who are powerless’. Liberation was ‘far more important than physical proximity to white people’. Consciousness had first to be improved – on both sides. ‘Whites must be made to realise that they are only human, not superior,’ Biko argued. ‘Same with Blacks. They must be made to realise that they are also human, not inferior.’ Only with mutual respect could meaningful integration proceed. This could not, however, be achieved if blacks continued to suffer an ‘inferiority complex – a result of 300 years of deliberate oppression, denigration and derision’. The first prerequisite was the ‘very strong grass-roots build up of black consciousness’ which would allow blacks to ‘learn to assert themselves and stake their rightful claim’.79

Working with (or rather under) white liberals merely reinforced that sense of inferiority. White liberals, argued Biko, ‘vacillate between the two worlds, verbalising all the complaints of the blacks beautifully while skilfully extracting what suits them from the exclusive pool of white privilege. But ask them for a moment to give a concrete meaningful programme that they intend adopting, and then you will see on whose side they really are.’ Liberation, in other words, could only come through a movement confined to those in need of liberating. ‘The white man’, Khoapa argued, ‘is free to aid . . . liberation by contributing information, sweat, money and blood, but he is not free to join that struggle or to lead it.’⁸⁰

White liberals objected that they had been transformed from allies into enemies. They rejected the separatism inherent in Black Consciousness, comparing it to the evil notion of white supremacy. Biko countered that white liberals insisted upon seeing black oppression as ‘a problem that has to be solved’ – something external to themselves. There was, he insisted, no ‘black problem’ in South Africa. ‘There is nothing the matter with blacks. The problem is WHITE RACISM and it rests squarely on the laps of white society . . . White liberals must leave blacks to take care of their own business while they concern themselves with the real evil in our society – white racism.’⁸¹

The apartheid government of Prime Minister John Vorster delighted in the discomfiture Biko caused white liberals. He was therefore given a long leash, on the assumption that his calls for black power would split the anti-apartheid movement. That proved a mistake. While Biko did cause discord within the movement, that was inconsequential compared to the energizing effect he had upon ordinary blacks in the townships. Eventually alerted to the threat Biko posed, the Vorster government belatedly took action. He was prevented from travelling outside his hometown and was prohibited from speaking in public or publishing his thoughts. His ideas were effectively banned, with severe penalties imposed on those who quoted him.

Biko could not, however, be neutralized. His influence was readily apparent in June 1976, when black students in Soweto, fired by Black Consciousness, took to the streets in a demonstration against apartheid. The uprising began among students protesting against the compulsory use of Afrikaans in schools, but soon spread to townships across the country. While the demonstrations started peacefully, activists were by no means wedded to non-violence and in fact saw violence as a legitimate expression of black pride. The brutal response of the police in turn demonstrated just how far the apartheid regime was prepared to go to continue black oppression. This turn to violence worried Biko. ‘There are alternatives,’ he argued. ‘We believe there is a way of getting to where we want to go through peaceful means.’ He feared that violence played into the hands of the apartheid government by converting a theoretical argument into a physical one. ‘We operate on the assumption that we can bring whites to their senses by confronting them with our overwhelming demands,’ he argued. As he repeatedly stressed, ‘ideas and men are stronger than weapons’.82

As time passed, the regime grew increasingly frustrated at its inability to silence Biko. On numerous occasions he was jailed and interrogated. He did not, however, fear for his life, since he believed that the government still retained a vestigial respect for the law. ‘They’re not completely fascist yet,’ he maintained. That assumption proved misguided. On 21 August 1977, Biko was arrested on suspicion of fomenting unrest in the Port Elizabeth area and of distributing pamphlets urging ‘violence and arson’. Two weeks later, during the course of his interrogation, he sustained a head injury. Doctors who examined him did not at first detect a neurological injury. On 11 September, however, he slipped into a semi-comatose state and a police physician recommended hospitalization. For reasons unknown, he was instead transported 1,200 miles to Pretoria Central Prison – a trip made while lying naked in the back of a Land Rover. Shortly after his arrival, on 12 September, Biko died. He was thirty years old.83

The government at first claimed that Biko had died in a Pretoria hospital as a result of refusing food and water. His condition had been closely monitored, but, after appearing ‘unwell’ on the seventh day of his strike, he died suddenly and unexpectedly. When that story failed to stand up to serious press scrutiny, the authorities abandoned it. An inquest concocted a new explanation. The chief magistrate of Pretoria, Martinus Prins, explained that, during a peaceful interrogation, Biko went ‘berserk’. In the process of restraining him, he suffered a brain injury that proved fatal. Eastern Cape security police commander, Colonel Pieter Goosen, speculated that Biko must have ‘bump[ed] his head’ during the scuffle. In fact, a post-mortem revealed that he had suffered five major brain lesions, a scalp wound, bruising around the ribs, and various cuts and abrasions. The inquest nevertheless concluded that ‘the available evidence does not prove the death was brought about by an act or omission involving any offence by any person’.⁸⁴

Perhaps inevitably, Biko’s funeral on 25 September was transformed into a powerful political demonstration against apartheid. Its impact was magnified by the rather clumsy attempts by security forces to contain the grief and anger. Heavily armed police set up roadblocks to prevent mourners from converging on the gravesite. Those from the Transvaal found that they were denied permits to travel on buses. In Soweto, police dragged mourners from buses and attacked them with truncheons. The ceremony, which lasted most of the day, was nevertheless punctuated by the cries of black mourners, who punched the air and shouted a single, simple word – ‘Power!’

Biko’s death sparked a huge outcry, both in South Africa and around the world. When the result of the inquest was announced on 2 December, 200 supporters held an impromptu demonstration, chanting ‘They have killed Steve Biko. What have we done? Our sin is that we are black?’ ‘I’m just afraid that . . . reason may not prevail,’ Woods warned. ‘Since the death . . . was announced I have received gloating messages from white racists who rejoice in his death and believe it will aid their cause. They don’t realize to what extent his moderation was preserving the brittle peace in this country.’ Chief Gaisha Buthelezi, leader of the country’s 6 million Zulus, who had frequently criticized Biko’s militancy, likewise warned of ominous implications. ‘I will not be able to curb my people, and indeed I soon may not want to curb my people, when they adopt an attitude of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’85

The brutality of Biko’s death, and the contempt shown by South African authorities in their cover-up, caused opposition to apartheid to coalesce in a way that had previously seemed impossible. A significant number of nations imposed economic sanctions against South Africa and, after sustained pressure, the United Nations Security Council finally agreed to an arms embargo. Biko became a potent symbol of the oppressiveness of apartheid and of the brutal determination by the white government to maintain it. That determination was further evidenced by the backlash against the anti-apartheid movement after Biko’s funeral. A number of his associates (including Woods) were banned, as were many of the Black Consciousness groups he had inspired.

Two decades would pass before a truer picture of Biko’s last days could emerge. Evidence uncovered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission revealed that after his violent interrogation, Biko was left naked on the concrete floor of his cell, chained to a metal grate. As a result of his brain injuries, he lost control of his bodily functions and therefore had to sit in his own faeces and urine. As to the sequence of events leading up to his injury, however, the story remains cloudy. Police officers who took part have proved evasive. ‘I am not sure who hit him and who got hit,’ Major Harold Snyman told the Commission. ‘We knew of a previous occasion in which Biko had assaulted a member of the police and knocked his teeth out. He was a big and strong man.’ He insisted that, ‘It was not our intention to kill him.’ The Commission nevertheless decided that Biko’s death was ‘a gross human rights violation . . . Despite the inquest finding no person responsible for his death, . . . in view of the fact that Biko died in the custody of law enforcement officials, the probabilities are that he died as a result of injuries sustained during his detention.’86

Within days of his death, Biko became an icon in the struggle against apartheid. But icons are often easier to tolerate than activists. On the twentieth anniversary of his death, Nelson Mandela summed up Biko’s importance. ‘It is the dictate of history’, he said, ‘to bring to the fore the kind of leaders who seize the moment, who cohere the wishes and aspirations of the oppressed. Such was Steve Biko, a fitting product of his time; a proud representative of the reawakening of a people.’ That was a respectful assessment, but not an entirely sincere one. Biko and Mandela represented two divergent and frequently antagonistic strands of the anti-apartheid movement. Black pride did not harmonize well with the interracial brotherhood envisaged by Mandela.⁸⁷

On this occasion, however, it behoved Mandela to say something positive about Black Consciousness, which he had previously found distasteful. He insisted that, ‘The driving thrust of black consciousness was to forge pride and unity amongst all the oppressed, to foil the strategy of divide-and-rule, to engender pride amongst the mass of our people and confidence in their ability to throw off their oppression.’ Mandela’s attempt to turn discord into harmony was admirable, but the mere fact that he was giving a speech in honour of Biko demonstrates that one approach had supplanted another. Biko, had he survived, would not be impressed with the South Africa that has emerged post-apartheid. Black Consciousness was co-opted by the ANC government, and neutered in the process. The fulfilment it promised has not been achieved. ‘We do not want to be reminded that it is we, the indigenous people, who are poor and exploited in the land of our birth,’ Biko once wrote. ‘These are concepts which the Black Consciousness approach wishes to eradicate from the black man’s mind before our society is driven to chaos by irresponsible people from Coca-cola and hamburger cultural backgrounds.’ Poverty and exploitation did not end with the demise of apartheid. The social transformation Biko advocated has not been achieved by the ANC. Blacks might be free, and racism banished, but dire poverty remains a massive obstacle to liberation.88