This is a must read!
Killing is thrilling
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Soldiers have acted with barbarity throughout history.
Remember that when our boys call the Serbs 'evil'
Decca Aitkenhead
Monday June 21, 1999
The Guardian
newsunlimited.co.uk
Before we grow too numb to such tales, here is another short account
of what soldiers and police did to a man they suspected of belonging
to a rebel army. They dragged him from his bed at 4.30am, shot at his
screaming wife and baby, and marched him to barracks where they made
him run barefoot across broken glass and barbed wire between two lines
of military police who beat him. They tied him up with a bag over his
head, and beat him repeatedly; a week later, 17lb lighter, he was
photographed naked and sent to a camp, where he soon learned how lucky
he had been. Other detainees had been beaten in the kidneys and
testicles, bent over electric fires, anally raped with objects, burnt
with matches, urinated on, deprived of sleep, assaulted with electric
cattle prods and terrorised by Russian roulette played with blanks.
The victim of this torture was not a Kosovan Albanian but an IRA
suspect, Kevin Hannaway, interred in the early seventies, and the men
who beat and abused him belonged to the very army currently helping to
liberate Kosovo. Less than a generation after torturing IRA suspects,
British troops are discovering Serb police stations refashioned as
crude torture chambers, and it is as if they cannot believe their
eyes. A corporal who rescued two sisters from Serb paramilitary
rapists last week said afterwards, "The men in that building were the
worst scum." A trooper from 1 Para said, "I just don't understand how
people could treat other human beings like this? They must be sick in
the head."
How indeed. It is the obvious question, although one that suggests an
awfulness so chill that, in a way, the idea that anyone could give a
cogent answer is almost worse than our daze of incomprehension. But it
is necessary for the Nato powers to be able to provide an answer, in
order that they can organise the random horror into a political
framework in which we can locate some sense. And so it is that every
Nato leader is repeatedly assuring us that the rape and the torture
and all the sick abandon in Kosovo are the unique consequences of
ethnic cleansing, a creed conceived by a monster in Belgrade. There is
a Serb canon in which torture chambers are possible - even
inevitable - and a western canon in which they are not. Ethnic
cleansers become sadists; we do not. Serbs are barbarians, and our
boys are disciplined peacekeepers.
This account may be immensely reassuring, but that is as much as you
can say for it. A new book, An Intimate History of Killing, has
revealed some uncomfortable truths about our boys, by publishing
extracts from letters sent home by Allied servicemen in both world
wars, and Americans in Vietnam. In one, a first world war officer
described seeing enemies' bodies exploding and hearing their screams
as "one of the happiest moments of my life"; another described
sticking a bayonet in a man as "gorgeously satisfying"; another wrote
of "big masturbations!" after a good killing. Many men experienced a
huge sexual thrill in killing - "It was like the best sex ever", "I
had a hard on" and so on - and there were endless accounts of comrades
committing rape and atrocities - and sometimes even confessions by the
letter-writers themselves.
These were not men corrupted by the mad creed of ethnic cleansing. Nor
were RUC officers in the 1970s, and yet by June 1978 an Amnesty
International report had concluded that "Maltreatment of suspected
terrorists by the RUC has taken place with sufficient frequency to
warrant establishment of a public inquiry." A year later, a doctor
confirmed that during his three years attending Castlereagh barracks,
he treated countless detainees for punctured ear drums and broken
bones. For what it is worth, I've witnessed more mindless, casual,
violent cruelty among squaddies after a good night in the pub than I
have yet to encounter in any other British men.
However unimaginable the atrocities of Serb paramilitaries and police
seem, and however much we wish to believe that normal people like us
could not commit them, the ugliest truth is that soldiers all over the
world have done things that would make your blood freeze. Brutal
sadism is not a state of mind exclusive to men made bad by ethnic
cleansing - it is the horribly ordinary condition of militarised men
made monstrous by war.
The distinction is an important one. Those of us who are angrily
intolerant of the Serbs still dismissing evidence of their soldiers'
atrocities as KLA propaganda should remember that the RUC chief in
1977 publicly accused IRA prisoners of harming themselves to discredit
the police, and that a programme dealing with the 1978 Amnesty report
was banned from being broadcast. The account of Kevin Hannaway's
torture comes from Gerry Adams' autobiography, and that is still
reason enough for many Britons to blithely dismiss it as pure lies;
likewise, veterans groups have denounced An Intimate History of
Killing as feminist propaganda. We all construct our history according
to what we are willing to believe, and the Serb people are no
different; just as there is no Serb monopoly on atrocity, nor do they
have a monopoly on distorting history. Just last week, as Nato's
forensic experts were sifting their way through Kosovo in pursuit of
war criminals, we were promising anonymity to the soldiers involved in
the Bloody Sunday massacre.
Inevitably, you must wonder whether barbarism is the natural condition
of man let loose, or the depraved state of man when corrupted by
violence. However interesting the question may be, it matters very
little right now. What matters is that we recognise that all military
men are capable of inhumanity under the right - or wrong -
circumstances, and that it is our absolute moral imperative to prevent
those circumstances developing again in Kosovo.
Supporters of the war have been flourishing evidence of Serb
atrocities with such extravagance of glee as to teeter on indecency.
What they choose to ignore is that it was militarised normality - the
normalisation of power by might - that legitimised and encouraged
these acts of inhumanity. If we militarise the Balkans indefinitely,
we risk reinforcing the very conditions which help breed the violence
we are supposed to be defeating. The trooper from Para 1 was confident
enough about his role last week: "this is why we are here," he said,
"to make sure this can never happen again." But the more triumphalist
our faith in our own military justness, the less willing we may be to
acknowledge the danger of a less honourable aftermath. It is
interesting that Americans have come closest to confronting their own
servicemen's cruelties in Vietnam, a war whose wisdom and justice they
hold in the greatest doubt. A belief that Nato's war against Serbia
was just should not be allowed to obscure our understanding of what
may well be yet to come.
Our press have been unsure in what light to cast the two ex-British
soldiers found last week fighting for the KLA. One had lost count of
the number of Serbs he had killed; "I didn't see them as people - they
were just targets. I felt nothing when they fell," he said, and his
remarks were generally reported sympathetically. British troops are of
course assumed to be self-disciplined - more responsible than that
pair of plucky, if a little wayward, have-a-go heroes. But what will
happen when our troops grow impatient with Kosovan acts of violent
revenge, or grow to despise the KLA renegades, or begin to hold proud
Serb civilians responsible for their soldiers' deeds?
The corporal who saved the sisters from Serb rapists was perfectly
candid about his feelings towards the men. "My inclination would have
been to take them around the back and kill them."
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