Will Mali Become the next Afghanistan?

When NATO forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001 their objective was to get rid of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaida fighters. This was soon successfully achieved. But 12 years later, NATO forces are still bogged down in a war that they will not win. Meanwhile, the war had totally unexpected outcomes, particularly the destabilizing of a nuclear armed and fragile Pakistan. The situation in Pakistan has become so violent that the response of the USA is more violence, by means of President Obama’s weapon of choice, the drone. The use of the drone has made Obama the world’s leading assassin.

When NATO forces bombed Libya in 2011 their objective was to get rid of Gaddafi and his henchmen. This was soon successfully achieved. But that war is now seeing some totally unexpected outcomes. Many of Gaddafi’s soldiers were Tuareg tribesmen form Mali.  Out of a job and persecuted in Libya, they have now returned home to Mali, well-armed and seething with rage. Islamic jihadists have joined the fray, and Mali’s fledgling democracy has been brought to an end in a military coup. This week, with the blessing of the UN, France, a member of NATO, has sent its troops into Mali to fight yet another Muslim enemy.  Mali has become the Pakistan of the area. It now looks like it is about to become the Afghanistan of West Africa.

We lurch from military crisis to crisis, most of them of our own making. One can only wonder what the unexpected outcomes of this military intervention will be.

Article first published as Mali: The Next Afghanistan on Technorati

Put down, but never discarded

There are books, read in youth, the content of which we still remember decades later. And there are books, of which the act of reading itself can be vividly recalled as if it were yesterday. It was July 1980. I had been travelling for three years. In the multitudinous din that was India, I was alone. Emaciated, jaded and worryingly low on funds, I arrived in the holy city of Madurai. Near the grand temple I found a room in a cheap hotel, a loveless place called Venus...

If you would like to read the rest of my article which appeared in Australia this morning, just click here.

Two Days in Paris - the Trailer to the Movie

I recently got back from my annual autumn trip to Paris, where my students give presentations on site at a variety of  locations linked to the French Revolution. This is the trailer to a documentary about our trip.

Skin by Esther de Vries

I do like this new poem from my favourite poet, Esther de Vries.

Goya Prints Defaced

During the Napoleonic occupation of Spain the Spanish artist Francisco Goya created a series of powerfully evocative prints – The Disasters of War.  Goya’s The Disasters of War provides us with an unparalled, brutally realistic rendering of the horror that is war, including graphic depictions of executions, rape, torture and dismemberment.

Goya: The Shootings of May 3rd 1808

 We don’t know what Goya’s exact intentions were when he created The Disasters of War. It certainly did not serve as anti-French propaganda, like his painting The Shootings of May ^3rd, 1808 (see above), because he never published the prints during his lifetime, nor did he attempt to.  Indeed Goya’s The Disasters of War series was only first published in 1863, decades after his death. Since then, the prints have become among the most renowned and influential depictions of war in art and an inspiration to the likes of Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, and others.

Jake and Dinos Chapman: The Disasters of War

The British contemporary artists Jake and Dinos Chapman provided an addition to the legacy of Goya’s  The Disasters of War when they exhibited their own The Disasters of War in 1993 (see above).  They had created three dimensional plastic sculptures based on Goya’s eighty scenes. They then went on to produce a life-size version of one of these: Great Deeds Against the Dead, which was based on one of Goya's particularly brutal prints, of dismembered male bodies.

Jake and Dinos Chapman: Great Deeds Against the Dead

So far so good, the Chapman’s work, though grotesque, seemed to be a homage to the work of the truly original artist, Francisco Goya. The Chapmans continued to achieve attention and a great deal of critical acclaim with a variety of provocative work, for instance mannequins of children with genitalia instead of faces and work that referenced Nazism.  Their piece, Death, which showed two sex dolls having oral sex in the 69 position, almost won them the Turner Prize, Britain’s most prestigious art prize.

The original print - Goya's Great Deeds Against the Dead

In 2003 they exhibited their Insult to Injury.  For this postmodern intervention they took an entire set of Goya’s The Disasters of War and systematically defaced every print by drawing the heads of clowns, mice and other funny faces on Goya’s work (see below). Writing in The Guardian, Jonathan Jones commented “in any terms, this [Goya’s The Disasters of War] is a treasure - and they have vandalised it.”

Jake and Dinos Chapman; from Insult to Injury

I am reminded of this now. I recently wrote a post about how a self-styled artist walked into the Tate Modern last month and defaced a work of Mark Rothko. For his pains, he will have his day in court. But the Chapmans have been widely celebrated for their defacement of Goya’s work. Is this a case of rich and famous artists being praised for defacing the work of another, while a poor and unknown artist is jailed for doing so? Does it matter that the Chapmans owned the copies of the prints that they vandalised, while the Rothko vandaliser did not?

Rothko Painting Defaced

The fact that a Mark Rothko painting was defaced has been big news, reported by every British newspaper as well as the the BBC. In Rothko's homecountry the Washington Post reported, with horror, that the vandal was still "on the loose", making it sound like it was dangerous to let your children out of your sight with such a maniac at large.

On October 7^th a man walked up to the Mark Rothko painting "Black on Maroon" and, with a thick black ink pen, defaced a work held in great reverence, by writing "Vladimir Umanets, 12, A Potential Piece of Yellowism". Cries of outrage were widely issued – how dare anyone vandalize a work from Saint Mark (though, it has to be admitted, with this particular painting experts don't even know which side is up). 

Entering the Rothko space in the Tate Modern is like entering a sacred sanctuary. The pilgrims talk in hushed tones; they gaze at the pictures, like the Eastern Orthodox bowing down and praying before their sacred icons.  The fact that Rothko committed suicide simply adds to his aura.  He must have been touched by the ineffable; his mysterious paintings provide gateways into another realm, an escape from our tedious everyday existence. If you can drag yourself away from your iPhone briefly, and gaze into the depth of Rothko’s paintings, like the priesterly Simon Schama, you too will be saved, for a few moments. That’s why the Rothko space has more worshippers these days than Saint Paul’s cathedral. Never mind that Rothko and his fellow American Abstract Impressionists owed their popularity, and their inflated prices, to the CIA, operating covertly behind their front, the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

The 21st century vandal, was operating in the name of Yellowism, whatever that means. Their manifesto seems as silly as, well, admiring a Rothko painting only to discover later that it was hanging the wrong way round.

What the Yellowist's action has done is simply add another layer to the Rothko mythical narrative. We will no longer simply stare at Rothko’s painting, yearning intently for the promised calmness to embrace us, but we will then take a further moment to look at the bottom right hand corner, to assure ourselves that, once scared by a defacer, it has survived this crucifixion and been resurrected to its former sacred self.

The Putten Massacre of 1944

It could be anywhere in Holland. A weak summer sun shines from an almost liquid sky, illuminating a  population of multi-cultural shoppers along a small main street that is lined with the usual chain-stores: Hans Anders, Blokker, V en D. Those in a rush, cycle between the pedestrians. Trianglular orange flags flap  sadly in the breeze, a  reminder of the dashed hopes during the recent football European Championship - yet another battle or three lost.

At the end of the street stands the Old Church, surrounded by typical brown cafes where the locals and German tourists sit at tables on the square and enjoy coffee and apple tart with cream, their bikes piled against walls. On a sidewall of the church stands a non-descript monument, put here in 1947.  It says simply: “From here they were taken way: 1 and 2 October 1944”.

 

We walk from here to the nearby graveyard and traverse most of the town. The sign on the cemetery gate says it includes Commonwealth graves, though only one  British soldier lies here, one victim among millions, far from home, buried in a piece of England far from England. The graveyard has a simple monument: Five upright stones slabs.  It says: “Remember those who sacrificed their lives: 1940-‘45”.

As we are leaving the small town of Putten, near a busy roundabout, we see a woman carved in stone, standing alone.

Her face looks sad. She is mourning for the men who have left and not returned, the husbands, father, sons, cousins and neighbours. For this town of Putten was once a town of women only; women mourning their murdered men.

Across the road we find this modern building – the October ’44 monument. 

 

 As far as war monuments go, this one is modest. There is no whiff of triumphant militarism. We walk to the door, press a button and the door opens automatically.  It closes and locks behind us.  Inside, we find ouselves alone in  a tiny museum.  Photographs and Dutch language text tell of the awful events that occurred in this country town in October 1944.

The Dutch resistance carried out an ambush on a German vehicle in the forest nearby on the night of September 30th, 1944. The Germans, fighting a losing war, responded promptly and visciously.  On Sunday, October 1st, all the women and children in Putten were rounded up and locked in the Old Church. The men and youths were rounded up too, and sent to the nearby concentration camp at Amersfort. On October 2nd the women were given two hours to empty their homes and then, supported by Dutch Nazis, the Germans torched 110 homes.  The clouds of smoke could be seen for miles.

Seven men had been killed while resisting arrest. Of the hundreds held in Amersfort, a handful were released. The rest, over 600 men and youths, were packed into trains and sent to Germany.  Some went through the gates of hell on earth itself, Auschwitz, where they died. In total 540 men and youths of Putten would die in Nazi concentration camps, all of them innocent of any crime.

A little over six months later the war was over, and the waiting for news of their loved ones began. Only 49 of the 602 deported returned to their women. Gradually the local newspapers filled with the death notices.

Five hundred and fifty-two men and youths from Putten were murdered by the Nazis.  Their names fill a wall in the memorial.

 

 

The lists speak of incredible suffering. The names are of fathers and sons; uncles and nephews; brothers and cousins. Jan Polhond died when he was 22, his brother Gerrit died, aged 21, and their younger brother Peter died at the age of 18; Hans Snippe died in Neuengamme concentration camp in December 1944 and his son Willem Snippe died there two months later, aged only 17; Cornelius Stoffer died, aged 33, his brother Aart Stoffer died aged 44 and Aart's 17 year old son Jan Stoffer died in June 1945, a month after the war's end.

 

How does a town without men recover?  How does a community of widows raise their children? How do young girls and  boys grow to adulthood without any men, knowing that all of their fathers and uncles and older brothers have been murdered?  Ironically, it isn't a question that only the women of Putten could answer.

Of course we think "Never again", but as long as men go to war, it will happen again and again.  Two years after the war, tens of thousands of young Dutch men were sent to war in Indonesia.  There, in 1947, Dutch soldiers rounded up all of the men and youths in the village of Rawagede, and murdered them.  The widows of Rawagede must know how the widows of Putten once felt. 

More recently, in 1995, Dutch soldiers had been mandated by the UN to provide a Safe Area for the muslim inhabitants of the Bosnian town of Srebrinica. Instead they handed the town over to Serbian irregular forces.  The Serbs, led by General Ratko Mladic, then proceeded to murder every man in the town. In a massacre that dwarfs Putten, nearly 8,000 thousand men and youths were killed under the noses of the Dutch. Srebrinica became a town of widows and children. Last year a court in The Netherlands found the Dutch responsible for the killing of some of the men who had been under their care. Ironically, today the killer, General Mladic is a prisoner of the International Criminal Court in The Netherlands.

We must remember the victims of Putten because they deserve to be not forgotten. But in itself, Putten, like any event in our dark history, has nothing to teach us as long as we think it is alright to send men to war.