By: Nazeer Ahmed
7/7/2007
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What the world demands from the West is respect.The present must come to terms with the past for a meaningful dialogue across cultural, national, ethnic and civilization divides. Mere slogans and platitudes will not do.
The modern dialectic between the West and other civilizations is colored by the often bloody history of colonialism. Centuries of domination and exploitation has fostered in many parts of the world an abiding distrust of the West.
On the other hand, attitudes of superiority persist in pockets of Europe and America.
In this article we recall but a few of historical events that are all too familiar to our readers and which may have shaped their perceptions of the West.
It Was The Year 1799.---
On a hot summer day in May of that fateful year, British troops stormed Srirangapatam, the capital of Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore. The sultan, alone among the princes and potentates of South Asia, had successfully resisted the advance of the British Empire for forty years. Tippu fell in battle, as a valiant soldier fighting for his people. That is well known. What is less known is the looting that followed.
When the news of Tippu's death was confirmed, British troops fell on the city. Looting continued through the night. It was not until late in the following morning that the mayhem was stopped. The British, known for their pomp, organized a state burial for the sultan, then turned again to the business of looting.
The state treasury had more than 150,000 gold coins. These were distributed among the troops. Next it was the turn of the royal belongings.
Tippu's gold throne was melted down, divided into small lots and the officers haggled over the size of their lot. The only item that was spared was the jewel studded huma bird that had graced the throne. It was packaged and sent off to London for the royal collections.
The loot of Srirangapatam was not unique. Similar episodes were repeated both before and after the fall of Mysore.
When the kingdom of Oudh fell in 1762 after the Battle of Buxor, Warren Hastings, the governor of Bengal embarked on an extortion spree to fatten up the coffers of the East India Company.---
He demanded all the gold and diamond jewelry from the Begums of Oudh. When the Begums refused, they were confined to their homes and starved until they surrendered their belongings.
---In 1857, when the Sepoy uprising in India failed, and the British marched victoriously back into the capital, they expelled the entire population of the city for six months.
More than fifty thousand people were hanged so much so that every street of Delhi looked like an execution chamber.-----------
It Was The Year 1919.
The First World War had ended and a large number of Punjabi troops fighting for the British had returned home.
Woodrow Wilson's rhetoric of democracy and freedom had caught their imagination.
But alas!
Returning home from war, they discovered that the rhetoric of freedom did not mean freedom for India.
Instead, the British, determined more than ever to hang onto their Indian colony, passed the infamous Rowlett Act, reminiscent in so many ways of the draconian anti-terrorist laws passed by modern nations. Its purpose was to prevent any organized movement for Indian independence.
Protests ensued. One such peaceful demonstration was in Jallianwalla Bagh in the Punjab.
Thousands gathered to hear the local leaders. Unknown to them a contingent of British troops, under the direction of one General Dyer, waited for them. Without warning, they shot point blank and massacred thousands of men, women and children.
The story is familiar. If you wish to discover the ancient heritage of a country, your best option is to visit one of the great museums in London, Madrid, Paris or Rome. Therein you will find the most valuable artifacts of a nation, from Egyptian mummies to the gold coins from Samaria.
Perhaps the only major country that escaped large scale looting was Turkey.
The Turks managed to hold their own against the West until the First World War and then waged a successful battle to retain their independence and carve out a homeland for themselves.
The British were not alone in the imperial game. France, Italy, Russia and Holland were co-players.
The French gained control of the Algerian coast in 1840 when the Ottomans, weakened by continuous warfare with Russia and Austria, could not defend their far flung possessions. By the time Sultan Abdul Hamid ascended the Ottoman throne (1876), French control of most of West Africa was complete. Substantial French colonization of the Algerian coastline followed. By the end of World War II, more than a million French were settled in Algeria, claiming it to be a part of France.---
Weakened and exhausted by Hitler's war (1939-45), the European powers could not hold on to their colonies.
When the Algerians, like the Indians and the Indonesians, made a demand for independence, the French who had just been liberated from Nazi occupation (1940-45), unleashed their guns on the hapless Algerians.
In 1945, over fifty thousand Algerian demonstrators were slaughtered by French gunfire in Setif and Guelma.
Over the next fifteen years, from 1945 until Charles De Gaulle gave up the Algerian colony in 1962, more than one million Algerians, almost five percent of the total population, was butchered by the French.
The Italians, under Mussolini, invaded Ethiopia, brutally occupied Addis Ababa and forced Emperor Haile Salassie into exile.---
Resistance was mercilessly crushed and the treasures of the land carted away to Rome.
The Dutch were defeated and evicted from Indonesia by the Japanese during WWII.---
Following the surrender of Japan (May 1945), the Indonesians under the leadership of Sukarno declared their independence.
The Dutch were not going to give up their colonies so easily.
The Dutch navy, backed up by the British navy, bombarded Jakarta, landed troops, and reoccupied the islands. A bloody war of liberation followed. Thousands were killed.
It was not until 1948 that the Indonesians were victorious and the Dutch finally packed up and went home.
The Russian occupation of Central Asia and the Caucasus was even more brutal.---
Starting with the decade of the 1850s the Czarist armies made relentless war on the Khans of Samarqand and Bukhara in Central Asia, and on the Chechens and Daghistanis in the Caucuses.
Resistance was stiff. The exploits of Shaykh Shamyl of Dagestan against the Russians are legendary.
Nonetheless, the superior power of the Russians finally prevailed and all of these areas came under Czarist occupation.
What followed was a century of cultural and national suppression until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992.
The lands of Central Asia gained their independence but Chechnya and Dagestan remain under Russian control to this day.
The American historical experience with non-European peoples has been equally tragic.---
The elimination of Native Americans and the Atlantic slave trade were so monstrous in their human impact that they are a painful sore in the collective conscience of humanity.
More recently, the selective internment of Japanese Americans during WWII was a reminder that ethnic distrust is a living reality.
Notwithstanding this background, perceptions of America around the world were free of the stigma of colonialism until 1945.
This was in spite of the American occupation of the Philippines and Cuba after the Spanish-American war of 1896.
American colonial rule in the Philippines was so benign that many in the islands genuinely liked the Americans.
As for Cuba, Fidel Castro would not stand a chance if the Americans had treated the island with a little more respect than a playboy resort to be ruled by Battista and his henchmen.
The Second World War thrust the United States on to the center stage in world affairs.
As a nation dedicated to democratic ideals and an open society, the emergence of the US brought hope to large sections of Afro-Asia and Latin America. The expectations evaporated as the United States got involved with geopolitics and soiled its hands.
The Vietnam war, the not so secret American role in the overthrow of Mussaddaq of Iran, perceptions of partisan role of the US in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and scores of interventions around the world have destroyed much of the goodwill that America enjoyed.
The Iraq war is an ongoing tragedy about which it is too early to form a historical perspective.
Even a cursory survey of colonialism and its legacy of distrust must include non-Western empires as well.---
The Japanese occupation of Korea and China was brutal and cruel beyond description. The atrocities committed by the Japanese forces continue to mar international relations in the eastern Pacific to this day.
It was the intervention of Japan, starting with Manchuria after the Russian-Japanese war of 1904, and the social havoc caused by military occupation (1931-45) that prevented the success of the modernizing, democratic reforms introduced by Sun Yat-Sen (1867-1925).
Ultimately, it pushed China in the direction of a Communist takeover in 1948.
A shrunken world has brought the former colonizers and the colonized closer together.
Thousands of angry African men roam the streets of Paris and unemployed Asian youth saunter around in London.
They may not know history but history has a way of getting into your blood. It is passed on through a mother's milk.
Memories shape attitudes. Grievances of the present are magnified by memories from the past.
Those concerned with civil unrest and the evolution of democratic, civil societies must come to terms not only with social conditions of the present but also perceptions of the past.
Professor Nazeer Ahmed is President of American Institute of Islamic History and Culture in Corcord, California.
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