Library:Washington Bullets

Washington Bullets
Author	Vijay Prashad
Written in	2020
Type	Book
ISBN	978-81-945925-2-5
Source	Anna's Archive

Preface

This is a book about bullets, says the author. Bullets that assassinated democratic processes, that assassinated revolutions, and that assassinated hope.

The courageous Indian historian and journalist Vijay Prashad has put his all into explaining and providing a digestible and comprehensive way of understanding the sinister interest with which imperialism intervenes in countries that attempt to build their own destiny.

In the pages of this book, Prashad documents the participation of the United States in the assassination of social leaders in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and in the massacres of the people, who have refused to subsidize the delirious business dealings of multinational corporations with their poverty.

Prashad says that these Washington Bullets have a price: ‘The biggest price is paid by the people. For in these assassinations, these murders, this violence of intimidation, it is the people who lose their leaders in their localities. A peasant leader, a trade-union leader, a leader of the poor.’

Prashad provides a thorough account of how the CIA participated in the 1954 coup d’état against the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. Árbenz had the intolerable audacity of opposing the interests of the United Fruit Company.

In Chile, Prashad shows us how the US government spent $8 million to finance strikes and protests against Allende.

What happened in Brazil when the parliamentary coup removed president Dilma Rousseff from office in August 2016 is an example of the perverse practice of ‘lawfare’, or the ‘use of law as a weapon of war’. The same method was used against former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who suffered in prison for 580 days as a result of a trial in which the prosecutors did not provide concrete evidence – just ‘firm beliefs’.

Times have changed, and business is no longer carried out in the same way, but the underlying methods and responses of imperialism have remained largely unaltered.

Bolivians know this perverse politics well. Long before our fourteen years at the head of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, we have had to confront the operations, threats, and retaliation of the United States.

In 2008, I had to expel Philip Goldberg, the ambassador of the United States, who was conspiring with separatist leaders, giving them instructions and resources to divide Bolivia. In that moment, the US Department of State said that my claims were unfounded. I don’t know what they would say now, when the participation of the US embassy in the coup that overthrew us at the end of 2019 is so clear. What will future researchers say who take up the work of reading the CIA documents that are classified today?

The Monroe Doctrine and the National Security Doctrine attempt to convert Latin America into the United States’s backyard and criminalize any type of organization that opposes its interest and that attempts to build an alternative political, economic, and social model.

Over the decades, the US has invented a series of pretexts and has built a narrative to attempt to justify its criminal political and military interventions. First, there was the justification of the fight against communism, followed by the fight against drug trafficking, and, now, the fight against terrorism.

This book brings to mind the infinite instances in which Washington Bullets have shattered hope. Colonialism has always used the idea of progress in accordance with its own parameters and its own reality. This same colonialism – which puts our planet in a state of crisis today, devours natural resources, and concentrates wealth that is generated from devastation – says that our laws of vivir bien [‘living well’] are utopian. But if our dreams of equilibrium with Pachamama [‘Mother Earth’], of freedom, and of social justice are not yet a reality, or if they have been cut short, it is primarily because imperialism has set out to interfere in our political, cultural, and economic revolutions, which promote sovereignty, dignity, peace, and fraternity among all people.

If the salvation of humanity is far away, it is because Washington insists on using its bullets against the world’s people.

We write and read these lines and this text in a moment that is extremely tense for our planet. A virus is quarantining the global economy, and capitalism – with its voracious habits and its need to concentrate wealth – is showing its limits.

It is likely that the world that will emerge from the convulsions of 2020 will not be the one that the one that we used to know. Every day, we are reminded of the duty to continue our struggle against imperialism, against capitalism, and against colonialism. We must work together towards a world in which greater respect for the people and for Mother Earth is possible. In order to do this, it is essential for states to intervene so that the needs of the masses and the oppressed are put first. We have the conviction that we are the masses. And that the masses, over time, will win.

Evo Morales Ayma, Former President of Bolivia

Buenos Aires, April 2020

Files

"I make no secret of my opinion that at the present time the barbarism of Western Europe has reached an incredibly high level, being only surpassed – far surpassed, it is true – by the barbarism of the United States." – Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 1955

Books and documents that detail the tragedies afflicted upon the people of the world surround me. There is a section of my library that is on the United States government’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and its coups – from Iran in 1953 onward, every few years, every few countries. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) reports make up an entire bookshelf; these tell me about the roadblocks placed before countries that try to find a way out of their poverty and inequality. I have files and files of government documents that had investigated old wars and new wars, bloodshed that destabilized countries in the service of the powerful and the rich. There are memoirs of diabolical leaders and advisors – the complete works of Henry Kissinger – and there are the writings and speeches of the people’s leaders. These words create a world. They explain why there is so much suffering around us and why that suffering leads not to struggle, but to resignation and hatred.

I reach above me and pull down a file on Guatemala. It is on the CIA coup of 1954. Why did the US destroy that small country? Because the landless movement and the Left fought to elect a democratic politician – Jacobo Árbenz – who decided to push through a moderate land reform agenda. Such a project threatened to undercut the land holding of the United Fruit Company, a US conglomerate that strangled Guatemala. The CIA got to work. It contacted retired Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, it paid off brigade commanders, created sabotage events, and then seized Árbenz in the presidential palace and sent him to exile. Castillo Armas then put Guatemala through a reign of terror. ‘If it is necessary to turn the country into a cemetery in order to pacify it,’ he said later, ‘I will not hesitate to do so.’ The CIA gave him lists of Communists, people who were eager to lift their country out of poverty. They were arrested, many executed. The CIA offered Castillo Armas its benediction to kill; A Study of Assassination, the CIA’s killing manual, was handed over to his butchers. The light of hope went out in this small and vibrant country.

What other day-lit secrets of the past are sitting in my files and books? What do these stories tell us?

That when the people and their representatives tried to forge a just road forward, they were thwarted by their dominant classes, egged on by the Western forces. That what was left was a landscape of desolation. Humiliation of the older colonial past was now refracted into the modern era. At no time were the people of the Third World allowed to live in the same time as their contemporaries in the West – they were forced into an earlier time, a time with less opportunity and with less social dignity. Tall leaders of the Third World felt the cold steel of execution – Patrice Lumumba in the Congo (1961), Mehdi Ben Barka of Morocco (1965), Che Guevara in Bolivia (1967), Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso (1987), and so many others, before, after, and in between. Entire countries – from Vietnam to Venezuela – faced obliteration through asymmetrical and hybrid wars.

This book is based on a vast amount of reading of US government documents, and documents from its allied governments and multilateral organizations, as well as the rich secondary literature written by scholars around the world. It is a book about the shadows; but it relies upon the literature of the light.

‘Bring Down More US Aircraft’

Estados Unidos: el país donde La libertad es una estatua.

United States: the country where Liberty is a statue. – Nicanor Parra, Artefactos, 1972

What is the price of an assassin’s bullet? Some dollars here and there. The cost of the bullet. The cost of a taxi ride, a hotel, an airplane, the money paid to hire the assassin, his silence purchased through a payment into a Swiss bank, the cost to him psychologically for having taken the life of one, two, three, or four. But the biggest price is not paid by the intelligence services. The biggest price is paid by the people. For in these assassinations, these murders, this violence of intimidation, it is the people who lose their leaders in their localities. A peasant leader, a trade-union leader, a leader of the poor. The assassinations become massacres, as people who are in motion are cut down. Their confidence begins to falter. Those who came from them, organized them, spoke from them, either now dead or, if not dead, too scared to stand up, too isolated, too rattled, their sense of strength, their sense of dignity, compromised by this bullet or that. In Indonesia, the price of the bullet was in the millions; in Guatemala, the tens of thousands. The death of Lumumba damaged the social dynamic of the Congo, muzzling its history. What did it cost to kill Chokri Belaïd (Tunisian, 1964– 2013) and Ruth First (South African, 1925–1982), what did it take to kill Amílcar Cabral (Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean, 1924–1973) and Berta Cáceres (Honduran, 1971–2016)? What did it mean to suffocate history so as to preserve the order of the rich? Each bullet red struck down a Revolution and gave birth to our present barbarity. This is a book about bullets.

Many of these bullets are red by people who have their own parochial interests, their petty rivalries and their small-minded gains. But more often than not, these have been Washington’s bullets. These are bullets that have been shined by the bureaucrats of the world order who wanted to contain the tidal wave that swept from the October Revolution of 1917 and the many waves that whipped around the world to form the anti-colonial movement. The first wave crested in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and in Eastern Europe, and it was this wave that provoked the Cold War and the East–West conflict; the other wave went from Vietnam and China to Cuba, from Indonesia to Chile, and this wave engendered the far more deadly North–South or West– South conflict. It was clear to the United States, as the leader of the West, that no muscular conflict would be possible along the East–West axis, that once the USSR (1949) and China (1964) tested their nuclear weapons no direct war would be possible. The battlefield moved from along the Urals and the Caucasus into Central and South America, into Africa, and into Asia – into, in other words, the South. Here, in the South where raw materials are in abundance, decolonization had become the main framework by the 1940s. Washington’s bullets that pointed towards the USSR remained unused, but its bullets were red into the heart of the South. It was in the battlefields of the South that Washington pushed against Soviet influence and against the national liberation projects, against hope and for profit. Liberty was not to be the watchword of the new nations that broke away from formal colonialism; liberty is the name of a statue in New York harbour.

Imperialism is powerful: it attempts to subordinate people to maximize the theft of resources, labour, and wealth. Anyone who denies the absolute obscenity of imperialism needs to find another answer to the fact that the richest 22 men in the world have more wealth than all the women in Africa, or that the richest one per cent have more than twice as much wealth as 6.9 billion people. You would have to have an answer for the reason why we continue to suffer from hunger, illiteracy, sickness, and indignities of various kinds. You could not simply say that there are no resources to solve these problems, given that tax havens hold at least $32 trillion – more than the total value of gold that has been brought to the surface. It is easy to bomb a country; harder yet to solve the pressing problems of its peoples. Imperialism’s only solution to these problems is to intimidate people and to create dissension amongst people.

But liberty cannot be so easily contained. That is why, despite the odds, people continue to aspire for alternatives, continue to organize themselves, continue to attempt to win a new world – all this despite the possibility of failure. If you do not risk failure, you cannot taste the fruit of victory.

On 2 September 1945, Hồ Chí Minh appeared before a massive crowd in Hanoi. He had never before been to the capital, but he was known by everyone there. ‘Countrymen,’ he asked, ‘can you hear me? Do you understand what I am saying?’ A few weeks before, in Tân Trào, the National Congress of People’s Representatives laid out the agenda for the new Vietnam. At that meeting, Hồ Chí Minh said, ‘The aim of the National Liberation Committee and all the delegates is to win independence for our country – whatever the cost – so that our children would have enough to eat, would have enough to wear, and could go to school. That’s the primary goal of our revolution.’ The people in Hanoi, and across Vietnam, knew exactly what Hồ Chí Minh was saying; they could hear him, and they could understand him. His slogan was food, clothes, and education.

To feed, clothe, and educate one’s population requires resources. Vietnam’s revolution meant that it would no longer allow its own social wealth to drain away to France and to the West. The Vietnamese government, led by Hồ Chí Minh, wanted to use that wealth to address the centuries-old deprivations of the Vietnamese peasantry. But this is precisely what imperialism could not tolerate. Vietnamese labour was not for its own advancement; it was to provide surplus value for Western capitalists, in particular for the French bourgeoisie. Vietnam’s own development could not be the priority of the Vietnamese; it was Vietnam’s priority to see to the aggrandizement of France and the rest of the imperialist states. That is why the French – in cahoots with the Vietnamese monarchy and its underlings – went to war against the Vietnamese people. This French war against Vietnam would run from 1946 to 1954, and then the mantle of war-making would be taken up by the United States of America till its defeat in 1975. During the worst of the US bombing of the northern part of Vietnam, Hồ Chí Minh went on a tour of air defences. He was already in his late 70s. His comrades asked after his health. ‘Bring down more US aircraft,’ he said, ‘and I’ll be in the best of health.’

Washington’s bullets are sleek and dangerous. They intimidate and they create loyalties out of fear. Their antidote is hope, the kind of hope that came to us in 1964 as the Colombian civil war opened a new phase, and the poet Jotamario Arbeláez (translated by Nicolás Suescún) sang of another future –

a day

after the war

if there is a war

if after the war there is a day

I will hold you in my arms

a day after the war

if there is a war

if after the war there is a day

if after the war I have arms

and I will make love to you with love

a day after the war

if there is a war

if after the war there is a day

if after the war there is love

and if there is what it takes to make love.

Part 1

Divine Right

Divine right is an old, established principle. It means that Kings have the right – ordained by God – to act in any way that they wish. Human-made laws are of no consequence beside the awesome power of God, and God’s representative, namely the monarch.

In Delhi, towards the end of the 16th century, the Mughal Emperor Akbar began to have doubts about the idea of divine right. He established a translation bureau (maktab khana), where he asked intellectuals to read deeply into all religious traditions. ‘the pillars of blind following were demolished,’ wrote Akbar’s biographer Abu’l Fazl. ‘A new era of research and enquiry to religious matters commenced.’ Part of the emergence of a nonreligious idea of sovereignty was the sense that the Emperor had to rule for the people, not based on his own God-given right. ‘Tyranny is unlawful in everyone, especially in a sovereign who is the guardian of the world,’ wrote Abu’l Fazl in Ain-i-Akbari (1590).

Nine years later, the Spanish historian Juan de Mariana wrote De rege et regis institutione (1598), which made the case that the people – he meant mainly the nobles – ‘are able to call a king to account’.

Abu’l Fazl and de Mariana had sniffed the mood. Peasant rebellions had their impact. Their pitchforks were sharp; their anger a tidal wave.

Sovereignty gradually went from God and King to People.

A generation later, Louis XIV of France said – L’État c’est moi, the State is Me. His descendants would be guillotined.

Preponderant Power

On 6 August 1945, the United States military dropped a bomb that contained 64 kg of uranium-235 over the city of Hiroshima (Japan). The bomb took just over 44 seconds to fall from 9,400 metres and detonated 580 metres above the Shima Surgical Clinic. Over 80,000 people died instantly. This was the first use of the nuclear bomb.

Four days later, Satsuo Nakata brought the Domei New Agency’s Leica camera to the city. He took 32 photographs of the devastation; each of these pictures – archived in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum – is iconic. The force of the bomb flattened the city, even though less than two per cent of the uranium detonated. Nakata took a picture of the office of the newspaper Chugoku Shimbun and of the Odamasa kimono store. The store’s metal twisted into a whirlwind. It is a sign of the power of this weapon. As Sankichi Toge, a hibakusha (survivor of the atom bomb) and poet, wrote of that power and its impact, as the fires burnt down from the bomb’s power in a city of 350,000: ‘the only sound – the wings of flies buzzing around metal basins’.

Between 1944 and 1946, Paul Nitze had been the director and then Vice Chairman of the US government’s Strategic Bombing Survey. He began this work in Europe, but then went to Japan shortly after the war ended. Nitze later said that he had believed that the war would have been won ‘even without the atomic bomb’. This is the thesis he hoped to prove during his time in Japan. The destruction he saw was breathtaking; it resembled the European cities that had faced conventional bombardment. As his biographer Strobe Talbott wrote, Nitze ‘believed that the measurements of the Survey at Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed the effects to be roughly the equivalent of an incendiary bombing raid’. The Japanese generals and businessmen he interviewed told him that they would eventually have surrendered but that the atom bomb certainly made further war impossible. In November 1945, Nitze met Baron Hiranuma Kiichiro, the president of the Privy Council. On 26 July 1945, the United States, the United Kingdom, and China issued the Potsdam Declaration that called on Japan to surrender or else it would face ‘prompt and utter destruction’. Kiichiro said he was moved by this threat to urge his fellow members of the Privy Council to surrender. He failed to carry the day. A week later, on 6 and 9 August, the US dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan’s Emperor Hirohito surrendered on 15 August. Kiichiro told Nitze that the ‘biggest factor’ for the Japanese surrender was ‘the atomic bomb’. The country, he said, ‘was faced with terrible destructive powers and Japan’s ability to wage war was really at an end’.

The immense authority of the atomic bomb had an impact on the Washington bureaucrats, even those who might have felt uneasy about its use. Nitze was one of them. He would have preferred that the atomic bomb not be used; but once used, saw its utility. It is why he would urge the US government to expand its massive arsenal. The point would not be to actually attack the USSR, but to ensure that the USSR was – as the US diplomat George F. Kennan said – contained, and then eventually rolled back. Nitze, more than Kennan, would shape US foreign policy for decades. With his team at the US State Department in 1952, Nitze formulated the clear objective of US power after the Second World War. The liberals in the US government, he said, tend to ‘underestimate US capabilities’; he did not, since he had seen it as part of the Strategic Bombing Survey. He introduced a word – preponderant – that would become part of the formula of US policy planners. ‘To seek less than preponderant power would be to opt for defeat,’ Nitze’s staff wrote in 1952. ‘Preponderant power must be the objective of US policy.’

The word ‘preponderant’ comes from Latin. It means to weigh more. The King is always worth his weight in gold. Now the United States claims the scale, its weight bolstered by the payloads dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Trusteeship

Old colonial masters liked to think that they were directed by God to bring peace and civilization to the world. That idea of the colonizer as the peacemaker and the lawgiver shuffled into the grand discourses of modern international law. Natives were fractious, unable to be governed by reason; they needed their masters to help them, to be their trustees. The League of Nations Covenant (1919) assembled the lands of the natives into ‘trusteeships’, so that their masters could believe that their domination was sanctified by law. It was in Article 16 of the Covenant that the ‘peace loving nations’ – namely the imperialists – said that they had the ‘obligation’ to maintain peace and security.

European hypocrisy over terms like ‘peace’ was by then clear to the colonized world. The League of Nations Covenant was signed on 28 June 1919. A few months earlier, on 13 April 1919, British troops conducted a massacre in Jallianwala Bagh (Amritsar, India), where a mass meeting was being held in opposition to the authoritarian Defence of India Act of 1915. As many as a thousand people were killed on that one day. They were holding a peaceful meeting. The ‘peace loving nations’ murdered them. This was despite the fact that ‘India’ was a member of the League. Well, as the Indian papers – such as Rajkaran (November 1919) – understood immediately, ‘England secured a vote for India on the League of Nations in order to be able to command a larger number of votes.’ There was no benefit for India ‘in any way’.

The United States signed the Covenant. So did Nicaragua and Haiti. In 1909, the US had intervened in Nicaragua to overthrow President José Santos Zelaya who had ambitions of creating a Federal Republic of Central America. Such a project of regional unity was unacceptable to the US, which wanted to carve out a canal through Nicaragua to unite the two oceans (when the US turned its attention to Panama, Zelaya asked the Germans if they would be interested in a canal; this was a fatal error for him). The departure of Zelaya opened up space in Nicaragua for nationalists, including in the military. When they rose up in the Mena Rebellion in 1912, the US marines returned – and remained until 1933.

Haiti, which, like Nicaragua, was in the League of Nations, saw its people rise up against the pro-US dictator Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam in 1915, whose death in the streets of Port-au-Prince gave the US the excuse to send in the marines; they remained in Haiti till 1934. Fifteen thousand to thirty thousand Haitians died in the repression, though this did not stop a peasant rebellion in 1919–20 and a series of strikes in 1929. The leader of part of this unrest – Charlemagne Masséna Péralte (1886–1919) – and his band of cacos fought to defend the Haitian people’s rights. He was shot in the heart by a US marine. Péralte was Haiti’s Sandino, the Nicaraguan revolutionary who met a similar fate in 1934. Every institution in Haiti was hollowed out, their functions subordinated to the United States.

A ‘peace loving nation’ invaded two other members of the League in the name of peace. But these exceptions were already baked into the Covenant. It said quite clearly, ‘Nothing in this Covenant shall be deemed to affect the validity of international engagements, such as . . . regional understandings like the Monroe Doctrine, for securing the maintenance of peace.’ The Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which the US understood as its right to the hemisphere, was quite legal since it allowed the imperialists a right to its dominions.

Japan’s representative to the League of Nations meeting was Baron Makino Nobuaki. His speech at the Versailles conference – tinged with naiveté – put forward a ‘proposal to abolish racial discrimination’. Nobuaki’s brief was narrow, as made clear by Foreign Minister Viscount Uchida Yasuya; this proposal would only apply to the members of the League of Nations, and not to the colonized territories. But even this principle was too much. Australia had officially adopted a White Australia Policy in 1901. Its Prime Minister William Morris Hughes would not tolerate such a proposal at the League. Both Britain and the United States of America agreed. The Japanese proposal fell by the wayside. Baron Nobuaki returned home furious; he was a patron of the ultra-nationalist groups whose role drove Japan towards its wars of aggression in Asia.

‘International Law Has to Treat Natives as Uncivilized’

In the days of colonialism, there was no need for any justication. If a colonial power wanted to invade a territory, it could do so at will. Other colonial powers could object – and sometimes did – but this objection did not come on behalf of those who were being overrun; it came out of the competitive feeling between colonial powers. In 1884–85, the imperialist powers met in Berlin to carve up Africa. European powers and the United States vied for ‘effective occupation’ and ‘spheres of inuence’, phrases that disguised the brute and cruel seizure of lands and the suppression of people’s aspirations. Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and the United States carved out the landscape. A decade later, only Ethiopia, Morocco, and the Sultanates of Majeerteen and Hobyo remained relatively independent. Within decades France and Spain would seize Morocco, and the two Sultanates would be taken by Italy, which would later ght a severe war against Ethiopia to seize it in 1936. All this was done through a legal framework which disenfranchised an entire continent to serve the needs of Europe and the United States.

John Westlake, the Cambridge University professor who pioneered international law and would later be a Liberal Member of Parliament, wrote in his 1894 textbook International Law,

[I]nternational law has to treat natives as uncivilised. It regulates, for the mutual benefit of civilised states, the claims which they make to sovereignty over the region and leaves the treatment of natives to the conscience of the state to which the sovereignty is awarded, rather than sanction their interest being made an excuse the more for war between civilised claimants, devastating the region and the cause of suffering to the natives themselves.

To protect the natives, in other words, they must give up their land and resources to the colonizers, who must themselves come to an understanding through international law so that they do not go to war with each other; it is to the benefit of the natives that they surrender and watch the imperialists divide up the loot. That’s the highest point of imperialist international law, which burrows itself into the conceptual framework of present-day international laws.

Legal fictions hovered over conquest, but there was no such disquiet over the massacres of entire peoples and cultures.

The First Geneva Convention (1864) emerged out of a sense of outrage at the large numbers of Europeans killed in battles in Europe. Two particular engagements disgusted the European public: the conflict in Crimea between 1853 and 1856, which claimed over 300,000 lives, and the Battle of Solferino in 1859, which claimed 40,000 lives in a single day. Out of these two wars came the First Geneva Convention and the International Committee for Relief to the Wounded (later the International Committee of the Red Cross). This law and this institution set the moral framework for warfare.

It would all fall apart during the First World War, when the technology of war eclipsed any moral framework. Chemical weapons and aerial bombardment removed the ‘honour’ in warfare, making combat a matter of technological superiority rather than bravery. The impact of aerial bombardment was the most significant, since it meant that the divide between combatant and civilians began to dissolve in front of the technological ability to bomb civilian areas far behind the front lines of the battlefield. Further Geneva Conventions (1929, 1949) would follow, each trying to ameliorate the harshness of the new technologies of death. The Nazis had no qualms about civilian deaths, the prelude being the bombing of Guernica (Spain) in 1937. But the Allies were no less harsh. In 1942, the British government acknowledged that its bombing was to damage ‘the morale of the enemy civil population and, in particular, the industrial workers’. The 1945 Allied bombing of Dresden (Germany) is practice to the 1942 theory. The US novelist Kurt Vonnegut was in Dresden as a Prisoner of War. Later, he wrote a devastating book about the bombing called Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). The dead littered the city. ‘There were too many corpses to bury,’ Vonnegut wrote. ‘So instead the Nazis sent in troops with flamethrowers. All these civilians’ remains were burned to ashes.’

The new technology of warfare – and the Holocaust – demanded that the West create the United Nations, and the UN Charter (1945). Europe had widened the jaws of hell for itself. Hell, on the other hand, had always been the condition in the colonies and for the colonized.

Thirteen hundred West African soldiers from Benin to Togo who had fought in the French army, been captured by the Nazis and held in a concentration camp, been freed and brought back to another concentration camp at Thiaroye outside Dakar, mutinied in November 1944 against the way they were being treated. They had seen the bombings and the brutality; they had thought they were on their way home to collect their war pensions. Instead, the French betrayed them, as colonialism always does. Their revolt was a cry into the dark. French soldiers opened fire and killed hundreds of them. In 1988, the brilliant Senegalese filmmaker Sembène Ousmane made a film – Camp de Thairoye – about this massacre. One of the key characters in the film is Pays, who suffers from the traumas of war, what used to be called shell shock; he cannot speak but can only grunt and scream. He is on guard duty. He watches the tanks circle the camp and tries to tell his fellow soldiers that the Nazis are back to kill them. His comrades say that he is crazy. The French tanks open fire. The Africans are all slaughtered.

Part 2

Part 3