15 August 2007

Ghost Trains



Truck bombs killed the Yazidis in northern Iraq this morning. Sunni men are responsible, apparently, some sort of revenge for an internet video of a local woman being stoned. It is supposed to be pretty vicious. Her crime was dating a co-religionist of the bombers, and naturally the response was to blow to tiny bits almost two hundred people over the affront.

Until this morning I had been blissfully unaware of the Yazidi sect, who speak Kurdish and have blended the traditions of Islam with that of a more ancient Persian faith. In that regard, they have much in common with the Sikhs of the Indian sub-continent, from what I understand of the theological details. They paid dearly for their faith when India was divided between the majority Hindus and minority Muslims.

Never mind the Sikhs and the Jains and the hundreds of other smaller sects.

Ghandi-ji had a view of a great nation unified in its diversity, but that was not going to come to pass. He would not honor the division of his country into glittering shards. He went to Calcutta in an attempt to forestall the recurrence of the bloody riots of the previous year.

Mohammed Ali Jinnah was a man of great personal dignity and remote public demeanor. He did not get on well with the last British caretakers of the Raj. He had some big dreams for the new state of Pakistan. He had come to the certainty that separation from his Hindu neighbors was the only way to go forward. He was a secularist in vision. His country was going to be democratic, for one thing, and a place where Islam would be respected. He presided at the ceremony at the Sind Government House, in Karachi, the largest city in what was about to become a new nation.

The Viceroy was there to formally transfer power, which was carefully planned to give the new Dominion a day of its own, before it's equally new neighbor came into existence at midnight.

Astrologers were consulted, and the day was not propitious, but Viscount Admiral Mountbatten was determined to go through with the thing anyway. It was raining in Karachi, another of the cities created by the Empire to ship the wealth of the Punjab to the world. The ceremony was low-key, compared to the one that would be held later in the night in Delhi, and the Viceroy hurried to the airport to climb into his DC-3 to be in attendance.

The nature of the partition might have been a damper on the mood, along with the rain. The Mountbatten Line had been a hurried affair, much to the dismay of Cyril Radcliffe. The veteran diplomat had been sent out to India to chair the commission on the Border, and despite his best efforts, some of the territory had been apportioned over lunch between the Viceroy and Pandit Nehru, the man who was rumored to be sleeping with his wife.

The details of the line would not be announced until after independence, which was probably a good thing. The disturbances that would begin when the reality of the border became clear would have detracted from the solemnity of the ceremonies.

The line slashed across Punjab, cutting the rail and road infrastructure willy-nilly. Dividing an integrated nation into pieces is a difficult task, and the members of Radcliffe's commission were so dissatisfied with what was done in their name that they refused payment for their service.

I almost got to see the infrastructure that was cut in Pakistan. I am always curious about trains that go nowhere, like the ones in Korea that are frozen in time. I almost made it to Karachi in 1979. The Pakis- at least the military juntas- traditionally aligned with the US when it is convenient, and at the time, the ships of the 7th Fleet made calls there as a gesture of friendship.

Karachi was the city where Daniel Peal had his head removed in 2002. He was attempting to unravel the story of Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, and his links to al Qaeda and the Pakistani intelligence service.

The authorities have the man who claims to have killed him in Guantanamo Bay. That would be KSM- Khalid Shiekh Mohammed- the self confessed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and the great Pacific airline plot. I like Gitmo. It is another one of those very odd political places.

They have about wrung all that is useful from him. The confession about Daniel Pearl was made in a military tribunal earlier this year. KSM is a problem at the moment, since no one is quite sure what to do with him.

He is a bad guy, one of the baddest, if his boasting is to be taken at face value. He is a Sunni, and although he grew up in Kuwait, he is a Pakistani national. I don't know what they are going to do with KSM. His confessions were extracted by means that are not in accordance with the Geneva Convention, not that mind particularly, but will mean that most of the evidence against him will be tainted if he is brought into a real court of law.

I would like him to pay for his crimes, but we will have to see about that. There are so many that go unpunished. Sixty years ago the Constituent Assembly of the Government of India assumed its sovereign power at midnight. As the clock completed the efficient British tolling of the hour, a long note was blown through a conch shell, like those used in Hindu temples to summon the gods was blown.

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, duly elected Prime Minister of the Union of India Government, then drove the half-mile from the Congress up the Rajpath to the Viceregal Lodge. He informed Lord Louis that the Constituent Assembly had formally assumed power, and that the now-former Viceroy would be appointed Governor General of India first thing in the morning.

There was no real disorder at the time, only a few hundred died across the country. Fewer than died than in the bombings of the Yazidis. That would not last long, though.

When the announcement of the new borders between the nations came, things began to fall apart.

The impact was worst in the Punjab's land of five rivers. In all, some ten million people had to move; Hindus and Sikhs to the east and Muslims to the west. The man who owns the Jiffy Lube franchise down the street was a boy then, and his family eventually wound up in Karachi. He is philosophical about it, now that he is in the States.

His son changed the oil in my car. He has a fierce beard and kept his opinion to himself.

The monsoon season of 1947 was a nightmare. Millions were on the move, clawing their way to safety. Those expelled from their homes were targets of the mobs. Indiscriminate killing and rape became the norm.

The locomotives continued to run, though schedules were hard to keep. People clambered on board to reach safety, packed in and on the cars.

They often arrived silent. They called them "ghost trains," since when they arrived at their destinations they were filled only with the dead, some mutilated beyond recognition.

The Governor General did what he could, of course. He stayed through the next year, when most of the movement had ceased, and the Line of Control was set, except for the problem with Kashmir.

They were fighting there for another fifty years. It is quiet at the moment, though there have been three major wars about the border. Pakistan and India both have nuclear arsenals now.

That is the reason I found myself in Delhi five years ago.

I recall sitting in an office high up in a ministry building, smoking with a man with sad brown eyes. There was a poster from the Patrice Lamumba Institute in Moscow on his wall and a view of the city from his window. I asked him why the world's oldest constitutional republic- America- could not get along with the largest democracy on earth.

He just looked at me impassively and shrugged. He seemed to think it was too complex for discussion, or maybe that I just could not understand something so simple.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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