With all the talk about civil war in Iraq, I’m reminded of the following accounts of sectarian violence I read awhile back:
“They would ride up behind a gasping victim and behead him with one terrible slash of the sword. Another … saw the head of one of their victims … rolling along the street, while the … assassin furiously pursued his next victim, waving his bloody sword and shrieking, “I’ll kill more! I’ll kill more!”
“A man’s executioner could be a friend, or a stranger. Every day for fifteen years, … a … tea merchant … had served a pot of Assam tea to the Moslem leatherworker who came rushing to his shop one August morning. He was setting the man’s ration on his little brass balance when he looked up to see his customer, his face contorted in hate, pointing at him and screaming, “Kill him! Kill him!”
“A dozen Moslem hoodlums raced out of the alley. One severed [his] leg at the knee with a sword. In an instant they had killed his ninety-year-old father and his only son. The last sight he saw as he lost consciousness was his eighteen-year-old daughter, screaming in fright, being carried off on the shoulders of the man whom he had been serving tea for fifteen years.”
Why, you might ask, haven’t we heard about these incidents in the press? There’s a simple answer: these events did not take place in Iraq between Sunnis and Shiites in 2006, but rather in the Punjab, between Moslems, Sikhs, and Hindus nearly 60 years ago. The preceding accounts were taken from Chapter 13 of the book, “Freedom at Midnight” by Larry Collins and Dominique LaPierre. During this six-week reign of terror following the independence of India, “[h]alf as many Indians would lose their lives in that slaughter as Americans in four years of combat in World War II.”
And yet, according Collins and LaPierre, “It was not a war; it was not civil war; it was not a guerilla campaign. It was a convulsion, the sudden, shattering collapse of a society.” Another interesting quote to consider: “A motive that had nothing to do with religious fervor was more often behind the Moslems’ attacks on Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan. It was greed, a simple, often carefully orchestrated effort to grab the lands, shops and wealth of their neighbors.”
In 1947, India endured a period of sectarian violence that makes Iraq’s problems pale in comparison, to later become the most populous democracy in the world. What are the chances of history repeating itself in Iraq? We may never know if we give up too soon.
