Cost & consequences of ambition to dominate: The anatomy of aggression - II

Listen to me closely, Vietnamese,

I, a stranger, write to you from Lima...

They too, have torn this city apart.

Clots of blood, the mornings begin

— Winston Orillo, Peru, 1969

THE end of the Second World War did not bring peace to most people inhabiting the two major spheres of political influence commanded by the US and the Soviet Union. The world was now caught up in a global turf war between the two “superpowers”, both maintaining huge military forces to defend and expand their respective spheres of influence.

For its part, the US moved to expand its influence beyond the Americas and the Pacific to include much of the old British, French, and Japanese colonial empires in Asia and Africa. In doing so, it had to deal with local aspirations which did not always agree with American plans. In order to put down insubordination, disorder and disloyalty in its sphere, Washington intervened militarily in foreign countries more than 200 times during the so-called cold war.

After World War II, the ambitious plans of the US State Department for Asia and the Pacific were completely upset by revolutions and anti-colonial wars stretching from China to Malaysia. A major confrontation developed in Korea. Washington intervened directly by using warships, bombers, and artillery to reduce much of Korea to rubble. Over 4,500,000 Koreans died, of whom three-quarters were civilians. US involvement in Korea cost America 54,000 lives, and despite American military superiority, a cease-fire was negotiated, with Korea divided between north and south — a division which is still there. Forty thousand American troops remain in southern Korea to this day.

Following the adventure in Asia, the US backed a military coup closer to home, in the Dominican Republic, installing its own man in power after ousting the popularly elected leader. In 1965, twentytwo thousand US troops were sent to the Dominican Republic to suppress the uprising. Three thousand people were gunned down in the streets of Santo Domingo.

During this same period, the US assaulted Vietnam with all the military force the Pentagon could muster. The attempt to preserve a corrupt South Vietnamese regime, inherited from the French colonial empire, lasted ten years between 1964 and 1973. The US may have used more firepower in Indochina than had been used by all warring sides in all previous wars in human history. US warplanes dropped seven million tons of bombs in Vietnam, the equivalent of one 350-pound bomb per person.

Four hundred thousand tons of napalm was used against the Vietnamese. Agent Orange and other toxic herbicides were used to destroy millions of acres of farmland and forests. Villages were burned to the ground and their residents massacred. Altogether, two million people died, most of them civilians. Almost sixty thousand US soldiers were killed and three hundred thousand wounded.

Despite the ferocity of the assault on Vietnam, the US was ultimately defeated by a lightly armed but determined peasant army.

The vortex of the Vietnam war was felt by other Asian countries which were drawn in the various aspects of the war as provider of bases and servicing US troops. Thailand was turned into a military camp from which Vietnam could be conveniently bombed. Before the end of the 1960s it was estimated that 850 million dollars had been put into that country, half of it in military aid and much of the rest for building strategic roads. Thailand was turned into a base for “rest and recreation”, giving rise to the infamous sex trade which flourishes even today.

The impact of the American agenda to exercise control over territories all over the world affected not only economies and governments, but also tore apart the social fabric of many of the countries which served as support bases in its aggressive designs to stay ahead in the war for world domination.

And in 1970, when Salvador Allende was elected to the presidency of Chile, it was quite clear to the US that progressive impulses amongst the people of Latin America were not being crushed by counter-revolutions arranged by the CIA. It was at this time that the term “destabilization” of sovereign governments came into existence. There was scarcely any concealment of this fact in Chile. A programme of economic strangulation against the Allende government was not hard to organize, as there was no sector of the Chilean economy that was not penetrated and in some cases dominated by American enterprises. The 1973 coup against Allende brought to power General Augusto Pinochet, who continued the brutalization of the Chilean resistance with assistance and advice from his supporters in Washington.

Shortly after the debacle in South East Asia, US marines intervened directly in the Lebanese civil war, taking the side of Israel and the right-wing Falangist militia which had just massacred 2000 Palestinian civilians in the camps of Sabra and Shatilla in 1982. They marched into Beirut in 1983; 241 marines were killed in a truck bomb attack aimed at their barracks. American involvement in the Middle East had become apparent after the dismantling of the British Empire following World War II. The creation and protection of the state of Israel has cost the US billions of dollars in aid every year, including the most advanced weaponry in its arsenal.

Many of the military officers responsible for the worst atrocities in Central America were trained at the Pentagon’s “School of the Americas”, an institution catering to the predatory needs of illegitimate governments in all of Latin America. Its training manual recommends torture and summary execution as part of “anti-subversive” activity. Today, a corrupt US-backed army fights alongside paramilitary forces in Colombia. Entire villages populations have been slaughtered and hundreds of opposition leaders and politicians have been murdered. In recent years the US has become further involved in the internal affairs of Colombia, providing billions of dollars of arms to continue the killing under the cover of the “war on drugs”.

Proxy armies such as the ones used in Latin America have been used to overthrow governments which have refused to do the bidding of the Pentagon or Wall Street. In 1961, US warships ferried a small army of mercenaries to Cuba, aiming at undoing the Cuban revolution. Landing at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, these forces undertook the fifth invasion of that country since the coming to power of Fidel Castro who still holds on to his position despite repeated attempts on his life by the US Central Intelligence Agency.

During the 1970s and the 1980s, the CIA was particularly busy financing, training, and arming guerilla armies around the world. For years, the US backed Portugal’s efforts to maintain its colonies in Southern Africa, helping stave off wars of independence in Angola and Mozambique. In 1975, after a democratic revolution in Portugal, the Portuguese pulled out of Africa, leaving Washington to form new alliances in the region. Teaming up with the apartheid regime in South Africa, it supplied a mercenary army to fight the new government in independent Angola. In the Mozambique, top US and South African politicians and ex-military officers sponsored a particularly violent force of mercenaries who massacred tens of thousands of African peasants.

In 1979, following the overthrow of US-backed dictator Somoza by the Sandanistas, the CIA gathered together the remnants of Somoza’s hated National Guards and sent them back to Nicaragua with weapons intended for use against unarmed peasants. According to Ronald Reagan, these “contras are the moral equivalent of our founding fathers.”

The same year, the Soviet Union entered Afghanistan to prop up a friendly regime. Soviet occupation met fierce resistance by fundamentalist forces which saw the regime in Kabul as anti-Islamic and dangerous to ancient patterns of political rule. The CIA stepped in to arm these forces, working closely with the Pakistani and Saudi governments. Among the CIA’s collaborators in this war was Osama bin Laden, who supplied the Afghan Mujahideen with money and guns to fight the Soviet Union. The Afghan war helped militarize an international movement aimed at ridding the Muslim world of foreign dominance. At that time, however, the US backers of Osama bin Laden were not overly concerned with the wider goals of this movement.

In the 1980s, Reagan stepped up the arms race, increasing military spending to unprecedented levels. The Soviet Union, with a much smaller economy, struggled to keep up, putting a tremendous strain on Soviet society and economy and contributing to its own collapse.

The end of the cold war led to talk of an era of world peace, with world citizenry expecting to reap the dividends of this hard won war. But that was not to happen, for there were still many more wars to fight, much more blood to spill before imperial agendas reached a point of saturation, reaping harvests of more wealth for the already affluent, bringing death and devastation to the already desperate.

The writer is United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for the Population Fund.

Bush’s poll prospects

AT a time when electioneering in the US has already started, who emerges as president in 2004 is a subject of more than routine interest for the international community. The last week of November has seen a turnaround in the prospects of George W. Bush winning a second term that is bound to have a significant impact on world politics.

The six months since Bush claimed victory in Iraq after launching a war without UN sanction had seen his domestic popularity and international standing eroded. Americans were getting disenchanted with the policy of unilateralism and pre-emption, and sentiments were growing in favour of the US scaling down its global commitments that were affecting welfare and prosperity at home. It appeared the younger Bush might be headed for the same fate that his father faced in 1992 when failures in domestic issues led to his defeat, despite victory in the Gulf War of 1991.

Even internationally, the Bush administration was seen as driven by hardline conservatives whose arrogant approach was resulting in resentment among European allies, and in alienation of the Arab and Islamic world. Small wonder that despite the continuing support to the war against terror, his popularity rating declined rapidly.

A series of developments compressed into an eventful week have led to a turnaround so that the question among political analysts is no longer “will Bush be re-elected?” but “can he be stopped?” A number of significant events in the areas of major concern to the American people mark the start of trends that may make the Republican position in next year’s elections unassailable.

The first major success of the Bush administration was the passage of the Medicare Bill by the Congress that increases health benefits for the senior citizens of the US. Such a measure had been attempted several times over the past 38 years, mainly by the Democrats who have traditionally stressed welfare. The Republican majority in the Congress had frustrated President Clinton’s efforts in this area. In a way, the Republicans hijacked this item that has always been a part of the Democrats’ agenda. But this is a coup that could win considerable support from the 40 million senior citizens that will be the beneficiaries in the 2004 elections.

Within a couple of days of this coup, the figures for the GDP growth in the US during the third quarter of 2003 were released, which disclosed growth of 8.2 per cent, which was the highest growth rate in any quarter over the past 14 years. The jobless rate had remained high, resulting in criticisms alleging that the figures had been doctored by the government to improve its image. However, numerous indicators, including rising consumer sales and buoyant industrial production left little doubt that the economy had come out of recession. If the trend sustained till the elections, Bush would also be rewarded for economic management.

The secret visit by President Bush to Baghdad to greet the US troops on Thanksgiving Day (November 27) was the third initiative that has been widely applauded in the country. Earlier, the planned trip to Afghanistan and Iraq by Democratic senators Hillary Clinton and Reed around the same time had attracted media attention. The president, by this surprise visit to the most dangerous place from the security point of view for the Americans, not only upstaged the opposition, but gained other significant benefits as well. He raised the morale of the US forces, while countering the rising tempo of opposition to the war in Iraq. He also took the occasion to proclaim that the US would not retreat in the face of “thugs and terrorists” but complete its mission in Iraq.

Senator Hillary Clinton, who is being seen as the one Democrat capable of defeating Bush, praised the president’s initiative in visiting US troops in Iraq but was critical of the unilateralist approach of the Republicans. She expressed the view that wider international involvement was necessary to achieve results in the pacification and reconstruction of Iraq. That the president is more mindful of international opinion, and listening to advisers who favour a return to traditional foreign policy concerns, has been evident from notable changes in the US policy on some major issues.

After having backed Ariel Sharon’s brutal policies vis-a-vis the Palestinians, which led to widespread resentment in the Arab and Islamic countries, the US is seeking to pressure Israel into adopting policies that could revive the process envisaged in the “roadmap” for Palestine. Though Sharon has admitted the necessity of withdrawing from Israeli settlements built recently on Palestinian land, he is intransigent on completing the “security fence” being built in a manner that is seen by the Palestinians as well as Arab and Islamic countries as a land-grab.

Both the government and media in the US are becoming aware that a fair settlement of the Palestine problem is essential to remove the resentment in the Middle East and the Islamic world against US partiality to Israel. Extensive coverage has been given in the media to the agreement reached at Geneva between Israeli moderates and the Palestinians that addresses the most critical issues between the Jews and Arabs in Palestine. The Israelis have agreed to two fundamental Palestinian demands, namely shared sovereignty over Jerusalem, and Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories, with land to be given in compensation for the areas where Israel wants to retain settlements. The Palestinians have compromised by withdrawing demand for the right of return for all refugees, who would be compensated financially. It may be recalled that Secretary of State Colin Powell had also welcomed the Geneva Accord.

The Bush administration has also lifted the tariffs it had imposed on imported steel, following the decision by the WTO that such protectionism is no longer admissible. Such a step would avert a trade war with major steel exporters, including Germany, France, South Korea, Japan, China, and Brazil that were getting ready to impose tariffs on US exports.

The problem of exit strategy from Iraq is likely to bring up the tussle between the conservatives and the pragmatists. Bush has made record provision of $410 billion for defence in next year’s budget. The Congress could not afford to reduce this amount that is being demanded to back up the armed forces, whose emoluments and perks have been raised. Significantly, provision has been made for $9 billion for Ballistic Missile Defence, that symbolizes the unilateralism of the Bush administration.

How the US occupation of Iraq has fared, six months after victory had been claimed, has led to broad acceptance of the need to bring in the international community (which means the UN system) into the process of supervising the process of transfer of power, now set to be completed by June 30,2004.

There are still conservatives who wish to retain US control over Iraq, or to have the decisive say on major issues even if the UN is given the responsibility for overseeing the transition to independence. Certainly, major US companies with links to the Bush team would like to get the major share of contracts. With reports appearing in the US media of the growing strength of the Al Qaeda, the US would claim to be justified in maintaining its military presence for the open-ended war against terrorism.

Terrorist networks and activities continue to receive prominent coverage in the US media, and this could be an important factor in Bush receiving support for continuing his tenure as a “president at war”, whose task of winning that war is far from complete. Finally, in the highly commercialized system of electioneering, the size of a candidate’s campaign chest remains a significant factor. Here, Bush has a decisive edge, with $200 million already in the kitty, while the nine Democratic hopefuls have less than half that amount between them.

The impact of 9/11, the continued threat from terrorism, and the remarkable upturn in the US economy are all factors that appear to favour Bush in his bid for a second term. Also helpful for his re-election is the absence of a leader of calibre among the Democrats. If Hillary Clinton were to throw her hat into the ring, there would be more of a contest, and the possibility should not be ruled out. Otherwise, the president’s prospects appear bright. However, the neo-conservatives around him have come in for much adverse comment, and many Americans would feel more comfortable with a second Bush term if the influence and role of some of them were to decline.

Regime change in the Caucasus

THE latest target of American-induced ‘regime change’ was not some miscreant Muslim state but the mainly Christian mountain nation of Georgia.

Eduard Shevardnadze, the 75-year old strongman who has ruled post-Soviet Georgia’s 5.1 million citizens since 1991, was overthrown by a bloodless coup that appears to have been organized and financed in large part by the Bush administration.

Shevardnadze’s sin, in Washington’s eyes, was being too chummy with Moscow and obstructing a major US oil pipeline, due to open in 2005, from Central Asia, across Georgia to Turkey. Georgia occupies the heart of the wild, unruly, and very strategic Caucasus region, which I call the Mideast North.

In recent months, Shevardnadze had given new drilling and pipeline concessions to Russian firms. He should have recalled the fate of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, which, like Georgia, was a US client and recipient of American aid until it turned down a major pipeline deal with US oil firm Chevron and awarded it to a Latin American consortium. The uncooperative talibs were promptly declared outlaws and put on Washington’s terrorism list. Pakistan was next, had it not accepted Washington’s demands.

Shevardnadze was no angel. He rigged elections, used squads of goondas to silence opponents, and ran Georgia like a medieval fief. But he was also a fascinating man, as I found when extensively interviewing him in Moscow in 1989 when he was foreign minister of the Soviet Union.

‘Shevy-Chevy,’ as we used to call him, looked like an amiable grandfather, with his wispy white hair and bulging eyes. In fact, he had been the tough, ruthless party and KGB boss of Georgia. Yet, quite remarkably, this hard-line communist became Mikhail Gorbachev’s right-hand man in implementing glasnost and perestroika reforms. He played a decisive role in ending the cold war and breaking up that criminal empire, the Soviet Union.

Like Gorbachev, Shevardnadze became a hero in the West, but was reviled at home as a traitor and wrecker. Many Russians believed Gorbachev was a British agent and Shevardnadze a CIA ‘asset.’

After the USSR’s collapse, Shevardnadze returned to Georgia and, backed by US funding, seized power from the fiery post-independence leader, Zviad Ghamsakhurdia, who may have been murdered. Shevardnadze has survived two assassination attempts over the last decade. Georgia is wild, turbulent, dirt poor, and very beautiful. I still savour the memory of the majestic, mist-shrouded mountains of Abkhazia, and the lovely Black Sea coast that recalls the French Riviera.

Georgia has been a battleground for much of its 2,500-year history. Georgia’s knights and warriors waged a heroic struggle against the Persian, Ottoman and Russian Empires. Neighbour Armenia and Georgia are the two oldest existing Christian nations. Georgian, Albanian, and Basque are Europe’s oldest living languages.

Like all mountain nations, Georgia is deeply divided by topography and fierce clan rivalries. Minorities of Armenians, Azeris, Ossetians(a Christian Turkic tribe), Mingrelians, and Muslim Abkhaz add further volatility. The Caucasus has over 100 feuding ethnic groups, a time bomb waiting to explode. Stalin was an Ossetian or perhaps a Mingrelian (as was henchman Lavrenti Beria).

Abkhazia and Ossetia seceded from Georgia after bloody fighting and ethnic cleansing that killed 10,000 and left 250,000 refugees. Today, Russian ‘peacekeeping’ troops keep the two rebellious regions, and a third Muslim enclave, Azharia, independent of Georgian control. Just to the north, the Chechen’s ferocious struggle for freedom from Russian rule grinds on, with the bloody struggle spilling into Georgia. Moscow repeatedly accused Georgia of aiding Chechen independence fighters, which is likely true. Neighbouring Armenia and Azerbaijan have waged a sporadic war for over a decade.

Shevardnadze kept Georgia independent by deftly playing off the Americans against the Russians, both of whom had designs on the little nation. But his luck finally ran out.

Washington sent high-level emissaries to warn Shevardnadze not to do anything that threatened the proposed oil corridor — deal with the Russians. When he went ahead with Russian oil deals, Washington denounced Georgian elections on November 2 as rigged — which they were — though it always turns a blind eye to rigged elections in useful allies like oil-rich Azerbaijan, Armenia, Russia, Egypt, Pakistan, Morocco, etc.

Anti-Shevardnadze political operatives from the US with large sums of cash poured into Tibilisi to back up the president’s American-educated principal rival, Mikhail Saakashvili. The rigged election ignited mass protests by Georgians, fed up with corruption and crushing poverty. Saakashvilli forces stormed parliament and drove out Shevardnasze, who resigned after army and police refused to defend him.

What next? Saakashvili appears almost certain to become president in early January. But the three political clans which united to overthrow the ancient regime, and now support him, may, true local tradition, soon be at one another’s throats. In hot-blooded Georgia, civil war is never far away.

Russia will try to limit US influence in Georgia and extend its own by stirring the pot and finding new Georgian allies. Washington will shore up its man in Tibilisi, Mr Saakashvili, and may send more Special Forces troops under the pretext of the faux war on terrorism.

The entire Caucasus is near a boil. Sharply increasing rivalry between the US and Russia for political and economic influence over this vital land bridge between Europe and the oil-rich Caspian Basin promises a lot more intrigue, skullduggery and drama. — Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2003.

Relief to detainees

The Pentagon’s announcement that its officials have agreed that an American citizen held for 18 months may finally consult with a lawyer is at once a relief and scary.

For a year and a half, Yaser Esam Hamdi has been locked in a military brig at the mercy of Pentagon officials engaged in what they blandly term “intelligence collection.” Hamdi — who, we repeat, is an American citizen — is charged with no crime, yet his captors have denied him a lawyer and any contact with his family.

Hamdi, captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan, is one of two Americans the Pentagon has deep-sixed since the 9/11 attacks. The other is Jose Padilla, arrested at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago in May 2002 on suspicion of plotting to detonate a radioactive bomb. President Bush declared both men “enemy combatants” on his say-so alone, stripping them of every constitutional right.

Like so much else since 9/11, the administration seems to have cobbled together its enemy combatant policy on the fly, without thinking through the ominous consequences of its actions. That this outrageous and capricious policy has prompted a chorus of opprobrium from the right and the left only underscores how insupportable it is.

A challenge to Padilla’s detention is now before a New York appeals court. This year, a Virginia appeals court upheld Hamdi’s continued incarceration, and a petition on his behalf is before the U.S. Supreme Court. If judges uphold Bush’s unilateral decisions to indefinitely imprison Padilla and Hamdi — as government lawyers urged the high court’s justices to do Wednesday — this administration will have turned the Constitution on its head, making the fundamental rights all Americans thought were guaranteed instead the result of the president’s discretion.

The Pentagon’s concession Tuesday follows comments critical of the enemy combatant policy from two men who themselves played key roles in shaping Bush’s terror-fighting agenda.

In recent speeches and interviews, Viet Dinh and Michael Chertoff have expressed concern about the legality of Padilla’s and Hamdi’s detentions and the seat-of-the-pants nature of administration policymaking.

It bears asking why neither man spoke up when White House and Pentagon officials hatched the enemy combatant policy. Dinh, now a Georgetown University law professor, helped write the USA Patriot Act while head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy and fiercely defended Hamdi’s and Padilla’s detentions until he left government in May.

—Los Angeles Times

Repairing bridges with India

THIS is going to be a nostalgic column, meant essentially for those boarders for whom the Latin motto Ut Prosim has a special meaning. It has been largely inspired by the news items that keep popping up, like ripened corn, which embellish each novel attempt to bring India and Pakistan closer together.

The unilateral ceasefire, overflying rights, the cross-border train and bus service, the swapping of parliamentarians and journalists, the crack down on religious extremists, and finally the willingness of the leader of the world’s largest democracy to come to Islamabad for a summit. Events that are giving rise to the notion of some Excalibur lying in the lake, simply waiting to be picked up.

It does look like sub-cultural arcana is once again being transformed into the stuff of modern fable, as members of the friendship club on both sides of the border, keep their fingers crossed. After all, this time the peace process has made considerable headway with a willingness of the leaders on both sides to accept the dictum that co-operation is immeasurably better than confrontation.

But one never really knows when the hawks in Islamabad and New Delhi will suddenly upset the apple-cart. Nevertheless, I hope that it will become much easier for nationals of the two countries to cross the border, especially now that I have learned that my old boarding school, St Peters, is celebrating its hundredth anniversary in December 2004.

How can anybody who has been there ever forget Panchgani, that verdant strip of paradise in the western ghats of India, which in spring and summer was always bathed in soft focus sunlight and which in the monsoon was hosed down by torrential rains?

It was there that I first became acquainted with the meaning of honour and humility and learnt the difference between right and wrong. It was there that I heard about the greatness of the Indian nationalist leaders, Mahatma Gandhi, Mr Jinnah, Pandit Nehru and Maulana Azad. Their names kept cropping up, whether we trudged gamely through the monsoon slush on our way back from a chilly wet soccer match, or watched the gulmoher and the jamun turn a golden brown in the eternal twilight of a warm summer evening. Political awareness started at an early age.

Panchgani is tucked away in the western ghats between Wai and Mahableshwar, and I was told the word was derived from Marathi and means five villages. Actually, there are five tablelands (or plateaux) which were once five mountains that majestically etched the skyline, but which were denuded by millions of years of wind and sun and rain.

Most students travelled from Bombay to Poona by Deccan Queen, an electric train which covered the 120-mile journey in a couple of hours as it cut its way through scores of tunnels which had been bored through the mountains. During the journey the train often struck and killed a number of cows that had strayed across the railway line. From Poona we travelled by a prehistoric, carbon monoxide sprouting bus which spluttered up a dusty 64-mile spiral route cut through the ghats, and by the time we caught a glimpse of the pines and the poplars which etched the boundary of the hill station, most of the boys had vomited the Bombay roast that they had wolfed down at the Deccan Queen restaurant at Poona station.

In addition to the four seasons, there was the monsoon which started on the first of June, as if by divine command, and we didn’t see the sun until the middle of September. The monsoon was often referred to as the mildew season for everything was always wet and smelled like rotten vegetables and had to be dried over coal heaters. The three-month winter was cold and signalled the beginning of the long holidays. The summer was short and warm and in our leisure hours we hunted butterflies and dragonflies on Rhodesia pitch.

One of the things I remember about my days at St Peter’s was the fact that we were always hungry. An invitation from a visiting relative or the parents of a friend to a weekend meal was a red letter day in our lives and we ate ourselves sick on these occasions. Boarding schools were notorious for the bad food that they served. In St Peter’s the food wasn’t all that bad and we soon got used to the bajra and jawar and the brown rice. It is just that there was never enough on the table.

Pocket money (which used to be eight annas a week in 1947) was issued in the form of tokens; and we were supposed to buy our stick-jaw (a toffee made from gurr and peanuts) and our tins of sweetened condensed milk from the school tuck shop which was run by a lower order tyrant with a rugged physique and a short fuse called Garika. He often regaled us with endless tales of Maratha valour. It was from him that I learned how Bat’s Cave and Devil’s Kitchen and Tiger’s Leap, which joined Tableland One with Tableland Two, got their names.

St Peter’s had a clutch of extremely interesting characters. The school medical assistant left his spouse and eight children and eloped with the wife of a film producer. Mohammad Ali Sonawalla, captain of school and champion boxer, could run a hundred yards in ten and a half seconds. Peter Scutt joined the Royal Navy after leaving school and went on an expedition to the South Pole. Sears manufactured crude pistols during prep and shot crows as a pastime. F.C.Hugo, who had a voice like Richard Tauber, won the school singing competition when he sang the Neapolitan folk song, O Sole Mio, and returned to Chile where he became a concert singer.

M.J. Jaffer, a brilliant scholar who came from East Africa., and is currently the chairman of Orr Dignam & Company in Karachi, obtained eight As in his Junior Cambridge examination. Unfortunately, the university did not see fit to award him a gold medal. They preferred to give the prize to an English boy who apparently got only seven distinctions. My name went down in the annals of cricket history for staying at the crease for two and a half hours and scoring eight runs, while Munawar-ul-Haq hit a double century at the other end in half the time.

St Peter’s also had a bunch of fruitcakes. There was one unforgettable character called Joseph Joseph Joseph, who was referred to as Joey J. Joseph or Joseph Cubed. He felt it was his bounden duty to sniff out the spies in Panchgani who could possibly damage the Allied cause. And so, heading an inquisition which was made up of another eight toffee-nosed twits from England who feigned upper crust bonhomie, interrogated every student who they felt sympathized with the cause of the Axis or the Indian National Army of Subhas Chandra Bose.

In a rich fruity voice, which belonged in the open air hemmed in by mortar fire and the acrid chorus of battle, Joseph Cubed would ask the enemy if they were passing on secret plans to Field Marshall Rommel! These encounters were usually settled according to the rules framed by the Marquis of Queensberry.

Most of the masters were Anglo Indian, who had decided to emigrate to England after the war was over, while two were English and had decided to settle in India. Panchgani wasn’t very kind to one of them, who had more than his share of bad luck. He lost his four year old son who had died of pneumonia. I will never forget that evening in the late monsoon, under a lemon grey sky. The poplars, pregnant with the spill of an earlier shower, bent a little as they lowered the little coffin into the cold, wet grave.

A light drizzle had started and there wasn’t a dry eye in the cemetery as the sixth formers, bravely trying to keep a stiff upper lip, shivered in their souwesters and sang ‘Abide With Me’. Two weeks later the master lost his two Alsatians when they bravely defended his other two children from a black panther which was one of the regular nocturnal asthmatic prowlers that had made the school compound their regular beat as they marched over the grounds with a measured tread.

Tremendous importance was given on the use of language and the promotion of theatre, for theatre was one of the great glories of the British Empire. Our English teacher recommended G.Lowes Dickinson’s ‘A Modern Symposium’ and the works of James Joyce and Arnold Bennett, who always used the right word in the right place.

Well, in a nutshell, that was what Panchgani was like in the late forties with its cholera and plague epidemics, its teachers with their self-conscious mock hilarity played with a twitchy relish in the face of adversity.

email: a-mooraj@cyber.net.pk