War by Other Means in Sri Lanka

By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, NB] Telegraph-Journal

You would think that after a vicious ethnically-based war between Sinhalese and Tamils that over three decades killed over 100,000 civilians and 50,000 fighters from both sides of the conflict, things would have calmed down in Sri Lanka. 

But that’s not the case. On Oct. 27, the president, Maithripala Sirisena, fired Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, calling him inept and corrupt. This was the culmination of months of tension between the two men and has led to violence.

The split between Wickremesinghe and Sirisena marked the end of the uneasy partnership between Wickremesinghe’s United National Front for Good Governance, led by his United National Party, and Sirisena’s United People's Freedom Alliance, led by his own Sri Lanka Freedom Party. They had been jointly governing the country since 2015.

The tensions between the two men peaked on Oct. 16 over the possible handover of a port development project to India, after it had been started with Chinese aid. Wickremesinghe favored the move but Sirisena opposed it.

The president then appointed a new prime minister, Mahinda Rajapaksa, the very former president whom he beat in the 2015 presidential election. Rajapaksa had signed the initial deal with China during his presidency. India and China have been engaged in a struggle for influence in the island nation.

Sirisena also dissolved parliament and decided to hold fresh elections, a move that experts called unconstitutional. Under the constitution, Sri Lanka’s president does not have the ability to replace the prime minister at will.

The country’s Supreme Court agreed, calling the move illegal, allowing the legislature to reconvene; they voted to remove Rajapaska on Nov. 16.

Calling it a foiled constitutional coup, Karunarathna Paranawithana, a supporter of Wickremesinghe, declared that “the only way Rajapaksa can hold on to power now is through the use of thuggery or the military.”

That wouldn’t be unthinkable, though. Rajapaksa was an authoritarian president, criticized for stifling dissent and accused of war crimes at the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war, which he brought to a close in a ruthless offensive against the Tamil Tigers in 2009.

He has not accepted the no-confidence motion against him. Meanwhile, he been working to bring lawmakers to his side. 

Five legislators from Wickremesinghe’s coalition have already defected to Rajapaksa -- and been granted cabinet posts. There have been other accusations of attempted bribery.

Wickremesinghe remains steadfast in his claim to be the rightful prime minister. He remains in the prime minister’s residence. Meanwhile, Rajapaska’s followers demand new elections.The president and the two rival prime ministers met on Sunday but did not appear to shift from their previous positions.

The country has never had a leader assume power through extra-constitutional means. This may now change. After all, as Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz famously remarked, “war is the continuation of politics by other means.”  The opposite is just as true.

The Stab-in-the-Back Myth

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The First World War was, without a doubt, the costliest mistake ever made by world leaders. It dragged on for four years and claimed an estimated 10 million military combatants and another 10 million civilians. In at least seven countries, more than 10 per cent of military-aged men were killed.

It also destroyed the European political order, bringing four dynasties to their knees, as the Austro-Hungarian, German, and tsarist Russian empires all collapsed, along with the Ottoman Empire.

Into the vacuum that emerged came something terrible: the triumph of vicious ideologies that made a second conflagration inevitable. 

In Russia, Bolshevik leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin ushered in a totalitarian Communist regime that would last until almost the end of the twentieth century.

Elsewhere, racists and anti-Semites would eventually take power in Italy, Germany, and smaller states, as democracy collapsed across the continent. Foremost among these leaders were Benito Mussolini in Italy and, of course, Germany’s Adolf Hitler.

When the armistice that ended the shooting was signed on Nov. 11, 1918, no Allied troops had entered Germany; the front lines were still in Belgium and France.

Berlin remained 725 kilometres from the nearest front, and the German armies retired from the field of battle in good order.

This would give birth to what has become known as the stab-in-the-back myth. This was the notion, widely believed and promoted in right-wing circles in Germany after 1918, that the German Army did not lose the war on the battlefield but was instead betrayed by civilians on the home front.

Blame would be placed on those republicans, Marxists, social democrats, and Jews, who overthrew the monarchy in the German Revolution of 1918 and signed the armistice ending the fighting. They would become known as the “November criminals.”

It was claimed that they had not supported the war and had played a role in selling out Germany to its enemies by criticizing the war effort, instigating unrest and strikes in critical military industries, and engaging in profiteering.

A typical example of this kind of propaganda was a 1924 right-wing German political cartoon showing Philipp Scheidemann, the Social Democrat who proclaimed the post-war Weimar Republic two days before the armistice, and was its second chancellor, and Matthias Erzberger, an anti-war politician from the Centre Party, stabbing the German Army in the back.

The 1919 Versailles Treaty, which blamed Germany for starting the war, and had it shoulder the burden of paying damages to the victors, created further anger, which the radical right could then exploit.

By 1924, Hitler, a former private in the Army and now head of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, known as the Nazis, had already tried to overthrow the government in the Munch “Beer Hall putsch.”

When the Nazis finally came to power in 1933, they made the legend an integral part of their official narrative. Nazi propaganda depicted Weimar as a morass of corruption, degeneracy, and national humiliation -- fourteen years of rule by Jews, Marxists, and “cultural” Bolsheviks, who had at last been swept away by the National Socialist movement.

German Jews, of course, denied the charge. A leaflet published in 1920 by German Jewish veterans in response to accusations of the lack of patriotism pointed out that “12,000 Jewish soldiers died on the field of honour for the fatherland.” It did little to stop the spread of this big lie.

“In truth, the Armistice was really a German surrender,” writes military historian J.L. Granatstein, author of The Greatest Victory: Canada’s Hundred Days. 

“There was no ‘stab in the back’ as Adolf Hitler and others in Germany would proclaim. The German army had been defeated on the field of battle by the Allies.” 

From Aug. 8, 1918, beginning with the Battle of Amiens, to the signing of the Armistice, the so-called Hundred Days campaign defeated the German Army on the Western Front, as Allied troops smashed through German lines at great speed. 

The Germans were forced to abandon increasingly large amounts of heavy equipment and supplies, further reducing their morale and capacity to resist. This collapse forced the German High Command to accept that the war had to be ended.

The stab-in-the-back legend may have been the most pernicious example of “fake news” in history. It would be part of the Nazi arsenal of myths that led to the Holocaust.

What Will Become of Ataturk's Legacy?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

 

The founder of the modern Turkish state, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, died eight decades ago, on Nov. 10, 1938.

But is his legacy now being buried alongside him in his Ankara mausoleum?

Ataturk, known originally as Mustafa Kemal, built the Turkish Republic on the ruins of the decayed Ottoman Empire, which was defeated and stripped of its remaining\Middle Eastern possessions in World War I. It was a time of great danger for the Turkish nation itself.

The victorious Allied powers planned to take possession of its capital, Istanbul, the old Greek city of Constantinople, and even place much of its Anatolian heartland in the hands of foreign powers.

The Treaty of Sèvres was imposed on the defeated Ottoman Empire in 1920. Under its provisions, the Turks were obliged to cede much of Anatolia to Greeks, Armenians, and Kurds, as well as to Britain, France and Italy, which would possess zones of influence.

What particularly rankled the Turks was the clause giving Greece control over a large area of western Turkey, including the city of Smyrna (now Izmir).

Mustafa Kemal demanded that the Turks fight, and the subsequent war with Greece resulted in a Turkish victory. Armenian forces were also defeated.

In 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne was signed, overturning the previous agreements, and resulting in total independence for the new Republic of Turkey. Mustafa Kemal became the country’s first president and would remain its leader until his death.

In creating a modern secular state, he ushered in reforms that modernized Turkey. He banished religion from the public sphere and looked westwards to Europe for inspiration.

Mustafa Kemal abolished the caliphate, thus separating religion from politics. He introduced the Latin alphabet for the Turkish language, ordering all newspapers, books, and street signs printed in the new script.

He gave women the right to vote and take jobs in business and government. In 1934, the Turkish assembly gave Mustafa Kemal the name Atatürk, or “Father of the Turks.”

But Ataturk’s policy of state secularism was controversial, and he was accused of decimating important cultural traditions. It was viewed by his opponents as a form of anti-clericalism, destroying the Islamic cultural basis of Turkish nationhood.

Are such people now reversing Ataturk’s work, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan now ruling the country in the manner of an Ottoman sultan?

Erdogan’s governing Justice and Development (AK) Party could reshape Turkey for years to come. In March 2014, Erdogan released a video suggesting he was leading Turkey’s “second war of independence,” shortly after an AKP press release referred to him as the “builder of Turkey.”

Erdogan has said one of his goals is to forge a “pious generation” in predominantly Muslim Turkey “that will work for the construction of a new civilisation.” Religion classes have been made compulsory for children in public schools.

All of this involves returning Turks to their natural state of religiosity before Ataturk had changed them from what they were and always had been.

His recent speeches have emphasised Turkey’s Ottoman history and domestic achievements over Western ideas and influences.

Under the AKP, the government’s Diyanet (Directorate of Religious Affairs), which trains imams, administers mosques and religious schools, and oversees Friday sermons, doubled its staff, with its annual budget increasing more than fourfold. 

Since November 2017, the national police have been monitoring online commentary on religion and suppressing freedom of expression when they find such commentary “offensive to Islam.”

All these new measures bode ill for the Kemalist tradition of secularism. Given the increasingly Islamic Turkey Erdogan has built – he calls it the “New Turkey” -- the country today looks less and less like a liberal European democracy.

Said one AKP advisor to the author Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, “We need to carry Mr. Ataturk to his grave again.”

Poland’s Jews in an Independent Poland

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

For the long-suffering Polish nation, which had lost its sovereignty by the end of the 18^th century, the end of the First World War entailed more than an end to the fighting.

November 11, 1918, the date of the armistice that ended what was then called The Great War, also provided a promise to recreate a sovereign Polish state, with its large Jewish population.

Jewish settlement on the territory that comprises modern day Poland can be traced back more than 1,000 years with the settlement of Jews seeking relief from persecution in Western and Central Europe.

The medieval Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had been one of Europe’s largest states. At the turn of the 17th century, its population of some seven million comprised 4.5 million Poles, the rest being Lithuanians, Jews and Ukrainian Ruthenians. By the beginning of the partitions, about ten percent of the population was Jewish, and part of the fabric of Polish life.

Though Poland was created as a nation state, it promised to protect the integrity of minorities within its borders. The Minorities Treaties had been drawn up between the Allied victors, on the one hand, and 14 newly created or expanded states in Europe and the Middle East, including Poland.  

They governed eligibility for citizenship in the latter states and granted citizens belonging to racial, religious, or linguistic minorities certain collective rights, including protection by the state for their members to use minority languages; and the right for them to establish and control educational, religious, and social welfare institutions.

Jews throughout the world greeted the treaties with enthusiasm, believing that the policies would inaugurate a new era of security -- but their hopes were soon dashed. Efforts in the 1920s to invoke the treaties and enlist the League of Nations to stop various anti-Semitic actions, including pogroms, brought no tangible results. 

In September 1934 Poland unilaterally renounced its obligations under its treaty, as political anti-Semitism increased during the decade.

Between the two world wars the Jewish population, which lived mostly in urban centres, comprised almost 10 per cent. Anti-Jewish boycott agitation grew as the economic situation deteriorated during the depression. Right-wing parties, especially the National Democrats (Narodowa Demokracja, or Endecja), with the silent approval of the authorities, pointed at the Jews as the cause of the distress. 

Jews could not work in the civil service, few were public school teachers, almost no Jews were railroad workers, and no Jews worked in state-controlled banks or monopolies. There was also discrimination and exclusion of Jews at the universities, including the creation of “ghetto benches.” 

Quotas introduced in 1937 in some universities halved the number of Jews by the late 1930s. The restrictions were so inclusive that, while Jews made up 20.4 per cent of the student body in 1928, by 1937 their share was down to only 7.5 per cent.

Between 1935 and 1937 seventy-nine Jews were killed and 500 injured in anti-Jewish incidents. Escalating hostility towards Polish Jews and an official Polish government desire to remove Jews from Poland continued until the German invasion in 1939.

On the eve of the Second World War, Poland was home to over three million Jews, making it the second-largest community in the world. Warsaw, the capital, had a population of over 300,000 Jews, more than 30 per cent of the population of the city.

The war was a disaster for Poland, of course, since as many as six million people – more than one-fifth of its overall population of 35 million in 1939 -- were murdered by the Nazis. 

The death toll included the mass slaughter of the country’s Jewish community, which had numbered about 3.3 million people, and had constituted one-tenth of Poland’s prewar population. 

The liquidation of Polish Jewry during the Holocaust, followed by an anti-Semitic campaign that drove thousands of Jews from the country in 1968, meant that for decades the community existed mostly as a fading memory.

Since the end of Communism, the small Jewish community in Poland has been able to reassert its identity and begin the process of rebuilding.

It is difficult to determine an exact figure for the Jewish population of contemporary Poland.  The Jewish community is primarily concentrated in Warsaw, but there are also communities in Kraków, Lodz, Szczecin, Gdansk, Katowice and Wroclaw. 

Over the past 25 years there has been a reawakening of Jewish consciousness, and the contemporary Polish Jewish community is estimated to have between 10,000 and 20,000 members.

Poland’s Independence After a Century

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlotttown, PEI] Guardian

For the long-suffering Polish nation, which had lost its sovereignty by the end of the 18^th century, the end of the First World War entailed more than an end to the fighting.

November 11, 1918, the date of the armistice that ended what was then called The Great War, also provided a promise to recreate a sovereign Polish state.

The three empires that had partitioned the country – Austria-Hungary, Prussian Germany, and tsarist Russia -- all fell victim to defeat and revolution.

Out of the rubble of the First World War were born new states. Some, like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, were multi-national. The others, including Poland, were created as nation states. 

However, they all promised to protect the integrity of minorities within their borders. The Minorities Treaties were drawn up between the victorious Allies, and 14 newly created or expanded states in Europe and the Middle East, including Poland.  

They governed eligibility for citizenship in the latter states and granted citizens belonging to racial, religious, or linguistic minorities certain collective rights, including protection by the state for their members to use minority languages; and the right for them to establish and control educational, religious, and social welfare institutions.

But efforts in the 1920s to invoke the treaties and enlist the League of Nations to stop discrimination brought no tangible results. In September 1934 Poland unilaterally renounced its obligations under its treaty.

After the 1918 armistice, the Allied Supreme Council, which was determining the frontiers of the re-established Polish state, had created a temporary boundary marking the eastern frontier of Poland, known as the Curzon Line.

However, the Russo-Polish War of 1919-1920, in which Poland was victorious, provided Poland with almost 135,000 square kilometres of land east of the Curzon Line. Most of its inhabitants were not Polish but Belarusian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian.

Overall, a full 31 per cent of the population were non-Polish minorities. Of these, according to the 1931 census, 15 per cent were Ukrainians, 8.5 per cent Jews, and 4.7 per cent Belarusians. 

The Second World War was a disaster for Poland, of course, since as many as six million people – more than one-fifth of its overall population of 35 million in 1939 -- were murdered by the Nazis. The postwar 1946 census found just 23,930,000 people left in the country.

The death toll included the mass slaughter of the country’s Jewish community, which numbered about 3.3 million people, and had constituted one-tenth of Poland’s prewar population. 

As well, Poland lost its large eastern territories, inhabited largely by non-Polish minorities, to the Soviet Union, as its border was moved westward along a line almost equivalent to the Curzon Line.

But it gained new territories in the west, wrested from Germany – and in the process expelled about five million Germans from those lands, in what we today would call “ethnic cleansing,” replacing them with Poles displaced from the lost eastern territories.

So, in a sense, it was two of the greatest mass murderers in history, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, who “solved” Poland’s minority “problem,” and thus paved the way for today’s Poland.

The “dirty secret” of Polish homogeneity is that it is the war, with its genocide, ethnic cleansing and massive war crimes, that made the country one of the most ethnically and religiously uniform nations in Europe.

Today around 98 per cent of the population of 38.4 million identifies as ethnically Polish, and 87 per cent belong to the Roman Catholic Church.