Donald Trump is happy, and so are his acolytes. It does not matter that the US president, true to form, has been taking recourse to hyperbole in informing the world that what he has been doing to bring about an end to the horrors in Gaza is unprecedented in history. He and his friends in America, Israel, and elsewhere believe the accord signed in Sharm-el-Sheikh on Monday will have lasting peace descend on the Middle East.
People around the world, being cynical about such a rush to conclusions, can only wait to see if Trump’s 20-point plan actually causes a difference in the Middle East or turns out to be another exercise in futility. Besides, there is the matter of what, if anything of substance, the plan has on offer for Palestinians. The peculiar bit in all this brouhaha over the Sharm-el-Sheikh deal is that nowhere is there any mention of the sufferings Palestinians were relentlessly subjected to by Israel in the past two years.
The emphasis is on Hamas. It is on the return of the remaining Israeli hostages seized by Hamas in October 2023. It is about the release of nearly 2,000 Palestinians imprisoned in an arbitrary manner by the Israeli authorities. But there is nothing in the accord that relates to the issue of illegal Jewish settlements on occupied Arab land.
Those settlements, in clear defiance of international law, continue to be built by Israel. In the accord, there is no mention of the genocide that has been perpetrated in Gaza since 2023. Close to 70,000 Palestinians have perished in Gaza, more than 20,000 of whom were children.
In Washington, Tel Aviv, and other capitals, these murdered Palestinians are as good as forgotten -- which, again, is a reminder to the world of the many times and many ways in which people caught up in conflict or targeted by vicious state forces have generally been forgotten.
Few have been the instances where the merchants of death have been made to account for their crimes. The Nazis in Nuremberg and the Japanese imperialists in Tokyo were brought to justice. But elsewhere? Hitler’s henchmen paid for the crime of pushing as many as 6 millionJews to death in the gas chambers. But in the course of the war, between 50 and 55 million German civilians were killed, most of them through Allied bombing of such cities as Dresden and Berlin.
The problem with conflict situations is that few, if any, inquiries are made into the killings of innocent civilians. The Nazis were punished for the genocide they committed, but no inquiry commission was set up to identify the civilians killed or in what conditions they lost their lives. Which takes one back to another disturbing aspect of the Second World War, namely, the death of 27 million Soviet citizens as well as military personnel.
The Soviet Union paid the highest price in the war. But how much of that tale of horror does the world remember? Who dwells on the hell let loose on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by America’s Truman administration? In the course of the Vietnam War, the period being 1960 to 1975, anywhere between 1.1 million and 2 million Vietnamese civilians lost their lives. Thousands of combatants among the North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese and Vietcong perished, along with 58,000 US soldiers.
Human nature is naturally drawn to the history of conflict, to the segregation of victor from vanquished. In Gaza, the false narrative peddled by Benjamin Netanyahu and his friends is that Israel fought a war there. The truth is something else, absolutely glaring.
The tens of thousands of Palestinians killed were not enemy combatants, but helpless civilians whose homes were destroyed and whose lives were put to the torch. Will this reality be recalled by historians in the future, by experts keen to educate the world on geopolitics?
There are, besides the casualties piling up in conflicts perpetrated by states against people not part of their society, regimes which have with impunity gone about murdering their own citizens for reasons of narrow political interests.
The death of between 1million and 2million Indonesians at the hands of the Indonesian military and its followers -- in the aftermath of the tragedy let loose on 30 September 1965 -- has never been explained in the 60 years which have elapsed since then.
The Indonesians were murdered on suspicion of being communists or communist sympathizers once General Suharto and his cabal seized power and pushed President Ahmed Sukarno into irrelevance. Suharto ran a kleptocratic regime for more than three decades. Neither he nor his successors have ever demonstrated the moral courage to explain or investigate the physical elimination of such a vast number of their own citizens at the hands of their own military and its cohorts.
In Bangladesh, a reported 3 million people died in the nine-month genocide perpetrated by the Pakistan army in 1971. None of the men charged with committing the crime were tried, even though the Bangladesh government originally planned to try 195 of Pakistan’s military officers. They were all permitted to go back to Pakistan as a result of the Bangladesh-India-Pakistan tripartite agreement of April 1974. Even today, Bangladesh’s people remember with profound reverence their compatriots killed in the war.
In every conflict, be it war or a consequence of questionable political decisions, it is unarmed men, women and children who see their lives draw to a sudden bloody end. The cataclysm caused by the partition of India in 1947 led to the death of 2 million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs and the displacement of a staggering 14 million forced to leave their ancestral homes and settle in countries they were strangers to.
In Cambodia, following the takeover of the state by the Khmer Rouge, 2 million people died as a consequence of the harsh measures imposed on citizens by the new rulers of the country. In Timor-Leste, formerly East Timor, between 60,000 and 308,000 people lost their lives during the brutal occupation of the country by Indonesia from 1975 to 1999.
Wars, civil wars, and sectarian conflict have been part of history since the beginning of human life on Earth. Millions have gone to their graves through the pig-headed policies of military rulers and short-sighted politicians. In the process, the innocent, including soldiers and civilians, have suffered grievously. In the First World War, between 9-22 million soldiers died in defence of their nations. And with them perished between 6-13 million civilians.
The brutality of conflict was intensified in the Second World War when, of the nearly 85 millioncasualties, 40 million related to civilians. In the long-running war between successive Sri Lankan governments and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), between 40,000 and 200,000 people, mostly Tamils, perished.
In Bangladesh in 1971, besides the millions killed by Pakistan’s forces, between 9,000 and 25,000 Pakistani soldiers died in battle against the Mukti Bahini. In the final phase of the war, when India and Pakistan became entangled in direct military conflict, between 3,000 and 5,000 Indian soldiers lost their lives.
Human memory, we have been informed time and again, is about not forgetting. Yet there is the propensity on our part, when we dwell on the factors that have taken history down a variety of twisted paths through millennia, to not remember, or recall with callous indifference, the men, women and children whose lives were brought to a sudden and brutal end by powerful individuals obsessed by delusions of grandeur for themselves and for their countries.
In Gaza, there is talk of peace, of reconstruction. But about the innocent dead, there is deafening silence ... of the kind which hangs low over their hastily dug graves in a land where life is trapped in the rubble and debris of a war these dead did not initiate.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is an author and writes on politics and foreign affairs.