France's war in Algeria explored in Paris exhibitionBy Hugh Schofield
BBC News, Paris
16 Jun 2012

On the 50th anniversary of Algerian independence, it might seem an odd choice to mount an exhibition marking 130 years of French colonial rule over the country.

But at the Army Museum at the Invalides in Paris, that is exactly what they have done.

Algeria 1830-1962 is a look back over France's long military presence there.

It starts with the arrival of an invading force at Sidi-Farruch in June 1830, and ends with the ignominious post-independence pull-out.

Visitors are treated to historic relics such as the ceremonial keys to the city of Algiers and the spurs of rebel leader AbdelKader.

But by far the greatest interest lies in the second part of the exhibition, which deals exclusively with the eight-year war of independence.

'Very sensitive questions'

Fortunately, this is no tub-thumping homage to "our-men-in-khaki" of the kind normally associated with military museums.

On the contrary, it is an honest attempt to understand a traumatic period of history which affected millions of people in sharply different ways.

"Our conception was to place the Algeria war in its long-term context," said Colonel Christophe Bertrand, the exhibition's curator.

"Obviously the emphasis is on the last eight years of France's presence, but a lot of what went on in the war can only be explained by what happened before.

"The story we tell is not one of brave paratroopers fighting nasty fellagha [bandits]. It is a story punctuated by phases of terrible violence, in which it is impossible to avoid some very sensitive questions."

The Algeria war began with a series of bomb attacks carried out by the National Liberation Front (FLN) in November 1954.

Since 1881 the country had been administered (unlike Morocco and Tunisia) as an integral part of France, with departments, communes and French place-names like Philippeville and Oran.

There were also around one million European settlers - not just French but also Italians, Spanish and Maltese - and a large indigenous community of Jews.

The war passed through various stages

a) helicopter-borne raids on the rural maquis [insurgents] of FLN's armed wing, the National Liberation Army (ALN)

b) sealing off the borders with Tunisia and Morocco

c) the so-called battle of Algiers against urban bomb-planters

Then came the Challe offensive of 1959 which effectively finished the ALN as a fighting force, and the hearts-and-minds campaign of the Constantine Plan which took army doctors and teachers out into the remote countryside.

For many historians, the irony is that, from a purely military point of view, the French army won.

But by the end of the 1950s, military victory had ceased to count.

Thousands dead

To Gen Charles de Gaulle - who took power in 1958 - it was obvious that the vast majority of Algerians supported national independence, while mainland French simply wanted the sorry story to end.

Talks with the FLN began as early as June 1960, prompting an angry backlash by the European settlers. There were riots in Algiers, and in 1961 part of the army there staged an unsuccessful military coup.


Peace was signed at Evian in March 1962. Independence officially arrived on 5 July, though it is hard to pinpoint one day in what was in fact a long and often violent process.

One million settlers - the pieds-noirs - were uprooted and transported to France.

And a far worse fate lay in store for the tens of thousands of Algerians who had fought on the side of France. Some 30,000 harkis - and possibly many more - were massacred by the new Algerian authorities.

Lucky Algerian loyalists made it to France, though once there the indifference towards them shown by de Gaulle's government was a bewildering humiliation.

Today arguments rage over casualty figures for the war, but here are the numbers offered in a recent book by British historian Martin Evans, Algeria - France's Undeclared War

- Algerian fighters killed by French army: 140,000
- Algerian civilians killed in French military operations: 60,000
- Algerians killed by FLN: 37,000
- Harkis killed at end of war: 30,000 (though some say 150,000)
- French troops killed in action: 15,500
- Settlers killed in FLN terrorism: 2,800
- Victims (mainly Algerian) of settler terrorism in 1962: 1,700
- All this is told in the exhibition, which draws on the army's own extensive film archives as well as photographs, uniforms, weapons and captured FLN documents.

A Disaster

There is no hiding the FLN's use of terrorism and murder to force Algerians to drop their allegiance to the French.

But nor does the museum avoid the vexed issue of France's own use of torture, which is now known to have been routine.

Previously unpublished photographs show a man trussed up and slung beneath a wooden bar being beaten on the soles of his feet. In another, French officers grip a prisoner by the throat

"If we had, we would have completely lost our credibility."

Testament to the exhibition's success is that it is drawing in visitors of all backgrounds. Not all are happy, but they are certainly fascinated.

One pied-noir, now in his 80s, was angry at the portrayal of the war: "Why rake it all up again? It was a disaster, and now look at the mess the Algerian government has made of the country."

There are also many young Algerians, keen to see a version of their history outside their official textbooks, and French army veterans, from among 1.4 million conscripts who saw service in the war.

"There is no one truth about the Algeria war," said the museum's director Gen Christian Baptiste.

"There are many truths, and we have done our best to reflect all of them.

"The difficulty is that even after 50 years the suffering is still very raw. In many cases, the pain has been handed down from one generation to the next."

'Condemned to co-exist'

The past does indeed still cast a shadow over France's relationship with Algeria. Though the two countries are bound together by a web of human and economic ties, somehow the suspicion never disappears.

In recent years an attempt to draw up a Treaty of Friendship has come to nothing, largely because of Algeria's insistence that France first commit some act of official contrition.

But such an act is most unlikely to emerge.

"Acts of repentance for specific events are one thing but a general statement of repentance is meaningless," said historian Maurice Vaisse.

"Algeria was part of the global historical phenomenon of colonialism. Of course France profited greatly from it and there were great injustices, but by the time France left, Algeria was a developed country with elements of a modern economy.

"Many terrible things happened, but they were also committed on the Algerian side."

For historian Benjamin Stora, France and Algeria are "condemned to co-exist".

"But it is true that the question of memory is a problem," he adds.

"They say that memory divides. Only history heals. That is why it is the task of historians and politicians to tell the full story - from all sides."

The Army Museum's exhibition is part of that process.

Tiananmen revisited - interview with Ezra Vogel (5 Jun 2012, ST)

THE day was June 4, 1989. American Sinologist Ezra Vogel was, as he puts it, 'furious' as he watched on television Chinese soldiers firing on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square.

Beijing's crackdown on the student-led protesters was a 'terrible tragedy', says Professor Vogel, an emeritus don in social sciences at Harvard University.

The man many blamed for the bloodbath was paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, who had ordered the crackdown.

Yet when Prof Vogel sat down in 2000 to begin writing a dispassionate biography of Deng, he found 'a logic' in how and why Deng did what he did.

He says Deng, already 84 years old in 1989, had to quell a 'perfect storm' of factors that threatened to derail his 10-year effort to modernise China. The storm had started two months earlier with the sudden death of widely respected former Communist Party of China (CPC) chief Hu Yaobang.

Deng sanctioned no public unrest and reviled anyone he felt was disloyal to China and the CPC. He had fallen out with Hu, whom he considered too liberal on political and economic reforms.

The paramount leader's stance angered Hu's many admirers, who were mostly students and poorly paid workers. They were buckling under soaring inflation, which Deng felt then Premier and CPC general secretary Zhao Ziyang had failed to manage. Deng's differing views with Zhao on reforms hastened their split in May 1989.

Prof Vogel, 81, shared these views with The Straits Times last week, on the eve of the 23rd anniversary of the June 4 incident. Chinese officials say about 200 people, including many soldiers, were killed. Prof Vogel, was here for two weeks as the Singapore Management University's Ho Bee Professor in Chinese Economy and Business.

After more than a decade of research, Prof Vogel published his 745-page book in September last year. Titled simply Deng Xiaoping And The Transformation Of China, it received mixed reviews.

Many praised his even-handed approach to the steely, taciturn pragmatist who set China on the path to economic supremacy. But critics found him too sympathetic to Deng. They were riled most by Prof Vogel's conclusion on the June 4 events: 'What we do know is that in the two decades after Tiananmen, China enjoyed relative stability and rapid - even spectacular - economic growth... than at any time in Chinese history.'

Of his critics, Prof Vogel says: 'Many... were reporters in Tiananmen Square on June 4 and Deng did such a horrible thing that they see anyone who explains why he did it, and how China has grown rapidly since, as soft and dumb.'

Deng, a thrice-married Sichuanese and father of five, went in 70 years from leading a small county to steering south-west China and then the entire country. Along the way, he was purged twice from the CPC, first for supposedly being a capitalist and then for being a counter-revolutionary. But Deng, who Mao Zedong once likened to a needle in a ball of cotton, rolled with the many political punches.

Ironically, Prof Vogel learnt none of this from Deng himself.

The closest he got to the leader was seeing him from across a crowded room. Also, Deng wrote almost none of his thoughts down, having learnt from his days in the underground not to leave paper trails that might damn him.

Does all this not leave his book wanting? Prof Vogel responds: 'I don't think I missed that much. Even if I had met him, he wouldn't have told me all the answers to the key questions, such as 'What were you thinking on June 4?', 'What did you really think of Mao?' and 'How did you take power?''

Still, he allows, he is 'not 100 per cent sure' about his interpretation of Deng, even after having interviewed Deng's youngest daughter Deng Rong, China's former president Jiang Zemin and Singapore's former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, among others.

Prof Vogel says Mr Lee, in particular, helped shape his reading of Deng's controversial 1979 invasion of Vietnam. Many had charged that Deng did that just to gain control of China's army; at that time, many of the country's high military officials were still in thrall of the late Mao and were resisting Deng, who they believed would betray China by making it embrace capitalism.

But Mr Lee, who discussed Deng only once with Prof Vogel some time in 2002, gave a clear-eyed account of Deng's 'intense worries' that the Soviet Union, with Vietnam's help, would encircle China - with a view to conquering South-east Asia.

Deng not only told Mr Lee all this when he visited Singapore for the first time in November 1978, but also asked the Singapore leader to stress to the United States how imminent that threat was. Mr Lee did so. A year later, China invaded Vietnam, staunching the Soviet tide in Asia.


Prof Vogel first met Mr Lee in the early 1970s, when he hosted the then Prime Minister at Harvard's East Asia Centre on the latter's official trip to the US. The Harvard don found Mr Lee 'extremely bright, vigorous and a real intellectual as well as a confident leader'.

And, he adds, although Mr Lee was 19 years younger than Deng, the latter respected Mr Lee for what he had done with Singapore. 'Deng was learning more from Mr Lee than vice versa,' says Prof Vogel, 'because by then, Singapore's leaders had a more settled political structure and learnt how to keep their city attractive'.

With such lessons in hand, Deng steered China to economic success. Who might be its next Deng, then?

Prof Vogel says: 'Nobody - and it's not just a question of talent; it's structural.

'Deng was a revolutionary and war hero who came to power in an unstructured time, so he had a special authority. But people in office in peacetime are not war heroes. It's a natural development.'

Is China's often corrupt nouveau riche a natural development of Deng's reforms too?

'Well, you could say that,' he allows, 'but just before he stepped down in 1992, somebody asked him about a corruption case and Deng said, 'We must move with two fists - one for pushing reform and the other for improper behaviour'.

The most notorious example of that today is the CPC's former top official in Chongqing, Bo Xilai and his lawyer wife, Gu Kailai. Prof Vogel says that with the hard-to-handle Bo gone, China's top and emerging leaders will now work together more closely to weed out corruption in their ranks and speed up political reform.

Prof Vogel is now in talks with China publisher San Lian to release a Chinese language version of his book in China.

He says: 'Many intellectuals in China would like to talk about the background to Tiananmen, but they would have more trouble than a foreigner would in doing so. So my book would hopefully increase the range of freedom they have to write about it

What happened to Mao's Revolution?

No-one in China is lower in the pecking order than farmers and villagers. When they migrate to cities to work in factories, they often live in squalor. So what happened to Mao Zedong's communist revolution which was supposed to improve the lot of the rural poor?

The rolling hills and rivers of Jiangxi province's Xunwu county in south-west China are picturesque, but this has long been one of the poorest places in the country.

That's why Mao Zedong came here for a month in 1930 - almost two decades before taking power. He visited the county seat, Changning, which was then a dusty little village of about 1,500 people, to see how the class system worked here.

The house where Mao stayed is now a museum. Visitors can gaze at the iron-frame bed where Mao slept, the desk where he worked, and the long table where he sat and talked with locals.

Mao met farmers, merchants, local officials, an imperial scholar, even disaffected youth. He noted, in colourful detail, who felt oppressed by whom, how the classes interacted, and how control of property was key to wealth and power.

Assisting Mao was a 24-year-old local named Gu Bo, the grandson of landowners. His family was renowned for sending many scholars over the centuries to serve the emperor. But Gu Bo wanted change.

"He thought the old system was unfair," says his grand-nephew, Gu Anjian, who lives in a village near Changning. "So once he joined the Communist revolution, he burned down his grandfather's house."

Gu Anjian chuckles affectionately. He's now a wizened 74-year-old, retired after serving 40 years as chief of his village. He sits at a round table in his kitchen with his brother, son and nephew, while the women in the family prepare lunch

He says Gu Bo and his brothers were all committed to revolutionary change in China. Four brothers went on the Long March with Mao. Three died. Gu Bo was killed in 1935 in an ambush, just a few years after working with Mao, believing that Communism was the best way forward to modernise China

China's Communist Party came to power promising to end the country's traditional class structure. As it turned out, it turned the class structure on its head. Scholars, landowners and merchants, the former privileged classes, were stripped of their rights, and sometimes of their lives. Villagers and workers were, for a time, elevated, in status and opportunity.

More than 60 years on, farmers and workers are again at the bottom of the heap, and while there's a growing middle class, China has one of the world's biggest and fastest-growing rates of income disparity.

The fortunes of the Gu family illustrate what's changed in China's class structure since Mao Zedong came here more than 80 years ago.

The family used to have more than its share of imperial scholars. Today, none of the Gu men at the kitchen table stayed in school beyond the age of 15.

Mao tried to abolish capitalism, but Gu Anjian's younger brother, Gu Anjia, is a keen capitalist: he traded steel abroad. I ask him what he thinks Gu Bo would have thought of him forging a career in capitalism.

"How would I know what he'd think?," he says, a little defensively. "Anyway, it was a state-run trading company I worked for - at least at first."


But in China, being connected to the state, or the Communist Party, doesn't mean you're not capitalist. More than 90% of China's richest people are Party members, according to the Hurun Report, which tracks the country's wealthy.

China's national anthem may exhort the downtrodden, "arise, those who refuse to be slaves," but these days, those who want to get rich join the Party, and the Party wants the rich to join it. That way, wealth stays concentrated in the hands of its members, who have little incentive to change the system.

The richest 75 members of China's legislature, the National People's Congress, have an average net worth of $1.2bn.

The Gu family is not in those ranks. It may have sacrificed its sons for the Revolution, but the family now lives a simple village life. Gu Anjian's 36-year-old son, Gu Zisong, scoffs when I ask if the family is proud that their relative worked with Mao to try to make China more egalitarian.

"Pride? What pride? If there were any glory in it, we wouldn't live here," he says.

Gu Zisong makes his living growing oranges - a line of work that has helped pull many farmers in this area out of poverty, since it caught on seven or eight years ago. You can see their profits in the new concrete and brick houses rising up in the village.

Gu Zisong admits life here is better than when he was a child. Back then, he says, the village consisted of mudbrick houses with no electricity or indoor plumbing, and dirt roads that turned to muck in the rain. Now, the roads are good, and most homes have refrigerators, TVs, even the occasional computer - which allows them to see that their lives might have got better - but the elite in China are doing far better still.

Another member of the family, Gu Yuesheng, 34, runs a kindergarten down the street. He started out as a migrant worker, in a sweater factory in the city of Dongguan, 250 miles away.

"I didn't really like the city," he says. "People looked down on migrant workers." He says workers were so underpaid and overworked that strikes and protests were common, even though independent trade unions in China are illegal.

"My own boss was ok," Gu says. "But even in my factory, if you were a migrant worker, you could only move up so far. The good jobs went to local people."

So, when Gu Yuesheng had made a bit of money, he came back here, and started his own sweater factory. At its peak, he says, it employed more than 120 fellow villagers, and produced four million sweaters a year. The factory had to close last year, when too many foreign customers went too long without paying.

"It felt like falling off a cliff," he says, shaking his head ruefully.

Still, Gu Yuesheng is proud of having helped his fellow villagers get a leg up, without having to go through the hardship and humiliation he experienced as a migrant worker. His efforts have also pushed him nicely into China's middle class. It's a mobility villagers here didn't have at the time Mao visited.

But with wages and expectations rising, Gu Yuesheng doubts the next generation will find it as easy as it was for him, if they're not educated. That's what the kindergarten is about, he says - to help children from this village get a head start.

Listen to more on this story at PRI's The World , a co-production of the BBC World Service, Public Radio International, and WGBH in Boston.

China's Great Wall is 'longer than previously thought'

China's Great Wall is 'longer than previously thought' (6 June 2012, BBC News)

The Great Wall of China has been officially declared even longer than previously thought, state-run media report.

The wall measures 21,196.18km (13,170.6956 miles) long based on the latest state survey results, state-run news agency Xinhua reported on Tuesday.

A preliminary study released in 2009 estimated the wall to be 8,850km long.

The world's largest man-made structure was built to protect China's northern border.

This is the first time such a definitive figure has been released, Xinhua reports.

The State Administration of Cultural Heritage released the results based on an archaeological survey done since 2007.

Previous estimates of the wall's length were mainly based on historical records.

Tong Mingkang, deputy chief, said that the survey revealed a total of 43,721 heritage sites that included stretches of the Great Wall, reports Xinhua.

Known to the Chinese as the "Long Wall of 10,000 Li", the Great Wall is a series of walls and earthen works begun in 500BC and first linked up under Qin Shi Huang in about 220BC.

Only 8.2% of the original wall remains intact, with the rest in poor condition, according to the report.

It was listed as a Unesco world heritage site in 1987.

Great Wall of China 'even longer' 20 April 2009

The Great Wall of China is even greater than previously thought, according to the first detailed survey to establish the length of the ancient barricade.

A two-year government mapping study found that the wall spans 8,850km (5,500 miles) - until now, the length was commonly put at about 5,000km.

Previous estimates of its length were mainly based on historical records.

Infra-red and GPS technologies helped locate some areas concealed over time by sandstorms, state media said.

The project found that there were wall sections of 6,259km, 359km of trenches, and 2,232km of natural defensive barriers such as hills and rivers.

The study was carried out by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage and the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping.

Barricade

Experts said the newly-discovered sections of the wall were built during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), and stretch from Hu Mountain in northern Liaoning province to Jiayu Pass in western Gansu province.




The project will continue for another 18 months in order to map sections of the wall built during the Qin (221-206BC) and Han (206BC-9AD) Dynasties, the report said.

The wall, the world's largest man-made structure, was built to protect the northern border of the Chinese Empire.

Archaeologists had lobbied for the survey to be done to provide scholars with an accurate understanding of the construction.

Known to the Chinese as the "long Wall of 10,000 Li", the Great Wall is in fact a series of walls and earthen works begun in the 5th Century BC and first linked up under Qin Shi Huang in about 220BC.

It was listed as a Unesco world heritage site in 1987.

Nazi legacy: The troubled descendants

Nazi legacy: The troubled descendantsBy Frances Cronin

BBC News, 23 May 2012

Amon Goeth's daughter Monika only learned the true extent of her father's war crimes when she watched the film Schindler's List

The names of Himmler, Goering, Goeth and Hoess still have the power to evoke the horrors of Nazi Germany, but what is it like to live with the legacy of those surnames, and is it ever possible to move on from the terrible crimes committed by your ancestors?

When he was a child Rainer Hoess was shown a family heirloom.

He remembers his mother lifting the heavy lid of the fireproof chest with a large swastika on the lid, revealing bundles of family photos.

They featured his father as a young child playing with his brothers and sisters, in the garden of their grand family home.

The photos show a pool with a slide and a sand pit - an idyllic family setting - but one that was separated from the gas chambers of Auschwitz by just a few yards.

His grandfather Rudolf Hoess (not to be confused with Nazi deputy leader Rudolf Hess), was the first commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp. His father grew up in a villa adjoining the camp, where he and his siblings played with toys built by prisoners.

It was where his grandmother told the children to wash the strawberries they picked because they smelled of ash from the concentration camp ovens.

Rainer is haunted by the garden gate he spotted in the photos that went straight into the camp - he calls it the "gate to hell".

"It's hard to explain the guilt," says Rainer, "even though there is no reason I should bear any guilt, I still bear it. I carry the guilt with me in my mind.

"I'm ashamed too, of course, for what my family, my grandfather, did to thousands of other families.

"So you ask yourself, they had to die. I'm alive. Why am I alive? To carry this guilt, this burden, to try to come to terms with it.
"That must be the only reason I exist, to do what he should have done."

His father never abandoned the ideology he grew up with and Rainer no longer has contact with him, as he attempts to cope with his family's guilt and shame.

For Katrin Himmler, putting pen to paper was her way of coping with having Heinrich Himmler in her family.

"It's a very heavy burden having someone like that in the family, so close. It's something that just keeps hanging over you."

Himmler, key architect of the Holocaust, was her great-uncle, and her grandfather and his other brother were also in the Nazi party.

She wrote The Himmler Brothers: A German Family History, in a quest to "bring something positive" to the name of Himmler.

"I did my best to distance myself from it and to confront it critically. I no longer need to be ashamed of this family connection."

Rainer Hoess's father (c) plays in a sand pit in the family villa with a gate (r) that leads into Auschwitz

She says the descendants of the Nazi war criminals seem to be caught between two extremes.

"Most decide to cut themselves off entirely from their parents so that they can live their lives, so that the story doesn't destroy them.

"Or they decide on loyalty and unconditional love and sweep all the negative things away."

She says they all face the same question: "Can you really love them if you want to be honest and really know what they did or thought?"

Katrin thought she had a good relationship with her father until she started to research into the family's past. Her father found it very hard to talk about it.

"I could only understand how difficult it was for him when I realised how difficult it was for me to accept that my own grandmother was a Nazi.

"I really loved her, I was fond of her, it was very difficult when I found her letters and learned that she maintained contact with the old Nazis and that she sent a package to a war criminal sentenced to death. It made me feel sick."

Trying to find out exactly what happened in her family's past was hard for Monika Hertwig. She was a baby when her father Amon Goeth was tried and hanged for killing tens of thousands of Jews.

Goeth was the sadistic commander of Plaszow concentration camp, but Monika was brought up by her mother as if the horrors had never happened.

As a child she created a rose-tinted version of her father from family photos.

"I had this image I created [that] the Jews in Plaszow and Amon were one family."
But in her teens she questioned this view of her father and confronted her mother, who eventually admitted her father "may have killed a few Jews".

When she repeatedly asked how many, her mother "became like a madwoman" and whipped her with an electric cable.

It was the film Schindler's List that brought home the full horror of her father's crimes.

Goeth was played by Ralph Fiennes and Monika says watching it "was like being struck".

"I kept thinking this has to stop, at some point they have to stop shooting, because if it doesn't stop I'll go crazy right here in this theatre."

She left the cinema suffering from shock.

For Bettina Goering, the great-niece of Hitler's designated successor Hermann Goering, she felt she needed to take drastic action to deal with her family's legacy.

Both she and her brother chose to be sterilised.

"We both did it... so that there won't be any more Goerings," she explains.

"When my brother had it done, he said to me 'I cut the line'."

Disturbed by her likeness to her great-uncle, she left Germany more than 30 years ago and lives in a remote home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

"It's easier for me to deal with the past of my family from this great distance," she explains.

While Bettina decided to travel far from the site of her relatives' crimes, Rainer Hoess decided he had to visit the heart of his family's shame - Auschwitz.

As a child he was not allowed on school trips to Auschwitz because of his surname, but as an adult in his forties, he felt the need to face "the reality of the horror and the lies I've had all these years in my family".

Seeing his father's childhood home he broke down and kept repeating the word "insanity".
"It's insane what they built here at the expense of others and the gall to say it never happened."

He could not speak when he saw the "gate to hell". In the visitors centre he encountered the raw emotion of descendants of camp victims.

One young Israeli girl broke down as she told him his grandfather had exterminated her family - she could not believe he had chosen to face them.

As Rainer spoke about his guilt and shame, a former Auschwitz prisoner at the back at the room asked if he could shake his hand.

They embraced as Zvika told Rainer how he gives talks to young people, but tells them the relatives are not to blame as they were not there.

For Rainer this was a major moment in dealing with the burden of his family's guilt.

"To receive the approval of someone who survived those horrors and knows for sure that it wasn't you, that you didn't do it.

"For the first time you don't feel fear or shame but happiness, joy, inner joy."

Zvika, holocaust survivor, embraces Rainer Hoess

Bettina Goering chose to be sterilised to ensure the family name did not continue

Schindler's List featured Amon Goeth as a major character

Remembering May 13: Breaking his silence on a day of tumult

Students marching in the streets in May 1955, with a banner reading 'Victory Parade' in Chinese. They had camped out for a week at Chung Cheng High School and The Chinese High School - both of which had been temporarily closed since May 13 that year - in defiance of the colonial government. -- PHOTOS: ST FILE, LIM CHIN JOO, SEAH KWANG PENG

Mr Lim Chin Joo (seated at table, third from left) as a student leader meeting then Chief Minister Lim Yew Hock (with pipe in hand) over the students' camp-in in 1956. -- PHOTOS: ST FILE, LIM CHIN JOO, SEAH KWANG PENG


For years, retired lawyer Lim Chin Joo has been reluctant to go public on an important phase of his life - the time in the 1950s when he was involved in the Chinese middle school students' movement and was arrested for alleged pro-communist activities.

By Leong Weng Kam, Senior Writer
The younger brother of the late leftist trade unionist and politician Lim Chin Siong never accepted invitations to speak at forums or entertained the press for interviews.
Locked up between 1956 and 1966, he studied law while in detention, started practising in 1973 and retired in 1998.

Now 75, and president of the Ee Hoe Hean Club, a gentlemen's club for Chinese businessmen, he has deliberately stayed out of the limelight.

So many were surprised by a notice in the Chinese daily Lianhe Zaobao last week, saying he would be speaking today about the three years he spent at The Chinese High School between 1954 and 1956.
The Chinese High School is now part of Hwa Chong Institution. Mr Lim's talk is being jointly organised by the Confucianism Society (Singapore), South Seas Society and the Federation of Chinese Schools' Alumni.

It was Professor Tan Eng Chaw, president of the Confucianism Society and South Seas Society, an academic group, who persuaded him to talk about his turbulent student days to mark the anniversary of Singapore's May 13, 1954 incident.

That day, Chinese middle school students clashed with riot police for the first time. The group was making its way to Government House, now the Istana, to hand a petition to the governor seeking exemption from conscription.

More than 26 people were injured, including a policeman. Some 45 students were arrested after scuffles which led to a mass anti-colonial movement, a political force which helped hasten the process of Singapore obtaining self-government and independence.

'I agreed to speak on the Chinese middle school students' movement which happened more than half a century ago in response to the Government's recent call to build an inclusive society,' Mr Lim told The Sunday Times last week. 'I believe there should be no monopoly of ideas or views by any group or individual.'

In the past, he noted, there were fears that topics such as the leftist student movement were taboo. Most people, especially those involved in past events, had chosen to remain silent.
Mr Lim said he was encouraged to open up now after the recent publication of a number of books on the cause of the Chinese middle school students in the 1950s and 1960s.

They include Xiao Yao You, a collection of interviews in Chinese on the Chinese student activities between 1945 and 1965 put together by The Tangent, a bilingual civil society group, two months ago.
On reading the books, he found there were different versions of what had happened.
'I have developed the urge to offer my version too, being a participant and witness of that part of Singapore history,' he said.

In his talk today, he will speak on why he believes the May 13 incident represented 'a breakthrough in the oppressive atmosphere in Singapore following the declaration of the Emergency in 1948'.
A State of Emergency declared by the colonial government to crack down on the Malayan Communist Party and its sympathisers, which started in Malaya, was extended to Singapore in June 1948. It ended only in 1960.

The Chinese students' petition against conscription, Mr Lim pointed out, questioned openly the legitimacy of colonial rule.

In April 1954, the colonial government had announced that all males between the ages of 18 and 22 were required to register for national service. They included many over-age Chinese middle school students.
But most important of all, he said, the May 13 event brought unity between the students and workers who supported the newly formed political party, the People's Action Party (PAP), led by Mr Lee Kuan Yew, a young lawyer then, and leftist trade unionists such as Mr Lim's elder brother, Chin Siong, and Fong Swee Suan, who were both active in the bus workers' union.

'Without the support of the students, the trade unions and their workers, the PAP could not have swept into power so easily in the 1959 election,' he said.

Mr Lee has a similar view. In his 1998 memoir, The Singapore Story, the former prime minister said his introduction to the world of the Chinese-educated came after the May 13 incident.

It was through the students who sought his help as a lawyer to defend those charged with obstructing police during the incident that Mr Lee got to know Lim Chin Siong and Fong Swee Suan.

With their support, the PAP won over the majority Chinese-speaking working-class population and won the crucial 1959 election to form the government.

Mr Lim Chin Joo will also describe the three student camp-ins at The Chinese High School and Chung Cheng High School between June 1954 and October 1956 to protest against a series of actions by the colonial government.

They included the temporary closure of both schools on the eve of the Hock Lee bus riots in May 1955, and the banning of the Singapore Chinese Middle Schools Students' Union (SCMSSU) in October 1956, barely a year after it was formed.

Mr Lim was expelled from The Chinese High after police forcibly dispersed the third camp-in on Oct 26, 1956, over the de-registration of SCMSSU. He was among 100 students expelled, ending their 16-day protest on the school grounds.

He joined the leftist General Employees' Union as a paid secretary shortly after, but was arrested by the Lim Yew Hock government for alleged Communist United Front activities in August 1957, a charge he denies to this day.

Reflecting on his eventful youth, Mr Lim said he had kept his views on that period to himself for far too long.

'Those who have witnessed the course of history have a duty to leave behind their memories,' he added.
wengkam@sph.com.sg

Mr Lim Chin Joo's talk, in Mandarin, on his three years at the former The Chinese High School will be held at Hwa Chong Institution's High School Auditorium (Clock Tower Block) today at 2.30pm and 4.30pm. Admission is free

Kahlil Gibran

Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet: Why is it so loved?By Shoku Amirani & Stephanie Hegarty

BBC World Service

Kahlil Gibran is said to be one of the world's bestselling poets, and his life has inspired a play touring the UK and the Middle East. But many critics have been lukewarm about his merits. Why, then, has his seminal work, The Prophet, struck such a chord with generations of readers? Since it was published in 1923, The Prophet has never been out of print. The perennial classic has been translated into more than 50 languages and is a staple on international bestseller lists. It is thought to have sold tens of millions of copies.

Although practically ignored by the literary establishment in the West, lines from the book have inspired song lyrics, political speeches and have been read out at weddings and funerals all around the world. "It serves various occasions or big moments in one's life so it tends to be a book that is often gifted to a lover, or for a birth, or death. That is why it has spread so widely, and by word of mouth," says Dr Mohamed Salah Omri, lecturer in Modern Arabic literature at Oxford University. The Beatles, John F Kennedy and Indira Gandhi are among those who have been influenced by its words.

"This book has a way of speaking to people at different stages in their lives. It has this magical quality, the more you read it the more you come to understand the words," says Reverend Laurie Sue, an interfaith minister in New York who has conducted hundreds of weddings with readings from The Prophet. "But it is not filled with any kind of dogma, it is available to anyone whether they are Jewish or Christian or Muslim."

The book is made up of 26 prose poems, delivered as sermons by a wise man called Al Mustapha. He is about to set sail for his homeland after 12 years in exile on a fictional island when the people of the island ask him to share his wisdom on the big questions of life: love, family, work and death. Its popularity peaked in the 1930s and again in the 1960s when it became the bible of the counter culture.

"Many people turned away from the establishment of the Church to Gibran," says Professor Juan Cole, historian of the Middle East at Michigan University who has translated several of Gibran's works from Arabic. "He offered a dogma-free universal spiritualism as opposed to orthodox religion, and his vision of the spiritual was not moralistic. In fact, he urged people to be non-judgmental."

Despite the immense popularity of his writing, or perhaps because of it, The Prophet was panned by many critics in the West who thought it simplistic, naive and lacking in substance.

"In the West, he was not added to the canon of English literature," says Cole. "Even though his major works were in English after 1918, and though he is one of bestselling poets in American history, he was disdained by English professors."

"He was looked down upon as, frankly, a 'bubblehead' by Western academics, because he appealed to the masses. I think he has been misunderstood in the West. He is certainly not a bubblehead, in fact his writings in Arabic are in a very sophisticated style.

"There is no doubt he deserves a place in the Western canon. It is strange to teach English literature and ignore a literary phenomenon."

Gibran was a painter as well as a writer by training and was schooled in the symbolist tradition in Paris in 1908. He mixed with the intellectual elite of his time, including figures such as WB Yeats, Carl Jung and August Rodin, all of whom he met and painted. Symbolists such as Rodin and the English poet and artist William Blake, who was a big influence on Gibran, favoured romance over realism and it was a movement that was already passe in the 1920s as modernists such as TS Eliot and Ezra Pound were gaining popularity. He painted more than 700 pictures, watercolours and drawings but because most of his paintings were shipped back to Lebanon after his death, they have been overlooked in the West. Professor Suheil Bushrui, who holds the Kahlil Gibran chair for Values and Peace at the University of Maryland, compares Gibran to the English Romantics such as Shelly and Blake, and he says that like Gibran, Blake was dismissed in his own time. "He was called 'mad Blake'. He is now a major figure in English literature. So the fact that a writer is not taken seriously by the critics is no indication of the value of the work". In Lebanon, where he was born, he is still celebrated as a literary hero.
His style, which broke away from the classical school, pioneered a new Romantic movement in Arabic literature of poetic prose.

"We are talking about a renaissance in modern Arabic literature and this renaissance had at its foundation Gibran's writings," says Professor Suheil Bushrui, who holds the Kahlil Gibran Chair for Values and Peace at the University of Maryland.

In the Arab world, Gibran is regarded as a rebel, both in a literary and political sense. He emigrated to the US at 12 but returned to study in Lebanon three years later where he witnessed injustices suffered by peasants at the hands of their Ottoman rulers. "He was a Christian but he saw things being done in the name of Christianity which he could not accept," says Bushrui.

In his writing, he raged against the oppression of women and the tyranny of the Church and called for freedom from Ottoman rule. "What he was doing was revolutionary and there were protests against it in the Arab world," says Juan Cole. "So he is viewed in Arabic literature as an innovator, not dissimilar to someone like WB Yeats in the West."

Political leaders considered his thoughts poisonous to young people and one of his books, Spirit Rebellious, was burnt in the market place in Beirut soon after it was published. By the 1930s, Gibran had become a prominent and charismatic figure within the Lebanese community and New York literary circles.

But the success of his writing in English owes much to a woman called Mary Haskell, a progressive Boston school headmistress who became his patron and confidante as well as his editor. Haskell supported him financially throughout his career until the publication of The Prophet in 1923. Their relationship developed into a love affair and although Gibran proposed to her twice, they never married. Haskell's conservative family at that time would never have accepted her marrying an immigrant, says Jean Gibran, who married Kahlil Gibran's godson and his namesake and dedicated five years to writing a biography of the writer.

In their book, Jean Gibran and her late husband didn't shy away from the less favourable aspects of the Gibran's character. He was, they admit, known to cultivate his own celebrity.

He even went so far as to create a mythology around himself and made pretensions to a noble lineage. But Jean Gibran says that he never claimed to be a saint or prophet. "As a poor but proud immigrant amongst Boston's elite, he didn't want people to look down on him. He was a fragile human being and aware of his own weaknesses." But arguably for Gibran's English readers, none of this mattered much. "I don't know how many people who picked up The Prophet, read it or gifted it, would actually know about Gibran the man or even want to know," says Dr Mohamed Salah Omri. "Part of the appeal is perhaps that this book could have been written by anybody and that is what we do with scripture. It just is."

Man Behind the Prophet Programme: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00r49dp A poet's life

Born to Maronite Catholic family in Lebanon, 1883
Moves to US aged 12 with mother and siblings after father imprisoned for embezzlement
Settles in South Boston's Lebanese community
Clerical error at school registers his name as Kahlil, not Khalil
He was a talented pupil and came to the attention of local artist and photographer Fred Holland Day Returns to Lebanon at 15 to study Arabic
Soon after, he lost his mother, sister and brother to TB and cancer within months of each other
Back in the US in 1904, he meets Mary Haskell
In 1908, goes to Paris for two years to study art in the symbolist school First book of poetry published in 1918, then The Prophet five years later
Dies in 1931 from cirrhosis of the liver and TB
Inspires a play Rest Upon the Wind, which tours UK and Middle East in 2012