How does it feel to live under foreign, and of course brutal, occupation? We in Bangladesh know the answer to that question, for we experienced life under an army which subjected us to not only occupation but also accompanied it by a systematic genocide of our compatriots.
Occupation by alien forces is a dehumanising process. At the same time, occupation brings out some of the best in people, especially when they realise that every occupation is a moment when resistance must be shaped to challenge it. In Bangladesh, resistance came in the shape of the Mukti Bahini. We did not know how long we would need to wage war, but as a people denied their democratic rights we knew full well that as long as the country remained under the occupation of the Pakistan army, there could be no let-up in our struggle.
No, life is not a happy experience under occupation. Ask the Palestinians, whose tragedy far exceeds that of many other nations we have seen wallow in despair in our times. The Palestinians lost their entire country in 1948 --- their villages, their towns, their cities, their olive orchards, their courtyards, their homes, their dreams --- when the state of Israel was imposed on the land generations of their ancestors had lived on. It would be naïve to ask today, with all the water that has flowed under the historical bridge, that the old Palestine be restored to what it was, to where it used to be.
But it is perfectly all right to demand of the global community that the Palestinian territory Israel has kept under military occupation in Gaza and the West Bank since June 1967 be freed of this stranglehold. It is a shame that this long occupation has gone on, that nothing the international community has done to bring about a return of Israel's soldiers to their country from occupied Arab land has worked. Over the decades, Palestinians have lived in ghettoes, for that is what Gaza and the West Bank have become under occupation. And with the current unchecked and indiscriminate Israeli military power pummelling Gaza into the stone age, it is not hard to imagine the agony of a people, most of whom were born in the darkness of occupation.
Foreign occupation of others' lands is guided by a single instinct, of the occupying power imposing its so-called racial superiority over its victims. When the Nazis, obsessed with their self-defined Aryan superiority, ran amuck in Europe in the Second World War, it was sheer evil which underscored their military advances into the countries their forces beat into submission. Occupied France remains a glaring instance of the philistinism that was Hitler-run Germany, attempting to coerce an occupied people into meek acceptance of a new reality. Intellectual life in France was quickly transformed into resistance and the country's elite devised the many means through which the Nazis could be undermined. In the villages, Hitler's forces were relentless in their bid to subdue the country --- and other countries --- to their will. In all these countries, a particular target of the occupiers was the Jewish community, six million of whom would end up losing their lives in concentration camps.
Occupation has often been deepened through various forms of colonialism, as was done in India through 190 years of the British presence in the country. Some might argue that the British were a civilising force in India, to which there could be a yes-maybe-no response. The British occupation led to the breakdown of centuries-old traditions in the country, caused the rise of abjectly loyalist Indians in the form of zamindars, khan bahadurs and rai bahadurs and would lead to an unbridgeable divide between Hindus and Muslims. It forced millions of Bengalis into famine in 1943. In the end, British occupation of India left the country sliced along communal lines, with two million Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs killed and fourteen million displaced. The ramifications of British rule are yet being felt, through the steep decline of secular politics in all the three countries which have replaced the old India.
Occupation strips occupied people of dignity. It is a truth we in our times have experienced in East Timor, today Timor-Leste, through the brutality exercised by the Indonesian military for years. Or walk back to the 1930s and 1940s, to relive the sheer criminality of Imperial Japan as it brutalised China, Korea and other nations with its colonial designs in Asia. The rape of Nanjing and the murder of innocent people cowering in occupation remain an ugly, not to say a most shameful scar on Japan's past, one it is yet doing penance for. Japan's occupation of east Asia could only be brought to an end through the humiliation of surrender in 1945. General MacArthur made Hirohito and his military bite the dust through literally turning the country into a decent, democratic place on the planet.
In a land under occupation, men and women disappear in the night, led blindfolded to their death by the occupying power. In Europe, humiliation through occupation was piled on Jews when they were forced to identify themselves through a yellow star on their clothes. In Bangladesh, occupation soldiers felt no qualms in subjecting Bengali men to examinations of their genitals to determine if they were Hindu or Muslim. Under occupation, women are not safe, for it is their modesty which comes under threat. In any occupation, it is women who pay a price, through subjection to rape and unwanted pregnancy. For the occupying power, the innocence of children needs to be violated. This is done, as is being done in Gaza, by bombing them to death.
The occupation of a country by another and more powerful country is an initial step in the liquidation of an intellectual class of citizens. Nazi Germany showed the way. And where intellectuals need to preserve their lives, they make their way out of their occupied countries to find refuge abroad. German intellectuals fled to the West, to begin life anew. In today's circumstances, a broad mass of Palestinian intellectuals inhabits capitals stretching from Tunis and Amman and Doha to Paris and London and Washington, for their country has been commandeered by aggressive outside forces.
Occupying powers blow the concept of global order into pieces, for they strike at territorial integrity and human self-esteem. Their goal is a demolition of the rules of behaviour, intending as they do the obliteration of the occupied country or making non-people of its population. That is what Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler did when they sent their soldiers into Poland, carved it up between themselves and so wiped a whole country off the map of Europe.
Occupation of another's land does something else. It gives rise to a class of men, all occupiers, doomed to be remembered by succeeding generations as war criminals. They lie in graves which men and women of moral intent will not visit. Think of Yasukuni.
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