Wars And Battles

"We stood with those taking risks for peace: in Northern Ireland, where Catholic and Protestant children now tell their parents violence must never return; in the Middle East, where Arabs and Jews who once seemed destined to fight forever now share knowledge and resources and even dreams. And we stood up for peace in Bosnia. Remember the skeletal prisoners, the mass graves, the campaign to rape and torture, the endless lines of refugees, the threat of a spreading war. All these threats, all these horrors have now begun to give way to the promise of peace. Now our troops and a strong NATO, together with our new partners from central Europe and elsewhere, are helping that peace to take hold. As all of you know, I was just there with a bipartisan congressional group, and I was so proud not only of what our troops were doing but of the pride they evidenced in what they were doing. They knew what America's mission in this world is, and they were proud to be carrying it out."

"We might add now that we do have an authoritative account of why the United States bombed Serbia in 1999. It comes from Strobe Talbott, now the director of the Brookings Institution, but in 1999 he was in charge of the State Department-Pentagon team that supervised the diplomacy in the affair. He wrote the introduction to a recent book by his Director of Communications, John Norris, which presents the position of the Clinton administration at the time of the bombing. Norris writes that "it was Yugoslavia's resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform - not the plight of Kosovar Albanians - that best explains NATO's war". In brief, they were resisting absorption into the U.S. dominated international socioeconomic system. Talbott adds that thanks to John Norris, anyone interested in the war in Kosovo "will know … how events looked and felt at the time to those of us who were involved" in the war, actually directing it. This authoritative explanation will come as no surprise at all to students of international affairs who are more interested in fact than rhetoric. And it will also come as no surprise, to those familiar with intellectual life, that the attack continues to be hailed as a grand achievement of humanitarian intervention, despite massive Western documentation to the contrary, and now an explicit denial at the highest level; which will change nothing, it's not the way intellectual life works."

"Nationalism’s gravitational pull made extremists even of politicians who cared little for the nation. The seemingly urbane international banker and technocrat Slobodan Milošević or the idiosyncratic scientist Radovan Karadžić—both later convicted war criminals—are well-known cases. In Srebrenica, far beyond the headlines, people of different ethnicities had lived harmoniously for generations, but in the early 1990s, moderate politicians were gradually pushed aside by hardliners from their own parties."

"The first step for Democrats was embracing violence as a tool of positive social change. In 1965, liberals viewed the bombing of North Vietnam as a moral atrocity. Thirty years later, they applauded Bill Clinton’s bombing of Bosnia as a means of protecting the rights of a vulnerable minority group, the local Muslim population. Liberals discovered that war was an expedient form of social engineering, not to mention politically popular. Want to save children? Bomb their country. Head Start suddenly seemed like a tepid half measure compared to the swift compassion of air strikes. How often do bombings actually improve people’s lives? Do children on the ground really like them? Who knows? Follow-up stories on the aftermath of cruise missile attacks are notably rare in American media. The practical effects of the policies are less interesting to policy makers in Washington than the spirit in which they’re intended. When you’re pulling the trigger, the spirit is always pure. Liberals believed that Curtis LeMay dropped bombs because he was a crazed warmonger who took pleasure in hurting people. Liberals believe they bomb countries for the same reason they once opposed bombing countries, because they want to make the world a better place. Intent is what matters."

"Unfortunately, for a variety of specific reasons - in Romania, in Bulgaria, in Albania, and in a very different sense, in Yugoslavia - the struggle with the past and the political front is still the dominant reality. It is not the shaping of the future that now determines what is going on. It is the struggle with the past."

"That Clausewitz lives, and will live, is equally shown in such cases as the former Yugoslavia, where Nato has simply frozen a war which will certainly break out again if and when the intervention forces leave; or Israel–Palestine, where the political relations between Jew and Arab reflect the military outcome of past wars, where the conflict of interest is essentially irreconcilable, and where therefore policy and violence will continue to go hand in hand. What may therefore be safely predicted is that over the next 170 years the world will continue to be an arena of complex rivalries and direct collisions of interest rather than a "world order" or a "world community", and that human groups engaged in such rivalries will from time to time resort to force as an instrument of their politics. What weapons will be then available, and what tactics will consequently be employed, only a fool would pretend to guess. It will be remarked that so far I have not mentioned the United Nations Organisation, that expensive figment of liberal wishful thinking. I have done so now."

"Moreover, I have also said this publicly before (let's look at Yeltsin's times now), there was a moment when a certain rift started growing between us. Before that, Yeltsin came to the United States, remember, he spoke in Congress and said the good words: “God bless America.” Everything he said were signals — let us in. No. Remember the developments in Yugoslavia. Before that Yeltsin was lavished with praise, as soon as the developments in Yugoslavia started, he raised his voice in support of Serbs, and we couldn't but raise our voices for Serbs in their defense. I understand that there were complex processes underway there, I do. But Russia could not help raising its voice in support of Serbs, because Serbs are also a special and close to us nation, with Orthodox culture and so on. It's a nation that has suffered so much for generations. Well, regardless, what is important is that Yeltsin expressed his support. What did the United States do? In violation of international law and the UN Charter it started bombing Belgrade. It was the United States that let the genie out of the bottle. Moreover, when Russia protested and expressed its resentment, what was said? The UN Charter and international law have become obsolete. Now everyone invokes international law, but at that time they started saying that everything is outdated, everything has to be changed."

"What are the problems of the present-day world order? Let us be frank about it, we are all experts here. We talk and talk, we are like diplomats. What happened in the world? There used to be a bipolar system. The Soviet Union collapsed, the power called the Soviet Union ceased to exist. All the rules governing international relations after World War II were designed for a bipolar world. True, the Soviet Union was referred to as "the Upper Volta with missiles." Maybe so, and there were loads of missiles. Besides, we had such brilliant politicians like Nikita Khrushchev, who hammered the desk with his shoe at the UN. And the whole world, primarily the United States, and NATO thought: this Nikita is best left alone, he might just go and fire a missile, they have lots of them, we should better show some respect for them. Now that the Soviet Union is gone, what is the situation and what are the temptations? There is no need to take into account Russia's views, it is very dependent, it has gone through transformation during the collapse of the Soviet Union, and we can do whatever we like, disregarding all rules and regulations. This is exactly what is happening. Dominique here mentioned Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia before that. Was this really all handled within the framework of international law? Do not tell us those fairy-tales."

"The question concerning the role of the state in preserving territorial integrity is raised by the recent events in the former Soviet Union and former Yugoslavia: why do some multinational states survive the collapse of the authoritarian regime while others do not? Except in Spain, democratization occurred until recently in countries where the integrity of the state was not problematic. The breakup of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia raises a new set of issues because there democratization unleashed movements for national independence; indeed, for some political forces, democratization is synonymous with national self-determination and the breakdown of the multinational state that was maintained by authoritarian rule. Under such conditions, Hobbes's first problem - how to avoid being killed by others - is logically and historically prior to his second problem - how to prevent people within the same community from killing one another."

"We must tell our children. But more than that, we must teach them. Because remembrance without resolve is a hollow gesture. Awareness without action changes nothing. In this sense, "never again" is a challenge to us all -- to pause and to look within. For the Holocaust may have reached its barbaric climax at Treblinka and Auschwitz and Belzec, but it started in the hearts of ordinary men and women. And we have seen it again -- madness that can sweep through peoples, sweep through nations, embed itself. The killings in Cambodia, the killings in Rwanda, the killings in Bosnia, the killings in Darfur -- they shock our conscience, but they are the awful extreme of a spectrum of ignorance and intolerance that we see every day; the bigotry that says another person is less than my equal, less than human. These are the seeds of hate that we cannot let take root in our heart."

"The Croats, Slovenes and Germans agreed to destroy Serbia."

"The Serbs always sought a peaceful solution; it was the others, first the Croats, then the Bosnians, and finally Kosovo, who wanted war."

"It is a historical lie to say that I had military responsibility, that I commanded the army. The Constitution does not give the president the power to give orders to the armed forces. That is why Yugoslavia was left alone. If I had had this power, Serbia would not have lost."

"Borders are always dictated by the strong, never by the weak.… We simply consider it as a legitimate right and interest of the Serb nation to live in one state. This is the beginning and the end.… If we have to fight, by God we are going to fight. I hope that they will not be so crazy as to fight against us. If we do not know how to work properly or run an economy, at least we know how to fight properly."

"The conflict revealed to the world images it thought it had left behind: emaciated men and women trapped behind barbed wire in concentration camps in the heart of Europe; mass rape; the deliberate shelling of cities such as Vukovar, Sarajevo, Dubrovnik and Mostar; and the indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians. Finally, genocide returned to the continent when 8000 Bosnian Muslims were slaughtered by Serb forces under General Mladić in the town of Srebrenica in July 1995. The conflict finally ended in 1995, after NATO and Croatian offensives turned the tide decisively against Milošević's forces. Milošević negotiated the Dayton Peace Accords and was allowed to remain in power — even to claim credit as the man who brought peace to the Balkans. It did not last. Having secured the position of president of Yugoslavia (reduced to just Serbia and Montenegro) when his tenure as president of Serbia ended in 1997, he soon embroiled his forces in a new war, this time over the province of Kosovo. An armed uprising there for independence in 1999 met with vicious Serbian repression, and ethnic cleansing once more returned to Europe. This time, though, it prompted a 74-day NATO bombing campaign, ordered by US President Clinton and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, which forced Milosevic to back down."

"Setting his goal as the creation of a ‘Greater Serbia’, Milošević deployed the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) — then the fourth largest army in Europe — against would-be secessionist republics. Meanwhile, Serb separatist forces within such republics were encouraged to rise up. Lacking a large Serb population, Slovenia was allowed by Milosevic, after a ‘ten-day war’, to go its own way after declaring independence in June 1991. Not so with Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina: he was determined that their sizeable Serb minority populations would remain within Yugoslavia. Milosevic loyalists helped carve out Serb autonomous enclaves in each: first Milan Babic in the Serb-dominated Krajina region of Croatia, and then General Ratko Mladić and the psychiatrist-turned-demagogue Radovan Karadžić, within Bosnia. Paramilitary gangs bearing outlandish names — Arkan’s Tigers, the White Eagles, the Chetniks — rampaged through Serb-run Croatia and Bosnia, bringing death and destruction wherever they went. In the process they endowed the lexicon of conflict with a new term, ethnicko cis cenje terena — literally the ‘ethnic cleansing of the earth’, or simply ethnic cleansing."

"On the shelves of the globalized market, the Powers are offering humanity only different versions of the same wrap: they come in all colors, flavors, sizes and shapes. They are for all tastes and all pocket books. There is only one thing that makes them the same, the results. Always destruction, always anguish, always death. And death, anguish, and destruction are always for the other, for the different, for that which is unnecessary, for that which is in the way, for that which is below."

"In Bosnia-Herzegovina the world watched daily over television the horrors perpetuated by the Serbs against the Muslim Bosniacs. In one case a British officer was very upset and furious as he condemned the burning of a house where women and young children were still alive inside. Thousands were murdered by the Serbs in Srebrenica even as the European forces who were supposed to be protecting them retreated and looked the other way. But for a very long time the Western European nations and America refused to act against the Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia. They feared that the Russians might come to the defence of the Serbs. Elsewhere they were not afraid of the Russians. They freely bomb Iraq, an ally of Russia. But in former Yugoslavia they feared Russia`s reaction. And so they allowed Serbian atrocities to go on. More than 200,000 Bosniacs, mostly the young people, were massacred and thrown into hastily dug graves. Many people cynically commented that had Bosnia-Herzegovina been producing oil for the West, or if the Serbs were Muslims, swift action would have been seen."

"The emergence of the strong state went hand in hand with its increasing monopoly over the use of force and violence within its borders. If you refuse to pay taxes, set your neighbour’s house on fire or ignore the summons to do military service, a strong state will lay hands on you and often your property as well and you will be punished and even, sometimes, executed. The peoples of Yugoslavia lived together peacefully if not always happily under Tito’s firm rule because, as a Croat put it, ‘every hundred yards we had a policeman to make sure we loved each other very much’. When Tito died and his Communist Party fell to pieces, the different ethnicities in Yugoslavia, urged on by unscrupulous demagogues, turned on each other. We may see the state as oppression incarnate, but we should think for a moment what it is like to live where there is no state power. The Samoans and the New Guinea highlanders once knew that and the unfortunate people of the failed states of Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan know it today."

"In fact, many of the old conflicts and tensions remained, frozen into place just under the surface of the Cold War. The end of that great struggle brought a thaw, and long-suppressed dreams and hatreds bubbled to the surface again. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait, basing its claims on dubious history. We discovered that it mattered that Serbs and Croats had many historical reasons to fear and hate each other, and that there were peoples within the Soviet Union who had their own proud histories and who wanted their independence. Many of us had to learn who the Serbs and Croats were and where Armenia or Georgia lay on the map. In the words of the title of Misha Glenny’s book on Central Europe, we witnessed the rebirth of history. Of course, as so often happens, some of us went too far the other way and blamed everything that was going wrong in the Balkans in the 1990s, to take one of the most egregious cases, on “age- old hatreds.” That conveniently overlooked the wickedness of Slobodan Milosevic, then the president, and his ilk who were doing their best to destroy Yugoslavia and dismember Bosnia. Such an attitude allowed outside powers to stand by wringing their hands helplessly for far too long."

"Of all these offenses the one that is most widely, frequently, and vehemently denounced is undoubtedly imperialism—sometimes just Western, sometimes Eastern (that is, Soviet) and Western alike. But the way this term is used in the literature of Islamic fundamentalists often suggests that it may not carry quite the same meaning for them as for its Western critics. In many of these writings the term "imperialist" is given a distinctly religious significance, being used in association, and sometimes interchangeably, with "missionary," and denoting a form of attack that includes the Crusades as well as the modern colonial empires. One also sometimes gets the impression that the offense of imperialism is not—as for Western critics—the domination by one people over another but rather the allocation of roles in this relationship. What is truly evil and unacceptable is the domination of infidels over true believers. For true believers to rule misbelievers is proper and natural, since this provides for the maintenance of the holy law, and gives the misbelievers both the opportunity and the incentive to embrace the true faith. But for misbelievers to rule over true believers is blasphemous and unnatural, since it leads to the corruption of religion and morality in society, and to the flouting or even the abrogation of God's law. This may help us to understand the current troubles in such diverse places as Ethiopian Eritrea, Indian Kashmir, Chinese Sinkiang, and Yugoslav Kossovo, in all of which Muslim populations are ruled by non-Muslim governments. It may also explain why spokesmen for the new Muslim minorities in Western Europe demand for Islam a degree of legal protection which those countries no longer give to Christianity and have never given to Judaism. Nor, of course, did the governments of the countries of origin of these Muslim spokesmen ever accord such protection to religions other than their own. In their perception, there is no contradiction in these attitudes. The true faith, based on God's final revelation, must be protected from insult and abuse; other faiths, being either false or incomplete, have no right to any such protection."

"The main reason for Yugoslavia's failure was that the formation of such a country was a need felt more by our Western allies than by the ethnic groups that actually constituted it."

"The trigger for this war was the new world order established in Malta by Presidents Gorbachev and Bush Sr.: our Western allies, having victoriously ended the Cold War, no longer felt the need for Yugoslavia to exist and so sacrificed it."

"The Serbs and Yugoslavia were the first victims of this New World Order, and the blame for its destruction lies squarely on the shoulders of Germany, the United States, Great Britain and France. With their premature recognition of the illegal and unilateral secession of Slovenia, Croatia and, later, Bosnia (which could have gained their independence in a regular manner in Parliament instead of through war), they set in motion the catastrophic events that have cost us so much, and continue to do so. Now we can only hope to re-establish friendly relations, as the Scandinavian countries have done, peacefully and through agreement."

"Common wisdom today has it that Yugoslavia was a doomed experiment. In the 1990s, ill-informed Western journalists reporting on the Yugoslav implosion wars wrote of the “centuries-old conflict between Serbs and Croats" — when the real genesis of Serb-Croat hostility really only reached back to the rise of nationalism in the 19th and 20th centuries."

"My quarrel with Chomsky goes back to the Balkan wars of the 1990s, where he more or less openly represented the "Serbian Socialist Party" (actually the national-socialist and expansionist dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic) as the victim. Many of us are proud of having helped organize to prevent the slaughter and deportation of Europe's oldest and largest and most tolerant Muslim minority, in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Kosovo. But at that time, when they were real, Chomsky wasn't apparently interested in Muslim grievances. He only became a voice for that when the Taliban and Al Qaeda needed to be represented in their turn as the victims of a "silent genocide" in Afghanistan. Let me put it like this, if a supposed scholar takes the Christian-Orthodox side when it is the aggressor, and then switches to taking the "Muslim" side when Muslims commit mass murder, I think that there is something very nasty going on. And yes, I don't think it is exaggerated to describe that nastiness as "anti-American" when the power that stops and punishes both aggressions is the United States … In some awful way, his regard for the underdog has mutated into support for mad dogs. This is not at all like watching the implosion of an obvious huckster and jerk like Michael Moore, who would have made a perfectly good Brownshirt populist. The collapse of Chomsky feels to me more like tragedy."

"That war in the early 1990s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstitution of torture and rape as acts of policy. And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be indifferent – or even take the side of the fascists. It was a time when many people on the left were saying 'Don't intervene, we'll only make things worse' or, 'Don't intervene, it might destabilise the region. And I thought – destabilisation of fascist regimes is a good thing. Why should the left care about the stability of undemocratic regimes? Wasn't it a good thing to destabilise the regime of General Franco? It was a time when the left was mostly taking the conservative, status quo position – leave the Balkans alone, leave Milosevic alone, do nothing. And that kind of conservatism can easily mutate into actual support for the aggressors. Weimar-style conservatism can easily mutate into National Socialism. So you had people like Noam Chomsky's co-author Ed Herman go from saying 'Do nothing in the Balkans', to actually supporting Milosevic, the most reactionary force in the region. That's when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favour of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there's Richard Perle. There's Paul Wolfowitz. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying that we had to act. Before, I had avoided them like the plague, especially because of what they said about General Sharon and about Nicaragua. But nobody could say they were interested in oil in the Balkans, or in strategic needs, and the people who tried to say that – like Chomsky – looked ridiculous. So now I was interested."

"An important and perhaps growing feature of official and strong-interest-group propaganda is the resort to personal attacks and flak to keep dissidents at bay and inconvenient thoughts out of sight and mind. […] We were very conscious of this when studying the Western dismantlement of Yugoslavia, where the Western media quickly fell into line and treated with aggressive condemnation any departures from the accepted truth and de facto party-line."

"We wait, like war-horse chafing To burst the fetters through, The word—"Up guards and at them" Of the Duke at Waterloo."

"Waterloo: I was defeated, you won the war."

"At the battle of Waterloo, when Napoleon's cavalry had charged again and again upon the unbroken squares of British infantry, at last they were giving up the attempt, and going off in disorder, when some of the officers in mere vexation and complete despair fired their pistols at those solid squares."

"Go on home British soldiers, go on home. Have you got no fucking homes of your own? For 800 years we've fought you without fear and we will fight you for 800 more. We'll fight them British soldiers for the cause. We'll never bow to soldiers because throughout our history we were born to be free. So get out British bastards leave us be."

"It would seem that dead hunger strikers, who have extinguished their own lives, are of more use to PIRA than living members. Such is their calculated cynicism. This Government is not prepared to legitimise their cause by word or by deed. And we should be clear what that cause is. It is a dictatorship by force and by fear in Northern Ireland, and in the Republic. These men deny democracy everywhere; they seek power for themselves. Some people argue that the Government could make the problem go away. We can of course maintain and improve an already humane prison regime. But there is no point in pretending that this is what the PIRA want. They have remained inflexible and intransigent in the face of all that we have done because what they want is special treatment, treatment different from that received by other prisoners. They want their violence justified. It isn't, and it will not be."

"[The documentary series] “” will help [with healing the collective trauma from The Troubles], providing a cautionary tale for those in Ulster — and those well beyond it — warning against the folly of using violence to resolve political disputes."

"We urge peace and justice for Northern Ireland. We welcome the newly begun process of constitutional dialogue that holds so much promise. We encourage investment and reconstruction to create opportunity for all."

"We share a deep concern for peace and justice in Northern Ireland and condemn all violence and terrorism in that strife-torn land. We support the process of peace and reconciliation established by the Anglo-Irish Agreement, and we encourage new investment and economic reconstruction in Northern Ireland on the basis of strict equality of opportunity and non-discrimination in employment."

"I was stopped by a soldier, he said 'You are a swine'. He hit me with his rifle and he kicked me in the groin, I begged and I pleaded, sure me manners were polite. But all the time I'm thinking of my little Armalite... A brave RUC man came marching up into our street, six hundred British soldiers he had lined up at his feet. 'Come out, ye cowardly Fenians, come out and fight'. But he cried, 'I'm only joking', when he heard the Armalite."

"They did exactly what was feared they might—invite the Amir of Afghanistan to invade India for the pan-Islamic cause. In his misguided enthusiasm, Gandhi went to the extent of even supporting such a move: ‘I would, in a sense, certainly assist the Amir of Afghanistan, if he waged a war against the British Government. That is to say, I would openly tell my countrymen that it would be a crime to help a government which had lost the confidence of the nation to remain in power.’ Even his most ardent supporters were shocked by such statements that had no roots in pragmatism or practicality. .... The government had intercepted a telegram—a wire sent to the Amir of Afghanistan inviting him to invade India and urging him to not make peace with the British—written in Persian, allegedly by Muhammad Ali. Swami Shraddhanand mentions this incident in his memoir. Muhammad Ali had feigned complete ignorance in the matter as he knew neither Persian nor Arabic and he was made a maulana only by virtue of the duties of tabligh (conversion) that he had conducted. On reaching Anand Bhawan, Pandit Motilal Nehru’s Allahabad residence, Muhammad Ali took Shraddhanand aside and taking out a paper from his handbag, gave him a draft of a telegram to read. ‘What was my astonishment,’ noted Shraddhanand, ‘when I saw the draft of the selfsame telegram in the peculiar handwriting of the Father of the non-violent cooperation movement!’ Gandhi reached Anand Bhawan the next day and when asked by Sharaddhanand about this matter, did not remember to have sent any such telegram."

"I cannot understand why the Ali Brothers are going to be arrested as the rumours go, and why I am to remain free. They have done nothing which I would not do. If they had sent a message to the Amir, I also would send one to inform the Amir that if he came, no Indian so long as I can help it, would help the Government to drive him back."

"I would, in a sense, certainly assist the Amir of Afghanistan if he waged war against the British Government. That is to say, I would openly tell my countrymen that it would be a crime to help a government which had lost the confidence of the nation to remain in power."

"But since the Government is apparently uninformed about the manner in which our Faith colours and is meant to colour all our actions, including those which, for the sake of convenience, are generally characterised as mundane, one thing must be made clear, and it is this: Islam does not permit the believer to pronounce an adverse judgement against another believer without more convincing proof; and we could not, of course, fight against our Muslim brothers without making sure that they were guilty of wanton aggression, and did not take up arms in defence of their faith." (This was in relation to the war that was going on between the British and the Afghans in 1919.) "Now our position is this. Without better proof of the Amir's malice or madness we certainly do not want Indian soldiers, including the Musalmans, and particularly with our own encouragement and assistance, to attack Afghanistan and effectively occupy if first, and then be a prey to more perplexity and perturbation afterwards. "But if on the contrary His Majesty the Amir has no quarrel with India and her people and if his motive must be attributed, as the Secretary of State has publicly said, to the unrest which exists throughout the Mahomedan world, an unrest with which he openly professed to be in cordial sympathy, that is to say, if impelled by the same religious motive that has forced Muslims to contemplate Hijrat, the alternative of the weak, which is all that is within our restricted means. His Majesty has been forced to contemplate Jihad, the alternative of those comparatively stronger which he may have found within his means; if he has taken up the challenge of those who believed in force and yet more force, and he intends to try conclusions with those who require Musalmans to wage war against the Khilafat and those engaged in Jihad; who are in wrongful occupation of the Jazirut-ul-Arab and the holy places; who aim at the weakening of Islam; discriminate against it, and deny to us full freedom to advocate its cause; then the clear law of Islam requires that in the first place, in no case whatever should a Musalman render anyone any assistance against him; and in the next place if the Jihad approaches my region every Musalman in that region must join the Mujahidin and assist them to the best of his or her power. "Such is the clear and undisputed law of Islam; and we had explained this to the Committee investigating our case when it had put to us a question about the religious duty of a Muslim subject of a non-Muslim power when Jihad had been declared against it, long before there was any notion of trouble on the Frontiers, and when the late Amir was still alive."

"Learn your lessons, if you wish to, from the Boer War. Those who have been enemies of that [British] empire a few years ago, have now become friends."

"The natives emerged from the War in a state of restlessness and unnatural excitement, with the idea that the object of the War had been to return to them their old lands, and that the white owners had been expelled for ever from their farms and habitations. They had become imbued with the idea that the country was now theirs to do as they willed with, and in fact that we had engaged in the war in order to win it for them. Wherever they got these ideas from they received a rude awakening. They found the country was not theirs; that we had not fought to give it to them, and most of all that the owners went back and still owned the farms the Natives now imagined to be theirs."

"[The natives] regarded themselves, not without reason, as essential to the contending forces in the field, both of whom required native experts for, amongst other things the important work of transport, herding and scouting. For these services, which they well and loyally fulfilled to whichever side they were attached they received high wages and, though losing a good deal of their live stock, enjoyed the benefits which always fall to neutrals. The war thus left South Africa with a heavy legacy in the shape of high wages which every common unskilled native labourer had learned to regard as normal, and further there was engendered a spirit of independence and apparent aggressiveness which was a new and regrettable feature in relations between black and white."

"The Victorian age ended in the crash and conflict of the Great Boer War."

"I know of only one statesman in modern times who firmly took his stand on the ancient ideal of citizenship, and that one was President Paul Kruger; it has always been my conviction that the real meaning of the Boer War is to be found in the necessary conflict between the two ideals, the English doctrine that all the white inhabitants of the country should be on equal footing, and the Boer doctrine that the Englishman was an inferior creature, just because he was not a citizen, and that he ought not to be allowed the honour of becoming a Boer until he had earned it by years or even generations of acquiescence in a subject position... he forgot that Englishmen could not accept the degraded status of subjects among citizens, and that the British Government could not submit to leave them sitting as suppliants on the lowest step of the altar. (Lord Cromer, interposing: "He forgot Lord Roberts.") The circumstance that the Boers seem now heartily to have accepted the modern doctrine of equality in the sight of the law seems the best augury for the future of the country."

"One day eight years later, I found myself talking over these events with General Botha, who was visiting this country as first Prime Minister of the South African Union. Just as I was leaving he stopped me for a moment and said: ‘After all, three words made peace and union in South Africa: “methods of barbarism.”’ Softening the epigram a little, he went on to speak of the tremendous impression which had been made upon men fighting a losing battle with an apparently hopeless future by the fact that the leader of one of the great English parties had had the courage to say this thing, and to brave the obloquy which it brought upon him. So far from encouraging them to a hopeless resistance, it touched their hearts and made them think seriously of the possibility of reconciliation."

"A second important consequence of this policy of spoliation has been the elimination from the Boer ranks of all those elements which are useless from a military point of view. The ordeal has been too terrible for the weak and the faint. First of all went the irresponsible braggarts who had clamoured for war and had called the peacemakers cowards and traitors. The man who expected to gain something from continuing in the field; the man who preferred to protect his property; the man who had lost all hope of a successful issue followed. There remain the stout-hearted and able-bodied – the men of physical courage, the men of moral endurance, whom self-respect and honour keep true to their country’s cause; the men of invincible hope in the future and child-like faith in God – truly a select band, the like of whom, I fondly think, is not to be found in the wide world today."

"The groans of the dying and the blanched set faces of the dead ... were enough to drive away all unwholesome feelings of exultation, and to remind one of the grim reality that war is. And even though these were the faces and the sufferings of our enemy, one had ... a deeper sense of the common humanity which knows no racial distinctions."

"... the Jameson Raid was the real declaration of war. And that is so in spite of the four years of truce that followed... [the] aggressors consolidated their alliance... the defenders on the other hand silently and grimly prepared for the inevitable."