The cessation of hostilities was declared on the 11th hour, the 11th day of the 11th month on the Western Front, between the Allies of World War I (WWI) and Germany. Today, the nation commemorates the 2.5 Million dead with a two-minute silence, a war that took approximately 20 Million lives in total.
Despite the enormous loss, and after almost one hundred years, there is little reflection on the causes of this war, hardly any discussion on this point, and the lessons to be learnt from it. They say historians to date cannot agree on the causes. The history books in schools and colleges point to the assassination of Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire by the Serb nationalists as the trigger for WWI.
Nations did not mobilise their forces and wage costly wars due to the assassination of one man. The war was not one of good versus evil, tyranny versus freedom, but simply a struggle for material resources. It was a war over territory, colony, inflamed by nationalism and historical feuds. The war was simply a global clash of empires.
Once the war was triggered, the central powers (German Empire, Austrian-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire) on one side faced the Triple Entente (Britain, France and Russia). This conflict was marked by the introduction of air raids and poison gas, a prelude to the birth of state-terrorism. In the early 1920s, the British used chemical weapons on the Kurds in Iraq, under the direction of Winston Churchill long before Saddam Hussein. During the next global war, these methods involving air raids, chemical weapons and explosives were developed and deployed on a larger scale on the civilian population. This is the origin of real terrorism.
The Germans tried to instigate a pan-Indian uprising against the British Raj by conspiring with the Ghadar Party and some Indian nationalists. This plan was thwarted when British intelligence infiltrated the movement. India was the Crown Jewel for the British Empire; it gave her so much wealth and the ability to raise an army. Many Indians did serve in the British forces, in fact a third of the British forces in France were from India.
Fighting also broke out between the British and the German in the various colonies in Africa (Togoland, Cameroon, South West Africa and East Africa).
Just prior to the war, Germany was strengthening political and economic ties with the Ottoman Empire. They advised and supported the building of the Berlin to Baghdad railway, which was planned to link with the Hejaz railway that was being built at the same time. The railway would operate from Istanbul to Damascus, then to Medina and Mecca. Both railways would make most of the provinces easily accessible to the Ottoman Caliphate. Part of the reason why this was constructed was to keep the British forces out of these Arab provinces.
The Hejaz railway links were never completed, the Ottomans joined in the war in 1914, Sultan Mehmed V declared the last Jihad by a Caliph. It had very little impact on the Muslims. The Arabs sided with the British, a major act of treachery against the Caliphate. The Muslims from India continued to serve the British Forces.
In response to the Ottomans declaring war, the first major military act by the British forces was to land troops in Abadan, near the southern tip of Iran. This was to protect the flow of oil to west. Substantial investment into the Iranian oil fields was already made by Britain and France. Two years earlier the British Royal Navy switched from coal to oil, and it was the fuel for its planes and tanks. Naturally, they felt the need to secure Iraq as a way of defending those supplies and the British forces marched along the Tigris and settled in Kut-al-Amra. This marked the beginning of the oil war, from this point on the entire region was subjected to western interventions in the successive years until present day.
Internally the Ottomans faced rebellion in many areas, propelled by Slavic nationalism, the Russians, the Greeks and the Serbs supported the various Orthodox Christian communities within the Ottoman State to rise in revolt. The Ottomans State fragmented by the end of the war, Palestine was acquired by Britain as war booty. So began the sufferings of the Palestinians, as their land was already promised to the Zionist Jews, according to the Belfour Declaration of 1917. Lord Balfour agreed to the Zionist demand as they promised to use their influence into bring the US into war on the side of the Allies. Which proved to be a turning point in the war, and the late entry by the US meant it minimised self-injury, whilst maximised the war booty.
The Arabs betrayed the Ottoman Caliphate and now it was their turn to be betrayed. The British betrayed them first by giving Palestine to the Zionist-Jews, and a secret treaty drawn up with France (Sykes-Picot) to carve up the Middle East amongst themselves, discarding the earlier promises of independence made to the Arabs in return for their support in rising against the Ottomans.
Armistice Day should remind us all of the mess created in the Middle East, all stems from treachery and the greed of Capitalist nations.
Yamin Zakaria (yamin@radicalviews.org)
UK, London
www.radicalviews.org
http://yaminzakaria.blogspot.com
