“For me it began in far-off Mesopotamia now called Irak, that land of Biblical names and history, of vast deserts and date groves, scorching suns and hot winds, the land of Babylon, Baghdad and the Garden of Eden, where the rushing Euphrates and the mighty Tigris converge and flow down to the Persian Gulf.”
“It was there in that land of the Arabs then a battle-ground for the two contending Imperialistic armies of Britain and Turkey, that I awoke to the echoes of guns being fired at the people of my own race by soldiers of the army with which I was serving.”
In these opening lines of his autobiography, Guerilla Days in Ireland, the famous Irish rebel Tom Barry described the moment when he learned of the Easter Rising in 1916.
Barry was at that stage a British soldier fighting in the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force, attempting to relieve the beleaguered garrison at Kut, the town which last week became one of Iraq’s latest flashpoints.
There are some striking parallels between the rebellion which Barry learned of in a British military communique, and the one now taking place in the southern Iraq where he once served.
Most remarkably, both events occurred in the midst of major religious festivals, festivals representing ideals of martyrdom which would have powerful political implications.
Whether by accident or design, the Sadrist uprising broke out last week in the run-up to Arbain, the feast at which Shi’ites mark the end of the 40-day morning period for the Imam Hussain, grandson of Mohammad.
It might be tempting to ascribe the upsurge of Iraqi resistance to a peculiar Shi’ite or Islamic psychology of martyrdom. However, it’s worth remembering that Christianity is also a religion of martyrdom and that Westerners have appealed to that tradition during their own struggles against colonialism.
The Irish rebels of 1916 launched their uprising on Easter Monday, deliberately evoking the death and resurrection of Christ as they sought the rebirth of their country. That tradition found echoes as recently as the hunger strikes of the 1980s. Similar circumstances can it seems lead very different peoples to resort to very similar ideas, and nothing is more liable to impose similar circumstances on diverse peoples than colonialism itself.
The circumstances colonialism created in Ireland in 1916 have important parallels with those it has imposed on Iraq today. Like Iraqi Shi’ites today, Irish nationalists had a moderate leader who commanded majority support.
John Redmond hoped, Like the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, that co-operation with the ruling power would lead to the establishment of an independent democracy which his supporters would dominate.
For Redmond, that strategy was shattered when a small group of radicals, the Irish Volunteers, launched the Easter Rising. Their leader, Padraig Pearse, has often been accused of a fixation on martyrdom, much like Moqtada al-Sadr in recent days.
We cannot yet know the outcome of the Sadrist uprising, and that perhaps is where the Irish example is most instructive.
The Volunteers could not win against the might of the British Army in a conventional battle and they were crushed within a few days. However, the brutality of the British response won them the support of the masses.
Within a few years, Ireland was in the grip of a nationwide insurgency. The former British soldier Tom Barry became the leader of a guerilla column. By the time the British sued for peace in 1921, his 310 men had fought more than 12,000 British soldiers to a standstill.
In his autobiography, Barry himself wondered why the British did not succeed in exterminating such a small force. “The answer, of course, is that in the last analysis the struggle was never one between the British Army and a small Irish force of Flying Columns and Active Service Units. This was a war between the British Army and the Irish people, and the problem for the British from mid-1920 was not how to smash the Flying Columns but how to destroy the resistance of a people.”
For coalition commanders in Iraq, that parallel may be the most disturbing of all.
Tom Griffin writes for the Irish World News Service; he is also a researcher for Antiwar.com.
