Garvin Karunaratne

War is War where lands are conquered. People are essentially a disposable quantity. That is what we are seeing in Gaza, intense bombing reducing homes to rubble where the occupants are buried. People being displaced. That is Today’s civilized order to clear out Gaza for occupation!

We are also seeing the indomitable human spirit of people scraping the bombed rubble to unearth human beings carrying them, rushing them in ambulances to hospitals which are also being targeted. The people do this without fleeing for their safety.

Long ago, in the Nineteen Fifties I was in charge of the Southern Province of Sri Lanka for administering paddy purchases and rice milling. Purchasing paddy from producers only at a premium price , paying almost double the world market price, not like today when we buy from anyone from traders too: I had to visit cooperatives purchasing paddy to ensure that we purchased only from genuine producers. . On my visits to Galle, in the hinterland, I spotted people with Negroid kinky hair. I wondered how this came about. In those non internet days I pored over history books and found that the British rulers at that time had concentration camps in that area for Boer prisoners. Boers wee incarcerated in camps in South Sri Lanka!

Britain fought with Two Boer Republics, Boers were mercilessly killed, captured and sent to concentration camps all over. It is on record that British troops were ordered to destroy farms and slaughter cattle”. Finally the Boers surrendered in 1802. Pretoria of today is in this Boer area.

The European Counties and even their proxies- gangs of criminals marched on to the Americas, to South Asia and Africa and conquered. They started nibbling in various parts of Africa and started fighting among themselves. To stop this infighting the Chancellor of Germany Bismark summoned all countries including America and parcelled out Africa among the European countries. That was the Treaty of Berlin of 1884

In Egypt , it is on record that, Lord Salisbury advised Lord Cromer to starve out the enemy . The Army routinely utilized tactics which included offering no quarter to surrendering wounded troops as well as the destruction of towns, villages and food stores”…” the Battle of Firket on 7/6/1896 was conducted in an uncompromising manner as many of the opposition was only waiting for the opportunity to surrender and as they came out with hands in the air they were duly put in the bag. These practices were undertaken in masse in the final battle in Omduruman, which was not a battle but an execution.”(GWStevens: With Kitchener to Khartoum. 1999)

Turn to France that controlled Algeria from 1830. It is said that the conquest caused the death of 400,000 to 1.5 million people. 2 million Algerians ended in concentration camps.

India was not conquered by the British. It was the East India Company that conquered India and ruled it for around half a century till the Indians in the Army rebelled in 1857. This Mutiny killed some 800,000 . It is on record, that ”Apart from hanging mutineers, the British had some blown from cannons- sentenced rebels were tied over the mouths of canons and blown to pieces when the canons were fired” It was that gruesome! It ended with the British taking control of India from the East India Company.

Take Germany. The Germans took control of the East African countries of Tanzania, Ruwanda and Burundi. Tanzanians rebelled in the Maji Maji Rebellion in 1905 to 1907, when 300,000 people were killed to restore order. The German troops systematically wiped out villages and people”. It is on record that the German troops, systematically wiped out villages and fields.” Germany lost its colonies when it was defeated in the World War I, under the Treaty of Versailes.

Germany’s mass killings of Nigeria’s Heroro and nama people is dubbed the first genocide of the 20 th Century.”

Sri Lanka came under the Portuguese from around 1525, when they controlled parts of the Western coast. For around a hundred years there was constant warfare between the Sinhala rulers and the Portuguese. It was eternal warfare, where the Potuguese had to retreat to their forts and wait till reinforcements came through ships.The Portuguese had guns while the Sri Lankans fought with bows and arrows.

The Portuguese were conquered by the Dutch and the Dutch in turn by the British who conquered the entire country by 1815. In 1818, the Uva Wellassa people rebelled and the rebellion spread to around half of the country. The rebellion was quelled with massive force. Governor Brownrigg ordered Major General McDowell to kills every man woman and child in the Uva Wellassa Districts and destroy all tanks and everything – fruit bearing trees and cattle- It was a scorched earth policy. The tanks- water holding reservoirs that were ten destroyed have not been totally repaired even till today.

That is the CONQUEST of the CIVILIZED World that we are seeing with our eyes today in Gaza

And the historic result:

As HanzaAlavi says:

Colonial plunder permitted Britain to balance its resource deficits. For some 200 years a river of flood to this country from such places as Ireland, India and the Caribbean.”(The Guardian8/6/2009)

In the first eight years of the East India Company’s rule, 5.9 million pounds were extracted out of Bengal. Between 1757 and 1815 Pounds 100 million went from India to Britain.”(How the IMF Sabotaged Third World Development by Garvin Karunaratne

And Today it is the IMF that rules the Third World by imposing its Structural Adjustment Programme. Before 1977 Sri Lanka never had a foreign debt. The foreign debt of Sri Lanka, which was $56 billion when President Gotabhaya left, is far more today as we yet follow the IMF’s dictates. It is The Financial Missiles of the IMF that made sovereign countries indebted”.(Ibid) With countries becoming indebted comes in poverty and hunger, and hunger causes death.

Garvin Karunaratne.

13/11/2023