Frank Walter Messervy Quotes
It was a horrible sight, The mobs had swept through the area like locusts. You could see corpses laid out in the fields just outside a village, like rabbits after a shoot.... As far as I could tell the massacres seemed to be almost entirely anti-Sikh.
Jinnah and other Muslim leaders had stirred up the Muslims to violence to put pressure on all the parties to accede to Jinnah's Muslim League's demand of an independent Muslim nation—Pakistan. Messervy was very sympathetic to the Muslim leadership as he had been feuding with and frustrated by the predominantly Hindu ruling Congress Party. After partition he accepted the mercenary position of Commander in Chief of the Pakistani Army. Then he was shocked and horrified at the slaughter of the terrorist attacks by the Muslims—about 4,000 Sikh men, women and children had been beaten and cut to death. The Sikhs had been targeted largely because Sikh leaders had recently announced that if there were a Partition, Sikhs would refuse to live in nation under Muslim control.
Frank Walter Messervy, 1893-1974 was a British Indian Army officer in both the First and Second World Wars. Following, British General in Chief, Northern Command, India, First Commander in Chief of the Pakistan Army, Description of his aerial observation of the rural Punjab the morning after the Moslem terrorist slaughters of the minority Hindus and Sikhs, March 19, 1947
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Two months earlier, Jinnah and the Muslim League had, behind the scenes, orchestrated and abetted vicious, murderous, terrorist attacks on Sikhs by Muslim tribesman brought into the Punjab for the purpose." Master Tara Singh
Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the other Muslim League leaders wanted to stir up India's Muslims in order to prevent Indian Independence from Britain unless India were partitioned and the Muslims could have their own nation. At that point the British and the Congress Party of India—the majority political party were both starting to plan for independence. Jinnah and most of the Muslim nationalists did not want to have Muslims in a Majority Hindu nation. To stop it, they first used fear to try and separate the many Indian Muslims who were politically active from their roles in and loyalty to the Congress Party which although Hindu dominated had Muslim members and officials. All the Muslims who were literate were aware of the terrible revelations of the Nazi Concentration Camps and the attempted extermination of all the Jews of Europe. The "party line" of the Muslim League was that once the British turned the government of India over to the Congress Party, they would turn on the Muslims and exterminate them so that India would be all Hindu. There were no such plans or even suggestions be anyone in the Congress party, the paranoia and the conspiracy theory resonated with many Indian Muslims just as conspiracy theories are believed by some people in every society. In this case, the paranoia that was unleashed by the Muslim League would have tragic consequences as with Independence getting closer many Muslims struck out and preemptively attacked and butchered Hindus and Sikhs who retaliated in kind and the butchery went on all through the Independence process and the partition of India to create a Muslim state—Pakistan. Almost 2 million people would be murdered in the sectarian violence that was unleashed.
The Hindus of Bihar had retaliated brutally to the earlier Muslim ethnic cleansing terror against Hindus. The atrocity by their own co-religionists was very shocking to the party leaders who realized for the first time that the "Blood for Blood" slogan and other incendiary oratory could have disastrous consequences. They realized that they had lost control and influence over their own followers and became really frightened as they seemed to be forced to accept the Muslim unreasonable dictates or accept the uncontrolled internecine civil war that ended up killing over 2 million Indians and displacing, raping and wounding more than 15 million more in the largest mass migration in human history.
The throwing of flaming torches to burn out members of the other religion got out of control and the fires spread to the homes of all residents. The fires were so prevalent that the riot was then and has since been referred to as the "Shahalmi Gate Blaze". At the time Jinnah was horrified at the violence, but by the following year he and other Muslim League leaders were aiding and abetting Muslim terrorist attacks to put pressure on the government to create a separate Muslim state upon Indian independence—Pakistan. Most historians agree that the Muslim terrorism in the short run had worked, as it would have been unlikely that India would have been partitioned in the absence of violence. However, it set in motion a cultural pattern of religious hate, bigotry, intolerance, violence and murder which would plague Pakistan thereafter. The politicians throughout the country's history have tried to use the Muslim religious, fundamentalist, extremists for their purposes only to find that the fanatics were out of control and the entire Pakistani population has lived in fear, lest an extremist decide that what they did or say was inimical to Islam and assassinate him or her. They have assassinated even the highest levels of politicians—President, Governors of Provinces, National Legislatures as well as Journalists, writers and academics. But the average Pakistani citizen has always been at risk of brutal murder with hundreds killed every year in an atmosphere of total impunity for the murderers. They have even murdered married women who had been raped on the grounds that they were adulterers and were therefore stoned.
A 'kirpan' is a type of knife—a weapon—which all male Sikhs are religiously obligated to have in his possession and on his body at all times. Singh was a Sikh Maharaja (King) of an area that had about an equal number of Muslims and Sikhs. The Sikh's had a long history of living under Muslim domination and wanted no part of any more. Patiala was within the Punjab and Jinnah was insisting that the Punjab should be a Province of the new Pakistan because the Punjab was majority Muslim. However, there were many Sikhs, as well as some Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians and virtually none of these wanted to be a part of Pakistan. Further, a significant portion of the Muslim Punjab population also preferred to join India for many reasons, not the least of which was that they had become used to a democracy where they had complete freedom of religion and civil rights as well, and with the exception of Turkey none of the Muslim countries were democratic. Based on the history, actions, inactions, and statements of the Muslim League which did not democratically elect its leaders, Pakistan would not likely be a democracy that guaranteed civil rights—especially religious rights—to their citizens (and they were right). So the majority of the people of the Punjab were opposed to becoming a part of Pakistan. The Sikhs were passionate opponents of being a part of Pakistan as they knew their Muslim neighbors one of whose major reasons for wanting a Muslim state was that everyone could then be forced to be Muslim or be expelled or ethnically cleansed.
The Sultan, led 17 different military expeditions to India to spread the Muslim faith He is one of the few major conquerors of the world who was never defeated in Battle. He conquered the Lahore area and others of India that became Muslim and eventually became Pakistan. He was the first Islamic leader to bear the Title of Sultan demonstrating the separation of the civil power from the Caliph.
The Muslim League was demanding that the Punjab become a part of Pakistan when independence was granted later. However, the Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Christians were all adamant that they would not live in a Muslim nation which would soon become a de facto theocracy if the British could not control them. The Punjab was divided between India and Pakistan, and hundreds of thousands died in Sikh-Muslim attacks and then Hindu-Muslim conflict in the Punjab.
He was echoing proposals that he made in the Delhi Emergency Committee that had been called to cope with the butchery and murder when the Hindus and Sikhs were trying to leave the areas that were to be part of Pakistan under the Partition and the retaliations against the Delhi Muslims who were trying to flee to the new Pakistan. Unfortunately, the Muslim leadership did not want such a truce as while the land had been partitioned, Indian Money, military equipment, and other resources were yet to be divided and the Muslim leaders who had been so successful playing the violence card to gain and independent Pakistan, did not want to give up that option in the remainder of the division of India. Also, it was not at all clear that the Muslim political leaders could even then control the mobs who they had already whipped up to violence.
This quotation is typical of the anti-Semitic view of the World that is held by many Islamic fundamentalists. Saudi Arabia promulgates this type of venom throughout the Muslim World. This, along with diatribes like it, are recorded in video and audio tape, and with the permission of the Saudi Arabian government if not with government funds.
14 Arab Armies in a coordinated attack on the 1 day old Israeli state, intended to massacre all the Israelis as demonstrated by this quote. Note that this kind of extermnination intent was advertised with pride. To everyone's surprised, the Jewish defenders not only beat back the viscious attacks but enlssarged their terroitory by capturing strategic sites from which the attacks had been launched. Many people credit to the Israely victory to the fact that they were litterally fighting for their lives. Defeat would have meant death for them and their families. The Arab armies, in contrast, were fighting for land that other Arabs claimed that should have been theirs. The willingness to stand and fight for this goal did not match the self preservation that motivated the Israelis--especially in the aftermath of the Holocaust killing 6 million Jews in WWII.
There are some who argue that the quotation was made earlier and was not meant as an incendary call for massacre of Israelis. It well may be that in his original thinking, he was predicting what would happen if the State of Israel was created, basing his thoughts on historical artrocieties of the past. And many think he was concerned about that possible outcome and was trying to avoid it. The import of the quotation was not necessaruly to hisltorically blame Assam for the point of view but to simply establish that there were many Arab voices calling for victories of history where there were massacres in the Middle East. And there were those who took Azzam's quotation and broadcasted it on Arab radio, calling for the very massacre that Assam may have been warning about. Note that this notion of Jewish massacre and extermination was also picked up 60 years later and called for by the President of Iran.
This was part of the continual conflict between the Muslims and the Eastern Orthodox Christians. The Greeks ended up doubling their territory.
The "trouble" was the terrorist attacks to gain an independent Pakistan that the Punjab Muslims were perpetrating against the Sikhs and the Hindus and the retaliations. At first organized in the cities they had become spontaneous and spread to the countryside. It turned out to be impossible for Governor Jenkins and the limited British troops and police to stop the violence in most places. By the end of the Partition of India hundreds of thousands of Punjabis had been killed.
Singh turned him down. Note that even before Pakistan was a country, Jinnah and other Muslim leaders had hopes of grabbing much of India as the British partitioned it, and have been trying to do so ever since the inception of Pakistan
The attitude of the non-Muslims at that time was based on the Muslim attacks in the Punjab on Sikhs where entire Sikh villages and neighborhoods in towns and cities were murdered—every man woman and child. In many cases women were first raped. The Muslims had been whipped up by the leaders of the Muslim League to put terrorist pressure on the Sikh, Hindu and British to meet the League's political and territorial demands for an Independent Pakistan. Soon there was retaliation in kind and there were many Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims engaged in internecine slaughter and behaving "little better than animals".
The Armenian-Turkish enmity was vicious to the point that each people tried to kill and exterminate the other—men women and children. The atrocities committed by the Armenians were unfortunately matched by the Turks in what is now referred to as the “Armenian Genocide”—see {51838} The armed combatants amongst Turks and Armenians were in the minority yet each side slaughtered all members of the other whenever they could. The hatred still prevails – see {588211}. And Turks and Armenians both still accuse the other of atrocities of the period and appear in denial about their own violence.
A very passionate minority of India’s Muslims demanded a separate Islamic State (what would become Pakistan) but Hindu’s and Muslims were mixed throughout India and many Indians and British were concerned that there would be a bloodbath if the plans for independence went forward. Gandhi desperately tried to avoid violence but thought that independence was so important that the sectarian violence should not be an excuse for continued British rule. Unfortunately, millions of Indians were killed in the riots and ethnic cleansing and revenge that followed independence. Since then there has been much second guessing on how else the situation might have been handled.
This quotation distressed many ultra rightists who otherwise were avid followers of Mises. See {632407} for another quotation that distressed many European conservative devotees of Mises.
Odo of Chatillon-Sur-Marne. This is an amazingly distressing quotation for most moderns. Here we have the Pope preaching genocide and ethnic cleansing. This was one of the main triggers of the bloody Crusades and is not forgotten by Muslims in the Middle East Today. As Islam has not changed a great deal in 1000 years, most Muslims assume that the same is true of Christianity and especially the popes and the Roman Catholic Church. This is one of the reasons that the Islamic world reacts so strongly when a pope makes any statement negatve about Muslims and Islam.
Greece had always coveted Anatolia which was a part of the Ottoman Empire but had been in antiquity a Greek dominated area. Further, people of Greek ethnicity and culture, who hundreds of years ago used to be the vast majority were, after the hundreds of years of Ottoman rule and migration, were then the largest minority in Anatolia. The Turks lost the First World War as a consequence of their allying with Germany, and had been stripped of their vast Arab territories. Also, Turkey had just undergone a revolution and the old order was displaced. Greek Nationalist Prime Minister Venizelos saw this as an opportunity to get back Anatolia and sent a military invasion force to land at Smyrna (Ismir to the Turks), the largest city of Anatolia where despite the Greek minority in all of Anatolia, Greeks were a small majority in Smyrna. The invasion was initially successful but was then repulsed by the Turk revolutionists lead by their great patriot Ataturk who counterattacked and defeated the Greek forces handily despite the fact that they were hastily organized, untrained together, and much more poorly equipped than the Greeks. However, the Greeks in their retreat, followed a scorched earth policy and as this quotation shows, committed many atrocities against the Turkish civilian villages.
The Christian Crusaders had captured Jerusalem and slaughtered the Muslim civilian inhabitants. In the 21st century, some Islamic terrorists justified the beheading of captured Christian prisoners as revenge for this massive Christian beheading of Muslims almost 1,000 years earlier.
The fear of the Sikhs was that if the Punjab became a part of the new Muslim State of Pakistan, they would not be allowed to practice their religion and that the new Islamic state would discriminate against non-Muslims. They were successful in keeping the Punjab as a part of India, and turned out to have been right about the intolerance of the new Muslim state.
Even into the 21st century, the problem was not solved and Muslims from Pakistan continue their futile but tragic terrorist tactics to try and acquire more territory from India." 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma
The Armenian-Turkish enmity was vicious to the point that each people tried to kill and exterminate the other—men women and children. The atrocities committed by the Armenians were unfortunately greatly exceeded by the Turks in what is now often referred to as the “Armenian Genocide”—see {51838}, {631062} and {61904}. Armenians were in the minority yet each side slaughtered members of the other whenever they could. The Ottoman Turks were much better at it. The hatred still prevails – see {588211}. And Turks and Armenians both still accuse the other of atrocities during the period and appear in denial about their own violence.
General Sir Frank Walter Messervy, KCSI, KBE, CB, DSO & Bar was a British Indian Army officer in the First and Second World Wars. Following its independence, he was the first Commander-in-Chief of the Pakistan Army (15 August 1947 – 10 February 1948). Previously, he had served as General Officer Commanding-in-Chief Northern Command, India in 1946 and 1947.