HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK ---------------------------
This time allies, British troops back in Afghanistan after 120 years The Globe And Mail (Canada) By SIMON DENYER Reuters News Agency Tuesday, March 26, 2002 KABUL -- Their standards flying in the wind, thousands of Afghan tribesmen screamed defiance from the peak of Takht-e-Shah as British soldiers below fired shell after shell at them. "The enemy muster in great force and have 16 standards flying," British witness Howard Hensman wrote on Dec. 12, 1879. They "are of quite a different standard to those we have hitherto had to deal with. They stood up boldly to their flags, and waved their rifles and knives in derision at each shot." Today, many of the British troops who died in the storming of Takht-e-Shah are buried in the quiet, walled Sherpur cemetery in Kabul, in sight of the hill where they fell. After crushing the Afghan resistance, avenging the massacre of a British expedition three months before and putting a friendly king on the throne, General Sir Frederick Roberts did not stay long in Afghanistan. He left in 1881. Now, for the first time in 120 years, British troops are back in Kabul, this time as an ally to the interim administration, heading an international force of peacekeepers. The British Army has helped to tidy up and restore the cemetery at Sherpur and rebuild a wall struck by mortar fire in the 1990s at the height of fighting between rival Afghan warlords, which turned whole swaths of Kabul into a wasteland. British soldiers paid tribute last month to their fallen comrades, playing The Last Post and saying prayers at a private ceremony in the cemetery. For Lieutenant-Colonel Neal Peckham of the International Security Assistance Force, it was a poignant moment. Twenty-nine of the men who died in the storming of Takht-e-Shah were from the 67th Foot (South Hampshire), a predecessor of his own Princess of Wales' Royal Regiment. In a country ravaged by 23 years of war and just emerging from harsh Taliban rule, it is perhaps ironic that their gravestones should have been destroyed not by man but by weather. There are 158 British soldiers buried in the cemetery, but a severe frost in 1978 broke most of their headstones. Today, a small memorial in the southern wall, recently repainted and restored by British troops, preserves the fragments of the 10 gravestones that have survived the ravages of time. Among them, many of the 29 casualties from the 67th Foot are remembered on a single jagged tablet. Remembered too is Major John Cook, holder of the Victoria Cross. Major Cook won his VC the year before, after saving a fellow officer during hand-to-hand combat. On Dec. 12, he took a bullet below the knee during the storming of Takht-e-Shah, and died the following day. He was 36. Lieutenant John Rumball Hearsay's name is there too, half scratched away but still recognizable. Military records show he took a bullet through the heart as the 9th Lancers charged "to save the guns at Killa Kazi" near Kabul. Britain's experience in Afghanistan in the 19th century was far from glorious. Its efforts to subdue the country and close off a possible route for Russia to invade India twice ended in disaster. In 1842, a column of 16,000 British and Indian troops, wives, children, servants and assorted hangers-on were massacred by Afghan tribesmen in the Khyber Pass. In September, 1879, a British force under Major Louis Cavagnari was slaughtered in Kabul itself. In both cases, only a handful of survivors lived to tell the tale. Gen. Roberts's force avenged that slaughter later that year, hanging nearly 100 Afghans in what one officer described as "a long, grim row of gallows." It was an action that was to turn every Afghan against the British, and despite Gen. Roberts's military victories, make a permanent presence in the country unthinkable. Before the British returned last year, Sherpur cemetery lay half-forgotten, tended for the past 16 years by an old man called Rahimullah, who looked after the graves of the few dozen mainly Europeans buried there, among them Russians, Germans, Italians and Poles. Rahimullah said he had not been paid for 18 months before the fall of the Taliban regime last year. Occasionally, when religious police came to ask why he kept foreigners' graves, he would explain that he had no other work. Most visitors, Rahimullah says, come to gaze at the grave of Sir Mark Aurel Stein, a Hungarian-born archeologist and explorer who spent most of his life in the service of the British Empire and later became a British citizen. Sir Mark has been described as one of the greatest but least-known archeologists of the 20th century -- and, alternatively, as a raider who plundered Chinese Turkistan and Central Asia of some of its most important ancient treasures. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Movies - coverage of the 74th Academy Awards® http://movies.yahoo.com/ --------------------------- ANTI-NATO INFORMATION LIST ==^================================================================ This email was sent to: archive@jab.org EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9617B Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
