History Today, June, 2002, by Sebastian Balfour
BETWEEN THE TWO WORLD WARS, Britain, Spain and Italy launched chemical offensives against their enemies in Afghanistan, Iraq and North Africa. Most of these wars have been kept secret for decades and official documents relating to them have still not been released. Politicians and military leaders in Europe were well aware of the effects of the deadliest of these chemicals, mustard gas. It had caused deaths and horrific injuries among soldiers in the battlefields of the First World War before they began to wear protective clothing. Yet this was the preferred chemical warhead used by European armies in these areas and their victims were often old men, women and children because they were easier to target and had no means of protection.
After Hiroshima and the Vietnam War, it may seem whimsical to suggest that war is anything else but barbaric. But in the aftermath of the Great War, in which military technology such as the development of deadly poisons overwhelmed the inherited rules of engagement, the European Powers agreed to re-affirm the principle that chemical and bacteriological weapons should be excluded from all future conflicts. Moreover, war was still considered a matter between men in uniforms. As late as 1938, Chamberlain insisted that civilians were not legitimate targets of war.
Yet the new standards that Europeans wished to apply to war were not extended to military action against their colonial enemies. Britain launched mustard-gas artillery shells against Afghans in 1919, shortly after signing the Treaty of Versailles prohibiting their use, and then in 1920-21 against Iraqis resisting British invasion of their lands. War Office documents on the build-up of these chemical warheads are available for consultation but none have yet been released about the chemical war itself, even 83 years later, and there is no guarantee that they ever will be made available.
Why this continued secrecy when the values that drove these chemical wars have been overturned? At the time non-whites in the Third World were regarded with paternalist racism. European expansion was justified on the grounds of civilisation. Natives were being brought the advantages of a superior society. Those who failed to embrace the benefits of Western values needed to be taught a harsh lesson, for their own good. As Colonial Secretary in 1919, Winston Churchill expressed impatience with the RAF's reluctance to drop mustard-gas bombs. `I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas', he wrote. `I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes'.
The deployment of chemicals was also justified because the `natives' did not behave with appropriate decorum on the battlefield. Yet among many military spokesmen, there was a wilful self-deceit about the effects of these chemicals. `If it is fair for an Afghan to shoot down a British soldier and cut him to pieces as he lies wounded on the ground', wrote one such officer, `why is it not fair for a British Artilleryman to fire a shell which makes the said native sneeze? It is really too silly'.
Of all these chemical wars, only the Italian use of mustard gas against Ethiopians in 1936 has been well documented (although the Italian historian who published the evidence has been hounded by the Right). Italy's toxic gas offensives in Libya in 1923-24 and 1927-28 are less well known. But probably the least known and possibly the most extensive of chemical wars in this period was that waged by Spain against Moroccans between 1921 and 1927. The matter has been hushed up ever since and the vast majority of Spaniards know nothing about it.
Spain was in northern Morocco as part of the deal between the Great Powers in the first decade of the twentieth century to share out Africa. Britain insisted that Spain should be awarded a sphere of influence (later a protectorate) in northern Morocco in order to prevent the French expanding to the coast opposite Gibraltar. With the acquiescence of the Sultanate, Spain moved out of its old coastal enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in 1908 and continued to expand into the craggy terrain of the Rif Mountains, encountering sporadic and violent resistance from its inhabitants.
A bloody disaster in July 1921, in which over 8,000 Spanish troops were massacred in the space of one week, led to a new jihad under the leadership of Abdel Krim, a progressive Moroccan who had collaborated for many years with the Spanish. Spain was driven out of most of the land it had occupied. In response, the Spanish army began to fire chemical shells at their enemy bought from the French. The Spanish government and the military also secretly approached the German High Command and the ex-Director of the German chemical war service. Evading the slow-moving post-war controls of the Allies, the Germans supplied Spain with the materiel and technicians that allowed the Spanish army to deploy massive amounts of chemical weapons against their Moroccan foes. Factories were converted in Melilla and in Spain to produce mustard-gas. The first gas bombs were dropped by air in 1924. For the next four years the Spanish air force and artillery launched these bombs against enemy troops, villages and souks throughout north Morocco.
In an effort to counter the deadly European warhead, Abdel Krim's technicians invented their own Third World bomb, a shell filled with chilli powder that indeed must have made its victims sneeze, but not much else. By 1927, the combined forces of the Spanish and the French colonial armies crushed the resistance to European expansion of the Moroccans.
The effects of the chemical offensive are still felt. Apart from the immediate casualties, whole families of Moroccans have since died of types of cancer associated with mustard gas. Evidence suggests that the chemical has transformed the genome among many families and the rate of childhood cancer in those areas contaminated by mustard gas is higher than anywhere else in Morocco.
The vast majority of the colonial subjects who survived the chemical onslaught in the inter-war years are now dead. But the memory of those wars is still alive among their children and grandchildren and forms part of the accumulated resentments against the West. Opening up the archives and acknowledging the damage done to thousands of families would be a small but significant step towards reconciliation.
Sebastian Balfour's Deadly Embrace: Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War is just published by Oxford University Press, 25 [pounds sterling].
COPYRIGHT 2002 History Today Ltd. in association with The Gale Group and LookSmart. COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group
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