Tag Archives: Mao Zedong

Bungling in the Himalayas

25 Saturday Feb 2017

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tibetHalper, Lezlee Brown, and Stefan Halper. Tibet: An Unfinished Story. London: C. Hurst & Co. Publishers, 2014. 367 pp.

In the broader story of freedom and liberty, the case of Tibet is seldom heard. Headlines and activists scream about the Syrians, Rohingyas, Kurds, and even the Yezidis but one of the greatest acts of geographical and political usurpation and cultural and demographic genocide of the Cold War era – Tibet – gets only an occasional mention in the international press. Tibet: An Unfinished Story by Lezlee Brown Halper and Stefan Halper impressively details the sad history of the Roof of the World from its earliest mentions in the West to its conquest, annexation, and subjugation by China, to eventual relegation to oblivion by the world community.

Ostensibly starting with Herodotus’ mention of Tibetan gold prospecting ants, the Halpers quickly move through the mythologising of Tibet in the 18th and 19th centuries by the British – no doubt, due to difficulty of access and a curious Oriental warp Westerners have always displayed – and German interest in the early 20th century in locating the Aryan homeland in Tibet to the critical years after the end of World War II when Tibet became one of the first pawns in the Cold War.

The book is impressive in its use of archives from the United States, Britain, and available Chinese and Indian sources. The basic premise of Tibet is that the country was abandoned – betrayed? – by India, the United States, and Britain in its hour of need against China. Not only did Tibet not receive much military support, it found little bilateral political assistance or even in the United Nations. Meanwhile, Mao systematically crushed the Tibetans. While this argument carries some weight, it does not  consider the Tibetan role in their own fortunes nor does it account for the material realities of the late 1940s.

The end of World War II saw the rise of Soviet power and the United States at once committed to fighting the spread of communism around the world. Tibet was a point of contact between the Communist bloc and the non-Communist world. However, Washington found itself restrained in its support for Tibet by several factors. One, the British, who had ruled over India and indirectly extended influence into Tibet after a military expedition in 1903 – in an effort to protect the jewel in the Crown, of course, against imagined Russian designs – accepted Chinese suzerainty over the Himalayan state though not sovereignty. This was a different position from that of George Curzon, who had stated in the British parliament that Chinese claims on Tibet were a constitutional fiction. Two, the Himalayan terrain was difficult to access even with aircraft. During World War II, the Office of Strategic Services had tried to supply the Chinese Nationalists against Japan (and the Communists) via Tibet but the mountains proved a difficult obstacle for early aircraft and Lhasa was unwilling o cooperate. Three, Jawaharlal Nehru did not want the Cold War to come to Asia. The Indian prime minister was not open to the idea of a new imperial power – that is how Nehru saw the United States’ actions in Europe and elsewhere – establishing a presence in India; furthermore, he was afraid that a substantial US presence would antagonise the Chinese into hostile relations with India who had to live with China even after the Americans left. And finally, four, despite an ongoing war between the Communists and the Nationalists in China, both sides agreed that Tibet was indisputably Chinese. Chinese Nationalists thus became an obstacle in US policy towards Tibet as well.

The United States did conduct covert operations in Tibet. This was done with Pakistani help rather than Indian, resulting in greater complications in the India-US-Pakistan triangle. These operations, as US intelligence had already foreseen, did not amount to much in the ultimate reckoning.

The Halpers put a fair share of the blame for the loss of Tibet on Nehru. They fail to consider, however, that there was little that Delhi could do in terms of providing military or economic support to the Tibetans. India was a new republic that was itself going through the pangs of Partition and faced a war in Kashmir after its twin, Pakistan, had instigated Pashtun tribesmen into invading the province. A poor economic and industrial base meant that India’s only realistic contribution to a Tibetan struggle would be to provide the geography for Western powers to fight. Additionally, Nehru was sceptical of Washington’s resolve: he did not believe that Harry Truman was as committed to the cause of an independent Tibet as he was to Western Europe. He was right in his suspicions: in a May 1950 meeting with his British counterparts, Dean Acheson had explained that the US State Department did not see the possibility of resisting the Chinese Communists in Tibet. However, “little covert assistance in the form of specialised military instruction and supplies to the Tibetans might make a Chinese military expedition prohibitively costly.” In other words, Washington’s aim was not to protect Tibet to use the country to harass the Chinese Communists. Nehru did not believe that this low bar sufficed Indian intervention.

The cynicism of the United States and the idealism of Nehru’s pan-Asian dream were pertly responsible for Tibet’s demise. The lion’s share of the blame, however, must rest with the Tibetan leadership. After the death of Thubten Gyatso, the 13th Dalai Lama, the country was wracked by a struggle for succession. A regent – Thubten Jamphel Yeshe Gyaltsen, of the Reting monastery – was put in place until the next Dalai Lama could be anointed but he was known for his fondness of beautiful women and other habits unbecoming of a spiritual leader of the Tibetans. He was replaced by Taktra Rimpoche in 1941 but led a failed uprising against his successor in 1944. The infighting among the Tibetan elites, monasteries, and the Kashag – Tibet’s governing council – diluted Tibet’s voice to the outside world. Some sections were content with autonomy under Beijing while others wanted complete independence.

To compound problems, the Tibetans were not yet educated in the ways of modern statecraft. They did not take the Chinese threat seriously, seeing them as merely the descendants of Szechuan warlords and reasoned that they could be easily defeated. When China finally did invade, the Tibetan National Assembly telegraphed Mao Zedong, “This is a sacred place of Buddhism, which does not allow armed force from foreign countries. This type of bullying activity shall not happen…. We hope you order all border troops not to exercise force against Tibetan soldiers and immediately withdraw to their original locations.” Needless to say, the message went unanswered by Mao. Perhaps the worst example of Tibetan incompetence is the incident at the fall of Chamdo, an important city in eastern Tibet on the route to Lhasa. As Chinese soldiers neared the city, the governor, Ngabo Jigme, frantically sent messages to Lhasa asking for instructions. After several messages went by without any response, his aide-de-camp finally got through to the Kashag aide-de-camp only to be told, “Right now is the period of the Kashags’ picnic and they are all participating in this. Your telegrams are being deoded and then we will send you a reply.” The aide’s angry and frustrated response, ‘skyag pa’i gling kha!, is quite understandable.

Tibet meticulously explains the key players in the sad saga. The authors analyse the political trends in Indian non-alignment politics and superpower rivalry in detail. Tibetan idiosyncrasies are not entirely left out. The Halpers relate one instance when Nehru yelled at Tenzin Gyatso, the new Dalai Lama, upon being told that Tibet must have independence. “That is not possible!” the Indian prime minister exploded, “You say you want independence and in the same breath you say you do not want bloodshed. Impossible!” At first glance a hypocritical outburst from a man who had, with Mohandas Gandhi, led India to independence through non-violent means, careful and objective consideration reveals that Nehru did not believe that non-violence was possible with all enemies.

The Halpers point to Nehru’s poor council on China – VK Menon and KM Pannikar have been lambasted by Indian scholars for their excessively anti-imperialist and pro-China perspectives, attitudes that landed India in trouble in 1962. Between Nehru’s approach to Indian national interests and the jaundiced views of his advisors, Tibet stood little chance. However, recent scholarship has also revealed that India’s first prime minister was concerned about the threat China posed to India. He expressed such thoughts privately to a select group of confidantes while publicly proclaiming brotherhood with the Chinese. To be fair, Tibet is not about Indian foreign policy or Nehru but about how actions, rather than thoughts, played out in Tibet’s story.

Tibet is an excellent read for any reader wishing to acquaint himself with the general contours of Tibetan history in the mid-twentieth century. Its placing of blame, however, seems to come from a sense of anguish – that all lovers of Tibet share – than the scholarship done even by its own authors. Particularly commendable is the the way the Halpers have shown how the different strands of the Tibetan issue – actors, political compulsions, material restrictions – all interlinked to a final tragic outcome.

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Missed Opportunities

09 Saturday Jan 2016

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JFK's Forgotten Crisis

Riedel, Bruce. JFK’s Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA, and the Sino-Indian War. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2015. 256 pp.

Occurring in the shadows of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Sino-Indian War of 1962 is a forgotten slice of history that is remembered vividly only in India. With it is buried an important episode of US president John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s diplomacy, an intriguing ‘what-if’ of Indo-US relations, and perhaps the most active chapter in the neglected history of Tibet’s resistance to China’s brutal occupation. The war, however, brought about significant geopolitical changes to South Asia that shape it to this day. Bruce Riedel’s JFK’s Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA, and the Sino-Indian War is a gripping account of the United States’ involvement in South Asia and Kennedy’s personal interest in India. In it, he dispels the commonly held belief that India was not a priority of US foreign policy in the early 1960s and that Kennedy was preoccupied with events in his own backyard to pay any attention to a “minor border skirmish” on the other side of the world.

Except perhaps among historians of the Cold War, it is not widely known that the United States cosied up to Pakistan during the Eisenhower administration not to buttress South and West Asia against communism but to secure permission to fly reconnaissance missions into the Soviet Union, China, and Tibet. Initiated in 1957, the US-Pakistan agreement allowed the Central Intelligence Agency to operate U-2 reconnaissance planes from Lahore, Peshawar, and other airbases in West Pakistan over Communist territory. Airfields in East Pakistan, such as at Kurmitola, were also made available to the United States. Some of the missions were flown by the Royal Air Force as well. These overflights provided a wealth of information about the Soviet and Chinese militaries, economies, terrain, and other aspects important to Western military planners. Particularly useful was the information on China, which was otherwise sealed off to Western eyes and ears. Ayub Khan, the Pakistani president, claimed his pound of flesh for the agreement – Washington and Karachi signed a bilateral security agreement supplementing the CENTO and SEATO security pacts that Pakistan was already a member of and American military aid expanded to include the most advanced US jet fighter of the time, the F-104.

In addition to intelligence gathering, the United States was also involved – with full Pakistani complicity – in supporting Tibetan rebels fight the Chinese army. The CIA flew out recruits identified by Tibetan resistance leaders, first to Saipan and then on to Camp Hale in Colorado or to the Farm – the CIA’s Virginia facility – to be trained in marksmanship, radio operations, and other crafts of insurgency. The newly-trained recruits were then flown back to Kurmitola, from where they would be parachuted back into Tibet to harass the Chinese military. No one in Washington had any illusion that these rebels stood any chance against any professionally trained and equipped force, especially one as large as the People’s Liberation Army, but US policymakers were content to harass Beijing in the hope of keeping it off balance.

Jawaharlal Nehru knew of US activities in Tibet, for his Intelligence Bureau chief, BN Mullick, had his own sources in Tibet. It is unlikely, however, that he knew of Pakistan’s role in the United States’ Tibet operations. In any case, Nehru did not believe that it was worth antagonising the Chinese when there was no hope of victory; India had to live in the same neighbourhood and hence be more cautious than the rambunctious Americans. Furthermore, it was the heyday of non-alignment and panchsheel and the Indian prime minister did not wish to upset that applecart if he could help it. In fact, Nehru urged US president Dwight Eisenhower during their 1956 retreat to the latter’s Gettysburg farmhouse to give the UN Security Council seat held by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist China to Mao Zedong’s Communist China. As Nehru saw it, a nation of 600 million people could not be kept outside the world system for long, but Ike, as the US president was known, still had bitter memories of the Chinese from Korea fresh in his mind. Yet three years later, when Ike visited India and Chinese perfidy in Aksai Chin had been discovered, the Indian prime minister’s tone was a contrast.

To most, Cuba defines the Kennedy administration: JFK had got off to a disastrous start in his presidency with the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba, an inheritance from his predecessor’s era. His iconic moment, indisputably, came two years later in the showdown with Nikita Khrushchev over Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. Less well known is the president’s interest in South Asia and India in particular. Riedel explains how, even before assuming the presidency, Kennedy had made a name for himself in the US senate with his powerful speeches on foreign policy. In essence, he criticised the Eisenhower government for its failure to recognise that the era of European power was over; Kennedy wanted to fight a smarter Cold War, embracing the newly liberated peoples of Asia and Africa and denying the Communists an opportunity to fan any residual anti-imperialism which usually manifested itself as anti-Westernism. Riedel points to a speech in May 1959 as a key indicator of the future president’s focus: in May 1959, JFK declared, “…no struggle in the world today deserves more of our time and attention than that which now grips the attention of all Asia. That is the struggle between India and China for leadership of the East…” China was growing three times as fast as India, Kennedy went on, because of Soviet assistance; to help India, the future president proposed, NATO and Japan should put together an aid package of $1 billion per year that would revitalise the Indian economy and set the country on a path to prosperity. The speech had been partially drafted by someone who would also play a major role in the United States’ India policy during Kennedy’s presidency: John Kenneth Galbraith.

Riedel shows how, despite his Cuban distraction, Kennedy put India on the top of his agenda. A 1960 National Intelligence Estimate prepared by the CIA for the new president predicted a souring of India-China relations; it further predicted that Delhi would probably turn to Moscow for help with Beijing. However, the border dispute with the Chinese had shaken Nehru’s dominance in foreign policy and made Indian leaders more sympathetic of the United States. The NIE also projected the military gap between India and China to increase to the disadvantage of the former. The PLA had also been doing exceedingly well against Tibetan rebels, picking them off within weeks of their infiltration. By late 1960, a Tibetan enclave had developed in Nepal; Mustang, the enclave was called, became the preferred site for the CIA to drop supplies to the rebels. Galbraith, the newly appointed ambassador to India, disapproved of the CIA’s Tibetan mission, which had delivered over 250 tonnes of arms, ammunition, medical supplies, communications gear, and other equipment by then. Like Nehru, he thought it reckless and provocative without any hope of achieving a favourable result. There were, however, occasional intelligence windfalls coming from Tibet and Kennedy overruled Galbraith for the moment.

JFK’s Forgotten Crisis shows how Galbraith was far more attuned to India than he is usually given credit for. He is most famously remembered – perhaps only among Cold War historians – for nixing a Department of Defence proposal in 1961 that proposed giving India nuclear weapons. Then, he predicted – most likely accurately – that Nehru would denounce such an offer and accuse the United States of trying to make India its atomic ally. Now, the Harvard professor pushed for Nehru and Kennedy to meet. This would give the Indian prime minister, Galbraith hoped, an opportunity to remove any lingering suspicions he may have had about US foreign policy in South Asia. The large aid package Washington had planned for India would only sweeten the meeting. This was not to be: Nehru remained most taciturn and almost monosyllabic during his visit to Jacqueline Kennedy’s home in Newport. However, he was quite enamoured by the First Lady, and Jackie Kennedy later said that she found the Indian leader to be quite charming; she, however, had much sharper things to say about the leader’s daughter!

Washington’s outreach to Delhi annoyed Karachi. Though ostensibly the US-Pakistan alliance was to fight communism, the reality was that Pakistan had always been preoccupied with India. Ayub Khan felt betrayed that the United States would give India, a non-aligned state, economic assistance that would only assist it in developing a stronger military to be deployed against Pakistan. Riedel’s account highlights the irresistible Kennedy charm – when Pakistan suspended the Dragon Lady’s flights from its soil, JFK was able to woo Khan back into the fold. However, the Pakistani dictator had a condition – that Washington would discuss all arms sales to India with him. This agreement would be utterly disregarded during the Sino-Indian War and Pakistan would start looking for more reliable allies against their larger Hindu neighbour. Riedel reveals how Pakistan had started drifting into the Chinese orbit as early as 1961, even before China’s invasion of India, an event commonly believed to have occurred after India’s Himalayan humiliation.

When India retook Goa from the Portuguese, a NATO country, it caused all sorts of difficulties for the United States. On the one hand, Kennedy agreed with the notion that colonial possessions should be granted independence or returned to their original owners but on the other, Nehru and his minister of defence, Krishna Menon, had not endeared themselves to anyone with their constant moralising; their critics would not, now, let this opportunity to call out India’s hypocrisy on the use of force in international affairs pass. The brief turbulence in relations was set right, oddly, by the First Lady again. On her visit to India, she again charmed the prime minister and he insisted that he stay with him instead of the US embassy and had the room Edwina Mountbatten had often used on her visits readied. The play of personalities, an often ignored facet of diplomacy, has been brought out well by Riedel.

Ironically, China believed that the Tibetan resistance movement was being fuelled by India with US help. India’s granting of asylum to the Dalai Lama did not help matters either, even though it was Nehru who had convinced the young Dalai Lama to return to Tibet in 1956 and have faith in Beijing’s promises of Tibetan autonomy. Although Indian actions did factor into the Chinese decision to invade India in October 1962, records from Eastern European archives indicate that the Sino-Soviet split was also partly to blame. Humiliating India served two purposes for Mao: first, it would secure Chinese access to Tibet via Aksai Chin, and second, it would expose India’s Western ties and humiliate a Soviet ally, thereby proclaiming China to be the true leader of the communist world.

Riedel’s treatment of the war and the several accounts makes for interesting reading, though his belief that there is rich literature on the Indian side about the war is a little puzzling. Most of what is known about the Sino-Indian War comes from foreign archives – primarily the United States, Britain, and Russia but also European archives as their diplomats recorded and relayed to their capitals opinions they had formed from listening to chatter on the embassy grapevine. There is, indeed, literature on the Indian side but much of it seeks to apportion blame rather than clarify the sequence of events. Records from the Prime Minister’s Office, the Ministry of External Affairs, or the Ministry of Defence are yet to be declassified, though the Henderson-Brooks-Bhagat Report was partially released to the public by Australian journalist Neville Maxwell. Chinese records, though not easily accessible, have trickled out via the most commendable Cold War International History Project. The Parallel History Project has also revealed somewhat the view from Eastern Europe.

Riedel dispels the notion of Nehru’s Forward Policy as the cassus belli. According to Brigadier John Dalvi, a prisoner of war from almost the outset, China had been amassing arms, ammunition, winter supplies, and other materiel at its forward bases since at least May 1962. This matches with an IB report Mullick had provided around the same time. Furthermore, the Indian forces were outnumbered at least three-to-one all along the border and five-to-one in some places. The troops were veterans of the Korean War and armed with modern automatic rifles as compared to Indian soldiers’ 1895 issue Lee Enfield. Though Riedel exonerates Nehru on his diplomacy, he does not allow the prime minister’s incompetence to pass: the political appointment of BM Kaul, the absolute ignorance of conditions on the ground, and the poor logistics and preparation of the troops on the border left them incapable of even holding a Chinese assault, let alone breaking it.

JFK’s Forgotten Crisis brings out a few lesser known aspects of the Sino-Indian War. For example, India’s resistance to the PLA included the recruitment of Tibetan exiles to harass the PLA from behind the lines. Nehru was approached by the two men most responsible for the debacle on the border – Menon and Kaul – with the proposal which Nehru promptly agreed. A team, commanded by Brigadier Sujan Singh Uban and under the IB, was formed. A long-continuing debate Riedel takes up in his work is the Indian failure to use air power during the conflict in the Himalayas. It has been suggested that had Nehru not been so timid and fearful of retaliation against Indian cities but deployed the Indian air force, India may have been able to repel or at least withstand the Chinese invasion. One wonders how effective the Indian Air Force really might have been given the unprepared state of the Army. In any case, Riedel points out that the Chinese air force was actually larger than the IAF – the PLAAF had over 2,000 jet fighters to India’s 315, and 460 bombers to India’s 320. Additionally, China had already proven its ability to conquer difficult terrain in Korea.

Throughout the South Asian conflict, the United States was also managing its relationship with Pakistan. Despite the Chinese invasion, the bulk of India’s armies were tied on the Western border with Pakistan and Ayub Khan was making noises about a decisive solution to the Kashmir imbroglio; it was all the United States could do to hold him back. However, Ayub Khan came to see the United States as a fair weather friend and realised he had to look elsewhere for support in his ambitions against India: China was the logical choice. Thus, the 1962 war resulted in the beginning of the Sino-Pakistani relationship that would blossom to the extent of Beijing providing Islamabad with nuclear weapon and missile designs in the 1980s.

The Chinese had halted after their explosive burst into India on October 20. For a full three weeks, Chinese forces sat still while the Indians regrouped and resupplied their positions. On November 17, they struck again and swept further south. The Siliguri corridor, or the chicken neck, was threatened , and India stood to lose the entire Northeast. In panic, Kaul asked Nehru to invite foreign armies to defend Indian soil. A broken Nehru wrote two letters to Washington on the same day, asking for a minimum of 12 squadrons of jet fighters, two B-47 bomber squadrons, and radar installations to defend against Chinese strikes on Indian cities. These would all be manned by American personnel until sufficient Indians could be trained. In essence, India wanted the United States to deploy over 10,000 men in an air war with China on its behalf.

There is some doubt as to what extent the United States would have gone to defend India. However, that November, the White House dispatched the USS Kitty Hawk to the Bay of Bengal (she was later turned around as the war ended). After the staggering blows of November 17, the US embassy, in anticipation of Indian requests for aid, had also started preparing a report to expedite the process through the Washington bureaucracy. On November 20, China declared a unilateral ceasefire and withdrew its troops to the Line of Actual Control. A cessation of hostilities had come on Beijing’s terms, who had shown restraint by not dismembering India. Riedel makes a convincing case that Kennedy would have defended India against a continued Chinese attack had one come in the spring of the following year, and that overt US support may have influenced Mao’s decision

In the immediate aftermath of the war, the United States sent Averell Harriman of Lend-Lease fame to India to assess the country’s needs. Washington had three items on its agenda with India – 1. Increase US economic and military aid to India; 2. Push India to negotiate with Pakistan on Kashmir as Kennedy had promised Ayub Khan; and 3. Secure Indian support for the CIA’s covert Tibetan operations. The first met with little objection, and though Nehru strongly objected to talks with Pakistan, he obliged. Predictably, they got to nowhere. On the third point, Riedel writes that India agreed to allow the CIA to operate U-2 missions from Charbatia. This has usually been denied on the Indian side though one senior bureaucrat recently claimed that Nehru had indeed agreed to such an arrangement but only two flights took off before permission was revoked. Nonetheless, the IB set up a Special Frontier Force of Tibetans in exile and the CIA supported them with equipment and air transport from bases in India. All  this, however, withered away as relations again turned sour after the Indo-Pakistan War of 1965 and the election of Richard Nixon.

Most of the sources JFK’s Forgotten Crisis uses are memoirs and prominent secondary sources on South Asia and China. Riedel also uses some recently declassified material from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library that sheds new light on the president’s views on South Asia. Despite the academic tenor of the book, it is readily accessible to lay readers as well; personally, I would have preferred a significantly heavier mining of archival documents and other primary sources but that is exactly what would have killed sales and the publisher would not have liked! Overall, Riedel gives readers a new way to understand the Kennedy years; he also achieves a fine balance in portraying Nehru’s limitations and incompetence. The glaring lack of Indian primary sources also reminds us of the failure of the Indian government to declassify its records that would inform us even more about the crisis.

As Riedel notes, the Chinese invasion of India created what they feared most and had not existed earlier: the United States and India working together in Tibet. This was largely possible also because of the most India-friendly president in the White House until then. Yet Pakistan held great sway over American minds thanks to the small favours it did for the superpower. It was also the birth of the Sino-Pakistani camaraderie that is still going strong. The geopolitical alignment created by the Sino-Indian War affects South Asian politics to this day. Yet it was a missed opportunity for Indo-US relations, something that had to await the presidency of George W. Bush.

There are two things Indian officials would do well to consider. First, Pakistan’s consistent ability to extract favours from Washington is worth study: if small yet important favours can evince so much understanding from the White House, it would be in Indian interests to do the same. Second, Jaswant Singh’s comment to Strobe Talbott deserves reflection: “Our problem is China, we are not seeking parity with China. we don’t have the resources, and we don’t have the will.” It is time to develop that will.

Yasukuni and Japan’s Simmering Nationalism

29 Sunday Dec 2013

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Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe’s visit to the Yasukuni Jinja, or Yasukuni Shrine, on December 26 has yet again created a political storm in Asia and across the Pacific. Singapore, Russia, and the United States have all expressed disappointment over Abe’s decision to visit the controversial shrine, and South Korea’s condemnation took on a much sharper tone. China has not only strongly denounced the visit but also singled out the prime minister for attack. One newspaper even demanded that Abe and other Diet members who have visited Yasukuni be banned from entering China. However, no Japan-related events have been cancelled nor have there been any public demonstrations. Japanese officials have said, however, that the prime minister visited the shrine in a private, not official, capacity.

For disinterested bystanders, the outcry is puzzling. China’s denouncement of Abe, as it celebrates Mao Zedong’s birth anniversary, comes off as particularly farcical considering that the dictator was responsible for, even by conservative estimates, approximately 35 million deaths during his rule; the higher estimates put the number closer to a staggering 100 million victims. Similarly, Russia’s legacy of Lenin, Stalin, and a brutal communist dictatorship gives it little moral ground to criticise Japan. As for the United States, not only do they have the dubious honour of attacking Japan with nuclear weapons not once but twice, their conduct in Vietnam and Cambodia hardly make them shining examples of military virtue. There are, of course, other colourful instances in recent US history such as the Tuskegee experiment which went on for forty years, from 1932 to 1972.

Yasukuni is a Shinto shrine in Chiyoda, Tokyo, commemorating Japan’s war dead from the Boshin War of 1867 until the end of World War II. Originally called the Tokyo Shokonsha, meaning ‘shrine to summon the souls,’ the structure was renamed to its present title, meaning ‘pacifying the nation, by Emperor Meiji in 1879.

Since 1946, the shrine has been privately funded and operated. This is because the management of a religious shrine went against post-war Japan’s secular laws. Abe is not the first prime minister to visit Yasukuni – in 1975, Takeo Miki became the first prime minister to visit the shrine, though in a private capacity, followed by Yasuhiro Nakasone in 1985 and Ryutaro Hashimoto in 1996. Junichiro Koizumi visited the war memorial every year of his prime ministership from 2001 to 2006, and since then, Abe has been the first sitting prime minister to go back to Yasukuni. Junior members of Japan’s government, across administrations, have visited the shrine on several occasions.

The site has almost two and a half million kami, spirits, enshrined, including some 28,000 Taiwanese and 21,000 Koreans. Of the two and half million kami, about a thousand were judged to be war criminals by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) set up after World War II. Of these thousand, 14 were designated as ‘Class A’ convicts. It is interesting to note that among the war criminals and the foreigners, many were enshrined at Yasukuni without consulting with surviving family members and in some cases, expressly against the wishes of their families.

The controversy at Yasukuni starts with the IMFTE. Indian jurist Radhabinod Pal argued that the trials were invalid and only a form of siegerjustiz. His book-length dissent, while admitting the horrors of Nanjing, excoriated the Americans for their use of nuclear weapons, fire-bombing cities, and provoking Japan into a war. Furthermore, he argued that all the crimes Japanese officials had been accused of came under Class B (mistreatment of prisoners, murder of civilians, wanton destruction) offences and had no need of post facto Class A (waging wars of aggression) or Class C (crimes against humanity) trials. In response, the United States did not allow the publication of his opinion until 1952 after Japan had signed a treaty recognising the validity of the Tokyo Trials. As a result, Pal’s dissent is the basis of many nationalist Japanese claims and Pal holds a revered place in Japan to this day.

In 1952, the occupation of Japan ended. Groups like the Tokyo Rusu Kazoku Kai and Nippon Izoku Kai had been lobbying the government in the name of the war dead, including war criminals, for public benefits. In May of that year, the Ministry of Justice declared that war criminals were not in the same legal category as criminals convicted by a Japanese court, thus restoring their civil rights. In 1953, a change in how public benefits were managed gave families and survivors of war criminals access to the same benefits families of any public servant who died in the line of duty would get.

In April 1954, the Yasukuni shrine started working closely with Japan’s Health and Welfare Ministry to recover the records of those killed in World War II. Once the data was compiled, the priests would decide who qualified to be enshrined at Yasukuni and by April 1959, enshrinement of all World War II casualties except war criminals was completed. Concurrently, due to an enormous public movement in Japan, the United States agreed to lessen the sentences of those found guilty by the IMFTE, and by the end of 1958, all war criminals were free and political rehabilitated.

In view of the release of the war criminals, the Repatriation Relief Bureau, the section of the Health and Welfare Ministry that liaised with the Yasukuni shrine, sent the records of Class B and Class C war criminals to the shrine. The head priest, Fujimaro Tsukuba, moved to quickly and quietly enshrine the war criminals. By 1967, 984 such war dead had been enshrined, some without permission from their families and others against the express wishes of their families.

The Health and Welfare Ministry also started sending Class A saijin meihyo, or enshrinement information cards, to the Yasukuni shrine in 1966. These included seven war criminals who had been hanged (Hideki Tojo, Seishiro Itagaki, Heitaro Kimura, Kenji Doihara, Akira Muto, Koki Hirota), five who had died in prison (Yoshijiro Umezu, Kuniaki Koiso, Hiranuma Kiichiro, Toshio Shiratori, Shigenori Togo), and two who had died of natural causes before sentencing (Osami Nagano, Yosuke Matsuoka) and were temporarily in a special category. The enshrinement was supposed to be done quietly to avoid a potential public backlash but vocal proponents of enshrinement in the Yasukuni Shrine Council passed a resolution denouncing the IMTFE and demanding that the war criminals be enshrined. The resolution left the date of enshrinement in the hands of the head priest, and Tsukuba, who had reservations about Class A war criminals, put it off until his death in 1978.

The incoming head priest, Nagayoshi Matsudaira, had an imperial background. His grandfather was a feudal lord during the last days of the Tokugawa shogunate, his father the last minister of the Imperial household, and his father in law a vice-admiral in the Imperial Navy who was tried by the Dutch for Class B and Class C crimes and executed. Matsudaira himself served in the Imperial Navy and later in Japan’s Self Defence Forces. Not surprisingly, Matsudaira abhorred the IMTFE and within three months of his appointment to the high office of the Yasukuni shrine, had all 14 war criminals enshrined.

The covert nature of the enshrinement has evoked much resentment even within Japan. When news of the enshrinement of Class A war criminals broke in April 1979, Emperor Hirohito refused to visit the shrine until his death in 1989. However, imperial emissaries have visited the shrine annually. Contrary to claims of religious or filial piety, the nature in which the war criminals were enshrined betrays the blatantly ideological basis behind the act. It is this fact that fuels the controversy to this day.

Interestingly, in a poll conducted immediately after Abe’s visit to the shrine, 43.2% of those polled said that they appreciated the gesture but a whopping 69.8% said that the prime minister should consider the international ramifications of his actions. Many Japan watchers consider visits to the Yasukuni shrine as playing to a domestic audience rather than international messaging. Indeed, the Abe administration’s approval rating has gone up one point to 55.2% and disapproval has gone down 0.4 points to 32.6% since last week.

Beyond Yasukuni, Japan’s neighbours and the United States are concerned about the country’s historical revisionism, apologies that are seen as half-hearted to the victims of Imperial Japan’s atrocities, and lack of any compensation to the victims as West Germany did with many Jewish families. Yet these issues are not so simple either.

Japan’s historical revisionism is based on the argument that they behaved as any other imperial power of the time. The atrocities committed by the Japanese Army in China, Korea, or elsewhere are to be expected in times of war and no different from European experiences in South America, the Caribbean, Africa, or Asia. This is not easy to refute. European barbarism in many of its colonies was hardly any better, if at all, than life under Japanese occupation. India is familiar with the massive famine in the late 1800s which caused, according to historian Mike Davis, approximately 29 million Indians to perish, and with Colonel Reginald Dyer. The Herero and Nama in Namibia remember the Germans well, as do the Congolese life under Belgian rule. British torture and war crimes in Yemen, Oman, Malaya, or during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya are best left unmentioned for the benefit of those with a queasy stomach. None of this exonerates Japanese war crimes but it puts them in the context of the milieu of the age of imperialism, thereby distributing the culpability to actors traditionally left unconsidered when discussing Japan.

Japan has also had trouble with its history textbooks trying to whitewash the role of the Imperial Army during World War II. The use of Korean women as sex slaves for their soldiers, chemical and biological warfare conducted by the Imperial Army, and inhuman medical experiments conducted by the infamous Unit 731 are sometimes dampened. Nonetheless, Thomas Berger, a professor at Boston University, says that these are not nearly as universal as made out to be and that Japanese history textbooks discuss Nanjing or the use of Korean comfort women in a fairly open manner. Evidence of this is seen in opinion polls that show most Japanese to be apologetic for their country’s behaviour in Asia during the Second World War. In addition, Japan has also sponsored joint historical research with both South Korea and China. In comparison, Chinese and South Korean textbooks opt for a far more hateful view of Japan than attempt any reconciliation.

Japan’s apologies have admittedly been awkward and half-hearted, and always been under a threat of retraction; it is no secret that Abe is uncomfortable with the 1993 statement released by then Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono as well as the 1995 statement by then Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama over Japan’s wartime actions. Nonetheless, these apologies remain unchanged for now. There is, however, the question of whether any apology by Japan will ever be good enough and if Seoul and Beijing are ready to accept an apology from Tokyo.

So far, there have been few signs that receptive ears await in Asia. When Japan set up the Asian Women’s Fund in 1994 to offer compensation to South Korea’s comfort women, Seoul established a rival group rather than support the Japanese effort. Meanwhile, other countries in Asia such as Indonesia, Vietnam, Taiwan, and the Philippines have forgiven the Japanese and moved on.

China, like South Korea, remains unmoved by Japanese apologies. Beijing has opportunistically stoked its subjects’ passions against Japan and allows their display conveniently such as in August and September 2012. China has also used exports of rare earths, a critical component for Japan’s technology industries, as a bargaining chip on several occasions. All signs from China indicate that they want to use Japan’s war guilt as a psychological weapon rather than find genuine reconciliation, a technique not entirely unknown to them. In Abe, they might have met a prime minister who does not care anymore and seeks to forge links with Australia, India, and China’s southeast Asian neighbours to counter China’s bullying.

The reaction from Japan’s neighbours, however much it needs to be contextualised, is understandable but the United States’ disappointment is harder to fathom. Arguably, the United States meted out harsher punishment to the Japanese than they received from them during World War II; furthermore, the attack on Pearl Harbour may have been militarily unexpected (due to logistics) but hardly out of the blue politically – the crippling sanctions imposed upon Japan in the 1930s and the Hull note were designed to provoke a response. Interestingly, after the war, the United States’ NSC 48-2 imagined an Asian order almost identical to Japan’s pre-war Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Today, when Washington is actively seeking partners for its pivot to Asia, stomping on one of its closest allies in the region seems counter-productive.

It is also hard to miss the irony in the US criticism of Abe’s visit to Yasukuni when US presidents visit the Vietnam War Memorial regularly. Washington’s conduct in that little squabble in Southeast Asia has been spared the war criminal tag only because they did not lose the war as completely as Japan did World War II; even the annual celebrations of Columbus Day and Thanksgiving may be questioned for their genocidal roots.

The knee-jerk outcry over a Japanese prime minister’s visit to Yasukuni shrine is very much overdone. Admittedly, the enshrinement of war criminals was ideologically motivated and done surreptitiously; however, it is equally true that there are legitimate questions about war-time conduct and the trial for both sides. This is not to excuse the cruelty of Japan’s Unit 731 but to recognise, as the old cliché goes, that all war is a crime. The enshrinement of IMTFE criminals at Yasakuni shrine, especially against the wishes of the families, is an issue that must be solved internally by the Japanese. It has, no doubt, tainted Japanese nationalism; but then, which nationalism has ever remained untarnished?