The photo, taken by Sebastiano Tomada, shows Ahmed, the eight-year-old son of a Syrian rebel fighter, smoking and standing guard with an AK-47 outside a barricade in Aleppo.
Tomada tells us that Ahmed's parents were killed, and he's living with his uncle now. He quotes Ahmed as saying, "I ended up helping my uncle and his comrades because I have no other choice, there is no school, my family is dead, what choice do I have?"
When he's not manning his post, Ahmed is doing chores and fetching tea and ammo. "There is always something to do here, I am never bored," Ahmed said, according to Tomada. "The fighting has calmed down a lot from last year. We had a lot of mortars, but snipers are still a big problem. Sooner or later the regime will kiss you with one of their bullets."
8-5-2013
Legislation to grant a pardon and apology to some 5,000 Defence Forces personnel who deserted to fight with the Allies in the second World War has passed all stages in the Dáil.
Welcomed by all sides in the House, the Defence Forces (Second World War Amnesty and Immunity) Bill now goes to the President for signature.
About 100 personnel are still alive. It is estimated that about 7,000 of the 42,000 members of the Defence Forces deserted and 5,000 jointed the Allies.
Following the war they were dismissed, publicly named and refused public service jobs for seven years.
Minister for Defence Alan Shatter said the Bill’s enactment sent an important message to the survivors and the families of those who had since died. “You can be proud of your contribution or your relative’s contribution in the fight against tyranny and this contribution is now fully acknowledged by this State.”
Mr Shatter said those soldiers and about 60,000 others who joined the British forces “also contributed to the safety of their home country. If the UK had fallen to the forces of Nazi Germany, the same fate would almost certainly have been visited on this island with all of the consequences that would have gone with it.”
The Minister also paid tribute to those personnel who did not desert. “We should not underestimate at any stage the importance of their loyalty and their continuing engagement in this State at a time of global difficulty and of particular chaos within Europe.”
Stressing the importance of loyalty, he said those who remained loyal “performed a crucial duty for the State at a key time in the history of the State”.
Fianna Fáil defence spokesman Seán Ó Fearghail said he hoped the broader membership of those who fought against tyranny and the “horrendous regime of the Nazis” would take some consolation in the words of support and recognition from all sides of the House during the debate.
He said the penalties were understandable at the time “and with the benefit of hindsight more than 70 years on we realise the need to take action”.
He hoped the survivors and their relatives “take some consolation” from the Minister’s initiative.
Sinn Féin defence spokesman Pádraig Mac Lochlainn welcomed the Bill and said it was right that the soldiers were pardoned. He said fascism did not just emerge with Hitler’s rise to power. It was already evident in Mussolini’s Italy and Franco’s Spain.
He pointed out that many men who went to fight fascism in Spain “were excommunicated from the Catholic church”.
11-5-2013
There has been much recent comment in relation to Ireland’s controversial neutrality during the second World War that suggests a diminishing rather than a deepening of historical understanding.
The apology and pardon granted to Irish soldiers who deserted the Irish Army during the war, some to fight with the British army, has been broadly welcomed and rightly seen as a noble gesture. But unfortunately, it has been accompanied by distorted and simplistic accounts of a complex period of Irish history.
It has become fashionable in recent times to denigrate Irish neutrality during this period, either because it is not accepted that Ireland was neutral at all, or because it is believed that the decision to declare and maintain neutrality involved a self-serving opting out of the defining moral and political issue of the 1930s and 1940s- the defeat of Nazism.
Last year, when he addressed the deserter issue, Minister for Justice Alan Shatter referred to Irish neutrality as “a principle of moral bankruptcy” in the context of the Holocaust, and this week, contrasted that with those deserters from the Irish army who fought for “freedom against tyranny”.
British journalist Ben Macintyre has also entered the fray, referring yesterday to an “indifference to the evils of Nazism” which still “shames” Ireland.
Would that history was so simple, but it is not, and what gets lost in too much of contemporary comment and judgement of neutrality is the nuance, context and shades of grey that form the basis of the documented history of Irish neutrality and the evolution of national and international policy at that stage of the State’s existence. Of course neutrality was not absolute; Ireland’s geographic position, small size and strategic interests would dictate that it could not be absolutist about its foreign policy. But the important point is that the desire that existed in the 1930s and 1940s was that a State that had experienced a war of independence – against an imperial Britain with an often shameful record of misrule and oppression of the Irish – and a civil war less than 20 years prior to the second World War, was determined to insist on the right to implement as independent a foreign policy as possible, because the ability to do this was seen by contemporaries as the ultimate test of true independence.
This was the logical conclusion to the various Anglo-Irish relations developments in the 1930s, including the crucial return of the Treaty Ports in 1938. What also seems to be forgotten is that the decision to declare neutrality was backed overwhelmingly by all political parties at a time when the civil war divide in Irish politics was still strong.
In practice, pragmatism, stubbornness and self-preservation were also relevant and the restraint of those who could have invaded Ireland was vital. There was a difficult balancing act to be performed in order to navigate relationships with Britain, Germany and the US, and a deliberate holding at arms length of certain moral dilemmas, a rigorous censorship and a pious belief in the right to choose an Irish solution to an international crisis.
As historian Dermot Keogh has pointed out “ the world of diplomacy in Dublin during the Emergency was not a time of philosophical discussion between de Valera and the different foreign ambassadors. It was a world of shadow language and shape-shifting”. These shapes and shadows are now being contorted to serve narrow contemporary agendas born of hindsight and current values.
The attempts to pronounce Irish neutrality dishonourable and amoral also conveniently overlook the wider cost of neutrality; it further entrenched partition, damaged relations with Britain and the US, and as much of Europe rebuilt and prospered in the 1950s under the aegis of reconstruction, the Irish economy floundered and emigration soared. Such was partly the price of what novelist Elizabeth Bowen, who observed the country closely during the war, described as the State’s “first free self-assertion”.
Diarmaid Ferriter is Professor of Modern Irish History at UCD
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