26 OCTOBER
HARROWING ACCOUNT OF THE EXECUTION OF INDIAN MUTINEERS PUBLISHED
Watercolour by Orlando Norie via the National Army Museum.
[ 26 October 1857 ]
Today in 1857, a graphic account was published of the bloody aftermath of an execution in which Indian rebels at Ahmedabad were blown apart by cannon. It was one of many instances of exemplary punitive executions carried out during Britain’s suppression of the Indian Mutiny. The chilling testimony was reported in several newspapers.
‘I walked straight to the scattered and smoking floor before the guns. I came first to an arm, torn off above the elbow, the fist clenched, the bone projecting several inches, bare. Then the ground sown with red grisly fragments, then a black haired head and the other arm still held together. This was the man I had watched; close by lay the lower half of the body of the next torn quite in two, and long coils of entrails twined on the ground. Then a long cloth in which one had been dressed rolled open like a floor cloth and on fire.’1
BRITISH ARMY TURNS PALESTINIAN VILLAGE INTO ‘A PILE OF MANGLED MASONRY.’
[ 26 October 1938 ]
Today in 1938, journalists were driven out to the Palestinian village of Mi’ar, east of Acre, to witness ‘a punitive measure.’
THE U.K. ABSTAINS FROM CONDEMNING ISRAEL’S ILLEGAL ‘SEPARATION WALL’
[ 26 October 2003 ]
On 26 October 2003, the United Kingdom abstained from an overwhelming vote in the U.N. General Assembly (144 to 4) against Israel’s erection of an illegal ‘separation wall’. 85% of the concrete barricade ran through occupied Palestinian land, dividing thousands of villagers from their water sources and arable land they depended on for their livelihood. The resolution declared that its construction was ‘in contradiction to the relevant provisions of international law’ and predicted that it would jeopardize the Middle East two-state peace plan. It also effectively annexed some ten per cent of Palestinian land which lay between the wall and the border and on to which, as the philosopher and historian Noam Chomsky observed, ‘anyone is permitted to enter – except Palestinians.’2
FOOTNOTES
- Account dated 26 October 1857 cited in ‘Execution of Mutineers,’ The Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard, 12 December 1857, p. 4.
- Noam Chomsky, Who Rules the World ? Hamish Hamilton, New York, 2016, p. 137.
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