Remember Gernika – but don’t forget Chaouen

The last few weeks have seen commemorations, mainly in the Basque Country, of the 75th anniversary of the bombing by German and Italian warplanes of the historic town of Gernika at the behest of General Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War.

Around 4.30 in the afternoon of April 26, 1937, a joint squadron of 23 German and Italian planes appeared in the skies over the historic, and undefended, Basque town. Over the next five hours they dropped a total of 22 tons of high explosives and incendiary devices that burned for days, destroying 70 percent of the town, and killing and wounding at least 1,600 people, around a third of the population.

Gernika remains a powerful symbol of the atrocity of war, and of the cruelty of General Franco, and is rightly remembered. At the time, it shocked people in Britain, France, and the United States, confirming their worst fears about the militaristic regimes in Berlin and Rome, as well as hinting at what awaited Spain when Franco won.

But Gernika is linked to another victim of savagery that took place more than a decade before: Chaouen, a small Moroccan city in the foothills of the Atlas mountains, around 20 kilometres from the Mediterranean coast, and a popular stopover for tourists.

Like Gernika, it is an ancient town, and like Gernika, of deep cultural significance. In the 1920s, Chaouen had roughly the same population as Gernika – about 6,000.

In 1925, Chaouen was reduced to rubble by an aerial bombardment carried out in the full knowledge that the site had no military value. There were no Moroccan soldiers there, but the city was the centre of an uprising against Spanish rule.

Spain responded to the uprising in Morocco with a military campaign during which General Franco learned many important lessons about the importance of breaking the will of the enemy’s civilian population, although it was not Spaniards who destroyed Chaouen, but American volunteers serving in the French Flying Corps.

The value of life

We might ask ourselves why we choose to remember Gernika over Chaouen. Some writers and historians, among them Sven Lindqvist in his excellent A History of Bombing, have put forward a compelling argument that exposes assumptions established over centuries of European colonial conquest that the lives of Arabs, Africans, Asians, and native Americans — whether combatants or civilians — are less “valuable” than those of white westerners: following this line of reasoning, it might convincingly be argued that the British and US electorates don’t want their armed forces out of Afghanistan and Iraq because of the tens of thousands of civilians they have killed there over the last decade, but because their own soldiers are dying, and to no discernable advantage.

It was the same story in Vietnam. Back in 1937, the British, French, and US governments expressed their outrage that an undefended, non-strategic, civilian centre had been subjected to sustained aerial bombardment. But as we know, Gernika was not the first city to be targeted in this way. What’s more, the British had used impromptu bombers in Egypt, Northwest India, and the Sudan; they had bombed Constantinople in 1917, Afghan villages in 1919, and did so again a year later in Somalia. In 1925, the French put down a revolt in Syria by bombarding Damascus, using aircraft, artillery, and tanks. Then, from 1926 to 1928, United States Marines utilized air power to force a regime change in Nicaragua. Even during World War I, the British, French, and Germans had attempted bombing raids against each other’s cities.

Sadly, the concept of bombing civilian centres cannot be attributed to Hitler or Franco, and it should be remembered that there had been no public outcry in Europe and the United States about the widespread practice, despite being relatively well reported, before Gernika. Furthermore, seen in the context of what Britain, France, and the United States had already been doing for more than a decade in their colonies, their response to Gernika might be dismissed by some as sanctimonious humbug, doubly hypocritical in light of their refusal to support the Spanish Republic. At this point, we might also usefully put the US outrage at Japan’s bombing of Shanghai in 1932 and 1937 in context by remembering its firebombing of Japanese cities during World War II, and of course Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in total killing more than one million civilians.

One country that can’t be accused of handwringing over Gernika and Chaouen, is of course Spain. While the German Parliament apologized in 1991 for an event that took place before any of its members were born, the Spanish state has yet to say sorry for what it did in 1925 and 1937.