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К Chestnut
Дата 08.10.2012 14:59:44
Рубрики WWII; Спецслужбы; Армия; ВВС;

Re: [2Chestnut] Военные и топичные...

Chadli Benjedid

Участник Алжирской войны и третий президент Алжира

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/politics-obituaries/9592757/Chadli-Bendjedid.html

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3560979.ece

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00343/114341996_Bendjedid_343559c.jpg



Long-serving President who eased many of Algeria’s repressive policies but still eventually succumbed to popular resentment

Chadli Benjedid was the third president of post-independence Algeria. His decade in power in the 1980s was at a time of momentous changes in what had been, for its admirers, a model socialist revolutionary state.

Benjedid had emerged as the surprise, compromise candidate put forward by the ruling National Liberation Front (FLN) on the death of the charismatic President Houari Boumedienne in 1979. At the time Algeria was still a tightly controlled society with the alliance between the FLN and the army ensuring almost complete central authority. But by the time of Benjedid’s removal by the army 13 years later, Algeria was in ferment: chronic economic problems and the collapse of communism worldwide had paved the way for a popular Islamist movement poised to be voted into power.

Benjedid’s hesitation, and indications that he was willing to consider sharing power with the Islamists, prompted the military to act against him. A savage conflict between the security forces and extremist Islamists tarnished the remainder of the 1990s, leaving no room for Chadli Benjedid’s qualities of pragmatism and flexibility.

Chadli Benjedid was born in 1929, the son of a small landowner, at Sebaa near Annaba on the northern coast of French Algeria. He joined the occupying forces and rose to the rank of NCO before deserting in 1955 to join the Armée de Libération Nationale (the armed wing of the FLN), an indigenous guerrilla movement aimed at securing the expulsion of the French and achieving Algeria’s independence.

He was arrested but escaped to join his comrades in exile in Tunisia. In 1960 he became commander of the rebel army’s 13th battalion on the Tunisian frontier. The following year he joined the insurgents’ general staff, where he liaised closely with Colonel Houari Boumedienne, the future head of state.

On independence in 1962 Benjedid was promoted to major and given command of the Constantine military region in eastern Algeria. An indication of his status was that he was chosen to head Algeria’s first mission to communist China in 1963. Two years later he helped Boumedienne overthrow Algeria’s first President, Ahmed Ben Bella. Benjedid’s reward was to be given a place, as a regional commander, on the influential Council of the Revolution. He remained a mainstay of the army and the regime supporting Boumedienne’s policies over the next 14 years and was promoted to colonel in 1969.

By the time Boumedienne was dying from a rare blood disorder, Benjedid was acting Defence Minister and Chief of Staff. Boumedienne’s death in December, 1978, was followed by an extraordinary session of the FLN which, against most predictions, chose Benjedid as its candidate for the presidential election.

He was seen as a compromise figure with the advantage that he was not linked to any particular faction in the party. He was inaugurated as president on February 9, 1979, after his sole candidature had been approved by 94 per cent of the electorate.

Benjedid inherited a nation which was highly respected in the developing world, with a potentially strong economy based on its oil and gas resources and with a history of political stability. But Algeria was also characterised by a climate of oppression which had worsened in Boumedienne’s last years.

Benjedid moved cautiously to try to change this. The activities of the secret police were curtailed, many of Boumedienne’s opponents were released from prison and exit visas, compulsory for Algerians since 1967, abolished. But formal dissent remained harshly treated, the monopoly of the ruling party was protected and human rights activists were regularly imprisoned. Benjedid was also uncompromising when faced with social disorder which seemed to threaten the national fabric. Outbreaks of Berber nationalism in the Kabyle region were suppressed with only token concessions.

In his economic policy Benjedid was bolder. The emphasis shifted from labour-intensive, centralised heavy industry towards more market-orientated policies. The revised National Charter of 1985 broke with doctrinaire socialist economics and sought to encourage foreign capital as well as local and individual initiative in Algeria. But, again, the unwieldy bureaucracy and entrenched ideas inherited from the Boumedienne era frustrated Benjedid’s ambitions.

Abroad Benjedid was more successful in laying the ghost of his predecessor. He managed to rebuild relations with the West, especially the US and France, without sacrificing Algeria’s radical Third World credentials.

Algerian mediation helped secure the release of the US hostages in Tehran in 1981, and in 1985 Benjedid became the first Algerian head of state to visit the US.

He was also largely successful in defusing the emotions which had troubled relations with France. Despite periodic rows over French support for Morocco in its war against the Algerian-backed Polisario Front in the western Sahara and the treatment of the Algerian community in France. Paris remained Algeria’s main trading partner. Benjedid was also the first Algerian head of state to visit France, in 1982.

This opening-out to the West was skilfully balanced by steadfast support for Arab radicals. Algeria was unique in maintaining good relations with almost all the factions within the PLO. The organisation’s reconciliation conference in Algiers in February, 1987 was largely a result of Benjedid’s industry.

At the same time, the Algerian leader succeeded, at least partially, in curbing Colonel Gaddafi’s destabilising activities in Chad and Tunisia in exchange for diplomatic backing and economic cooperation. Relations with Moscow, Algeria’s main arms supplier, also remained close.

Benjedid, as the candidate of the ruling FLN, was re-elected unopposed to the presidency in 1984. But already hopes that his liberal and reformist tendencies would be able to move Algeria in a new direction were fading. The manifest failure of world socialism and the government’s inability to solve the country’s economic and social problems — not helped by the fall in world oil prices — had begun to undermine the government’s credibility.

The first sign of the impending conflict was widespread and serious rioting in 1985, stoked by increasingly outspoken Islamist leaders who branded the government atheists and called for a government based on Islam.

Benjedid responded by initiating a programme of reform, removing many old-guard Boumedienne allies from the government and trying to push through privatisation more quickly. But the changes were too little, too late, and towards the end of 1988 the country exploded in rioting again.

It was clear that only radical political reform could save the regime. Consequently, Benjedid — who had been re-elected unopposed again in 1988 — pushed through a new constitution reducing the role of the FLN and, for the first time since independence, allowing other political parties to operate. Public sector workers were also given the right to strike. In the course of 1989 alone 21 new parties were founded, among them the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS).

However, the FLN still controlled most of the levers of powers, including the judiciary and the media. Despite this, a rising tide of Islamist activism saw the moderate FIS score an overwhelming victory at municipal and provincial elections in 1990. This was followed by a stunning FIS success in the first round of the general election of December, 1991. The FIS took a 188 seats against 15 for the FLN. With the Islamists certain to come to power after the second round of voting, the military-political regime struck back. The electoral process was halted, parliament suspended and the FIS banned.

Benjedid — whose willingness to reform was blamed by hardliners within the FLN for allowing the situation to develop in the first place — was another casualty. On January 11, 1992, under extreme pressure from the army, he resigned. A five-member Higher State Council, under Mohammed Boudiaf — who was assassinated five months later — took power in Benjedid’s place. The new military rulers calculated, probably rightly, that repression of the FIS would ignite a wave of extremist fundamentalist violence that would divide the Islamist movement and alienate many Algerians. But the ensuing savagery was to be a heavy price to pay for abandoning the political process which Chadli Benjedid had, albeit tentatively, begun.

For the remaining years of his life, Chadli Benjedid lived quietly in the western city of Oran, and avoided making political statements.

Chadli Benjedid, President of Algeria 1979-1992, was born on April 14, 1929. He died on October 6, 2012, aged 83



>Tereska Torrès

>Её роман 1950 года "Женская казарма", основанный на её опыте военной службы в женском корпусе Свободной Франции во время ВМВ, стал всемирной сенсацией (4 миллиона копий продано в США) из-за откровенного описания лесбийских отношений

> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/9566294/Tereska-Torres.html

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3560975.ece

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00343/114121801_Torres_343563k.jpg



http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02350/torres_book_2350535b.jpg



http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02350/torres_2350530b.jpg


Tereska and Georges Torres on their wedding day

Author whose controversial bestseller based on the love lives of fellow Free French servicewomen became a classic of lesbian fiction

One of the early recruits to the all-women’s corps, the Volontaires Françaises, in the Free French Forces, Tereska Torrès spent most of her war service working as a secretary at General de Gaulle’s headquarters in London. she had also begun to write a novel at 17, and this was published as Le Sable et l’écume (Sand and spume) in Paris in 1946 to modest critical, but no commercial success. A compulsive diarist, she had throughout the war been recording her impressions of service life in London at war, and this diary was to be published decades later, only in French, as Une Française Libre.

It was her canny second husband, Meyer Levin, who suggested that a fictionalised account of wartime doings among members of the Volontaires Françaises ought to be published in English, in America. This account of the love lives of French women soldiers, both lesbian and heterosexual, appeared in 1950 from a US paperback publisher, Gold Medal Books, under the title Women’s Barracks, with a (for the time) suitably salacious cover, and swiftly made its author notorious.

However Torrès might protest that “only one-and-a-half” of her five main protagonists could be considered lesbian, and that the work was a serious survey of the effects of war on the emotional lives of serving personnel in a city like London, she found herself hailed as the queen of lesbian pulp fiction, and the novel sold two million copies in its first five years, en route to total sales of perhaps twice that number, in 13 languages.

The censorious Fifties were descending on America, and to the menace of communism was added the fear of a nationally enfeebling sexual degeneracy. This fear was particularly marked among the members of the House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials, who selected Women’s Barracks as an example of the morally subversive nature of paperback publishing. In Canada the book was banned after a trial in Ottawa in 1952 during which the Crown prosecutor described its contents as “nothing but lewdness from beginning to end”.

Her enthronement as a pioneering lesbian author was to continue to dismay Torrès for the rest of her life. Yet, when the Feminist Press republished her novel in 2005, it used the same cover under which it had originally appeared, with its somewhat endearingly dated portrayal of a group of really rather jolly women sitting about in brightly coloured underwear. Although she wrote 14 other books, Torrès was never able to escape from the reputation Women’s Barracks gave her.

Tereska Torrès was born Tereska Swarc in 1920, the daughter of an émigré Polish Jewish sculptor, Marek Swarc, and his wife Guina. When France fell in June 1940 her father was serving with the Polish units in the French Army, and was later to be evacuated by warship to England via La Rochelle. Deeply ashamed of the French capitulation and the Pétain collaborationist administration, she fled to London via Bordeaux, having heard that de Gaulle had raised the Free French standard in Britain. Determined to do her bit, she joined up.

In 1944 she married a young soldier, Georges Torrès, who was the stepson of the prewar French premier Léon Blum. But her husband was killed while fighting for the French forces in Alsace in October that year, leaving her five months pregnant. She became friendly with the American novelist Meyer Levin, whom she accompanied while he made a documentary film about Polish Jewish refugees who had attempted to flee the Holocaust for the safety of Palestine. During this time she kept a diary about the experiences of the refugees fleeing Polish cities and displaced persons camps in Western Europe to Palestine, where she was to find herself incarcerated for a time by the British mandated authorities. The resulting book appeared only in German as Unershrocken (Unafraid).

Torrès married Levin in Paris in 1948 and thereafter they lived in Paris, New York and Israel. He was not an easy companion, and her book Les Maisons Hantées de Meyer Levin (1974) described the bouts of paranoia that often put their marriage under strain and his 30-year obsession with writing a play about Anne Frank. Levin died in 1981.

Torrès refused to allow a French version of Women’s Barracks to appear in French, regarding it as giving too unfavourable an impression of the conduct of the Free French Forces in London. But in 2000 she published her wartime diary Une Française Libre — which appeared only in French. This, she felt, gave a more accurate description of the febrile nature of life in London, both civilian and military, as men and women tried to extract the most they could from what might remain of existence, as the German bombs fell.

Nevertheless in 2010 she changed her mind, and rewrote Women’s Barracks in French, incorporating material from her wartime diaries to give what she felt was a more authentic account of how things had been. Latterly she had settled in Paris where she died.

Torrès is survived by the two sons of her marriage to Meyer Levin, and by the daughter of her marriage to Georges Torrès.

Tereska Torrès, author and wartime member of the Free French Forces, was born on September 3, 1920. She died on September 20, 2012, aged 92


'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
От Chestnut
К Chestnut (08.10.2012 14:59:44)
Дата 10.10.2012 16:23:11

Военные и топичные некрологи из британских газет

Eric Lomax

Бывший пленный у японцев, встретивший в мирной жизни своего мучителя, но выбравший примирение вместо возмездия

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/army-obituaries/9596599/Eric-Lomax.html

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3563020.ece

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00344/2586200_Lomax1_344187c.jpg



Lomax with Takashi Nagase, his former Japanese torturer, on the bridge over the River Kwai. Nearly 50 years after the war the two men met and were reconciled

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00344/2321900_Lomax2_344190c.jpg



Eric Lomax and other Allied prisoners of war worked on the Burma – Siam “Death Railway”.

Wartime prisoner of the Japanese who recounted his appalling experiences in a sensational memoir in 1995

Captured by the Japanese while in charge of a signal section in the Royal Artillery as Singapore fell to the Japanese in February 1942, Eric Lomax was sent to work as a PoW on the notorious Burma-Thailand Railway. There, with other captives, he suffered severe privations, including torture and beatings, until his release in the summer of 1945.

The story of his sufferings, ghost-written by Neil Belton, caused a sensation when it was published as The Railway Man in 1995. That year it was made into a television drama entitled Prisoners in Time, starring John Hurt as Lomax, and the book went on to win the 1996 NCR Book Award and the J. R. Ackerley Prize for autobiography, though several authorities on the experiences of Far East Prisoners of War (FEPoWs) were to query the accuracy of some of its details.

In the meantime Lomax had tracked down and met one of his former torturers, a Japanese interpreter named Takashi Nagase, and had had a reconciliation with him on the banks of the River Kwai where he had been imprisoned. The reconciliation and the Japanese apology had been filmed as the documentary, Enemy, My Friend, in 1995, directed by Mike Finlason. Lomax was subsequently to describe how this meeting and Nagase’s apology had purged him of a long-nursed anger at his treatment, and restored him to wholeness and peace.

Eric Sutherland Lomax was born in Edinburgh in 1919, and when war came he was called up and commissioned into the Royal Signals in 1940. He was serving as a Royal Signals officer attached to the 5th Field Regiment Royal Artillery in Singapore early in 1942 as the Japanese closed in on the city.

After periods in various camps he was among the thousands of prisoners selected to work on the Burma-Thailand Railway, constructed using forced labour by the Japanese to support their forces in the Burma campaign. Of these, around 90,000 Asian labourers and 16,000 Allied PoWs died through malnutrition, disease and maltreatment, as well as being shot out of hand or beaten to death.

In his own account, Lomax and his fellow prisoners came to the attention of their guards in August 1943 when a radio they had assembled from silver paper, wire, aluminium and wax, so that they could monitor the All India Radio broadcasts from New Delhi, and follow the course of the war, was discovered by the authorities at their camp at Kanburi on the River Kwai. Lomax had, too, made a map of the area which was also found. From that moment, as Lomax described it both in The Railway Man, and in a short account Beyond the River Kwai, published in a collection, Soldier Stories, in the US in 2006, their lives became a living hell.

The five men suspected of being involved in the construction of the radio, who included Lomax, were beaten with pick-axe handles until two of them died. Both Lomax’s arms were broken, and he was subsequently subjected to a form of “waterboarding” when a brutal NCO forced the torrent from a high-pressure water hose into his nose and mouth. In this torment the perpetrators of these evils came to be symbolised by the constant voice of the interpreter at his ear, urging him to confess and reveal information about anti-Japanese activities within the camp of which he actually had no knowledge. Periods in the camp hospital, so that they might become “well enough” to endure further torment, were followed by a renewal of the physical violence against the men.

Eventually news that the war was going against the Japanese began to filter through to the camps. Finally, in the summer of 1945 came the information that an astonishing new bomb had brought the Japanese Empire to its knees, and one day an American B29 flew over the camp dropping food packages. After gaining his liberty Lomax was mentioned in dispatches for his resolute conduct in the camps.

After recovering he was able to return to work, and for some years lectured in personnel management at Strathclyde University. But mental flashbacks, particularly the low whispered voice of the interpreter repeatedly assuring him “Lomax, you will tell” continued to dog him. To find this man became something of an obsession.

As he recounted, Lomax eventually had a stroke of luck when a British Army chaplain who had been in contact with former Japanese soldiers told him he had located the interpreter and found out that he lived in the city of Kurashiki. His former tormentor had apparently become active in charitable causes and had built a Buddhist temple of peace close to the river and railway at Kanburi, as an act of atonement. Lomax’s sufferings ran too deep for him to be convinced at that stage, but eventually, in 1991, he was persuaded to read a book written by Nagase, in which the former interpreter mentioned him and expressed deep remorse for his sufferings.

Eventually Lomax felt he could face meeting Nagase and he and his wife, a nurse, flew to Thailand, to take a train to Kanburi, where the two men at last met and were reconciled. Nagase, it transpired, had devoted his life since the war to campaigning against militarism and working for reconciliation. As he recalled in Beyond the River Kwai, Lomax was able to assure him of his total forgiveness.

In the year following its publication The Railway Man was criticised for the inaccuracy of some aspects of its account of what had happened at Kanburi and other camps, by relatives of other survivors of the experience and professional historians.

The book is currently being made into a film directed by Jonathan Teplitzky and starring Colin Firth and Jeremy Irvine as, respectively, the older and younger Eric Lomax, and with Nicole Kidman playing Patti, who befriended and married Lomax as his second wife.

Lomax is survived by his wife, Patti, by a daughter from his first marriage and by four stepchildren.


Eric Lomax, prisoner of war and survivor of the Burma-Thailand Railway, was born on May 30, 1919. He died on October 8, 2012, aged 93


'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
От Chestnut
К Chestnut (10.10.2012 16:23:11)
Дата 15.10.2012 18:13:28

весьма топичный некролог

Norodom Sihanouk

Король, принц и премьер, эмигрант и снова король Камбоджи (дважды отрёкшийся от престола в итоге)

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3568706.ece

Energetic Cambodian monarch who after abdicating the throne became an important figure in his country’s turbulent political life

Norodom Sihanouk was a gifted and mercurial participant in Cambodian politics for more than 70 years. He reigned for many years as Cambodia’s king and abdicated in 1955 in order to take up a political career. In the so-called Sihanouk period (1955-70), when he served first as prime minister and later as chief of state, he displayed a formidable array of political skills while ruling his “children”, as he called them in a theatrical, benevolent and despotic fashion.

After he was removed from office in 1970 in a bloodless coup, Sihanouk formed an alliance with the Cambodian Communists, or Khmer Rouge, hoping to return as chief of state. Instead, the Khmer Rouge, after they came to power in 1975, held him prisoner for three years before they were driven from power.

Sihanouk spent the 1980s in exile, mostly in Beijing. He returned home briefly in 1991 and was crowned king for the second time in 1993. Given nothing significant to do, he abdicated again in 2004. From then on he lived primarily in Beijing and never spent more than a few weeks a year in his native country.

Norodom Sihanouk was born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in 1922, when the southeast Asian kingdom formed a part of French Indo-China. He was the only child of Prince Norodom Suramarit and Princess Sisowath Kossamak, whose father, Sisowath Monivong, reigned as king during much of Sihanouk’s boyhood.

When Monivong died in 1941 the French plucked Sihanouk from high school in Saigon and named him king — it was a position he had never expected to occupy. At the time Japanese troops were stationed throughout Indo-China with the permission of the French, who remained in administrative control.

The French assumed that Sihanouk would be a pliable ruler of Cambodia in perilous times. In March 1945, however, the Japanese imprisoned French officials throughout Indo-China and encouraged Sihanouk to declare Cambodia’s independence, which he did with little enthusiasm. The newly named Kingdom of Kampuchea lasted until the French returned to Cambodia in force in October 1945, as Sihanouk knew they would. The young King welcomed them warmly and soon regained their backing.

The French were in no hurry to leave Indo-China, but to reduce nationalist pressure they allowed political parties to form in Cambodia in 1946. Elections in 1947 and 1951, the first in Cambodian history, were won by the mildly proindependence Democrat Party. As he gained self-confidence Sihanouk feuded with the Democrats but he waited until 1952, when France’s war against rebels in Indo-China was going badly, to confront the French himself. He shut down the Democrat-controlled National Assembly and embarked on what he called a “royal crusade for independence”, threatening to abdicate and to arm the Cambodian people if France kept control of the kingdom.

Taken aback, the French caved in and granted Cambodia its independence in November 1953. A royal decree, signed by the King, named him the Father of Independence.

In mid-1955 Sihanouk abdicated, had his father named king in his place, and set out as a Prince on a political career. Political parties ceased to exist, and Sihanouk’s personally sanctioned political movement, the Sangkum Reastr Niyum (People’s Socialist Community), came to dominate political life, winning four elections against derisory opposition between 1955 and 1966. When King Suramarit died in 1960 Sihanouk allowed the monarchy to lapse as an institution.

Throughout the Sihanouk period the Prince was immensely popular among the Cambodian peasantry, towards whom he displayed sustained and genuine affection. Domestically, he supported improvements in Cambodia’s education but was intolerant of dissent and easily bored by economic issues. In the international arena he energetically pursued a policy of neutralism, which alienated him from the US, Thailand and South Vietnam, but pleased de Gaulle’s regime in France, non-aligned nations and the Sino-Soviet Bloc.

Walking a tightrope of his own design, the Prince attracted substantial assistance from a range of donors and kept Cambodia out of the Second Indo-China War then being waged less than 70 miles from Phnom Penh. Unsurprisingly, many elderly Cambodians still see his years in power as a kind of golden age.

By the late 1960s, however, governing the country singlehandedly became difficult for the Prince and his behaviour became erratic. He spent much of his time writing, directing and starring in popular films that dramatised Cambodia’s joie de vivre and his own importance.

As economic conditions worsened and as the war in Vietnam intensified, many of the urban elite withdrew their support from him. As the Cultural Revolution flourished in China, Sihanouk also lost the backing of young Cambodians like Hun Sen, Cambodia’s prime minister since 1985, who were attracted to radical ideas. A civil war against communist-led guerrillas — the so-called Khmer Rouge — broke out in 1968.

In March 1970 the National Assembly voted Sihanouk out of office while he was travelling abroad. The new regime, led by General Lon Nol, plunged Cambodia into the Vietnam war via an alliance with the US.

Sihanouk was deeply affronted by the coup. He took refuge in Beijing and with Chinese encouragement became the head of a government in exile, allied with the Communist Vietnamese, the Peoples’ Republic of China and the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) led by Saloth Sar, alias Pol Pot. His allies promised to return him to power. Lon Nol, meanwhile, decided to attack the Communist forces dominated by North Vietnam inside Cambodia. These forces cut his poorly trained army to ribbons, and after 1971 he was unable to mount any offensive action despite massive infusions of American aid. The CPK forces gained experience, confidence and thousands of recruits, especially after Vietnamese troops withdrew in 1972.

In the five-year war, perhaps as many as half a million Cambodians perished. Many of the casualties were inflicted by a massive US aerial bombardment in 1973 that postponed a CPK victory for a couple of years.

In April 1975 CPK forces overwhelmed the Lon Nol regime. Pol Pot and his colleagues immediately set in motion a series of harsh economic and political measures, including the evacuation of cities, the execution of political enemies, the abolition of money and the collectivisation of agriculture.

The regime called itself Democratic Kampuchea (DK) and its dogmatic, inexperienced and terrifying leaders presided over the deaths of over 1.5 million Khmer, or roughly a quarter of the country’s population. The dead included six of Sihanouk’s 14 children.

Pol Pot and his colleagues summoned Sihanouk home in 1975 as chief of state but gave him no duties. In the following year, they forced him to resign and placed him under house arrest on the grounds of the former royal palace. Although he lived in relative comfort, Sihanouk in this period expected to be killed from one day to the next.

In 1978 DK went to war with Vietnam and by the end of December, facing a Vietnamese invasion, it was on the brink of collapse. Three days before the fall of Phnom Penh, Sihanouk was flown to the US to plead DK’s case. Soon afterwards he sought asylum in Beijing. By 1980, with Chinese encouragement, he began presenting himself as a valid alternative to the Peoples’ Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), the pro-Vietnamese regime that had taken power in Phnom Penh.

Sihanouk’s ongoing marriage of convenience with the Khmer Rouge, whose forces formed the backbone of anti-PRK resistance along the Thai-Cambodian border in the 1980s, diminished his credibility. However, as the Cold War ended and as foreign powers sought to extricate themselves from their commitments to Indochina, Sihanouk came to be seen by some, as he had always seen himself, as an indispensable, unifying element in a Cambodian government that would be acceptable to foreign powers and to Cambodia’s hostile political factions.

Under the Paris peace agreements in 1991, Sihanouk returned to Cambodia after 12 years in exile, and was greeted by enthusiastic crowds. In 1993, guided by the UN, Cambodia held national elections, which were won by a royalist party, led by Sihanouk’s eldest son, Norodom Rannaridh, whom Sihanouk disliked. The winners were quickly forced to share power with the Cambodian Peoples’ Party (CPP), which had monopolised Cambodian politics under various names since 1979.

In October 1993 Sihanouk was crowned king for the second time. At his request, the pre-1970 Cambodian flag was reinstated along with pre-1970 street names in Phnom Penh, the abandoned royal palace and pre-1970 military uniforms. Sihanouk also bestowed royal titles on many CPP officials, but their loyalty to him was almost nonexistant.

Although Sihanouk in the 1990s was almost as energetic as ever, Hun Sen saw to it that he had limited authority, no media outlets, and no sustained contacts with the population. Chafing under these restrictions and pleading ill-heath, Sihanouk spent much of the period in Beijing and North Korea. In 2004 he abdicated for the second time. His youngest son, Norodom Sihamoni, a childless bachelor, took his place, and it seemed clear to many that the demise of Cambodian royalty as an institution was only a matter of time. It had probably been fatally wounded in 1960, when Sihanouk refused to have a king named in his father’s place.

Norodom Sihanouk is inseparable from the history of 20th-century Cambodia, and a balanced view of his 70-year career is difficult to assemble. He was a hard-working patriot whose unpredictable actions often had deleterious effects. An ardent Francophile, he also befriended the Chinese Prime Minister Zhou enlai, and after 1970 he never challenged Chinese policy. This alliance led him to support the Khmer Rouge for much longer than most Cambodians would have liked. His opponents also criticised his autocratic, ego-driven style, his fondness of flattery and his intolerance of dissent.

His supporters, while admitting his flaws, pointed to his unswerving devotion to Cambodian independence and praised his affection for Cambodia’s rural poor. Moreover, unlike many southeast Asian rulers, Sihanouk made no effort to enrich himself during his years in power. A talented musician, an eloquent orator and a fluent writer, Sihanouk vigorously defended his place in history in several volumes of self-serving memoirs, written in elegant French.

Sihanouk fathered 12 children before he married Monique Izzi in 1955. She bore him two children, including the reigning monarch and was crowned Queen Monineak in 1992. She survives him, as do six of his children.

Norodom Sihanouk, ruler of Cambodia, was born on October 31, 1922. He died on October 14, 2012, aged 89




'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
От Chestnut
К Chestnut (15.10.2012 18:13:28)
Дата 16.10.2012 12:06:21

Re: весьма топичный...

>Norodom Sihanouk

>Король, принц и премьер, эмигрант и снова король Камбоджи (дважды отрёкшийся от престола в итоге)

> http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3568706.ece

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/politics-obituaries/9610196/Norodom-Sihanouk.html

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02369/sihanouk_2369186b.jpg



Король Сианук в Ппариже в 1946 году в компании французских генералов

'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
От Chestnut
К Chestnut (10.10.2012 16:23:11)
Дата 11.10.2012 19:04:23

Re: Военные и...

Sir Geofroy Tory

Дипломат, занимавшийся вопросом перенесения тела казнённого в 1916 году за государственную измену Роджера Кэйсмента в Ирландию для торжественного перезахоронения

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/politics-obituaries/9600062/Sir-Geofroy-Tory.html

Lt-Cdr Allan Waller

Морской офицер, воевавший на пяти кораблях, четыре из которых были потоплены

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/naval-obituaries/9600060/Allan-Waller.html

'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
От Chestnut
К Chestnut (11.10.2012 19:04:23)
Дата 12.10.2012 14:56:58

Re: Военные и...

>Harold Shukman


>Британский историк России и СССР (Оксфорд, Сэнт-Энтониз), переводивший >с русского в том числе книги Волкогонова, и сын участника РЯВ

> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/9566293/Harold-Shukman.html

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3561765.ece

Historian of modern Russia, biographer of Stalin and Rasputin and translator of novels and studies of the leaders of the Revolution

Harold Shukman was a historian of 19th and 20th-century Russia, a prolific translator of Russian literary and political writings and an author on subjects as diverse as literature and the world of espionage. For more than 50 years he was associated with the University of Oxford as a lecturer in modern Russian history and with St Antony’s College where he was a Fellow and, at one time, director of its renowned Russian and East European Centre.

From the 1960s and until his retirement in 1998 he was deeply involved in developing and enriching Russian studies at Oxford as an academic discipline in an era when the Cold War cast its ominous shadow over scholarly research in this field. He also helped to organise a popular weekly seminar at St Antony’s at which both prominent scholars and historical figures appeared — among them, like a ghost from the past, Alexander Kerensky, the dominant if short-reigning Prime Minister in the Russian Provisional Government established in the wake of February 1917 and the fall of the Tsarist monarchy.

Shukman’s scholarly work was characterised by a sense of both the futility and the tragedy of the Russian and Soviet history that began with Kerensky and culminated with Mikhail Gorbachev, whom Shukman admired but whose attempts at reform eventually led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Some of Shukman’s work was devoted to the 19th-century seeds of this grim story.

Harold Shukman was born in London in 1931, the son of Jewish immigrants who in 1913 had fled anti-Semitic persecution in Russia. His father, David Shukman, a tailor, was soon subjected to an excruciating dilemma which Harold later wrote about in the book War or Revolution: Russian Jews and Conscription in Britain, 1917 (2006). The British Government, despite the growing demands of the First World War, at first did not impose conscription on some 30,000 Russian Jewish immigrant men of military age like Harold’s father. But when the Romanov monarchy collapsed in February 1917, Britain gave these immigrants a choice: join the British Army or be repatriated for service in Russia. Harold’s father was among some 3,500 who chose the latter. He survived the hardships that ensued following the October Revolution and eventually succeeded in making his way back to London. Shukman’s book is a detailed study of this heretofore little-known story, where both the personal and the collective are poignantly interwoven.

It may well be that this personal family history had already foreordained Shukman’s future interests. But his road to an academic career in Russian history had a more practical beginning. After an unremarkable early education, he was offered the prospect, during his National Service, of Russian language training at the Joint Services School for Linguists (JSSL) in Cambridge and Bodmin. No doubt the purpose of this course was to produce linguists for the various intelligence tasks made necessary by the emerging Cold War. Many years later, Shukman would co-write with Geoffrey Elliott the book Secret Classrooms: An Untold Story of the Cold War (2002) in which the JSSL intelligence training programme is meticulously described. In the event, however, instead of taking that “espionage” route to a career, Shukman turned to academic studies.

In 1956 he completed a first-class degree in Russian language and literature at Nottingham University and then moved to St Antony’s College where in 1960 he received the DPhil for a thesis on the Bund, an important socialist and cultural movement among Russian Jews in prerevolutionary Russia. After a year spent as an Astor Fellow at Harvard and Stanford universities in the United States, he returned to St Antony’s in 1961 as a research fellow and, in 1969, became a Governing Body Fellow. He remained at the college for the rest of his life.

During the two and a half decades or so from the early 1960s, the college became a leading centre of Russian and Soviet studies and a home to some of the most distinguished scholars of the time, among them David Footman, Max Hayward, George Katkov, Harry Willetts, Ronald Hingley, Sergei Utechin, Richard Kindersley, Michael Kaser and Archie Brown. All aspects of Russia and Russian culture were considered to be within the purview of its lectures and seminars and, in fact, the founding Warden of St Antony’s, Sir William Deakin, a distinguished historian of Europe in his own right, was also an expert on Russian and East European subjects.

In this atmosphere of intellectual discussion and research, Shukman flourished and published a number of important works, including, in 1975, together with Deakin and Willetts, A History of World Communism. He wrote short biographies of Rasputin and Stalin, a study of Lenin and the Russian Revolution (1967) and, towards the end of his life, together with Felix Patrikeeff, Railways and the Russo-Japanese War: Transporting War (2007). He was also the editor of a large number of works, among them The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Russian Revolution (1988); Stalin’s Generals (1993); and Agents for Change: Intelligence Services in the 21st Century (2000).

If this provides an idea of his range and scope of interests, his work as a translator from the Russian was no less prodigious. Among his translations are plays by Isaac Babel, two novels by Anatoly Rybakov, Heavy Sand (1981) and Children of the Arbat (1988), as well as the Memoirs of Andrei Gromyko (1989) and the three ruthlessly critical biographies of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky by the Russian general and historian Dmitri Volkogonov, which appeared in the 1990s and had a powerful impact on the subsequent re-evaluation of Soviet history. In all these capacities, as author, editor and translator, Shukman has left a deep imprint upon the study both of Russia and of the Soviet Union.

Shukman had great personal charm and graciousness and enjoyed endearing relationships with friends and colleagues. He possessed a sharp wit and an irrepressible sense of humour and was a celebrated raconteur and conversationalist within the sometimes overbearing corridors of academia.

He is survived by his wife, Barbara, an artist who turned him into an enthusiast of modern art and its techniques, two sons and a daughter from a previous marriage and two stepdaughters and a stepson.

Harold Shukman, historian, was born on March 23, 1931. He died on July 11, 2012, aged 81

Prince Roy of Sealand

Бывший военный, создавший себе независимое государство на заброшенной нефтяной платформе в Северном Море

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/royalty-obituaries/9602837/Prince-Roy-of-Sealand.html


'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
От Chestnut
К Chestnut (12.10.2012 14:56:58)
Дата 15.10.2012 18:15:18

Re: Военные и...

Group Captain Sir Richard Kingsland


Австралийский военный пилот, в 1940 г предотвративший арест фельдмаршала Горта вишистами и доставивший его в Гибралтар (за что получил DFC)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9607727/Group-Captain-Sir-Richard-Kingsland.html

'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
От Chestnut
К Chestnut (15.10.2012 18:15:18)
Дата 16.10.2012 12:03:54

Re: Военные и...

Colonel Clive Fairweather

Офицер SAS, командовавший первым этапом операции по освобобждению иранского посольства в Лондоне от террористов

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/special-forces-obituaries/9610176/Colonel-Clive-Fairweather.html

'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
От JGL
К Chestnut (12.10.2012 14:56:58)
Дата 12.10.2012 15:37:42

Re: Военные и...

Здравствуйте,

>Prince Roy of Sealand

>Бывший военный, создавший себе независимое государство на заброшенной нефтяной платформе в Северном Море

> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/royalty-obituaries/9602837/Prince-Roy-of-Sealand.html
Не на нефтяной, а как раз на очень топичной бывшей ПВОшной ;)

С уважением, Юрий.
От Chestnut
К Chestnut (08.10.2012 14:59:44)
Дата 09.10.2012 13:51:08

Re: [2Chestnut] Военные

>Edwin Wilson


>Американский разведчик, осуждённый за поставку взрывчатки Каддафи

> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/politics-obituaries/9574988/Edwin-Wilson.html

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3561998.ece

CIA agent who led a playboy life while carrying out clandestine operations, such as selling arms to Libya, before being hung out to dry

It would surely stretch the imagination of any writer of fiction to invent so improbable a character as Edwin Wilson — a renegade American secret agent and arms dealer who sold 20 tons of C4 plastic explosives to the terrorist regime of President Gaddafi and built up a business empire founded entirely on his relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency.

A swaggering 6ft 4in ex-Marine from a poor farm family in Idaho, Wilson in his prime was a larger-than-life, wheeler-dealer with an apartment in Geneva, a seaside villa in Tripoli, Libya, a town house in Washington and a 3,300-acre estate in Virginia hunting country where he entertained generals, senators and CIA colleagues.

He kept a mistress he called “Wonder Woman” on whom he lavished every luxury; he owned three aircraft and claimed to own 100 corporations in the US and Europe, some real and many of the others shells as cover for his espionage. He was reportedly once worth $23 million.

Wilson, in the late 1970s sold a huge quantity of powerful explosives — almost the whole of America’s stockpile — which were flown out of Houston in barrels marked “oil-drilling mud”. He also recruited a group of retired Green Berets (US special forces) to go to Libya and train military and intelligence officers.

This irresponsible operation, supposedly carried out with CIA backing, was intended to ingratiate the US with the Gaddafi regime with the aim of building up the Libyan leader as a US intelligence asset in North Africa. Libyans were even trained in how to make terrorist explosive devices, and Wilson also supplied guns to Libya, one of which was used to murder a prominent Libyan dissident.

During the first Reagan administration this policy was reversed and Gaddafi was denounced as the world’s leading terrorist. The CIA was ordered to overthrow Gaddafi, and all records of the previous policy of co-operating with Wilson were destroyed. Wilson became the scapegoat. He was cut adrift from the agency and declared an outlaw. Fearing arrest, he went into hiding in 1982 but was lured from his haven in Libya by a CIA con-man who convinced him he would be safer in the Dominican Republic.

Once there he was arrested and brought back to the US where he was sentenced to a total of 52 years’ imprisonment by four different courts for among other things selling explosives to Libya and attempted murder.

Interviewed in prison by the reporter Eric Margolis, he declared: “I was framed by the Government. They wanted me to disappear. I knew too much.”

Throughout his 22 years of imprisonment, mostly spent in solitary confinement, Wilson worked to prove his innocence. He hired a new lawyer, a former CIA officer who had clearance to view classified documents and who found 80 incidents where Wilson had met the CIA on a professional basis.

In 2003 a federal judge threw out his two-decade old conviction, stating that the government “knowingly used false evidence” against Wilson.

Wilson’s sole defence was that he had all along been working for the CIA in the service of his country. Documents unearthed by Wilson showed that the agency, despite its denials, had continued to engage in significant contact with Wilson throughout his clandestine career.

The judge added: “America will not defeat Libyan terrorism by double-crossing a part-time informal government agent.”

Edwin Paul Wilson was born in 1928 in Nampa, Idaho. He worked as a merchant seaman before attending the University of Portland where he received a degree in psychology in 1953. He then served in the US Marine Corps in Korea. After discharge in 1955 he joined the CIA.

He was one of the agency’s old-time “cowboys”, using dirty tricks to destabilise European labour unions and setting up front companies. He became involved in the civil war in Angola when the CIA used him to secretly supply arms to the rebel leader Jonas Savimbi at a time when the US did not want it known that it was backing an ally of apartheid South Africa. He officially left the CIA in 1971 but only to join Task Force 157 of the Office of Naval Intelligence, another super-secret outfit.

In 1976 he went freelance but continued his contacts and clandestine operations with the agency until he was driven out into the cold and arrested. Right up to that time he was used by the Agency for operations it wanted to be “deniable”.

Wilson was finally released from jail in 2004 and, bankrupt and divorced, lived in poverty with his brother in Seattle on social security.

David Corn, the author of a biography of the CIA boss who sent Wilson to Libya, summarised the essential paradox of the Wilson story: “I think he’s a terrible fellow who got what he deserved, but they did frame him.”

Wilson is survived by two sons.

Edwin Wilson, CIA operative, was born on May 3, 1928. He died on September 10, 2012, aged 84



'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
От Chestnut
К Chestnut (09.10.2012 13:51:08)
Дата 09.10.2012 14:05:31

Думаю, некролог Грачёва представит интерес для форума

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3561997.ece

Pavel Grachev

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00343/113623474_Grachev_343891c.jpg



http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00343/9206687_Grachev2_343888c.jpg



Decorated Soviet Army general who aligned himself with Yeltsin in the break-up of the USSR and rose to be Russian Defence Minister

Pavel Grachev was a senior Soviet army officer who became Russia’s Minister of Defence under President Boris Yeltsin. He came to prominence as an influential commander in the Soviet Union’s Afghan campaign. The later failure of the first Chechen campaign brought an end to his career.

Pavel Sergeyevich Grachev was born in 1948 in the village of Rvy in the Tula region, just south of Moscow, the son of a locksmith and a dairy farm worker. He joined the Soviet Army in 1965, graduating with honours from the Ryazan Higher Airborne Forces Command School in 1969, a qualified German-language interpreter and Airborne Troops platoon commander. After some command experience, he continued his training at the Frunze Military Academy, graduating in 1981. He served as commander with the Airborne Troops in the Baltic, but most notably as commander of the 103rd Guards Airborne Division in Afghanistan. He was honoured as a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1986 in recognition for his service and the minimal losses that were incurred by units under his command in combat in Afghanistan.

The Afghan campaign made Grachev’s reputation as a soldier, but it was his role in the 1991 coup attempt that brought him into the realm of politics and led ultimately to his appointment as Defence Minister.

When hardliners sought in August 1991 to resist Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, which for them meant the collapse and dismemberment of the Soviet state that they had taken solemn oaths to serve and protect, the Defence Minister Dmitry Yazov, a Second World War veteran, ordered Grachev’s troops to be deployed in Moscow to protect strategically important sites.

Grachev obeyed the orders but, crucially, took no further action. When the coup attempt collapsed, he was seen as having declared his loyalty not to the new state, Russia, but to Boris Yeltsin. He rose quickly, becoming Defence Minister in 1992 after brief periods as chair of the RSFSR Defence and Security Committee and deputy defence minister.

When the 1993 constitutional crisis came, culminating in a dangerous stand-off between President Yeltsin and the Russian Parliament, Grachev ordered his troops to fire on the parliament building, the White House, despite months of holding out for balance and a neutral army. In so doing he decisively backed Yeltsin against his opponents, leaving himself open to the oftrepeated charge that he was more loyal to the president than to the country.

In Russia in the early 1990s great liberalisation went hand in hand with rampant corruption that spread throughout all the chief agencies of state. It was a chaotic, lawless time.

Foreign influence in many areas went unchecked. Separatists in Chechnya received funds, equipment and training from external powers. Gorbachev had sent in troops to quell separatism in the Baltic states. They failed. Yeltsin faced a serious separatist threat in the country’s south and ruled that the issue could be resolved only by force.

However, the army was weakened, like the other institutions of state. Warehouses and weapons stockpiles were poorly protected, and supplies found their way from Russian storage facilities to Chechen separatists even as military intelligence indicated that they were preparing to make a violent claim for independence.

The web of conflicting personal interests at the heart of power in Yeltsin’s Russia had a direct impact on the development of any strategy of government. There was little co-ordination between political and military initiatives, which had disastrous consequences for the Russian Army during the first Chechen campaign.

As casualties rose, Grachev increasingly became the target of criticism. He was widely represented as the brutal commander responsible for sending untrained, ill-equipped conscripts to the front line as cannon fodder. He felt he had been unfairly made the scapegoat for the disastrous campaign.

Amid much criticism, he retired as defence minister in 1996, after four years in office. He then served as chief military adviser to the general director of Rosvooruzhenie (now Rosoboronexport) until he retired in 2001.

He remained a controversial figure. Some praised him for taking a visionary approach to the Russian military-industrial complex — insisting on the need for privatisation, and for holding the army together at a time when every other institution of state had all but collapsed. Others viewed him solely through the prism of Yeltsin’s partisan political world, his success in Afghanistan dwarfed by his presiding over the bloodbath in the Caucasus.

Grachev died after being in hospital with acute high blood pressure. He is survived by his wife, Lyubov Alexeeva, and their two sons.

Pavel Sergeyevich Grachev, soldier and politician, was born on January 1, 1948. He died after a short illness on September 23, 2012, aged 64


'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'