We fought for liberty, freedom and independence on D-Day. But what happened to these promises in the Middle East?

Roosevelt, Churchill and the representatives of Russia and China signed the United Nations Declaration on New Year’s Day 1942, two and a half years before D-Day. After that, those words “United Nations” became the formal name under which the allies were fighting Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Japan.

The declaration, which would cover the aims of the 6 June 1944 landings, declared that victory was “essential to defend life, liberty, independence and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights and justice”. It also supposedly – and very significantly – upheld the Wilsonian “principles of self-determination”.

I’m old enough to have met the soldiers of the First World War – at Ypres in the late Fifties with my 1918 veteran dad, when the men of Passchendaele returned to their former battlefields on holiday. And later I met, on my own Normandy holidays, the men of D-Day.

Their stories didn’t always match up with what we hear today. The 1914-18 men talked not so much about dead friends and trench rats and stupid British generals – though that threaded through their conversations – but about their outrage at the German invasion and plunder of Belgium. They spoke rather like the Americans I heard after 9/11.

And several of the D-Day men thought that the June 1944 invasion, far from being a tactical operational necessity was a political strategy – because if the Brits and Americans didn’t get a move on, the victorious Red Army would soon be sunbathing on the beaches of Spain.

And it’s not just because I’m writing this article in Beirut – but whenever I contemplate D-Day and the Second World War today, I think more and more of the Middle East.

The first great European war, of course, gave us the Treaty of Versailles and the creation of the modern Middle East. The second showed the effectiveness of the great military powers which would dominate the world – albeit that Britain and France would soon drop out – until our own day. If the Arabs and Muslims lost out after the first war, they were certainly oppressed after the second.

These days, we cut the Middle East out of our D-Day anniversaries. We prefer not to remember that Muslim Indians and Azerbaijanis and even Armenians were found fighting among the Germans in Normandy.

The Bosnian Muslim “hanjar” battalion was too busy helping the Nazis to suppress the Greek resistance. Its creator, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, had planned to “liberate” Palestine from the British once Rommel reached Sinai. And, needless to say, we absolutely have to forget that one of Rommel’s spies in Egypt – before the Desert Fox moved to Normandy – was that future peace-making president Anwar Sadat.

For quite different reasons, we forget that many more Arabs and Muslims died fighting for the allies than for the Germans. We totally ignore the fact that around 40,000 north Africans, most of them Algerians, fought and died for France – fighting in French uniform against the Nazis – in the last year of the war.

At least 5,400 Algerians were killed fighting for France in 1940 (a fact blissfully avoided in the 2017 movie Dunkirk). At El Alamein, Palestinian Arab gravestones lie beside Palestinian Jewish gravestones, the first written in Arabic, the second in Hebrew. Yes, French Moroccan troops committed mass rapes during the “liberation” of Italy. And Chandra Bose raised an Indian army to fight for the Japanese. But can we turn our backs on the courage of the young Indian Muslim poet and pianist Noor Inayat Khan who was an Special Operations Executive agent in France, betrayed by her comrades and shot by an SS firing squad?

But that’s not quite my point. It’s not what Middle Eastern Arabs or Asian Muslims thought then. Or what was going through the minds of the Brits and Americans and French and Canadians as they jumped into the waves or onto the beaches of Normandy.

Staying alive and going home is the first priority of most soldiers, save for the most suicidal – and these days, and on this occasion, that might be a subject best avoided. But the United Nations soldiers who stormed ashore in June 1944 did have right on their side.

They knew what the Nazis stood for, long before they reached Bergen-Belsen and Dachau. Soviet soldiers had even more reason to understand the evil of Hitler’s Germany. The obscene scorecard of 20 million dead had been ticking away since 1941, and it was not surprising to find that Muslims in their tens of thousands were in the Red Army.

So, interestingly, were the Christian Armenians. An entire Armenian division fought in the last battle for Berlin in 1945. An Armenian communist living in France, Missak Manouchian was one of the bravest French resistance heroes, and like Noor Inayat Khan he was executed by the Nazis. Several thousand of the Armenians who fought in Berlin were survivors of the Turkish genocide of the Armenian people only 30 years earlier. So was Manouchian. Germany had been Turkey’s ally in the First World War. There were scores to settle.

But did those soldiers – and let’s keep to D-Day – think of the future? Did they think of a safer world as well as a safer Europe? Looking down the list of nations which signed the UN Declaration within three years, we find Iraq and Iran (in 1943), then Egypt, Lebanon and Syria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey. And we are entitled to ask how much life, liberty, independence and religious freedom, human rights and justice, let alone self-determination, they have received in the 75 years since D-Day.

Within just nine years of D-Day, the Americans and Brits were staging the overthrow of Iran’s first elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. Within 12 years of D-Day, Britain and France (and their new ally Israel) were invading Egypt – while their D-Day Soviet allies were crushing the Hungarian uprising.

The Americans and the British would subsequently bomb Iraq in 1991 – and every year from there on – until 2003 when they invaded Iraq, directly or indirectly killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, most of them civilians. The Americans bombed Lebanon in 1983 and 1984, and the Americans and the British attacked Syria – directly or indirectly – after 2011. Sure, we didn’t like the local dictators – but I don’t recall the victors of D-Day bombing the brutal and corrupt police state tyrants of Eastern Germany or Poland or Czechoslovakia or Hungary or Bulgaria or Romania or Albania after the Second World War.

As for Palestine, well Wilsonian self determination was served up to the Israelis in spades after 1948. But today, 75 years after D-Day, the son-in-law of Roosevelt’s crazed successor tells us that while the Palestinians deserve “self-determination”, they are not yet capable of governing. Is that what Roosevelt and Churchill had in mind when they signed the 1942 UN Declaration, that “liberty” and “independence” wouldn’t necessarily require self-government?

And it is forlornly instructive to compare those two principal signatories of the 1942 UN Declaration. Back then – and on the two victory days of 1945 – you couldn’t keep the adoring crowds from Roosevelt and Churchill. And in London today, you had to keep the angry crowds from even catching sight of Donald Trump and Theresa May. Before they both went off to celebrate D-Day, of course, and the soldiers who fought for the UN Declaration.