Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Issue 1 | Page 24

the atrocities the soldiers, or at least some of them, were likely to commit
during the war. And the young soldiers, “drafted originally for two years, but
often serving for up to four” (Chabal ����:��), were “disillusioned” (Chabal
����:��) and unprepared for guerilla warfare. Having been dispatched as
conscripts by an authoritarian regime, they could not normally themselves
decide whether they wished to participate in the wars or not: the option
not to participate in a seemingly unwinnable and hopeless war existed
for only a minority of young people. Dictator Salazar’s “own personnel
commitment” to the Portuguese presence in Africa and “his propensity to
brook no opposition” dominated “any voice of reason” and made “retreat or
compromise over African affairs” impossible (Cann ����:��). Opposition was
translated into an ever more intransigent position on Portugal’s presence
ultramar up to the ���� revolution, backed by a powerful secret police
operating both in Portugal and in the colonies. �
Thus, without ignoring or minimizing the suffering inflicted on local
populations by Portuguese soldiers and without denying the power
discrepancies between colonizers and colonized, the suffering inflicted
on Portuguese soldiers and their relatives by their political and military
leadership should not be ignored. After all, the soldiers soon realized that “the
generals in air-conditioned Luanda invented a war in which we would die
and they would live” (Antunes ����:���). They understood that one objective
of the war, waged “in the name of a lot of cynical ideas no one believe[d]
in,” was “to defend the wealth of the three or four families who shore up
the regime” (Antunes ����:���). I am fully aware of the dangers inherent in
discussing what might be seen as the victimization of the perpetrators. I am
certainly not arguing that the “real” victims of colonialism are the soldiers
sent from Europe to defend the colonial project. � That would be absurd,
even obscene. Addressing the suffering of the Portuguese soldiers does not
imply the denial of the suffering they inflicted on others or an attempt at
“ranking” suffering. Rather, it offers the possibility to see both the suffering
inflicted on them by a dictatorial political regime and the suffering they
inflicted on others; it thus addresses a double dimension of suffering and
enables a more differentiated understanding of suffering than does the
crude binary perpetrator–victim that, as every binary, hides as much as
�
In ����, ��% of the political police force worked in the colonies. Overall, the political police force had
���� agents (Aljube—a voz das vítimas; see note ��).
�
See Rothberg (����:��–���) for “Eurocentric pitfalls” (p. ��) in selected anticolonial discourses.
��
In his psychoanalytic approach to perpetrator trauma, LaCapra (����:��) argues that such trauma,
“while attended by symptoms that may be comparable to those of victims, is ethically and politically
different in decisive ways” from victim trauma. I acknowledge these differences.
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