Slices of October history

A month of great historical significance.

October has been a fascinating month in history. And history, if you must know, is something you cannot live without. Anyone who tells you history does not matter is someone who is only exposing the brilliant ignorance he suffers from. Ignore his philistine behaviour and move on. For those of us who have lived through some of the most stirring of times, October is a journey back to some old tragedies, some near forgotten tales of heroism and some defining moments in the lives of people across the world.
It was in October 1967 that Che Guevara was murdered by the Bolivian army and its friends in the CIA. His captors thought that killing him and then hacking off his arm to prove to Fidel Castro that the revolutionary was truly dead would be the end of Guevara. Well, it was no such thing. Thirty years after his murder, Guevara's remains were located and unearthed and sent to Havana for honourable burial.
October, if you reflect on it, has been an extraordinary time for revolutionaries. On October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China at Tienanmen Square and so launched a phenomenon that was to have dramatic results for many across the globe.
October in China has always been a season of remembrances. It was on October 10, 1911 that Sun Yat-sen's Young China followers overthrew the Manchus and set the country on the road to republicanism. In another October, this one in 1934, Mao, Chou En-lai, Chu Teh, Liu Shaoqi and other communists led 100,000 of their followers into what came to be known as the Long March. By the time the march drew to an end, only 30,000 remained of that mighty force.
The communist revolution which led to the establishment of the Soviet Union in 1917 exploded on October 25 (or November 7 by the new calendar). In October 1964, the powerful Nikita Khrushchev was removed from office by the triumvirate of Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin and Nikolai Podgorny.
In terms of modern history, October remains a point of reference for Moscow, for it was in October 1962 that the Cuban missile crisis broke out and pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war. Neither US President Kennedy nor Soviet Premier Khrushchev would budge from their positions, until eventually Moscow agreed to a pull-out from Havana. Suspicion has since lingered that the Soviets operated at the time on a quid pro quo basis: they had America's promise to withdraw its own war materiel from Turkey.
October 1964 was a triumphant month for, again, China. It exploded its first atomic bomb, sending waves of worry through the capitals of the West. Two years earlier, in October 1962, the Chinese had launched a war against India. Jawaharlal Nehru was a broken man after that. And the irascible but extremely intellectual Krishna Menon was out of a job.
Pakistan has had its own trysts with October. Its first prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan was assassinated in October 1951 at a public rally in Rawalpindi. In October 1958, its army seized the state for the first time, propelling General Ayub Khan to the presidency, where he hung on for more than a decade. Forty-one years later, in October 1999, General Pervez Musharraf became Pakistan's fourth military ruler when he ousted the civilian government of Nawaz Sharif in a move that was as bizarre as it was comical.
Khwaja Nazimuddin, Pakistan's second governor general and then its second prime minister in the 1950s, died in October 1964 as he and other opposition politicians looked to Ayub Khan's defeat at the upcoming presidential elections at the hands of Fatima Jinnah.
Britain, buffeted by the Profumo scandal in 1963, saw Prime Minister Harold Macmillan quit office in October of the year and replaced by the urbane Alec Douglas-Home. In the event, Home was to last in office for just a year. In October 1964, Harold Wilson's Labour Party beat Home's Conservatives at the general elections and went on to form a new government.
You may remember Dienbienphu when you travel back to 1954, for it was a time when the silent, determined Vietnamese injected enough fear in the French to force them to leave the country. On the last day of October 1954, another historic step would be taken: Algerian nationalists, personified by the likes of Ferhat Abbas and Ahmed Ben Bella, launched the struggle for liberation that would compel France to bid farewell to Algeria eight years later.
In October 1973, Egypt's Anwar Sadat launched the Yom Kippur war against Israel. The shock engendered by the conflict would force the stalemate, in place since June 1967, to an end through what would become known as Henry Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy. Eight years later, in October 1981, Sadat was murdered by soldiers of the Egyptian army at a military parade marking the anniversary of the 1973 war.
In October 1956, Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops invaded Hungary. Prime Minister Imre Nagy would be deposed and executed and hardline communist rule would be restored in the country.
Indians have celebrated Mahatma Gandhi's birth in October. They have also, since October 31, 1984, remembered Indira Gandhi. On that day, she was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star. E-mail: [email protected]