Britain destroyed records of colonial crimes

[heyokah]

Thousands of documents detailing some of the most shameful acts and crimes committed during the final years of the British empire were systematically destroyed to prevent them falling into the hands of post-independence governments, an official review has concluded.

Those papers that survived the purge were flown discreetly to Britain where they were hidden for 50 years in a secret Foreign Office archive, beyond the reach of historians and members of the public, and in breach of legal obligations for them to be transferred into the public domain.

The archive came to light last year when a group of Kenyans detained and allegedly tortured during the Mau Mau rebellion won the right to sue the British government. The Foreign Office promised to release the 8,800 files from 37 former colonies held at the highly-secure government communications centre at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire.

The historian appointed to oversee the review and transfer, Tony Badger, master of Clare College, Cambridge, says the discovery of the archive put the Foreign Office in an "embarrassing, scandalous" position. "These documents should have been in the public archives in the 1980s," he said. "It's long overdue." The first of them are made available to the public on Wednesday at the National Archive at Kew, Surrey.

The papers at Hanslope Park include monthly intelligence reports on the "elimination" of the colonial authority's enemies in 1950s Malaya; records showing ministers in London were aware of the torture and murder of Mau Mau insurgents in Kenya, including a case of aman said to have been "roasted alive"; and papers detailing the lengths to which the UK went to forcibly remove islanders from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.


Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/18/britain-destroyed-records-colonial-crimes

[Corncrake]

I was so pleased to hear the Chagos Islands get a mention here - anything to bring this awful episode of UK history back to the public consciousness. If you want to hear the full extent of British infamy here watch John Pilger's documentary 'Stealing a Nation' http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3667764379758632511 It is unbelievable - only it isn't.

[tonton]

not surprising,also australian indigenous suffered tremendously, and some of the crimes were at the lowest levels a humanity .i m putting this as nice as i can.BUT, i do warn one thing, the collective conciosness (mind)of england or europe at that time was really something else.to them at the time they(the victoms) were not considered to be people. they were less than live stock. this is truth. so in there minds, at that time it was almost normal.............When the Commonwealth of Australia was formed in 1901 the new nation excluded Aboriginal people from participating in the new nation, including being counted in census figures.[1] Under the Aborigines Act of 1905, Western Australian Aboriginal people had to apply for "citizenship" and were issued Aboriginal "passports" by the Western Australian Government.[1][2][3] Without the passport Indigenous Australians could not work where they wanted, spend money how they wanted, receive health care or enter many public buildings such as hotels or restaurants.[1] The Act was repealed in 1963 and replaced by the Native Welfare Act.[4] The 1967 referendum allowed for Aboriginal to be included in census figures.[1][5][6]

anyways sorry for rattling on......................just that these kinds of thing happened all over the place and im glad that at least a few will be recognized and addressed.
[edit]

[heyokah]

Dear Corncrake,
As a Dutch person to point a finger at another colonial power and say, oh you guys were really bad, is rather hypocritical.
Every empire and colonial power had their crimes.
I don't see why Britain was worse than any of the others.

[heyokah]

not surprising,also australian indigenous suffered tremendously, and some of the crimes were at the lowest levels a humanity .i m putting this as nice as i can.BUT, i do warn one thing, the collective conciosness (mind)of england or europe at that time was really something else.to them at the time they(the victoms) were not considered to be people. they were less than live stock. this is truth. so in there minds, at that time it was almost normal.............When the Commonwealth of Australia was formed in 1901 the new nation excluded Aboriginal people from participating in the new nation, including being counted in census figures.[1] Under the Aborigines Act of 1905, Western Australian Aboriginal people had to apply for "citizenship" and were issued Aboriginal "passports" by the Western Australian Government.[1][2][3] Without the passport Indigenous Australians could not work where they wanted, spend money how they wanted, receive health care or enter many public buildings such as hotels or restaurants.[1] The Act was repealed in 1963 and replaced by the Native Welfare Act.[4] The 1967 referendum allowed for Aboriginal to be included in census figures.

anyways sorry for rattling on......................just that these kinds of thing happened all over the place and im glad that at least a few will be recognized and addressed.


Yes, tanton, there were terrible injustices committed by the imperialist societies.

In the case of aboriginal peoples of North America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, there's little doubt these people suffered tremendously at the hands of European imperialists.
They lost virtually all of their land, self-determination, liberty, culture, health, and resources.

[Corncrake]

Another article to come out in the wake of the above drawing on Caroline Elkins book 'Britain's Gulag' on Britain's role in Kenya: not comfortable reading but it needs to be out there.


Dark Hearts
Posted: 23 Apr 2012 12:26 PM PDT
We British have a peculiar ability to blot out our colonial history.


By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 24th April 2012

There is one thing you can say for the Holocaust deniers: at least they know what they are denying. In order to sustain the lies they tell, they must engage in strenuous falsification. To dismiss Britain’s colonial atrocities, no such effort is required. Most people appear to be unaware that anything needs to be denied.

The story of benign imperialism, whose overriding purpose was not to seize land, labour and commodities but to teach the natives English, table manners and double-entry book-keeping, is a myth that has been carefully propagated by the right-wing press. But it draws its power from a remarkable national ability to airbrush and disregard our past.

Last week’s revelations, that the British government systematically destroyed the documents detailing mistreatment of its colonial subjects(1), and that the Foreign Office then lied about a secret cache of files containing lesser revelations(2), is by any standards a big story. But it was either ignored or consigned to a footnote by most of the British press. I was unable to find any mention of the secret archive on the Telegraph’s website. The Mail’s only coverage, as far as I can determine, was an opinion piece by a historian called Lawrence James, who used the occasion to insist that any deficiencies in the management of the colonies were the work of “a sprinkling of misfits, incompetents and bullies” while everyone else was “dedicated, loyal and disciplined”(3).

The British government’s suppression of evidence was scarcely necessary. Even when the documentation of great crimes is abundant, it is not denied but simply ignored. In an article for the Daily Mail in 2010, for example, the historian Dominic Sandbrook announced that “Britain’s empire stands out as a beacon of tolerance, decency and the rule of law. … Nor did Britain countenance anything like the dreadful tortures committed in French Algeria.”(4) Could he really have been unaware of the history he is disavowing?

Caroline Elkins, a professor at Harvard, spent nearly ten years compiling the evidence contained in her book Britain’s Gulag: the Brutal End of Empire in Kenya(5). She started her research with the belief that the British account of the suppression of the Kikuyu’s Mau Mau revolt in the 1950s was largely accurate. Then she discovered that most of the documentation had been destroyed. She worked through the remaining archives, then conducted 600 hours of interviews with Kikuyu survivors – both rebels and loyalists – and British guards, settlers and officials. Her book is fully and thoroughly documented. It won the Pulitzer prize. But as far as Sandbrook, James and the other imperial apologists are concerned, it might as well never have been written.

Elkins reveals that the British detained not 80,000 Kikuyu, as the official histories maintained, but almost the entire population of one and a half million people, in camps and fortified villages. There, thousands were beaten to death or died from malnutrition, typhoid, tuberculosis and dysentery. In some camps almost all the children died(6).

The inmates were used as slave labour. Above the gates were edifying slogans, such as “Labour and freedom” and “He who helps himself will also be helped”. Loudspeakers broadcast the national anthem and patriotic exhortations. People deemed to have disobeyed the rules were killed in front of the others. The survivors were forced to dig mass graves, which were quickly filled. Unless you have a strong stomach I advise you to skip the next paragraph.

Interrogation under torture was widespread. Many of the men were anally raped, using knives, broken bottles, rifle barrels, snakes and scorpions. A favourite technique was to hold a man upside down, his head in a bucket of water, while sand was rammed into his rectum with a stick. Women were gang-raped by the guards. People were mauled by dogs and electrocuted. The British devised a special tool which they used for first crushing and then ripping off testicles. They used pliers to mutilate women’s breasts. They cut off inmates’ ears and fingers and gouged out their eyes. They dragged people behind Land Rovers until their bodies disintegrated. Men were rolled up in barbed wire and kicked around the compound(7).

Elkins provides a wealth of evidence to show that the horrors of the camps were endorsed at the highest levels. The governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, regularly intervened to prevent the perpetrators from being brought to justice. The colonial secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, repeatedly lied to the House of Commons(8). This is a vast, systematic crime for which there has been no reckoning.

No matter. Even those who acknowledge that something happened write as if Elkins and her work did not exist. In the Telegraph, Daniel Hannan maintains that just eleven people were beaten to death. Apart from that, “1,090 terrorists were hanged and as many as 71,000 detained without due process.”(9)

The British did not do body counts, and most victims were buried in unmarked graves. But it is clear that tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of Kikuyu died in the camps and during the round-ups. Hannan’s is one of the most blatant examples of revisionism I have ever encountered.

Without explaining what this means, Lawrence James concedes that “harsh measures” were sometimes used, but he maintains that “while the Mau Mau were terrorising the Kikuyu, veterinary surgeons in the Colonial Service were teaching tribesmen how to deal with cattle plagues.”(10) The theft of the Kikuyu’s land and livestock, the starvation and killings, the widespread support among the Kikuyu for the Mau Mau’s attempt to reclaim their land and freedom: all vanish into thin air. Both men maintain that the British government acted to stop any abuses as soon as they were revealed.

What I find remarkable is not that they write such things, but that these distortions go almost unchallenged. The myths of empire are so well-established that we appear to blot out countervailing stories even as they are told. As evidence from the manufactured Indian famines of the 1870s(11) and from the treatment of other colonies accumulates(12,13), British imperialism emerges as no better and in some cases even worse than the imperialism practised by other nations. Yet the myth of the civilising mission remains untroubled by the evidence.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/18/britain-destroyed-records-colonial-crimes

2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/18/sins-colonialists-concealed-secret-archive

3. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2131801/Yes-mistakes-stop-proud-Empire.html

4. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1299111/Stop-saying-sorry-history-For-long-leaders-crippled-post-imperial-cringe.html

5. Caroline Elkins, 2005. Britain’s Gulag: the Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. Random House, London.

6. Caroline Elkins, as above.

7. Caroline Elkins, as above.

8. Caroline Elkins, as above.

9. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100083096/in-all-the-coverage-of-the-atrocities-in-kenya-two-words-are-missing

10. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2131801/Yes-mistakes-stop-proud-Empire.html

11. Mike Davis, 2001. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World. Verso, London.

12. See for example John Newsinger, 2006. The Blood Never Dried: a people’s history of the British empire. Bookmarks, London.

and

13. Mark Curtis, 2007. Unpeople: Britain’s secret human rights abuses. Vintage, London