Of Britain, that CHOGM participant
DAVID M. ANDERSON
THE British do not torture. At least, that is what we in Britain have
always liked to think. But not anymore. In a historic decision last
week, the British government agreed to compensate 5,228 Kenyans who were
tortured and abused while detained during the Mau Mau rebellion of the
1950s. Each claimant will receive around £2,670 (about $4,000).
The money is paltry. But the principle it establishes, and the
history it rewrites, are both profound. This is the first historical
claim for compensation that the British government has accepted. It has
never before admitted to committing torture in any part of its former
empire.
Kenyans celebrate Mau Mau compensation win |
In recent years there has been a clamour for official apologies. In
2010, Britain formally apologized for its army’s conduct in the infamous
“Bloody Sunday” killings in Northern Ireland in 1972, and earlier this
year Prime Minister David Cameron visited Amritsar, India, the site of a
1919 massacre, and expressed “regret for the loss of life.”
The Kenyan case has been in process for a decade in London’s High
Court. The British fought to avoid paying reparations, so the decision
to settle is a significant change of direction. The decision comes
months ahead of the 50th anniversary of the British departure from Kenya
— once thought of as the “white man’s country” in East Africa.
Detention camps
The Kenya case turned on the evidence of historians, including my own
role as an expert witness. I identified a large tranche of documents
that the British government smuggled out of Kenya in 1963 and brought
back to London. The judge ordered the release of this long-hidden
“secret” cache, some 1,500 files.
The evidence of torture revealed in these documents was devastating.
In the detention camps of colonial Kenya, a tough regime of physical and
mental abuse of suspects was implemented from 1957 onward, as part of a
government policy to induce detainees to obey orders or to make
confessions.
The documents showed that responsibility for torture went right to
the top — sanctioned by Kenya’s Governor, Evelyn Baring, and authorized
at Cabinet level in London by Alan Lennox-Boyd, then secretary of state
for the colonies in Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government. When
told that torture and abuse were routine in colonial prisons, Mr.
Lennox-Boyd did not order that such practices be stopped, but instead
took steps to place them beyond legal sanction. “Compelling force” was
allowed, but defined so loosely as to permit virtually any kind of
physical abuse.
Why did the British keep these documents, instead of destroying them?
Plenty else was burned, or dumped at sea, as the British left Kenya.
The answer lay in the unease of some British colonial officers. Many
did not like what they saw. When the orders to torture came down, some
realized the jeopardy they were in. These men worried that it was they,
not their commanders, who would carry the can.
Junior officers
David Cameron |
They were right to worry. Official reports from the 1950s always
blamed individual officers — the “bad apples in the barrel” — for acts
of abuse. But the blame lay not with junior officers forced to implement
a bad policy but with the senior echelons of a colonial government that
was rotten to the core.
Kenya’s will not be the last historical claims case. The Foreign and
Commonwealth Office faces others, some of which have been in progress
for years.
A case already before the courts concerns the 1948 Batang Kali
massacre in colonial Malaya, now Malaysia. There, the relatives of
innocent villagers — who were murdered by young conscript soldiers
ordered to shoot by an older, psychopathic sergeant major — have asked
for compensation. For Americans, the case has eerie echoes of Vietnam.
European colonial power
In Cyprus, translators employed by the British during the 1950s told
tales of electrocutions and pulled fingernails as British intelligence
officers tried to elicit information about gunrunning.
The case of Aden, now in Yemen, could be the worst of all. In 1965,
the British Governor retreated up the steps of his departing aircraft,
firing his revolver at snipers arrayed around the airport runway. This
was not the “orderly retreat from empire” that many historians would
have us believe characterized British decolonization. Britain’s
brutality against its Yemeni enemies in Aden during those final days has
become a local legend.
Though Britain is the first former European colonial power to pay
individual compensation to victims, other countries have been confronted
by similar accusations. In 2006, Germany offered to pay millions of
euros to the Namibian government to compensate for the German Army’s
genocide against the Herero tribe in the early 20th Century. It also
issued a public apology in the capital, Windhoek. In 2011, the Dutch
government was ordered by the International Court of Justice to
compensate survivors of a 1947 massacre in colonial Indonesia; it has
not yet paid.
Historical research has played its part in all these cases, but not
all historians are happy with the way things are turning out. Leading
historians of British colonialism have long tended to rejoice in a
benevolent, liberal view of imperialism.
The British historians Andrew Roberts, Niall Ferguson and Max
Hastings have all nailed their colors to the mast of the good ship
Britannia as she sailed the ocean blue bringing civilization and
prosperity to the world. This view seems unlikely to be credible for
much longer.
Guantanamo survivors
Empire was built by conquest. It was violent. And decolonization was
sometimes a bloody, brutal business. No American should need reminding
of that. And Britain, along with other imperial powers of the 19th and
20th centuries, may yet have to pay for this. Torture is torture,
whoever the perpetrator, whoever the victim. Wrongs should be put right.
Whatever wrongs were done in the name of Britain in Kenya in the 1950s,
the British government has now delivered modest reparations to some
victims. And maybe we in Britain have also finally begun to come to
terms with our imperial past. Would the United States be so
accommodating to a similar claim? In the current political climate,
probably not. But times change. Fifty years from now, will Americans
face claims from Guantanamo survivors? You might, and perhaps you
should.
David M. Anderson, a professor of African history at the University
of Warwick, is the author of “Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in
Kenya and the End of Empire.”
Courtesy: New York Times |