[Historical events - Victims still seeking just resolutions 60 years on.]
Mau Mau victims seek compensation from UK for alleged torture
Four Kenyans say they suffered abuse under British colonial rule during the 1950s Mau Mau rebellion
by Owen Bowcott, guardian.co.uk, Thursday 7 April 2011 14.47 BST(original article here)The full extent of British brutality during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya 50 years ago has begun to emerge through government reports documenting "systematic" torture, starvation and even the burning alive of detainees.
Four elderly Kenyans who claim they were variously whipped, beaten, sexually abused and castrated while detained under colonial rule in the 1950s have brought their claims for compensation to the high court.
The survivors of the emergency regime of detention camps were "screened" – or violently interrogated – in order to extract confessions. One claimant, the court was told, witnessed the clubbing to death of 11 prison inmates. The British governor, Sir Evelyn Baring, was said to have been present at beatings.
The landmark hearing, expected to last several weeks, will highlight atrocities and attitudes that may rewrite the history of British colonial rule in Africa. Boxes of previously undisclosed documents, stored by the Foreign Office, have been unearthed during research into the claims. They record the methods employed to defeat the rebellion and government awareness of abuses.
While not denying that torture took place, the Foreign Office insists that the UK government retains no residual liability, deploying a range of constitutional precedents – including reference to the declaration of martial law in Jamaica in 1860 – to block the survivors' quest for compensation.
Robert Jay QC, for the Foreign Office, opened the hearing with an application that the claims should be struck out. Jay told a packed courtroom in London that he did not seek to diminish the appalling acts committed in detention camps between 1952 and 1961, but said the claim that the UK was liable for compensation was "built on inference" and ended in a "cul-de-sac".
The FCO argues that legal responsibility was transferred to the Kenyan republic upon independence in 1963, or else simply ceased to exist.
The test case claimants, Ndiku Mutua, Paulo Nzili, Wambugu Wa Nyingi and Jane Muthoni Mara, who are in their 70s and 80s, have flown 4,000 miles from their rural homes for the trial. It will also consider whether the claim was brought outside the legal time limit.
The judge, Mr Justice McCombe, heard Mutua and Nzili had been castrated, Nyingi was beaten unconscious at Hola prison in 1959, which 11 men were clubbed to death and Mara had been subjected to appalling sexual abuse.
The statement of claim drawn up by the law firm Leigh Day and Co, which represents the four Kenyans, says that detainees were subjected to "sodomy, the insertion of sand into men's anuses and the insertion of glass bottles filled with hot liquid into women's vaginas". In many cases detainees died.
The claimants' solicitor, Martyn Day, said earlier that the case was "not about reopening old wounds". He added: "It is about individuals who are alive and who have endured terrible suffering because of the policies of a previous British government. They are now seeking recognition and redress in the form of a carefully conceived welfare fund. It is incumbent on the government to treat such people with the respect and dignity they deserve."
But the extraordinary quantity of Kenyan colonial service documents, removed from Nairobi by British civil servants at independence in 1963 because of their extreme sensitivity, will lead to a re-examination of the period.
Professor David Anderson, of the African Studies Centre at Oxford University, discovered the files that had been lost or concealed. He has examined only a small proportion of the 17,000 pages relating to Kenya. A further 300 boxes of colonial administration files have emerged from the Foreign Office, covering former UK territories around the world.
In a witness statement, Anderson described the contents of the Kenyan files. Forced labour was used in the camps, he said, even though it was known to be illegal under international convention. Breaches of the convention were a daily occurrence and the attorney general, in one extract, noted that "if we are going to sin, we must sin quietly".
The government in London knew what was going on, Anderson states. "These documents contain discussion of torture and abuse and the legal implications for the British administration in Kenya of the use of coercive force in prisons and detention camps, by so-called 'screening' teams, and in other interrogations carried out by all members of the security forces."
The legal limits of coercive force were debated. "They reveal that changes to legislation, and additions to the emergency powers regulations, were made retrospectively in order to cover practices that were already normal within the camps and detention centres."
Torture was commonplace. One file, Anderson says, "contains a telegram, from Governor Baring to the secretary of state for the colonies, dated 17 January 1955, detailing 'brutal allegations' against eight British district officers regarding the murder of detainees under 'screening' (ie interrogation). This includes the burning alive of detainees."
In another file, a provincial commissioner, CM "Monkey" Johnson, wrote to the attorney-general asking him to extend an amnesty because "each and everyone one of us, from the governor downwards, may be in danger of removal from public service".
At certain camps, Anderson notes, "specific methods of interrogation were devised, involving the systematic beating and torture of detainees". In Mwea camp there was starvation of detainees for up to three days, sleep deprivation and regular beatings carried out by British officers.
Altogether 1,090 men were sent to the gallows for Mau Mau crimes. Many protested that their confessions had been extracted under torture.
The hearing continues.
----------------------------------------------
Grandfather was tortured
Among those who were tortured in Kenya was Barack Obama's grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama. Having served in the British army in Burma during the second world war, he returned home and was accused of being a Mau Mau fighter.
In his memoir, Dreams From My Father, Obama refers briefly to his grandfather's imprisonment: "Eventually he received a hearing, and he was found innocent. But he had been in the camp for over six months, and when he returned … he was very thin and dirty. He had difficulty walking, and his head was full of lice."
In 2008, Sarah Onyango, Hussein Onyango's third wife, told journalists that "white soldiers" had visited the prison every few days to inflict what was described as "disciplinary action" upon inmates suspected of subversion. "He said they would sometimes squeeze his testicles with parallel metallic rods," she said. "They also pierced his nails and buttocks with a sharp pin, with his hands and legs tied together with his head facing down." Onyango is said to have been left permanently scarred. He was also bitterly anti-British.
The current court case was already underway by the time Obama was elected president. Inside the Oval Office, his predecessor had given pride of place to a loan from the British government, a bronze bust of Winston Churchill, who had been prime minister when the state of emergency was declared in Kenya and when Obama's grandfather had been detained and tortured. Although the White House would deny there was any connection, one of the newly-elected President's first acts was to order that the bust be packed up and sent back.
by Ian Cobain
Mau Mau veterans launch second round of legal action
Kenyans' lawyers say discovery of files on torture and murder of detainees by colonial officials means courts can hear case
by Ian Cobain, guardian.co.uk, Monday 16 July 2012 16.32 BST(original article here)
 |
Group of people detained during the Mau Mau uprising. Photograph: George Rodger/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images |
Three elderly veterans of the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya have launched the second round of their attempt to sue the British government following the discovery of a secret cache of Foreign Office files that document the torture and even murder of detainees by colonial officials.
Round one was won by the trio last year when the high court ruled there was "ample evidence … that there may have been systematic torture of detainees during the [Mau Mau] emergency", and suggested it would be "dishonourable" for the courts to accept the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's argument that the veterans should be suing the current Kenyan government.
Now the FCO's lawyers are arguing the claim for compensation should be struck out because too much time has elapsed since the 1950s insurgency, with the result that a fair trial is no longer possible.
In papers submitted to the court, they argue that they face "irredeemable difficulty" in their attempts to defend the claim, not least because they cannot bring forward witnesses. "The majority who might give material evidence are now dead."
However, lawyers for the three veterans say the discovery last year of the FCO's secret archive of thousands of colonial-era files – and the realisation that many of the most incriminating documents had been systematically destroyed – means that the courts can agree to hear the case.
The archive at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire contained in excess of 15,000 pages of contemporaneous documents of relevance to the case, Richard Hermer QC, for the claimants, told the court. He added: "Not only is the document base vast, it is very high quality."
The veterans' lawyers also argue that some potential witnesses who could give evidence on behalf of the government are still alive.
The lawyers have retained a number of historians who argue that the claimants could not have brought a case before now because of the manner in which the abuses were systematically denied and concealed, not only by colonial officials in Kenya but by senior civil servants and government ministers in London.
One of them, Caroline Elkins, a Pulitzer prize-winning Harvard professor, submitted a statement to the court on Monday which said the wide-scale destruction of documents was part of "an explicit effort to shape an archival record and British colonial legacy in Kenya".
The documents that survived were held for decades amid strict security at Hanslope Park, the home a government research centre that provides technical help to the security and intelligence agencies.
Once the FCO acknowledged the cache's existence and allowed the veterans' lawyers to see its contents, it became clear, according to Elkins, that both Whitehall officials and the colonial administration in Nairobi sanctioned the abuse of detainees and then suppressed the evidence, and that the British army had been responsible for the "creation, maintenance and application of systems of abuse".
Another historian, David Anderson, professor of African politics at Oxford, said the files showed that one European settler, Jack Hopcraft, painstakingly documented the abuses perpetrated against his employees and that colonial officials chose to ignore him.
The newly obtained documents show that colonial officials and police officers were aware that prisoners were being raped, beaten, whipped and subjected to summary execution. Even children were killed. Eight white officers accused of "roasting detainees alive" were granted an amnesty.
One letter from 1953 shows that the colony's attorney general, Eric Griffith-Jones, expressed concern that the treatment of detainees was "distressingly reminiscent of conditions in Nazi Germany or Communist Russia".
Despite this, he drafted legislation that sanctioned a form of beatings known as "dilution technique", and then warned the then governor, Evelyn Baring, of the need for complete secrecy, because "if we are going to sin, we must sin quietly."
Senior officials in both countries were aware that this dilution technique could result in serious injury or death. But the previously secret archive makes clear that in 1959, when 11 detainees were beaten to death at a camp at Hola in south-east Kenya, the then UK attorney general, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, worked to shift the blame from London to Nairobi.
Although senior Red Cross officials visited Kenya and witnessed the dilution technique being applied, no mention was made of the beatings in their final report. Its author, Henri Junod, a friend of Baring, even confessed to being "impressed by the work", and told British officials that they were "angels of mercy" compared with the French in Algeria.
While an estimated one to one-and-a-half tonnes of documents were destroyed in Kenya, those that did survive and were archived at Hanslope Park include copies of correspondence generated at the Foreign Office in London which have not been transferred to the National Archive. This is raising concerns among historians that civil servants in London – as well as colonial officials – may have destroyed key documents.
No comments:
Post a Comment