‘Britain’s guilty secret’ of torture in Kenya to be laid bare at last

May 10, 2011
Yorkshire Post

Highly sensitive documents revealing the torture of Mau Mau Kenyans at the hands of the British authorities were a “sort of guilty secret” for the UK Government, a report has found.

Foreign Secretary William Hague said the documents, which detail how detainees were castrated, beaten and sexually abused while in British camps, should now be made public.

His announcement comes as a High Court judge is set to decide whether the UK Government, which sanctioned “systematic violence” in the detention camps, is liable for the torture of the Mau Mau people for almost a decade, between 1952 and 1961.

Last month, the High Court heard how Ndiku Mutua, Paulo Nzili, Wambugu Wa Nyingi and Jane Muthoni Mara, who are now in their 70s and 80s, were subjected to appalling abuse at the hands of the British authorities.

Mr Mutua and Mr Nzili were castrated while Mr Nyingi was beaten unconscious during an incident in which 11 men were clubbed to death. Mrs Mara was also subjected to horrendous sexual abuse during her detention.

All four want the British Government to issue a “statement of regret” and pay around £2m into a welfare fund to assist the hundreds of victims still alive.

The Government’s lawyers claim that it is the Kenyan government which is now responsible, while arguing that there has been such a delay since the atrocities occurred it can no longer be held accountable.

But the Kenyans’ legal team at Leigh Day say they have only been able to bring the case now because of recent historical research and officials at the FCO finally releasing some of the 1,500 files relating to the abuse of the Mau Mau people and their supporters.

The Government has also admitted there are some 8,800 files which were transferred to the UK when the British authorities withdrew from the colonies.

Following the revelation in January, Mr Hague requested former British High Commissioner to Canada, Anthony Cary, to conduct an internal review into what happened to the documents, known as “migrated archives”, when the British left Kenya. Mr Cary said he found there was confusion about the status of the files although some officials at the FCO realised their importance but chose to “ignore” their existence following three Freedom of Information requests from the Kenyans’ lawyers made in 2005 and 2006.

Mr Cary said: “Lack of process documentation and misunderstandings about the importance and searchability of the archives explain the failure only up to a point.

“I think it is fair to say these misapprehensions were only half believed, at least by some of the more thoughtful and knowledgeable staff (at the Foreign Office).

“It was perhaps convenient to accept the assurances of predecessors that the migrated archives were administrative and/or ephemeral, and did not need to be consulted for the purposes of FOI requests, while also being conscious of the files as a sort of guilty secret, of uncertain status and in the ‘too difficult’ tray.”

Adding that officials at the Foreign Office need urgently to review all its documents, the former British High Commissioner said: “The migrated archives saga reminds us that we cannot turn a blind eye to any of our holdings.

“All information held by the FCO should have been retained by choice rather than inertia, and must be effectively managed from a risk perspective.”

The Myall Creek Massacre, 1838

Creative Spirits

On 10 June 1838 a group of white settlers murdered 28 Aboriginal men, women and children near Myall Creek Station in northern New South Wales, near Bingara. Seven of the killers were tried and hanged.

The Myall Creek Massacre now serves as both a harrowing reminder of Australia's colonial violence towards Aboriginal people and an example of modern-day reconciliation.

Warning! You might find some of the text here disturbing. It describes strong violence and quotes racist language.

Historic background

In 1838 white people had settled Australia for just 51 years. Pastoralists were pushing into Aboriginal land, dispossessing Indigenous people from the land that nurtured them physically and spiritually.

Aboriginal people did not give up their land that they had looked after for millennia without a fight. White settlers engaged in many clashes with Aboriginal people at the frontier. Fearing to be outnumbered by Aboriginal tribes some settlers escalated low-level skirmishes to the atrocities we now know as Australia's massacres of Aboriginal people.

With the eyes of the law often several days' ride away the settlers had little to fear. Gangs of stockmen went on what was known as 'the Big Bushwhack' or simply 'the Drive': a hunt for Aboriginal people which lasted several months [2]. They thought there was nothing wrong with shooting Aboriginal people or raping Aboriginal women.

Among the massacres, the one at Myall Creek differs from the many other massacres of Aboriginal people in that it is a well documented and extreme example of what white people were capable of perpetrating on Indigenous peoples.

Myall Creek was the tip of the iceberg of frontier violence against Aboriginal people.—Prof. Rhonda Craven, Centre for Educational Research, University of Western Sydney [11]

The events of the Myall Creek Massacre on June 10, 1838

Many massacres, including Myall Creek, were witnessed only by the murderers. But because the Myall Creek Massacre has been extensively documented we know now what happened.

At the time about 50 Aboriginal people had moved to Myall Creek Station at the invitation of a stockman employed there.

The Myall Creek Massacre. Note the rope binding the Aboriginal people together and the little child on the back of her mother on the far right. Published in The Chronicles of Crime, 1841.

Ten of them, all able bodied males, were working on a neighbouring station, 50kms away, when they learned that a group of armed stockmen planned to go onto Myall Creek Station. They walked back as fast as they could, but it was already too late.

The stockmen, led by John Fleming, were already galloping towards the huts of Myall Creek Station where the remaining Aboriginal people were preparing their evening meal.

The stockmen herded the defenceless Aboriginal people together and tied their hands together with a long rope. Only two young boys escaped.

The men were deaf to the cries of their victims. Within twenty minutes of their arriving they hauled their captives westwards from the huts and over the top of a rise.

About 800 metres from the huts the defenceless Aboriginal people were hacked and slashed to death. They were beheaded and their headless bodies were left where they fell. The stockmen then set up camp, drinking and bragging about their killings.

Late that night the Aboriginal men who had been working at the neighbouring station arrived at Myall Creek Station. They were urged to move on and headed off into the night.

Two days after the Myall Creek Massacre the murderers returned and burned the bodies of their victims. They then set out to find the ten Aboriginal people they had missed.

They found them the next day and murdered most of them.

Two beautiful young girls were allowed to live so that they could be raped.—'Massacre at Myall Creek', The Sydney Morning Herald [14]

It seems likely that the same stockmen perpetrated another massacre near MacIntyre's (near Inverell) where the group of ten Aboriginal people had headed. Reportedly between 30 and 40 Aboriginal people were murdered and their bodies cast onto a large fire.

A woman was allowed to run with blood spurting out of her cut throat. She was then thrown alive onto the fire. Her infant child was thrown alive onto the fire. Two young girls were mutilated by the gang.

Eventually the party immersed into heavy drinking and dispersed five days after their first killings.

Investigating the Myall Creek Massacre

Almost three weeks later the atrocity was reported to police in Sydney in the absence of the local police magistrate. Governor George Gipps ordered an investigation which opened on July 28th, 1838. Eventually ten suspects were identified and marched 300kms to Sydney for trial. Their leader, John Fleming, escaped.

As news spread about the prisoners their capture attracted wide interest. Given the accepted opinion about Aboriginal people of those days the public were soon in favour of the accused and a prominent landholder offered to finance their defence.

I look on the blacks as a set of monkeys, and the earlier they are exterminated from the face of the earth the better... I would never see a white man hanged for killing a black.—One of the jurors, quoted in The Australian, 18 December 1838 [8]

The first trial in November 1838 was based on thin evidence. No-one apart from the killers had witnessed the massacre and they had removed all bodies before they could be recovered as evidence. The accused pleaded not guilty.

In the absence of any corpse the jury took only 15 minutes to pronounce the accused not guilty to the cheering of the crowd in the court. But Attorney-General James Plunkett asked for and was granted another indictment.

The second trial, ten days later, accused only seven of the original ten men and focused on the killing of just one Aboriginal child. Eventually the jury found them guilty of the murder of the child.

On 18 December 1838 the seven stockmen were hanged. For the first time in Australian history white men were punished for murder of Aboriginal people [3].

But the NSW governor's commitment to justice for Aboriginal people waned. The involvement of the other three men in the Myall Creek Massacre was never investigated.

The verdict and sentence caused outrage among settlers [2,3]. Petitions were signed and money was raised to employ the best lawyers to defend the murderers [14]. For the murderers it was inconceivable that they had committed a crime given that there had been many such killings. Often the leader of a 'punitive party' and the magistrate responsible for trials were one and the same man [3,11].

Protocols of the court proceedings.

The whole gang of black animals are not worth the money the colonists will have to pay for printing the silly [court] documents.—The Sydney Morning Herald, 5 October 1838 [3,8]

After Myall Creek

After the Myall Creek Massacre murderous attacks on Aboriginal people continued for many decades well into the 20th century. White people now went 'underground' using poisoned flour [2] which was harder to prove in court [13]. They also took greater care to conceal or destroy the corpses [13]. Many massacres never became known outside the district where they occurred [3].

One of the last big massacres occurred in 1928 when a group of policemen chained together and shot 50 Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory. Three women were spared to be raped and later burned [10]. It became known as the Coniston Massacre.

Overall, "premeditated butchery of men, women, children and infants accounted in the aggregate for tens of thousands of black lives," reported the Sydney Morning Herald [14], a view Colin Clague confirms. Colin was head of the Aboriginal Land Claims Unit from 1983 to 1988 and vividly remembers the struggle to acknowledge many other massacre sites. Many of them could not be claimed, and when you walk along public reserves or in national parks you might as well come across a massacre site [17].

Myall Creek is all over Australia.

Calling for information on Pilbara massacres

The Wangka Maya Pilbara Aboriginal Language Centre in South Hedland seeks information, stories or recollections about Pilbara massacres.

Please contact the centre on (08) 9172 2344.

Massacres: The horrors of frontier violence

25:1

Ratio at which Aboriginal people of the Northern Territory were killed compared to white settlers from 1870s to 1900 [1].

12:1

Ratio at which Aboriginal people of Victoria were killed compared to white settlers from the 1800s [1].

Contemporary sketch of the Waterloo massacre. Note the firecrackers exploding in the background while white men shoot Aboriginal people. The Waterloo massacre occurred 50kms south-west of Moree (380 kms south-west of Brisbane), on Waterloo Creek (what is known today as Millie Creek [16]) on Australia Day (26 January) 1838, a few months before the massacre at Myall Creek. Five white men were killed, but between 120 and 300 Aboriginal people of the Kamilaroi nation were shot by Major James Nunn [15], making it the maybe the largest single massacre in Australia.

Black memories

"My mother would sit and cry and tell me this; they buried our babies in the ground with only their heads above the ground. All in a row they were. Then they had tests to see who could kick the babies' head off the furthest. One man clubbed a baby's head off from horseback.

They then spent the rest of the day raping the women, most of whom were then tortured to death by sticking sharp things like spears up their vaginas till they died.

They tied the men's hands behind their backs, then cut off their penis and testicles and watched them run around screaming until they died. They killed in other bad ways too." [4]

The main reasons why Aboriginal people were killed by white settlers were [1]:

• a struggle for land where stockmen often led cattle to graze well beyond the limits of the station
• as reprisals for attacks on white men, cattle or horses
• lack of communication because of linguistic barriers
• for being cheeky (e.g. for being "found standing in the moonlight in the doorway of [a squatter's] hut")
• fear of attacks by Aboriginal people (settlers thought Aboriginal people painted for important ceremonies were performing war dances),
• to remove all male Aboriginal people so that white settlers could sexually abuse women and girls.

White settlers found no reason to spare Aboriginal men, boys and children. Aboriginal girls and women, however, were often kept for sexual pleasure. Research uncovered "stories of girls as young as eight who were kidnapped and raped and infected with syphilis. Teenage girls were kept for sex and chained up at night to stop them running away. One group of girls was held in a chicken wire enclosure." [1]

Jack Watson, head stockman at Lawn Hill station in the Gulf country, in 1885 had 40 pairs of human ears nailed to the walls of his hut.—The Age [1]

Some other massacre sites include Appin, Bluff Rock, Slaughterhouse Creek, Waterloo Creek and Woodford Bay.

Myall Creek Massacre memorial

The Myall Creek Massacre memorial site is approx. 20 kms out of Bingara and 600km north of Sydney.

Initiatives to erect a memorial on the Myall Creek Massacre site date from as early as 1965. But it wasn't until 1998 that a conference on reconciliation decided to erect a permanent memorial because the participants felt that the 'bad history' had to be acknowledged along with the good. The Myall Creek Memorial Committee was formed to carry out the proposal.

There is a code of silence surrounding the massacres. —Paulette Smith, Myall Creek Memorial Committee [7]

On 10 June 2000 the Myall Creek Memorial Committee officially opened the Myall Creek Memorial.

The memorial consists of a single, large granite rock. A pathway which leads from the road to the site features seven plaques which briefly explain the history of the massacre. They were made according to artwork by Colin Isaacs.

Travelling to the memorial

The Myall Creek Massacre memorial is situated in northern NSW between the towns of Bingara and Delungra.

From Sydney travel north to Newcastle then on highway number 15 to Tamworth. Continue north via Manilla and Barraba to Bingara. In Bingara follow the highway number 95 along East St, and after leaving town turn right into Old Bingara Road.

Refer to the map on the right for further details.

Myall Creek Massacre memorial stone. The plaque reads: "In memory of the Wirrayaraay people who were murdered on the slopes of this ridge in an unprovoked but premeditated act in the late afternoon of 10 June, 1838."

One of the Myall Creek memorial plaques. Note the translation into Gamilaraay language on the top of the plaque. Seven plaques tell the story on your way to the memorial stone.

Myall Creek Massacre memorial added to national heritage list

On 7 June 2008, 170 years after the Myall Creek Massacre happened, the Federal Heritage Minister Peter Garrett declared the Myall Creek memorial an official national heritage site. Myall Creek joins as the 79th place to be included on the national heritage list which protects natural, historic and Indigenous places of outstanding heritage value to the nation.

The protection the Myall Creek Massacre memorial enjoys through its listed heritage status is welcome because the memorial was damaged in 2005 when vandals hammered words out of some plaques [6].

The events at Myall Creek resonate across the years and the listing of the Myall Creek Massacre and Memorial Site formally recognises a pivotal moment in Australia's history—Peter Garrett, Federal Heritage Minister [5]

Myall Creek Massacre site gets heritage listing. Heritage Minister Peter Garrett (right) hands over the heritage listing plaque to descendants of the Aboriginal people murdered: Sue Blacklock (left) and Lyall Munro.

On 14 November, 2010 the site was given the state's highest form of heritage protection and recognition when Minister for Planning, Tony Kelly, announced it was listed on the State Heritage Register because it represents an important part of the history of New South Wales.

Myall Creek Massacre memorial—a reconciliation site

With all the violence and atrocities associated with Myall Creek it is hard to imagine that the memorial is also a place of reconciliation.

Ever since the 1980s, annual commemorations recalled the events and remembered both the murderers and the victims of the massacre at Myall Creek.

In 1998 Sue Blacklock, a descendant of an Aboriginal survivor, approached the Rev. John Brown to offer Myall Creek as a reconciliation project. [3]

Coincidentally Beulah Adams, a woman descended from one of those hanged, and Des Blake, descendant of another murderer, also came forward.

Sue acknowledged the courage of Beulah and Des and all felt a strong connection between them. Des told his story in schools—any Australian with ancestors of the 'pioneering days' could have similar links to atrocities in the past.

By their coming together these people make Myall Creek an outstanding example of history used to reconcile and restore relationships. Sue, Beulah and Des still meet during the annual commemorations at the Myall Creek memorial site.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s I used to think, 'If they could do [the killings] then, they still might'. Deep down I sometimes still think that way... It's sometimes hard to lose the young girl inside.—Sue Blacklock [12]

Myall Creek reconciliation. In a gesture of reconciliation Lyall Munro (left), descendant of the Aboriginal people murdered at Myall Creek, shakes the hand of Des Blake, descendant of the white murderers.

Resources

Roger Milliss' Waterloo Creek: The Australia Day Massacre of 1838 describes the Australia Day 1838 Waterloo Creek and Myall Creek massacres of Aborigines.

It is easy to read and keeps you horrified and glued to it at the same time. Milliss was the co-winner of the National Book Council's 1992 Banjo Award. 'Waterloo Creek' includes a detailed reference with many endnotes and pages of bibliography.

This book inspired the group Kilminister to write a song about the Myall Creek Massacre (see below).

Demons at Dusk by Peter Stewart describes the Myall Creek Massacre in a half-novel, half-historic manner.

I can't put this book down. As an Australian I am appalled that not only did the massacre happen but also that this wasn't an isolated incident.—'browneyedgirl' in an ABC reader forum

Blood on the Wattle by Bruce Elder informs about massacres and maltreatment of Aboriginal people. It was voted one of the most influential works of Australian non-fiction by newspaper readers in the 'Spectrum Poll of the Century'.

Make sure to pick up the third edition which includes a new chapter on the massacres in the New England area of NSW and around the Three Rivers - the Hastings, the Macleay and the Manning (120 kms north-east of Newcastle).

Craig Lahiff's movie Black and White is about an Aboriginal man who is falsely accused to have murdered a nine-year-old white girl.

The movie documents how white people, police, judges, townsfolk, have no doubt of the Aboriginal man's guilt and what a white lawyer can lose when he sets out to defend the accused.

Read the full review about 'Black and White'.

Resources on massacres in Victoria: Gippsland Massacres - The Destruction Of The Kurnai tribe, 1800-1860, Peter Gardner and Scars in the landscape: A register of massacre sites in western Victoria, 1803-1859, Ian Clark.

The Wikipedia provides a list of massacres of Indigenous peoples in Australia.

Check out the website of the Sydney Friends of Myall Creek.

Songs about the Myall Creek Massacre

"Kilminister's Confession" by Kilminister

In 2007 the group 'Kilminister' recorded the song Kilminister's Confession which tells the thoughts of one of the white men, Charlie Kilminister, who murdered the Aboriginal people at Myall Creek.

Laurie McGinness from Kilminister says [9]: "The Kilminister character is an amalgamation of several of those involved so the song should not be considered as a completely accurate recount of the events... I changed the story for dramatic effect and to emphasise the cycle of violence, abuse breeds abuse, so the brutalisation of the convicts flowed into the brutalisation of the Indigenous people."

Lyrics: Kilminister's Confession

My name is Charlie Kilminister and tomorrow I must die When the sun comes up I will stand upon the scaffold high With six of my companions beneath the crowd's gaze At the end of a rope, short and strong, I will end my days  Jack Ketch will be the hangman and he'll hang us true and well When the sun goes down tomorrow, we'll be on pour way to hell God doesn't care for murderers or so the priest did say But if I go to hell I don't care, I already spent ten years there  I was sent to the colony of New South Wales for stealing a pound, a pound of nails They took me from my wife and child, it's the things a man loses that drive him wild  Out beyond the Big River, to Myall Creek I was delivered                                           In the heart of an Aboriginal nation well beyond the limits of location  My master was Henry Dangar and I was his convict fool I've known a lot of evil men but never one so cruel He had me march to Patrick Plains for twice times fifty on my back Then the bastard turned me round and marched me straight back  Most of the blacks were dead already from the work of Cobban and Nunn The few that were left hid in the bush and from the stockmen they did run Some women and kids and a few old men took shelter at our station They were about ail that was left of a great Aboriginal nation  There was a woman named Ippeta who with her husband I did share She felt the scars upon my back, I thought she cared though her skin was black Well Daddy was an old man and Billy but a boy Somehow into our misery they brought a little joy  John Russell was a stockman who hated all the blacks With George Cobban he had ridden on many great bushwhacks He heard about the group we had at Myall Creek like Satan he did tempt me, like Judas I was weak  We took them out and murdered them, for no reason that I know And when it came to Ippeta, I killed her with one blow The power of pure evil was strong upon my mind But still I cannot understand how I was so blind  The night is nearly over and the sun will surely rise Soon it will be time to die with those I do despise But one question still haunts me won't you tell me if you can Why Major Nunn, who did worse than me, will never hang and still is free  My name is Charlie Kilminister and tomorrow I must die When the sun comes up I will stand upon the scaffold high With six of my companions beneath the crowd's gaze At the end of a rope, short and strong, I will end my days 

Lyrics published with kind permission by Laurie McGinness from Kilminister. The CD features another song about a massacre, called Waterloo Creek.

Download a sampler of the song 'Kilminister' (mp3, 1.2MB; published with permission).

"John Fleming" by Timeline

Timeline recorded a song based on the Myall Creek Massacre called John Fleming (the leader of the stockmen) which can be heard in full on Timeline's website.

A play about the Myall Creek Massacre

Maurice Strandgard wrote a play titled Massacre which was published in 1991. It was performed at the Castlemaine Fringe Festival in Castlemaine, Victoria.

An excerpt is available at the Australian Script Centre.

Out of respect for Aboriginal culture I use Indigenous sources as much as possible.
[-] Source unless otherwise cited: Myall Creek Massacre & Memorial, brochure, Myall Creek Memorial Committee, 2008 [1] 'Skeletons are out', The Age, 2/7/2005 ('Frontier Justice' by Tony Roberts) [2] 'Myall Creek' section, Aboriginal Australia, Lonely Planet, 1st ed., p.143 [3] 'Survival - A History of Aboriginal Life in New South Wales', Nigel Parbury, pp.55 [4] 'Massacres to Mining: The Colonisation of Aboriginal Australia', Jan Roberts, 1981, p.19 [5] 'Myall Creek Massacre site heritage listed', ABC News, 7/6/2008 (http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/06/07/2267910.htm?section=australia) [6] 'Vandals deface two Australian memorials', Sydney Morning Herald, 31/1/2005 (http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/Vandals-deface-two-Australian-memorialss/2005/01/31/1107020322985.html) [7] 'The Myall Creek Massacre', booklet published by the Myall Creek Massacre Committee, Bingara, 1981 [8] 'Myall Creek murders still cast long shadow', Daily Telegraph, 10/6/2008, p.29 [9] Personal communication with Laurie McGinness [10] 'From Massacres to Mining, The Colonization of Aboriginal Australia', J.G. Roberts, 1978 [11] 'Teaching Aboriginal Studies', Rhonda Craven (ed.), 1999, p.107 [12] 'Myall milestone to reconciliation', Sydney Morning Herald, 7/6/2008 [13] 'Australia's worst racial years', SMH, 8/6/1978 [14] 'Massacre at Myall Creek', SMH, 5/11/1977 [15] 'Australia Day massacre swept under the mat', SMH, 25/1/1988 [16] 'The Encyclopedia of Australia's Battles', Chris Coulthard-Clark, 2001, p.12 (http://books.google.com.au/books?id=DLz6LJBgYHcC&pg=PA12&lpg=PA12&dq=waterloo+creek+moree&source=web&ots=s848SwS_4m&sig=O-btdKH877bBMkoRHVfrx0xCcNM&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=3&ct=result) [17] 'What about other massacre sites?', Koori Mail 429 p.25

How the Murdoch Press Keeps Australia’s Dirty Secret

By John Pilger

May 12, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- The illegal eavesdropping on famous people by the News of the World is said to be Rupert Murdoch’s Watergate. But is it the crime by which Murdoch ought to be known? In his native land, Australia, Murdoch controls 70 per cent of the capital city press. Australia is the world’s first murdochracy, in which smear by media is power.

The most enduring and insidious Murdoch campaign has been against the Aboriginal people, who were dispossessed by the arrival of the British in the late 18th century and have never been allowed to recover. “Nigger hunts” continued into the 1960s and beyond. The officially-inspired theft of children from Aboriginal families, justified by the racist theories of the eugenics movement, produced those known as the Stolen Generation and in 1997 was identified as genocide. Today, the first Australians have the shortest life expectancy of any of the world’s 90 indigenous peoples. Australia imprisons Aborigines at five times the rate South Africa during the apartheid years. In the state of Western Australia, the figure is eight times the apartheid rate.

Political power in Australia often rests in the control of resource-rich land. Most of the uranium, iron ore, gold, oil and natural gas is in Western Australia and Northern Territory – on Aboriginal land. Indeed, Aboriginal “progress” is all but defined by the mining industry and its political guardians in both Labor and coalition (conservative) governments. Their faithful, strident voice is the Murdoch press. The exceptional, reformist Labor government of Gough Whitlam in the 1970s set up a royal commission that made clear that social justice for Australia’s first people would only be achieved with universal land rights and a share the national wealth with dignity. In 1975, Whitlam was sacked by the governor-general in a “constitutional coup”. The Murdoch press had turned on Whitlam with such venom that rebellious journalists on The Australian burned their newspaper in the street.

In 1984, the Labor Party “solemnly pledged” to finish what Whitlam had begun and legislate Aboriginal land rights. This was opposed by the then Labor prime minister, Bob Hawke, a “mate” of Rupert Murdoch. Hawke blamed the public for being “less compassionate”; but a secret 64-page report to the party revealed that most Australians supported land rights. This was leaked to The Australian, whose front page declared, “Few support Aboriginal land rights”, the opposite of the truth, thus feeding an atmosphere of self-fulfilling distrust, “backlash” and rejection of rights that would distinguish Australia from South Africa. In 1988, an editorial in Murdoch’s London tabloid, the Sun, described “the Abos” as “treacherous and brutal”. This was condemned by the UK Press Council as “unacceptably racist”.

The Australian publishes long articles that present Aboriginal people not unsympathetically but as perennial victims of each other, “an entire culture committing suicide”, or as noble primitives requiring firm direction: the eugenicist’s view. It promotes Aboriginal “leaders” who, by blaming their own people for their poverty, tell the white elite what it wants to hear. The writer Michael Brull parodied this: “Oh White man, please save us. Take away our rights because we are so backward.”

This is also the government’s view. In railing against what it called the “black armband view” of Australia’s past, the conservative government of John Howard encouraged and absorbed the views of white supremacists -- that there was no genocide, no Stolen Generation, no racism; indeed, whites are the victims of “liberal racism”. A collection of far-right journalists, minor academics and hangers-on became the antipodean equivalent of David Irving Holocaust deniers. Their platform has been the Murdoch press.

Andrew Bolt, columnist on Murdoch’s Melbourne Herald-Sun tabloid, is currently the defendant in a racial vilification case brought by nine prominent Aborigines, including Larissa Behrendt, a professor of law and indigenous studies in Sydney. Behrendt has been an authoritative and outspoken opponent of Howard’s 2007 “emergency intervention” in the Northern Territory, which the Labor government of Julia Gillard has reinforced. The rationale to “intervene” was that child abuse among Aborigines was in “unthinkable numbers”. This was a fraud. Out of 7,433 Aboriginal children examined by doctors, four possible cases were identified – about the rate of child abuse in white Australia. What this covered was an old-fashioned colonial grab of mineral-rich land in the Northern Territory where Aboriginal land rights were granted in 1976.

The Murdoch press has been the most lurid and vociferous in its promotion of the “intervention”, which a United Nations special rapporteur has condemned for its racial discrimination. Once again, Australian politicians are dispossessing the first inhabitants, demanding leasehold of land in return for health and education rights that whites take for granted and driving them into “economically viable hubs” where they will be effectively detained -- a form of apartheid.

The outrage and despair of most Aboriginal people is not heard. For using her institutional voice and exposing the government’s black supporters, Larissa Behrendt has been subjected to a vicious campaign of innuendo in the Murdoch press, including the implication that she is not a “real” Aborigine. Using the language of its soulmate the London Sun, the Australian derides the “abstract debate” of “land rights, apologies, treaties” as a “moralizing mumbo-j

Comments:

wreckedearth

I recently finished a book on Australia and I can tell you that today aborigines are still viewed with contempt, racism is alive and well in Australia.

In 1838 white people had settled Australia for just 51 years. Pastoralist's were pushing into Aboriginal land, dispossessing Indigenous people from the land that nurtured them physically and spiritually.

"My mother would sit and cry and tell me this; they buried our babies in the ground with only their heads above the ground. All in a row they were. Then they had tests to see who could kick the babies' head off the furthest. One man clubbed a baby's head off from horseback.
They then spent the rest of the day raping the women, most of whom were then tortured to death by sticking sharp things like spears up their vaginas till they died.
They tied the men's hands behind their backs, then cut off their penis and testicles and watched them run around screaming until they died".
This is how this land was taken from its original owners. A heritage that every Australian can be really proud of. But if you are white and of English extraction you are okay. Australia should hang its head in shame.

The ugly side of Britain in the Mau Mau case

By AABDULLAHI
The Nation
April 9 2011

For me, the gripping court case for the week is not the appearance of six Kenyans before the International Criminal Court. The case that drew my attention is the start of the hearing of the Mau Mau case before Justice McCombe in the High Court in London.

In this case, four Kenyans have brought a representative suit in which they seek damages, compensation and a “statement of regret” from the British Government for the atrocities the British committed against Kenyans between 1952 and 1961.

The case quite unpleasantly for the David Cameron Administration brings to the fore what is now referred to as “imperialism in human rights discourse”.

In a month when the British Government has told the world that it is protecting Libyans against their government, and is at the forefront of The Hague trials for six Kenyans, that same government is refusing to compensate for the gross human rights abuses it wantonly committed against innocent and defenceless Kenyans.

The facts of the Mau Mau case are simple. The case is premised on a pattern of systematic torture, starvation, mass killing and, in some instance, burning alive of Kenyans.

The use of rape and sodomy as a form of torture and punishment was also prevalent and widespread among British soldiers.

The most common form of sexual abuse according to the pleading filed in court were “the insertion of sand into the men’s anus’’ and the insertion of glass bottles filled with hot liquid into women’s birth canals.

In one horrifying incident, 11 men were clubbed to death in the presence of the British Governor to Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring.

To the credit of the British Government, it doesn’t deny the facts alleged by the Mau Mau claimants.

In fact, pursuant to an order by the court, the government released 300 boxes and 17,000 pages of documents that vividly describe the atrocities.

These documents were secretly shipped from Kenya a few months before independence and were thought to have been lost or destroyed.

In one of the documents, a district commissioner called C.M. “Monkey” Johnson wrote to the Attorney-General asking for amnesty to be extended because “every one of us, from the Governor downwards, may be in danger of removal from the public service”.

One will be asking that since the facts surrounding human rights abuses by the British Government are not in dispute, why is the case being contested? The answer lies in the senseless defence adopted by the British Government. It is not that the same is just laughable.

It is more a testimony to the fact that Britain has no regard for the human blood it so needlessly spilt. It is a validation of “human rights imperialism” that the West plays as its trump card.

In supporting The Hague trials of the six Kenyans and justifying the invasion of Libya, Britain is simply adhering to its deep imperialistic instinct.

It has nothing to do with human rights in the sense the rest of the world knows. In both instances, it is in line with its strategic interests in Kenya and Libya.

Robert Jay QC, the lawyer for the British Government, has applied to strike out the case on two grounds.

First, that legal liability of the British Government was transferred to Kenya in 1963 upon independence. Second, he contends that facts underpinning the case are old and the cause of action has simply “ceased to exist”. That contention is both ugly and untenable.

What is disappointing is the press coverage of this historic trial in Kenya. Both the print and electronic media have given it a wide berth.

Even the civil society, probably because their benefactor is on the dock, have kept quiet.

UK bid to cover up Mau Mau torture exposed

A mau mau veteran.

April 5 2011 at 22:00

The Nation (Kenya)

The British Government’s efforts to cover up one of the darkest episodes in colonial history have been revealed by the discovery of a vast cache of documents relating to the bloody Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya.

The papers, documenting efforts to put down insurgency, were spirited out of Kenya on the eve of independence and have been held in secret British government archives for half a century.

The files were unearthed only this year after four elderly Kenyans sued the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, claiming they were tortured during the rebellion against British rule in Kenya between 1952 and 1960.

The claimants allege that they suffered “unspeakable acts of brutality, including castrations and severe sexual assaults”, under a system of torture carried out against the Mau Mau fighters by the British colonial authorities.

The case, which opens in the High Court in Britain on Thursday, has led to the discovery of 300 boxes of documents. The files were removed from Kenya in 1963, and secretly brought to Britain days before Kenya’s declaration of independence.

British officials deliberately removed evidence that “might embarrass Her Majesty’s Government”.

The missing material was thought to have been destroyed or lost, but after the High Court judge ordered the government to produce all relevant evidence, the documents were found in the Foreign Office archives: about 1,500 files.

The “vast majority” of the files relate to the Mau Mau, including the detention and punishment of suspected fighters, according to material released to the National Archives.

The documents appear to have been removed from Kenya as part of a policy of extracting sensitive or incriminating files from former colonies. Historians believe that similar files relating to Cyprus, Nigeria, Malaya, Palestine and other former dependent territories may also be held in secret.

“These documents were hidden away to protect the guilty,” David Anderson, Professor of African History at the University of Oxford, said on Tuesday.

“And it’s not just Kenya. What other colonial skeletons are rattling in the FCO basement? Are there secret files from Cyprus and Malaya, or from Nigeria and Rhodesia? It’s time to know the truth, however uncomfortable that may be.”

For many years, former Mau Mau detainees and their families who sought the official and legal records were told that these had been lost or destroyed, while historians have never been granted access to them.

The Kenyan claimants want a statement of regret from the government and a welfare fund for the victims. There are at least 1,400 other former Mau Mau detainees alive, and if former colonial subjects from other countries follow suit, the government could face claims for millions of pounds.

Some of those allegedly implicated are living in Britain, raising the further possibility of criminal prosecutions.

At least 12,000 fighters were killed, but atrocities were committed on both sides, and an estimated 70,000 Kenyans were held in prison camps as the British tried to quell the uprising.

The four claimants, who arrived in Britain on Tuesday, are seeking “damages for personal injuries caused by repeated assaults perpetrated by employees and agents of the British Colonial Administration in Kenya when they were detained”.

Letters: Death of a terrorist and unanswered questions

• The Guardian,
• Thursday 5 May 2011

Your correspondents have rightly been critical of the questionable legality of American action against Bin Laden and Nato attempts to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi (Osama bin Laden and wild-west justice, 3 May). Some 65 years ago US prosecutors and politicians led the way in rejecting the idea of simply identifying and then executing Nazi leaders when they fell into allied hands. Justice Robert Jackson insisted that if the western allies wanted to hold the moral high ground they had to be seen to behave differently from the defeated axis states. The Nuremberg trials gave an opportunity through due legal process for the victor states to demonstrate that the rule of law had to be applied even to the most lawless acts.

How the wheel of history has turned? Instead we have extra-legal murder squads, concentration camps, torture of suspects, wilful disregard for legal sovereignty. No one will shed tears for Bin Laden or for Gaddafi, but if the rule of law was good enough for the Nazi leadership, responsible for the greatest mass murders in history, it must be good enough for our current conflicts. It is time to put an end to the idea that lynch law is a legitimate form of international justice and to try to base Obama's limp claim that "justice" has been done on a restoration of international behaviour that respects those rules and sets aside the unconvincing assertion that the western killing is the archway to democracy. Robert Jackson would be turning in his grave.

Professor Richard Overy

London

• Although the killing of Mr Bin Laden appears to have been received positively in the west (Cheers, tears and beers..., 3 May), I for one struggle to understand on what basis the US can attack and kill a person in another sovereign state.

Bin Laden has not been convicted in any court, other than the court of public opinion. The US is not at war with Pakistan. As far as I am aware a state cannot declare war on an individual. What possible legal basis, other than "might is right", does the US have to kill this man, without even the cover of acquiescence by that state in such a killing? Can we expect Black Hawks to descend on the home counties in search of Julian Assange, I wonder? The US needs to provide a legal basis for this action or be held to account.

David Enright

Solicitor, St Albans, Hertfordshire




•  So after 10 years US special forces finally killed Osama bin Laden. The evil genius is dead! He was a genius for taking questions to the empire's military, political and economic heart, but an evil one for the murderous methods he asked them. But as you cheer, please tell us one thing. We are malnourished Indian children, Palestinians corralled in Gaza, Bangladeshis sandwiched between Himalayan floods and inexorably rising sea, HIV-positive Kenyans with no access to retrovirals … we are all those clinging to the underbelly of this wickedly wonderful world system. How do we get answers to the questions of economic, social and environmental justice that Bin Laden so inappropriately asked?

Dr Jeph Mathias

Landour community hospital, India

• Now retribution has been exacted and the US has taken its "pound of flesh", it is time to sit down and talk (Brain food, 3 May). Even the British managed it with the IRA. And if the world has learned one thing over the last 15 years, it is that al-Qaida hardliners are so hacked off they are prepared to strap bombs to themselves and kill anyone.

So why doesn't the west do something about the legitimate issues that induce Islamic fundamentalism? Like remove western airbases from Saudi Arabia? Like initiate a Middle Eastern peace talk mechanism involving Hamas, without kowtowing to the US Israeli lobby? It would be much cheaper – in both human and financial terms – than continuing to fight a losing global battle. If we engage and negotiate – fairly and unilaterally – there is no "war on terror".

Nick Hopewell-Smith

Stradbroke, Suffolk

• I am not surprised by Mona Eltahawy's description of the scenes at Ground Zero following the death of Osama bin Laden (Comment, May 3). We have been governed by frat boys for the main part of the 21st century – Bush and Blair now followed by Cameron, Osborne and Hague.

David Wayte

York

•  It is clear that Obama employs a strategy of taking no prisoners in conflicts with extremists. Despite the ruthlessness of his intelligence, I think this politically superior to incarcerating "enemy combatants" in perpetual legal black holes. It may be justified to kill a man who murders your people and vows to continue, but to hold him in legal limbo is a toxic advert of our failure to fully answer his crimes.

The conflict with stateless enemies with an irrational agenda is a modern phenomenon. None of our models of sovereign law or international conventions on the conduct of international war were designed to address these conditions. I believe that a new moral, intellectual and legal framework is required – a constitutional statement on how we deal with stateless enemies. Guantánamo is the great consequence of our inability to answer this question. I was surprised by Obama's unwise pledge to close it without a clear answer to the underlying problem in mind. He is well-suited, in terms of qualifications and character of mind, to recognise and tackle the intellectual and legal challenge of breaking new constitutional ground.

For Liberals, it is vital that we perceive the conditions clearly. I look at Christopher Hitchens to illustrate the quandary. He spent the majority of his career warning against the internal threat of state and corporate power. Since 9/11, he has become in his own words "a single issue voter" in the struggle against "Islamofascism", horrified by the left's craven and masochistic capitulation to the threat. He has a point, but there is a danger that a genuine enemy may be leveraged by the state as Orwell's imaginary enemy, eroding our freedoms and distracting our attention from their agenda. The simplistic arguments of both left and right in this matter are lost in the vacuum of a coherent answer. Until we make an effort to form one, we are in the worst of worlds – vulnerable to the enemies within and without.

James Gibbs

London

Mau Mau secret papers to be made public

BBC
May 6, 2011


The files only emerged because of a compensation claim by four Kenyans who say they were abused

A collection of sensitive documents from Britain's colonial past are to be made public through the National Archives for the first time.

The files were sent to the UK from various former territories, mostly at the time they achieved independence.

The documents emerged when four Mau Mau veterans sued the UK, saying they were tortured by Kenyan colonial government in the 1950s.

The British government says it cannot be held responsible.

It wants the claim thrown out by the High Court.

Foreign Secretary William Hague said the Foreign Office only became aware of the significance of the files in January because of research linked to the court case.

'Enormous significance'

He said: "I believe that it is the right thing to do for the information in these files now to be properly examined and recorded and made available to the public.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

[This] will clarify the last days of Empire in ways that will be shocking for some people in Britain”

End Quote Prof David Anderson Oxford University

"It is my intention to release every part of every paper of interest, subject only to legal exemptions."

Mr Hague said the job of making the papers public would be done "rapidly", but that it might take some time to complete because of the size of the archive.

David Anderson, professor of African politics at Oxford University, told the BBC the files were of "enormous significance".

He said: "These are a set of selected documents withheld for their sensitivity. We will learn things the British government of the time didn't want us to know."

"They are likely to change our view of some key places", he said. "It will clarify the last days of Empire in ways that will be shocking for some people in Britain."

Rebellion

The Foreign Office says officials have briefed the governments of those former British territories which might be affected.

The four Kenyans suing the UK say they were assaulted between 1952 and 1961 by British colonial officers in detention camps during the Mau Mau rebellion.

Thousands of people involved in the rebellion, or suspected of supporting it, were sent to the camps for "screening", or interrogation.

Britain says it cannot be held responsible for the actions of a colonial government.

The Kenya Human Rights Commission has said 90,000 Kenyans were executed, tortured or maimed during the crackdown, and 160,000 were detained in appalling conditions.

Kenya a White Man's Country

"When the Missionaries arrived, the Africans had the Land and the Missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible." Jomo Kenyatta

I was unable to locate the rest of this documentary. If anyone can help, please contact me.

Assainating enemies

The Standard

06/05/2011

By Amos Kareithi

The powers that be have perfected methods of wishing away their nemesis.

From Europe to Africa to Asia, dried bones of yesteryear dictators and liberators litter unmarked graves; their ashes are strewn all over, unremembered.

When America killed global terror kingpin Osama bin Laden and secretly disposed his body at sea in an undisclosed location, tongues started wagging, but history is replete with similar incidences.

Adolf Hitler achieved a rare feat by uniting Germany and triggering off a major military face off which consumed millions, and shaped the face of the world.

He polarised the world, touched off a major conflict, which culminated in the use of biological warfare that claimed millions of civilians.

But when the allied forces closed in on him, the leader, who had a cult like following, turned his gun on his head and left his pursuers to desecrate his remains.

Lurid details are given of how the Fuehrer was first burnt and his ashes flushed down the sewerage system in Ukraine.

Berlin bunker

Some accounts indicate that after Hitler shot himself in his Berlin bunker, his body was burnt by his staff, along with the remains of his lover Eva Braun.

Soviet troops seized the remains when they captured the bunker. But what happened later has been shrouded in mystery and speculation.

Secret communications between Soviet counter-intelligence units in Germany and the Government in Moscow tell of repeated burials and exhumations of the remains, and of their final destruction by fire in 1970.

Now all that remains is a four inch fragment of his skull, bearing a bullet hole exit, displayed in Moscow for public viewing, while the jaw allegedly used by Soviet investigators to identify the Nazi leader is said to be hidden in secret archives.

Despite the scattering of his remains, Hilter and the organisation he founded, the Nazi, have continued to influence and inspire future generations with some secret organisations copying its mode of dress in ideology of a super human race.

Nearer home in Somalia, Sayyid Muhammad Abdullah Hassan terrorised the British for 20 years until they could stomach his antics no more.

Hassan, the man the British christened Mad Mullah, had set up a separate state in Dervershi, from where he continued humiliating the British.

When he died on December 20, 1920 aged 64, the British authorities were keen to make his final resting place a mystery, and for fear his adherents would transform it into a shrine.

Somali region

His grave is believed to be somewhere close to Imay town of the Somali region of Ethiopia, but the exact spot of the tomb is not known.

There have been attempts to trace and exhume his remains and rebury them at his old castle at Imme, but most people who may have known the exact place are either dead or senile.

In Kenya, the British colonialists used the same script when Waiyaki wa Hinga was killed in 1902 as he was being transported to Mombasa for trial. Despite claims that he was buried alive in Kibwezi, the grave has not been traced despite spirited search by his descendants and the Government.

Koitalel arap Samoei, who also fiercely fought off the European invasion, was lured into a meeting in Nandi Hills, where he and some of his clansmen were shot to death.

The seer’s head was severed from his body and flown to Britain, and his family had to bury a headless body, where a mausoleum has since been erected.

But the biggest mystery of modern times was perpetuated by the British in 1956, when Dedan Kimathi, perceived by the colonial government as the head of the Mau Mau freedom fighters, died.

Although prison authorities in Kamiti executed Kimathi, his grave has remained one of the most guarded secrets.

Efforts by the Government to trace, exhume and accord Kimathi’s remains a decent burial have been in vain.

Several trips to Kamiti and Kin’gong’o in Nyeri by human rights activists have turned into a wild goose chase, as Britain remains tight lipped.

In Cambodia, Pol Pot, who in life was perceived by some as a brutal dictator whose regime killed an estimated one million people, assumed a curious stature after his death.

Pot’s death in 1998 heralded the end of the brutal career of a man responsible for overseeing one of the worst genocides of the 20th century.

His victims died from between 1975 and 1979 from execution, starvation, and disease — as the Khmer Rouge reigned supreme.

All suspected intellectuals were killed and others would be condemned to a painful death for wearing glasses or knowing a foreign language.

The Khmer Rouge government collapsed in 1979 after Vietnam invaded Cambodia after a series of violent border confrontations.

Tourist attraction

Pol Pot and his forces once again fled to the northern jungle as evidence of their atrocities was broadcast around the world.

Ironically, after his death, millions of Cambodians and also tourists have continued to troop to his grave in search of good luck.

But the act of concealing the body of an annihilated rival is not the preserve of law enforcement agents; the mafia have excelled in making their adversaries disappear without trace.

One of the most memorable mysteries is the disappearance of controversial trade unionist Jimmy Hoffa, who ran afoul with the mafia.

Hoffa earned the wrath of lawyers after he was convicted of fraud in 1964, together with six other leaders.

He was, however, granted presidential pardon after his sentence was commuted to a sentence served in 1971, but instructed to stay away from labour matters for ten years.

But just when he was trying to have the orders reversed, he was grabbed from the parking lot of Machus Red Fox restaurant in Detroit.

That was the last time Hoffa was heard of, and despite years of FBI carrying out extensive searches following tips from Mafia sources, no one knows where he was interred.

There have been numerous rumours about Hoffa’s ultimate whereabouts, including a tip off attributed to mafia hit man Richard "the Iceman" Kuklinski, who died in prison after he ‘confessed’ that Hoffa’s body was compacted in a car that later became scrap metal in New Jersey.