Njonjo Kihuria
7 April 2011
the Star
When the British colonialists left, they made bonfires of most of the incriminating material in detention camps and prisons, but some like the 'pits of death' in Narok still exist and are vivid reminders of the heinous brutality perpetrated against the Kenyan people. In these deep pits, detainees used to be brutally murdered and buried en masse.
Recently, thousands of exasperated Mau Mau freedom fighters demonstrated outside the British High Commission in Nairobi seeking word on compensation for victims of the atrocities perpetrated by the former colonial masters during the state of emergency in the 1950s.
In a period of about ten years, the British officers, soldiers and their African collaborators savagely abused those in detention camps, controlled villages and prisons through a culture of beatings, starvation, killings and other forms of grotesque torture.
Unfortunately when the British left, they made bonfires of most of the incriminating material in detention camps and prisons, but some like the 'pits of death' in Narok still exist and are vivid reminders of the heinous brutality perpetrated by the colonial government against the Kenyan people.
While seeking compensation for those unlawfully killed, tortured, imprisoned and subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment by the British, the Narok Mau Mau War Veterans Association is also in the process of preserving the sites on which these atrocities were committed.
“Apart from seeking compensation from the British, we are also identifying the sites where people were unlawfully detained, tortured and killed and/or buried in mass graves, and seeking to have them gazetted as national monuments and/or shrines”, association secretary Charles Ngare told the Star in a recent interview.
As an alternative, the association’s officials say, these sites should be used for the benefit of the veterans and their offspring.
“We want Jela Ndogo within Narok town, with all the buildings and other structures within it, preserved in memory of those who were tortured, killed and buried there during the struggle,” added Ngare.
The association noted that some of the deep pits where detainees used to be dropped to their death on concrete bases and others where they were brutally murdered and buried en masse exist to date and they would also like these preserved as national monuments.
Unfortunately, they claim, a church has been built over two such sites and the association would like this brought down and the grounds preserved.
“While this particular site could easily become a tourist attraction if properly marketed, we could also use it as an office as we do not have one and we are at times forced to hold meetings in the open or borrow venues in noisy bars,” lamented association treasurer Joseph ole Larus.
However, the association is yet to convince the government to preserve the site and so far nobody has come along to assist in setting up offices for them or in marketing the site for tourism purposes.
Similar torture, killings and cruel deaths as those witnessed at Jela Ndogo during the emergency also took place at a camp known as Entara, some 11 kilometres away from Narok town along the Mara River.
And although it is evident that the British tried to destroy the evidence of these torture chambers when they left, traces of the same are still visible though most of the evidence is being erased by intensive farming that is going on along the river.
In a recent visit, the Star saw similar death pits as those at the Jela Ndogo though some are now being covered by the farmers. There are also the remnants of the camp's strong perimeter fence, other ruins including those of houses and slabs for pit latrines and even those of vehicle inspection units.
In fact, one of the farmers we found on the campsite during the visit claimed that recently a group of white men on one or the other mission excavated a whole Land Rover laden with all sorts of military gear from the ground at one of the corners of the camp.
We were unable to establish the authenticity of this claim, but to date evidence of the camp and its torture machine exist and this could form the basis for its preservation.
Some of the survivors of the two detention camps have very clear and vivid memories of what happened there though in some instances clarity has faded with years; in their narration one could sense some mix up in dates and years.
Born in 1936, Joseph Sironka ole Ketikai played the role of 'piki piki' (gun runner for the Mau Mau) in the early 1950s.
He ferried stolen British and homemade guns and clothing - especially armed forces uniforms - from Narok to Elementaita and Nyandarua. These uniforms were later used by the Mau Mau to raid police stations, prisons and camps.
He remembers that before 1952, there was a small prison at the site where petty offenders were jailed and hence the name Jela Ndogo. It also held the police line.
“The detention camp at the prison started being built in 1952 and it was brought to the prison site because on the only side where prisoners could attempt escape, there was a deep, rugged depression. The Johnnies would watch from higher ground for possible breakout attempts and I remember how four men were shot dead by them as they tried to escape through that route,” he narrated to the Star.
He remembers those killed on that day as one Njuguna, Kangoro and a woman called Gaciku who was helping herself when the Johnnies opened fire.
Ole Ketikai recalled how an “especially brutal” force of African administration policemen were put on standby to murder whoever the Johnnies wanted done away with, while the homeguards were placed strategically to ward off attacks from the Mau Mau.
According to him, directly under the pulpit of the church that stands on the former Jela Ndogo grounds is the ten-foot diameter deep hole where those murdered by the British and their collaborators were buried.
The other space taken by the church formed the screening area where brutal interrogation took place. “Some of the methods the Johnnies used to torture their victims included exposing men's private parts to safari ants and inserting the painfully burning 'thabai' leaves into women”.
Those who confessed to having taken the oath were taken to far-flung detention centres while those who did not were held until two huge pits that were being dug at the site were completed. “In one of the pits, the men would be buried alive head down in the mass grave, while the women were buried in the other”.
Ole Ketikai says where some semi-permanent buildings stand today near the church was the hole that was used for burying children and “when the pits were almost full and to stop them from attracting too much attention from outside, the plot on the other side of the church was turned into a cemetery.
“But the people were buried barely two feet deep and their bodies would be dug out and eaten by hyenas to the amusement of the Johnnies who hilariously took pictures of the macabre goings-on”.
He remembers a camp teeming with the walking-dead; people who were dying in their numbers of diseases caused by the congestion, starvation and neglect. They mostly died of typhoid, pneumonia and malaria, with children and pregnant women suffering most and dying in larger numbers.
“It appeared as if the British were deliberately perpetuating the terribly unhygienic conditions so that people could suffer. They actually encouraged the detainees to confess to having taken the Mau Mau oath so that 'the deaths could stop'. They told us that if we confessed they would bring in doctors to treat us”.
When the congestion became unbearable even for the cruel British Johnnies, some detainees were relocated to Entara, a camp in the wild surrounded by wild animals and poisonous snakes.
“The idea was to take the prisoners to a place where they could not escape for if they tried to, they would be devoured by the wild animals. In fact in the initial stages, the perimetre fence in that camp was made up of the wild animals”.
Screening at Entara was done under the supervision of a short white soldier nicknamed 'Karukuma', who also supervised the digging of two pits for burying those killed by the authorities or by disease. Ole Ketikai also remembers a British nurse by the nickname 'Gacucu' as the one who treated prisoners at the camp.
Eighty four-year-old Loise Kinga was arrested in 1952 as she walked from Melili to the hospital in Narok to take food to her husband's brother. The homeguards suspected her of having taken the Mau Mau 'batoni' oath and they beat her senseless as they tried to extract a confession from her.
At some stage the Johnnies were brought in to do the unspeakable to her but she pinched the child she was carrying on her back and it cried uncontrollably. With her life dependent on it, she resisted the efforts of the homeguards who were struggling to wrench the baby from her back.
She was later taken to Entara which by this time was highly guarded with four barriers already put in place. She recalls Gacucu treating the wounds on her back and being saved by a Maasai man she only remembers as Mururunkei who was their interpreter who declared that he knew her and swore she had not taken the Mau Mau oath.
All she remembers from that camp are inhumane tortures, killings and undignified burials that she would rather not discuss.
Peter Muturi, now 74, remembers how he was arrested together with hundreds others and taken to Jela Ndogo when a man who had been appointed chief by the colonial government was killed by the Mau Mau in the early 1950s at Lonkito.
The next day he was transferred to Entara at a time when the camp was made up of three houses only; one for the Mzungu officer and the other two for the African homeguards. The detainees were forced to walk long distances under guard and constant beating to fetch building materials including thatching grass and poles. “At Entara, we were put on hard labour that included uprooting huge tree stumps to give way for upcoming buildings and building the houses and huts even as we were beaten mercilessly by the soldiers and homeguards. “We were given a small tin of unga as our daily food portion and as there were no vegetables, we were forced to escort the little dry ugali down our throats with a little salt.”
Muturi recalls a congested camp which initially was not fenced. Later the camp was fenced using barbed wire and today stumps of the poles that fenced the camp are still visible.
Following the Lari Massacre, Julia Wambui, now 80 years old, was arrested at Lonkito and taken to the main prison in Narok. For a month Wambui was held at the Narok main prison before being transferred to Entara at a “time when the camp was still under construction and the perimeter fence had not come up yet. We used to be herded towards the current Entutu Lodge to fetch grass and other building material”.
One of the images that still sticks to her mind was the dragging of one Sieni behind a Land Rover and the beating senseless of her pregnant colleague, Miriam ole Kisio, the wife of the late Mau Mau General Kurito ole Kisio.
One night she personally suffered the brutal wrath of the British soldiers when she tried to escape from the camp. “I cannot attempt to explain the beating I got, but to date I carry a scary scar on my back as testimony”.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Kenya's Mau Mau take UK to court
On Thursday the British High Court began hearing claims of torture and brutality perpetrated by British staff on Kenyan Mau Mau rebels in the 1950s.
By Richard Walker, Amsterdam
13 April, 2011
Lawyers said British officials committed grave acts of torture, including castration and severe sexual assault.The case was first brought to court by victims two years ago, when the British government argued that it had no jurisdiction to hear the case. The court disagreed. Now the UK Foreign Office contends there is no case to answer because it has no liability.
The UK government argues, “in passing sovereignty to the Kenyan government in December 1963, it passed on all responsibility for any outstanding legal cases,” according to Oxford University’s David Anderson, who’s been helping prepare the case for the Mau Mau claimants.
This means that the British view is that the Kenyan government is liable and it is up to the Kenyan courts to deal with such cases. The British government argues that in signing the Kenyan declaration of independence in 1963 it extricated itself from any actions that took place under its rule.
“Believe me that is the position they have taken. It seems to me just a completely unethical, immoral and frankly ridiculous stance”, says David Anderson.
“The new evidence that’s come to light includes material that was specifically set to one side by the British government in 1963 because it was believed to be particularly sensitive. So I can only imagine that this new evidence we are about to hear in court is likely to be more condemning than anything we’ve seen so far”.
Some evidence of atrocities has long been in the public domain. According to one respected history of the conflict the following is an account by one British officer describing his actions after capturing three Mau Mau:
“I stuck my revolver right in his grinning mouth and I said something, I don’t remember what, and I pulled the trigger. His brains went all over the side of the police station. The other two Mickeys [Mau Mau] were standing there looking blank. I said to them that if they didn’t tell me where to find the rest of the gang I’d kill them too. They didn’t say a word so I shot them both. One wasn’t dead so I shot him in the ear. When the sub-inspector drove up, I told him that the Mickeys tried to escape. He didn’t believe me but all he said was “bury them and see the wall is cleared up.”
David Anderson sees no room for doubting that evidence was deliberately hidden by the British, and then forgotten about: “I’m certain that when Britain left Kenya in 1963 there was a purposeful cover up of these materials… I’m sure they did this in every single colony Britain departed from, in fact I’m sure that every single colonial power did just the same.
I cannot imagine that the French or the Dutch or the Portuguese or the British would have left any colony without taking some material with them to protect their own interests.
So then the (British) Foreign Office lost track of (these materials)…and clearly something has gone amiss I think since 1963 – I think what we have here is an initial cover-up and then a later cock-up.”
The fear that the British government could be overwhelmed by prosecutions if it admitted liability for atrocities in Kenya is unfounded according to the lawyers representing the four Mau Mau claimants in London last week.
They say they are not asking the court for full damages. They say they are asking for an acknowledgment and a financial “gesture” and argue they have confronted the issue of setting an uncomfortable legal precedent by asking the court only for the setting straight of the wrongs of the past.
They point to the precedent set by Germany in 2004 when it apologized to the people of Namibia for the Herero genocide under its colonial rule. Berlin gave a gift in the form of a trust fund for the Namibian people. The money has been spent on infrastructure projects and welfare initiatives for the benefit of the wider population – not on specific damages for individuals.
David Anderson argues that “acknowledgement in this case is… more important than any sums of money you might calculate.”
Greek Cypriot EOKA fighters to sue Brits over torture
By Patrick Dewhurst
April 14, 2011
VETERAN EOKA members are planning lawsuits against British authorities after the UK High Court revealed secret foreign office files detailing the systematic torture of Kenyans in the 1950s.
The court released the files after four elderly Kenyans sued the British government for their brutal suppression of Mau-Mau rebels, and after a Times investigation the EOKA Veteran’s Association is following suit.
The association claims 14 Cypriots died and hundreds more could have been tortured during interrogations by the British during the 1955-1959 armed struggle against colonial rule. Two of those who died during interrogation were 17.
It is understood that the British government has up to 9,000 documents from 37 colonial administrations, including Cyprus, and the veterans association’s lawyer is now in communication with a London law office.
Former EOKA leader and association head Thassos Sophocleus, 78, told the Times: “We will pursue cases for all those who were tortured. It could be hundreds.”
Sophocleus said: “The truth is we have a similar case to the Kenyans. We are not doing this for the money. It is for the satisfaction of presenting to the international community what the British did to us...instead of giving us our freedom, they tortured and killed us.”
The Times said the existence of Foreign Office files detailing Britain’s brutal response to anti-colonial struggles emerged this month, and that British and Cypriot accounts from the same time document numerous cases of torture on the island.
For example, the Times said, a post-mortem examination on one of the 14 who died in custody, Andreas Panayiotou, 26, found that he had been beaten to death. British police, however, claimed that he had died trying to escape custody: a common cover-up, EOKA veterans say.
Sophocleus, who led a contingent of guerrillas in the Pentadactylos mountains at the age of 24, told the Times that he was tortured for 16 days after his arrest in 1956.
He alleges that his back was flayed with a rope embedded with iron shards and that he was kicked in the head, body and testicles.
Sophocleus was sentenced to life imprisonment for possessing firearms but was released when Cyprus won independence in 1960.
__________
Helen Ioannides:
April 14, 2011
VETERAN EOKA members are planning lawsuits against British authorities after the UK High Court revealed secret foreign office files detailing the systematic torture of Kenyans in the 1950s.
The court released the files after four elderly Kenyans sued the British government for their brutal suppression of Mau-Mau rebels, and after a Times investigation the EOKA Veteran’s Association is following suit.
The association claims 14 Cypriots died and hundreds more could have been tortured during interrogations by the British during the 1955-1959 armed struggle against colonial rule. Two of those who died during interrogation were 17.
It is understood that the British government has up to 9,000 documents from 37 colonial administrations, including Cyprus, and the veterans association’s lawyer is now in communication with a London law office.
Former EOKA leader and association head Thassos Sophocleus, 78, told the Times: “We will pursue cases for all those who were tortured. It could be hundreds.”
Sophocleus said: “The truth is we have a similar case to the Kenyans. We are not doing this for the money. It is for the satisfaction of presenting to the international community what the British did to us...instead of giving us our freedom, they tortured and killed us.”
The Times said the existence of Foreign Office files detailing Britain’s brutal response to anti-colonial struggles emerged this month, and that British and Cypriot accounts from the same time document numerous cases of torture on the island.
For example, the Times said, a post-mortem examination on one of the 14 who died in custody, Andreas Panayiotou, 26, found that he had been beaten to death. British police, however, claimed that he had died trying to escape custody: a common cover-up, EOKA veterans say.
Sophocleus, who led a contingent of guerrillas in the Pentadactylos mountains at the age of 24, told the Times that he was tortured for 16 days after his arrest in 1956.
He alleges that his back was flayed with a rope embedded with iron shards and that he was kicked in the head, body and testicles.
Sophocleus was sentenced to life imprisonment for possessing firearms but was released when Cyprus won independence in 1960.
__________
Helen Ioannides:
Torture of Greek Cypriots was generalised during the uprising, no matter if they were EOKA fighters or not.Only by suspicion and it was enough for anyone to be tortured.Those betrayed, their ordeal never ended.Inspite of all odds the EOKA fighters brought independence and won the respect not only of their people but also the freedom lovers of the world at large.
Britain owes an appology and an obligation of compensation to those still alive.
Melios A Ioannides.
Britain owes an appology and an obligation of compensation to those still alive.
Melios A Ioannides.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Crushed Testicles: Mau Mau and The Barbaric Face of The British Empire
The British were supposed to be refined in the handling of their “overseas possessions and subjects“. Nothing could be farther from the truth as a case filed in London by former Mau Mau fighters and contents of secret papers carted out of Kenya a week before independence(1963) show. The forces of the British state crushed testicles and breasts with pliers. It was part of a deliberate policy of breaking a civilian population who we regarded as “baboons,” “barbarians” and “terrorists.” They murdered, raped and ran Nazi-style detention camps
Ben McIntyre.
12 April 2011
Political Articles
One horrific day in September 1957, Ndiku Mutwiwa Mutua claims, he was castrated by the British Government.
Last week the elderly Kenyan appeared in the High Court in London, along with three others to accuse Britain of being liable for what was done to him 54 years ago, and to demand compensation.
The case of Mutua and others versus the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) relates to events that took place at the height of the Mau Mau emergency — the uprising against colonial rule in Kenya between 1952 and 1960.
The Mau Mau rebellion was one of the nastiest chapters in British colonial history. Appalling atrocities were perpetrated by both sides, but few stories of cruelty are worse than that of Mr Ndiku Mutwiwa Mutua.
In 1956 Mr Mutua was a 24-year-old herdsman working for Mr Louvaine Dunman, a white settler in Kenya’s Eastern Province. Mr Dunman, a police officer in the district force, was known as “Luvai” among the Kamba people who couldn’t pronounce the name Louvaine properly.
While working on Mr Dunman’s farm, Mr Mutua began supplying food to the Mau Mau rebels hiding out in the nearby forest. On or before September 17, 1957, he was arrested by Mr Dunman and five other African police officers.
According to a court document, he was repeatedly beaten by European and African officers alike and then taken, blindfolded, to a tent.
Inside, he was allegedly handcuffed and pinned to the ground, with his legs pulled apart and tied or strapped down.
“Having been rendered completely powerless and vulnerable,” according to the document, Mr Mutua claims that he was “castrated by one or more of the officers present.”
For two days he was allegedly left without medical attention and then liberated from the camp by Mau Mau rebels. He remained in the forest for three-and-a-half years before the rebellion ended and he returned home.
Mr Mutua claims that he suffered depression, anguish, mental stress, and “intense flashbacks to the episodes of assault, including castration (and) mourned the fact that he will never have children of his own and never be with a woman.”
Like his fellow claimants, Mr Mutua holds the British Government responsible for his suffering. Another of the plaintiffs also claims to have been castrated, while a third was allegedly beaten and left for dead during the infamous Hola Camp massacre of 1959 in which 11 detainees were clubbed to death.
The only woman claimant said that she was subjected to sexual torture in which she was violated using bottles filled with hot water.
The alleged mistreatment of another claimant, Mr Wambugu wa Nyingi, carries echoes of waterboarding. Mr Nyingi claims that he was “suspended by his feet from the hut roof. He was then subjected to a severe beating over a period of about 30 minutes, while cold water was poured on to his face and into his mouth so he could not breathe.”
The claimants’ case rests on the argument that these acts of brutality were not isolated or random, the spontaneous cruelty of a few sadists, but a systematic policy organised and condoned by the British authorities, “part of a system of torture, inhuman and degrading treatment applied by police, home guards, and other members of the security services with the knowledge of the colonial administration.
“Many detainees were subjected to gross abuse and torture,” say the claimants.
“Such abuse included whippings, beating, castration, and sexual abuse of men and women… in many cases the abuse and torture were so brutal and dangerous that the detainee died.”
Lawyers representing the British Government argue that the case should be dismissed because the alleged abuse was carried out by the colonial government, which passed all rights and responsibilities to the independent Kenyan Government in 1963.
When Kenya assumed national sovereignty, government lawyers will argue, this included an implicit acceptance of liability for any outstanding claims against the national administration.
The Kenya Government flatly denies any liability. A letter was sent to British Foreign Secretary William Hague on March 31 stating:
“The Republic of Kenya fully supports the claimants’ case and has publicly denied any notion that responsibility for any acts and atrocities committed by the British colonial administration during the Kenya ‘Emergency’ was inherited by the Republic of Kenya.”
Among those rounded up in the run-up to Mau Mau was Hussein Onyango Obama, Barak Obama’s paternal grandfather, who became involved in the Kenyan independence movement while working as a cook for a British Army officer after the war.
He was arrested and jailed for two years in a high security prison where, according to his family, he was subjected to horrific violence to extract information about the growing insurgency.
Further light will be shed by the newly discovered Foreign Office files relating to Mau Mau, which were deliberately removed from Kenya.
On December 3, 1963, nine days before Kenya formally declared independence, three wooden crates containing 1,500 highly sensitive government files were loaded on to a British United Airways flight bound for Gatwick.
A memo written by one Foreign Office official noted that the removal of the documents had been carried out in “meticulous fashion,” with files selected on the specific grounds that their contents “might embarrass Her Majesty’s Government, members of the police, military forces, public servants, or others.”
In a memo marked “Most Secret,” the Foreign Office noted that “the vast majority of the files concern the Emergency: eg, intelligence reports and summaries, African associations, activities of Africans, unrest in the districts etc . . . collective punishments, detainees and detention camps.”
In 1967, the Kenyan Foreign Ministry asked the British Government to return the missing files. The FCO refused.
A confidential FCO memo written on November 2, 1967, warned that if the documents were sent back to Kenya, it could “set a precedent and encourage other governments to follow suit” and demand “the documents of other former Dependent Territories which are now held here.”
A letter on the same subject from the Commonwealth Office clearly shows that the decision to remove the Kenyan documents was not an isolated incident:
“The fact that it has always been British policy to withdraw or destroy certain sensitive records prior to independence has never been advertised or generally admitted,” the letter states.
“The reply we give to Kenya could affect the treatment of records and files withdrawn from other former Colonial Territories.”
After 1967, the files removed from Kenya apparently vanished into the Foreign Office archives. There has long been speculation among historians about what happened to them, including the rumour that they had been loaded into a Lancaster bomber and dropped into the Indian Ocean.
When the four Kenyans filed suit last year, the High Court was informed that some of the most critical evidence relating to the case was still missing. The FO duly launched a search for the documents and in January the missing files were finally located.
The reparations claim is regarded in Kenya as nationally divisive since the Mau Mau was in large part an ethnic rebellion by the Kikuyu rather than a national uprising. Most of the alleged torture and abuse was carried out by Africans of other tribes, albeit under British supervision, adding a potentially toxic tribal element to the mixture.
The claimants are demanding a welfare fund and a statement of regret.
Mr David Miliband, the Labour Foreign Secretary, is believed to have favoured this approach, but a resolution was blocked by FCO officials.
The implications go far beyond the individual accusations levelled by four Kenyans. Hundreds more former Mau Mau detainees could file suit and countless other former colonial subjects may be able to claim mistreatment at the hands of the British Government.
Leigh Day, the lawyers representing the Kenyans, say they do not believe that the case will establish a precedent.
“The systematic torture which went on in pre-independence Kenya was exceptional in its scale and barbarity,” a spokesman for Leigh Day said. “This case is about victims who are alive and are seeking redress. People who suffered similar ill treatment in other colonies who are still alive are very few in number.”
In a speech at SOAS, the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, last month, David Anderson, professor of African history at the University of Oxford, who is advising the claimants, said that the files discovered in the FCO archives may be the tip of a huge legal iceberg.
“In other instances — Malaya, Cyprus, Nigeria, to name just three possible examples — there might also be missing documents ‘retrieved’ to London, with much to tell us about the actions of colonial administrations.
“The Mau Mau claim is not the only claim the British Government may have to worry about,” he added. “Claims may arise from, for example, Palestine, and there is a fear that a successful claim could set a precedent.”
The files were spirited out of Kenya in 1963 because they “might embarrass Her Majesty’s Government.” Some 48 years later, they have at last come to light, with their capacity to embarrass the government intact.
Kenyan nationals Wambugu wa Nyingi, (R) Ndiku Mutua, (2nd R) Paulo Nzili (2nd L) and Jane Muthoni Mara, (L) outside the High Court in central London, on April 7, 2011. They are hoping their cases, which include castration, torture, sexual abuse, forced labour and beatings, will secure a statement of regret over Britain's role in the Kenya Emergency, and a victims' welfare fund.
Kenyan nationals Wambugu wa Nyingi, (R) Ndiku Mutua, (2nd R) Paulo Nzili (2nd L) and Jane Muthoni Mara, (L) outside the High Court in central London, on April 7, 2011. They are hoping their cases, which include castration, torture, sexual abuse, forced labour and beatings, will secure a statement of regret over Britain’s role in the Kenya Emergency, and a victims’ welfare fund.
About The Author: Ben Macintyre (born 1963) is a British author, historian, and columnist writing for The Times newspaper. His columns range from current affairs to historical controversies. Macintyre is the author of a book on the gentleman criminal Adam Worth, “The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief.” He also wrote — “The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan,” and a book on the real-life double agent of Germany and England during the Second World War, Eddie Chapman, titled “Agent Zigzag: The true wartime story of eddie chapman, lover, betrayer, hero, spy.”
_________________________________
Ben McIntyre.
12 April 2011
Political Articles
One horrific day in September 1957, Ndiku Mutwiwa Mutua claims, he was castrated by the British Government.
Last week the elderly Kenyan appeared in the High Court in London, along with three others to accuse Britain of being liable for what was done to him 54 years ago, and to demand compensation.
The case of Mutua and others versus the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) relates to events that took place at the height of the Mau Mau emergency — the uprising against colonial rule in Kenya between 1952 and 1960.
The Mau Mau rebellion was one of the nastiest chapters in British colonial history. Appalling atrocities were perpetrated by both sides, but few stories of cruelty are worse than that of Mr Ndiku Mutwiwa Mutua.
In 1956 Mr Mutua was a 24-year-old herdsman working for Mr Louvaine Dunman, a white settler in Kenya’s Eastern Province. Mr Dunman, a police officer in the district force, was known as “Luvai” among the Kamba people who couldn’t pronounce the name Louvaine properly.
While working on Mr Dunman’s farm, Mr Mutua began supplying food to the Mau Mau rebels hiding out in the nearby forest. On or before September 17, 1957, he was arrested by Mr Dunman and five other African police officers.
According to a court document, he was repeatedly beaten by European and African officers alike and then taken, blindfolded, to a tent.
Inside, he was allegedly handcuffed and pinned to the ground, with his legs pulled apart and tied or strapped down.
“Having been rendered completely powerless and vulnerable,” according to the document, Mr Mutua claims that he was “castrated by one or more of the officers present.”
For two days he was allegedly left without medical attention and then liberated from the camp by Mau Mau rebels. He remained in the forest for three-and-a-half years before the rebellion ended and he returned home.
Mr Mutua claims that he suffered depression, anguish, mental stress, and “intense flashbacks to the episodes of assault, including castration (and) mourned the fact that he will never have children of his own and never be with a woman.”
Like his fellow claimants, Mr Mutua holds the British Government responsible for his suffering. Another of the plaintiffs also claims to have been castrated, while a third was allegedly beaten and left for dead during the infamous Hola Camp massacre of 1959 in which 11 detainees were clubbed to death.
The only woman claimant said that she was subjected to sexual torture in which she was violated using bottles filled with hot water.
The alleged mistreatment of another claimant, Mr Wambugu wa Nyingi, carries echoes of waterboarding. Mr Nyingi claims that he was “suspended by his feet from the hut roof. He was then subjected to a severe beating over a period of about 30 minutes, while cold water was poured on to his face and into his mouth so he could not breathe.”
The claimants’ case rests on the argument that these acts of brutality were not isolated or random, the spontaneous cruelty of a few sadists, but a systematic policy organised and condoned by the British authorities, “part of a system of torture, inhuman and degrading treatment applied by police, home guards, and other members of the security services with the knowledge of the colonial administration.
“Many detainees were subjected to gross abuse and torture,” say the claimants.
“Such abuse included whippings, beating, castration, and sexual abuse of men and women… in many cases the abuse and torture were so brutal and dangerous that the detainee died.”
Lawyers representing the British Government argue that the case should be dismissed because the alleged abuse was carried out by the colonial government, which passed all rights and responsibilities to the independent Kenyan Government in 1963.
When Kenya assumed national sovereignty, government lawyers will argue, this included an implicit acceptance of liability for any outstanding claims against the national administration.
The Kenya Government flatly denies any liability. A letter was sent to British Foreign Secretary William Hague on March 31 stating:
“The Republic of Kenya fully supports the claimants’ case and has publicly denied any notion that responsibility for any acts and atrocities committed by the British colonial administration during the Kenya ‘Emergency’ was inherited by the Republic of Kenya.”
Among those rounded up in the run-up to Mau Mau was Hussein Onyango Obama, Barak Obama’s paternal grandfather, who became involved in the Kenyan independence movement while working as a cook for a British Army officer after the war.
He was arrested and jailed for two years in a high security prison where, according to his family, he was subjected to horrific violence to extract information about the growing insurgency.
Further light will be shed by the newly discovered Foreign Office files relating to Mau Mau, which were deliberately removed from Kenya.
On December 3, 1963, nine days before Kenya formally declared independence, three wooden crates containing 1,500 highly sensitive government files were loaded on to a British United Airways flight bound for Gatwick.
A memo written by one Foreign Office official noted that the removal of the documents had been carried out in “meticulous fashion,” with files selected on the specific grounds that their contents “might embarrass Her Majesty’s Government, members of the police, military forces, public servants, or others.”
In a memo marked “Most Secret,” the Foreign Office noted that “the vast majority of the files concern the Emergency: eg, intelligence reports and summaries, African associations, activities of Africans, unrest in the districts etc . . . collective punishments, detainees and detention camps.”
In 1967, the Kenyan Foreign Ministry asked the British Government to return the missing files. The FCO refused.
A confidential FCO memo written on November 2, 1967, warned that if the documents were sent back to Kenya, it could “set a precedent and encourage other governments to follow suit” and demand “the documents of other former Dependent Territories which are now held here.”
A letter on the same subject from the Commonwealth Office clearly shows that the decision to remove the Kenyan documents was not an isolated incident:
“The fact that it has always been British policy to withdraw or destroy certain sensitive records prior to independence has never been advertised or generally admitted,” the letter states.
“The reply we give to Kenya could affect the treatment of records and files withdrawn from other former Colonial Territories.”
After 1967, the files removed from Kenya apparently vanished into the Foreign Office archives. There has long been speculation among historians about what happened to them, including the rumour that they had been loaded into a Lancaster bomber and dropped into the Indian Ocean.
When the four Kenyans filed suit last year, the High Court was informed that some of the most critical evidence relating to the case was still missing. The FO duly launched a search for the documents and in January the missing files were finally located.
The reparations claim is regarded in Kenya as nationally divisive since the Mau Mau was in large part an ethnic rebellion by the Kikuyu rather than a national uprising. Most of the alleged torture and abuse was carried out by Africans of other tribes, albeit under British supervision, adding a potentially toxic tribal element to the mixture.
The claimants are demanding a welfare fund and a statement of regret.
Mr David Miliband, the Labour Foreign Secretary, is believed to have favoured this approach, but a resolution was blocked by FCO officials.
The implications go far beyond the individual accusations levelled by four Kenyans. Hundreds more former Mau Mau detainees could file suit and countless other former colonial subjects may be able to claim mistreatment at the hands of the British Government.
Leigh Day, the lawyers representing the Kenyans, say they do not believe that the case will establish a precedent.
“The systematic torture which went on in pre-independence Kenya was exceptional in its scale and barbarity,” a spokesman for Leigh Day said. “This case is about victims who are alive and are seeking redress. People who suffered similar ill treatment in other colonies who are still alive are very few in number.”
In a speech at SOAS, the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, last month, David Anderson, professor of African history at the University of Oxford, who is advising the claimants, said that the files discovered in the FCO archives may be the tip of a huge legal iceberg.
“In other instances — Malaya, Cyprus, Nigeria, to name just three possible examples — there might also be missing documents ‘retrieved’ to London, with much to tell us about the actions of colonial administrations.
“The Mau Mau claim is not the only claim the British Government may have to worry about,” he added. “Claims may arise from, for example, Palestine, and there is a fear that a successful claim could set a precedent.”
The files were spirited out of Kenya in 1963 because they “might embarrass Her Majesty’s Government.” Some 48 years later, they have at last come to light, with their capacity to embarrass the government intact.
Kenyan nationals Wambugu wa Nyingi, (R) Ndiku Mutua, (2nd R) Paulo Nzili (2nd L) and Jane Muthoni Mara, (L) outside the High Court in central London, on April 7, 2011. They are hoping their cases, which include castration, torture, sexual abuse, forced labour and beatings, will secure a statement of regret over Britain's role in the Kenya Emergency, and a victims' welfare fund.
Kenyan nationals Wambugu wa Nyingi, (R) Ndiku Mutua, (2nd R) Paulo Nzili (2nd L) and Jane Muthoni Mara, (L) outside the High Court in central London, on April 7, 2011. They are hoping their cases, which include castration, torture, sexual abuse, forced labour and beatings, will secure a statement of regret over Britain’s role in the Kenya Emergency, and a victims’ welfare fund.
About The Author: Ben Macintyre (born 1963) is a British author, historian, and columnist writing for The Times newspaper. His columns range from current affairs to historical controversies. Macintyre is the author of a book on the gentleman criminal Adam Worth, “The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief.” He also wrote — “The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan,” and a book on the real-life double agent of Germany and England during the Second World War, Eddie Chapman, titled “Agent Zigzag: The true wartime story of eddie chapman, lover, betrayer, hero, spy.”
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The Ghosts of Empire Are Returning To Haunt Britain - and the US
In a few weeks, a group of quiet, dignified elderly men and women will arrive in London to explain how the forces of the British state crushed their testicles or breasts with plyers. It was part of a deliberate policy of breaking a civillian population who we regarded as “baboons”, “barbarians” and “terrorists.” They will come bearing the story of how Britain invaded a country, stole its land, and imprisoned an entire civillian population in detention camps – and they ask only for justice, after all this time.
As a small symbol of how we as a country have not come to terms with our history, compare the bemused reaction to the arrival of these Kenyan survivors of Britain’s gulags to the recent campaign supporting the Gurkhas. We have all waxed lyrical over the Nepalese mercenaries who were, for two centuries, hired by the British Empire to fight its least savoury battles. Sometimes they were used in great causes, like the defeat of Nazism. Sometimes they were used to viciously crush democratic movements in India or Malaya or Pakistan. But they obediently did the bidding of the Empire – so they are a rare bunch of foreigners who the right will turn moist over and welcome to our island.
I too strongly supported their rights to reside in Britain, out of simple humanity – if they’re good enough to die for us, they’re good enough to live with us. But isn’t it revealing that even in 2009, we can cheer the servants of Empire but blank the people mutilated and murdered by it? There will be no press campaigns or celebrity endorsements for the surivors of the Kenyan supression when they issue a reperations claim in London next month. They will be met with a bemused shrug. Yet their story tells us far more.
The British arrived in Kenya in the 1880s, at a time when our economic dominance was waning and new colonies were needed. The Colonial Office sent in waves of white settlers to seize the land from the local “apes” and mark it with the Union Jack. Francis Hall was the officer of the East India Company tasked with mounting armed raids against the Kikuyu – the most populous local tribe – to break their resistance. He said: “There is only one way of improving the [Kikuyu] and that is to wipe them out; I would only be too delighted to do so but we have to depend on them for food supplies.”
The British troops stole over sixty thousand acres from the Kikuyu, and renamed the area “the White Highlands.” But the white settlers were artistocratic dillettantes with little experience of farming, and they were soon outraged to discover that the “primitives” were growing food far more efficiently on the reserves they had been driven into. So they forced the local black population to work “their” land, and passed a law banning the local Africans from independently growing the most profitable cash crops – tea, coffee, and sisal.
The people of Kenya objected, and tried to repel the invaders. They called for “ithaka na wiyathi” – land and freedom. After peaceful protests were met with violence, they formed a group, dubbed the Mau Mau, to stop the supression any way they could. They started killing the leaders appointed by the British, and some of the settlers too. As a result, the London press described them as “evil savages” and “terrorists” motivated by hatred of Christianity and civilisation. They had been “brainwashed” by “Mau Mau cult leaders”, the reports shrieked.
The 1.5 million Kikuya overwhelmingly supported the Mau Mau and independence – so the British declared war on them all. A State of Emergency was announced, and it began with forced removals of all Kikuyu. Anybody living outside the reserves – in any of the cities, for example – was rounded up at gunpoint, packed into lorries, and sent to “transit camps”. There, they were “screened” to see if they were Mau Mau supporters. One of the people locked up this way for months was Barack Obama’s grandfather.
Professor Caroline Elkins, who studied the detention camps for five years for her remarkable book ‘Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya’, explains the tactics adopted by the British to snuffle out Mau Mau. “Electric shock was widely used, as well as cigarettes and fire,” she writes. “Bottles (often broken), gun barrels, knives, snakes, vermin and hot eggs were thrust up men’s rectums and women’s vaginas. The screening teams whipped, shot, burned, and mutilated Mau Mau suspects.”
The people judged to be guilty of Mau Mau sympathies were transferred to torture camps. There, each detainee was given a number which they had to wear on a band on their wrist. They were then stripped naked and sent through a cattle dip, before the torture would begin again. “Detainees were frog-marched around the compound and beaten until blood ran from their ears,” Elkins writes.
The Kikuyu survivor Pascasio Macharia describes some of the tortures he witnessed: “The askaris [guards[ brought in fire buckets full of water, and the detainees were called on by one, [my friend] Peterson first. The asakaris then put his head in the bucket of water and lifted his legs high in the air so he was upside down. That’s when [one of the camp commandants] started cramming sand in Peterson’s anus and stuffed it in with a stick. The other askari would put water in, and then more sand. They kept doing this back and forth… Eventually they finished with Peterson and carried him off, only to start on the next detainee in the compound.”
Another favoured torment was to roll a man in barbed wire and kick him around until he bled to death. Typhoid, dissentry and lice sycthed through the population. Castration was common. At least 80,000 people were locked away and tortured like this. When I reported from Kenya earlier this year, I met elderly people who still shake with fear as they talk about the gulags. William Baldwin, a British member of the Kenya Police Reserve, wrote a memoir in which he cheerfuly admits to murdering Kikuya “baboons” in cold blood. He bragged about how he gutted them with knives while other suspects watched. Another British officer, Tony Cross, proudly called their tactics “Gestapo stuff.”
For the civilians outside, life was only slightly better. Women and children were trapped in eight hundred “sealed villages” throughout the countryside. They were surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards, and forced at gunpoint to dig trenches that sealed them off from the world.
There was always another, honourable Britain who fought against these crimes. The Labour left – especially Barbra Castle and Nye Bevan – fought for the camps to be exposed and shut. They didn’t succeed until the British imperialists were finally forced to scuttle away from the country entirely. We will never know how many people they murdered, because the colonial administration built a bonfire of all the paperwork on their way out the door. Elkins calculates it is far more than the 11,000 claimed by the British government, and could be as many as 300,000.
Yet in Britain today, there is a blood-encrusted blank spot about Empire. On the reality show The Apprentice, the contestants recently had to pick a name for their team, and they said they weanted “something that represented the best of British” – so they settled on “Empire.” Nobody objected. Imagine young Germans blithely naming a team “Reich”: it’s unthinkable, because they have had to study what their fathers and grandfathers did, and expunge these barbarous instincts from their national DNA.
This failure to absorb the lessons of Empire is not only unjust to the victims; it leads us to repeat horrifying mistakes. Today, we are – with the Americans – using unmanned drones to bomb the Pakistan-Afghan borderland, as we did a few years ago in Iraq. Nobody here seems to remember that the British invented aerial counter-insurgency in this very spot – with disastrous consequences. In 1924, Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris bragged that all rebellion could be stopped with this tactic. We have shown them “what real bombing means, in casualties and damage: they know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed,” he said. Yet instead of “pacifying” them, it radically alienated the population and lead to an uprising. If we knew our history, we would not be running the same script and expecting a different ending.
Gordon Brown said last year (in India, of all places) that “the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over.” The survivors of England’s blanked-out torture camps are entitled to ask: when did we start?
To read J Hari's series of articles criticizing the imperialist historians Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts, click here, here and here.
___________________British War Crimes In Kenya
British imperialism: a chronicle of humiliation
Nov 2 2008
There can be no doubt about the government's determination to defend the interests of British national capital abroad. We have only to look at the UK involvement in the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Britain isalways pronouncing on current conflicts, even if it is powerless to influence, as it was in Georgia, and even more now with David Milliband proposing an EU force on stand-by for the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Recent events indicate the very great difficulties in the way of Britain making a successful defence of its interests on a global scale.
Unwanted in Iraq
Britain is not so much withdrawing from Iraq, as being told it is no long wanted: "the presence of this number of British soldiers is no longer necessary. We thank them for the role they have played, but I think that their stay is not necessary for maintaining security and control", as PM al-Maliki said in the interview in The Times. It's difficult to see why Iraq would want the 4000 troops holed up in Basra Airport. Their defeat was already obvious in February last year when Blair announced a partial withdrawal, "By March-April 2007, renewed political tensions once more threatened to destabilise the city, and relentless attacks against British forces in effect had driven them off the streets into increasingly secluded compounds. Basra's residents and militiamen view this not as an orderly withdrawal but rather as an ignominious defeat. Today, the city is controlled by the militias..." (‘Where is Iraq going? Lessons from Basra' June 07, International Crisis Group). And "Anthony Cordesman of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, asserts that British forces lost control of the situation in and around Basra by the second half of 2005" (The Independent 23.2.07).
Britain also showed it was not capable of standing up to Iran, the main regional threat in Southern Iraq, when it captured 15 UK Naval personnel in March 07. A year later the Iraqi government called on US forces to help them with their push in Basra, rather than British troops from much closer. Why would they want to keep them?
Ill-equipped in Afghanistan
The UK commander in Helmand has warned we should not expect a decisive victory, as Britain finds itself bogged down with its much bigger US ally in Afghanistan. The whole situation is one of spreading chaos as the US makes more incursions into the Taliban's bases within western Pakistan - attacking one of its erstwhile great allies in the ‘war on terror'.
Meanwhile an SAS commander has resigned in disgust at the poor equipment provided for soldiers, in this case the Snatch Land Rover which becomes a death trap, offering no protection when it hits a landmine. There was a similar scandal over "serious systemic failures" condemned by a coroner after unnecessary deaths due to lack of explosion suppressant foam. This should remind us one more time that when the ruling class is determined to defend the national interest abroad, it always makes the working class pay for it - by increased exploitation at home, and in the blood spilt in adventures abroad. When the country finds its resources stretched by participation in too many conflicts it will send in its soldiers without the protection expected by a modern army.
Buffeted by events
British imperialism's difficulties should not lead us to think it is no longer a significant military power, far from it; but it is a declining power, one that ruled the world a hundred years ago, one that still has interests worldwide but no longer has the strength to act independently to defend them - a point made very forcibly at Suez in 1956. To defend its interests now is to ‘punch above its weight', and this can only be achieved by positioning itself in relation to stronger powers and trying to play them off against each other. When the USA and Russia faced each other at the head of two military blocs armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, Britain was clearly positioned behind the US bloc. When Russia collapsed it had the space to play a more independent role, particularly in the break-up of Yugoslavia where Britain and France gained some influence in Serbia, while Germany encouraged Croatia and the USA based itself on Bosnia. But this success could not last, and after 9/11 the UK positioned itself closer to the USA under the force of its ‘war on terror', joining its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. This brought scant reward - it had to face the July 7th bombing in 2005, and by summer 2006 Britain was humiliated again when Blair waited for the call to negotiate at the top table over the Lebanon crisis, a call that never came.
The British bourgeoisie needed to find a new position less closely identified with the US and better able to play it off against Europe. Blair had to be forced out of office, through the loans for peerages scandal, before he was ready because "...Mr Blair's room for pragmatic manoeuvre in foreign affairs was limited by his partnership with George Bush... his insistence on seeing problems of the Middle East in purely Manichean terms - as a global struggle between Good and Evil, between Western Civilisation and apocalyptic terrorism - does not lend itself to good policy-making. Stabilisation in Iraq, Iran's nuclear ambitions, Israel's occupation of Palestine - these are problems that require separate treatment" was a typical comment in the Observer 29.4.07. When Brown finally became PM the change in foreign policy was illustrated by the appointment of David Milliband, a critic of Blair's policy on Lebanon, as foreign secretary; Shirley Williams, who had opposed the Iraq war as an advisor; and another critic, Mallach Brown, as minister for Africa. Mallach Brown's appointment was described as "inauspicious" by John Bolton, former US ambassador to the UN.
The problem for Britain however is that its closeness to the USA was a result not so much of Blair's relationship with Bush as its weakness as a declining power in the face of the pressures from America's ‘war on terror'. Indeed, steering a path between the US and Europe will only get harder, whoever is in no 10. Essentially the British bourgeoisie has been unable to extricate itself from the disaster of its close relationship to the USA and still finds itself bogged down and increasingly humiliated in unsuccessful military adventures. As the economic crisis worsens so will the barbaric military conflicts around the world, further exposing Britain's weakness, damaging its prestige and reducing its margin for manoeuvre in future conflicts.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
History of torture finally catches up with the Brits
By AHMEDNASIR ABDULLAHI
Daily Nation
April 9 2011 at 20:21
Both the print and electronic media have given the case a wide berth
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.
Daily Nation
April 9 2011 at 20:21
Both the print and electronic media have given the case a wide berth
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.
Torture and killing in Kenya – Britain's double standards
The UK sees no contradiction in forcing Libyans to apologise for Lockerbie while denying Kenya's Mau Mau victims recompense
The Guardian,
Kenyans protest at the high court over the British refusal to apologise for the Mau Mau killings. Photograph: Carl Court/AFP/Getty Images
This week, a British human rights lawyer backed by the Foreign Office managed to strong-arm an apology out of Libya's revolutionary leadership for the actions of the man it is struggling to overthrow.
The apology and promise of compensation over Muammar Gaddafi's supply of explosives used in IRA bombs and his role in blowing up the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie was made by the rebels in the name of the Libyan people as a whole – a move that astonished and offended many Libyans, who see no reason to take responsibility for the crimes of their oppressor.
But the Foreign Office shared the view of the British lawyer, Jason McCue, that saying sorry for something they had no hand in would somehow be good for the Libyan people as a whole by establishing a newfound commitment to human rights. The promise of money helps, of course.
The truth is that the revolutionary leadership, which has rather more pressing issues to hand such as keeping Gaddafi's troops from overrunning Benghazi, felt it had to play along to bolster crucial support from the UK and the west. McCue even praised David Cameron for making the case a priority at the Foreign Office.
This demonstration of power politics is made all the more distasteful by the contrasting attitude of the British government at the high court toward victims of the most depraved torture, gruesome killings and mass hangings by Britain during Kenya's struggle for independence.
Hiding behind legal contortions, the government is refusing to apologise or pay compensation for appalling abuses done in the name of and with the knowledge of the British state, with the intent of preserving a system of racist privilege for white settlers in the east African colony.
The Kenya Human Rights Commission says about 160,000 black people were held in dire conditions in camps run by the British colonial authorities and tens of thousands were tortured to get them to renounce their oath to the Mau Mau rebellion against British rule in the 1950s.
The Foreign Office doesn't deny there was torture and killings in the camps. How could it? Many of the abuses are documented in files discovered in its own archives. They including a telegram from the British governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, documenting torture allegations against colonial district officers including "the burning alive of detainees".
Instead the Foreign Office is deploying an array of legal barriers to argue that it is not required to pay compensation. Among the arguments is that Britain's responsibility for its colonial crimes ceased to exist when Kenya became independent in 1963 – a legal convenience that apparently does not apply in Libya where Britain has willed it that responsibility for Gaddafi's crimes has been transferred to the people as a whole and their representatives in the struggle for freedom.
The Foreign Office also argues that these crimes are historic. But they are not history to those who live with the consequences, including the four claimants at the high court such as Ndiku Mutua and Paulo Nzili, who say they were castrated in a British camp. Or to Jane Muthoni Mara who I spoke to in Nairobi several years ago and who described to me how as a 15-year-old she was arrested as a Mau Mau spy and, among other things, tortured under the supervision of a British army officer by being raped with a bottle filled with hot water.
Other prisoners told of being beaten, starved, anally raped and flogged. The official documents found at the Foreign Office acknowledge that prisoners were used as forced labour. Some detainees were tortured so badly they died.
More than 1,000 Kenyan men met their death at the end of a hangman's noose, many after confessions they said were tortured from them.
All of this led a Kenyan colonial judge, Arthur Cram, who was appointed to examine the role of British officials in torture and killings, to draw comparisons with infamous Nazi camps.
"They [British colonial officials] not only knew of the shocking floggings that went on in this Kenya Nordhausen, or Mathausen [sic], but must be taken to be the men who were said to have carried them out. From the brutalising of flogging it is only a step to taking life without qualm," he said in his judgment.
Germany is still apologising and paying compensation for the crimes of the Nazi state in Nordhausen and Mauthausen. It has not tried to say that responsibility dissolved with the collapse of the Third Reich.
The survivors of the British camps in Kenya are asking for what the victims of the IRA and Lockerbie have now been promised from the new Libya – an apology and compensation to live out the rest of their lives with respect and dignity.
But the Foreign Office believes apologies are for Libyans.
Kenya: Mau Mau And the Barbaric Face of the British Empire
Ben Macintyre
10 April 2011
Nairobi — One horrific day in September 1957, Ndiku Mutwiwa Mutua claims, he was castrated by the British Government.
Last week the elderly Kenyan appeared in the High Court in London, along with three others to accuse Britain of being liable for what was done to him 54 years ago, and to demand compensation.
The case of Mutua and others versus the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) relates to events that took place at the height of the Mau Mau emergency -- the uprising against colonial rule in Kenya between 1952 and 1960.
The Mau Mau rebellion was one of the nastiest chapters in British colonial history. Appalling atrocities were perpetrated by both sides, but few stories of cruelty are worse than that of Mr Ndiku Mutwiwa Mutua.
In 1956 Mr Mutua was a 24-year-old herdsman working for Mr Louvaine Dunman, a white settler in Kenya's Eastern Province. Mr Dunman, a police officer in the district force, was known as "Luvai" among the Kamba people who couldn't pronounce the name Louvaine properly.
While working on Mr Dunman's farm, Mr Mutua began supplying food to the Mau Mau rebels hiding out in the nearby forest. On or before September 17, 1957, he was arrested by Mr Dunman and five other African police officers.
According to a court document, he was repeatedly beaten by European and African officers alike and then taken, blindfolded, to a tent.
Inside, he was allegedly handcuffed and pinned to the ground, with his legs pulled apart and tied or strapped down.
"Having been rendered completely powerless and vulnerable," according to the document, Mr Mutua claims that he was "castrated by one or more of the officers present".
For two days he was allegedly left without medical attention and then liberated from the camp by Mau Mau rebels. He remained in the forest for three-and-a-half years before the rebellion ended and he returned home.
Mr Mutua claims that he suffered depression, anguish, mental stress, and "intense flashbacks to the episodes of assault, including castration (and) mourned the fact that he will never have children of his own and never be with a woman".
Like his fellow claimants, Mr Mutua holds the British Government responsible for his suffering. Another of the plaintiffs also claims to have been castrated, while a third was allegedly beaten and left for dead during the infamous Hola Camp massacre of 1959 in which 11 detainees were clubbed to death.
The only woman claimant said that she was subjected to sexual torture in which she was violated using bottles filled with hot water.
The alleged mistreatment of another claimant, Mr Wambugu wa Nyingi, carries echoes of waterboarding. Mr Nyingi claims that he was "suspended by his feet from the hut roof. He was then subjected to a severe beating over a period of about 30 minutes, while cold water was poured on to his face and into his mouth so he could not breathe".
The claimants' case rests on the argument that these acts of brutality were not isolated or random, the spontaneous cruelty of a few sadists, but a systematic policy organised and condoned by the British authorities, "part of a system of torture, inhuman and degrading treatment applied by police, home guards, and other members of the security services with the knowledge of the colonial administration.
"Many detainees were subjected to gross abuse and torture," say the claimants.
"Such abuse included whippings, beating, castration, and sexual abuse of men and women... in many cases the abuse and torture were so brutal and dangerous that the detainee died."
Lawyers representing the British Government argue that the case should be dismissed because the alleged abuse was carried out by the colonial government, which passed all rights and responsibilities to the independent Kenyan Government in 1963.
When Kenya assumed national sovereignty, government lawyers will argue, this included an implicit acceptance of liability for any outstanding claims against the national administration.
The Kenya Government flatly denies any liability. A letter was sent to British Foreign Secretary William Hague on March 31 stating: "The Republic of Kenya fully supports the claimants' case and has publicly denied any notion that responsibility for any acts and atrocities committed by the British colonial administration during the Kenya 'Emergency' was inherited by the Republic of Kenya."
Among those rounded up in the run-up to Mau Mau was Hussein Onyango Obama, Barak Obama's paternal grandfather, who became involved in the Kenyan independence movement while working as a cook for a British Army officer after the war.
He was arrested and jailed for two years in a high security prison where, according to his family, he was subjected to horrific violence to extract information about the growing insurgency.
Further light will be shed by the newly discovered Foreign Office files relating to Mau Mau, which were deliberately removed from Kenya.
On December 3, 1963, nine days before Kenya formally declared independence, three wooden crates containing 1,500 highly sensitive government files were loaded on to a British United Airways flight bound for Gatwick.
A memo written by one Foreign Office official noted that the removal of the documents had been carried out in "meticulous fashion", with files selected on the specific grounds that their contents "might embarrass Her Majesty's Government, members of the police, military forces, public servants, or others".
In a memo marked "Most Secret", the Foreign Office noted that "the vast majority of the files concern the Emergency: eg, intelligence reports and summaries, African associations, activities of Africans, unrest in the districts etc . . . collective punishments, detainees and detention camps".
In 1967, the Kenyan Foreign Ministry asked the British Government to return the missing files. The FCO refused.
A confidential FCO memo written on November 2, 1967, warned that if the documents were sent back to Kenya, it could "set a precedent and encourage other governments to follow suit" and demand "the documents of other former Dependent Territories which are now held here".
A letter on the same subject from the Commonwealth Office clearly shows that the decision to remove the Kenyan documents was not an isolated incident:
"The fact that it has always been British policy to withdraw or destroy certain sensitive records prior to independence has never been advertised or generally admitted," the letter states.
"The reply we give to Kenya could affect the treatment of records and files withdrawn from other former Colonial Territories."
After 1967, the files removed from Kenya apparently vanished into the Foreign Office archives. There has long been speculation among historians about what happened to them, including the rumour that they had been loaded into a Lancaster bomber and dropped into the Indian Ocean.
When the four Kenyans filed suit last year, the High Court was informed that some of the most critical evidence relating to the case was still missing. The FO duly launched a search for the documents and in January the missing files were finally located.
The reparations claim is regarded in Kenya as nationally divisive since the Mau Mau was in large part an ethnic rebellion by the Kikuyu rather than a national uprising. Most of the alleged torture and abuse was carried out by Africans of other tribes, albeit under British supervision, adding a potentially toxic tribal element to the mixture.
The claimants are demanding a welfare fund and a statement of regret.
Mr David Miliband, the Labour Foreign Secretary, is believed to have favoured this approach, but a resolution was blocked by FCO officials.
The implications go far beyond the individual accusations levelled by four Kenyans. Hundreds more former Mau Mau detainees could file suit and countless other former colonial subjects may be able to claim mistreatment at the hands of the British Government.
Leigh Day, the lawyers representing the Kenyans, say they do not believe that the case will establish a precedent.
"The systematic torture which went on in pre-independence Kenya was exceptional in its scale and barbarity," a spokesman for Leigh Day said. "This case is about victims who are alive and are seeking redress. People who suffered similar ill treatment in other colonies who are still alive are very few in number."
In a speech at SOAS, the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, last month, David Anderson, professor of African history at the University of Oxford, who is advising the claimants, said that the files discovered in the FCO archives may be the tip of a huge legal iceberg.
"In other instances -- Malaya, Cyprus, Nigeria, to name just three possible examples -- there might also be missing documents 'retrieved' to London, with much to tell us about the actions of colonial administrations.
"The Mau Mau claim is not the only claim the British Government may have to worry about," he added. "Claims may arise from, for example, Palestine, and there is a fear that a successful claim could set a precedent."
The files were spirited out of Kenya in 1963 because they "might embarrass Her Majesty's Government". Some 48 years later, they have at last come to light, with their capacity to embarrass the government intact.
British torturer of Kenyans now lives comfortably in retirement
By Neil Sears
Daily Mail
10th April 2011
An old man living comfortably in retirement in London has been named as a torturer by a Kenyan seeking compensation.
Terence Gavaghan, 89, was awarded the MBE for his work during the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s, when Britain moved to crush a Kenyan uprising.
He now appears to be the only living individual accused of human rights abuses in a multi-million pound court case being presented at the High Court in London by four ageing Kenyans who claim they were tortured in detention camps set up by Britain.
TERENCE GAVAGHAN
Kenyan national Wambugu wa Nyingi
The claimants are represented on a no-win no-fee basis by British lawyers, and if they win compensation, thousands of other Kenyans could claim too, as well as other alleged victims of the Empire, costing taxpayers billions.
One of the four Kenyans in the High Court case, Wambugu We Nyingi, directly blames Mr Gavaghan for abuse he alleges he suffered.
Mr Gavaghan, who lives in Putney, South-West London, is no longer able to defend himself against the allegations because he has Alzheimer’s.
But before his recent decline he denied previous more general allegations, and yesterday his wife Nicole, 77, insisted that the lawyer at the centre of the compensation case simply wanted to make money.
Mrs Gavaghan said: ‘Terence got a decoration from the Queen for the work he did in Kenya.
1953: British police using guns to guard Mau Mau suspects at a detention camp in Kariobangi, Kenya
1953: British police using guns to guard Mau Mau suspects at a detention camp in Kariobangi, Kenya
‘It was through Terence that 20,000 detainees were released. There’s never been any evidence he maltreated anyone.
‘The solicitors’ game is that they are going to make money out of this.’
Mr Nyingi’s High Court testimony is key to claims that Britain authorised extreme brutality in Kenya, where the Mau Mau terror group killed around 100 white settlers and troops, but at least 11,000 Kenyans died.
Mr Nyingi claim
s he was detained for nine years without being charged, and that early in 1957 he was transferred to a camp where Mr Gavaghan was an officer.The document submitted to court says: ‘Immediately, he was beaten with 25 stokes of the cane which caused him to lose consciousness.
‘After this for five days Gavaghan made the detainees, including Mr Nyingi, dig trenches to a depth and width of eight feet. They would then be required to fill them up again, rendering the work pointless.
Fighting: Police and troops point rifles with bayonets at a local man as they quell a battle between rival tribes in 1950
Fighting: Police and troops point rifles with bayonets at a local man as they quell a battle between rival tribes in 1950
Prisoners: Captured Mau Mau prisoners at a British camp sit with theirs hands on their heads as they await their fate
‘Mr Nyingi was also made to carry on his head a bucket filled with sand and stones for hours at a stretch. While he was doing so one or more officers would hit him in the face. ‘He would be forced to run on gravel with bare feet for hours. During this period he was subjected to the same brutal assaults, always in the presence of Gavaghan.’
A further document claims Mr Gavaghan once watched as Mr Nyingi was given 72 strokes of the cane.
Captured Mau Mau prisoners at a British camp sit with theirs hands on their heads as they await their fate
Before Alzheimer’s took hold, Mr G
avaghan, who after leaving colonial service worked for the United Nations in Afghanistan and Somalia, denied torture.He said he lost control just once, when his guards were grappling with a man who had ‘adopted the plasticine doll technique’ of falling about if pushed.
‘Partly to associate myself with the frustration of the others, I hit him back-handed across the face, ripping my knuckles on his teeth.’
He added: "We used compelling force because it was necessary in that situation." without a trace of irony.
_______________________
Shameful legacy
In the early 1950s, Mau Mau rebels murdered 32 people in an uprising against colonial rule in Kenya. Britain's response was brutal: 150,000 Kenyans were detained in camps where, survivors claim, prisoners were beaten, tortured, sexually abused and even murdered. Fifty years on, a handful of them are suing the British government. By Chris McGreal
The Guardian,
13 October 2006
It has been 50 years and there is much to remember. But what still stands out from his time in the camps is a tall white man in shorts with a swagger stick. "When we first arrived we didn't know who he was, but we quickly knew he was in charge," says Espon Makanga. "All the other whites and the black guards waited for him to speak, and when he gave the order that is when it began. After that it never really stopped. I came to hate that man. I can never forgive him."
Makanga, now 78, had already endured more than two years as a prisoner of the British when the colonial authorities sent him to Kandongu camp in Kenya in 1957. He describes life in the earlier camps as a routine of tortures, beatings and typhoid that claimed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives.
But Kandongu was designed to be the toughest stop on what British officials described as the "pipeline" of camps intended to break down the "hard core" of Kenyans supporting the Mau Mau rebellion against colonial rule, which began in 1952. Hard core did not mean the worst killers, merely the most defiant.
The camp enforced a regimen known as the "dilution technique". It was designed by three white colonial officials, one of them the officer whom Makanga spotted as being in charge when he first arrived at Kandongu, and whom he and the other inmates came to fear. They had various nicknames for that officer, but it was only in time that they discovered he was really called Terence Gavaghan. "He was a tall man with a thin face and we soon discovered his camp was about nothing more than being beaten and tortured. They beat us from the day we arrived, with sticks, with their fists, kicking us with their boots. They beat us to make us work. They beat us to force us to confess our Mau Mau oath. After a year I couldn't take it any longer. Gavaghan had won," he says.
Makanga was just one of the estimated 150,000 Kenyans held in British prison camps for up to seven years during what was known as the Kenya Emergency, a rebellion against colonial rule in Kenya. Today, he is among a group of 10 survivors, all in their 70s and 80s, who took the first legal step in London this week towards suing the British government for what they say was officially sanctioned torture and other human rights abuses.
Some of the former prisoners describe rape and sexual abuse of women; others say they survived camps where inmates were flogged, worked to death, murdered in cold blood or starved. They want compensation but also an apology for what they describe as a system of organised brutality unmatched anywhere else in the waning years of the British empire. Even in the 1950s, the camps were described as "Kenya's gulags" and likened by officials to Nazi slave labour camps.
The camps were justified, in British eyes, by the Mau Mau's butchering of 32 white settlers and African chiefs loyal to the crown early in the rebellion. The Mau Mau were dominated by the Kikuyu, the largest ethnic group in Kenya, and were largely driven by bitterness at the loss of land to the white settlers. But the struggle also divided the tribe, and the Mau Mau ultimately killed far more fellow Kikuyu than whites, with massacres such as the killing of 120 men, women and children at Lari in March 1953. In Britain the Mau Mau were portrayed as representing the re-emergence of a primitive bloodlust that the twin benefits of colonisation - Christianity and civilisation - were intended to eradicate. But the British soon proved they could be as brutal as their enemies.
Jane Muthoni Mara is among those taking legal action against the British government. She was 15 when she was arrested for supplying Mau Mau fighters with food and taken to Gatithi screening camp. There she says she and two friends, including a young boy, were beaten with the butts of guns. Her interrogators demanded to know the whereabouts of her brother, who was a member of the Mau Mau. Mara says she was ordered into a tent by a white army officer. There was a black soldier from her area she knew as Edward. He ordered her to lie down and asked her where her brother was. When she did not answer, he picked up a bottle. "He filled the bottle with hot water and then pushed it into my private parts with his foot. I screamed and screamed," she says.
Mara says other women were also tortured by having bottles thrust into their vaginas. "For older women, Edward would use bigger beer bottles, but for us younger girls it was smaller soda bottles," she says. "The next day we were forced to sit with our legs in front of us, and the African guards marched over them in their army boots. We were often beaten."
Mara was later tried and sentenced to three years in prison for Mau Mau membership. "We were taken to Embu prison. A lot of people died there of typhoid. We were forced to do work carrying bricks to build a school. We were beaten if we moved too slowly. It was very hard work," she says. "They would just flog everyone at times, four or five guards with whips would come into the cell." She was finally released in September 1957, but never saw her brother again. She says she never recovered from the sexual violence and for years was frightened of sex with her husband.
Terence Gavaghan is 84 now and lives in London. His former prisoners do not accuse him of the worst crimes committed in some of the camps, such as the sexual abuse or killing. But they do say that the camps under his authority enforced a regime of systematic brutalisation aimed at breaking any resistance to the authority of British rule.
Gavaghan was a colonial district officer when he was recruited to oversee "rehabilitation" of Mau Mau prisoners at six camps in the Mwea area of central Kenya. In his memoirs he describes agreeing with John Cowan, the head of Kenya's prisons, on a system to force detainees to renounce their support for the Mau Mau that he described as "enlightened, humane and Christian-based". He also writes that "no legal restraints were envisaged".
In a telephone interview with the Guardian, Gavaghan says his orders were to end the defiance of inmates who were viewed as a block toward economic and political progress on the way to independence. He declines to discuss whether he ever used the beatings described by Makanga on prisoners, or other specifics of how he broke the hard-core Mau Mau, other than to say he was intent on ensuring that on release they would "not be demonstrating defiance".
He also says he cannot be expected to remember a few individuals from among the mass of detainees who passed through the camps under his authority. "It would not be sensible to answer questions about people I cannot remember who say I did things I did not do," he says. "I decided on a process, with the agreement of the attorney general, Eric Griffith-Jones, which led to their release within a year. And that was achieved without a single death, and no ill-treatment."
Griffith-Jones was Kenya's top law officer during the emergency. In June 1957, he visited Kandongu to watch Gavaghan at work and wrote a secret memo detailing what he saw. The memo was attached to a letter, also marked "secret", from the governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, to the colonial secretary, Alan Lennox Boyd. In it, Baring says that Gavaghan had established a regime of beatings as a means to break the prisoners and that the government needed to give it legal cover, as violence was "in fact the only way of dealing with the more dyed-in-the-wool Mau Mau men who will be our problem in the future".
Griffith-Jones says he and other colonial officials were shown around Kandongu by Gavaghan, who "participated in the proceedings and maintained, in conjunction with the senior prison officers, direct personal control over the proceedings". Those proceedings were to oversee the intake of 80 Mau Mau detainees over whom "camp discipline" was to be swiftly established. This included shaving their heads and beards, and requiring them to wear prison uniforms.
"Any who showed any reluctance or hesitation to do so were hit with fists and/or slapped with the open hand," wrote Griffith-Jones. "This was usually enough to dispel any disposition to disobey the order to change. In some cases, however, defiance was more obstinate, and on the first indication of such obstinacy three or four of the European officers immediately converged on the man and 'rough-housed' him, stripping his clothes off him, hitting him, on occasion kicking him, and, if necessary, putting him on the ground. Blows struck were solid, hard ones, mostly with closed fists and about the head, stomach, sides and back. There was no attempt to strike at the testicles or any other manifestations of sadistic brutality; the performance was a deliberate, calculated and robust assault, accompanied by constant and imperative demands that the man should do as he was told and change his clothes." Griffith-Jones says that eventually all of the new intake submitted.
"Gavaghan explained, however," Griffith-Jones's memo continues, "that there had, in past intakes, been more persistent resistors, who had had to be forcibly changed into the camp clothing; that some of them had started the 'Mau Mau moan', a familiar cry that was promptly taken up by the rest of the camp, representing a concerted and symbolic defiance of the camp authorities; that in such cases it was essential to prevent the infection of this 'moan' spreading through the camp, and that accordingly a resistor who started it was put on the ground, a foot placed on his throat and mud stuffed in his mouth; and that a man whose resistance could not be broken down was in the last resort knocked unconscious."
Although Gavaghan says that this regime was carried out with the approval of the attorney-general, Baring's letter suggests that the routine of beatings was already established and that the colonial authorities were keen to give it legal authority. "We have felt that either we must forbid Gavaghan and his staff to proceed in this way, in which case the dilution technique will be ineffective and we will find that we cannot deal with many of the worst detainees, or, alternatively, we must give him and his staff cover provided they do as they say they are doing," Baring writes to the colonial secretary. "Put another way the problem is this. We can probably go further with the more fanatical Mau Mau in the way of release than we had ever hoped 18 months ago. But to do so there must be a phase of violent shock."
In the end, Gavaghan's methods were approved with "safeguards", including a requirement for a medical examination and that violence should be carried out only by Europeans. The new regulations permitted force to be used to "enforce discipline and preserve good order" because established punishment "achieves little or nothing". Such a broad definition opened the way to a regime of perpetual violence endured by men such as Makanga.
Gavaghan came late to the camps, however. The British government's apparent desire to bring some order and legal cover to the treatment of Mau Mau prisoners was prompted by a string of abuses long before Gavaghan appeared on the scene, and growing questions at home, particularly from the Labour opposition. The camps were one part of a process of breaking the Mau Mau that extended from herding large numbers of Africans into "protected villages" to confiscating livestock and destroying homes.
Espon Makanga witnessed many abuses before he arrived in Kandongu. He had joined the Mau Mau in 1952 when he was 24. Two years later he was shot in his right elbow in a British army ambush, and he lived with the wound for a year until he was arrested and sent to Thika prison camp. "Many inmates in Thika died from beatings and typhoid. We had to bury many of our comrades who died there," he says.
Makanga was moved to Manyani, where on arrival the prisoners were thrown in a pit of disinfectant. "The guards surrounded us and beat us to force us in as if we were cattle," he says. "Some people went under and swallowed the disinfectant, which made their stomachs swell up and caused a lot of pain. The camp was under the command of a white officer who frequently gave orders for us to be beaten if he thought we weren't working hard enough. Some people died from the beatings. Others died from typhoid. They were buried just outside the camps." One typhoid outbreak in Manyani killed more than 100 inmates.
Another survivor from Manyani is Kariuki Mungai. He says a much-feared punishment was to be forced to carry the overflowing toilet buckets from the cells. "You had to carry the bucket on your head. They were always overflowing with excrement and urine, and the guards would beat you as you ran with it on your head so that it flowed down your face," he says. In time, Mungai was forced down the "pipeline" and into the hands of Gavaghan. "There was a day when a group refused to work. Gavaghan called all the guards together and ordered that we all be beaten for an hour. Those who still did not work were beaten again."
Another former prisoner who has joined the lawsuit, Wambugu wa Nyingi, says Gavaghan ordered inmates to walk on gravel on their knees with their hands up for long periods. He shows me the scars to his knees that he says are the legacy of the punishment. "We were terrified of him," says Nyingi.
Patrick wa Njogu was a Mau Mau general who led a force fighting from the Mount Kenya forest, which was frequently bombed by the RAF, and who lost a leg after he was shot by British troops. He was arrested, tried for the murder of a forestry officer and acquitted. But he was still sent down the camp pipeline. "I remember the preaching and indoctrination," says Njogu, who says he was held in 15 camps over six years. "And I remember the beatings and the lack of food and the typhoid. When I was in Gathigiriri [camp] I refused to work digging trenches because I had lost a leg. They still beat me as they beat anyone else who would not work. On one occasion they beat me and dragged me around the camp by my remaining leg."
Back in Britain, Labour MP Barbara Castle was one of those worried by what was happening in Kenya. Among her sources was Kenya's assistant police commissioner, Duncan McPherson, who was frustrated at being blocked by the colonial government from prosecuting camp officials. He told Castle of several instances in which Mau Mau prisoners were beaten to death or shot, and about the ensuing cover-ups. "I would say that the conditions I found existing in some camps in Kenya were worse, far worse, than anything I experienced in my four-and-a-half years as a prisoner of the Japanese," he told Castle.
A Kenyan judge, Arthur Cram, offered a damning verdict after an investigation into torture, murder and cover-up at one interrogation centre, not under Gavaghan, by drawing comparisons with infamous Nazi labour camps. "They not only knew of the shocking floggings that went on in this Kenya Nordhausen, or Mathausen, but must be taken to be the men who were said to have carried them out. From the brutalising of flogging it is only a step to taking life without qualm," he said in his judgment.
The executioners were also working at a rate unprecedented in the final years of the British Empire. At the height of the emergency, about 50 Kenyans a month were being hanged for rebellion. Prominent Britons, including Bertrand Russell, Michael Foot and Tony Benn, wrote to a senior Kenyan cabinet minister objecting to the numbers of people executed for offences other than murder. The letter noted that in the two years to November 1954, 756 Africans were hanged, more than 500 of them for crimes other than murder and 290 for "unlawful possession of weapons". Only a minority of the 1,090 eventually executed for Mau Mau-related offences during the emergency were convicted of killings.
What some saw as the inevitable outcome of the camp regimes was realised in March 1959 at a place called Hola, where African guards clubbed 11 prisoners to death while European officers looked on. The camp authorities immediately moved to cover up the cause of the killings. When the local district officer, Willoughby Thompson, arrived, he was told that the dead Mau Mau prisoners were overcome by heat and that water had been thrown over them and they had drowned. Thompson described the explanation as "very improbable", but it was accepted by the colony's governor, Baring, and passed on to London. The truth came out in part because Nyingi and other prisoners gave accounts at an inquiry into the killing of the 11 inmates. The investigating magistrate, W H Goudie, blamed officially sanctioned brutality for the deaths.
An official report into the emergency concluded that about 12,000 Mau Mau were killed in the conflict. Some historians put the figure much higher. But the numbers are not what concerns the former prisoners now suing the British government. They are worried that their accounts will not be believed in London because the British do not think they are capable of such abuses. "The British see themselves as good," says Njero Mugo, another veteran of the camps. "But from the day the first missionaries arrived we never believed that the British stood for the rule of law. They stole our land. They treated us as though they had more right to be in our country than we did. Did you know that if you were walking down the street and you met a white person you had to remove your hat?"
At the end of Gavaghan's tenure in charge of the Mwea camps, a young district officer, John Nottingham, was assigned to take over. Nottingham, who still lives in Kenya, refused. "I heard the most terrible stories about those camps from my fellow DOs. They didn't surprise me very much. There had long been indications of the brutality," he says now. "I went to see Gavaghan in his office. He said that people were just roughed up, it wasn't anything very violent. He described it as being like a good rugger scrum. I went back to Nairobi and wrote possibly the most pompous note of my life. I said I myself think I know the difference between right and wrong, and I also realise it's not my job to teach the government the difference between right and wrong. But what you're doing is wrong and I can't accept this job."
In his memoirs, Gavaghan describes Nottingham as encumbered by "confused pretensions and attitudes". Nottingham says there could not have been many colonial officials who did not know the truth of what was going on. "After Hola I was at a meeting with Baring and other DOs at which Baring was asked if he knew about the violence in the camps. Baring answered no, he knew nothing. He said he had given the strongest possible orders that violence should not be used," says Nottingham. "Outside the meeting I asked Gavaghan if what Baring had said was true. Didn't Baring know? And Gavaghan said: 'Of course he knew.' People in Britain said our people could never do that. But they did. The men who ran these camps were specially chosen from top schools. They didn't last long before they fell and the whole argument that we're bringing civilisation collapsed," he says. "It's a big lesson".
Monday, February 07, 2011
US aid to Egypt ends up in US contractors' pockets
Critics question billions in aid routed back to US contractors
By Farah Stockman
Globe Staff / February 3, 2011
WASHINGTON — United States taxpayers have funneled more than $60 billion of aid into Egypt since President Hosni Mubarak came to power in 1981, but more than half of the money has been spent supplying weapons to the country’s military, an arrangement that critics say has benefited American military contractors more than ordinary Egyptians.
About $34 billion of the aid to Egypt has come in the form of grants that Congress requires Egypt to spend on American military hardware, according to statistics from the Congressional Research Service. Those contracts include helicopter engines built by GE Aviation in Lynn and transmitters for Egypt’s Navy built by Raytheon in Tewksbury.
“Egypt has a real need for foreign aid, but not the kind of foreign aid they are getting,’’ said Geoffrey Wawro, history professor and director of the Military History Center at the University of North Texas. “They need more butter than guns. They need development aid, but development aid does not serve as a stimulus plan for American factories.’’
Military aid to Egypt became a cornerstone of US foreign policy in 1979, when Egypt signed a landmark peace deal with Israel that bought some measure of stability in the tumultuous region.
But in recent years the large amount of aid earmarked for the military, and the relatively low sums supporting civilian aid, have attracted scathing criticism from Egyptians, some of whom argue that US aid has gone to entrench a military dictator at the expense of the fledgling democracy activists.
Now that protesters have taken to the streets in Egypt against Mubarak’s regime, questions are being raised about whether the massive aid package — and the emphasis on military support — should continue under whatever government comes next in Cairo.
Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, a Democrat who heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is among those who have called on Congress to focus more on providing support to ordinary Egyptians civilians, and require more accountability for the military aid.
“Congress and the Obama administration need to consider providing civilian assistance that would generate jobs and improve social conditions in Egypt, as well as guarantee that American military assistance is accomplishing its goals,’’ he wrote in an op-ed in Tuesday’s New York Times.
The Egyptian military, which has close ties to the Pentagon, appears to remain a popular institution in Egypt and there is no evidence that tanks have fired on protesters. But during the early turmoil, protesters were the target of tear gas canisters that read “made in the USA,’’ fueling debate about the aid.
Edward Djerejian, a former senior State Department official whose specialty was the Middle East, said the special military relationship with Egypt should continue, as long as a new government abides by democratic process and respects its international obligations, including the peace treaty with Israel.
“We don’t know what the composition of the next government will be, so it’s difficult to make any decision on US aid until we see it,’’ Djerejian said. “I think it is critically important that our aid to the Egyptian military continue, because the military, as we have seen, is really the pillar of law and order and stability in Egypt.’’
Shifting away from the massive military aid package to Egypt would be an uphill battle on Capitol Hill, because billions of dollars for the US defense industry, and American jobs, are at stake.
“When you think about the aid, a large portion of it is very self-serving. It gets funneled right back to the United States,’’ said Bill Allison, editorial director at the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit organization geared toward government accountability.
Last year, Egypt was the fifth-largest recipient of US aid, getting $1.6 billion. That was not the case in the 1950s and 1960s, when Egypt’s fiery leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, leaned toward the Soviet Union instead of the United States. He nationalized the strategically located Suez Canal and went to war with Israel, a US ally.
But in 1979 Egyptian president Anwar Sadat changed course and signed a peace accord brokered by President Jimmy Carter, whose administration wrote letters to both countries promising strategic military assistance.
Congress soon authorized major aid packages to both countries, using an informal formula — not enshrined in the peace treaty — that gave Egypt $2 for every $3 that Israel received. Israel quickly became the largest recipient of US aid, and Egypt the second-largest — rankings that were only recently overtaken by wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and last year, the disaster in Haiti.
In the early years, the aid was distributed evenly between assistance to Egypt’s military and civilian economic support for its people. Most of the military support came in the form of a loan. But in 1985, as the United States beefed up its support to Israel, the military assistance to Egypt also increased, and became a grant that the Egyptians had to spend on US defense contractors.
The Egyptians bought tanks from Sterling Heights, Mich., which are viewed today on television amid the throngs of protesters; high-speed boats from Gulfport, Miss., Hellfire missiles from Orlando, Fla.; and Black Hawk helicopters from Stratford, Conn.
In Massachusetts, the deal with Egypt helps keep 3,200 people employed in Lynn at GE Aviation, one of three companies to win a $820 million contract to make helicopters for Egypt. Spokesman Richard Gorham declined to say whether the company is worried that military aid to Egypt will be cut.
Waltham-based Raytheon has also reaped huge benefits from the military aid to Egypt. It is one of 18 companies involved in a $3.2 billion deal to make 24 F-16 aircraft.
Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems, in Tewksbury, has a separate $77 million contract to make transmitters for Egypt’s Navy. Jon Kasle, a spokesman for Raytheon, said he did not have a comment about how the turmoil in Egypt might impact the company.
Allison, of the Sunlight Foundation, said attempts to curb military aid to the Egyptians, or condition it on democratic reforms, have been met with opposition from powerful lobbyists on Capitol Hill.
“You have foreign agents for Egypt lobbying for it, and the US defense contractors lobbying for it, and in some cases they are the same people,’’ Allison said.
The strong interest of US companies could help explain why US military assistance to Egypt has remained at $1.3 billion a year, while its civilian economic assistance has steadily shrunk, from $815 million a decade ago to $250 million requested for 2011. The decline began in 1998, when Israel arranged for a reduction in economic support and an increase military aid. As Israeli’s economic aid shrunk, so too did Egypt’s, at a rate of $40 million per year every year, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service.
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