The colonial precedent

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1335961,00.html

The growing brutality and deception of the Iraq war mirrors Britain's recent imperial history

Mark Curtis
Tuesday October 26, 2004
The Guardian

<snip>British ministers' claim to be defending civilisation against barbarity in Iraq finds a powerful echo in 1950s Kenya, when Britain sought to smash an uprising against colonial rule. Yet, while the British media and political class expressed horror at the tactics of the Mau Mau, the worst abuses were committed by the occupiers. The colonial police used methods like slicing off ears, flogging until death and pouring paraffin over suspects who were then set alight.

British forces killed around 10,000 Kenyans during the Mau Mau campaign, compared with the 600 deaths among the colonial forces and European civilians. Some British battalions kept scoreboards recording kills, and gave £5 rewards for the first sub-unit to kill an insurgent, whose hands were often chopped off to make fingerprinting easier. "Free fire zones" were set up, where any African could be shot on sight.

As opposition to British rule intensified, brutal "resettlement" operations, which led to the deaths of tens of thousands, forced around 90,000 into detention camps. In this 1950s version of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, forced labour and beatings were systematic and disease rampant. Former camp officers described "short rations, overwork, brutality and flogging" and "Japanese methods of torture".

Guerrillas resisting British rule were routinely designated "terrorists", as now in Iraq. Britain never admitted that it was opposing a popular, nationalist rebellion in Kenya.

[Carolab]

1. I remember this well.

My father was supposed to move us to Kenya, for a job he was offered there. We didn't go because "they were hanging white people in the trees" or some such nonsense. I had images of savage tribes boiling missionaries in those big black cauldrons, like in the cartoons.

[NNN0LHI]

2. Did your father ever find out the worst abuses in Kenya were committed...

...by the British occupiers?

Don

[Carolab]

3. I don't know. He died shortly afterward and I never asked him. n/t