British war crimes covered up by destruction of colonial records

[Cain]

The Guardian has an in-depth report today on things long suspected, but hard to prove:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/18/britain-destroyed-records-colonial-crimes

Thousands of documents detailing some of the most shameful acts and crimes committed during the final years of the British empire were systematically destroyed to prevent them falling into the hands of post-independence governments, an official review has concluded.

Those papers that survived the purge were flown discreetly to Britain where they were hidden for 50 years in a secret Foreign Office archive, beyond the reach of historians and members of the public, and in breach of legal obligations for them to be transferred into the public domain.

The archive came to light last year when a group of Kenyans detained and allegedly tortured during the Mau Mau rebellion won the right to sue the British government. The Foreign Office promised to release the 8,800 files from 37 former colonies held at the highly-secure government communications centre at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire.

The historian appointed to oversee the review and transfer, Tony Badger, master of Clare College, Cambridge, says the discovery of the archive put the Foreign Office in an "embarrassing, scandalous" position. "These documents should have been in the public archives in the 1980s," he said. "It's long overdue." The first of them are made available to the public on Wednesday at the National Archive at Kew, Surrey.

The papers at Hanslope Park include monthly intelligence reports on the "elimination" of the colonial authority's enemies in 1950s Malaya; records showing ministers in London were aware of the torture and murder of Mau Mau insurgents in Kenya, including a case of aman said to have been "roasted alive"; and papers detailing the lengths to which the UK went to forcibly remove islanders from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

However, among the documents are a handful which show that many of the most sensitive papers from Britain's late colonial era were not hidden away, but simply destroyed. These papers give the instructions for systematic destruction issued in 1961 after Iain Macleod, secretary of state for the colonies, directed that post-independence governments should not get any material that "might embarrass Her Majesty's government", that could "embarrass members of the police, military forces, public servants or others eg police informers", that might compromise intelligence sources, or that might "be used unethically by ministers in the successor government".

Among the documents that appear to have been destroyed were: records of the abuse of Mau Mau insurgents detained by British colonial authorities, who were tortured and sometimes murdered; reports that may have detailed the alleged massacre of 24 unarmed villagers in Malaya by soldiers of the Scots Guards in 1948; most of the sensitive documents kept by colonial authorities in Aden, where the army's Intelligence Corps operated a secret torture centre for several years in the 1960s; and every sensitive document kept by the authorities in British Guiana, a colony whose policies were heavily influenced by successive US governments and whose post-independence leader was toppled in a coup orchestrated by the CIA.

The documents that were not destroyed appear to have been kept secret not only to protect the UK's reputation, but to shield the government from litigation. If the small group of Mau Mau detainees are successful in their legal action, thousands more veterans are expected to follow.

But some files were retrieved

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/18/colonial-office-eliminations-malayan-insurgency?intcmp=239

The "elimination of ranking terrorists" was a repeated theme in secret monthly reports on casualty figures circulated by the director of intelligence in British-controlled Malaya during the 1950s.

Long-lost files from the "emergency" period, when insurgents attempted to drive out colonial occupiers, reveal how the protracted jungle war was fought to drive communist groups into submission and deprive them of food and support.

The first tranche of documents belatedly transferred from the Foreign Office depository in Hanslope park, near Milton Keynes, to the National Archives in Kew, show how British officials in Kuala Lumpur interpreted virtually all anti-colonial protests as evidence of a planned communist takeover.

But many potentially embarrassing documents, including probably some of those relating to the alleged 1948 massacre by Scots Guards of 24 villagers in Batang Kali, appear to be missing.

These missing papers could have been among scores of files listed for destruction in the colony's final months.

A compensation claim by relatives and survivors of the killings – described by some as the "British My Lai massacre", after the US troop killings in Vietnam – is due to come to trial in London in May.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/18/archives-diego-garcia?intcmp=239

The extent to which successive British governments set out to hoodwink parliament and the public over the decision to give the US a military base in Diego Garcia and force out the islanders is laid bare in files released on Wednesday.

The base, on the largest island in the British Indian Ocean territory, was established after the UK bought the Chagos archipelago from Mauritius in 1965. It has been used by long-range US bombers in attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan, and would almost certainly be used in the event of any American air strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, British officials say.

Diego Garcia was used by the CIA as a refuelling stop for flights secretly rendering terror suspects to jails, including a Libyan dissident flown to Muammar Gaddafi's Libya in an operation involving MI6.

The aim behind the decision to control the islands, noted a Foreign Office official in a document dated September 1966 and marked "Secret and Guard", was to build "defence facilities ... without hindrance or political agitation".

In 1970, the Foreign Office told its officials at the UN to describe the islanders as "contract labourers" engaged to work on coconut plantations. "The merit of this line," it noted, "is that it does not give away the existence of the Ilois [the indigenous islanders] but is at the same time strictly factual."

Officials reported the prime minister, Ted Heath, as saying: "Any discussions between the United States and ourselves must remain confidential."

A year later, most of the islanders – about 1,500 in total, of whom 500 lived on Diego Garcia – were deported, mainly to Mauritius and Seychelles.

The Chagos Islands in particular is a very special stain on British history.  We deported an entire population, turned their home into an international torture chamber, and then mocked them when they organised themselves and protested to have their land back.

And we were spying on Obama's father

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/18/barack-obama-father-colonial-list?intcmp=239

The name of Barack Obama, the father of the American president, is on the top of a list of names revealed in a hitherto secret British colonial file of Kenyans studying in the US.

The file notes that the US state department had told British officials in 1959 that they were concerned Kenyan students in America had a reputation for "falling into the wrong hands".

US officials complained that Kenyan students were becoming "anti-American and anti-white" just at the time Barack Obama Senior was given a grant to study in America.

British colonial administrators in Nairobi expressed concern about the calibre of Kenyans receiving scholarships to go to US universities, claiming they were "academically inferior" to their contemporaries who stayed in Africa to study. They criticised a US-based body, the African American Students Foundation, which gave Obama Senior grants to study business administration at the University of Hawaii, Honululu. Supporters of the project included the singer Harry Belafonte, the actor Sidney Poitier, and the baseball player Jackie Robinson.

[Doktor Howl]

This sheds a little light on the "Malaysian Miracle". 

[Placid Dingo]

The Chagos Islands in particular is a very special stain on British history.  We deported an entire population, turned their home into an international torture chamber, and then mocked them when they organised themselves and protested to have their land back.

John Pilger's 'Freedom Next Time' has a fantastic account of this.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Holy shit.

[Cain]

This sheds a little light on the "Malaysian Miracle".

Indeed.  The other aspect Brecher has covered before - the Communists were mostly ethnic Chinese, not ethnic Malay.  The British strategy including inciting conflict against the Chinese as a whole, besieging the community while executing the militant/political leadership that allowed them to fight back.  Without that, they collapsed entirely.