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Tue May 22nd, 2007
UK denies liability for
torture claims
The British government has denied responsibility for
torture and other colonial-era atrocity claims from veterans
of the African independence movements such as Mau Mau one of
the Africa's most notorious independence uprising, the
veterans' lawyers said Tuesday.
London said British colonial rulers had not been acting on its
behalf and it therefore did not have to compensate,
particularly, six Kenyans claiming to have undergone inhuman
and degrading treatment by pre-independence administrators
during the 1950s.
The Mau Mau, which started as a grassroots movement among the
Kikuyu tribe to recover farmlands appropriated by British
colonial settlers, evolved into a full-fledged rebellion in
1952 that demanded Kenyan independence.
Its hit-and-run tactics against white settlers prompted a
heavy-handed response from colonial police and allied home
guards who rounded up thousands of young Kikuyu men and
allegedly brutalised and tortured many of them.
"The Crown was acting at all times until independence
in right of Kenya, not in right of the United Kingdom,"
the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) said in a letter
presented to a news conference in Nairobi.
Liability for torture should therefore be passed to the Kenyan
government, the FCO said in the letter dated April 2, in
response to a formal claim issued by the lawyers last October.
The FCO also said the claims were no longer valid because too
much time had lapsed since the crimes were allegedly
committed.
"Vindications of human rights violations are not limited
by time," said Mbugua Mureithi, one of the attorneys.
He described the FCO argument as "a constitutional theory
to bar the potentially many claims from (former British)
colonies."
The FCO also said that the colonial government had destroyed
much of the documentary evidence and it would be difficult to
identify the six claimants - in their 60s and 70s - as the
specific victims of torture in the named detention centres.
The Africans want an
apology from Britain
Kenyan Justice Minister Kiraitu Murungi urged Britain to
formally apologise for the brutality it committed against the
continent's independence fighters such as Mau Mau, during the
colonial period.
"I call upon the government of the United Kingdom, as a
civilised nation to do the honourable thing and issue a formal
apology to the Africans like the Mau Mau, their families and
the people of the continent for these barbaric crimes against
humanity," Murungi said.
Murungi was speaking on Thursday during the launch of a book,
Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End Of Empire In Kenya, by
Caroline Elkins of Harvard University, who argues that tactics
used by the British in their crackdown on the Africans such as
Mau Mau rebellion amounted to crimes against humanity.
Elkins writes that London's "draconian response"
to the independence fighters was to "treat and portray
them as sub-human savages".
"We want the British government to acknowledge their
wrongdoing and say sorry. It's only that way that we can say
that our humanity is recognised," said Paul Muite, a
Kenyan lawmaker, who is among a team of lawyers preparing to
sue Britain for compensation.
The freedom fighters have vowed to sue London for compensation
for the torture and atrocities inflicted during the brutal
repression of the Africans such as Mau Mau rebellion a half
century ago.
Crushed testicles, weeks of starvation, being tossed into hot
water and onto ant hills, being smeared with blood and
released to dogs, beatings, nakedness and having soil stuffed
into their rectums were just some of the litany of horrors the
Africans like Mau Mau claim to have been subjected to.
The Mau Mau which started as a grassroots movement among the
Kikuyu tribe to recover arable farmlands appropriated by
British colonial settlers, evolved into a full-fledged
rebellion in 1952 that demanded Kenyan independence.
Its hit-and-run tactics against white settlers prompted a
heavy-handed response from colonial police and allied home
guards and thousands of young Kikuyu men were rounded up and
died amid horrific brutality and torture.
In late 1952, the colonial authorities declared a state of
emergency that led to the detention of several members of the
Mau Mau political wing, including Jomo Kenyatta, the man who
in at independence in 1963 became Kenya's founding president.
esinislam.com + Agencies
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