Posts Tagged ‘history’
British Empire systematically destroyed war crime documents: Not to fall into the hands of post-independence States?
Posted on: April 20, 2012
British Empire systematically destroyed war crime documents: Not to fall into the hands of post-independence States?
Ian Cobain published in The Guardian on April 17, 2012:
“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.
![[Paper burning in recycle barrel via Shutterstock]](https://i0.wp.com/www.rawstory.com/rs/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Paper-burning-in-recycle-barrel-via-Shutterstock.jpg "Paper burning in recycle barrel via Shutterstock")
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 papers at Hanslope Park include monthly intelligence reports on:
1. the “elimination” of the colonial authority’s enemies in 1950s Malaya;
2. records showing ministers in London were aware of the torture and murder of Mau Mau insurgents in Kenya, including a case of a man said to have been “roasted alive”;
3. papers detailing the lengths to which the UK went to forcibly remove islanders from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean (a US most important military outpost 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 destroyed 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, 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:
1. records of the abuse of Mau Mau insurgents detained by British colonial authorities, who were tortured and sometimes murdered;
2. reports that may have detailed the alleged massacre of 24 unarmed villagers in Malaya by soldiers of the Scots Guards in 1948;
3. most of the sensitive documents kept by colonial authorities in Aden (Yemen), where the army’s Intelligence Corps operated a secret torture centre for several years in the 1960s;
4. 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.
It is a case that is being closely watched by Former Eoka guerillas who were detained by the British in 1950s Cyprus, and possibly by many others who were imprisoned and interrogated between 1946 and 1967, as Britain fought a series of rearguard actions across its rapidly diminishing empire.
The documents show that colonial officials were instructed to separate those papers to be left in place after independence – usually known as “Legacy files” – from those that were to be selected for destruction or removal to the UK. In many colonies, these were described as watch files, and stamped with a red-letter W.
The papers at Kew depict a period of mounting anxiety amid fears that some of the incriminating watch files might be leaked. Officials were warned that they would be prosecuted if they took any paperwork home – and some were.
As independence grew closer, large caches of files were removed from colonial ministries to governors’ offices, where new safes were installed.
In Uganda, the process was codenamed Operation Legacy. In Kenya, a vetting process, described as “a thorough purge”, was overseen by colonial Special Branch officers.
Clear instructions were issued that no Africans were to be involved: only an individual who was “a servant of the Kenya government who is a British subject of European descent” could participate in the purge.
Painstaking measures were taken to prevent post-independence governments from learning that the watch files had ever existed. One instruction states: “The legacy files must leave no reference to watch material. Indeed, the very existence of the watch series, though it may be guessed at, should never be revealed.”
When a single watch file was to be removed from a group of legacy files, a “twin file” – or dummy – was to be created to insert in its place. If this was not practicable, the documents were to be removed en mass. There was concern that Macleod’s directions should not be divulged – “there is of course the risk of embarrassment should the circular be compromised” – and officials taking part in the purge were even warned to keep their W stamps in a safe place.
Many of the watch files ended up at Hanslope Park. They came from 37 different former colonies, and filled 200 metres of shelving. But it is becoming clear that much of the most damning material was probably destroyed.
Officials in some colonies, such as Kenya, were told that there should be a presumption in favour of disposal of documents rather than removal to the UK – “emphasis is placed upon destruction” – and that no trace of either the documents or their incineration should remain. When documents were burned, “the waste should be reduced to ash and the ashes broken up”.
Some idea of the scale of the operation and the amount of documents that were erased from history can be gleaned from a handful of instruction documents that survived the purge. In certain circumstances, colonial officials in Kenya were informed, “it is permissible, as an alternative to destruction by fire, for documents to be packed in weighted crates and dumped in very deep and current-free water at maximum practicable distance from the coast”.
Documents that survive from Malaya suggest a far more haphazard destruction process, with relatively junior officials being permitted to decide what should be burned and what should be sent to London.
Dr Ed Hampshire, diplomatic and colonial record specialist at the National Archive, said the 1,200 files so far transferred from Hanslope Park represented “gold dust” for historians, with the occasional nugget, rather than a haul that calls for instant reinterpretation of history.
Only one sixth of the secret archive has so far been transferred. The remainder are expected to be at Kew by the end of 2013.”
I wonder: “Has all files of the crimes of the British Empire committed in Palestine between 1935-38 are still kept for history research?” Mind you that Britain dispatched 100,000 soldiers to tame a civil disobedience uprising in Palestine and the most cruel techniques and methods of torture and humiliation were applied. Nazi Germany applied the British torture techniques to the letter and how to quell uprising and dissatisfaction…
Babel, Babylon: A historic site, a city, a kingdom, a “communication confuser”…?
Posted on: April 4, 2012
Babel, Babylon: A historic site, a city, a kingdom, a “communication confuser”…?
Babel is Bab Eblo in Babylonian language, which translates to Bab Eel (Door of the God) in Sumerian language and called Kad Nekrowa 6,000 years BC. Babel is situated 60 km south of Bagdad and became famous during the Akkadian Kingdom around 3,350 BC and later during Hammurabi, the king who is renowned for the first laws penalizing builders for defective constructions…
River Euphrates flowed by Babel, bu the river is very distant now from its original bed. Later, the Persian kingdom built their Capital Ctesiphon south of Bagdad and on the eastern side of the Tigres River. Babel and this region was the center of the universe for thousand of years, and Babylon was the center between 562-604 BC during the reign of Nabukhodnossor who ruled over Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Egypt…Babel was rediscovered by German archeologists around 1899, particularly by Robert Coldway.
Babel northern entrance was dedicated to goddess Ishtar (goddess of fertility) and the huge door was transported to Berlin. The door was painted of 575 animal species, and the dragon (dedicated to God Marduk) had a fish body, the tail of a serpent, the front legs were a lion, and the hind legs those of an eagle.
The south castle was the heart of the city and spanned 52,000 square-meter and had 172 rooms. Each of the 5 successive esplanade, stretching from east to west, had specific function, and the south side on each esplanade had a huge community housing. The central esplanade was the Throne headquarter. The third is recorded to witness Alexander death in 323 BC and who offered sacrifices every day during his stay in Babylon. Actually, Babylon was Alexander capital for 9 years.
The Street of Victory was on the north side and 60 sculpted lions were lined on the sides. The Street was used for religious ceremonies, especially on Babylon New Year that started on April and celebrations extended for 11 days. The festivities begin at the Tower of Babel, pass through the temples, to the north area, and end at the House of Celebration (Beit Akito)
The long and vast Street of Victory was in asphalt, a tar product extracted from the Heat region in Ramadi, and scientists are still unable to reconstitute this product. Mind you that oil products, afloat in abundance in the south regions, were known at the period and the cities in Iraq were lit by oil lamps.
By the south-east side of Ishtar Door is the main temple called A-Mach (the High House). A well was in its center for the virgin girls to bath before getting wed during the New Year. Alexander offered sacrifices in this temple.
There is this famous Babel Lion of one block of basalt and weighting about 5 tons, and sitting on a base representing the various vanquished people. The rock is from north current Syria and brought via the Euphrates River.
The US military used this particular historic site as one of the major headquarter and vandalized the site and transported the precious artifacts and sold many of them. Later, the US returned a few historic pieces to the Iraqi government.
“Shaking off, Civil Disobedience movements”: Palestinian Intifadas of 1936,1987, 2000, and 2011…
Posted on: December 13, 2011
Palestinian Intifadas “shaking off civil disobedience movements”: 1936,1987, 2000, and 2011
I still cannot believe how this Palestinian people managed to survive as an entity after a century of continuous pogroms and programs to wipe this tenacious people out from the consciousness of world community, as a people entitled for a State and the dignity of a special community that lived for centuries in the same land of Palestine.
Starting in 1918, and for over 18 years, the British mandated power over Palestine refused to hold any election of any kinds (even local and municipal elections) for the Palestinian people.
France had already executed democratic elections for parliaments in Syria and Lebanon since 1920! Why England failed to emulate democratic processes in its mandated States? The Jews represented one tenth of the population. The Zionist organization refused to have any sort of democratic elections in Palestine until the immigrant Jews reached a majority of the population.
In 1936, Sheikh Al Qassam was assassinated and the Palestinian civil disobedience lasted three years.
The mandated British power dispatched 100,000 soldiers to quell the uprising, using harsher new military laws, new torture techniques, new terrorist methods…
All the modern Torture techniques that Nazi Germany studied and applied…
All the terrorist methods that the Zionist State retained in its laws and legal books, applied and went even further until today…
All of the movement containment methods that Israel transferred to the US domestic security forces after 9/11 attack, on the ground of fighting “terrorists” and are still applied on the protesters of Occupy Wall Street
During the WWII, the British mandate refused to enlist Palestinians in its army, but strongly encouraged the Jews in Palestine to enlist, learn how to fight, do war, learn terror tactics, and amass weapons for the next phase after the war.
In 1948, the State of Israel executed its plans and programs that it worked upon in the late 30’s, with the facilitation of the British in providing all kinds of intelligence pieces and data on the Palestinian towns and villages.
The Palestinians were forced by random violence and genocide tactics to flee, transfer, and evacuate their homes, villages and lands…Over 400,000 Palestinians fled to temporary refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria…
Temporary camps that evolved to be permanent shantytown residence for the next 60 years…
In 1973, the hideous Golda Meir PM, proclaimed: “Palestinians? There is no Palestinian people, period...”
In 1982 and 2003 Ariel Sharon committed two genocides against the Palestinian civilian refugees. In the Sabra and Shatila (Chatila) camps (Beirut), the genocides that lasted three nights and three days: 2,000 were buried hastily in dug up graveyards, less than a meter deep, and another 1,000 were carried away, never to reappear.
Solemn U.S. security guarantees for safeguarding the unarmed Palestinians in the camps were proven untrustworthy, as Ambassador Philip Habib of President Reagan acknowledged.
In 2003, The camp of Jennine in the occupied West Bank, the genocide lasted an entire week. Over 5,000 civilians were buried in a crater larger and deeper than Ground Zero in New York. Tanks rolled over live children, women, and elderly people…
Of the many genocides committed on Palestinians, the “advanced” democracies in Europe and the USA didn’t bat an eyelid…
Israel invaded Lebanon on June 6, 1982, put siege on West Beirut, cut off water supply, electricity, food supply… for 3 months and bombarded the city by air, sea and land. Israel entered the Capital Beirut and forced the PLO to vacate Lebanon to Tunisia and Yemen…
Israel carried out assassinations of the Palestinian leadership in Tunis (October 1985).
In the spring of 1987, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) met in Algeria and a significant unity in the ranks was accomplished and the decision to getting the Palestinians inside the occupied land to rise and confront their occupiers.
As the Arab Summit held in Amman (Jordan) in the fall 1987 virtually ignored the plight of the Palestinian people under occupation, the spirit of the occupied Palestinians rose to the challenge: This spirit of determination moved on the ground, using civil disobedience, stones, rocks and bare flesh…all that they ever had…
The catalyst for the First Intifada movement started as a protest after 4 Palestinians in Gaza were killed when an Israeli truck collided with two vans carrying Palestinian workers.
On that first day, the Israeli authorities shot and killed a number of Palestinians, including an infant, Fatmeh Alqidri of Gaza City. The protests spread immediately to Nablus on the West Bank the next day, where the Israeli authorities shot and killed more unarmed Palestinians, including eighteen-year-old Ibrahim Ekeik.
Protests broke out in East Jerusalem on December 13, and by the end of the first week, a general strike had paralyzed all of the Occupied Territories. Ensuing clashes spread throughout the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza.
Stones, rocks, bare flesh…against bullets, teargas, helmets
The protests occurred in the context of increasing violence by heavily armed settlers in the Occupied Territories against the unarmed Palestinian people, growing unemployment and rising national consciousness, and the political mobilization which had taken place in the Diaspora since the 1960s, and especially since Israel’s invasion of Lebanon on June 6, 1982, entering Capital Beirut and forcing the PLO to vacate Lebanon to Tunisia and Yemen…
The Intifada was a popular, national rebellion, carried by the youth (some 60 per cent of the society was under the age of 15) with the active participation of Palestinian workers and all sections of the society.
Palestinians resigned from the local police forces and from the civil administration, and Palestinian shopkeepers attempted to set their own hours and prices.
The Intifada organized “people committees“, many of them publishing their own information and news bulletins, exposing the day-to-day reality of life under occupation and spreading the communiques of the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising — a coalition of the main political parties — with the goal to end the Israeli occupation and establish Palestinian independence.
The response of the State of Israel was characteristic of its entire policy since before it was created in 1948: Random acts of violence, terrorism, closing the Palestinian universities and schools, deporting activists, scorching and destroying homes, and firing live ammunition and “rubber” bullets into crowds, especially of youth.
By July 1, 1988, the Israeli Central Command declared all the Palestinian popular committees to be illegal.
In 1989, the number of soldiers deployed by Israel to the West Bank was more than 3 times the number used to conquer it during the Six Day war (1967), when vast numbers of Palestinians were driven from their homes; some four hundred thousand Palestinians were displaced, about half of them displaced for the second time.
By the end of the first year of the Intifada the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces was 218, the injured were over 20,000, over 15,000 were arrested, 12,000 jailed and 34 deported under the pretext that they were “committee activists.
Over 1,500 Palestinians died and thousands more were maimed during the first Intifada, brought to an end by the Oslo process.
In November 1988, the Palestine National Council adopted its Declaration of Independence and announced the establishment of the State of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza, initially recognized by 55 countries. The number of States recognizing the Palestinian State has increased to 120 today.
At the end of the first war on Iraq in 1991, the US administration realized that the Palestinian problem must reach a resolution if any kinds of stability is to be sustained in the Middle East. President George Bush Senior inaugurated the “New Arab Order”: A conference was held in Madrid.
The Palestinians were inspired by the heroic resistance of the Lebanese people during Lebanon invasion in 1982. The First Palestinian Intifada in turn inspired the resistance of the Lebanese people to resume resistance against Israel’s illegal occupation of South Lebanon throughout the 1990’s.
The Oslo Accords of September 1993 refused to recognize the right of the Palestinians to their own sovereign State and the right of return of five million people in the Diaspora, who had been deported since 1948. As Rabin PM was assassinated by one of his Jewish bodyguard, the Oslo Accord faltered and stopped. Israel implemented its greatest expansion of colonial settlements into Palestinian territory (doubling between 1983 and 1991) — its policies of “Transfer and dispersal of the Palestinians”.
On September 28, 2000, candidate Ariel Sharon visited the Mosque, supported by thousands of security forces armed to the teeth, deployed in and around the Old City in Jerusalem. The Palestinians spontaneously unleashed their second popular Intifada (also known as the Al-Aqsa Intifada), in response to the calculated provocations of Ariel Sharon’s “visit” to the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Ensuing clashes with protestors, armed only with stones, left in the first two days alone five Palestinians dead and over 200 injured. The incident sparked a widespread uprising in the Occupied Territories, inside Israel and the Arab World, anger throughout the world and brought the peace process to a halt.
The Second Intifada forced Israel to build the Wall of Shame (strongly condemned by the UN) and vacating all Jewish settlements and Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip. In 2011, even the insipid Mahmoud Abbas (President of the Palestinian Authority) gave a speech in the UN demanding the recognition of a Palestinian State.
On the first Intifada on December 9, 1987, the Palestinian people gave political form and content to their more than 100-year-old struggle for self-determination and national independence, reflecting new levels of national unity not seen since the Great Revolt of the mid-1930’s.
Palestinian resisting and steadfast people , I salute you.
Note: Last week, Gingrich, the Republican Presidential candidate, proclaimed that there is no Palestinian people for any homeland.
Worse, every Palestinian is necessarily a terrorist…
Is Gingrich running in the US or in Israel? Gingrich has Alzheimer disease? The Washington Post published a piece claiming that Gingrich is technically Not off the mark!
Horrors of the Longest March of: Mao’s communists retreat in 1935
It is Oct. 20, 1935. The Chinese communist party of Mao Tse Tong (The Chinese Red Army) is seriously attacked by the Nationalist forces of Chang Kai-Chek (Kuomintang) and is about to be wiped out, unless a hasty retreat to a safe refuge in the province of Shaanxi (North-West of China) is successful.
One hundred thousand communists began their retreat from the city of Ruijin in the Jiangxi province. Only 8 thousands arrived at destination after an entire year of steady progress over 10,000 kilometers in all kinds of weather and geographic conditions… It was the quickest, and most famished retreat of all times in history. The wife of Mao is pregnant and Mao is seriously sick with malaria and was using the sole horse available to the retreating army.
Every member had to carry his provisions: 5 pounds of rice, and on each side of a stick across the shoulders were hanging either two boxes of munition or grenades, and an empty large canister of kerosene filled with hand tools. Back packs contained a sleeping cover, a winter outfit, and three pairs of study shoes made of cord and reinforced with metal at the heel.
This huge army had no medicine and progressed for days without eating anything. Most of them died of illness and were left on side roads. During most of the retreat, the Red Army was harassed and attacked by the Kuomintang forces. This army had to cross a river at Luting hanging to a cable of a suspended bridge. The army had to traverse seven ranges of high mountains in winter and crossed deserts in summer time.
The humid soil prevented the soldiers of cooking whatever food they managed to scavenge. Thousands died of dysentery after eating raw rice and raw vegetables.
Chang Kai-Chek had decided to eradicate the communists, even though Japan had started its invasion of China. By 1937, Chang Kai-Chek realized the impossibility of wiping out the communist forces and agreed on a truce to opposing the Japanese forces. Once the Japanese army vacated China in 1945, hostility resumed.
The US tested its newly acquired biological weapons on the Red Army, but the communists had the upper hand in 1949. Chang Kai-Chek fled to Taiwan and established his rule on this nearby island. Mao had stated: “Power is won by armed forces”
Note 1: Curious to know a sample of what happened after Mao gained power? https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2011/09/14/the-chant-of-martyrs-in-the-death-camps-of-china-mao/
Note 2: Story extracted from “365 dates that made history” by W.B. Marsh and Bruce Carrick
Adonis Diaries 