Eight months after the Mau Mau insurgency broke out in October 1952, General Sir George Erskine, a personal friend of Churchill’s, was sent out to Kenya to investigate. In a report to the then secretary of state for war, Anthony Head, Erskine wrote: “I am quite certain prisoners were beaten to extract information. It’s a short step from beating to torture and I am now sure … that torture was a feature of many police posts.” This was in 1953. Erskine’s report was only declassified in 2005.
The use of torture was condoned at the highest levels as it was taking place, as Ian Cobain describes in his book Cruel Britannia. The colony’s attorney general, Eric Griffith-Jones, said the mistreatment of detainees was “distressingly reminiscent of conditions in Nazi Germany or communist Russia”, but agreed to draft new legislation sanctioning beatings as long as it was kept secret. “If we are going to sin, we must sin quietly,” he wrote.
It has taken 60 long years for a minister of the British government to come clean and, even then, William Hague’s statement of sincere regret, while welcome, fell short of a full apology. To apologise might be interpreted as admitting liability, and with pre-action letters received from lawyers representing former Eoka guerrillas in Cyprus, and others in Kenya considering claims, in addition to the 5,228 claimants compensated yesterday, the government continues to deny liability for the actions of the colonial administration.
A law lords ruling has set June 1954 as the earliest date from which future claims could be considered, and, as well as Cyprus, the government is thought to be vulnerable to claimants from Yemen for the treatment of detainees in Aden. Only the lack of security for British personal injury lawyers collecting evidence in Yemen might save the government’s bacon.
The denial of justice to victims of British torture, some of which Britain admits, is set to continue. Successive governments have fought this case doggedly through the courts – first arguing that the liability for such atrocities was inherited by the Kenyan republic as the successor to the Kenyan colony, and then saying that the claims were time-barred. The real argument is uncontestable: that by dragging this out, elderly victims might never achieve justice and redress for their appalling treatment.
Once this pandora’s box is opened, it cannot be slammed shut again. To try to do so is to undermine Britain’s already battered moral authority in the world, after Iraq and Afghanistan. It is inconsistent with the spirit, if not the letter, of the United Nations convention against torture, and it fails to deal with dishonourable periods of our history. We, who are so quick to condemn others about human rights, must deal with our own dark deeds first.
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