The Caribbean case for Reparations from Britain

Reparations: a case for settlement

[A Rastafarian man holds up a cardboard placard calling for reparations during a demonstration as Britain’s Prince Harry visited the non-governmental organisation RISE in Kingston on March 6, 2012. – AP]

Courtenay Barnett, Guest Columnist, The Gleaner (Jamaica, West Indies), Sunday, June 30, 2013

This month, Her Majesty’s Government (HMG) was required to pay 19.9 million pounds in compensation to some 5,000 elderly Kenyans who were tortured and abused during the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s. This case bears lessons for the Caribbean and it also has much to teach about the true nature of the British Empire.

The British imposed themselves in Kenya and confiscated land. In 1948, a quarter-million Kenyans were confined to 2,000 square miles, while 30,000 English settlers lived on 12,000 square miles of the most fertile lands in Kenya. Africans under an apartheid and colonial policy were forbidden to enter certain areas and confined away from the most arable land.

Not surprisingly, the Kenyans rebelled and started a violent campaign against the white settlers in 1952. The colonialists responded, and the Kenya Human Rights Commission estimated that 90,000 Kenyans were executed, tortured or maimed. There was the use of literal concentration camps as a nationwide network of detention for some 160,000 who were detained in the most appalling conditions.

TORTURED

President Obama’s grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, happened to be one of those detained persons. He had pins placed into his fingernails and in his buttocks and his testicles were squeezed between metal rods. Other Kenyans were forcibly relocated in new villages. Within the camps, the British inflicted beatings, castrated, raped and performed other forms of sexual abuse and torture applying brutal interrogation techniques against the Kenyans.

It was against this background that elderly Kenyans who had suffered abuse when detained filed a claim in the English High Court. Two of the original five claimants had been castrated and an African lady who had been raped was included in the claim.

Margaret Thatcher’s death greeted with street parties in Brixton and Glasgow

Crowds shout ‘Maggie Maggie Maggie, dead dead dead’ during impromptu events

Barry Neild

guardian.co.uk, Monday 8 April 2013

Several hundred people gathered in south London on Monday evening to celebrate Margaret Thatcher‘s death with cans of beer, pints of milk and an impromptu street disco playing the soundtrack to her years in power.

Young and old descended on Brixton, a suburb which weathered two outbreaks of rioting during the Thatcher years. Many expressed jubilation that the leader they loved to hate was no more; others spoke of frustration that her legacy lived on.

To cheers of “Maggie Maggie Maggie, dead dead dead,” posters of Thatcher were held aloft as reggae basslines pounded.

Clive Barger, a 62-year-old adult education tutor, said he had turned out to mark the passing of “one of the vilest abominations of social and economic history”.

He said: “It is a moment to remember. She embodied everything that was so elitist in terms of repressing people who had nothing. She presided over a class war.”

She Almost Stopped the War

Katharine Gun: Ten years on,  what happened to the woman who revealed dirty tricks on the UN Iraq war vote?

In the run-up to the critical vote on war in Iraq, Katharine Gun exposed a US plot to spy on the UN. As a film of her story is planned, she tells of her anger and frustration – but not her regrets

Martin Bright,  The Observer, Saturday 2 March 2013

[Katharine Gun back in Cheltenham last week: ‘This is the ugly truth of what goes on.’ Photograph: Andy Hall for the Observer]

Ten years ago, a young Mandarin specialist at GCHQ, the government’s surveillance centre in Cheltenham, did something extraordinary. Katharine Gun, a shy and studious 28-year-old who spent her days listening in to obscure Chinese intercepts, decided to tell the world about a secret plan by the US government to spy on the United Nations.

She had received an email in her inbox asking her and her colleagues to help in a vast intelligence “surge” designed to secure a UN resolution to send troops into Iraq. She was horrified and leaked the email to the Observer. As a result of the story the paper published 10 years ago this weekend, she was arrested, lost her job and faced trial under the Official Secrets Act.

The memo from Frank Koza, chief of staff at the “regional targets” section of the National Security Agency, GCHQ’s sister organisation in the US, remains shocking in its implications for British sovereignty. Koza was in effect issuing a direct order to the employees of a UK security agency to gather “the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals or to head off surprises”. This included a particular focus on the “swing nations” on the security council, Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria and Guinea, “as well as extra focus on Pakistan UN matters”.

A Week of Action to Ground the Drones

Drone Wars UK

1-8 October 2011

The Drones Campaign Network in the UK is calling for a week of action to protest the growing use of armed drones from 1st – 8th October.  The week will be part of the international ‘Keep Space for Peace Week’, which this year is focusing on the use of drones.

Recently, Libya has been added to the list of countries subjected to  drone strikes by US and British forces, joining Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and  Iraq.  Gaza, too it hardly needs to be said, has regularly faced drone strikes by Israeli forces.  Unfortunately, the list of countries facing these kind of remote attacks is only likely to grow as US military procurement plans,  released in June show that the Pentagon is planning to double its arsenal of large military drones over the next decade.   The UK has also announced plans to double the number of armed drones in its arsenal.

Protests against drone strikes are growing in Pakistan and Yemen and the peace and human rights community in the UK needs to add their voices to this call to Ground the Drones

Members of the network will be organising protests at various sites connected to the drone wars throughout the UK.  Details will be announced nearer the time.

However if you can’t attend one of these events you may well want to organise something in your local area.  Suggestions include meeting with your local MP, organising a speaker meeting about drones or having a stall in your local high street with information and letter/petition signing.

Further details and resources will be available here as we get closer to the event.

Please put the dates in your diary NOW and begin thinking about what you can do locally to Ground the Drones

Blair agreed to train Gaddafi’s special forces in ‘deal in the desert’

[The extensive collaboration between imperialist powers and Muammar Gaddafi–especially in the last decade–has been ever more deeply exposed in recent reports.  The extensive oil contracting, and the joint US-UK-EU-Libyan “war on terror” measures developed since early in the Bush-Blair period, have been coming to light.  This article traces a military, and internal Libyan, component of this relationship. — Frontlines ed.]

By Rosa Prince, The Daily Telegraph

February 28, 2011

Tony Blair used his final foreign trip as prime minister to sign a confidential deal with Moammar Gadhafi to train Libyan special forces and supply him with Nato secrets.

A copy of the accord obtained by The Daily Telegraph shows that the two leaders agreed to co-operate on defence matters in a range of areas, including exchanging information about defence structures and technology.

It was signed during the former Labour prime minister’s “Blair-well” tour of Africa in May 2007, in Gaddafi’s tent in the Libyan desert.

Included in the document was an agreement on “co-operation in the training of specialised military units, special forces and border security units”.

London: Led by military families, 10,000 march against NATO war in Afghanistan

Military families lead anti-war protest in London as Nato leaders agree on exit strategy

A demonstrator walks through London before a protest against the Afghanistan war.

The Guardian UK,  20 November 2010

 

Thousands of protesters have marched through London against the war in Afghanistan as Nato leaders agreed a strategy to withdraw their troops from the country.

The demonstration, which organisers said was 10,000-strong, came as the prime minister, David Cameron, said the withdrawal of British combat troops from Afghanistan by 2015 was a “firm deadline” that would be met.

Speaking at a Nato summit in Lisbon, Cameron said Afghan forces would begin taking charge of security from early next year and the security handover would be complete by the end of 2014. “The commitment we have entered into today to transfer the lead responsibility for security to the Afghan government by the end of 2014 will pave the way for British combat troops to be out of Afghanistan by 2015. This is a firm deadline that we will meet.”

The protesters were led by military families, including those of soldiers killed in the conflict.

British government settles rendition cases, avoids court battle in which details of CIA torture would come out

Map of flights to CIA "black site" prisons where it could waterboard prisoners and use other forms of torture--while US government officials denied that these illegal practices were being used

Britain to Settle Rendition, Torture Case for Millions

By William Fisher

NEW YORK, Nov 16, 2010 (IPS) – The British government will reportedly pay millions in compensation to seven British nationals who were unlawfully “rendered” to U.S.-run prisons and tortured with the cooperation of British intelligence.

The British press is reporting that ministers and the security services appear to have decided that exposure of thousands of documents in open court was a risk they could not take. The documents presumably would confirm British complicity with the U.S. in the so-called “extraordinary rendition” of terrorist suspects.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) represents two of those slated to receive reparations in a lawsuit against Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen DataPlan for its role in the U.S. extraordinary rendition programme. The organisation said in a statement it was “deeply troubling that while the U.K. and many other countries are now acknowledging and addressing their official complicity in the Bush administration’s human rights abuses, here in the United States the [Barack] Obama administration continues to shield the architects of the torture program from civil liability while Bush-era officials, including former President Bush and former Vice President Cheney, boast of their crimes on national television.”

The ACLU added, “To date, not a single victim of the Bush administration’s torture program has had his day in a U.S. court. The U.S. can no longer stand silently by as other nations reckon with their own agents’ complicity in the torture programme. Reckoning with the legacy of torture would restore our standing in the world, reassert the rule of law and strengthen our democracy.”