The Blood Spattered Legacy of Crimes Against Humanity of the British Empire

By Ananda-USA

November 18, 2013

If  Sri Lanka is hauled up by the United Kingdom in front of the UNHRC meeting in Geneva next March as UK Premier David Cameron has threatened to do, Sri Lanka’s UNHRC team should ENTER INTO THE PERMANENT UNHRC RECORD a FULL LIST of the global WAR CRIMES and HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS by the United Kingdom, and DEMAND EQUAL ACCOUNTABILITY from the United Kingdom.

So far, the United Kingdom, has gotten away scot-free with war-mongering and killing innocents all over the world with absolute IMPUNITY, with a slap on the wrist by the captive puppet United Nations and the International Criminal Court. Let us now shine a bright light on the war crimes skeleton’s stacked to the ceiling in the historical cupboard of this self-appointed holier-than-thou HYPOCRITICAL COUNTRY, immersed up to the neck in far greater war crimes, waging a global war against other distant nations to preserve its Imperialist hegemony and accusing sovereign nations defending their own people against foreign sponsored terrorism on their own territory.

A PARTIAL list of these British CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY, culled from sources on the Web, is given below:

…. The ILLEGAL unpunished war in Iraq without UN sanction and based on false fabricated allegations of WMD production by the Iraqis, extinguished over 1.5 million Iraqi lives as estimated by the British Medical Association’s Lancet journal staff. During the first years of British rule in Iraq, numerous attacks on civilians were carried out, including village burning and indiscriminate bombing.

…. Raping of local German women was a common feature among British troops in post-WWII occupation of Germany. Even elderly women were targeted. The Royal Military Police tended to turn a blind eye towards abuse of German prisoners and civilians but rape was a major issue for them.

….The indiscriminate carpet bombing of Dresden, Germany that created a firestorm that killed over 100,000 people. While “no agreement, treaty, convention or any other instrument governing the protection of the civilian population or civilian property” from aerial attack was adopted before the war, the Hague Conventions did prohibit the bombardment of undefended towns. Allied forces inquiry concluded that an air attack on Dresden was militarily justified on the grounds the city was defended.

…. The summary execution of 7 captured Argentine soldiers by British soldiers in the Falklands war. In 1993, Argentine president Carlos Menem ordered an investigation into allegations that Argentine soldiers captured during the Battle of Mount Longdon had been executed by British paratroopers. The statements were said to confirm seven executions.

…. The GENOCIDE in Sri Lanka in the Uva-Welassa uprising of 1818. Tens of thousands of innocent villagers were slaughtered by marauding British troops, thousands of women raped, thousands of children decapitated, hundreds of thousands of homes burned, all cattle and other live stock killed, fruit trees cut down, rice fields and irrigation systems destroyed, and the land and the means of livelihood of the people laid waste, just as Gen. Tecumseh Sherman did fifty years later in his march from Atlanta to the Sea in the US Civil War.

…. The suppression of India’s 1857 Sepoy Mutiny including widespread summary executions across the countryside, particularly by forces under the command of Neill and Renaud; indiscriminate murder of civilians during the capture of Delhi; and the summary execution of the princes of Delhi and other Indian leaders,

….. The abuse and murder of Boer civilians in the Second Boer War, when the British Empire ordered the civilian internment of the Afrikaner population into concentration camps, killing around 34,000 people. A later Prime Minister, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, declared in the British Parliament on 14 June 1901: “When is a war not a war? When it is waged in South Africa by methods of barbarism.”

…. The murder of German naval prisoners from two German submarines, U-27 and U-41, which were sunk by the British Q-ship HMS Baralong between August and September 1915. In the first case, a number of survivors were summarily executed by Baralong´s crew members under orders of Lieutenant Godfrey Herbert on 19 August 1915. The massacre was reported to a newspaper by American citizens on board Nicosia, a British freighter loaded with war supplies which was stopped by U-27 just minutes before the incident. On 24 September, Baralong destroyed U-41, which was in the process of sinking the cargo ship Urbino. According to Karl Goetz, the U-41′s commander, the British vessel continued flying the U.S. flag after opening fire on the submarine, and the lifeboat carrying the German survivors was rammed and sunk by the British Q-ship.

…. The use of chemical weapons in WW-I. Poison gas was introduced by Imperial Germany, and was subsequently used by all major belligerents (including Britain) in the war against enemy soldiers, in violation of the 1899 Hague Declaration Concerning Asphyxiating Gases and the 1907 Hague Convention on Land Warfare, which prohibited the use of “poison or poisoned weapons” in warfare.

….. The killing of Irish civilians in retaliation for Bloody Sunday violence in Dublin on 21 November 1920 in which the IRA assassinated 13 British intelligence agents. That same afternoon, a joint force of British soldiers, policemen, and paramilitaries opened fire in retaliation on a crowd attending a Gaelic football match in Croke Park, killing 14 civilians and wounding 68. The British are responsible for many other atrocities in Ireland, including engineering the Potato famine that killed tens of thousands of Irishmen.

…. The greatest genocide of the 20-th century was not the Holocaust in German death camps during WW-II, but the Bengal famine in India as late as 1943, caused due to English atrocities and food shipments to the UK from India. Mass stockpile of food grain harvested in the state of Bengal, were taken away and hoarded by the English in anticipation of Japanese attack. Very seldom has this genocide been mentioned in historical records. More than 3 million people perished. Never has England acknowledged this fact, and never will they include this in their historical records. It is an absolute shame. This aspect places England not much better than some of the merciless regimes of the modern era that have absolutely no remorse for the crimes they have committed.

…. The mass murder by engineered famines in Colonial India. In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, published in 2001, Mike Davis tells the story of the famines which killed between 12 and 29 million Indians. These people were, he demonstrates, murdered by British state policy.

When an El Nino drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau in 1876 there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. But the viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent its export to England. In 1877 and 1878, at height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat. As the peasants began to starve, government officials were ordered “to discourage relief works in every possible way”. The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited “at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices.” The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. Within the labour camps, the workers were given less food than the inmates of Buchenwald. In 1877, monthly mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94%.

As millions died, the imperial government launched “a militarized campaign to collect the tax arrears accumulated during the drought.” The money, which ruined those who might otherwise have survived the famine, was used by Lytton to fund his war in Afghanistan. Even in places which had produced a crop surplus, the government’s export policies, like Stalin’s in the Ukraine, manufactured hunger. In the North-western provinces, Oud and the Punjab, which had brought in record harvests in the preceding three years, at least 1.25m died.

….. The slaughter of 100,000 people by violence and engineered famine in Kenya. Three recent books – Britain’s Gulag by Caroline Elkins, Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson and Web of Deceit by Mark Curtis – show how white settlers and British troops suppressed the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya in the 1950s. Thrown off their best land and deprived of political rights, the Kikuyu started to organise – some of them violently – against colonial rule. The British responded by driving up to 320,000 of them into concentration camps. Most of the remainder – over a million – were held in “enclosed villages”. Prisoners were questioned with the help of “slicing off ears, boring holes in eardrums, flogging until death, pouring paraffin over suspects who were then set alight, and burning eardrums with lit cigarettes.” British soldiers used a “metal castrating instrument” to cut off testicles and fingers. “By the time I cut his balls off,” one settler boasted, “he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket”. The soldiers were told they could shoot anyone they liked “provided they were black”. Elkins’s evidence suggests that over 100,000 Kikuyu were either killed by the British or died of disease and starvation in the camps. David Anderson documents the hanging of 1090 suspected rebels: far more than the French executed in Algeria. Thousands more were summarily executed by soldiers, who claimed they had “failed to halt” when challenged.

…. At least twenty more atrocities were overseen and organised by the British government or British colonial settlers. They include, for example, the Tasmanian genocide, the use of collective punishment in Malaya, the bombing of villages in Oman, the dirty war in North Yemen, the evacuation of Diego Garcia. Some of them might trigger a vague, brainstem memory in a few thousand readers, but most people would have no idea what I’m talking about. Max Hastings, in the Guardian today, laments our “relative lack of interest in Stalin and Mao’s crimes.” But at least we are aware that they happened.

…. The enslavement of whole Indian villages and transporting them as bonded laborers to work in other British colonies in Asia, Africa and the West Indies. This is how many of the Indian communities in other colonized countries were created.

…. The production of Opium in India and its sale under military threats (i.e., the Opium Wars) to the people of Imperial China to convert them wholesale into drug addicts.

Seeing little to gain from trade with European countries, the Chinese Qing emperor permitted Europeans to trade only at the port of Canton, and only through licensed Chinese merchants. For years, foreign merchants accepted Chinese rules—but by 1839 the British, who were the dominant trading group, were ready to flex their muscles.

They had found a drug that the Chinese would buy: opium. Grown legally in British India, opium was smuggled into China, where its use and sale became illegal after the damaging effects it had on the Chinese people.

With its control of the seas, the British easily shut down key Chinese ports and forced the Chinese to negotiate—marking the beginning of what is known as the “one hundred years of humiliation” for the Chinese. Dissatisfied with the resulting agreement, the British sent a second and larger force that took even more coastal cities, including Shanghai. The ensuing Opium War was settled at gunpoint; the resulting Treaty of Nanjing opened five ports to international trade, fixed the tariff on imported goods at five percent, imposed an indemnity of twenty-one million ounces of silver on China to cover Britain’s war expenses, and ceded the island of Hong Kong to Great Britain.

This treaty satisfied neither side. Between 1856 and 1860, Britain and France renewed hostilities with China. Seventeen thousand British and French troops occupied Beijing and set the Imperial Palace on fire. Another round of harsh treaties gave European merchants and missionaries greater privileges, and forced the Chinese to open several more cities to foreign trade and opium sales.

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