read the independence facts of many countries fight colonialsm----
all tell the facts that anyone worked with colonial is traitor, is pengkhianat bangsa, is bastard of the bastard!!!!!!!!
these are facts!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
read more:
East Africa: Hooray All the Heroes, Saints And Foes Outsiders Have Chosen for Us
Joachim Buwembo22 May 2011
Email|Print|Comment
Share:
opinion
Nairobi — As the US and its allies go on high alert in face of an injured Al Qaeda, it would be interesting to imagine what Uganda's commander in chief would do if his security chiefs started spending more time in Taliban "madrasa" to the extent of neglecting their duties.
That is the feeling you get after reading the recently released book Mwanga II, Resistance to Imposition of British Colonial Rule In Buganda 1884 - 1899, by history professor Samwiri Lwanga Lunyiigo.
The book takes a new look at the Uganda Martyrs and the king blamed for their death. Lunyiigo's book meticulously examines archival evidence to show that the "martyrs" were executed more for political betrayal of their king than for their religious fervour.
What is more, some of these "saints" who will be feted by pilgrims from all over Africa next week on June 3, were top security chiefs whose successors holding their jobs today are generals like David Tinyefuza and Aronda Nyakairima.
St Joseph Mukasa Balikudembe was Kabaka Mwanga's chief of intelligence and St Andrea Kaggwa was deputy army commander.
They allegedly ignored the king's several warnings, even as sensitive intelligence started leaking to the enemy, like plans to deal with one Bishop Hannington who insisted on entering the kingdom using the vulnerable and prohibited eastern route through Busoga.
If Uganda's top military commanders compromised operations in the east (say, Somalia), would you blame Museveni if he threw them to a jittery court martial?
Long vilified as a killer of Christians, Mwanga actually loved Christianity more than his predecessors did.
He never killed anybody just for being Christian and, indeed, after the Namugongo "martyrdom," he appointed more Catholics to his new cabinet and gave them lots of powers.
While the "martyrs" can at best be called naïve, (rather unconvincing for security operatives) the most despicable fellows who enabled the British colonise the country were the Kabaka's top officials -- like premier Sir Apollo Kaggwa and the military turncoat commander Semei Kakungulu.
The UK government had no financial capacity to militarily conquer Uganda, which had no immediate mineral return, and had opted to abandon the costly venture.
But the ambitious missionaries insisted, to the extent of fundraising to bankroll the conquest.
Our kings, Mwanga and Kabalega were captured by African troops commanded by Baganda generals Semei Kakungulu and Andrew Lwandaga.
The British paid the Baganda traitors NOT with wealth from England, but with loot and land stolen from Buganda and Bunyoro.
The key important conclusion from Mwanga II is that colonialism was absolutely unnecessary; the so-called civilisation in the form of western education and infrastructure, were already under way before colonialism as Kabalega, Mwanga and his predecessors were keen on trading, interacting and gaining knowledge from the outside world.
Another sad myth busted is the so-called enmity between Baganda and Banyoro, cleverly fabricated by the victorious divide-and-rule writers. That some Ugandans ignorantly continue viewing Baganda as "the problem" is eloquent proof of Steve Biko's famous assertion that the oppressor's most potent weapon is the mind of the oppressed.
So we continue letting outsiders choose heroes, saints and enemies for us. No wonder Kampala still has street names like Siad Barre, Mobutu Sese Seko and Apolo Kaggwa.
Not surprisingly, Mwanga II has been published by a local venture, Wavah Books Ltd.
Joachim Buwembo is a Knight International fellow for development journalism
VVVVVVVVVVV
Forgotten claims? Forgotten heroes? Forgotten atrocities?
A People’s History of the British Empire:
A rebuttal to Furgusan, Boot, Kaplan & other Colonial aplogists.
“A conquered nation is like a man with cancer: he can think of nothing else.“ George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was right. Those who were able to expunge the cancer of Colonialism (India, Pakistan, Nigeria) are weak and had to overcome their hemerage. Those who were unable to overcome the occupation (the Native Americans, the Mayas, Incas, the Aborigines of Australia, the original people of the Caribbean etc.) are in a coma unable to remove the parasites.
The British were responsible for the death and destruction of millions of people in South Asia. London was a shanty-town in the 15thcentury, where Benaras, Calcutta and Delhi were the epitome of cosmopolitan and tolerance, industrialization, art, music and culture. The British destroyed the local industries. ”The What Man’s Burden” was to civilize the populations and “Christianize” them. Asian and African nations were called “tribes’ and European tribes were called “nations”.
The infrastructure of Britain, the roads, railways, sewer lines, water works, subway stations, electrical grids were built on the looted gold, spices, opium, sugar cane, and oil from the colonies. Entire civilizations were reduced to slavery which destroyed the peaceful village culture of Africa and Asia. Uprooted populations were sent to the cities with improper sanitation and facilities. This led to disasters which we are living with today.
With the destruction of the village culture, the population was at the mercy of the Centralized colonialists. The aim was to create chaos and turmoil. The result was pestilence, disease, and death.
Huge political issues have been left behind involving mass movement of populations from Europe to the colonies in Palestine, Azania (South Africa), Zimbabwe, Australia, New Zealand, Americas, South America. Intracable disputes were created which left the indiginous peoples to having to deal with the new realities in Palestine, Kashmir, China and many parts of Africa and Asia. Neocolonialism now takes advantage of these disputes.
The term “democracy” (which does not appear in the US contitution–se my articles on this site on how Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and Socrates wrote reams against this invention) was coined to disenfranchise the former rulers and upset the political systems of the indigenous populations. The colonies will never forget. The invoices have been prepared and ready to be mailed. There is some glacial progress in the United Nations and other international agencies.
Barely half a century later, the colonies are mocked, goaded and made fun of because of their penury. It is like a home invasion robber taking over your house stealing everything in it, raping your daughter, stealing your bank account and your lands, and leaving the street gang in charge of the ruins and a few days later driving by in your Mercedes making fun of your poverty.
THE EFFECTS OF COLONIALISM
Ayman El Amir syas the following:
“There was a trend during the colonial era among dominated peoples to pretend, by way of desperate resignation, that their colonial rulers were more benign than others. They thanked their lucky stars that the British administration, for example, was less brutal than the French who, in turn, were more merciful than the Portuguese. As four centuries of imperialism and colonialism have proven, the atrocities and consequences of the colonial era have belied the claim of “the white man’s burden” of extending the benefits of Western civilisation to the “primitive savages” they conquered.
The fact is that colonial powers plundered the wealth of future nation- states, displaced tribal populations, carved up territories, sowed the seeds of future inter-state and tribal conflicts, reduced the indigenous population to a sub-human status and enslaved them.
When the conquerors finally departed, they left virtually nothing in place to help colonised peoples develop independent governance or a meaningful political community. The legendary statesman Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, eloquently put it this way:
“It is far easier for the proverbial camel to pass through the needle’s eye, hump and all, than for an erstwhile colonial administration to give sound and honest counsel of a political nature to its liberated territory.”
Historically, the colonial experience leaves no doubt that all its protagonists sought to create a subject race of colonised peoples. Together with suppressive military power, the cultivation of this sense of inferiority facilitated the plundering of the colonial territories’ resources and the subjugation of their peoples. In Egypt, for example, the racist undertone of colonial rule was reflected in Lord Cromer’s memoirs, Modern Egypt.
As the British proconsul in Egypt from 1882 to 1907, Cromer denigrated Egypt’s centuries-old civilisation and multicultural tradition as “barbarous”, “coarse”, “cruel” and “lacking in harmony”. His prescription for the Egyptians was to abandon their crude cultural heritage, Pharaonic, Christian and Arab, and try to aspire to the superior ways of the civilised European colonialist. Brutal force and racist subjugation were the hallmark of colonial occupation and administration wherever invading imperial armies set foot.”
….British colonialism had its share of acts of genocide too, whether in the suppression of the Kikuyu tribes revolt in Kenya in the 1950s, the starvation of millions in India, or the Opium Wars against China in the mid-19th century, to name but a few.
The 1960 UN Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples was a watershed landmark ending the centuries-old colonial era.
Soon afterwards the US was involved in the Vietnam War that ended more than a decade later, leaving behind tens of thousands of American casualties and millions of Vietnamese dead, maimed or terminally ill by chemical defoliants. Like France, Britain and other colonial powers, the US never offered an apology to the Vietnamese people nor was it condemned for war crimes.Colonialism in all its abominable forms, whether direct military conquest or settler colonialism, has crept into the 21st century. Its cruelties are daily played out in Iraq and Palestine for the world to see and despair over.http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2007/854/op6.htm
THE BEGINING OF COLONIALISM IN THE SUBCONTINENT: The effects still remain in Bengal
Sankar Ray says the following about the begining of Colonialism in the Subcontinent:
“Two hundred and fifty years ago, on 23 June 1757, the last sovereign nawab of Bengal (which included present-day Bihar, West Bengal, Orissa and Bangladesh) was defeated on the banks of the Ganga by an army under the command of the British East India Company’s Colonel Robert Clive. The battle came to be known as the Battle of Plassey, after the mango orchard of Palashi, near Murshidabad, on which it was fought. Clive’s victory and the subsequent annexation of Bengal allowed the East India Company to strengthen its military might across India, paving the way for it to make massive economic gains – some would say plunder. “
In spite of the importance of this turning point in the region’s history, however, media pundits and historians throughout the Subcontinent showed little interest this past June in remembering the death of Nawab Mirza Muhammad Sirajuddaula (see pic), of his commanders Mir Madan and Mohanlal, or of the hundreds of soldiers who lost their lives on the day that British colonialism established its first territorial foothold on Southasian soil. Even as academics queued up in hope of publishing their essays on the mutinous events of 1857, which took place a full 100 years after the battle, the memorial in Plassey remained largely neglected. No government official deigned to lay a wreath here.
A child of the royal family of Murshidabad, then the capital of Bengal, Sirajuddaula was groomed by his maternal grandfather, Nawab Alivardi Khan, as his successor. To acquaint the 13-year-old boy with the arts of governance and martial affairs, Alivardi took him to battle against the Marathas in 1746. In May 1752, the septuagenarian nawab named Sirajuddaula his heir, splitting Bengal’s gentry along complicated lines of loyalty. With the death of Alivardi in April 1756, things took a difficult turn. The defeat of the army of the 24-year-old nawab, enthroned only 14 months earlier, was no feat of military brilliance, but rather a tale of colonial cunning.
Though discontentment within certain palace factions following Sirajuddaula’s ascension were a shot in the arm for the British, the plot for the young nawab’s overthrow had in fact been in place long beforehand. According to Robert Orme, an official historian of the East India Company, the British had prepared a blueprint for the conquest of Bengal soon after Alivardi named his successor. British private trade had been experiencing severe cash-flow problems since the late 1740s, and financial crisis had also engulfed the Mughal regime.
Bengal, in the meantime, was incredibly rich. According to official colonial records, Shaista Khan, governor of Bengal from 1664 to 1688, had amassed 640 million rupees, excluding gold and jewellery; during the early 1680s, he had even been able to give a bribe of 20 million rupees to the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb for an extension of his governorship.
In 1756, Sirajuddaula seized Calcutta. Months before Clive’s local co-conspirators were brought on board, the Council of Fort St George, the proto-colonial administration in Madras, had instructed officers of the East India Company not only to ensure the “mere retaking of Calcutta” and the payment of “ample reparations”, but “to effect a junction with any powers in the province of Bengal that might be dissatisfied with the violence of the Nawab’s government or that might have pretensions to the Nawabship.”
The rest is history.
Clive moved towards Murshidabad for a head-on clash with Sirajuddaula’s troops at the orchards of Palashi. Sirajuddaula’s commander-in-chief Mir Jafar Ali Khan, in league with the British, defected, causing the collapse of the nawab’s army. The fateful battle went on for eight hours, after which the defeated Sirajuddaula tried to flee towards Rajmahal, in present-day Jharkhand. He was captured, and eventually killed on 2 July 1757.
After Sirajuddaula’s death, Mir Jafar was installed as Nawab of Bengal. Clive, however, made it difficult for him to rule effectively, extracting a massive yearly tax from him, in addition to compensation for losses and military expenditures. The annual revenue extorted by the colonial regime from Bengal ranged between GBP 2-4 million – enough to ensure that the East India Company would be able to maintain its armed forces, and to keep the newly acquired territories under its control. Clive went on to attain knighthood, and to reward some of his other co-conspirators handsomely.
There have been some notable attempts to rescue Sirajuddaula’s reputation. Kali Kinkar Dutta (in his book Sirajuddoula), Akshay Kumar Maitreya (in a similarly titled book in Bengali) and even Rabindranath Tagore considered the nawab a gallant opponent of British colonisation. Luke Scrafton, the director of the East India Company from 1765 to 1768, joined them in their praise.
“The name of Sirajuddaula stands higher in the scale of honour than does the name of Clive,” he wrote. “He was the only one of the principal actors who did not attempt to deceive.” Scrafton added that the young Sirajuddaula had taken an oath on the Koran at Alivardi’s deathbed that he would thenceforth not touch liquor – and that he had kept his promise.
http://tinyurl.com/2ato6s
ECONOMIC APHYXIATION OF THE COLONIES:
Lal Vinay says:
”Some apologists for the British empire, whose numbers have increased rapidly in recent years under aggressive cheerleaders such as Niall Ferguson, Max Boot, and Robert Kaplan, have long argued that British colonial rule was, on balance, something of a gentlemanly affair.“
“The British liked their tea and gin and tonic, cricket and polo, and dealing with the natives was something of a nuisance. Sometime after General Dyer had shot dead at least 379 people at the Jallianwala Bagh, the British initiated an official inquiry and Dyer was brought before the Hunter commission.
In the House of Commons, Churchill thundered forth about how ‘frightfulness’ or terror of the sort in which Dyer engaged was not part of the British pharmacoepia. This is the kind of ‘evidence’ that is usually summoned forth to support the view that the British cared much about what is today called ‘accountability’ and were guided by principles of ‘fair play’. To clinch their argument, the members of the British Empire fan club never fail to mention that had Gandhi faced any foe other than the British, he would certainly have been shot dead long before he had multiple opportunities to create mischief. The apologists invite their readers to countenance the fate of Gandhi before Goebbels’s thugs and Nazi tanks”
“..a history, more precisely, of British repression, of the suffering imposed upon the Empire’s victims, and frequent resistance to colonial rule. Most histories of the British Empire have dwelled on regimes of law and order installed by the British, the bringing of the railways, roads, and telegraph to the natives, the institutionalisation of formal education, the introduction of British political traditions and institutions—not only parliamentary democracy, but law courts, an adversarial judicial system, and so on. Newsinger dispenses with the idea, which is almost like a religion to (especially Anglo) historians of the British empire, that the good must be weighed alongside the (little) evil and that the well-intentioned proconsuls and office-bearers of the Empire have not been done justice.”“What Newsinger offers instead is an annotated catalogue of British crimes, some more familiar than others. The story of the brutal suppression of the Indian Rebellion of 1857-58, for instance, has been the staple of nationalist Indian narratives and is gen erally encountered in most histories of the British empire.
The chapter on the 1940s which covers the Quit India ‘disturbances’ INA trials, and the Royal Indian Navy mutiny, is more intellectually rewarding since the historiographical focus has been largely on the Hindu-Muslim communal conflict. At the same time that Churchill was waging a valiant struggle against the Nazis and Japanese, he complained to Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India, ‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.’ The Hindus, Churchill ob served, are a ‘foul people’, and the Royal Air Force’s surplus bombers could, in his opin ion, be suitably deployed ‘to destroy them’ Amery privately noted, ‘I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s.”
“Though India was doubtless Britain’ most important colony, the British were, as Newsinger amply demonstrates, ecumenical in their pursuit of dominance and, when faced with resistance, unflinching retribution. British historians are fond of dwelling on the abolition of slavery in British possessions, but Newsinger alerts us to the less frequently mentioned suppression of slave revolts by the British in their Caribbean possessions. They initiated ferocious antiinsurgency campaigns against the Malays in the 1940s, pioneering methods of ‘forced villigisation’ that would later be adopted by the Americans in Vietnam.
The Mau Mau revolt in Kenya was crushed with complete abandon, and arguably the British abandoned all restraint on the theory that African people were even less deserving than other people of any measure of dignity and respect. Nor does Newsinger at all incline to the relatively benign reading of the devastating Irish Potato famine of the 1840s, which killed a million people, as merely a consequence of ill-informed English administrative decisions and neglect. He sees the famine through the eyes of the Republican John Mitchel, who described ‘how every one of those years, ’46, ’47 and ’48, Ireland was exporting to England food to the value of 15 million pounds sterling’. Mitchel recognised genocide for what it was.”
THE ECONOMIES OF THE COLONIES SHRUNK DRAMATICALLY DURING COLONIALISM
The Subcontinent+China’s economy shrunk from quarter of Global GDP to inconsequential around 1900 was the direct result of Colonialism. According to various studies the economy of the Subcontinent went down from from 12.2% of global GDP in 1870 to 4.2% of global GDP by 1950 with almost anemic growth for forty years starting 1900.
“.. Newsinger offers instead is an annotated catalogue of British crimes, some more familiar than others. The story of the brutal suppression of the Indian Rebellion of 1857-58, for instance, has been the staple of nationalist Indian narratives and is gen erally encountered in most histories of the British empire.
The chapter on the 1940s which covers the Quit India ‘disturbances’ INA trials, and the Royal Indian Navy mutiny, is more intellectually rewarding since the historiographical focus has been largely on the Hindu-Muslim communal conflict. At the same time that Churchill was waging a valiant struggle against the Nazis and Japanese, he complained to Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India, ‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.’ The Hindus, Churchill ob served, are a ‘foul people’, and the Royal Air Force’s surplus bombers could, in his opin ion, be suitably deployed ‘to destroy them’ Amery privately noted, ‘I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s”.
Vinay Lal: Publication:TOI_Kolkata; Date:Jan 14, 2007; Page Number:8
From 1857 to 1947 India’s share in the world economy fell from 18% to 3%, a six fold decrease. It is also true that British levied high taxes on agriculture, leading to disastrous famines the second half of the nineteenth century (Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis). Cheap and shoddy British goods flooding Indian markets lead to the complete destruction of the Indian industries. The growth less decades of British imperialism transferred wealth to London.
http://tinyurl.com/yof8tm
In reviewing one of the seminal books on colonialism, the reviewer says:
“One of the unexpected consequences of the “War on Terror” has been an attempt to reinvent the history of the British Empire. To justify the actions of the American government around the world, it’s important to show the benovolance of previous Empires.
John Newsinger’s book has been written in response to this re-writing of history. In turn, Newsinger writes short and sharp pieces on moments and places of the British Empire. So we read how the British government decided that the free market would solve the Irish Potato famine of 1846 - resulting in a million deaths. We discover how the British murdered their way around countries from Egypt to China. How, in the interests of Free Trade they fought two brutal wars (though war is hardly the right term for such unequal conflicts) for the right to sell Opium to the Chinese, and along with this, raped, pillaged and plundered the country.”
The “Jewel in the Crown” of the Empire, India, makes for several interesting chapters. Newsinger documents how the manner of British rule led directly to the uprising of 1857. Newsinger calls the events of 1857 an uprising (his authority is no-less a figure as Benjamin Disraeli who described the war as a “National revolt”) rather than the mutiny that it is normally described as.
Newsinger argues that the brutal nature of the uprising, described with glee in the media of the time, was only brutal because it was a response to the violence of British Rule up to that point. He quotes Karl Marx, writing at the time, that however violent the action of the rebels;
“it is only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of England’s own conduct in India, not only during the epoch of the foundation of her Eastern Empire, but even during the last ten years of a long-settled rule.”
The violence of the British troops in putting down the revolt, was often glorified as bravery, worthy of many medals. This violence of course was characteristic of all of Britain’s colonial rules. From the utter brutality of the British response to the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, to the violence vested on those in countries like Malaysia, Egypt, Iraq or China who dared to question rule from London.Newsinger’s book finishes with a reflection on the new aspect of Imperialism.
How Britain has become so linked to the new American Empire. The author argues that this is not something new, and it is actually a characteristic of Labour government policy over the years. Newsingers conclusion is hopeful; he argues that historically while Empires are brutal, they are also weak. The hope he says must be that those resisting new attempts at neo-colonialism, can eject the oppressors from their lands.
When will the British pay reparations to India, Pakistan Bangladesh and Sri Lanka for the 250 years of colonialism?
THE UN: A CASE FOR REPARATIONS
The Need to Repair the Damage: A Case for Reparations and Compensation
http://www.uctp.org/Reparations.html
Given the lengthy list of human rights abuses endured by the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas as a result of massive and flagrant violations of human rights during slavery, colonialism, wars of conquest and for contemporary forms of racism, the following outlines the case for reparations and compensation.
… Dispossession of land and waters
Since it may be impossible to return the stolen properties, the former colonial powers should pay to the Indigenous Peoples so affected, the monetary value of the properties in question.
Where Indigenous Peoples purchased Crown properties before 1934, as in the case of the former British colonies, the Government of the United Kingdom should pay compensation to the Indigenous Peoples; equivalent to the present market value of the purchased property.
… Dispossession of historical records
All historical records belonging to Indigenous Peoples, illegally obtained by the former colonial powers, should be returned with royalty payments for use; calculated from the date of seizure to the date of release.
… Dispossession of sacred and cultural objects
All such objects should be returned to the rightful owners.
… Use of historical records for financial gain
It is incumbent upon the former colonial powers, organizations and private collectors to return the historical records of the Indigenous Peoples, and with compensation.
… Use of sacred and cultural objects for financial gain
Individuals and organs holding such objects are requested to return them to their rightful owners. The removal of the remains of Indigenous Peoples dead is discouraged and where such remains are stored by individuals, organs or the State, those remains should be re-buried.
… Genocide
Little or nothing can be done by the colonial powers to absolve themselves from this “crime against humanity. The Indigenous Peoples are entitled to compensation for war damage to territorial properties.
… Ethnocide
The execution of millions of Indigenous Peoples in the Americas, deprived the cultural sustenance and robbed the region of its precious human resources.
… Slavery
Compensation must be paid to the Indigenous Peoples, commensurate to the amount of time held in servitude.
… Use of land for commercial purposes
There is no denying that the former colonial powers enriched themselves from the use of, and proceeds of the natural resources of territories belonging to the Indigenous Peoples. By so doing, the former colonial powers are requested to abide by the traditional and ancient law, paying to the Indigenous Peoples, twenty (20%) of the value of all the goods produced and extracted from the resources of their territories from 1492.
… Environmental damage to the land surface and waters
Residues of European sponsored wars for domination of the Americas have heavily polluted the waters and lands of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. The former colonial powers are requested to remove the waste and compensate the Indigenous Peoples.
… Violence against Indigenous Peoples’ women
The colonial male raped and impregnated many Indigenous Peoples’ women. They must be held responsible for such violent actions.
… Character assassination
The Indigenous Peoples of the Americas are known to be hospitably and peaceful peoples. The dehumanizing of them by agents of the former colonial powers is deeply rooted in the Americas. The Indigenous Peoples of the Americas are legally and morally entitled to have that true told. [6]
United Nations World Conference Against Racism Follow-Up Activities by the IAAR relating to reparations and compensation; 2003-2004.
The United Nations World Conference Against Racism Follow-up Activities organized by the International Alliance Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia And Related Intolerance, shall be executed in two phases during the period 01 December 2003 and 04 December 2004.
Phase I:
The International Meeting of Experts; 01-05 December 2003.
1. To identify the peoples who have suffered the disastrous consequences of slavery, colonialism, wars of conquest and post-slavery racism since the 1400s.
2. To discuss the historic responsibility of Nations towards the peoples, whom they subjected to slavery colonized, affected by wars of conquest and by post-slavery racism.
3. To arrive at a universal position on the issues of Reparations and Compensation for the disastrous consequences of slavery, colonialism, wars of conquest and post-slavery racism.
4. To submit the conclusions of the “International Meeting of Experts” to the United Nations General Assembly for discussions.
5. To create public awareness of the consequences of massive and flagrant human rights violations during slavery, colonialism, wars of conquest and post-slavery racism.
6. To prepare an agenda for the promotion of 2004 as: “International Year to Commemorate the Struggle against Slavery and its Abolition”.
Phase II:
The International Conference; 29 November to 04 December 2004.
1. To examine, discuss and adopt recommendations arising out of the conclusions of the “International Meeting of Experts” on massive and flagrant violations of human rights during slavery, colonialism, wars of conquest and post-slavery racism.
2. To examine, discuss and adopt recommendations arising out of the contributions of the United Nations General Assembly debate on the conclusions of the “International Meeting of Experts” on massive and flagrant violations of human rights during slavery, colonialism, wars of conquest and post-slavery racism.
3. To establish an International Participatory Mechanism for victims of massive and flagrant violations of human rights during slavery, colonialism, wars of conquest and post-slavery racism.
4. To consider proposals and make recommendations to the United Nations for the strengthening of existing International Human Rights Instruments.
5. To make recommendations for the realization of an International Negotiating Mechanism for encouraging on-going dialogue and understanding between the victims and alleged perpetrators of massive and flagrant violations of human rights during slavery, colonialism, wars of conquest and post-slavery racism.
6. To decide on the nature of the reparations; quantify the amount of compensation due; and determine the mode of distribution.
Participation
The International Meeting of Experts and the International Conference on Reparations and Compensation for Massive and Flagrant Violation of Human Rights during Slavery, Colonialism, Wars of Conquest and Post-Slavery Racism, are open to Victims, Governments, Civil Society, NGOs, Institutions and individuals. [7]
Footnote:[1] The Spanish Decree of 1511: A Turning Point in the history of the Indigenous Peoples of the Caribbean Basin.
[2] UN Press Release HR/SC/01/8; 06 August 2001.
[3] United Nations NGO Forum; South Africa; 2001 World Conference Against Racism; WCAR NGO FORUM DECLARATION AND PROGRAMME OF ACTION; 03 September 2001.
[4] United Nations World Conference Against Racism; Declaration and Programme of Action 08 September 2001.
[5] Declaration of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas in Santiago de Chile, Chile; 04 December 2000.
[6] The Need to Repair the Damage: A Case for Reparations and Compensation.
[7] International Meeting of Experts/International Conference on Reparations and Compensation for Massive and Flagrant Violations of Human Rights during Slavery, Colonialism, Wars of Conquest for Post-Slavery Racism.
How much reparations are to be paid? Several studies have come up with numbers.
“Grasse and his Center City-based organization, the International Coalition for British Reparations, waited for the weekend of Prince Charles and the Duchess Camilla’s visit to Philadelphia in late January to announce plans for their new petition, which asks the United Kingdom’s government to pay out the world’s citizens for centuries of imperialism, war and diseases. The coalition’s plan would see the $58 trillion split out evenly at $8,350 for every living human being on the planet”
An American led “Marshall Plan” for Pakistan and Afghanistan will reduce tensions, and provide employment to the disaffected youth of the area.
HOW MUCH TO PAY?
When your last general left the Subcontinent, Pakistanis and Afghans thought that you would really leave, we would remember you for trains started by Lord delhousie’s. But you keep coming back to the Middle East and South Asia.
The main purpose of introducing railways was to “immensely increase the striking power of the military forces at every point of the Indian empire, to bring British capital and enterprise to India and to bring into the ports the produce from the interior.”
“Even in the 19thcentury technology was not the panacea that prevented defeat. Unfortunately the lessons of unmitigated disaster of “Auckland’s Folly”, (First Anglo-Afghan War 1838-42) have not been taught to the Oxbridge students. Perhaps Blair and Brown never saw Lady Butler’s famous painting of Dr William Brydon, the sole survivor, gasping his way to the British outpost in Jalalabad. This painting codified Elphinstone’s retreat from Kabul and established Afghanistan’s reputation as a graveyard for foreign armiesThe lessons learned from the defeat of Lord Curzon’s (1878-1893) “On to the Oxus” policy are not taught to the Eaton and Harrow graduates. ”
Will Britannia learn her lessons ever? Does no one in Britain read Robert Fisk anymore? The minority Northern Alliance led non-Pashtun government has been a total failure. The only way out of the Afghan quagmire for NATO is to negotiate with the Talibaan and the Pashtuns. Pakistan’s vital interests in Afghanstan have to be taken into account, and the Hindu Kush mountains cannot be used to launch terrorism into Pakistani Baluchistan.
HOW TO MAKE BRITIAN PAY? WILL THEY EVER PAY?
“NEVER SAY NEVER”; 2050 will be the year for reparations.
No nation has been forced to pay raparations when she had strength. Nations that paid repearations were the countries that were defeated–Austro Hungarian Empire, Germany, Japan and Iraq. All countreis were forced to pay reparations when they were most vulnerable. Britian is powerful and it is in her best interests to pay of the reparations when she can afford it. Else the Chinese Superpower in 2050 will be the first country to ask for reparations. India and Pakistan will not be far behind. Then the avalance will commence from Africa and the Caribbean. Todays bill of $58 Trillion will be quadrupled by that time. This will totally devastate the economy of Britian, and she will have to sell off her “colonies”, Grand Cayman Islands and others as compensation. It is in Britain’s own interests to begin paying off $1 Trillion per year to the countries so that when the Chinese are a superpower, it will be much easier to pay of the debt.
FOOLS GOLD? Pay Now or pay later! Only vulnerable populations pay reparations
THE UN RESOLUTION OF 2001 ON COLONIAL REPARATIONS
The Spanish Decree of 1511: A Turning Point in the history of the Indigenous Peoples of the Caribbean Basin. [1]
In United Nations Press Release dated 06 August 2001 entitled “Subcommission adopts resolution on responsibility, reparation for violations during slavery and colonial period”, sensing the mood of preparatory discussions and resolutions by non-governmental organizations during the process leading to the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, the international community was told:
“The Subcommission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights adopted unanimously this morning a resolution on recognition of responsibility and reparation for the massive and flagrant violations of human rights which constituted crimes against humanity that took place during slavery and the colonial period.
Through this measure, the Subcommission requested all the countries concerned to take initiatives which would assist, notably through debate and the provision of truthful information, in the rising of public awareness of the disastrous consequences of the periods of slavery and colonialism; requested that a process of reflection be initiated in a concerted fashion on appropriate procedures which would enable the guarantee of the implementation of this resolution; and to continue consideration of this question at its fifty-fourth session”. [2]
In a collective declaration, the United Nations NGO Forum of the World Conference Against Racism states that the slavery was a crime against humanity and a unique tragedy in the history of humanity and that its roots and bases were economic, institutional, systemic and transnational in dimension. [3] http://www.uctp.org/Reparations.html
APPENDIX AND SUPPORTING DOCUMENTS
Her are some references:This is a microcosm of the British rape of India
http://tinyurl.com/ysq6gm
and
http://tinyurl.com/yqfjv7
http://tinyurl.com/252zogAPPENDIX A
A REVIEW OF “The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire” JOHN NEWSINGER LONDON: BOOKMARKS
http://ellissharp.blogspot.com/2006/11/john-newsinger-blood-never-dried.html
Newsinger has three basic propositions:
Firstly, he identifies the history of the British Empire in these terms:
Whereas Britain after 1918 was a ‘satisfied’ empire, concerned to hold what it had rather than seize more, in the 19th century the British Empire, despite the liberalism of its metropolitan rulers, was a predatory empire engaged in continuous warfare. (p. 67)
Secondly, he diagnoses extreme violence as an inherent component of imperialism. Colonialism always requires police officers and soldiers, whose brutality towards the colonized is a fundamental condition of governance. There is no imperialism without repression and violence.
Thirdly, politicians and journalists have, historically, generally failed to confront the barbarism which formed an essential feature of British imperial rule, and this has been replicated by academics. Historians shy away from acknowledging the stupendous brutality of empire; often they ignore it completely. In so doing they fail to provide an adequate or reasonably objective account of Britain’s past. Newsinger’s book corrects this blind spot with a revisionist history of the British empire which focuses on native resistance to it and the extreme violence used by a supposedly civilized state to suppress it. His title echoes the words of the Chartist and socialist Ernest Jones, who in 1851 wrote of Britain, “On its colonies the sun never sets, but the blood never dries.”
Newsinger develops these three arguments over twelve chapters which analyze, in chronological order, key episodes in the history of the British Empire. These are
(1) slavery in the Caribbean
(2) the Irish famine
(3) China and the opium wars
(4) the Indian mutiny
(5) the invasion of Egypt
(6) global insurgencies against the Empire in the wake of the First World War
(7) the Palestinian uprising 1936-9
(8) the struggle for Indian independence
(9) Suez
(10) insurgency in Kenya
(11) insurgency in the Far East
(12) the subordination of the British Empire to US imperialism.
I think it’s a brilliant book. Newsinger is prodigiously well read and writes with absolute lucidity and clarity. His book is full of shocking examples of terror and atrocity.
It’s a great resource and my copy will go on the same shelf as Mark Curtis’s Web of Deceit and Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilisation. I’ll probably return to this book in a future post, but for the moment let me just briefly mention Newsinger’s account of the great Indian rebellion 1857-8, an insurrection which is memorialized in Trafalgar Square by the monument to Major General Sir Henry Havelock, who was in charge of the army which suppressed it.
Newsinger argues that torture was a fundamental aspect of the financial operations of British colonialism in India. Having cited the evidence for this he remarks,
What is remarkable is how little this regime of torture has figured in accounts of British rule in India. It is a hidden history that has been unremarked on and almost completely unexplored. Book after book remains silent on the subject. This most surely calls into question the whole historiography of the Raj. (p. 70)
The revolt which erupted in 1857 against British rule was, he asserts, “without doubt, one of the largest revolutionary outbreaks of the 19th century.” And it was put down with massive force and extreme violence. The mass media of the day played a crucial role in mobilising British public opinion in support of the repression. Firstly, it ran bogus horror stories, which cast the rebels as barbarians: “It was widely reported that British women had been cooked alive, forced to eat their children, horribly mutilated with noses and ears cut off and eyes put out, and stripped naked and publicly raped. These stories were untrue.” (p. 74)
Conversely, the barbarism and atrocities carried out by the British army went unreported. The horrors matched those perpetrated by the Third Reich when it rampaged through eastern Europe. Sergeant William Forbes recorded witnessing 130 men hanged from a giant banyan tree. And the intelligentsia played its part, too. Charles Dickens raged that he desired “to exterminate the race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested…to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the earth.”
The great rebellion was crushed. But it led to the termination of the power of the East India Company and marked the beginning of the long struggle for Indian independence, proving an inspiration to later generations.
http://tinyurl.com/yvmuvg
APPENDIX B
JOHN NEWSINGER ON BRITISH ATROCITIES
Amid the recent outpouring of books and articles rehabilitating the purposes and practices of empire, two works have stood out for their unflinching scrutiny of British colonialism in Kenya. David Anderson’s Histories of the Hanged and Caroline Elkins’s Britain’s Gulag provide complementary accounts of the Mau Mau Emergency, the former an overall study of the rebellion, the latter focusing on the Kikuyu experience of repression, and in particular on the mass detention camps through which at least 160,000 Africans passed between 1952 and 1960. Anderson, a British Africanist, has mined the substantial body of court records of the Mau Mau trials preserved in the Kenya National Archive and reconstructs a detailed account of the rebellion, providing a vivid portrait of the struggle for Nairobi. His Histories of the Hanged is the best book to appear on the Kenya Emergency so far. Elkins, at Harvard, had originally intended to write ‘a history of the success of Britain’s civilizing mission in the detention camps of Kenya’ as her doctoral thesis; finding that British official records had been systematically destroyed on Kenyan independence in 1963, she was driven to attempt an oral history of the Emergency from the Kikuyu side. In her interviews with some three hundred men and women, which provide the bulk of the material for her trenchant book, she discovered an appalling catalogue of hardship, abuse, torture and murder. http://newleftreview.org/?view=2558
APPENDIX C
KARL MARX ON THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE
Karl Marx in the New-York Tribune 1857
The Indian Revolt
——————————————————————————–
Source: New-York Daily Tribune, September 16, 1857;
Transcribed: by Tony Brown.
——————————————————————————–
London, Sept. 4, 1857
The outrages committed by the revolted Sepoys in India are indeed appalling, hideous, ineffable - such as one is prepared to meet - only in wars of insurrection, of nationalities, of races, and above all of religion; in one word, such as respectable England used to applaud when perpetrated by the Vendeans on the “Blues,” by the Spanish guerrillas on the infidel Frenchmen, by Servians on their German and Hungarian neighbors, by Croats on Viennese rebels, by Cavaignac’s Garde Mobile or Bonaparte’s Decembrists on the sons and daughters of proletarian France.
However infamous the conduct of the Sepoys, it is only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of England’s own conduct in India, not only during the epoch of the foundation of her Eastern Empire, but even during the last ten years of a long-settled rule. To characterize that rule, it suffices to say that torture formed ail organic institution of its financial policy. There is something in human history like retribution: and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself.
The first blow dealt to the French monarchy proceeded from the nobility, not from the peasants. The Indian revolt does not commence with the Ryots, tortured, dishonored and stripped naked by the British, but with the Sepoys, clad, fed, petted, fatted and pampered by them. To find parallels to the Sepoy atrocities, we need not, as some London papers pretend, fall back on the middle ages, not, even wander beyond the history of contemporary England. All we want is to study the first Chinese war, an event, so to say, of yesterday. The English soldiery then committed abominations for the mere fun of it; their passions being neither sanctified by religious fanaticism nor exacerbated by hatred against an overbearing and conquering race, nor provoked by the stern resistance of a heroic enemy. The violations of women, the spittings of children, the roastings of whole villages, were then mere wanton sports, not recorded by Mandarins, but by British officers themselves.
Even at the present catastrophe it would be an unmitigated mistake to suppose that all the cruelty is on the side of the Sepoys, and all the milk of human kindness flows on the side of the English. The letters of the British officers are redolent of malignity. An officer writing from Peshawur gives a description of the disarming of the 10th irregular cavalry for not charging the 55th native infantry when ordered to do so. He exults in the fact that they were not only disarmed, but stripped of their coats and boots, and after having received 12d. per man, were marched down to the river side, and there embarked in boats and sent down the Indus, where the writer is delighted to expect every mother’s son will have a chance of being drowned in the rapids. Another writer informs us that, some inhabitants of Peshawur having caused a night alarm by exploding little mines of gunpowder in honor of a wedding (a national custom), the persons concerned were tied up next morning, and “received such a flogging as they will not easily forget.”
News arrived from Pindee that three native chiefs were plotting. Sir John Lawrence replied by a message ordering a spy to attend to the meeting. On the spy’s report, Sir John sent a second message, “Hang them.” The chiefs were hanged. An officer in the civil service, from Allahabad, writes:
“We have power of life and death in our hands, and we assure you we spare not.”
Another, from the same place:
“Not a day passes but we string up front ten to fifteen of them (non-combatants).”
One exulting officer writes:
“Holmes is hanging them by the score, like a ‘brick.‘”
Another, in allusion to the summary hanging of a large body of the natives:
“Then our fun commenced.”
A third:
“We hold court-martials on horseback, and every nigger we meet with we either string up or shoot.”
From Benares we are informed that thirty Zemindars were hanged or) the mere suspicion of sympathizing with their own countrymen, and whole villages were burned down on the same plea. An officer from Benares, whose letter is printed in The London Times, says:
“The European troops have become fiends when opposed to natives.”
And then it should not be forgotten that, while the cruelties of the English are related as acts of martial vigor, told simply, rapidly, without dwelling on disgusting details, the outrages of the natives, shocking as they are, are still deliberately exaggerated. For instance, the circumstantial account first appearing in The Times, and then going the round of the London press, of the atrocities perpetrated at Delhi and Meerut, from whom did it proceed? From a cowardly parson residing at Bangalore, Mysore, more than a thousand miles, as the bird flies, distant from the scene of action. Actual accounts of Delhi evince the imagination of an English parson to be capable of breeding greater horrors than even the wild fancy of a Hindoo mutineer. The cutting of noses, breasts, &c., in one word, the horrid mutilations committed by the Sepoys, are of course more revolting to European feeling than the throwing of red-hot shell on Canton dwellings by a Secretary of the Manchester Peace Society, or the roasting of Arabs pent up in a cave by a French Marshal, or the flaying alive of British soldiers by the cat-o’-nine-tails under drum-head court-martial, or any other of the philanthropical appliances used in British penitentiary colonies. Cruelty, like every other thing, has its fashion, changing according to time and place. Caesar, the accomplished scholar, candidly narrates how he ordered many thousand Gallic warriors to have their right hands cut off. Napoleon would have been ashamed to do this. He preferred dispatching his own French regiments, suspected of republicanism, to St. Domingo, there to die of the blacks and the plague.
The infamous mutilations committed by the Sepoys remind one of the practices of the Christian Byzantine Empire, or the prescriptions of Emperor Charles V.’s criminal law, or the English punishments for high treason, as still recorded by Judge Blackstone. With Hindoos, whom their religion has made virtuosi in the art of self-torturing, these tortures inflicted on the enemies of their race and creed appear quite natural, and must appear still more so to the English, who, only some years since, still used to draw revenues from the Juggernaut festivals, protecting and assisting the bloody rites of a religion of cruelty.
The frantic roars of the “bloody old Times,” as Cobbett used to call it - its, playing the part of a furious character in one of Mozart’s operas, who indulges in most melodious strains in the idea of first hanging his enemy, then roasting him, then quartering him, then spitting him, and then flaying him alive - its tearing the passion of revenge to tatters and to rags - all this would appear but silly if under the pathos of tragedy there were not distinctly perceptible the tricks of comedy. The London Times overdoes its part, not only from panic. It supplies comedy with a subject even missed by Molière, the Tartuffe of Revenge. What it simply wants is to write up the funds and to screen the Government. As Delhi has not, like the walls of Jericho, fallen before mere puffs of wind, Jolin Bull is to be steeped in cries for revenge up to his very ears, to make him forget that his Government is responsible for the mischief hatched and the colossal dimensions it has been allowed to assume.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/09/16.htm
