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Britain expresses 'sincere regret' for torture of Kenyans

 
A Mau Mau veteran in Nairobi, Kenya, raises a fist Thursday to celebrate the  settlement in a legal case seeking compensation from the British government for colonial-era abuses.
A Mau Mau veteran in Nairobi, Kenya, raises a fist Thursday to celebrate the settlement in a legal case seeking compensation from the British government for colonial-era abuses.
Published June 7, 2013

NAIROBI, Kenya — It was not quite a direct apology and it came at least 50 years late.

But the British government's "sincere regret" for colonial abuses of Kenyans during the 1950s Mau Mau uprising and its agreement to pay $30 million in compensation to surviving victims was the first time Britain has admitted guilt over colonial-era abuses not just in Kenya but anywhere, according to Harvard historian Caroline Elkins.

It was also a landmark admission by Britain that its empire was far more violent and sordid than acknowledged.

"It's the first time the British government has acknowledged that it was not the empire it claimed to have been," said Elkins, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague announced the compensation payments — averaging about $5,700 for each of the 5,228 claimants — in Parliament, acknowledging that the victims were tortured and abused by the colonial administration.

"The British government sincerely regrets that these abuses took place and that they marred Kenya's progress toward independence," Hague said. "Torture and ill treatment are abhorrent violations of human dignity which we unreservedly condemn."

Thousands of Kenyans were killed in the Mau Mau rebellion against British rule and thousands more were detained and tortured, including the grandfather of U.S. President Barack Obama, according to Obama's stepgrandmother, Sarah Onyango.

The brutality was one of the empire's guilty secrets and it was never supposed to get out: "If we are going to sin, we must sin quietly," the British attorney general in Kenya, Eric Griffith-Jones, told the governor, Sir Evelyn Baring, in a 1957 letter. It was one of thousands of official documents finally released from government archives last year.

The rebellion began in 1952 and continued until 1960. Kenya gained independence in 1963. According to the Kenya Human Rights Commission, 90,000 Kenyans were killed, tortured or maimed during the conflict and 160,000 were held in inhumane prison camps.