After the Chinese expelled the merchants from Canton, the merchants established their base in Hong Kong. Meanwhile the British government demanded compensation for the confiscated opium, opening up of more ports for trade and legalization of opium trade which the Chinese refused.
As the Chinese refused to be poisoned by opium, the opium wars between Britain and China ensued. The Chinese were massacred by the superior firepower of British warships and were forced to concede the territory of Hong Kong to the British. But the Chinese refused to legalize opium sales. In the second opium war that followed, the Chinese resistance to British bullying was pulverized by warships. The Anglo-French army savagely rooted out pockets of Chinese resistance in the Canton region by burning down whole blocks of residential homes.
The Treaty of Tietsin was signed in 1858 and the Chinese capitulated to British demands: one million pounds was given to the British as indemnity and the sale of opium was legalized by the Emperor.
In 1860 another punitive expedition was organized which led to plunder and slaughter of the Chinese. The summer Palace was sacked and burned. The robes and the thrones were brought to England for display in the Victoria and Albert museum as a stunning testimony to British benevolence. Drug running, imperial style has its rewards!
With a kind of monotonous regularity that numbs the
senses, British Colonial Policy in Kenya was pursued in the same brutal and
cynical fashion bereft of any moral or ethical values. In 1952 Britain declared
a state of emergency in Kenya to quell the Mau Mau uprising against the
Colonial government.
The Mau Mau was largely drawn from the Kikuyu who constituted the largest
ethnic group in Kenya. The racism and the exploitation at the hands of white
settlers and the Colonial Government was the root cause of the hatred and the
intense Anti-European sentiments. The Kenyans were paid low wages and they
lived in appalling conditions. The revolt was against the British Colonial
repression.
The Mau Mau uprising was not a communist plot to oust the British Colonial
government but a nationalist movement to resist the British. As the colonial
power could not find credible evidence for a communist plot, the Mau Mau revolt
was represented as a sinister cult whose members indulged in sexual orgy,
cannibalism, occult and black magic. The unrest grew as the British blocked the
constitutional road to resolve the crisis.
Jomo Kenyatta, the leader of the Kenya African Union (KAU), organised a
peaceful struggle against the British Government. The KAU in its declaration
noted:
"The chief characteristic of all labour- skilled or not is the low
wages.....Due to this, ninety percent of our people live in the most deplorable
conditions ever afforded to a human being .. Modern serfdom has come into being
as cheap labour."
The reaction of the British was to jail Kenyatta for seven years on flimsy
trumped up charges. The official version was that the unrest had to put down
with paternal firmness with the same sorrow as a father giving his errant son
six of the best. The paternal firmness found expression in extreme brutality
and gross abuse of human rights. The declassified documents show that the
declaration of emergency was done with the intention of curbing the popular
nationalist movement and to make land and the rich mineral resources safe for
the Colonial Power.
In the brutal war between the Mau Mau and the government forces, both sides
committed atrocities. The Colonial forces killed 10,000 Africans while the Mau
Mau killed 32 Europeans. More white settlers were killed in road accidents in
Nairobi than at the hands of Mau Mau.
The colonial counter insurgency forces were given a free hand to shoot anybody
if they were black. The Colonial Police used the most extreme forms of torture
on Mau Mau suspects such as slicing off ears, boring holes in eardrums,
flogging until death, pouring paraffin over suspects who were set alight, and
burning eardrums with lit cigarettes. Some suspects were castrated; others had
their fingertips cut off.
Shortly after the emergency was declared, the Governor passed orders that it
could detain whomsoever it wanted in nazi style concentration camps. A former
officer in one of the detention camps in 1954-55 witnessed "overwork,
brutality, humiliating and disgusting treatment and flogging- all in violation
of human rights."
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