Natasha Walter
Saturday July 5, 2003
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.ukImagine that half a dozen German women had just claimed they had been gang-raped by British soldiers who were stationed in their country on exercise. Imagine that even when the women had reported the rapes the soldiers had been allowed to fly home and the incident was never investigated. Imagine that a few months later another such incident took place.
If such accusations were being made against British soldiers by European women, and if the women's stories were backed up by hospital and police records and compelling testimony from the traumatised young women, then the media would have gone into a frenzy - demanding to know how British soldiers could go on the rampage, and why officers were covering up for them.
Far from just a few cases, we are currently seeing hundreds of women coming forward to claim that they have been raped by British soldiers. Six hundred and fifty women who say that they were raped over the past 30 years - the most recent incident took place last year - have just been granted legal aid to bring a case for compensation against the British army. But these women aren't from Europe; they come from pastoralist communities in the highlands of Kenya. For the past 50 years their land has been used by thousands of British soldiers who go out to Africa for a few weeks or months at a time to practise desert and mountain warfare.
The mere fact that they are in Africa seems to have ensured that these women's claims have sparked little fury in comparison to what would have occurred if the same had happened on any other continent. A racist view that black women do not have the same rights or the same sensibilities as other women still seems to influence us in Britain, far more than we like to admit. But it shouldn't need to be stated that the trauma these women have suffered goes just as deep as it would with any other women in any other part of the world. I went out to Kenya when the first women began to put their claims to a British solicitor, and although I spoke only to a small number of them, I will never forget their tales of emotional and physical pain.
If we do allow ourselves to take these allegations seriously, then they must change the way we look at the British army. When I first reported on the women's claims for this newspaper back in March, the armed forces were just going into action in Iraq. From that moment on, we have faced a barrage of exhortation from politicians and the media to get behind our boys. In contrast to the troops of other countries, we are told, British soldiers are always disciplined, and always respectful towards local people. We have been shown charming pictures of British soldiers giving sweets to children and putting themselves at risk by going around without their helmets. Their bravery, we are told, is matched only by their gentlemanly behaviour.
Are we allowing this spurt of patriotism to blind us to the gravity of the accusations coming out of Kenya? Their nature and number suggest that rapes were not simply being committed by a few soldiers going on a brutal spree for a few days.
More than half of the alleged attacks were gang rapes, and many of them were carried out in a systematic manner by groups of soldiers hunting down women at watering holes or in pasture grounds. I spoke to one woman who said that she was caught up in an attack in which at least 12 soldiers raped six women. One woman told me of another incident in which two soldiers raped her in turn, while another soldier looked on silently, holding the others' guns.
If these rapes did go on for so long and in such numbers, then the whole scandal could not have continued without officers deliberately turning a blind eye. Documentary evidence of reports made to army officers in Kenya is now coming to light, including letters written by local chiefs and local government officers that are dated as far back as 1977.
I have spoken to Masai chiefs who attended a meeting with senior army officers in 1983 at which the rapes were discussed and the officers promised to take steps to prevent them; I have also spoken to a Kenyan man who remembered reporting a rape as recently as 1998 to a major at a British army camp. No action, however, was ever taken to investigate or discipline any soldiers.
The suggestion that a culture of impunity reached throughout the army from the bottom to the very top can be put into the wider context of the history of the British army in Kenya. Only now is the real story being told of the atrocities carried out by the British against fighters for Kenyan independence in the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s.
Although full investigations have, up to now, been thwarted by Kenyan and British authorities, veterans of that struggle are now preparing to launch their own action for compensation against the British government. Their allegations against British authorities include tales of starvation, beatings, forced labour, torture, and also claims by Kikuyu women that they were systematically raped by British soldiers as punishment for their people's involvement in the independence uprising.
The legacy of this brutal colonialism clearly infects the behaviour of the British army in Kenya to this day. If you are simply incredulous at the very idea that the British soldiers could still get away with raping Kenyan women without immediate disciplinary action being taken, you might want to consider other aspects of the way the army behaved while on exercise in these areas. Although the area that I visited is actually owned by the Masai people, the British army never paid them directly (money went instead to the Kenyan government) for the privilege of taking over part of their precious grazing land every year, but they would treat the land as if it were their own. Sometimes they would divert the water supply from local settlements for the army camps, so that Kenyan children went thirsty while British soldiers drank freely.
And then there is the fact that for decades these soldiers left their unexploded ordnance on grazing grounds so that ordinary people, including children, could stumble on them and be maimed and even killed. A £4.5m compensation settlement was winkled out of the Ministry of Defence only last year for those people who were injured or bereaved in such incidents, when at last our government realised that it could not get away with allowing black children to be blown up by its bombs in peacetime.
Amnesty International has now called for an independent inquiry to be held into these hundreds of allegations of rape. Indeed, although the Ministry of Defence has recently sent a few members of the Royal Military Police to start an investigation, a more public and more accountable inquiry is essential. The scale and gravity of these alleged crimes suggest that this goes way beyond the wild behaviour of a few soldiers. As one of the Kenyan women I met said to me of the men who raped her: "They have brought shame on all the British people."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/kenya/story/0,12689,992066,00.html
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