Somalis took part of Kenya massacre

[Snake-i]

MoD 'refusing to release file on massacre of Kenyans'

 

The Ministry of Defence has refused to release documents which may resolve the 53-year-old mystery of a massacre involving British-led troops, it is claimed today.

 

Dr David Anderson, the Oxford historian whose researches uncovered new evidence linking two British officers to the murder of 22 Kenyans in the spring of 1953, says the incident was "the tip of the iceberg" in a bloody campaign that Britain should be ashamed of.

 

The Chuka massacre is the subject of BBC Radio 4's Document programme tonight.

 

At the height of the war against Mau Mau insurgents in Kenya, Somali members of the 5th Bn King's African Rifles killed 20 men in the Chuka region of the country.

 

Two men acting as guides, who were suspected of being Mau Mau themselves, were also killed. But the 20 men were not Mau Mau.

 

They were members of the Home Guard, a loyalist militia recruited to fight an increasingly powerful and audacious guerrilla enemy. In an atmosphere of atrocity and reprisal, the matter was swept under the carpet, but tacitly admitted by the MoD, which agreed to pay blood money to the families of the murdered men. Nobody ever stood trial for the crimes.

 

New evidence uncovered by a team of academics led by Dr Anderson, of St Cross College, Oxford, shows that two British junior officers were with the Somalis at the time of the massacre.

 

Both were subordinates of Acting Major Gerald Griffiths, who was convicted later of the killing of an African guide, offences which took place shortly before the Chuka massacre. One of the two Britons is believed to be dead, but the second is still living in this country.

 

The crucial evidence in the case, the only material not recorded in Kenyan National Archives documents that detail the compensation hearing held after the massacre, is in the form of statements made by three local women eyewitnesses and 10 of the Somali soldiers. Those statements form part of a file obtained by Dr Anderson's team under the Freedom of Information Act, but the MoD has still refused to release it.

 

The only eyewitnesses to the period of the massacre traced by Dr Anderson or the BBC were two men, Celestino Mbare, now 84, and Jediel Nyaga, 80. Mr Mbare told the programme how he had gone along to identify the dead, 20 of whom were from his own village.

 

Mr Nyaga told the BBC: "They were innocent people who went to help soldiers and soldiers shot them."

 

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Dr Anderson said: "This was a remarkably brutal campaign and one of which we should be ashamed.

 

"I just don't understand why we don't have the courage to say, 'We made a mistake' and face up to it."

 

The MoD told one of Dr Anderson's researchers that it did not want to release the missing 11 pages of testimony because it was too graphic and upsetting.

 

The remaining British officer is believed to have pressed the MoD not to release details of the case.

 

The BBC producers said they were awaiting the MoD's response to a Freedom of Information Act request for the missing pages.

 

They had also asked for a detailed reason why the pages had not been released so far.

 

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Does anyone has any knowledge about this incident?