The BBC's subjective view of Israel's occupation should concern us all

Just over a week ago, Israeli armed forces dragged a French diplomat out of an aid vehicle in the occupied West Bank. The international news agency Reuters released subsequent photographs of the woman, Marion Fesneau-Castaing, lying in the dust at the feet of Israeli soldiers, a gun pointed at her face. Fesneau-Castaing and others had been attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to the villagers of Khirbet al-Makhul, whose homes had been demolished by the Israeli army four days earlier, on 16 September.

Amena Saleem

The BBC responded with an online story headlined: "Diplomats protest over West Bank clash with Israel troops"

As is the norm with the BBC's coverage of Palestine and Israel, the story was written without context or background. Israel's presence in the West Bank, its military occupation, is illegal under international law. Its demolition of Palestinian houses and the displacement of their inhabitants are in violation of the Geneva Convention. In a feature on the demolition of Khirbet al-Makhul, the Independent quotes Bill Van Esveld of Human Rights Watch as saying, "All the criteria appear to be met for this to be considered forcible transfer, which is a war crime."

None of this was reported by the BBC, whose headline reduced all of the above to "a clash with Israel troops". In the BBC's use of the word "clash" there is an implication that the diplomats were also at fault, that they waged some kind of battle against armed soldiers.

Khirbet al-Makhul is in the fertile Jordan Valley, a key area for Israeli settlement building. To obtain the necessary land for the illegal settlements, Palestinian villages have to be destroyed and the villagers moved on.

BBC Online's story chose to put the process this way: "The homes in Khirbet al-Makhul were knocked down on Monday after Israel's High Court ruled that they had been built without the correct permits."

The fault, then, seems to lie with the Palestinians who appear to be attempting to operate outside the planning system. A planning system, the average reader will assume, is fair, open and transparent, but nothing could be further from the truth. Under the practices of Israel's military occupation, it is a rarity for Palestinians to be granted a building permit, either to build new homes or extend existing ones.

The Israeli human rights group B'Tselem reports that the Israeli military refuses to give building permits to Palestinians in 99 per cent of Area C, which is where the Jordan Valley, containing the village of Khirbet al-Makhul, lies.

Oxfam reports: "Israel's planning policy in Area C is used to maintain reserves of land for future development of Israeli settlements. Palestinians are often left with no choice other than to build without a permit, despite the ever present risk of demolition which threatens thousands of buildings and puts thousands of families at risk of forced displacement."

Who, reading the BBC's report, would know that? There was nothing in this report to provide a context for the events of a week of Palestinian house demolitions and the manhandling of European diplomats.

To add insult to injury, the Palestinians, who were presented as infringing Israel's honest planning laws, are then depicted as being too intransigent to comply with the consequences. The article continues: "... the Bedouin villagers of Khirbet al-Makhul have refused to leave the land where they say they have grazed sheep for generations."

The fact that the Palestinians have indeed been on this land for generations is furthermore presented as no more than a claim with the addition of two simple words: "they say". The Palestinians' existence on this land and their dispossession of it is not a fact for the BBC, it is merely a claim.

Why is the way the BBC presents Israel's occupation of Palestinian land an issue? After all, it is not as if much of the mainstream media does any better on the subject.

There are several key reasons. According to the BBC's own figures, BBC News reaches 81 per cent of the UK each week across all platforms (television, news, online). That's a quite staggering percentage of the population consuming the BBC's output, including what it has to say on Palestine and the occupation. No other news organisation can claim to be reaching and influencing the vast majority of the British population in this way.

Even more worrying, the BBC Media Centre reports that, "The BBC remains the news provider that the UK public trusts the most by far." It quotes an Ipsos Mori survey, conducted in February 2013, in which 58 per cent of respondents said that the BBC was the "one source they would most likely turn to for news they trust". This was significantly ahead of the nearest other provider, ITV, on 14 per cent.

So here we have a news organisation with a vast reach, commanding a high level of trust, publicly funded, which is failing to tell its audiences the ugly truth of Israel's occupation.

As demonstrated by the article on Marion Fesneau-Castaing and Khirbet al-Makhoul, the BBC will leave out the facts and the context which, if included, would show Israel to be the rogue state it is. And, wherever possible, it will present its audience with the official Israel line only; in this report, for example, that the Palestinians allegedly had no legal right to build where they did. The Palestinian perspective, indeed the fact that Israel almost never gives planning permission to Palestinians, forcing them to build "illegally" is omitted.

Four days after publishing this article, BBC Online ran another piece, headlined "Israel 'to act' over West Bank diplomats scuffle". This contained a video showing Fesneau-Castaing pushing an Israeli soldier in the face as she was lifted up from the ground and led away. The BBC reports that "...video emerged of her lashing out at an Israeli border policeman."

The video that BBC audiences will not see is that of Israeli forces destroying the tents in which the homeless Palestinian villagers were sheltering, while they were still inside. Once again, the true extent of Israel's aggression against the Palestinian people has been carefully hidden from those receiving their news via the BBC.

Through its massive omissions in reporting, the BBC is keeping its audience, 81 per cent of the British population, in the dark about the reality of Israel's occupation. Where are the BBC's reports on the arbitrary arrests and detention without trial of Palestinian civilians; the dragging of Palestinian children from their beds at night by Israeli soldiers to be thrown into jail; the destruction of Palestinian farmland and olive groves by armed Israeli settlers; the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from East Jerusalem in ever-increasing numbers; and the impact of the apartheid wall and the checkpoints which contain Palestinian movement?

They are not there in the BBC's world; they are non-existent. Instead we have offerings from BBC Online such as, "West Bank: Why do some UK Jews settle in Israeli occupied land?"

The article begins: "Every year hundreds of British Jews make the life-changing decision to emigrate to Israel. A small number of these decide to join settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank." What follows is a 1,000 word paean to Israeli settlers. They are not an obstacle to peace, they tell BBC reporter, Samantha Dalton, they are in the West Bank to "contribute to civil society" and are simply misunderstood.

This cosy little article, given to us by a news organisation funded by our licence-fees, somehow seems oblivious to the fact that the settlers' very presence in the occupied West Bank contravenes international law. It is not bothered by the fact that UN Resolution 446 says settlements "constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East." From that point of view alone, this feature on the "life-changing" experiences of those who would be settlers is incredibly irresponsible.

And where is the Palestinian perspective? Again, as so often with the BBC, there is none. Not a single Palestinian is interviewed about the impact of settlers and settlements on Palestinians in the West Bank. There is nothing about the land theft necessary for the creation of settlements; nothing about the violent extremism of settlers in Hebron and elsewhere; and nothing about the allocation of 70 times more water to illegal Israeli settlers than to Palestinians.

For the BBC to include that kind of balanced information would be to inform its huge audience of the Palestinian experience of occupation and to expose too clearly the horrors of Israel's apartheid system. As we've seen, it's not the kind of information that the BBC is in the habit of giving out. That the BBC chooses to withhold important information which is vital for its audience to understand what is happening in Palestine and Israel is something that should concern us all. More

Amena Saleem is a journalist and activist, working closely with Palestine Solidarity Campaign in the UK. She has twice driven on convoys to Gaza with PSC. More information on PSC's solidarity work is available at www.palestinecampaign.org

 

The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory

Book Review: The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory

"To write more truthfully about the Nakba is not just to practice a professional historiography; it is also a moral imperative of acknowledgement and redemption." The Palestine Nakba: decolonising history, narrating the subaltern, reclaiming memory' (Zed Books, 2012) dismantles the myths structured by Zionism and sustained by an acquiescing narrative, furthering recognition of Palestinian legitimacy which surpasses remembrance.

Nur Masalha's research provides a meticulous framework through which the Palestinian struggle for memory exceeds the conventional definition of resistance tainted by the enforced oblivion of Palestinian narrative. Through analysis of various academic works which are compared and contrasted to various Palestinian narratives, Masalha elevates subaltern memory to prominence, highlighting a continuous rupture exacerbated by euphemisms which attempt to diminish the Palestinian problem.

The various memory conflicts expounded upon in the book stem from Israel's insistence upon manipulating Palestinian history in an attempt to thwart Palestinian consciousness, not only within the dispersed national dimension. The international support which Zionism harbours enables the occupying power to maintain the endorsed alienation from Palestinian existence and memory, which is erroneously supported in the West through a selective discernment of what constitutes genocide, thus displacing Palestinian history while supporting Zionist ambiguity and denial of the Nakba. The collaboration both at the Zionist governmental and academic levels portrays a reinvention of Jewish historiography 'divorced from collective memory' as the obsession of rewriting history in order to construct the fabrications of Jewish nationhood strive to eliminate the authenticity of Palestinian memory, hence the importance of reversing the traditional approach to history by returning to the subaltern memory – a component which is particularly vital in securing the Palestinian narrative which has already suffered appropriation and destruction of archived historical material.

Zionist historiography justifies Jewish independence by expounding upon oriental stereotypes, thus promoting Palestinian displacement and the elimination of the indigenous population in order to maintain the myth of the barren land. The Nakba, described by Israel as the war of liberation, is relegated to a segment of history within the Israeli narrative which is either denied or else misrepresented in a manner which seeks to divest Palestinians not only of their legitimate rights to land, but also of their existence. The settler-colonial memory supported by the Plan Dalet created colonial terminology which justified the occupation supported by imperialism. The justifications endorsed and promulgated by Israel reflect the lack of anti-colonial debate to the point of distortion concerning the actual commencement of the colonisation of Palestine which liberal Zionists claim had started in 1967. Masalha, however, traces the origins of colonisation back to 1882, when the concept of forced transfer had already formed part of Zionist ideology. Marginalising Palestinians by declaring them a segment of the Arab population furthered their displacement in terms of historical visibility enhanced by Zionist manipulation of language supporting a fictitious common history among settlers while justifying the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians through the colonising of remnants of indigenous memory.

The imposition of Jewish collective memory designed by Zionism is a focal issue through which the colonisation of Palestinian identity and collective memory can be challenged through subaltern memory and the processes through which it ensured remembrance remained enshrined within a resistance which protected its people from the sequence of oblivion. The subaltern has presented a challenge to Zionist efforts to appropriate Palestinian territory. Toponymy, the destruction of Palestinian sites and their reinvention into places of allegedly Jewish significance aided by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), the demolishing of villages in an attempt to invalidate Palestinian claims, massacres, internal forced displacement and the millions of Palestinian refugees have been minimised within the Zionist narrative to strengthen the alleged connection "between the days of the biblical Israelites and the modern Israeli state". However, the intention to construct a state upon remnants of Palestinian territory is challenged by the strength of Palestinian memory. Despite eradication of Nakba discourse from Israeli debate which intentionally fails to associate the violence unleashed upon Palestinians as pertaining to Palestinian memory, Palestinians have struggled from the periphery for their right to memory within a context which the Israeli narrative deems obsolete.

Masalha highlights the urgency expressed by Palestinians in asserting their historical memory in various mediums of dissemination. With a discrepancy between Israeli and Palestinian narratives regarding documented collective memory, Palestinians have embarked upon a process of unification within various experiences of the Israeli occupation which reflects the colossal predicament of refugees. Israel's vast archives and destruction of Palestinian documents led to unjustifiable claims of Palestinian memory as unreliable, hence the importance of asserting oral tradition to reconstruct the ostracised history, particularly the atrocities of the Nakba. Masalha states that "The overall bias towards Israeli 'archives' and the lack of sufficient attention given to Palestinian oral history have contributed to silencing the Palestinian past ... As is the case with other subaltern groups, refugee oral testimony is a crucial source for recovering the voice of the victims of ethnic cleansing and for constructing a more comprehensible narrative of the experience of ordinary Palestinian refugees". The urgency also reflects the necessity to rapidly depart from the colonial perspective in a manner through which Palestinians are able to author their own history, as well as counter Israeli perspectives that Palestinians should acknowledge responsibility for the Nakba.

The continuity of trauma necessitates the validation of oral history within Palestinian collective memory, in order to challenge the conventional Israeli historiography supplemented at various levels including education, by Israel's security agency, Shin Bet. Palestinian oral history is disassociated from any ideological project, however it should be allowed the space to flourish and challenge the manipulation of discourse through recollection of Palestinian trauma. Exposing Israeli patriotism as a force intent on the obliteration of the indigenous population in turn provides the initial deconstruction of oblivion processes which tend to have further ramifications than the obvious process of forgetting. Indifference plays an integral role in the dynamics of oblivion – recognition of subaltern memory significantly challenges the exclusion of the Nakba from any political platform including the alleged peace process. Masalha's arguments for a coherent counter hegemony that dispels Zionist manipulation of language, history and memory, based upon recognition of the Nakba and efforts to maintain its protection against denial especially with the international community portray the need to comprehend and maintain a wider commitment to the Palestinian struggle against Zionist and imperialist oblivion. More

 

Mau Mau: Breaking the silence of colonial torture

The settlement of the claims brought by a group of elderly Kenyans, imprisoned and tortured during the Mau Mau insurgency that preceded the country's independence, marks an important victory of justice for colonial crimes.

The survivors of the torture meted out by the colonial administration were determined to break the silence surrounding their suffering, including rape, castration and severe beatings. They succeeded in overcoming major hurdles with the support of Kenyan organisations, human rights groups, lawyers, academics and others.

The UK government finally bowed to the inevitable, following a four-year legal battle and faced with irrefutable evidence. During this time, the government suffered two significant defeats in the courts, the most recent being one in October 2012, when the High Court rejected the government's argument that "too much time had elapsed for there to be a fair trial".

With the revelation of a vast secret colonial archive in early 2011, the judge found that a fair trial was indeed possible, noting that "the documentation is voluminous… the governments and military commanders seem to have been meticulous record keepers". REDRESS, an international human rights organisation that helps torture survivors obtain justice and reparation, made written and oral submissions to the court that supported the victims' rights.

The British government has now agreed to provide compensation to 5,228 survivors totalling 19.9m pounds ($31m), including 6m pounds ($9.3m) in legal costs, and to fund the construction of a memorial in Nairobi to the victims of colonial torture.

In his statement to Parliament on June 6, Foreign Secretary William Hague expressed his "sincere regret" and unreservedly condemned the torture on behalf of the government. This is welcome. However, the statement fell short on several counts. The UK "regretted", but did not fully apologise for what happened. Its analysis failed to recognise the anti-colonial nature of the uprising. It stressed that the settlement was confined to Kenya and did not constitute a precedent.

"We will… continue to exercise our own right to defend claims brought against the government," Hague stated in parliament. "We do not believe that this settlement establishes a precedent in relation to any other former British colonial administration."

The foreign secretary's statement defended the UK's legal position of denying liability. This fails to recognise victims' right to reparation for torture that is well established under international law and results in delaying payouts to people who are coming to the end of their lives.

The "Mau Mau" settlement is groundbreaking because - contrary to the government's portrayal - it does indeed set a major precedent in which decades of denial and silencing of the victims is replaced with the truth as to what happened, the responsibility of the UK, and the right of victims to obtain reparation.

Even though the UK government stopped short of apologising, it is clear that the settlement goes a long way in restoring the dignity of the victims. The terms agreed upon are important to treat survivors as individuals who suffered grievous and lasting injustices and to set the record straight. The case should also pave the way for much more fundamental changes.

While Hague's statement downplayed the prospect of the UK being prepared to seriously address the issues raised by the case, these questions cannot be ignored: Who should own and have access to the historical records, such as those on the Mau Mau uprisings kept by the UK? How, and through whose eyes, should the UK's colonial history be portrayed, taught and remembered? And, what lessons should be learned from what was done to "colonial subjects" and civilians branded as "terrorists" and the manner in which they have subsequently been denied truth and justice?

These questions are not purely theoretical. Atrocities carried out by British forces outside of the UK mainland are not isolated or abstract. A glimpse at current debates and litigation concerning events in Iraq and Afghanistan illustrate this point only too well.

The settlement has potentially wide ramifications for victims of violations from Aden to Cyprus and Malaysia that have been swept under the colonial carpet. More claims can be expected. The foreign office has already been informed that it will be receiving a claim from lawyers representing a number of Cypriots who allege that they were also mistreated during the island's decolonisation conflict in the 1950s. More

 

Israeli rabbis commit atrocity against Jewish history

When settlers and Rabbis called the policemen and soldiers of Israel “Nazis”, hardly anyone spoke out. When I voiced criticism over this, I received phone threats.

Yoram Kaniuk

Then, last week, when MK and MD Professor Aryeh Eldad sided with rabbis who warned their flock not to rent or sell property to non-Jews, I remembered that in Nazi Germany many physicians also identified with Hitler. The term “Nazi” now lingers once more in the air, but on the opposite side to that of settlers who swore at soldiers. The word “Nazi” now lingers because the Rabbis who signed the racist declaration committed an atrocity against Jewish history.

A duck may be declared as such if it looks like a duck, talks like a duck and walks like a duck. Nazis began their assault on Jews by by humiliating them, by forbidding them to share life with Germans. The benches on the boulevards were marked “Germans only”. The Nazi claimed that only someone possessing of pure German blood could be a part of the German nation.

Rabbis and other racists, who popped up like mushrooms following a rain of anti-humanist sewage, fear dangerous encounters between Jews and Arabs or life among gentiles. Much in the same did the Nazis, unlike the Italian fascists, fear intermarriage and launch campaigns of defamation and humiliation against their resident enemy. At first they did not consider murdering the Jews. The wanted to isolate them, to discriminate against them, to have them fired from their workplaces. They refused to share a park-bench with them and called on them to immigrate.

Those who wished to immigrate and had the opportunity could flee, even with their assets. Prior to becoming the driver of Jews to their death, Adolf Eichmann worked in Vienna and later in Prague as the head of a state agency devoted to forcing immigration on the Jews. The Nazis wanted the Jews out of Europe, which, in their eyes, they had soiled. Annihilation began only after the Nazis could no longer await immigration and the nations of the world refused to receive the refugees.

Thus, the racist actions committed by the Rabbis and by much of Israel’s population today is old-school racism which we are adopting sixty five years after the Holocaust. Pure German blood massacred the Jews. Jewish law is rich with goodness and rich with ugliness, but when Rabbis speak on television about wanting to expel Arabs from this land and not co-reside with them, we must remember of whom these rabbis and other racists learned their craft.

This is because if anyone who voices such opinions and acts according to them at home and on the street would look at the map knowing its measure, they will understand that none of it would work without a horrible punitive action. There’s hardly enough in a decree forbidding Arabs from living in the town of Safed or a housing project for Jews only built in Jaffa, or in the occupied territories of the West Bank. There, the expulsion, the robbing and the beating of anyone who isn’t Jewish has already been permitted by Jewish law.

All that’s left for them then is annihilation, otherwise the Arabs will avenge, helped by the international community. This may well be the case, and just as the Nazi state crumbled so will this Israeli state, so distant from the culture of Israel, from the values of Israel, from the wisdom of Israel. Those who do not know history and do not know the Holocaust turn the Holocaust into a rope by which to hang and hate those who live here and are not of our own: the immigrant workers, the children of mixed marriages and non-Jews in general.

One rabbi, interviewed on television this week, was shocked to hear blasphemous Rabbis being called “racists”. Nearly in a cry, with his startled eyes shut, he said something like “how can the word racism could ever be said in relation to Rabbis?”

These are the crooked and corrupt, because the word “racists” weighs heavy on that vacant and vehement fool and reminds him, heavens forbid, of the Holocaust. What does it do? Remind him? And this is while all that was ever done in the struggle of religious Zionism against Jewish nationalism, against the gentiles, against the God of Israel, is all racism in the spirit of the Nurnberg laws.

Had that God existed, then I assume, grace of first hand acquaintance, he wouldn’t have wanted to see “National Wailing Wall” in Jerusalem as a sort of pagan golden calf taken for Jewish by them, its plaza split into separate sections for men, women, gentiles and foreigners. It is much like the “gold-less” calf that the Jews had when they left Egypt, and was surely created of looted Egyptian jewelry, or where else would the gold come from?

Soon the nations of the world will declare their acceptance of a Palestinian state in accordance with the 1967 borders. Israel will stand alone. Will the Jews of this world, whom Israel’s Rabbis put at risk, accept the verdict? And what then of the State of Israel? It shall become another episode in the history of the Jewish people. More

 

 

Files that may shed light on colonial crimes still kept secret by UK

Secret government files from the final years of the British empire are still being concealed despite a pledge by William Hague, the foreign secretary, that they would be declassified and opened to the public.

The withheld files are among a huge cache of documents that remained hidden from view for decades at an undisclosed Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) archive, in breach of laws governing the handling of official papers. Once the existence of the archive became known to lawyers for a group of elderly Kenyans who are trying to sue the British government over the abuses they suffered during the Mau Mau insurgency, Hague ordered an inquiry and promised disclosure.

He told MPs: "I believe that it is the right thing to do for the information in these files now to be properly examined and recorded and made available to the public through the National Archives. It is my intention to release every part of every paper of interest subject only to legal exemptions."

However, it emerged this week that the Foreign Office is holding back significant numbers of documents, using a legal exemption contained within a catch-all clause within the very law that it had breached by maintaining the secret archive.

Among the papers known to have been withheld by the FCO are a file that contains the minutes of many of the meetings of the cabinet of the British colonial government in Kenya in 1963, the year before independence; a file about compensation that was paid after the 1946 bombing of the British military HQ at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem; and a file containing telegrams that British diplomats sent to London from Mauritius in 1968, the year that colony proclaimed independence.

Other files that are known to remain hidden from public view include a series of five concerning a visit that Prince Philip made to Singapore in 1956; three concerning a proposed royal visit to Nigeria the same year; and a proposed royal visit to Mauritius in 1968.

The Mauritius papers could be particularly sensitive as they could shed light on Britain's decision to expel about 1,500 Chagos islanders a few years later, having agreed to lease Diego Garcia to the United States for use as a military base.

Sections of some files that have been declassified and handed over the National Archives at Kew, south-west London, are also being withheld. These include parts of a 1950 file about the "indoctrination of Malay Chinese" travelling to China, which the Foreign Office wishes to remain concealed until 2032; Singapore intelligence reports from the 1950s; and a 1960 file concerning Northern Cameroons, both of which the Foreign Office plans to withhold until 2029. These files remain classified under the terms of Section 3.4 of the 1958 Public Records Act, which permits government departments to withhold from public view any historic document "required for administrative purposes" or that "ought to be retained for any other special reason".

The Foreign Office declined to disclose the reasons for deciding that specific files should be withheld, with the result that the reason for the continuing secrecy is itself, at this stage, a secret. A Foreign Office spokesperson said: "We are committed to making as many files as we can from our colonial archives available to the public. These files are an important part of our history. By the end of our programme, we'll have released some 18,000 files. On average, only 1% of material has been withheld from release."

The secret archive was discovered by a number of historians, including David Anderson, professor of African politics at Oxford, who were working for the legal team that represented the Mau Mau veterans as they fought for the right to sue to the British government for the mistreatment they suffered as prisoners of the British in 1950s Kenya. The government had acknowledged that their accounts of appalling torture are true, but is continuing to contest their right to claim damages, saying that a fair trial is impossible after so many years.

During a series of hearings the Foreign Office acknowledged that the archive existed, and that it contained 200 boxes of files: 1.5 tons of paper that covered about 200 metres of shelving. Lord Howell, then Foreign Office minister, said that the documents had been brought to the UK not only from Kenya, but from 37 different colonies and protectorates including Aden, Ceylon, Cyprus, Malaya, Malta, Nigeria and Northern Rhodesia.

For several years the secret archive was housed at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire, inside the highly secure premises of Her Majesty's Government Communications Centre. This is a facility where teams of scientists – real-life versions of Q, the fictional boffin of the James Bond films – work behind five metre-high fences topped with razor wire to devise technical aids for MI5 and MI6.

An inquiry commissioned by Hague established that the files were first stored in Hayes, west London, before being moved to Hanslope Park, where staff were led to believe that they belonged to another organisation called Hayes and not to the FCO.

Anthony Cary, the former British high commissioner to Canada, who conducted the investigation, reported that "a canard that was widely shared and passed down during handovers" included the explanation that the FCO was holding the archive because there had been a fire at Hayes. In this way it was never assessed for declassification, as the law required, and placed beyond reach of the Freedom of Information Act.

Once the bulk of the material began to be handed over to the National Archive, it became clear that many of Britain's late colonial-era official papers were not archived anywhere, but destroyed.

Thousands of documents containing evidence of official misdeeds committed in the years in the years before independence were either incinerated or dumped at sea. Surviving scraps of documents show that colonial officials in some colonies, such as Kenya, were told that there should be a presumption in favour of disposal of documents rather than removal to the UK – "emphasis is placed upon destruction" – and that no trace of either the documents or their incineration should remain. When documents were burned, officials were told that "the waste should be reduced to ash and the ashes broken up".

Some idea of the scale of the destruction operations can be gleaned from instruction documents that survived the purge. In certain circumstances, officials in Kenya were informed, "it is permissible, as an alternative to destruction by fire, for documents to be packed in weighted crates and dumped in very deep and current-free water at maximum practicable distance from the coast". More