Atrocities & Erasure

King Leopold II ran the Congo as his personal property for twenty-three years. The territory existed to extract wild rubber. Villages were given quotas. Failure to meet the quota meant the Force Publique would burn the village and cut off the hands of survivors as proof to their officers that bullets had been used on humans, not animals.

By 1908, when international pressure finally forced Leopold to transfer the territory to the Belgian state, the population had fallen by an estimated half. The wealth Leopold extracted built the Arcades du Cinquantenaire in Brussels, the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, and the seaside resort of Ostend.

In the middle of the Second World War, Britain diverted food from Bengal to feed British troops and stockpile reserves in Europe. When officials in India warned Churchill that people were dying, his response, recorded by Leopold Amery, was to ask why Gandhi had not yet died.

The Bengal famine was not caused by crop failure. Rice harvests in 1943 were only slightly lower than normal. It was caused by deliberate policy: requisitioning, scorched-earth tactics against possible Japanese supply lines, and a refusal to release reserves. Two to four million people starved in a province under the direct administration of the British Crown.

While Persia was a declared neutral in the First World War, British and Russian armies occupied the country and turned it into a logistical theatre against the Ottomans. The historian Mohammad Gholi Majd, working from U.S. State Department archives, documents what followed: occupation forces requisitioned or purchased almost the entire harvest, blocked grain shipments at the southern ports, and in some districts burned food storages to deny them to rivals or to clear land for military use. Wheat that Iranian peasants had grown was loaded onto British transports for Mesopotamia and India.

The result was the largest demographic catastrophe of the First World War. Famine and the typhus and cholera epidemics that travelled with it killed, by Majd's accounting, somewhere between eight and ten million Iranians — close to forty percent of the population — in barely two years. The episode is virtually absent from British and Russian textbooks. It is absent from the standard Western chronologies of the Great War. Even in Iran, the cynical use of the famine by later regimes has not produced a public reckoning commensurate with its scale.

The Iranian case shows the colonial logic at its most undisguised: a neutral country, a foreign army, a confiscated harvest, a population left to die, and a century of silence afterwards. The phrase 'collateral damage' had not yet been invented; the practice was already mature.

When the Herero rose against German settler land seizures in 1904, General Lothar von Trotha issued an Extermination Order: 'every Herero, with or without rifles, with or without cattle, will be shot.' The Herero were driven into the waterless Omaheke desert. Wells were poisoned. Survivors were sent to concentration camps on Shark Island, where forced labor and starvation killed roughly half of them.

German anthropologists collected the skulls of victims for racial-science research. Some of those skulls were only returned to Namibia in the 2010s. Germany formally recognized this as a genocide in 2021, more than a century later.

France did not consider Algeria a colony. It considered it part of metropolitan France. When Algerians rose for independence in 1954, the French Republic responded with the Battle of Algiers, in which paratroopers under General Massu used systematic torture — la gégène (electric shock to the genitals), waterboarding, rape — to extract information from suspected FLN members.

The war killed several hundred thousand Algerians. Entire villages were 'regrouped' — forcibly relocated to camps. In Paris in October 1961, French police under Maurice Papon murdered between 100 and 300 Algerian demonstrators and threw their bodies into the Seine. The French state acknowledged this in 2012.

The British colonization of Tasmania is one of the few cases in modern history that historians describe, with little controversy, as genocide. Settlers, with state backing, conducted the 'Black War' — a campaign of hunts and massacres that, combined with introduced disease and forced displacement, reduced an Aboriginal population of perhaps 5,000–10,000 to a handful within a generation.

Truganini, often (and inaccurately) called the last full-blooded Tasmanian Aboriginal woman, died in 1876. Her skeleton was put on display in a museum until 1947.

The Seventh Cavalry surrounded a band of Lakota under Spotted Elk who had been ordered to disarm. When the shooting started — over a deaf elder named Black Coyote who did not understand he was being told to give up his rifle — soldiers used Hotchkiss guns to cut down men, women, children and infants. The bodies were left in the snow.

Twenty soldiers received the Medal of Honor for this. The medals have never been rescinded.

The Mayan codices — folding books containing centuries of astronomy, mathematics, history and prophecy — were systematically burned by Spanish missionaries in the sixteenth century. Bishop Diego de Landa burned dozens of them at Maní in 1562. Four codices survive. Four.

The library of the University of Sankoré in Timbuktu, the libraries of the Songhai Empire, the architectural records of the Benin Bronzes (16,000 of which were looted by the British Army in 1897 and still sit, mostly, in European museums), the Buddhist sculptures of Gandhara, the ceremonial objects of the Pacific Northwest — colonialism was not only a project of killing people. It was a project of erasing the proof that they had a civilization in the first place.

On Baisakhi day, an unarmed crowd — pilgrims, families, political meeting-goers — was trapped in a walled garden with one narrow exit. Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer arrived with fifty rifles, blocked the gate, and ordered ten minutes of continuous fire into the densest part of the crowd. Many died trying to climb the walls; others drowned in the garden's well, where 120 bodies were later recovered.

Dyer was relieved of command but never tried. The Morning Post raised £26,000 for him by public subscription — about £1.3 million today — and the House of Lords passed a motion of approval. Britain offered no formal apology until David Cameron called the killings 'deeply shameful' in 2013, still short of the word 'sorry.'

When the Kikuyu rose to demand the return of land stolen by white settlers, Britain declared a State of Emergency and built a network of concentration camps that historian Caroline Elkins, working from the surviving files, called Britain's Gulag. Detainees were beaten, electrocuted, castrated, and worked to death; women were raped with bottles and broken glass.

In 2011 the British government tried to deny the records existed. In 2013, after losing in the High Court, it admitted the abuses, paid £19.9 million in compensation to 5,228 elderly survivors, and quietly disclosed the 'Migrated Archive' — 1.2 million colonial files secretly shipped from twenty-three colonies to Hanslope Park to keep them out of the hands of newly independent governments.

America's first overseas colonial war began the moment Filipino independence fighters realised the United States had bought the islands from Spain rather than recognising the republic they had just declared. General Jacob H. Smith ordered Samar turned into 'a howling wilderness' and instructed his men to kill every male over the age of ten. The 'water cure' — a forerunner of waterboarding — was used in field tribunals.

On Jolo in 1906 the U.S. Army surrounded around 1,000 Moro men, women and children in the crater of Bud Dajo and killed nearly all of them. Mark Twain, then vice-president of the Anti-Imperialist League, wrote that the flag should be redesigned 'with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and crossbones.' The episode does not appear in most American high-school textbooks.

What Leopold did in the Congo, Julio César Arana did in the Amazon — on behalf of a company listed on the London Stock Exchange and audited by British accountants. Indigenous Huitoto, Bora and Andoque people were forced to tap rubber under threat of flogging, mutilation and the 'rubber stocks.' Roger Casement, the same Foreign Office investigator who had exposed Leopold, produced a 1912 report so damning that a House of Commons inquiry followed.

Nothing happened. Arana was elected to the Peruvian senate. The Indigenous population of the lower Putumayo had fallen from an estimated 50,000 to fewer than 8,000 within a decade. The City of London absorbed the profits and absolved itself of the deaths through the convenient fiction of limited liability.

Following the alleged 30 September coup attempt, the Indonesian army under General Suharto, supplied with kill lists by the U.S. embassy in Jakarta, oversaw the extermination of suspected communists, ethnic Chinese, trade unionists and leftist artists. Rivers in Bali and East Java were clogged with corpses. The CIA's own retrospective called it 'one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century'; it remains absent from almost every Western chronology of the Cold War.

Declassified documents released in 2017 confirm that U.S. and British officials not only knew but actively encouraged the killings as a strategic gain. No Western government has apologised. Indonesia has held no trials. Joshua Oppenheimer's films The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014) finally forced the episode into international view — fifty years late.

Australian historians have catalogued more than 400 separate massacres of Aboriginal people by settlers, police, and Native Mounted Police units between 1788 and 1928. The Myall Creek massacre (1838), the Coniston massacre (1928, the last officially recorded), and dozens of poisonings of waterholes with arsenic or strychnine are documented by name and date.

Australia simultaneously operated the 'Stolen Generations' policy from c.1905 to 1969: an estimated one in three Aboriginal children was forcibly removed from their families and placed in church and state institutions, where many were physically and sexually abused. A formal apology came in 2008. Reparations have not.

The Ottoman Empire's destruction of its Christian minorities is recognised as genocide by the European Parliament, the United States Congress, and most credible historians. It deserves a place in this archive not because the Ottomans were European colonialists — they were not — but because the modern Republic of Turkey still denies the genocide, and because the major Western powers, including Britain, France and Germany, knew, archived the evidence in real time, and then declined to prosecute under the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) when oil concessions in Mosul became the higher priority.

The pattern is colonial in its bookkeeping if not in its perpetrator: a mass killing whose denial is now policed by an allied state, whose evidence sits in the foreign offices of states that traded recognition for resources, and whose survivors are still asked, a century later, to prove that what happened to their grandparents happened.

Imperial Japan ran two parallel atrocities whose paper trails were largely destroyed in August 1945 and whose surviving documentation the United States classified in exchange for the research data. The 'comfort women' system trafficked an estimated 200,000 Korean, Chinese, Filipino, Indonesian and Dutch women into military brothels; survivors waited fifty years for any official acknowledgement, and the Japanese state still disputes the numbers. Unit 731, in occupied Manchuria, performed vivisection, frostbite testing and plague-bomb development on Chinese, Korean, Mongolian and Soviet prisoners.

The architects of Unit 731 — including its commander, Shirō Ishii — were granted immunity from prosecution by General MacArthur's occupation administration in exchange for handing their biological-warfare research to the United States Army's Fort Detrick programme. The Tokyo Tribunal heard nothing about it. The data was used. The victims were not informed.

Operation Condor was a continent-wide intelligence-sharing agreement between the military dictatorships of the Southern Cone, brokered and underwritten by the United States via the CIA and the Pentagon. Its purpose was the cross-border kidnapping, torture and 'disappearance' of left-wing dissidents, trade unionists, priests, students and journalists. Pregnant women were kept alive until they delivered; their babies were given to military families. Roughly 500 stolen children have been identified by Argentina's Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Hundreds remain missing.

Henry Kissinger, in a 1976 cable later declassified, told the Argentine foreign minister: 'If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly.' He died in 2023 without standing trial. The U.S. School of the Americas, which trained many of the responsible officers, was renamed in 2001 and continues to operate.

Since March 2015, a Saudi- and Emirati-led coalition has bombed Yemen using jets and munitions overwhelmingly supplied by the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany. Wedding halls, school buses, hospitals, water-treatment plants and the port of Hodeidah have been deliberately targeted. The naval and air blockade has produced what UNICEF described as the world's worst humanitarian crisis: cholera in the hundreds of thousands, child malnutrition at famine thresholds, and a state of permanent economic strangulation.

British arms-export licences to Saudi Arabia have been suspended, restored, and ruled unlawful by the UK Court of Appeal (2019), then resumed. US arms sales continued under three administrations. This is not history. It is the present tense, performed by the same parliaments that lecture other countries on rules-based order.