Apa yang dikatakan di sini..tak semua sejarah ditulis dengan betul..yes! TAK SEMUA... ada yang direka dan dicipta utk sedapkan jalan cerita, menutup kesalahan orang-orang berkepentingan dan menjadikan orang-orang tertentu HERO dlm sejarah.. this is not funny..seriously..
'Lost' colonial papers made public
SAm MARSDEN
The Foreign Office has finally made public the first batch of
thousands of "lost" colonial era files believed to have been
destroyed.
The documents, which were secretly sent back to the UK
when former colonies became independent, shed new light on how British
officials ran overseas territories including Kenya, Cyprus and present-day
Malaysia.
They also record how colonial administrators planned to burn
other classified papers - potentially revealing abuses committed under British
rule - before handing power to the new indigenous governments.
The Foreign Office only admitted last year that it held some
8,800 files at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire which were "migrated"
to Britain from colonies at the time of independence because of their
sensitivity.
More than 1,200 of these records were released today at the
National Archives in Kew, west London, the first of six tranches in a process
due to be completed by November 2013.
A memo in the Kenyan files dated May 1961 sets out the criteria
under which papers were to be "migrated".
Then-colonial secretary Iain Macleod said the aim was to ensure
no files were passed to a post-independence regime which "a) might
embarrass HMG (Her Majesty's Government in Britain) or other governments; b)
might embarrass members of the police, military forces, public servants or
others eg police informers; c) might compromise sources of intelligence
information; d) might be used unethically by ministers in the successor
Government." Dr Edward Hampshire, diplomatic and colonial records specialist
at the National Archives, said these guidelines were interpreted "very
liberally indeed" by the different colonial administrations, with one even
retaining the personnel files for people working as drivers. Kenyan ministry of defence files state that British officials
were told to divide all documents into the categories of "legacy"
material, which could be left behind, and "watch" material, which
could not. One memo dated April 1961 - two years before Kenyan independence
- noted: "The aim will be to ensure that as much material as possible is
left for the unimpaired functioning of the succeeding independent government,
and for the proper recording of the past...
"'Watch' material can only be seen by 'authorised'
officers. An 'authorised' officer is defined in the draft as a servant of the
Kenya government who is a British subject of European descent, and who has been
security cleared to see classified documents." It added: "To obviate a too laborious scrutiny of 'dead'
files, emphasis is placed on destruction - a vast amount of paper in the
Ministry of Defence secret registry and classified archives could be burnt
without loss, and I should be surprised if the same does not apply to the CS's
(chief secretary's) Office." A detailed document explaining how to decide which files should
be given "watch" designation added: "There is undoubtedly much
old classified material in many offices which is never used, even for
reference, and which has no historical significance: this should be burnt by an
'authorised' officer in person." It stressed that the "very existence" of
"watch" material should never be revealed, and advised that officials
might need to change page numbers in files to disguise the removal of sensitive
papers. There are similar references to the destruction of classified
material in the files relating to Malaya, which became independent in 1957 and
joined with three other states to form Malaysia in 1963. In July 1956, the private secretary to British high commissioner
Sir Donald MacGillivray raised the question of what should be done with old
papers. He wrote: "I have been through them and it would seem that
some contain items of historical interest in the event of anyone writing a
history of the Emergency (the 1948-1960 conflict with communist guerillas) or
biography of former high commissioners. "The others should be dealt with in detail, but I have not
time to do this. Would you agree to their disposal as suggested against
individual files in the list."
A separate appendix listing the material proposed for
destruction includes documents relating to a visit to Malaya by the Duchess of
Kent and "law and order" files covering intelligence, the internal
security committee and situation reports. It is not known what happened to these papers, but archivists
who have gone through the Malaya files say there are only limited references to
the alleged Batang Kali massacre of December 1948, when British troops shot
dead 24 unarmed rubber plantation workers. The "migrated" archives came to light in January last
year after four elderly Kenyans brought a High Court case against the UK
Government over the alleged torture of Kenyan Mau Mau rebels in British camps
in the 1950s. Only a third of the Kenyan files were released today, but they
contain detailed bureaucratic accounts of the policy of seizing the livestock
of people suspected of aiding the Mau Mau insurgency. On January 5 1955 a British district commissioner seized a total
of 30 sheep from four members of the Kikuyu tribe who worked on the farm of a
Mr SJO Armstrong in the Naivasha district of Rift Valley Province.
A short file on the case reveals that these were all the animals
they owned. The action was prompted by suspicions that they had "harboured
and fed" a 40-strong Mau Mau gang for a fortnight. In a line expressing the frustration, and perhaps
vindictiveness, of the UK colonial administrators, an official wrote:
"Owing to the fact that the Kikuyu labour was totally unco-operative and
showed no signs of assisting security forces, native stock was seized." Tony Badger, a Cambridge University history professor who has
been appointed by the Foreign Office as an independent reviewer of the
archive's release, acknowledged that there was a "legacy of
suspicion" about the documents among journalists and academics. But he stressed that so far no files have been withheld from
release at the National Archives, and significantly less than 1% of the content
has been redacted.
from : www.independent.co.uk
p/s : kaji sejarah...berhati2 lah..
