British war crimes
After burning down the village and its Dutch Reformed church, Hamilton posted a bulletin stating: "The town of Ventersburg has been cleansed of supplies and partly burnt, and all the farms in the vicinity destroyed, on account of the frequent attacks on the railway lines in the neighborhood.
"[8] [failed verification] On 1 November 1900, Major Edward Pine-Coffin wrote in his diary that the remaining civilian population of Ventersburg had been transported to concentration camps.
"[8] The destruction of Ventersburg was denounced in the House of Commons by Liberal MP David Lloyd George, who said Hamilton "is a brute and a disgrace to the uniform he wears.
[10] Even though Louis Trichardt was "reeling from the annual effects of malaria", British and Commonwealth servicemen sacked the town and arrested an estimated 90 male residents suspected of links to the Zoutpansberg Commando.
[12] According to South African historian Charles Leach, Captain Taylor "emphatically told" the local Venda and Sotho communities "to help themselves to the land and whatever else they wanted as the Boers would not be returning after the war.
Written by BVC Trooper Robert Mitchell Cochrane, a former justice of the peace from Western Australia,[18][19] the letter accused members of the Fort Edward garrison of six "disgraceful incidents": 1.
Lt. Morant's former orderly and interpreter, BVC Trooper Theunis J. Botha, testified that Visser, who had been promised that his life would be spared, was cooperative during two days of interrogation and that all his information was later found to have been true.
In response, Maj. Bolton argued that they were "illegal orders" and said, "The right of killing an armed man exists only so long as he resists; as soon as he submits he is entitled to be treated as a prisoner of war."
[41] On 27 February 1902, two British Army Lieutenants — Anglo-Australian Harry Morant and Australian born Peter Handcock of the Bushveldt Carbineers — were executed by firing squad after being convicted of murdering eight Afrikaner POWs.
[citation needed] According to author Alan Kramer, "The dominant scholarly (and popular) view is that the blockade was illegal and led to serious food shortages causing the mass starvation of German civilians".
According to Article 16 of Hague X:[60] "After every engagement, the two belligerents, so far as military interests permit, shall take steps to look for the shipwrecked, sick, and wounded, and to protect them, as well as the dead, against pillage and ill treatment."
This convention was not ratified by the United Kingdom, though large numbers of U-boat crew were rescued and captured as POW interrogations were often an important source of military intelligence.
[64][65][66] After a few German survivors managed to climb aboard the Nicosian, Herbert sent Baralong's 12 Royal Marines, under the command of a Corporal Collins, to board the sinking vessel.
Oberleutnant zur See Iwan Crompton, after returning to Germany from a prisoner-of-war camp, reported that Baralong had run down the lifeboat he was in; he leapt clear and was shortly after taken prisoner.
[76] In his postwar memoirs, Fürbringer alleged that, after the sinking, HMS Garry hove to and opened fire with revolvers and machine guns on the unarmed shipwreck survivors in the water.
The memoir states that the shooting ceased only when the convoy that the destroyer had been escorting, and that contained many neutral-flagged ships, arrived on the scene, at which point "as if by magic the British now let down some life boats into the water.
The list, which survived the Allied firebombing of Berlin and Potsdam during the Second World War, contains a total of 39 names, including "Captain McBride" of HMS Baralong.
[111] American author and historian Alfred M. de Zayas identifies the sinking of Tübingen and other German and Italian hospital ships as war crimes.
[121] During the war, British and Commonwealth forces hired Iban (Dyak) headhunters from Borneo to decapitate suspected MNLA members, arguing that this was done for identification purposes.
[128] In response to the Daily Worker articles exposing the decapitation of MNLA suspects, the practice was banned by Winston Churchill who feared that such photographs would give ammunition to communist propaganda.
[136] In June 1957, Eric Griffith-Jones, the attorney general of the British administration in Kenya, wrote to the governor, Sir Evelyn Baring, detailing the way the regime of abuse at the colony's detention camps was being subtly altered.
[citation needed] All of the soldiers involved in the Chuka patrols were placed under open arrest at Nairobi's Buller Camp, but General George Erskine, Commander-in-Chief of the East Africa Command, decided not to prosecute them.
British security forces were called to a crowd of Kikuyu who had gathered to hear the prophecies of a man who claimed to have seen a vision foreshadowing the end of colonial rule.
The soldiers were initially welcomed by the Catholic population; the relieve of the RUC from some security duties and the disbandment of the B specials brought hope that discrimination and heavy-handedness would be rooted out.
The deadliest incident happened in January 1972 on Bloody Sunday, when British paratroopers killed 14 civilians and injured several more at a protest held by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA).
In 2017, barrister Hugh Southey, representing 14 men who endured the "five techniques" interrogation method while interned in 1971, told the High Court that the mistreatment "was in the scale of a war crime".
Over the course of their confinement, their chamber pots began to fill, forcing the women to dump the urine out of spy holes in their doors (these were subsequently nailed shut) and to throw the excrement out their windows (which were then boarded up).
As time went on, the dirty protest changed the conditions within the prison from bad to worse, adding filth and stench to the already nearly insurmountable obstacles to daily life within the walls of Armagh.
[186] In November 2019, BBC News reported that the British government and military were accused of covering up the killing and torture of civilians and children during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
[193] In September 2013,[194] Royal Marines Sergeant Alexander Blackman, formerly of Taunton, Somerset,[195] was convicted at court martial of having murdered an unarmed, wounded Taliban insurgent during the Helmand province campaign.
