Britain has agreed on a Sh1.8 billion compensation settlement for thousands of Kenyans tortured by colonial forces during the Mau Mau uprising, a lawyer and expert witness said on Wednesday. According to London’s Guardian newspaper, the historic compensation payment will be officially announced today at an occasion in which Britain will express its “sincere regret” for the torture inflicted upon thousands of people imprisoned during Kenya’s Mau Mau insurgency. In a statement to MPs, WilliamHague, foreign secretary, is expected to announce payments of £2,600 (Sh340,000) each to more than 5,000 survivors of the vast network of prison camps that the British authorities established across its colony during the bloody 1950s conflict: a total of about £13.9m (Sh1.82 billion). After weeks of negotiations with lawyers representing three elderly former prisoners who brought a series of test cases in the high court in London, the government has agreed also to fund the construction of a memorial in Nairobi to Kenya’s victims of colonial-era torture. Negotiations began after a London court ruled in October that three elderly Kenyans, who suffered castration, rape and beatings while in detention during a crackdown by British forces and their Kenyan allies in the 1950s, could sue Britain. The torture took place during the so- called Kenyan “Emergency” of 1952-60, when fighters from the Mau Mau movement attacked British targets, causing panic among white settlers and alarming the government in London. “We have agreed on an out-of-court settlement,” Kenyan lawyer Paul Muite, an advisor to the Mau Mau veterans seeking compensation, told Reuters. “(The negotiations) have included everybody with sufficient evidence of torture. And that number is about 5,200,” he said. The Mau Mau nationalist movement originated in the 1950s among the Kikuyu people of Kenya. Its loyalists advocated violent resistance to British domination of the country.
Posted on: Wed, 05 Jun 2013 21:44:46 +0000