Kitchener
A Sudanese MP wants one of Britain’s most revered heroes to be classed as a war criminal. Ian Black reports
Britain has no plans to apologise to Sudan for Lord Horatio Kitchener’s behaviour at the end of the 19th century – a demand Khartoum may be planning to lump together with one from Washington for its more recent military action.
British Foreign Office officials last week scoffed at reports that a Sudanese MP, Mohammed Daoud al- Khalifa, grandson of the Khalifa whose rebellion was crushed by Kitchener’s victory at Omdurman, is calling for one of Britain’s most revered imperial heroes to be branded a war criminal.
Khalifa, a member of Sudan’s ruling National Islamic Front and chair of the committee commemorating the landmark September 1898 battle, is said to want to mount a posthumous case against Kitchener at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
But the court deals only with civil cases, while the newly constituted International Criminal Court, set up to deal with genocide and war crimes, has no retroactive powers.
“We are not aware of any legal format in which this could take place,” the Foreign Office said last week.
Khalifa also wants an apology from its northern neighbour Egypt – now, as then, at odds with the fundamentalist Islamic regime in Khartoum.
Britain’s Prime Minister, Tony Blair, recently expressed regret for the Irish potato famine and United States President Bill Clinton used a visit to Africa to apologise for the US role in the slave trade. Japan has been cagy about saying sorry for World War II atrocities, though Germany has done much to atone for its attempt to exterminate the Jews.
But Britain’s imperial record may be off limits, with Queen Elizabeth II pointedly declining during her Indian visit last year to apologise for the Amritsar massacre of 1919.
And a leading British historian, Edward Spiers, said it was a risible idea to indict Kitchener, still remembered for his luxuriant moustache and finger-pointing exhortation to young men on World War I recruiting posters.
His army was outnumbered by Sudanese forces at the battle, but the British and their Egyptian and Sudanese levies had the devastating firepower of the Maxim gun and their enemy did not. Khalifa’s dervishes, armed only with rifles, lost 10 000 dead, while fewer than 500 British were killed.
Spiers, editor of Sudan, A Reappraisal, said: “There is no cause for such a charge against Kitchener. He fully implemented British policy. He did it at minimal risk to the Egyptian and British lives under his command and he did it in a fully professional and methodical manner.
“Apologising is a dangerous and misguided concept because you’d be judging people by the standards of the moment rather than by any objective standard of historical evidence. Actions at Omdurman might have been a cause of surprise if CNN cameras had been present on the battlefield, but they weren’t. Nothing that was done there was out of character for Sudanese warfare.”
Sudan’s London embassy, whose ambassador was recalled following British support for the recent US attack on a Khartoum pharmaceutical factory, said there was no formal demand to indict Kitchener.
The general faced far greater controversy when he set up what were innocently called “concentration camps” during the Boer revolt against British rule in South Africa in which thousands of women and children died.
He was mourned by millions when he was drowned after his ship struck a mine in 1916.
This week Sudan demanded that the US pay reparations to victims of last month’s bombing of what the regime insists was a factory producing medicines, not chemical weapons financed by the terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.