Friday, December 9, 2022

Forgotten History: Operation Legacy When British Destroyed Its Colonial History


 December 9, 1959, the British Foreign Office sent out a memo to all their offices and all colonial offices ordering that all ‘top secret’ and “non-accountable files from colonies like Rhodesia and Kenya be burned as part of “Operation Legacy”.

Operation Legacy was a plan by British officials to keep a permanently sealed lid on their appalling human rights record in the former empire. British agents across the world. In the 23 nations bargaining and fighting for freedom from Britain in the 50s-70s MI5 went about both collecting and destroying records of incidents like the 1948 Batang Kali Massacre where British Army forces killed 24 Malaysian rubber plant workers to end a strike or all papers on the Kenyan concentration camps during the Mau-Mau uprising.

The memo detailed the destruction of all migrated records to the home office from Operation Legacy. Previously to this orders had gone out to collect these files and any files that could embarrass the military, and the royal family, the memo itself ordered the destruction or removal of “all papers which are likely to be interpreted, either reasonably or by malice, as indicating racial prejudice or bias”.

Operation Legacy had gone into effect when the British government recognized that a mass “de-colonization” movement was picking up across Southeast Asia, the South Pacific, and Africa following the 1947 independence of India. In fact, in 1947 there was an actual early run of this burning of files that became known as the “Pall of Delhi” when Raj officials tried to destroy all records of the occupation of the Indian Subcontinent kept in India.

It is unknown how many records were actually destroyed under operation legacy. In the 80s the rules changed and there have been some large, migrated file stores discovered but only a very small fraction of what should exist based on historical study.

Sources:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/revealed-how-british-empire-s-dirty-secrets-went-up-in-smoke-in-the-colonies-8971217.html

 

https://mandemhood.com/operation-legacy-how-the-british-government-destroyed-its-history/

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