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