List of Atrocities committed by the United Kingdom

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British authorities detaining Kenyan civilians during the Mau Mau Uprising.

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland throughout its history from its inception to the present, has committed a long list of atrocities, ranging from war crimes to crimes against humanity. This is a list that encompasses the atrocities committed by this country.

Atlantic Slave Trade

The British were no exception when it came to the Atlantic slave trade. To find cheap labor for their colonies in America, the British set up the Royal African Company which captured or bought African slaves and transported them in barcos to America, where they had no rights and were exploited to death. It was not until 1830 that slavery in the British colonies was abolished.

Expulsion of the Acadians

The Expulsion of the Acadians was the forced removal by the British of the Acadian people from the present-day Canadian Maritime provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and northern Maine — parts of an area historically known as Acadia. The Expulsion occurred during the French and Indian War (the North American theatre of the Seven Years' War) and was part of the British military campaign against New France. The British first deported Acadians to the Thirteen Colonies, and after 1758, transported additional Acadians to Britain and France. In all, of the 14,100 Acadians in the region, approximately 11,500 Acadians were deported. A census of 1764 indicates that 2,600 Acadians remained in the colony having eluded capture.

Indigenous Australian Genocide

Australian Frontier Wars

Starting with the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, British settlers in Australia clashed with the aboriginal people living on the continent, leading to a series of conflicts and massacres that led to the British fully incorporating Australia. The Black War is a good example, where Governor George Arthur of Van Diemen's Land declared martial law on the island of Tasmania and deported the aborigines to Flinders Island afterwards, which led to the virtual extinction of the aboriginal population of Tasmania. In addition, Australia was declared terra nullius, which deprived the aboriginal people of their rights to control their lands and gave the British the advantage to conquer Australia without treaty rights.

Stolen Generations

Throughout much of the 20th century, Australian bureaucrats removed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families with the goal to absorb them into the white population. The removal policy was aimed at half-blooded children in particular, as it was widely believed that the aboriginal race was dying out and that full-blooded individuals were incapable of fitting in with white society.

Peterloo Massacre

On 16 August 1819, 60,000 people gathered in St. Peter's Field, Manchester, to peacefully demand voting rights and an end to poverty. The meeting was headed by radical orator Henry Hunt. Local magistrates panicked and ordered the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry to charge the meeting and arrest Hunt. The Yeomanry, many of whom were drunk, used their sabres to hack a path through the crowd and ran several people down with their horses before managing to arrest Hunt, and the 15th Hussars were then ordered to disperse the crowd, with similar results. Overall, 18 people were killed by the cavalry during the meeting and 700 were injured.

Opium Wars

When the British began to illegally sell tons of opium to China in an attempt to expand their economy, the Chinese attempted to stop the trade by destroying a shipment in the Port of Canton in 1839, which led to a series of two wars. Eventually, after the British won, China was forced to sign the Treaty of Nanking and surrender Hong Kong. Afterwards, the economy was left in a state of devastation as millions of Chinese civilians were forced to buy opium from the British.

Great Irish Famine

Between 1845 and 1849, the island of Ireland was affected by a great famine caused by a plague that affected potato crops (the main food consumed by the Irish), and despite the fact that initially, the government of Sir Robert Peel provided help to the Irish population, when the Whigs took power, they withdrew much of the aid, and allowed the export of Irish food, which ended up aggravating the famine.

New Zealand Wars

When British colonial forces began to colonize New Zealand, the Māori clashed with the British colonists, resulting in a series of wars that lasted from 1845 to 1872. The most popular example is the Invasion of the Waikato, where Governor George Grey began a series of campaigns against the Māori in an attempt to crush the Māori King Movement. These constant seizures of lands violated the Māori's rights to keep their lands in accordance with the Waitangi treaty of 1840.

Complicity in the Moriori Genocide

While the Moriori were being massacred and enslaved by Māori invaders from Taranaki, the British looked the other way, despite their obligations to protect them in accordance with the Treaty of Waitangi. The Moriori requested the colonial government under George Grey to protect them, but the Native Land Court granted ownership of the Chatham Islands to the Māori, since the Moriori were "conquered". The British then constructed a myth portraying the Moriori as primitive Melanesians who lacked the capacity to fight back in addition to being wiped out from the New Zealand mainland by the Māori.

Canadian Indian residential school system

Starting in the 1880's, the Department of Indian Affairs began removing thousands of children from their indigenous families in an attempt to eradicate their culture as a means of "killing the Indian in the child". This policy remained in force for over a century until the last school closed in 1997. It is estimated that approximately 150,000 children were removed from their families in an attempt to assimilate them into western culture.

Labouchère Amendment

The Labouchère Amendment was an amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, an act of Parliament which strengthened the law around paedophilia and child prostitution and raised the age of consent from 12 to 16. The Amendment, introduced by Henry Labouchère, mandated a penalty of two year's imprisonment for "gross indecency between two males", i.e. any male homosexual activity short of actual sex, which was already illegal. It also allowed chemical castration to be used against homosexuals rather than imprisonment.

Benin Expedition

In 1897, an army of 1,200 British soldiers under the command of Admiral Harry Rawson invaded the Kingdom of Benin and massacred and raped hundreds of civilians, including women and children. The expedition was done in retaliation to an ambush against British soldiers under General James Phillips a month prior. After the British successfully managed to conquer Benin City, they burned the city to the ground, including its massive walls (which are considered the largest manmade structure in history) and absorbed it into colonial Nigeria. It was also revealed that the British soldiers came across a massive amount of human sacrifices after the Oba had sacrificed several of his subjects in order to ward off full disaster ever since the ambush against Phillips' army took place.

Expedition to Tibet

In 1903, with the intention of preventing the influence of the Russian Empire in Tibet, the British Empire invaded the homonymous region (without the Tibetans attacking the British). After a successful advance, Tibet was forced to pay compensation to the British and the expedition left great material damage to Tibet and it is estimated that between 2,000 or 3,000 Tibetans were killed by the British.

Mental Deficiency Act

The Mental Deficiency Act 1913 was an act of Parliament passed in 1913 which reformed the British mental health system. While the Act did mandate better care for and treatment of mentally handicapped people, it also allowed those judged to be "morally defective" (people who were not insane but were thought to be lacking in moral character, such as single mothers or prostitutes) to be placed in asylums in the name of public safety. The Act was strengthened by several more Mental Health Acts until it was finally repealed in the 1950s.

Persian Famine

During World War I, Iran was between British Raj, the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire, so, to prevent a possible Ottoman occupation, the British and Russians decide to invade the country in 1914. Later, Russia would withdraw from the war and left the country in 1917, the same year that, due to poor harvests, there would begin to be a food shortage in Iran. It is then that the United Kingdom, as revenge against the Qajar Dynasty of Iran for not letting them exploit the country's oil, decides to impose a blockade on imports into Iran, which ends up aggravating food shortages to the point of becoming a famine that killed between 2 and 10 million people, thus weakening the country and allowing the British to carry out a coup which would replace the Qajar Dynasty with the Pahlavi Dynasty, more in line with British interests in the country.

Portobello killings

During the Easter Rising of 1916, British soldier John Bowen-Colthurst (previously accused of committing war crimes in Tibet) went on a killing spree in the Portobello area of Dublin, shooting two people dead (a nineteen-year-old boy and a local politician) and taking two journalists prisoner. The two journalists, along with activist Francis Sheehy-Skeffington who was previously arrested for supporting the Rising, were then executed without trial.

Rowlatt Act

The Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act 1919, popularly known as the Rowlatt Act, was an act passed by the Imperial Legislative Council in India in 1919 in response to growing dissent against British colonial rule. The Rowlatt Act indefinitely extended emergency measures enacted during the First World War, giving colonial authorities the power to arrest any person suspected of political crimes without a warrant, and imprison them without trial and without telling them the basis for the charges against them. Colonial authorities were also given the power to restrict press coverage critical of British rule and ban those suspected of political crimes from taking part in political activities.

Jallianwala Bagh massacre

When a large crowd of Indian civilians gathered in Jallianwala Bagh garden, Amritsar, in April 1919 to protest the imprisonment of Indian nationalist leaders, General Reginald Dyer responded by ordering his troops to fire into the crowd, after first blocking off the only exit to prevent the protestors from escaping. He then moved curfew forward several hours to prevent the wounded from being helped. Estimates of the number of protestors killed range from 379 - 1500. Dyer had not previously ordered the crowd to disperse, and later admitted during a Parliamentary inquiry that he had wanted to punish the Indians for disobedience.

1920 Iraqi revolt

The Iraqi revolt against the British, also known as the 1920 Iraqi Revolt or Great Iraqi Revolution, started in Baghdad in the summer of 1920 with mass demonstrations by Iraqis, including protests by embittered officers from the old Ottoman army, against the British occupation of Iraq. The British retaliation left 6,000 to 10,000 dead by the time it ended in 1922.

It has been alleged that the British used chemical weapons during the revolt. Use of tear gas and lethal poison gas against rebels was considered, and was promoted by Winston Churchill, who was then the head of the War Office.

Bloody Sunday of 1920

In 1920, during the Irish War of Independence, the Irish Republican Army began an operation to kill members of the "Cairo Gang", a group of British intelligence agents, killing or mortally wounding 15 men.

Later, as revenge, a group of members of the Royal Irish Constabulary called "Black and Tans", along with British auxiliaries and soldiers, entered Croke Park, where a Gaelic football game was being played, and without warning, started shooting at the spectators, and blocked the exits so that people could not escape. As a result, 14 people (including two children and a soccer player) died and 80 were injured.

Complicity in Apartheid

Following the 1931 Statute of Westminster, the British colonial authority granted dominion status (a colony with self-rule and limited autonomy) to South Africa despite knowing that the Afrikaner government wished to exclude black South Africans from society. The South African parliament then passed a number of laws setting in place the Apartheid system, which the British authorities made no attempt to prevent. Some of these laws were extensions of laws that existed under British rule before South Africa was unified.

The Great Palestinian Revolt

Racial and ethnic tension in the British Mandate of Palestine was at an all-time high during the late 1930s when Arabs launched an armed revolt against the British military administration in 1936. Military law allowed swift prison sentences to be passed. Thousands of Arabs were held in administrative detention, without trial, and without proper sanitation, in overcrowded prison camps.

The British had already formalised the principle of collective punishment in Palestine in the 1924–1925 Collective Responsibility and Punishment Ordinances and updated these ordinances in 1936 with the Collective Fines Ordinance. These collective fines (amounting to £1,000,000 over the revolt) eventually became a heavy burden for poor Palestinian villagers, especially when the army also confiscated livestock, destroyed properties, imposed long curfews and established police posts, demolished houses and detained some or all of the Arab men in distant detention camps.

Operation Countenance

On August 25 1941, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union launched a joint invasion of Iran. The reasoning was that Iran's leader Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was believed to be sympathetic to Nazi Germany, and the two countries also wanted access to the country's oil. 800 Iranian soldiers were killed before a ceasefire was reached on August 30.

Bengal famine of 1943

During World War II, the majority of the population of the Bengal region in India fed on rice from Burma, so when Burma was invaded by Imperial Japan, the people of Bengal experienced a food shortage. It is then that the government of Winston Churchill, instead of helping the Indians, decided to export food to the British army, which, added to other decisions such as a "scorched earth" policy, led to a great famine that killed between 2,100,000 and 3,000,000 people.

Briggs' Plan

During the Malayan Emergency, the Briggs Plan was a military plan devised to isolate the Communist Party of Malaya from rural support. For this, some 500,000 peasants were forcibly stripped of their lands and taken to the "New Villages", which were internment camps with very poor conditions and receiving very bad treatment.

Mau Mau Uprising

During the Mau Mau Uprising, the British authorities sent large numbers of Kenyan civilians to concentration camps under the guise of being alleged members of the Mau Mau rebel group, and multiple Kenyans were tortured and killed inside the camps.

Operation Ajax

The United States government initiated "Operation Ajax" in 1953, with the help of the British government and a group of Iranian insurgents. This was a plan to overthrow prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in order to increase the power of exiled ruler Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, thus resulting in Pahlavi giving a monopoly on Iranian oil to the two countries.

Cyprus Emergency

In 1956, Britain officially used collective punishment in Cyprus in the form of evicting families from their homes and closing shops anywhere British soldiers and police had been murdered, to obtain information about the identities of the attackers.

Censorship of Great Zimbabwe

After the initial discovery of the Great Zimbabwe ruins, the British debated over who built the city and dismissed any archeological evidence that it was built by Africans and instead chose to believe that it must have been built by non-Africans. During the administration of Ian Smith, the Rhodesian Front censored books and archeologists, in some cases even outright deporting them in order to retain white rule in Rhodesia and to prevent Africans from gaining power. The censorship of the Great Zimbabwe ruins ended in 1980 when Rhodesia gained independence and the country was renamed Zimbabwe in honor to the sacred ruins.

Expulsion of the Chagossians

Due to the request of the United States to create a military base in the Chagos Islands, the British government deported the entire population of the islands, first killing their pet dogs under the orders of Bruce Greatbatch, and then sending them on ships to Mauritius and Seychelles, where they were left in poor places and without any help.

Operation Demetrius

Operation Demetrius was an operation carried out by the British Army in Northern Ireland, during The Troubles. This involved the arrest and imprisonment without trial of persons suspected of having ties to the Irish Republican Army. During this operation, many civilians who had no ties to the organization were interned and tortured by the British authorities, apart from the fact that the operation generated more violence in the area, which led to many civilian deaths (some perpetrated by British authorities).

Ballymurphy Massacre

From 9 - 11 August 1971, British soldiers sent to the Irish town of Ballymurphy to intern suspected Republican paramilitaries shot and killed 10 civilians, several of whom were shot again while lying on the ground and one of whom, Joseph Murphy, was beaten and then shot again while in custody. An eleventh civilian, Paddy McCarthy, died on 11 August when a British soldier placed an unloaded gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, causing him to suffer a heart attack.

Bloody Sunday

On 30 January 1972, the 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment (the same regiment implicated in the Ballymurphy Massacre) opened fire on a protest march against internment without trial. 26 protestors were shot; 13 were killed outright, and a fourteenth died of his injuries four months later. Other protestors were injured by rubber bullets and shrapnel or beaten with batons, and two were run over by a British Army vehicle.

Involvement in Operation Blue Star

Margaret Thatcher's government was aware of Indira Gandhi's intent to launch Operation Blue Star in an attempt to eliminate Sikh militants by storming the Golden Temple, and had provided an SAS officer to advise the Indian authorities. This and other assistance was reportedly intended to safeguard the UK's arms sales to India. Relevant UK government records have been censored.

Battle of Orgreave

The Battle of Orgreave was a violent confrontation between police and striking miners on 18 June 1984. Part of the Miner's Strike of 1984, it occurred when the South Yorkshire Police deployed 6, 000 officers to Orgreave to break up a large crowd of strikers attempting to prevent access to the coal mines. During the confrontation, Chief Constable Anthony Clement ordered a mounted charge towards the unarmed miners, who were beaten with batons and arrested. 95 miners were prosecuted for allegedly attacking the police, but all were acquitted after multiple officers were found to have lied about the events of the battle.

Complicity in the Rwandan Genocide

According to declassified government documents, the UK was aware in 1994 that the Rwandan Genocide was about to take place but refused to take action, even lobbying for United Nations peacekeepers to be removed from the country. The John Major government also refused to acknowledge that the actions of Hutu extremists constituted genocide as this would obligate them to intervene under the genocide convention.

Relationship with Muammar al-Gaddafi

In an attempt to improve international relations, the British government under Tony Blair ordered the SAS to train Libyan dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi's secret police in spite of the Gaddafi government's support for the Irish Republican Army. Blair also advocated the release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, a Libyan security officer convicted of involvement in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, in order to appease Gaddafi.

War Crimes

American Revolutionary War

• The Waxhaws Massacre occurred in May 1780. Patriot forces commanded by Abraham Buford attempted to surrender to Loyalists led by British officer Banastre Tarleton, but as the white flag was raised a stray shot killed Tarleton's horse, pinning him to the ground and leaving him believed dead by his men. As a result, his men refused to accept the surrender and fell upon the Patriots with their sabres. No quarter was given and around 113 Patriots were killed, including those who were wounded or did not attempt to resist, leading to the phrase "Tarleton's quarter" being used to describe prisoners not being taken.
  • Tarleton was also known to have conducted a campaign of looting and burning of American homes in South Carolina, and men under his command were accused of a number of crimes against civilians.

Indian Mutiny

• During the latter stages of the war, British soldiers carried out harsh reprisals for atrocities by the Sepoy rebels. Many Indian civilians accused of supporting or participating in the mutiny were hanged or blown out of cannons. Indian prisoners were tortured by having their skin burned with hot irons or being half-drowned in wells.
• Troops under General James Neill were accused of indiscriminately killing Indians in the cities he captured. Upon capturing Cawnpore, where the most infamous massacre had taken place, Neill forced a number of suspected rebels to lick up the blood of the dead before being flogged and hanged.
• Numerous reports emerged of sexual violence against Indian women by British soldiers, in retaliation for exaggerated reports of British women being raped by Sepoy rebels.

Boer Wars

• On 19-20 August 1901, several British soldiers carried out reprisals against Boer rebels in revenge for the killing and mutilation of Captain Percy Hunt. These reprisals included the extrajudicial execution of prisoner Floris Visser and the shootings of eight people arrested at Elim Hospital. British soldiers George Witton, Breaker Morant and Peter Handcock later became the first British soldiers to be convicted of war crimes.
• Throughout the war, the British army under Herbert Kitchener adopted a Scorched earth policy, burning down every village they came across, killing all the white men and sending all the women, children and black labourers to concentration camps to be detained until the end of the war. 26, 000 Boer and Bantu civilians died in the camps due to dehydration, disease, overcrowding and starvation.

World War II

• Captain Anthony Miers of the HMS Torbay wrote in his ship's log in July 1941 that he had on two occasions attacked survivors of German ships he had sunk and massacred them, a violation of the Hague Convention of 1907.
• Three Italian hospital ships were sunk by the Royal Air Force during the war - the Po in March 1941, the California in August 1942 and the Arno in September 1942. The RAF also sunk the German hospital ship Tübingen in November 1944.
• Small-scale instances of rape, looting and execution of prisoners by British troops were reported during and after the invasion of Normandy. British troops looted Glücksberg castle in Schleswig-Holstein in May 1945 and numerous women were sexually assaulted.
• Two civilian cottages in Seedorf, Germany, were burned by British troops on 21 April 1945 as punishment for locals having allegedly harboured German soldiers.
• After the war ended, German prisoners in Norway were used by the British to clear out minefields in a direct violation of the Geneva Conventions, leading to around 275 deaths.

Mau Mau

• As previously mentioned, the British detained and tortured many civilians in Kenya. A lot of people were sexually assaulted, beaten or whipped to extract information from them.
• The Chuka Massacre took place in June 1953 when members of the King's African Rifles detained 20 suspected rebels and executed them. These people were not rebels, and were in fact UK loyalists who supported the British military effort.
• In May 1959 88 Mau Mau detainees in a detention camp in Hola were ordered to work and beaten when they refused. 11 were clubbed to death by guards and 27 were hospitalised as a result of the beating.
• Hussein Onyango Obama, grandfather of Barack Obama, was captured by British soldiers who drove metal pins into his fingers and beat him. Two other men were castrated.

Afghanistan

• In 2011 a wounded Taliban fighter was executed by the Royal Marines in Helmand Province. Sergeant Alexander Blackman was convicted of killing the fighter and sentenced to life imprisonment, while two unnamed soldiers were acquitted.
• 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. Leaked documents allegedly contain evidence implicating British troops in killing children and the torture of civilians in these regions.

Iraq

• An Iraqi policeman named Raid al-Mosawi was shot dead by a British soldier after leaving his family home.
• A prisoner named Baha Mousa was tortured so severely in British custody that he later died. His killer, Donald Payne, became the first British soldier to be convicted of war crimes since the Boer War.