Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
DENIED A HERO’S GRAVE BY RACISM
Up to 350,000 troops snubbed
THE Government yesterday issued a formal apology for the “pervasive racism” that denied up to 350,000 troops a proper memorial.
Defence Secretary Ben Wallace apologised in the Commons after a probe found 116,000 First World War casualties, mostly African and Middle Eastern, “were not commemorated by name or possibly not commemorated at all”.
Boris Johnson also offered an “unreserved apology” and said he was “deeply troubled”.
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission found as many as 350,000 men were commemorated by memorials that did not carry their names.
The probe also estimated 45,000 to 54,000 Asian and African casualties were “commemorated unequally”. Mr Wallace acknowledged “prejudice played a part” in failures to commemorate troops properly. The report came after Labour MP David Lammy presented documentary
Unremembered: Britain’s Forgotten War Heroes on Channel 4 in 2019.
In the film, Prof Michele Barrett quoted a 1920s report by Major George Evans as saying: “Most of the natives who have died are of a semi-savage nature and do not attach any sentiment to marking the graves of their dead.”
She added to Mr Lammy: “He thought the erection of individual headstones in the case of African natives would constitute a waste of public money.”
The War Graves Commission will now “extend the search” for inequalities in its records, Mr Wallace told MPS.
Its report says the failure to properly commemorate soldiers was “influenced by a scarcity of information, errors inherited from other organisations and the opinions of colonial administrators”.
But it continues damningly: “Underpinning all these decisions, however, were the entrenched prejudices, preconceptions and pervasive racism of contemporary imperial attitudes.”