‘Our failure’: Apology for war graves race scandal
FAILURES to honour black and Asian troops who died fighting for the British Empire resulted from ‘prejudice’ and ‘ideology’, the defence secretary has said.
Ben Wallace yesterday issued an apology and expressed ‘deep regret’ after a probe found the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) did not properly commemorate up to 350,000 African and Middle Eastern service personnel in the same way as white comrades.
He told MPs that the report, which cited ‘pervasive racism’ for the unequal treatment, made for ‘sobering reading’.
‘There can be no doubt prejudice played a part in some of the commission’s decisions,’ Mr Wallace, the CWGC chairman, told the Commons. ‘I want to apologise for the failures to live up to the founding principle all those years ago and express deep regret that it has taken so long to rectify the situation.’
He said there were cases where the commission ‘deliberately overlooked evidence’ that would have allowed it to find the names of the dead.
He also said there were examples of the officials employing an ‘overarching imperial ideology connected to racial
and religious differences’ in order to ‘divide the dead and treat them unequally in ways that were impossible in Europe’. The CWGC also issued an apology, saying the actions were ‘wrong then and are wrong now’, and that officials would be ‘acting immediately to correct them’. The inquiry was established in 2019 following a documentary called The Unremembered, presented by Labour MP David Lammy. Yesterday Mr Lammy said the apology ‘offers the opportunity for us as a nation to work through this ugly part of our history’. Broadcaster Prof David Olusoga, whose TV company produced the programme, told the BBC the failure to properly commemorate black and Asian service personnel is ‘one of the biggest scandals I’ve ever come across as an historian’.