Palace of Westminster the birthplace of evil

REGARDING a recent letter (WM, June 13) applauding the British Empire, the letter failed to mention the massive scale of holocausts and atrocities committed by our country.

The notorious death camps Britain set up around the world, in South Africa, where tens of thousands of Boer and African women and children perished, in Kenya when, in the 1960s, the British rounded up 1.5 million people and placed them in concentration camps with inmates worked to death as slave labour, in Chinese resettlement camps in Malaysia where many of the imprisoned 500,000 were forced to do hard labour for scraps of food.

In the 1960s there were Britishrun torture centres in Aden, where prisoners were put through grotesque torture processes and in the Cyprus internment, where detainees received regular beatings, waterboarding, and summary executions.

The British Empire in India was a disaster for that country, the Amritsar Massacre, where protesters were prevented from leaving a public square and brutally executed, and the 1943 Bengal famine, where millions starved to death after Churchill ordered that American and Canadian aid should not be allowed.

Also in India in 1947, a British civil servant was given a couple of hours to draw a line on a map which would be the border between India and Pakistan to separate Muslims and Hindus. The result was 30 million people trying desperately to escape one country or the other, a situation that quickly spiralled into violence with half a million people killed in a frenzy of killing due to British rule.

Other atrocities include the 1920s Iraq Uprising, where the British used gassing and collective punishment against the offending tribes. Any tribe that caused a fuss would have one of its villages randomly annihilated, with orders to exterminate every living thing within its walls, from animals to children.

Also the British Empire was at the forefront of the slave trade which transported 12 million Africans from their homes, millions of whom died in pain while kept in chains.

These examples are the tip of the iceberg, and the birthplace of all this evil has been our Palace of Westminster. Bizarrely, but I guess true to form, they now plan a £50m Holocaust Memorial next to their own institution dedicated not to the British Empire holocausts, but another country’s genocide, Germany’s dreadful Holocaust of the Jewish people. Far from being an empire where the sun never set, it was an empire where, for millions, the sun never rose. Chris Lewis Cardiff