CWGC issues apology for commemoration failures in WW1
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC; cwgc.org) has apologised after a report found that up to 400,000 predominantly black and Asian casualties of the First World War were not properly commemorated.
The CWGC’s Special Committee to Review Historical Inequalities in Commemoration has published its final report. It said that between 116,000 and 350,000 casualties (mainly East African and Egyptian personnel) were not commemorated by name or possibly not commemorated at all, and between 45,000 and 54,000 casualties (predominantly Indian, East African, West African, Egyptian and Somali personnel) were commemorated unequally.
The report found that the CWGC’s policy of equality of treatment in death was “effectively achieved” in the European theatre of war but “had limits elsewhere”. It added: “In the 1920s, across Africa, the Middle East and India, imperial ideology influenced the operations of the IWGC [Imperial War Graves Commission, the original name of the CWGC] in a way that it did not in Europe, and the rules and principles that were sacred there were not always upheld elsewhere. As a result, contemporary attitudes towards non-European faiths and differing funerary rites, and an individual’s or group’s perceived ‘state of civilisation’, influenced their commemorative treatment in death.”
Examples include 38,696 Indian casualties commemorated on memorials by numbers rather than by name, and 2,692 West African and Chinese casualties in Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Hong Kong whose names were put on memorial registers but not inscribed on monuments.
Claire Horton CBE, director general of the CWGC, responded: “The events of a century ago were wrong then and are wrong now. We are sorry for what happened and will act to right the wrongs of the past.”
The report’s authors recommended a series of steps for the CWGC to take, including an ongoing commitment to search for the unnamed war dead, the inscription of recovered names on existing memorials, and building new memorials or commemorative structures where appropriate.