UK sorry for ignoring colonial WWI dead
LONDON — British authorities apologized Thursday after an investigation found that at least 161,000 mostly African and Indian military service personnel who died during World War I weren’t properly honored because of “pervasive racism.” It said that number could possibly range up to 350,000.
The report, written by an independent committee, found that the graves of 45,000 to 54,000 people who died serving the British war effort — largely East Africans, West Africans, Egyptians and Indians — didn’t receive appropriate memorials.
At least 116,000 other casualties weren’t named on any memorials, the report said.
The inquiry found that while some colonial subjects had volunteered their service, “an equally high proportion may have been coerced or forcibly conscripted by the military and colonial authorities,” especially in African colonies and in Egypt.
Those who died, in some cases, were commemorated collectively on memorials rather than with their own individual headstones or grave markers, like their European counterparts were. In other cases, soldiers who were missing had their names recorded in registers rather than in stone.
Critics called the report a long overdue acknowledgment that needed to be followed up with concrete actions toward correcting racial injustice in Britain.
The inquiry was commissioned in 2019, prompted in part by the findings of a Channel 4 documentary, “Unremembered — Britain’s Forgotten War Heroes,” which followed British Labour lawmaker David Lammy as he investigated why African soldiers who served and died during World War I hadn’t received their own graves.
“No apology can ever make up for the indignity suffered by The Unremembered,” Lammy tweeted. But recognition that the commission had failed to treat Black African and other ethnic minority soldiers the same as others was a “watershed moment,” he said, adding that it offered an opportunity to work through “this ugly part of our history.”