02:47 GMT 8th November 2011
The claimants are seeking substantial damages, saying they were tortured between 1952 and 1961 by British colonial officers in detention camps, along with thousands of others involved in the Kikuyu-led rebellion or suspected of supporting it.
The four were given the go ahead to pursue their claim earlier this year, which means the British government will have to defend accusations of torture, murder, sexual assault and other alleged abuses at a full damages trial in 2012.
'The treatment they endured has left them all with devastating and lifelong injuries. There is no doubt that endemic torture took place in Kenya before independence,' said their lawyer Martin Day, of the campaigning British law firm Leigh Day and Co. He said the compensation being sought could run into 'many millions of pounds'.
The armed Mau Mau movement began in central Kenya during the 1950s with the aim of getting back land seized by British colonial authorities as part of the push towards self-rule. It developed into a civil war as the colonialists recruited local people to help them fight the insurgents.
According to the Kenya Human Rights Commission, 90,000 Kenyans were executed, tortured or maimed during the crackdown, and 160,000 were detained in appalling conditions. Among those allegedly abused was US President Barack Obama's grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama.
The veterans' claim for compensation has been gathering support in Kenya ever since former fighters tried to hand a petition in to the British High Commission in the Kenyan capital Nairobi in 1999. Speaking early September during the burial of Wambui Otieno, a female war veteran who joined the Mau Mau at the age of 16, Kenya's Prime Minister Raila Odinga described how the freedom fighters were rounded up, tortured and hauled to detention camps. 'It was a fact that war veterans were executed, tortured or maimed during the uprising and were imprisoned in appalling conditions,' he said.
Raila's support for the claimants shows the degree of international attention the case is likely to attract and the potential embarrassment Britain is bound to suffer. Also joining the fray are a number of human rights groups and prominent figures like South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who called on Britain to deal with the Kenyan victims honourably. 'Responding with generosity to the plea of the Kenyan victims is not a matter oflegal niceties. No, it is about morality, about magnanimity and humaneness, about compassion', the Archbishop said.
George Morara of the Kenya Human Rights Commission,which first took up the war veterans' case in 2003, said, 'These are test cases but if they succeed there are many more,' noting that there were up to 30,000 others waiting to file similar complaints of torture. But the wheels of justice are notoriously slow and one of the original five claimants has already died while waiting for the case to come to court.
In April, the remaining four, Ndiku Mutua, Paulo Nzili, Wambugu Wa Nyingi and Jane Muthoni Mara, who are in their seventies and eighties, flew from their homes in rural Kenya to appear at the London High Court. Mr Justice McCombe heard that Mutua and Nzili had been castrated, Nyingi was beaten unconscious in an incident in which 11 men were clubbed to death, and Mara had been subjected to sexual abuse.
Although Foreign Office lawyers argued that the British government could not be held liable for abuses committed during the uprising, the judge ruled that the claimants had 'arguable cases in law'. '1 have decided that these five claimants (one is since deceased) have arguable cases in law and on the facts as presently known, that there was such systematic torture and the UK government is so liable,' he ruled.
McCombe went on to describe the UK authorities' attempts to avoid responsibility as ' dishonourable'. 'It may well be thought strange, or perhaps even dishonourable that a legal system which will not in any circumstances admit evidence obtained by torture should yet refuse to entertain a claim against the government ... for that government's allegedly negligent failure to prevent torture which it had the means to prevent, on the basis of a supposed absence of a duty of care', the judgement read.
'1 am very happy that the British people are becoming just, not like in the colonial days,' said Wambugu Wa Nyingi, 83, one of the four claimants. He is a survivor of the infamous Hola massacre of 1959 that saw the death of 11 prisoners in a concentration camp located in Coast Province.
He describes how he was tied upside down by the feet and beaten senseless. 'There were 12 of us and they killed 11. 1 was the only survivor', he said. 'The independence for the country in 1963 did not heal the wounds left by the harsh treatment.'
Another of the claimants, 78-year-old Ndiku Mutua, says he was castrated with a pair of pliers at the Lukenya detention camp in 1954 following severe beatings at the hands of the British soldiers.
'1 live with the physical and mental scars of what happened to me. Not a day goes by when 1 do not think ofthese terrible events. At last I can tell my story and at last 1 can hope for justice from the British courts,' he said.
'The ruling gives me hope that 1 am on the way to being compensated for what 1 suffered,' said Nzili, 83, who also says he was castrated. '1 wish to go to court now so that people around the world will know what happened here.'
That Britain wished to sweep allegations of atrocities it committed during the Mau Mau under the carpet came to the fore when previously unseen evidence of atrocities emerged during the case when colonial-era files withheld from the National Archives were discovered by historians working with the claimants' lawyers. The documents contain reports of British officers implicated in atrocities, including the murder of suspected Mau Mau rebels.
Martyn Day said, 'It is an outrage that the British government is dealing with victims oftorture so callously. We call on the British government to deal with these victims of torture with the dignity and respect they deserve, and to meet with them and their representatives in order to resolve the case amicably.'
The issue of whether the injuries were sustained too long ago - beyond the legal time limit - is to be argued at a separate hearing. 'Even ifthe next hearing ruled too much time had passed for a full trial, a lot of the evidence about what happened will be put into the public domain and people will be able to judge for themselves,' Day observed.
'We understand the pain and grievance felt by those on all sides who were involved in the divisive and bloody events of the emergency period in Kenya. We have taken note of the judgment and are considering next steps,' said foreign office minister for Africa, Henry Bellingham.
'The government will continue to defend fully these proceedings given the length of time elapsed and the complex legal and constitutional questions the case raises. Our relationship with Kenya and its people has moved on since the emergency period. We are now partners and the UK is one of the largest bilateral donors in Kenya.'
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