Not an Afterthought

In January 1949, the Dutch Senate discussed the recent military offensive against the Indonesian Republic, which had been halted by Resolution 63 of the United Nations Security Council. Communist member Jan Haken quoted letters sent by Dutch conscripts. One case concerned an act of revenge for the death of two Dutch soldiers, when the company burned down the nearest kampung and ran domly shot at least ten local men. The soldier wrote, "If you tell the men this is just like the Huns had done, they answer that 'these blackies' are to blame them selves." 1 Nearly four years later, in the British House of Commons, the colonial secretary, Oliver Lyttelton, was pressed to explain military methods in Kenya. Labour Party member of Parliament Maurice Edelman asked whether the "sin ister proportions" of killed to wounded Kenyans indicated the security forces were pursuing a "shoot to kill" policy, including executing the wounded. Lyttel ton refused "to allow British soldiers . . . to have to fight entirely with their hands tied behind their backs." 2 In both the Dutch and British cases, attempts to hold ministers accountable for human rights violations signally failed. This chapter asks why such attempts failed, because accountability failure meant extreme vio lence could continue unchecked. We build on scholarship that analyzes the poli tics of international law to investigate how colonial powers attempted to bypass universal human rights standards. As Fabian Klose points out, European powers violated in the colonies the very same principles they championed at home. 3 We argue that the politics of domestic governmental accountability must be under stood to properly account for the success of this sustained hypocrisy

Accountability · Colonialism · Political science · Asian Studies and History · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Law