Amritsar massacre — is this the only black spot in the history of the Empire?

The Amritsar massacre in India in 1919 showed the cruelty of humanity which comes to the surface when power is taken for granted as a rightfully inherited force. These incidents of terror were enacted more often in the near past then we might want to think. For instance, there was Hitler-Germany or the Jim Crow Laws in the USA. In all these cases, a small group of people gained power and ruled without questioning its moral and ethical perspective. In order to exemplify the dimension of this abuse of power in the British Empire, I want to comment on an instrument far from justice — the proclamation of the “State of Emergency”.

India, Burma, Cyprus, Central African Federation, Ghana and Kenya — and Aden.

The emergency laws were activated whenever the British Empire proclaimed a colony as subject to terrorism. However, terrorism was defined on the grounds of the British perspective. In the case of Aden, a colony bordering on Yemen, the realisation of the emergency status was the following: “numerous military check-points in and around Aden searching minutely all vehicles and their passengers. Large areas [were] encircled by barbed wire and sand bags and cement blocks dominate[d] the picture in many districts. Military vehicles, equipped with machine guns and radio, patrol[ed] the streets twenty four hours a day”. Nevertheless, the most inhuman act during the “State of Emergency” was that suspicious people could be arrested without being brought to court. As a consequence, many innocent people suffered the hardship of detention.

In fact, any democratic and juridical right was dismissed after the British had proclaimed the State of Emergency. This law was “a part of the British Constitutional Law; the State

of Emergency [could only] be proclaimed and lifted by the British Parliament.”

In all these cases, whenever the State of Emergency was proclaimed in one of the Empire`s colony, a small but influential group of people, thus the representatives of the Empire, where equipped with power which they used, thinking of it as a rightfully inherited instrument, however without questioning the moral and ethical meaning of it.

Sources:

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL. “ADEN REPORT” By S. Rastgeldi

http://listverse.com/2014/02/04/10-evil-crimes-of-the-british-empire/