NAIROBI: Britain’s King Charles and Queen Camilla met with World War Two veterans in Kenya on Wednesday on the second day of a state visit, as survivors of colonial-era abuses criticised Charles’ failure to issue a full apology or propose reparations.
At a state dinner on Tuesday, Charles expressed his “deepest regret” for what he called abhorrent and unjustifiable acts of violence committed against Kenyans during the country’s independence struggle.
President William Ruto commended the monarch’s first step toward going beyond the “tentative and equivocal half-measures of past years”, but said much remained to be done.
During the 1952-1960 Mau Mau revolt in central Kenya, a period known as “the emergency”, some 90,000 Kenyans were killed or maimed and 160,000 detained, with many subjected to torture, according to the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC).
British colonialists also committed gross human rights violations, including land expropriation, killings, and sexual violence, against hundreds of thousands of people in western Kenya over decades, United Nations investigators have said.
Britain agreed to a 20 million pound ($24 million) out-of-court settlement in 2013 to more than 5,200 survivors of abuses during the emergency, but it has refused to issue an apology and has rebuffed claims by other communities.
Britain’s high commissioner to Kenya, Neil Wigan, told a local radio station last week that an apology would take his country into “difficult legal territory”.
“His expression of regret, without apologising, means he is still holding back,” Gideon Mungai, a former Mau Mau fighter, said about Charles’ remarks. “What would make me even happier in my old age is the return of the grabbed land.”
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