British Army counterinsurgency campaigns were supposedly waged within the bounds of international law, overcoming insurgents with the minimum force necessary. This revealing study questions what this meant for the civilian population during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s, one of Britain's most violent decolonisation wars. For the first time Huw Bennett examines the conduct of soldiers in detail, uncovering the uneasy relationship between notions of minimum force and the colonial tradition of exemplary force where harsh repression was frequently employed as a valid means of quickly crushing rebellion. Although a range of restrained policies such as special forces methods, restrictive rules of engagement and surrender schemes prevented the campaign from degenerating into genocide, the army simultaneously coerced the population to drop their support for the rebels, imposing collective fines, mass detentions and frequent interrogations, often tolerating rape, indiscriminate killing and torture to terrorise the population into submission.
This article argues that the British government's deliberate exclusion of international law from colonial counterinsurgencies allowed the army to suppress opponents with little restraint. The oft-assumed national inhibitor, the principle of 'minimum force', was actually widely permissive. As a result exemplary force was employed to coerce the Kikuyu civilian population in Kenya into supporting the government rather than the insurgents. Apparently random acts were thus strategic, and emerged in three forms: beatings and torture, murders, and forced population movement. The article argues that such harsh measures were seen as necessary and effective; they were a form of indirect policy and did not arise from a disciplinary breakdown.
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