Ulyanov reacts to Jake Sullivan's remarks on Iran atomic case

TEHRAN, May 06 (MNA) – A senior Russian diplomat has reatced to the recent remarks by the US national security adviser about alleged Washinton's sticking to diplomacy in dealing with Iran nuclear case.

Russia's permanent envoy to international organizations in Vienna Mikhail Ulyanov wrote in a post on Twitter on Saturday that "The #US National Security Adviser delivered a keynote speech on the Middle East. It’s section on #Iran is puzzling. Not clear what kind of message he wanted to send. However the positive sign is that the diplomatic option, judging by his words, still remains on the table."

US national security adviser Jake Sullivan claimed on Thursday that Washiognton still seeks a diplomatic solution in nuclear talks with Tehran.

Announcing Biden administration's plan to send American officials to the West Asia region, Sullivan repeated US baseless accusations against Iran's peaceful nuclear program.

The US accusations against Iran's peacefull nuclear program come despite the fact that Tehran's program is monintored by the nuclear watchdog, IAEA, and that the US that unilaterally withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal known as the JCPOA in 2018, and the Israeli regime possess a large number of warheads.

MNA

Comprehensive strike prevails in Palestinian city of Tulkarm, mourning souls of two martyrs

Comprehensive strike prevails in Palestinian city of Tulkarm, mourning souls of two martyrs

[06/May/2023]


TULKARM May 06.2023 (Saba) - The Palestinian National Action Factions in Tulkarm announced on Saturday a general and comprehensive strike in mourning for the souls of the two martyrs who were shot dead by the Zionist enemy in the city.
According to what was reported by the "Palestine Today" news agency, the Palestinian Ministry of Health announced the arrival of two martyrs, shot by the enemy, to Dr. Hospital. Thabet Thabet al-Hukoomi, in addition to a stable injury to the extremities, as a result of the Zionist aggression on the city of Tulkarm.
The ministry said: The martyrs of Tulkarm are the two young men: Samer Salah al-Shafei, 22, (wounded with gunshots in the neck, chest, and abdomen), and Hamza Jamil Khreyoush, 22, (wounded with gunshots in the chest, abdomen, and left foot).
It is noteworthy that the occupation forces assassinated the two martyrs amid armed clashes.
E.M

REFUGEES,AMNESTY SEEKERS
Over 600 new migrants dock on Italian island of Lampedusa in 24 hours


Migrants in the Mediterranean - Copyright frame
By Euronews with ANSA, EFE, AP • Updated: 06/05/2023 

Warm weather and full moon conditions have been met with an increase in attempted migrant crossings of the Mediterranean over recent days.

The Italian island of Lampedusa is facing a crisis after over 600 migrants docked between Friday and Saturday.

Ten boats with 430 people on board arrived on Saturday alone, compared to 247 on Friday.

The passengers were mostly from Pakistan, Syria, Egypt, Ghana, Ethiopia and Eritrea.

These new rescues come after a new wave of disembarkations on the Italian coast last week, which saw the arrival of nearly 3,000 people in 48 hours in Lampedusa alone.

It is estimated that the island's reception centre is now running at three times its capacity, despite recent attempts to ease overcrowding.

The local prefecture and the Italian government have arranged for some of the migrants to be to Porto Empedocle, Sicily, for better care. The exact number is yet unknown, as the identification process of the new arrivals is underway.

The Italian Interior Ministry says that in the first four months of 2023, more than four times as many people arrived in Italy compared to last year: 40,856 people compared to 10,188 in 2022.

Meanwhile, the ship belonging to the NGO Doctors without Borders, the _Geo Barents,_was able to dock in the port of La Spezia with 336 migrants and refugees, following two separate rescue operations in the Central Mediterranean last Sunday and Tuesday.

The NGO complained that the Italian authorities assigned a very distant port when a large number of passengers needed medical assistance, a common practice since the ultra-right-wing Giorgia Meloni took office as prime minister.

"After this difficult experience, the survivors now only need to be properly cared for and protected. We wish them well for the rest of their journey. In accordance with international law, it is essential that they disembark in a safe place as soon as possible," the NGO said.

According to MSF, "the decision to assign a distant port does not take into account the welfare of the newly rescued survivors" and is not in line with international guidelines on the treatment of people rescued at sea.

Former Erdoğan insider reveals $3.5 bln EU fund corruption scandal involving ex-agriculture minister

ByTurkish Minute
May 6, 2023

A former confidant of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan revealed the details of a corruption scheme involving $3.5 billion worth of EU funds allocated for the improvement of agriculture, implicating the then-minister of agriculture in the scandal, in a video released by journalist Cevheri Güven on Saturday.

Yeşildağ is a former associate of Erdoğan and a member of the influential Yeşildağ family, who detailed in a previous video on Friday how Erdoğan pocketed $ 1 billion in a 2007 tender.

In a second video of the series that is expected to be seven videos, Yeşildağ claimed Mehdi Eker, Turkey’s Minister of Agriculture from 2002 to 2013, used his position as Minister of Agriculture to manipulate tender processes, granting favors to companies he had a partnership with and abusing his power in violation of public trust.

In the latest video, Yeşildağ alleges that Eker, along with several other associates, exploited funds worth $3.5 billion provided by the European Union to develop Turkey’s agricultural infrastructure. Yeşildağ claims that Eker and his associates formed partnerships with companies bidding on ministerial tenders funded by the EU, ensuring they would receive a 50 percent share in profits.

According to Yeşildağ, these partnerships led to inflated bids, with profit margins reaching 60 and 70 percent. He alleges that the corruption extended to meat and pulse imports, resulting in higher prices for Turkish consumers. Yeşildağ also claims that the corruption continued even after Eker left office, with the system now being controlled by then-Prime Minister and current President Erdoğan.

Yeşildağ asserts that he is only sharing information about instances of corruption in which he was personally involved or has firsthand knowledge. He has promised to reveal more in future videos, stating that “you will vomit in the future.”

The allegations have not yet been independently verified, and the parties involved have not made any public statements in response to the claims. The story continues to develop as the public awaits further revelations from Yeşildağ.

France’s CGT Union Agrees to Meet With Macron’s Government Chief

Story by Ania Nussbaum • Today

Members of the French Confederation of Labour (CGT) union hold lit flares during a demonstration against pension reform in the La Defense business district of Paris, France, on Wednesday, May 3, 2023. Emmanuel Macron’s government called for a crackdown on violent protesters as labor unions vowed to pursue their campaign against his pension reforms with a 14th day of demonstrations.© Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- The hardline CGT union, which has been among the forces driving months-long protests against Emmanuel Macron’s plans for pensions reform, agreed to meet with his prime minister.

The CGT will have talks with Elisabeth Borne at her office on May 16 or 17, Agence-France Presse reported Saturday, citing a spokesperson for the labor group.

After Macron enacted his unpopular pension reform last month, Borne has renewed an invitation to all representative unions to meet, without providing a specific agenda. The head of the moderate CFDT union has said he could accept the invitation, but warned that the talks must be substantive.

A month ago, unions left a meeting with Borne saying she was not ready to offer any concessions, calling the encounter a failure.

Macron has been facing protests and strikes since mid-January against his plan to push back the minimum retirement age from 62 to 64. Polls show most French people back the movement, and the president’s popularity is dwindling. Anger has been palpable on the streets since Macron used a constitutional provision to bypass parliament, after failing to convince conservative lawmakers to back his proposal.

French Ruling Shoots Down Pension Referendum in Blow for Unions

The CGT union recently appointed a new head. Sophie Binet became the first woman to lead the labor group since its creation in 1895. She’s devoted time to work on environment and gender equality issues.

Unions, which have remained united so far, have called for a new day of strikes and protests on June 6, two days before the National Assembly reviews a proposal to repeal Macron’s pension reform, filed by a group of independent, centrist lawmakers, known as LIOT.

The initiative is fraught with challenges, however, as Macron’s party could use delay tactics to prevent its review before a parliamentary deadline. It’s also uncertain whether the conservative Republicains will back the proposal. Even if the National Assembly adopts it, it’s unlikely to get through the Senate.

CGTN Poll: U.S. 'Hacking Empire' a serious threat to world peace


China's National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center and Qihoo 360 Technology Co. Ltd, a Chinese cybersecurity company, jointly released an investigation report that exposed the United States Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) exploitation of internet technology to wiretap and incite "color revolutions" in other countries. This report has gained widespread attention.

An opinion poll conducted by CGTN for global netizens revealed that 93 percent of respondents believe that the U.S. is posing a serious threat to global cybersecurity.

The U.S. has long been abusing its advantage in internet technology to conduct large-scale and prolonged theft and surveillance of other governments and its own citizens, significantly jeopardizing global cybersecurity. According to the poll, 94.4 percent of global respondents are outraged by U.S. espionage, which constitutes a blatant violation of the sovereignty and security of other countries.

Ironically, the U.S. government has accused other nations of cyber surveillance under the guise of "national security" while using this excuse to suppress other countries' technology enterprises to maintain its own technological hegemony in the world. About 95.7 percent of respondents strongly condemned the U.S. government's "double standard" approach to national security issues.

As the main intelligence agency of the U.S. government, the CIA has long been covertly organizing and conducting regime subversion and protest activities with the nature of "Peaceful Evolution" and "Color Revolution" worldwide. Over the decades, the CIA has overturned or attempted to overthrow at least 50 legitimate governments and created disturbances in other countries, seriously undermining global peace and stability.

What's even more alarming is that the U.S., according to CIA's internal documents leaked by Wikipedia, owns the largest cyber arsenal by developing numerous hacking tools and cyber-attacking weapons. As many as 92.8 percent of respondents believe that the U.S. has used its technological superiority to maintain its hegemony.

The poll dismissed the offensive U.S. cybersecurity strategy by 90.8 percent of respondents as a serious threat to the global cybersecurity order, which is deeply concerning.

CGTN released the poll on its English, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Russian platforms, with over 56,000 people voting within 24 hours.

Read more:

China issues report on U.S. CIA's cyberattacks on other countries

WAR CRIME

What are white phosphorus bombs? All we know about incendiary weapons Russia accused of using in Ukraine

US PHOSPHOROUS BOMBING VIET NAM WAR 

Ukraine has accused Russia of using the weapons on a number of occasions, the latest in the eastern city of Bakhmut

Joe Sommerlad

Ukraine has accused Russia of attacking the besieged eastern city of Bakhmut with phosphorus munitions.

Drone footage released by the UKrainian military, shows parts of the city – the scene of some of the bloodiest fighting of the war – ablaze as what is alleged to be white phosphorus rains down. While white phosphorus weapons are not banned in their entirety, but their use in civilian areas is considered a war crime.


Writing on Twitter, Ukraine's defence ministry said the phosphorus attack targeted "unoccupied areas of Bakhmut with incendiary ammunition" – although it is unclear exactly when the alleged attack took place.


Moscow has been accused of using white phosphorus several times since the launch its invasion last year, including during the siege of Mariupol at the beginning of the war.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky alleged at a summit of Nato leaders in Brussels near the start of the invasion that white phosphorus munitions had already been fired on civilians in his country’s cities.

“This morning, by the way, phosphorus bombs were used. Russian phosphorus bombs. Adults were killed again and children were killed again,” he said.

Moscow has never publicly admitted to using white phosphorous, and last year Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov insisted "Russia has never violated international conventions" after Mr Zelensky’s remarks.

Cluster munitions are also alleged to have been fired on Ukrainian targets since the war began on 24 February while the UK’s Ministry of Defence has said that the Kremlin itself has admitted to using thermobaric rockets.

White phosphorus is a yellowish or colourless translucent substance, wax-like in texture and smelling faintly of garlic, which ignites immediately on contact with oxygen in the air, creating a bright plume of smoke.

It cannot be put out with water and burns at up to 1,300C.

The acid is commonly used in warfare to create smoke screens to conceal troop movements, to illuminate the battlefield at night or to mark targets and, because of these practical applications and the fact that it is not explicitly intended to target the body’s life systems, is not currently recognised as a chemical weapon under the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention.


However, it can certainly be used as an incendiary weapon to maim, poison or kill indiscriminately and is known to cause instant scarring of the lungs, heart, liver and kidneys and to be capable of burning through muscle to the bone, often causing severe second and third-degree burns that typically require skin grafts.

“Incendiary weapons cause devastating burns, and in far worse ways than any of the standard scald or fire burns,” Dr Rola Hallam, a physician who treated victims of chemical warfare in Syria, is quoted as saying in a report by Human Rights Watch. “They can burn through everything. If they can burn through metal, what hope does human flesh have?”

Protocol III of the 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons does explicitly prohibit the use of white phosphorus as a weapon against civilian populations, drawing a distinction between combatants and non-combatants, which means that the protocol is only breached if the latter group is fired upon.

Article 35 of Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions meanwhile rules that any weapon that causes “superfluous or unnecessary suffering” is outlawed, which could be applied to the indiscriminate firing of white phosphorus and potentially constitute a war crime.

“This is part of the horror of war,” lamented RAND Corporation researcher and Army veteran David Johnson in conversation with Insider recently. “These weapons were developed for military purpose. And, quite frankly, they’re going to be used.”

White phosphorus was deployed in both the First World War and Second World War and colloquially known as “WP” or “Willy Pete”.

Its legacy can still be felt: in August 2017, a woman passing the banks of the River Elbe near Hamburg plucked what she believed to be a nugget of amber from the wet sand and tucked it into her coat pocket, only for it to catch alight, the explosive revealing itself and the pedestrian only narrowly escaping serious injury.

DESANTISLAND

Anti-Ukraine Sentiment Simmers in Florida

Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida everyone expects to run for president, and two members of Congress from his state are now testing the waters on the issue of defunding military aid to Ukraine.

by John Moretti | May 6, 2023

 CHENEY ORR / AFP

As you drive around the coastal neighborhoods of Pinellas County, Florida, the blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flags are hard to miss, hanging from hundreds of sun-bleached cottages in this once predominantly Democratic district along the Gulf of Mexico.

But despite its seeming support for Ukrainian sovereignty, this populous and increasingly populist community is just a small electoral microcosm of the American South. This historically Democratic district has recently turned Republican, backing leaders who have soured as of late on aid to Kyiv.

Politicians leading the charge

The Congressional district is now represented by Anna Paulina Luna, a freshman Republican who has been questioning, loudly, the American dollars sent to Ukraine’s defense.

“We have gone above and beyond other NATO countries in terms of sending money to Ukraine,” Rep. Luna said to right-wing TV outlet Newsmax in February., “When people are talking about sending more money to Ukraine, you know, anyone watching this program, when you go to Publix [a Florida grocery chain] or Walmart, you look at the price of eggs right now and it’s close to eight dollars, and so to talk about sending more money overseas, it’s just something we can’t afford to do.”

With about 22 million people and growing rapidly, Florida is the third-most populated state in the US and historically a bellwether for American presidential politics: a purple state that has been leaning red – that is, Republican – in recent years. It is the residence of former US President Donald Trump and his presumed but unannounced Republican presidential rival in 2024, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, as well as a host of younger, maverick politicians who are trying to appease the ultra-conservative base that both of these would-be presidents are trying to win over.


MORE ON THIS TOPIC
More Ammo for Ukraine in New $300m US Aid Package

The latest package includes HIMARS, additional howitzers, artillery and mortar rounds, all badly-needed by Kyiv for its upcoming counteroffensive.

Pinellas County is also, incidentally, DeSantis’ childhood home. The governor recently wrapped up a world tour through Asia, the Middle East and the UK, shopping out his nascent foreign-policy thoughts on about China, and reducing US aid to Ukraine.

After describing the war in Ukraine to Fox News in April as a “territorial dispute” and not “a vital national security interest,” DeSantis has found himself backpedaling.

According to the Washington Post: “As the criticism mounted, including from major donors, the potential 2024 presidential client quickly clarified that Russia had invaded and that Russian President Vladimir Putin was a war criminal. But in a private conversation, the governor celebrated the controversy as a win, according to one conservative policy leader who met with him in [the Florida state capital] Tallahassee.”

Perhaps more poignantly, Florida is also home to two junior but seated US representatives who have been spearheading what has seemed thus far a quixotic effort to squash America’s commitment to Ukraine: namely, Luna, the first-term Congresswoman from Pinellas County, and Matthew Gaetz, from the very conservative northwest Florida Panhandle, along the border with Alabama.

On April 20, Luna and Gaetz joined 16 other US representatives (half of them from the South) and two US senators in signing a letter to President Joe Biden, which called for an immediate diplomatic conclusion to the war, and a stop to the “open-ended” funding of military aid to Ukraine.

“While the pace of our aid would suggest otherwise, the US is in no position to expend $113 billion reinforcing a foreign military as our own military atrophies,” the letter reads. “Time and again, the executive branch has used debt as a tool to finance foreign wars to the detriment of the American taxpayer… To prop up a foreign government that is historically mired in corruption while the American people suffer from record inflation and a crippling national debt is wildly irresponsible on its own – but to do so while our military contends with aging weapons systems and depleted stockpiles is disgraceful.”



Ukrainians in Florida

The west coast of Florida is home to a small but growing Ukrainian community. Traditionally, Ukrainians in the US have been staunch Republicans, especially during the Cold War.

Roman Voloshyn is a Ukrainian-born businessman and owner of the St. Petersburg, Florida restaurant, Pierogi and Martini Bar. Before his interview with. Kyiv Post on May 2, he had never heard of his congresswoman, Luna, but he has now.

“They do not understand. These people are ignorant. They have ignored history,” Voloshyn said when asked about Luna’s comments.

A self-described Reagan Republican and a Ukrainian banker who grew up in Lviv, not too far from the Polish border during the Polish Solidarnosc movement in the 1980s, Voloshyn and his family came to America in 2002. He was incredulous about his congresswoman’s comments to Newsmax.

“Imagine this is 1939, and the Holocaust has already started. The same thing is happening in Ukraine. This is a genocidal war. It’s an existential war. Just like in World War II, very similar things are happening in Ukraine. Take Bucha, for example, the Russians are killing people simply because they are Ukrainian,” he said.

“And what does the price of eggs have to do with anything, when millions of people are being killed?” Voloshyn added. “How can you compare that to what is happening on a global scale?”

Riding Trump’s slipstream

His comments are very similar to those offered by convicted Trump associate and Ukrainian businessman Lev Parnas in an interview with Kyiv Post in late February, while on under house arrest in Boca Raton, Florida.

“You have to understand that the people in the group you’re talking about [Gaetz, et al.] haven’t traveled outside of the US, and certainly not to Ukraine,” said Parnas, who is now a harsh critic of Trump.

“They simply don’t comprehend the magnitude and severity of the situation. So, their motivation is isolationist, inward-looking and ultimately, self-serving… Of course, all of them are Trump ideologues and will do anything not just to please him, but to bring him back to power.”

So where are these votes coming from in this erstwhile Democratic haven on Florida’s Gulf Coast, and who tacitly provides the mandate for these isolationist views?

In a quick survey of four men at a St. Petersburg sports bar who wore American flags on their hats and identified themselves as US Army veterans, none of them offered to volunteer their thoughts on whether the US should be supporting Ukraine.

“That’s just something I like to keep to myself,” one of the bearded men said.

Jazlin Staeden, a server at that same sports bar, called Whiskey Wings, said that a Ukrainian friend of hers is housing five refugees in her house in Tennessee. But Staeden added, “As for me, I know we need to help people, but I’m on the fence about the whole thing.”

Sophia Fall, another waitress there, said, “I think the US has a long history of sticking their nose in business that’s not theirs.”



Voloshyn quietly said that he has registered a downturn in his pierogi business since the onset of the Russian invasion and assumed that some local residents have frowned upon supporting local Ukrainians. And while he hadn’t heard his congresswoman’s comments prior to the interview, he certainly had heard DeSantis’s remarks.

“That was a kick in the groin,” Voloshyn said. “The Republican Ukrainian community is disgusted by his comments. I went to a Ukrainian church recently and the community there was like, ‘“Who is this guy?’”

“It would help if DeSantis came to visits us. Maybe I can give him some ideas. I have a 52-seat banquet room here, he can have a meeting here, and maybe he can get some education on this war. This is an existential war,” Voloshyn said.


John Moretti
John Moretti is a freelance journalist and author dividing his time between Europe and the United States. He has also spent more than a decade working with companies that protect travelers from health and security emergencies abroad. His academic background is in Eastern European Studies, international public policy and counterterrorism.

ECOCIDE

Malaysia suspends search for 3 missing men from Singapore-bound tanker that caught fire

The Gabon-registered tanker was heading for Singapore from China when it caught fire in the South China Sea off the Johor coast on Monday. PHOTO: AFP

Eileen Ng
Correspondent
UPDATED
6 HOURS AGO

Malaysia has suspended the search for three missing crewmen of a Singapore-bound tanker that caught fire early this week, until new leads surfaced.

The development comes as rescue teams failed to find the men – two Indian nationals and one Ukrainian – on board the stricken ship, Pablo, on Friday.

“We searched the entire ship but we did not find them, and there were no indications that the men were on board,” said Johor Maritime director Nurul Hizam Zakaria.

He said the ship has started to tilt and smoke could be seen coming out from one of the ship’s funnel.

Based on the results of the search and a safety assessment of the vessel, First Admiral Nurul said a decision was taken to suspend the search on Friday night “until new leads are found”.

Previously, First Adm Nurul said the crew members could have been swept into Indonesian waters, and Malaysia has requested assistance from Indonesia’s National Search and Rescue Agency to help look for the men.

The Gabon-registered tanker was heading for Singapore from China when it caught fire in the South China Sea off the Johor coast on Monday.

In a statement on Monday night, the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA) said the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre Singapore received information from the master of tanker Enola that the vessel had rescued 18 crew members from Pablo.

Seven other Pablo crew members were picked up by vessels in the vicinity.

There were no Singaporean crew members on board, the MPA said.

Media reports said four crew members of Pablo had serious injuries and were hospitalised in Johor.

The coronation of King Charles: A fresh layer of royal whitewash

This weekend, the British will be asking the world to join in celebrating something they have actively denied to other societies – a sense of their own history.

Patrick Gathara
Published On 5 May 2023

[Patrick Gathara/Al Jazeera]


The coronation of Britain’s King Charles III this weekend will be presented as steeped in history, a re-enactment and remembrance of ancient traditions and events. For many, the ceremonies and pageantry, with their centuries-old carriages, crowns and even stones, will serve to re-establish a link to the past. However, a central irony will be that the British will be asking the world to join in celebrating something they have actively denied to other societies – a sense of their own history.

The ritual of coronation, perhaps like the monarchy and the king himself, is itself a relic from a vanishing past. Today, the United Kingdom is the only European monarchy to keep such a ceremony. Emerging in Europe at a time when monarchs claimed their rule was legitimised by divine sanction, the central act of the coronation ceremony is the “unction”, the anointing with holy oil signalling conferment of God’s grace upon a ruler.


Before his anointment, Charles III, like his predecessors, will take the Coronation Oath – pared down to reflect the loss of empire. It is the only bit of the ceremony that is actually required by law. Seventy years ago, his mother, Elizabeth II, solemnly promised “to govern the Peoples of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, Pakistan, and Ceylon, and of [her] Possessions and the other Territories to any of them belonging or pertaining, according to their respective laws and customs”.

At the time, and in the years that followed, few of her subjects outside the UK were ruled “according to their respective laws and customs”. On the African continent, as the late Professor Terence Ranger noted, British colonial administrators had “set about inventing African traditions for Africans”. These subjects were in fact taught that they had no history or achievements, and that the brutal colonial dispossession and occupation was actually for their benefit – that it helped to civilise them.

Africans are still today living with the effects of this loss and reinvention of their history and remaking of their societies. The “tribal” cleavages that distort politics on the continent are almost entirely a legacy of that occupation. “Africa, for the European occupant, was quintessentially tribal’,” wrote the late Professor Crawford Young. “Thus the task of the colonial state was to discover, codify, and map an ethnic geography for their newly conquered domains, according to the premise that the continent was inhabited by ‘tribal man’. This ethnic template, as imagined by the colonizer, became the basis for administrative organization.”

In Kenya, as Timothy Parsons, Professor of African History at Washington University in St. Louis, notes, “faced with a confusing range of fluid ethnicities, [British] colonial officials sought to shift conquered populations into manageable administrative units”. In the process, they linked land to ethnic identity, creating a system that assumed each of these fictional ‘tribes’ had a specific homeland. In effect, the British imposed their ideas of ethnic order, of tribes bounded within district boundaries, and even created an entirely new “traditional” administrative structure in the form of tribal chiefs who were actually state employees. It is thus no coincidence that the British divided Kenya into 41 administrative districts and the country eventually ended up with nearly the same number of official “tribes”.


Further, colonial-era anthropologists and historians, as Dr Christopher Prior asserts, showed little interest in African history, and “were invariably of one mind as to the need for the colonial state to partially overwrite that which they felt was ‘old’ and ‘traditional’”. Thus generations of Africans, cut off from traditional histories through indoctrination in Western schools, grew up imagining that the fictional picture Europeans painted of a tribalised, brutal pre-colonial Africa, full of petty “tribal” conflicts, and chained by the despotism of age-old and unchanging “customs and traditions,” was essentially true. In many ways, the persecution of sexual minorities, often justified using colonial ideas of Africa as populated by “noble savages” instinctively upholding supposedly natural Victorian ideals about sex and needing to be protected from Western corruption, is a direct consequence of the erasure of African history.

The pageantry that will accompany King Charles’ investiture, which is meant to awe through sheer spectacle, is also a reminder of the place to which the British had exalted themselves. In a sense, it was not just the monarch that was ordained as God’s chosen ruler, but the entire nation that had staked for itself a claim as ruler of other nations and peoples. Today, like its monarchy, the UK is a pale shadow of its imperial self, and such displays may provide some level of nostalgic comfort as it struggles against its increasing marginalisation and loss of prestige.

Tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of people around the world will undoubtedly also tune in to the live broadcast of the proceedings. But likely for a very different reason. The UK monarchy is probably the world’s longest-running reality show, with a constant cast of dysfunctional individuals, incredible and melodramatic plot twists, as well as sexual drama, corruption and emotional and moral conflicts. The coronation episode is sure to be a hit with the legions of fans.

This reinvention of the monarchy as global entertainment has helped to shield it, and the country it leads, from the more unsavoury bits of its history, such as the links to the slave trade. And certainly, true remembrance of the actions taken by British officials in their monarch’s name in the colonies is made harder by the wholesale and deliberate theft, concealment and destruction of documents.

As the British Empire crumbled, thousands of documents detailing some of its most shameful acts and crimes committed were systematically destroyed, or transferred discretely to the UK and hidden in a secret Foreign Office facility, to prevent them falling into the hands of post-independence governments. The existence of this stolen record, euphemistically called the “migrated archive”, kept at the highly-secure government communications centre at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire, was only officially admitted in 2012 following a lawsuit by Kenyans who were detained and tortured during the Mau Mau Emergency of 1952-1957. In it were documents that showed official complicity in the crimes and prompted the British government to settle out-of-court to avoid the embarrassment of a full trial. The archive, however, is yet to be repatriated to the countries it was taken from at independence. In Kenya’s case, this is despite demanding the return of the documents for over 55 years.

While there will be attempts to show some sensitivity to modern-day issues – the sacred coronation oil will be animal-cruelty free, the King has invited leaders of non-Christian faiths – there will be very little about the ceremony that will address the historical harms, which remain unacknowledged by the monarch. And without that, the ceremony will be little more than a fresh layer of royal whitewash.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Patrick Gathara
Communications consultant, writer, and award-winning political cartoonist based in Nairobi.