Australia has sent Britain a petition calling for posthumous pardons for two soldiers court-martialed and executed more than 100 years ago in South Africa, a government spokesman said yesterday.
The petition asks Britain to review the 1902 trials of lieutenants Harry “Breaker” Morant and Peter Handcock, who were found guilty of the murder of 12 prisoners of war in the dying days of the Boer war.
Attorney-General Robert McClelland sent the petition, from military lawyer Commander James Unkles, to Britain’s secretary of state for defense last week.
“We don’t express a view either way on it,” McClelland’s spokesman said.
“We sent it because we don’t have any jurisdiction to issue a pardon or review a case that was made by a foreign government in a foreign country,” he said.
Unkles said there were strong grounds for overturning the 1902 verdict against Morant, Handcock and their fellow defendant George Witton, who had his death sentence commuted, because it contained serious errors.
“The passing of time and the fact that Morant, Handcock and Witton are deceased does not diminish the errors and these injustices must be addressed,” Unkles said in a statement.
“The issue is not whether Morant and Handcock shot Boer prisoners, which they admitted to, but whether they were properly represented and military law properly and evenly applied,” he said.
The petition argues the accused were denied the right to communicate with the Australian government or relatives after their arrest and during their trials and were refused an opportunity to prepare their cases.
“During the trial they were denied an opportunity to have their defense of obedience to superior orders tested in court as Lord Kitchener, the British military commander-in-chief — who allegedly issued orders to the accused to shoot Boer prisoners — declined to appear despite being called,” Unkles said.
Morant, who volunteered to fight with the British in South Africa, was born in England but became well known in Australia as a poet and a horsebreaker.
Scottish-born writer Nick Bleszynski, who researched the case for his book Shoot Straight, You Bastards! and helped write the petition, said a pardon for Morant was overdue.
“People have always said, ‘Oh, yeah, The Breaker, he didn’t get justice,’” he said.
“And what we’re saying is, it is true. The fact that he was dudded [cheated] by the Poms isn’t just a grand old legend, it’s actually going to become fact,” Bleszynski said.
Australian director Bruce Beresford turned the story into the 1980 movie Breaker Morant, starring the late Edward Woodward.
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s officially declared wealth is fairly modest: some savings and a jointly owned villa in Budapest. However, voters in what Transparency International deems the EU’s most corrupt country believe otherwise — and they might make Orban pay in a general election this Sunday that could spell an end to his 16-year rule. The wealth amassed by Orban’s inner circle is fueling the increasingly palpable frustration of a population grappling with sluggish growth, high inflation and worsening public services. “The government’s communication machine worked well as long as our economic situation remained relatively good,” said Zoltan Ranschburg, a political analyst
RSS