Editing Roger Casement (section)

== British diplomat and human rights investigator ==

===The Congo and the Casement Report===
{{Main|Casement Report}}
Casement worked in the Congo for [[Henry Morton Stanley]] and the [[African International Association]] from 1884; this association became known as a front for King [[Leopold II of Belgium]] in his takeover of what became the so-called [[Congo Free State]].<ref name="foden">{{cite news|author=Giles Foden|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/08/dream-celt-mario-vargas-llosa-review|title=The Dream of the Celt by Mario Vargas Llosa – review|newspaper=[[The Guardian]]|access-date=12 April 2016|archive-date=4 March 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160304093749/http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/08/dream-celt-mario-vargas-llosa-review|url-status=live}}</ref> Casement worked on a survey to improve communication and recruited and supervised workmen in building a railroad to bypass the lower {{convert|220|mi|km}} of the [[Congo River]], which is made unnavigable by cataracts, in order to improve transportation and trade to the Upper Congo. During his commercial work, he learned African languages.{{citation needed|date=April 2016}}

[[File:Herbert ward and roger casement.jpg|thumb|Roger Casement (right) and his friend [[Herbert Ward (sculptor)|Herbert Ward]], whom he met in the [[Congo Free State]]]]In 1890 Casement met [[Joseph Conrad]], who had come to the Congo to pilot a merchant ship, ''Le Roi des Belges'' ("[[King of the Belgians]]"). Both were inspired by the idea that "European colonisation would bring moral and social progress to the continent and free its inhabitants 'from slavery, paganism and other barbarities.' Each would soon learn the gravity of his error."<ref>Liesl Schillinger, [https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/books/review/the-dream-of-the-celt-by-mario-vargas-llosa.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 "Traitor, Martyr, Liberator"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170817034838/http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/books/review/the-dream-of-the-celt-by-mario-vargas-llosa.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 |date=17 August 2017 }}, ''[[The New York Times]]'', 22 June 2012, accessed 23 October 2014</ref> Conrad published his short novel ''[[Heart of Darkness]]'' in 1899, exploring the colonial ills. Casement later exposed the conditions he found in the Congo during an official investigation for the British government. In these formative years, he also met [[Herbert Ward (sculptor)|Herbert Ward]], and they became longtime friends. Ward left Africa in 1889, and devoted his time to becoming an artist, and his experience there strongly influenced his work.{{citation needed|date=April 2016}}

Casement joined the [[Colonial Service]], under the authority of the [[Colonial Office]], first serving overseas as a clerk in [[British West Africa]].<ref name="fintan"/> In August 1901 he transferred to the [[Foreign Office]] service as British consul in the eastern part of the [[French Congo]].<ref>{{London Gazette|issue=27354|date=13 September 1901 |page=6049}}</ref> In 1903 the [[Unionist government, 1895–1905#Balfour ministry|Balfour Government]] commissioned Casement, then its consul at [[Boma, Congo|Boma]] in the [[Congo Free State]], to investigate the human rights situation in that colony of the Belgian king, [[Leopold II of Belgium|Leopold II]]. Setting up a private army known as the ''[[Force Publique]]'', Leopold had squeezed revenue out of the people of the territory through [[Atrocities in the Congo Free State|a reign of terror]] in the harvesting and export of rubber and other resources. In trade, Belgium shipped guns and other materials to the Congo, used chiefly to suppress the local people.{{citation needed|date=August 2016}}

[[File:Stamps of the Faroe Islands-2014-21.jpg|thumb|2014 [[Faroe Islands]] stamp depicting Casement and [[Daniel Jacob Danielsen]], his Faroese boat captain and assistant<ref>{{Cite news|last=Maye|first=Brian|title=Daniel J Danielsen – a pioneering humanitarian who helped Roger Casement expose the horror of Belgian rule in the Congo|url=https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/daniel-j-danielsen-a-pioneering-humanitarian-who-helped-roger-casement-expose-the-horror-of-belgian-rule-in-the-congo-1.2036137|access-date=2021-01-25|newspaper=The Irish Times|archive-date=23 October 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201023081548/https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/daniel-j-danielsen-a-pioneering-humanitarian-who-helped-roger-casement-expose-the-horror-of-belgian-rule-in-the-congo-1.2036137|url-status=live}}</ref>]]Casement travelled for weeks in the upper [[Congo Basin]] to interview people throughout the region, including workers, overseers and mercenaries. He delivered a long, detailed eyewitness report to [[the Crown]] that exposed abuses: "the enslavement, mutilation, and torture of natives on the rubber plantations".<ref name="fintan"/> It became known as the ''[[Casement Report]]'' of 1904. King Leopold had held the Congo Free State since 1885, when the [[Berlin Conference]] of European powers and the United States effectively gave him free rein in the area.{{citation needed|date=April 2016}}

Leopold had exploited the territory's natural resources (mostly rubber) as a private entrepreneur, not as king of the Belgians. Using violence and murder against men and their families, Leopold's private Force Publique had decimated many native villages in the course of forcing the men to gather rubber and abusing them to increase productivity. Casement's report provoked controversy, and some companies with a business interest in the Congo rejected its findings, as did Casement's former boss, Alfred Lewis Jones.<ref name="siochain"/>

When the report was made public, opponents of Congolese conditions formed interest groups, such as the [[Congo Reform Association]], founded by [[E. D. Morel]] with Casement's support, and demanded action to relieve the situation of the Congolese. Other European nations followed suit, as did the United States. The British Parliament demanded a meeting of the 14 signatory powers to review the 1885 Berlin Agreement defining interests in Africa. The Belgian Parliament, pushed by Socialist leader [[Emile Vandervelde]] and other critics of the king's Congolese policy, forced Léopold to set up an independent commission of inquiry. In 1905, despite Léopold's efforts, it confirmed the essentials of Casement's report. On 15 November 1908, the parliament of Belgium took over the Congo Free State from Léopold and organised its administration as the [[Belgian Congo]].

=== Portugal ===
In July 1904 Casement was appointed as Consul in Lisbon. This was seen in London as a comfortable and better paid promotion after his arduous service in Africa. Casement had responded that while he would take up the assignment, "it might relieve the Foreign Office of some embarrassment were I to resign from the Service".<ref>{{cite book|first=Roland|last=Phillips|page=73|title=Broken Angel. The Tempestuous Lives of Roger Casement|date= 1995 |publisher=Bloomsbury USA |isbn=1-85532-516-0}}</ref>

In the event Casement found the undemanding and routine nature of consular work in a European capital to lack the challenge and satisfaction of his earlier postings. Poor health gave grounds for his returning to Britain after only a few months.<ref>{{cite book|first=Roland|last=Phillips|page=77|title=Broken Angel. The Tempestuous Lives of Roger Casement|date=1995 |publisher=Bloomsbury USA |isbn=1-85532-516-0}}</ref>

===Peru: Abuses against the Putumayo Indians===
{{See also|Putumayo genocide|Peruvian Amazon Company}}
{{more citations needed|section|date=August 2017}}
In 1906 the Foreign Office sent Casement to Brazil: first as consul in [[Santos (São Paulo)|Santos]], then transferred to [[Pará (Belém)|Pará]],<ref>Brian Inglis, "Roger Casement" 1973, pp. 157–165</ref> and lastly promoted to consul-general in [[Rio de Janeiro]].<ref>See Roger Casement in: "Rubber, the Amazon and the Atlantic World 1884–1916" (Humanitas)</ref> He was attached as a consular representative to a commission investigating reports about an enslaved workforce collecting rubber for the [[Peruvian Amazon Company]] (PAC), which had been registered in Britain in 1907 and had a British board of directors and numerous stockholders.{{sfn|Hardenburg|1912|pp=202, 210}} In September 1909, a journalist named Sidney Paternoster wrote in ''Truth'', a British magazine, of abuses against PAC workers as well as Peruvians competing against Colombians in the disputed region of the [[Peruvian Amazon]]. The article was titled "The Devil's Paradise: A British-Owned Congo".{{sfn|Goodman|2010|p=5}}

In addition, the British consul at [[Iquitos]] had said that [[Barbados|Barbadians]], considered British subjects as part of the empire, had been ill-treated while working for PAC, which gave the government a reason to intervene (ordinarily it could not investigate the internal affairs of another country). These Barbadians were exploited into indebtedness to the Company, and used as enforcers against the Company's enslaved indigenous workforce.{{efn|Some of the ways the company exploited these Barbadians, include wage theft, charging extortionate prices for the goods necessary to survive, violating agreed terms of a signed contract, encouraging unrestricted gambling, and more.{{sfn|The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement|1910|pp=351, 365}}}} American civil engineer Walter Hardenburg had told Paternoster of witnessing a joint PAC and Peruvian military action against a Colombian rubber station, which they destroyed, stealing the rubber. He also saw Peruvian Indians whose backs were marked by severe whipping, in a pattern called the "Mark of Arana" (the head of the rubber company), and reported other abuses.<ref name="goodman">{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ixfR9QpXBEwC|title=The Devil and Mr. Casement: One Man's Battle for Human Rights in South ...|author=Jordan Goodman|year=2010|publisher=Farrar, Straus and Giroux |isbn=978-1-4299-3639-2|pages=17–23|access-date=4 January 2016}}</ref>

PAC, with its operational headquarters in Iquitos, dominated the city and the region. The area was separated from the main population of Peru by the Andes,{{sfn|Goodman|2010|p=26}} and it was {{convert|1900|mi|km}} from the Amazon's mouth at Pará.{{sfn|Casement|1997|p=48}} The British-registered company was effectively controlled by the archetypal [[rubber baron]] [[Julio César Arana]] and his brother. Born in [[Rioja Province (Peru)|Rioja]], Arana had climbed out of poverty to own and operate a company harvesting great quantities of rubber in the [[Peruvian Amazon]], which was much in demand on the world market.{{sfn|Goodman|2010|pp=36, 39}} The rubber boom had led to expansion in [[Iquitos]] as a trading centre, as all the company rubber was shipped down the Amazon River from there to the Atlantic port. Numerous foreigners had flocked to the area seeking their fortunes in the rubber boom, or at least some piece of the business.{{sfn|Goodman|2010|pp=29–32}} The rough frontier city, including both respectable businesses and the vice district, was highly influenced by the PAC and Arana.{{sfn|Casement|1997|p=473}}

[[File:Enslaved natives with a load of rubber weighing 75 kilos, they have journeyed 100 kilometers with no food given.jpg|thumb|Enslaved natives with a load of rubber weighing 75 kilos, having journeyed 100 kilometers with no food given]]

Casement travelled to the [[Putumayo District]], where the rubber was harvested deep in the Amazon Basin, and explored the treatment of the local [[Indigenous peoples of the Americas|Indians]] of [[Peru]].<ref>Casement’s journal maintained during his 1910 investigation was published as The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement (London: Anaconda Editions, 1997). A companion volume of documents relevant to 1911 and his return to the Amazon was published as Angus Mitchell (ed.), Sir Roger Casement’s Heart of Darkness: The 1911 Documents (Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2003)</ref> The isolated area was outside the reach of the national government and near the border with Colombia, which periodically made incursions in competition for the rubber. For years, the Indians had been forced into unpaid labour by field staff of the PAC, who exerted absolute power over them and subjected them to near starvation,{{efn|In his Putumayo report, Casement wrote that "[d]eliberate starvation was again and again resorted to, but this not where it was desired merely to frighten, but where the intention was to kill.{{sfn|Slavery in Peru|1913|p=270}}}} severe physical abuse, rape of women and girls by the managers and overseers, terrorization and casual murder.{{sfn|Slavery in Peru|1913|pp=96, 270, 303}} Casement found conditions as inhumane as those in the [[Congo Free State|Congo]]. On 23 October 1910, regarding those conditions, he wrote that "It far exceeds in depravity and demoralisation the Congo regime at its worst". With "the only redeeming feature" he could identify with being that the Putumayo genocide affected thousands, whereas Leopold's state affected millions.{{sfn|The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement|1910|p=294}}

Casement made two lengthy visits to the region, first in 1910 with a commission of commercial investigators. During his first journey in the Putumayo, he met several people connected to the company's most infamous actions, including [[Armando Normand]] and [[Victor Macedo]].{{sfn|Slavery in Peru|1913|pp=216–217}} Casement wrote in his journal that Normand and Macedo actively tried to discredit his investigation and bribe the Barbadian employees. Casement believed that Macedo and Normand would do anything to save themselves and thought that they might have the Barbadians arrested in Iquitos for libel.{{efn|Macedo threatened the Barbadian employees during Casement's investigation in 1910. Casement's journal states "He has threatened the Barbados men here with being shot—with 'having them shot' if they told anything on him—and he has been the principal directing Agent in a series of appalling crimes committed on the native population whereby the Company's 'workers' have been reduced in numbers and in physical capacity for work."{{sfn|The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement|1910|p=365}}}} Casement even speculated that if he went to Matanzas alone, which was Normand's station, he might have "died of fever" and no one would have known. This alludes to previous suggestions that if Casement had not come to the Putumayo on an official mission, he might have been murdered.{{sfn|The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement|1910|pp=298–300}} On his return to Iquitos, a French trader Casement had previously met, told Casement that if he hadn’t come in an official manner, the Company "would have got away with" him up there and his death would be blamed on the Natives.{{sfn|The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement|1910|pp=471, 472}} Casement interviewed both (some of) the Putumayo natives and men who had abused them, including thirty Barbadians, three of whom had also suffered from inhumane conditions imposed by the company. When the report was publicised, there was public outrage in Britain over the abuses.

[[File:Photograph of Roger Casement and Juan A. Tizón at La Chorrera in 1910.jpg|thumb|upright|Roger Casement and Juan A. Tizón at La Chorrera in 1910]]

Casement's report has been described <!-- by whom -->as a "brilliant piece of journalism", as he wove together first-person accounts by both "victims and perpetrators of atrocities ... Never before had distant colonial subjects been given such personal voices in an official document."<ref name="fintan"/> After his report was made to the British government, some wealthy board members of the PAC were horrified by what they learned. Arana and the Peruvian government promised to make changes. In 1911, the British government asked Casement to return to Iquitos and Putumayo to see if promised changes in treatment had occurred. In a report to the British foreign secretary, dated 17 March 1911, Casement detailed the rubber company's continued use of [[pillories]] to punish the Indians:<blockquote>Men, women, and children were confined in them for days, weeks, and often months. ... Whole families ... were imprisoned—fathers, mothers, and children, and many cases were reported of parents dying thus, either from starvation or from wounds caused by flogging, while their offspring were attached alongside them to watch in misery themselves the dying agonies of their parents.{{sfn|Slavery in Peru|1913|p=274}}</blockquote>

[[File:Flogging of a Putumayo native, carried out by the employees of Julio César Arana.jpg|thumb|Flogging of a Putumayo native, carried out by the employees of Julio César Arana]]

Some of the company men exposed as killers in his 1910 report were charged by Peru, while most fled the region and were never captured. In 1911, Casement tried to have one man in particular arrested, [[Andrés O'Donnell]], after he was discovered living comfortably in Barbados. O'Donnell had worked for Arana as the manager of Entre Rios for seven years, and hundreds of natives died under his administration. Casement noted that he was the "least criminal of the chief agents" and "I don't think he killed Indians for pleasure or sport—but only to terrorize for rubber".{{sfn|Goodman|2010|p=160}} An extradition order was issued by Peru however it was found to be faulty, so O'Donnell was released on a legal technicality. He later escaped to Panama, and then the United States.{{sfn|The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement|1910|p=225}} Others, such as Armando Normand and [[Augusto Jiménez Seminario]], were arrested but escaped from jail before the conclusion of trials in court.

Between September and November of 1911, Casement attempted to secure the arrest of [[Peruvian_Amazon_Company#Alfredo Montt|Alfredo Montt]] and [[Peruvian_Amazon_Company#José Inocente Fonseca|José Inocente Fonseca]], which Casement referred to as two of the "worst Criminals on the Putumayo".{{sfn|Hardenburg|1912|p=268}}{{sfn|Casement|2003|pp=585, 597}} At the time, the pair were working for a Brazilian firm named [[Edwards & Serra]] at the settlement of Santa Theresa, around 40 miles from [[Benjamin Constant, Amazonas|Benjamin Constant]] on the [[Javary River|Javary River's]] confluence with the [[Solimões River]]. They also had around ten Boras people with them, trafficked from the rubber station of La Sabana, part of La Chorrera's agency.{{sfn|Casement|2003|pp=593, 605, 646}}{{efn|"and it is on the forced labour of these people that they [,Montt and Fonseca,] now rely for their subsistence."{{sfn|Casement|2003|p=646}}}} Casement managed to get Brazilian authorities to issue an arrest warrant and order of expulsion from Brazilian territory; however, Casement wrote this was "not put into execution by the police officer dispatched for that purpose from Manaos".{{sfn|Casement|2003|p=640}} The instructions delivered to local authorities detailed that they would accompany Casement, detain Montt and Fonseca, then travel to the Peruvian port of Nazareth, located on Peru's border with Brazil, where Peruvian authorities could arrest the pair.{{sfn|Casement|2003|pp=585, 603}} Casement observed that on the day of his arrival at Benjamin Constant, the officer sent from Manaos, José P. de Campos, gathered with the commander of the local police and señor Serra of the Edwards & Serra firm. Casement became convinced that Serra bribed these two figures of authority, as Campos left four days after his arrival at Benjamin Constant instead of beginning his pursuit immediately while Montt and Fonseca were warned that authorities were actively seeking them.{{sfn|Casement|2003|p=605}} Montt and Fonseca managed to evade further attempts to secure their arrest by Peruvian and Brazilian authorities.{{sfn|Casement|2003|p=646}}

After his return to Britain, Casement repeated his extra-consular campaigning work by organising interventions by the [[Anti-Slavery and Aborigines' Protection Society]] and Catholic missions in the region. Some entrepreneurs had smuggled out cuttings from rubber plants and began cultivation in southeast Asia in colonies of the British Empire. The scandal of the PAC caused major losses in business to the company, and rubber demand began to be met by farmed rubber in other parts of the world. With the collapse of business for PAC, most foreigners left Iquitos and it quickly returned to its former status as an isolated backwater. For a period, the rubber patrons that depended on the Putumayo Indians for their workforce, were largely left alone. Arana was never prosecuted as head of the company. He lived in London for years, then returned to Peru. Despite the scandal associated with Casement's report and international pressure on the Peruvian government to change conditions, Arana later had a successful political career. He was elected a senator and died in [[Lima]], Peru in 1952, aged 88.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Goodman|first1=Jordan|title=The devil and Mr. Casement: one man's battle for human rights in South America's heart of darkness|date=2010|publisher=Farrar, Straus and Giroux|location=New York|isbn=978-0-374-13840-0|page=[https://archive.org/details/devilmrcasemento00good/page/269 269]|edition=1st American |url=https://archive.org/details/devilmrcasemento00good/page/269}}</ref>

Casement wrote extensively for his private record (as always) in those two years, 1910–1911. During this period, he continued to write in his diaries, and the one for 1911 was described as being unusually discursive. He kept them in London along with the 1903 diary and other papers of the period, presumably so they could be consulted in his continuing work as "Congo Casement" and as the saviour of the Putumayo Indians. In 1911 Casement received a [[Knight Bachelor|knighthood]] for his efforts on behalf of the Amazonian Indians{{efn|Casement's sentiments on this subject may be examined through the following quote, written as a reply to Gerald Spicer: "if you ever attempt to 'Sir Roger' me again I'll enter into an alliance with the Aranas and Pablo Zumaeta to cut you off someday in the woods of St. James' Park, and convert you into a rubber worker to our joint profit."{{sfn|Goodman|2010|pp=149–150}}}} having been appointed [[Order of St Michael and St George|Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG)]] in 1905 for his Congo work.{{sfn|Goodman|2010|pp=86, 149}}