One man's fight against rendition
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One man's fight against rendition
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
The Independent - Dec 6, 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article3226319.ece
One man's fight against rendition
Rendition is nothing new. In 1908, British diplomat Henry Cockburn
fought a furious battle with his own government to prevent a Korean
journalist from being handed over to the Japanese for torture. His
grandson, Patrick Cockburn, uncovers a long-forgotten scandal, and
explains why it reverberates more than ever today.
By Patrick Cockburn
As a child the only interesting fact that I knew about my grandfather,
Henry Cockburn, was that he had read his own obituary in The Times.
This happened because he was a diplomat in the British legation during
the siege of Peking in 1900 during which the Chinese Boxer rebels were
wrongly reported to have stormed the legation quarter and slaughtered
its defenders.
When I was a little older my father, Claud Cockburn, told me that after
the siege Henry had gone on to become British Consul General in Seoul
in Korea. He was the senior British diplomat in the country as Japan
took control. "Quite suddenly," my father related, "he announced he was
weary of the whole business and retired, saying that at 49 it was high
time to start leading an entirely new sort of life."
It seemed a whimsical reason for an Edwardian diplomat to resign,
especially as he had little money and no other career to look forward
to. In fact, I discovered a century later that there was a very precise
reason for Henry Cockburn's retirement, which followed a prolonged and
furious row within the Foreign Office over an issue which reverberates
more than ever in British foreign policy today.
My father had written in his autobiography, In Time of Trouble, that
Henry "thought the whole British agreement with the Japanese on the
Korean issue disastrous". I was curious about this sentence. One day I
was in the National Archives at Kew looking at some old MI5 files when
it crossed my mind that it might be interesting to look at the Foreign
Office papers marked "Corea" for the relevant period to see if they
contained any clue as to what happened.
As soon as I started reading the files I saw a word which has become
familiar since President George Bush launched his "war on terror" after
the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001. I had previously
thought that "rendition", meaning the handing over of prisoners by one
country to another in the knowledge that they are going to be tortured,
was a modern use of the term.
Over the past five years, of course, "rendition" has acquired an
infamous meaning since it was revealed that the CIA had been covertly
flying political prisoners to countries such as Egypt, Afghanistan and
Syria, to which the ghastly business of torture had been farmed out by
the US.
But in the ageing Foreign Office files I was surprised to find the very
same word used in exactly the same sense as we use it today.
It turned out that my grandfather's differences with the Foreign Office
were not about British policy in general but over the specific issue of
the rendition of a Korean journalist called Yang Ki-tak, a vocal and
effective critic of the Japanese occupation.
After being tortured in a Japanese-run prison, he had taken refuge on
British-owned property. The Japanese wanted to re-arrest him but, under
the terms of a treaty with Britain, Japanese police could not enter
premises owned by a British subject without the authority of the
British consul. This my grandfather refused to give.
One of the first papers I found in Kew is the transcript of a telegram
entitled "Rendition of Corean", dated 20 August, 1908, from Henry
Cockburn to Sir Claude MacDonald, the British ambassador in Tokyo,
warning that "if it became known that we had handed over a prisoner to
the Japanese & that he had subsequently been subjected to conditions
similar to those which obtained in the case of
Yang, the worst impression would be created".
My grandfather, by this time, had a very clear idea what happened to
political prisoners held in jail in Seoul. In a long telegram to Sir
Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary in London, he describes how a
British visitor to Yang while he was still in jail "had been startled
by the prisoner's appearance and by the cowering timid air with which
he looked nervously at prison officials before he answered".
At first Yang had said listlessly that he had nothing to complain of,
but then suddenly added in a low, agitated voice: "I can't breathe. I
can't breathe. I can get no air." He explained he was held with 20 men
in a room measuring 14ft by 12ft. Henry had no doubt that his
mistreatment also included physical torture.
The reaction of the Foreign Office mandarins was a little more robust
than its attitude a century later when the CIA was allegedly landing
aircraft in Britain with hooded and drugged prisoners on board on their
way to secret prisons in eastern Europe and the Middle East. The then
Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, who copiously annotated Henry's
dispatches in red ink, asked for assurances that Yang would not be
further mistreated if he was handed over, though he also made clear
that fostering good relations with Japan was his priority.
In Tokyo, MacDonald, a soldier turned diplomat who had been the
military commander during the siege of Peking, was bemused by the fuss
being made by my grandfather in Seoul over the rendition of a single
Korean journalist. He downplayed Henry's account of the grim conditions
in Japanese prisons in Korea, saying he had seen worse in prisons in
Egypt after Britain had taken control. "I am seriously of the opinion,"
he wrote "that Yang should be given up immediately and unconditionally."
By then other Foreign Office mandarins were becoming increasingly
irritated by what they saw as Henry's unnecessary quarrel with the
Japanese over a single dissenting Korean journalist that was beginning
to endanger relations with a potent new ally.
Japan had shown its strength by defeating China in 1894 and Russia in
1904. Henry was later to complain that he felt let down by his
superiors on several occasions when they ordered him to comply with
Japanese demands that he had previously rejected.
In trying to save Yang, Henry did not have a strong hand but he played
his cards with skill. He was the senior British diplomat in Korea, but
he was outranked by MacDonald in Tokyo and had to obey what Grey and
senior officials in London told him to do. At the same time the British
had their own imperial prestige to consider and could not allow the
Japanese to have everything their own way, once the issue had been
raised, over Yang.
The Japanese for their part were anxious to avoid an open rupture with
Britain over the fate of a single torture victim and were prepared,
under British pressure, to promise to treat him more humanely. They
were also mystified because they wholly disbelieved that a British
diplomat could have had any disinterested objection to Yang's
mistreatment. Henry caustically noted that the Japanese officials with
whom he was dealing were convinced that "if I persisted in dwelling on
so trivial a side issue, it must be because I was inspired by an
unfriendly wish to interpose obstacles in the Japanese path."
My grandfather seems to have expected that he would ultimately be
forced to surrender Yang to the Japanese. But by then he had kicked up
such a row that the Japanese agreed to various conditions such as
keeping Yang in hospital and allowing him a fair trial so that they
were ultimately forced to release him.
It was four years before they caught up with him again when he was once
more imprisoned after a trial in which his co-defendants described how
they had been hung by their thumbs from the ceiling, savagely beaten
and burned with cigarettes until they confessed.
My grandfather's career as a diplomat was ended by his defence of Yang.
A week after handing over the journalist to the Japanese on 21 August
1908 he announced he was going on leave and returned to Britain via the
trans-Siberian railway. He never went back to Korea and resigned from
the Foreign Office six months later. He died several years before the
Second World War, when tens of thousands of captured British soldiers
and civilians discovered that the Japanese treatment of prisoners could
be just as horrific as he had described.
Reading through the voluminous Foreign Office files on the Yang case I
felt a certain pride in my grandfather's behaviour. He was one of those
self-confident high Tories who, like Lord Gilmour of Craigmillar who
died a few months ago, prove to be the staunchest opponents of
oppression because they do what they themselves, and not their
government or their employer, think to be right.
He never had any doubts about the virtues of imperialism as a system
quite separate from the motives, which he often derided as pathetic or
sordid, of those who ran it. In my father's view, Henry saw the British
Empire as if it was like a strange symphony. The failings of the
individuals involved in running it were "as irrelevant as would be the
fact that the composer took dope and conductor lived off the immoral
earnings of women".
My grandfather spent almost 30 years in the Far East, almost all of
them in China, although he had originally intended to live in India.
Born in 1859, he was the son of Francis Jeffrey Cockburn, a British
judge in India mainly notable for having blown off his right hand as a
boy when experimenting with a gunpowder flask. His family kept the
mangled hand preserved in a jar of spirits on the mantelpiece and would
show it to interested guests.
Henry expressed an early desire to enter the Indian Civil Service and,
since he was highly intelligent, seemed likely to pass the entrance
examination with ease. Unfortunately for him, however, shortly before
taking it, he confided to his father that under the influence of German
philosophy he had become an atheist.
This was unwise because his father viewed religion as part of the
essential cement of the British Empire and hurried to London to pull
all available strings at the Indian Office to make sure that they never
gave his son a job.
Regretting that he had blighted his career prospects by not keeping his
mouth shut, Henry sold his books and all but one suit and disappeared
from home. When next heard of he had entered the Eastern Consular
Service, from which he knew he could later pass into the diplomatic
service without taking a further examination.
He learned Chinese and became British vice consul in Chunking, an
isolated city on the upper Yangtze, in 1880 at the start of the quarter
of a century he lived in China. His final post was as "Chinese
Secretary" in the Peking legation, where he was trapped during the
famous siege.
On moving to Seoul in 1906 he expressed no particular objection to the
Japanese take over of Korea, which he saw as "a pawn in a game of chess
that has been the centre of interest solely by reason of its position
relative to the pieces of the great powers".
Not that the Foreign Office had any doubts that the Koreans regarded
the Japanese with anything other than visceral hatred. The forced
abdication of the Korean Emperor led to an uprising in 1907, which
Japanese troops bloodily repressed.
Henry's early dispatches are coolly written accounts of the Korean
rebellion and Japan's efforts to suppress it. In their military
operations against the guerrillas, he wrote, there had "certainly been
no indiscriminate laying waste the country and many of the houses and
villages of which the destruction is laid to the account of Japanese
troops were in fact burned by the insurgents as a punishment for
harbouring the troops".
One Briton in Korea who took a much more critical view of Japanese
repression was a journalist called Ernest Bethell. He owned a
newspaper, The Korea Daily News, which had a Korean edition called Dai
Han Mai Il Shinpo. It printed graphic stories about atrocities which
were all the more resented by the Japanese authorities because
Britain's extra-territorial rights in Korea meant that they could not
legally close down the newspapers.
Unable to act themselves, the Japanese persuaded the British to act for
them and, on 12 October 1907, Bethell was summoned to appear before a
specially appointed Consular Court charged with action likely to cause
a breach of the peace.
"The trial," wrote Fred McKenzie, a pro-Korean observer, "took place in
the Consular building, Mr Cockburn, the very able British
Consul-General acting as judge". He found the editor guilty and ordered
him to enter into recognisances of sterling 300 for his good behaviour
for six months. This effectively gagged the newspaper.
The trial turned out to be only the first round of a triangular battle
between Bethell, the Japanese authorities and Henry.
In March 1908 a Korean nationalist shot and killed Durham White
Stevens, an American adviser to the Japanese administration, in San
Francisco. The assassination was covered by Bethell's Korean paper,
which printed a eulogy to the assassins under the headline:
"Particulars of the attack upon the scoundrel Stevens."
The Japanese supreme authority in Korea, Prince Ito, in charge of
turning the country into a Japanese protectorate, requested Sir Claude
MacDonald in Tokyo for the British to deal with Bethell and his
newspaper, claiming he held them partly responsible for the
assassination of Stevens.
MacDonald agreed with him. On 7 May Henry wrote a memo sympathetic to
the Japanese case and castigated Bethell, saying that "an analogous
case [to that of Stevens] would be the assassination of a prominent
Anglo-Indian official on his arrival in England by a native of Bengal".
As regards my grandfather's actions, what happened next falls into two
distinct halves. In the first he did everything he could to close down
Bethell and his newspaper on the grounds that they threatened public
order and disturbed Britain's alliance with Japan. In the second half
he tried to prevent the Japanese imprisoning and torturing Yang Ki-tak,
the nationalist editor of the Korean edition of Bethell's paper. The
previously calm tone of his diplomatic dispatches is replaced by
outrage at the brutal methods and contempt for legality of the Japanese
occupation.
Bethell was summoned before a British consular court in Seoul for a
second time, accused of causing tumult in a country which was "under
the de facto protectorate of Japan". He was sentenced to three weeks'
imprisonment, bound over for six months and deported on a British naval
vessel to Shanghai, where there was a British prison.
Henry soon found out that this was not the end of the affair. The chief
defence witness at Bethell's trial was his editor, Yang. So long as he
remained in his British-owned newspaper office he was safe, but on 13
July he was tricked by the Japanese police into leaving the office and
arrested.
Henry protested at the arrest
of the chief witness at the trial he had organised, but was blandly
assured that Yang had been detained for embezzlement. He was bitterly
scornful at the Japanese excuse for the arrest, since the money that
Yang was accused of embezzling were in a fund "instituted for the
purpose of freeing Corea from the Protectorate of Japan". He thought it
unlikely that Japanese were truly interested in safeguarding
subscribers.
In jail in Seoul, Yang's health rapidly collapsed. He was kept in a
crowded cell, which was too small to lie down in and too low to stand
up in. He was evidently tortured.
When a British visitor called Marnham saw him three weeks after his
arrest, he described Yang as "looking like a skeleton" and in a state
of nervous collapse because of his visible terror of his Japanese
guards.
When Henry protested to a senior Japanese official about these inhumane
conditions, he was told that Yang was being treated just the same as
other untried prisoners.
The Japanese also disbelieved his claim of humanitarian concern for the
prisoner. "It is," he wrote, "this callousness and this failure to
recognise that to the English mind such slow torture of unconvicted
prisoners is abhorrent, that has constituted one of the great obstacles
in dealing with this case."
He protested vigorously to London and Tokyo and with some effect since
Prince Ito, a powerful and sophisticated statesman, ordered that Yang
be moved to hospital.
The case now took a peculiar twist. The Japanese prison governor
misunderstood his instructions. Instead of being sent to hospital, Yang
was released on to the street and he promptly fled back to his
newspaper. He was still in a very bad state. A British consular
official confirmed that he still looked like a skeleton and the consul
had been "struck by the frightened look on his face, as of a hunted
creature, and by his nervousness in answering even a simple question".
My grandfather struggled not to return Yang to Japanese custody despite
increasingly peremptory instructions from London and Tokyo. He was
refusing to speak to the Japanese official in charge of the case whom
he said had lied to him. He did extract promises from the Japanese that
Yang would be taken to hospital, tried in open court and be represented
by a Korean lawyer.
On 20 August Henry received a telegram from Grey in London ordering him
to hand Yang over to the Japanese. In reply he sent "an account of the
rendition of the prisoner with a description of his appearance [bearing
marks of his mistreatment]".
In the short term Henry's protests were surprisingly effective. The
case had become so well publicised that Yang was released on 25
September, though he was imprisoned and tortured again in later years.
Bethell returned to Korea in 1909 but almost immediately died of
natural causes. In 1960 he was retrospectively declared "a Hero of the
Korean Revolution".
My grandfather left Korea even before Yang was released, privately
claiming that the Foreign Office had not given him sufficient support.
In resigning the following July he does not mention this but says: "It
is with some sense of humiliation that one admits oneself to have
broken down at an earlier age than usual." Probably he was being
circumspect about his motives because he was applying for a full
pension and he lived for another 20 years.
Henry's protests against rendition read as fresh today as when they
were written, as does his half-spoken suspicion that the torture
chamber might be an essential foundation of foreign occupation and not
one of its excesses.
*
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