Ruairí Mac Easmainn

Roger David Casement (; 1 September 1864 – 3 August 1916), known as Sir Roger Casement, CMG, between 1911 and 1916, was a diplomat and Irish nationalist executed by the United Kingdom for treason during World War I. He worked for the British Foreign Office as a diplomat, becoming known as a humanitarian activist, and later as a poet and Easter Rising leader. Described as the "father of twentieth-century human rights investigations", he was honoured in 1905 for the Casement Report on the Congo and knighted in 1911 for his important investigations of human rights abuses in the rubber industry in Peru.

In Africa as a young man, Casement first worked for commercial interests before joining the British Colonial Service. In 1891 he was appointed as a British consul, a profession he followed for more than 20 years. Influenced by the Boer War and his investigation into colonial atrocities against indigenous peoples, Casement grew to mistrust imperialism. After retiring from consular service in 1913, he became more involved with Irish republicanism and other separatist movements.

During World War I, he made efforts to gain German military aid for the 1916 Easter Rising that sought to gain Irish independence. He was arrested, convicted and executed for high treason. He was stripped of his knighthood and other honours. Before, during and after the trial, British security agents and police showed typescripts prepared by the Metropolitan police to influential persons. These were said to be official copies of his private journals which detailed homosexual activities. Given prevailing views and existing laws on homosexuality, this material undermined support for clemency. Disputes have continued about these diaries; a private handwriting comparison study in 2002 concluded that Casement had written the diaries, but this was contested by several scholars.

Early life

Family and education

Casement was born in Dublin and lived in very early childhood at Doyle's Cottage, Lawson Terrace, Sandycove, a terrace that no longer exists, but that was on Sandycove Road between what is now Fitzgerald's pub and The Butler's Pantry delicatessen.

His father, Captain Roger Casement of the (King's Own) Regiment of Dragoons, was the son of Hugh Casement, a Belfast shipping merchant who went bankrupt and later moved to Australia. Captain Casement had served in the 1842 Afghan campaign. He travelled to Europe to fight as a volunteer in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 but arrived after the Surrender at Világos. After the family moved to England, Roger's mother, Anne Jephson (or Jepson), had him secretly baptised at the age of three as a Catholic in Rhyl, Wales. However, the priest who arranged his baptism in 1916 clearly stated that the baptism had been in Aberystwyth, from Rhyl. Confusion over the location of his baptism can be explained by Casement mistaking the placename after 48 years.

According to an 1892 letter, Casement believed his mother was descended from the Jephson family of Mallow, County Cork but the Jephson family's historian provides no evidence of this. The family lived in England in genteel poverty; Roger's mother died when he was nine. His father took the family back to Ireland to County Antrim to live near paternal relatives. When Casement was 13 years old, his father died in Ballymena, and he was left dependent on the charity of relatives, the Youngs and the Casements. He was educated at the Diocesan School, Ballymena (later the Ballymena Academy). He left school at 16 and went to England to work as a clerk with Elder Dempster, a Liverpool shipping company headed by Alfred Lewis Jones.Séamas Ó Síocháin, ''Roger Casement, Imperialist, Rebel, Revolutionary'', Lilliput Press, 2008, p. 15;

Roger Casement's brother, Thomas Hugh Jephson Casement (1863–1939), had a roving life at sea and as a soldier, and later helped establish the Irish Coastguard Service. He was the inspiration for a character in Denis Johnston's play ''The Moon in the Yellow River''. He drowned in Dublin's Grand Canal on 6 March 1939, having threatened suicide.

Observations of Casement

In a 1938 comment on Casement, which may have been coloured by knowledge of his subsequent fate, and timed to follow Maloney’s allegations of forgery, diplomat Ernest Hambloch, who knew Casement for three weeks in 1910, describes an "unexpected" figure: tall, ungainly; "elaborately courteous" but with "a good deal of pose about him, as though he was afraid of being caught off his guard". "An easy talker and a fluent writer", he could "expound a case, but not argue it". “His greatest charm was his voice, which was very musical". The eyes were "kindly", but not given to laughter: "a sense of humour might have saved him from many things". The reference to his voice as ‘musical’ is an allusion to vocal peculiarities of intonation and frequency parameters found in the speech of some homosexual men.

Joseph Conrad's first impressions of Casement, from an encounter in the Congo in 1890 he judged "a positive piece of good luck", was "thinks, speaks, well, most intelligent and very sympathetic". Later, ''after'' Casement's arrest and trial, Conrad, by then a naturalized British subject: revoked and contradicted his original judgment of a quarter century earlier; "Already in Africa, I judged he was a man, properly speaking, of no mind at all. I don't mean stupid. I mean that he was all emotion. By emotional force (Putumayo, Congo report etc) he made his way, and sheer temperament—a truly tragic figure."

British diplomat and human rights investigator

The Congo and the 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. Casement worked on a survey to improve communication and recruited and supervised workmen in building a railroad to bypass the lower 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.

In 1890 Casement met Joseph Conrad, who had come to the Congo to pilot a merchant ship, ('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." 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, 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.

Casement joined the Colonial Service, under the authority of the Colonial Office, first serving overseas as a clerk in British West Africa. In August 1901 he transferred to the Foreign Office service as British consul in the eastern part of the French Congo. In 1903 the Balfour Government commissioned Casement, then its consul at Boma in the Congo Free State, to investigate the human rights situation in that colony of the Belgian king, Leopold II. Setting up a private army known as the , Leopold had squeezed revenue out of the people of the territory through 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.

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". 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.

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 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.

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 Leopold'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 Leopold 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".

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.

Peru: Abuses against the Putumayo Indians

In 1906 the Foreign Office sent Casement to Brazil: first as consul in Santos, then transferred to Pará, and lastly promoted to consul-general in Rio de Janeiro. 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. 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".

In addition, the British consul at Iquitos had said that 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. 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.

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, and it was from the Amazon's mouth at Pará. The British-registered company was effectively controlled by the archetypal rubber baron Julio César Arana and his brother. Born in 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. 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. The rough frontier city, including both respectable businesses and the vice district, was highly influenced by the PAC and Arana.

Casement travelled to the Putumayo District, where the rubber was harvested deep in the Amazon Basin, and explored the treatment of the local Indians of Peru. 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, severe physical abuse, rape of women and girls by the managers and overseers, terrorization and casual murder. Casement found conditions as inhumane as those in the 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

Casement's report has been described 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." 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:

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.

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". 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. 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 1911, Casement attempted to secure the arrest of Alfredo Montt and José Inocente Fonseca, which Casement referred to as two of the "worst Criminals on the Putumayo". 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 on the 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. 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". 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. 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. Montt and Fonseca managed to evade further attempts to secure their arrest by Peruvian and Brazilian authorities.

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.

Casement wrote extensively both for his private record and for the Foreign Office and the anti-slavery cause. In 1910 he wrote a long and detailed personal account of his day-to-day experience in the Putumayo investigation. This is known today as "The Amazon Journal" as edited and published by Angus Mitchell The original manuscript is kept in the National Library of Ireland; it contains no sexual references whatsoever. The Black Diaries have seven conflicting versions of their provenance furnished by British officials. In 1911 Casement received a knighthood for his efforts on behalf of the Amazonian Indians having been appointed Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) in 1905 for his Congo work.

Irish revolutionary

Return to Ireland

In Ireland in 1904, on leave from Africa from that year until 1905, Casement joined the Gaelic League, an organisation established in 1893 to preserve and revive the spoken and literary use of the Irish language. He met the leaders of the powerful Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) to lobby for his work in the Congo. He did not support those, like the IPP, who proposed Home Rule, as he believed that the House of Lords would veto such efforts. Casement was more impressed by Arthur Griffith's new Sinn Féin party (founded 1905), which called for an independent Ireland (through a non-violent series of strikes and boycotts). Its sole imperial tie would be a dual monarchy between Britain and Ireland, modelled on the policy example of Ferenc Deák in Hungary. Casement joined the party in 1905.

In a letter to Mrs. J. R. Green, (the Irish historian Alice Stopford Green) dated 20 April 1906 Casement reflected on his conversion to the national cause as someone who had "accepted imperialism" and had been close to an "ideal" Englishman:

It is a mistake for an Irishman to mix himself up with the English. He is bound to do one of two things—either to go to the wall if he remains Irish or to become an Englishman himself. You see I very nearly did become one once. At the Boer War time, I had been away from Ireland for years, out of touch with everything native to my heart and mind, trying hard to do my duty, and every fresh act of duty made me appreciably nearer the ideal of the Englishman. I had accepted Imperialism. British rule was to be accepted at all costs, because it was the best for everyone under the sun, and those who opposed that extension ought rightly to be 'smashed.' I was on the high road to being a regular Imperialist jingo—although at heart underneath all, and unsuspected almost by myself, I had remained an Irishman. Well, the war, the Boer War">Second_Boer_War.html" ;"title=".e., the Boer Wargave me qualms at the end—the Second Boer War concentration camps">concentration camps bigger ones—and finally, when up in those lonely Congo forests where I found Leopold II of Belgium">Leopold