The Prisoners of St. Helena: Part 2

By BERNARD LEVIN

GEORGE ORWELL tells, in Homage to Catalonia, of the occasion when, on sniper-duty in the front line only a few score yards from the Fascist positions, he saw one of the enemy sprint- ing across some open ground while holding up his trousers with one hand. Orwell deduced that the man had been sum- moned to take a message that Could wait even less than he could, and raised his rifle to fire. But he found he could not; the great, good disillusionment had set in. For, as he said, 'A man holding up his trousers is not a ascist; he is just a man holding .up his trousers.'

I find myself in much the same position where Mr. Edward Heath is concerned. A strictly Objective observer might well conclude that the Conservative Chief Whip at the time of Suez Could hardly fail to be a dastard, and he might go on to presume, not without some evidence, that the Lord Privy Seal who made two separate Speeches in the same evening on a subject of Which, as the speeches in question made abun- dantly clear, he knew nothing whatever, was a bit of an ass.

Yet every time 1 raise my rifle and draw a bead on Mr. Heath, something happens to show rhe he is as human as I am, and I let it fall. Here Was preparing to give him stick for his deplor- able showing in the case of the Bahraini Prisoners, and just as I am on my way to do it, I discover that he buys his chocolates at Charbon- nel and Walker, as do I, and leaves his Christmas 8.1101313i:1g as late as I do, and we are brothers beneath the skin.

In the event, the Cadi in me just gets the upper hand, and the bastinado is ordered, though with reluctance. Mr. Heath's showing in the Bahraini Prisoners debate was lamentable, after all and like Cinna the poet, he will bear me a bang for that. I fear. And surely Orwell would have VolPathised : for if ever a man was caught with his trousers down it was Mr. Heath in the week before Christmas.

, To begin with, Mr. Heath had to learn the oat'd way—as, in their time, did Mr. Milligan and Mr. Henry Hopkinson and even Mr. Macmillan, that You must never, never, never, say never. On "daY, he ended a Question-Time exchange on toe subject of the Bahraini prisoners with the memorable words, 'I shall have nothing further ,(3saY to the House before we rise for the Recess.' 15 Lit the following day, his braces haying burst asunder in the interim and his well-creased t.ruusers having descended around his ankles, he tacl a total of something like eleven columns of .r!ansard to say to the House before they rose for (r'le Recess, and was told in no uncertain fashion to behave himself, too—and even, to some extent, Promised that he would. But I realise that it is most unlikely that any- body around here knows what I am talking about. I must therefore recapitulate the gist of a long, complex and deeply shameful story, the whole of which I told in the Spectator on July 1 last.

Five men, members of a committee struggling to get sonic rudimentary form of political. rights, justice and a legal code in Bahrain (which had none of any of these things), were arrested in November, 1956, and charged with various seditions, including the attempted assassination of the Ruler, an absolute despot under the pro- tection of the British Government, which runs its foreign policy. They were not tried according to the provisions of any legal code, for there was no such thing in Bahrain then; the ad hoc 'court' before which they appeared was composed of the Ruler's relatives; it was held in a remote area of the country; the prisoners refused to recognise its jurisdiction, and were unrepresented by coun- sel; and they were, not surprisingly, convicted. Three were sentenced to fourteen years' imprison- ment (subsequently reduced, by a magnanimous gesture on the part of the Ruler, to thirteen years).

Under the Colonial Prisoners Removal Act of 1869 and subsequent statutes, there are arrange- ments whereby prisoners sentenced in one British colony may be sent to serve their time in another, and this may be extended, in certain circumstances, to foreign territories over which Britain has a jurisdiction, as in Bahrain. The Ruler of Bahrain applied to have ihrs system set in motion for three of the five prisoners, and they were sent to St. Helena, where they now are. (Nobody outside the 'court' which 'tried' them has ever seriously suggested that they were guilty, and they are confined in a kind of 'house arrest' which sorts ill with the sort of desperate Men they would be if they had been.) But the key to the whole business, which makes so repellent the British Government's part in general and Mr. Heath's in particular, is that the whole thing—conviction, application to have thc relevant Acts extended to Bahrain, agree- ment of Britain that this should be done, application to have the men sent. to St. Helena, application by Governor of St. Helena to receive them, announcement of the place on St. Helena in which they would serve their sentence —.all this was officially ancl formally done and decided not merely before the trial had taken place, but before the 'court' had even been set up. For the 'trial' began on December 23, 1956, but on the 22nd the St. Helena Government Gazette published the following:

An urgent request made on behalf of Her Majesty's Government was recently received by His Excellency the Governor, as to the possibility of arranging for the detention in St. Helena of five subjects of the Ruler of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, convicted of political offences.

And four days prdviously, on the 18th, the Ruler had sent to the Queen the following message . . . We beseech you to allow us to make arrangements with the Governor of the island of St. Helena for the reception of the persons who will be sent to that island in accordance with the sentence decided.

And there is worse yet; for on the same day as this disgraceful message was handed over in Bahrain for transmission to Britain, the Gover- nor of St. Helena sent his own message to the Queen, reading in part :

Whereas the Ruler of Bahrain has expressed his desire that arrangements should be entered into between Bahrain and St. Helena for the removal of certain prisoners from Bahrain to St. Helena . . now therefore I, the Governor of St. Helena, do hereby respectfully submit . . that the desired arrangements be entered into.

It also said that 'it is proposed to make provision for the extension of the Colonial Prisoners Removal Act, 1869, to Bahrain,' which was false, no such proposal having then been made by anybody.

But we have still not heard the worst. For on December 19 two Orders in Council were made in Britain. One extended the 1869 Act to Bahrain (a step which had to be taken to allow the prisoners to be transported under it); the second declared that 'The sanction of Her Majesty is hereby given in order that the Ruler of Bahrain and the Governor of St. Helena may . . . enter into an agreement for the removal of prisoners . . from Bahrain to the Colony of St. Helena.'

And still the Ruler's 'court' had not been set lip. Now for a tyrant like the Ruler of Bahrain to - behave in this way, faking a court and a trial in which everything is settled before it begins, is not surprising. It is shameful that Britain, which could in fact simply order the Ruler, who after all only rules by British favour, allows it, but it might be argued that we must maintain the pretence that he is independent of Britain and British wishes. But how can the behaviour of the British authorities involved in this farce be con- doned? How can the Governor of St. Helena, the British Government, and the Privy Council which made the Orders in Council, defend their active participation in the Ruler's illegality? There can be no ambiguity in the documents from which I have quoted. Words like 'will' are used, not 'may'; it was officially agreed by the British Government that prisoners who had not even been tried would be imprisoned with British help in a British colony at the request of the titan who was about to rig their trial.

This account is necessarily sketchy and corn- pressed; there are a large number of equally dis- graceful episodes in this business that I have had to omit. But I hope it provides the background for what follows. For the next act of this farce has begun. The Ruler has asked that the three prisoners be sent back from St. Helena to Bahrain. Now, displeasing though their imprison- ment on St. Helena is to, them, the prospect of being sent back to Bahrain must make St. Helena seem positively agreeable. For at any rate in St.

Helena they can be sure of fair and proper treat- ment; in Bahrain they have no guarantee that they will be released at the end of their sentence, if indeed they have not been tortured or killed, or both, long before. Yet Mr. Heath was proposing to send them back to the Ruler's pleasure, and was planning to do so without consulting the House either, and if Mr. John Stonehouse had not spotted what he was up to, and asked questions, and then moved the emergency adjournment of the House, he would have done it, too.

Which brings us, as I knew it would, to Mr. Heath's showing in the debate. It was deplorable. as I have said; he clearly knew nothing whatever about the case, and was merely relying on what his advisers had told him when the 'thing blew up in the House, and on what they managed to ferry to him from the Civil Servants' Box behind the Speaker's chair during the debate itself. But if Mr. Heath will not work a little harder, I will have to reprove him for it; he said, in his first speech of the evening: 'After the sentence, the Ruler made a request . . . that these three men should be detained somewhere outside Bahrain.' I am very sorry to have to tell this to Mr. Heath, but that statement is false, and he had better start inquiring how it came to be put into his hand for reading out; the Ruler made this request before the sentence, and indeed before the 'court' which was to decide it was set up. Mr. Heath went on to make it a good deal worse by saying, when questioned on this point: Yes—before the trial, and the wording shows that it was 'in the event of conviction'—that is why the request was made—Surely, it is in order to ask for facilities in the event of their being required.

Which is doubly false, first because it repeats the earlier statement, and second because the words he quoted do not occur in the Ruler's request, in .which there is no question of an 'if' or a con- ditional.

I think, nice man though he is, that Mr. Heath owes the House of Commons a withdrawal of these remarks, and an apology for making them without investigating what degree of veracity was to be found in them.

But what do some of the other speakers owe the House—let alone the question of what they owe simple decency? There is a man called Kershaw, for instance, who said, among other things, some of which were even worse, that 'It was further said that this particular order can- not apply to these prisoners on the grounds, among others, that the arrangements for their reception at St. Helena were made before the sentences were passed. That was surely only an administrative convenience.' I suppose that there are people in the world—indeed, there is cer- tainly one, called Kershaw—who believe that to arrange a man's sentence before his trial comes under' the heading of nothing more disturbing than 'an administrative convenience,' but I am glad that I am not among their number. I am even more glad that I am not another fellow, this one called Mott-Radclyffe (who are these people who have been crawling into Parliament, and why have I not been kept informed?), Who, when he was told about the Ruler's document arranging for the transportation of men who had not even been tried, let alone convicted, let alone sentenced, said, 'I doubt whether he said anything of the kind.' Why does Mott-Radclyffe doubt whether the Ruler said anything of the kind? There is nothing secret about most of the documents in this case: how dare he take decent wages for making speeches about subjects on which he has not bothered to get himself informed before making them?

Indeed, the Tory Party on this occasion be- haved disgracefully; the only Conservative to stand in support of the request for an emergency debate was Mr. William Yates, to whom be honour. Most of the rest sat about, apparently neither knowing nor caring what was being done in Britain's name, and ready to march through the lobby, if the occasion had arisen, still neither knowing nor caring.

As it happens, the occasion did not arise. Mr. Heath, properly shaken, gave an undertaking that these. prisoners would not be sent back (0 Bahrain before the end of the recess, that the House would be kept informed, when it resumed, of the situation, and that the Ruler of Bahrain would be further urged to exercise clemency in the case. Mr. Heath, clearly, will bear watching; a man who can spout the kind of stuff Iv spouted without, apparently, bothering to check it, is clearly going to need a good deal of keeping in line. But meanwhile, the fact remains that 19 a British colony there have been since the cad of 1956 three men who were convicted in a fake' trial by a fake-court set up by a fake-ruler (and put aboard their prison-ship, I may add--though this is another story—with a fake-warrant), and whose conviction, sentence and place ef imprisonment were decided before the trial be- gan; and also that this has all been done with the active participation of the British Govern- ment. I think that when the House of Commons resumes next month it should have something more important to talk about than the Human Tissue Bill.