Roger Casement

Sir Roger David Casement (Irish name: Ruairí Mac Easmainn
Allegiance	Irish Republican Brotherhood Irish Volunteers
Years of service	1917–1917
Rank	Member of the Provisional Committee of the Irish Volunteers.[1]
Battles/wars	Easter Rising
Awards	CMG

Sir Roger David Casement CMG (Irish: Ruairí Mac Easmainn) (1 September, 1864 – 3 August, 1916) was an Irish patriot, poet, revolutionary and nationalist by inclination. He was a British diplomat by profession and is famous for his activities against human rights abuses in the Congo and Peru, but more well known for his dealings with Germany prior to Ireland's Easter Rising in 1916. A patriotic Briton early in his life, his traumatic experiences witnessing human rights abuses in the Congo and Peru led him to anti-Imperialist and ultimately Irish Republican political opinions.

Origins

Casement was born in Dublin to a Protestant father, Captain Roger Casement of (The King’s Own) Regiment of Light Dragoons, himself the son of a bankrupt Belfast shipping merchant (Hugh Casement) who later moved to Australia. Captain Casement served in the 1842 Afghan campaign. Casement's mother Anne Jephson of Dublin (whose origins are obscure), had him rebaptised secretly as a Roman Catholic when aged three in Rhyl, and died in Worthing when her son was nine. By the time he was thirteen, his father was also dead, having ended his days dependent on the charity of relatives. Roger was afterwards raised by Protestant paternal relatives in Ulster, where he was educated at Ballymena Academy. He lived in early childhood at Doyle's Cottage, Lawson Terrace, Sandycove, County Dublin.

The Congo: The Casement Report

In 1904, Sir Roger Casement, then the British Consul, delivered a long, detailed eyewitness report detailing human rights abuses in the Congo Free State: The Casement Report. The Congo Free State was under the ownership of King Leopold II of Belgium (which he owned as a rich private entrepreneur, not as Belgian King). This report was instrumental in Leopold finally reliquishing his private holdings in Africa. Leopold had had ownership of the Congolese state since 1885 (granted to him by the Berlin Conference) in which he exploited its natural resources (mostly rubber) for his own private wealth.

When the report was made public, the British Congo Reform Association, founded by Morel with Casement's support, demanded action. Other European nations followed suit, as did the United States, and the British Parliament demanded a meeting of the 14 signatory powers to review the 1885 Berlin Agreement. 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, and despite the King's efforts, in 1905, it confirmed Casement's report in every damning detail.

On November 15, 1908, four years after the Casement Report, the Parliament of Belgium annexed the Congo Free State from Leopold and took over its administration as the Belgian Congo.

Peru: Abuses against the Putumayo Indians

In 1906 Casement was sent as consul to Pará, transferring to Santos, Brazil and lastly was promoted to consul-general in Rio de Janeiro. He had the occasion to do work similar to that which he had done in Congo among the Putumayo Indians of Peru when he was attached as a consular representative to a commission investigating murderous rubber slavery by the British-registered Peruvian Amazon Company effectively controlled by Julio Arana and his brother. This involved two visits to the region one in 1910 with a follow-up in 1911.

After his return to Britain he repeated his extra-consular campaigning work by organising Anti-Slavery Society and mission interventions in the region which was disputed between Peru and Colombia. Some of the men exposed as killers in his report were charged by Peru and others fled. Conditions in the area undoubtedly improved as a result but the contemporary switch to farmed rubber in Malaya etc was a godsend to the Indians as well.

Casement wrote extensively (as always) in those two years including several of his notorious diaries, the one for 1911 being unusually discursive. They and the 1903 diary were kept by him in London with other papers of the period, presumably so they could be consulted in his continuing work as 'Congo Casement' and the saviour of the Putumayo Indians.

Irish revolutionary

Casement resigned from colonial service in 1913. The following year, he joined the Irish Volunteers and befriended Eoin MacNeill, the organisation's chief of staff. When the First World War broke out in 1914, he attempted to secure German aid for Irish independence, sailing for Germany via America. He viewed himself as a self-appointed ambassador of the Irish nation. While the journey was his idea, he managed to persuade the exiled Irish nationalists in Clan na Gael to finance the expedition. Many members of Clan na Gael never trusted him completely, as he was not a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), and held views considered by many to be too moderate.

Casement drafted a "treaty" with Germany, which stated that country's support for an independent Ireland. Most of his time in Germany, however, was spent in an attempt to recruit an "Irish Brigade" consisting of Irish prisoners-of-war in the prison camp of Limburg an der Lahn, who would be trained to fight against England.

The effort proved unsuccessful, as all Irishmen fighting in the British army did so voluntarily, and was abandoned after much time and money was wasted. The Germans, who were sceptical of Casement but nonetheless aware of the military advantage they could gain from an uprising in Ireland, offered the Irish 20,000 rifles, 10 machine guns and accompanying ammunition, a fraction of the amount of weaponry Casement had hoped for.

Casement did not learn about the Easter Rising until after the plan was fully developed. The IRB purposely kept him in the dark, and even tried to replace him. Casement may never have learned that it was not the Volunteers who were planning the rising, but IRB members such as Patrick Pearse and Tom Clarke who were pulling the strings behind the scenes.

File:Casementglas.jpg

Roger Casement's grave in Glasnevin Cemetery.

The German weapons never reached Ireland. The ship in which they were travelling, a German cargo vessel, the Libau, was intercepted, even though it had been thoroughly disguised as a Norwegian vessel, Aud Norge. All the crew were German sailors, but their clothes and effects, even the charts and books on the bridge, were all Norwegian. The British, however, had intercepted German communications and knew the true identity and exact destination of the Aud. After it was intercepted, the ship's captain scuttled the Libau.

Capture, Trial and Execution

Casement left Germany in a submarine, the U-19, shortly after the Aud sailed. Believing that the Germans were toying with him from the start and purposely providing inadequate aid that would doom a rising to failure, he decided he had to reach Ireland before the shipment of arms and convince Eoin MacNeill (who he believed was still in control) to cancel the rising.

In the early hours of 21 April 1916, three days before the rising began, Casement was put ashore at Banna Strand in Tralee Bay, County Kerry. Too ill to travel, he was discovered at McKenna's Fort (an ancient ring fort now called Casement's Fort) in Rathoneen, Ardfert and subsequently arrested on charges of treason, sabotage and espionage against the Crown.

Following a highly publicized trial, he was stripped of his knighthood. To their embarrassment, the courts found little legal basis to prosecute Casement because his crimes had been carried out in Germany and the Treason Act seemed to apply only to activities carried out on British soil. However, closer reading of the medieval document allowed for a broader interpretation, leading to the accusation that Casement was "hanged by a comma". The court decided that a comma should be read in the text, crucially widening the sense so that "in the realm or elsewhere" meant where acts were done and not just where the "King's enemies" may be. After an unsuccessful appeal against the death sentence, he was hanged at Pentonville Prison in London on 3 August 1916, at the age of 51. He converted to Catholicism while awaiting execution and went to his death, he said, with the body of his God as his last meal.

Among the people who pleaded for clemency for him were Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who became acquainted with Casement through the work of the Congo Reform Association, and George Bernard Shaw. Edmund Dene Morel couldn't visit him in jail, being under attack for his pacifist position. On the other hand, Joseph Conrad could not forgive Casement for his treachery toward Britain.

The Black Diaries and Casement’s sexuality

Prior to his execution, photographs of a diary which the Crown claimed belonged to Casement were circulated to those urging commutation of his death sentence. These documents, supplied to King George V, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and others in Britain, Ireland and the United States, showed Casement to have been a promiscuous homosexual with a fondness for very young men, a crime at the time. In a time of strong social conservatism, not least among Irish Catholics, the "Black Diaries" undermined or at least stifled support for Casement. They also led some of Casement's opponents to suggest that details about colonial sexual atrocities in his reports were based on his personal fantasies, though this was not supported by evidence. The diaries may now be inspected at the British National Archives in Kew.

Though some believed that the diaries were forgeries, much as Charles Stewart Parnell had been the target of the Pigott forgeries implicating him in the Phoenix Park Murders, others did not. H. Montgomery Hyde, the Unionist MP and barrister who wrote a book on Casement's trial, had no doubt that Casement had been a pederast.

In an effort to settle the issue, an independent forensic examination of the diaries, funded by RTÉ and the BBC, was recently undertaken by Dr. Audrey Giles, an internationally respected figure in the field of document forensics. In comparing Casement's "White Diaries" (ordinary diaries of the time) with the "Black Diaries", which allegedly date from the same time-span, the study concluded, on the basis of detailed handwriting analysis, that the Black Diaries were genuine and had been written by Casement.

This study, commissioned by a team of academics from Goldsmiths, University of London, was submitted to the forensic expert James Horan for peer review. Horan rejected the report. His main criticism was that there was no evidence that the comparative material used was the handwriting of Roger Casement. He noted that it was this problem which lead to the mistaken authentication of the Hitler diaries. The comparative material given to Dr Giles by the team from Goldsmiths was taken from the Morel Archive at the London School of Economics. All of it passed through the hands of British Intelligence after Morel's arrest in 1917.

The case for forgery of the Black Diaries has always been predicated on the fact that Casement was a uniquely admired and respected public figure in Britain among the 1916 leaders. It has also been claimed that the extremely active homosexual sex life described in the diaries is unlikely to be genuine, but it has been argued that this would not refute the authenticity of the diaries, as they may have been sexual fantasies.

State funeral

As was the custom at the time, Casement's body was buried in quicklime in the yard at Pentonville Prison where he was hanged. In 1965, Casement's body was repatriated and, after a state funeral, was buried with full military honours in the Republican Plot in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin. The President of Ireland, Éamon de Valera, who in his mid-eighties was the last surviving leader of the Easter Rising, defied the advice of his doctors to attend the ceremony, along with an estimated 30,000 Irish citizens. Casement's last wish, to be buried at Murlough Bay on the North Antrim coast has yet to be fulfilled.

In the 1990s, doubts were cast as to whether the bones buried in Glasnevin were Casement's. It was suggested that when his prison grave was opened, it was impossible to distinguish his bones from those of other prisoners, and as result a skeleton was assembled from the bones found and arbitrarily described as Casement's.

Trivia

• In the 1912 novel The Lost World, Conan Doyle used Casement as an inspiration for the character of Lord John Roxton.
• Many landmarks through Ireland are named after Casement including:
  • Casement Park the Gaelic football ground on Andersonstown Road in west Belfast
  • Casement Aerodrome in Baldonnel, the Irish Air Corps base in Dublin
  • Casement Station in Tralee, near the site of Casement's landing on Banna Strand
  • Many streets, particularly in the north-west Dublin suburb of Finglas

Bibliography

• Casement, Roger, The Crime against Europe. The causes of the War and the foundations of Peace. Berlin, The Continental Times, 1915.
• Casement, Roger, The Crime against Ireland, and how the War may right it. Berlin, no publisher, 1914.
• Casement, Roger: The Eyes of Another Race: Roger Casement's Congo Report and 1903 Diary. University College Dublin Press, 2004. ISBN 1-900-62199-1
• Casement, Roger, Gesammelte Schriften. Irland, Deutschland und die Freiheit der Meere und andere Aufsätze. Diessen vor München, Jos. Huber's Verlag, 1916. Second expanded edition, 1917.
• Casement, Roger, Ireland, Germany and freedom of the seas: a possible outcome of the War of 1914. New York & Philadelphia, The Irish Press Bureau, 1914. Reprinted 2005: ISBN 1-421-94433-2
• Casement, Roger, Roger Casement's diaries: 1910. The Black and the White. Edited by Roger Sawyer. London, Pimlico, 1997. ISBN 0-7126-7375-X
• Casement, Roger, Some Poems. London, The Talbot Press / T. Fisher Unwin, 1918.
• Casement, Roger The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement. Edited by Angus Mitchell. Anaconda Editions
• DaRosa, Peter, Rebels: The Irish Rising of 1916
• Dudgeon, Jeffrey, "Roger Casement: The Black Diaries with a Study of his Background, Sexuality and Irish Political Life", ISBN 0-9539287-2-1 (2002)
• Hochschild, Adam, King Leopold's Ghost
• Mitchell, Angus, Casement (Life & Times Series). Haus Publishing Limited, 2003. ISBN 1-904-34141-1
• Hyde, H. Montgomery, The Love That Dared not Speak its Name. Boston, Little, Brown, 1970.
• Inglis, Brian, Roger Casement, ISBN 0-14-139127-8 (2002)
• Reid, B.L., The Lives of Roger Casement. London, The Yale Press, 1976. ISBN 0-300-01801-0
• Sawyer, Roger, "Casement: The Flawed Hero"
• Singleton-Gates, Peter, & Maurice Girodias, The Black Diaries. An account of Roger Casement's life and times with a collection of his diaries and public writings. Paris, The Olympia Press, 1959. First edition of the uncensored Black Diaries.
• Wolf, Karin, Sir Roger Casement und die deutsch-irischen Beziehungen. Berlin, Duncker & Humblot, 1972. ISBN 3-428-02709-4

External links

• Photographs of and about Casement in the National Library of Ireland (no charge for reproduction)
• Brief biography of Roger Casement
• A BBC investigation into the "Black Diaries"
• A BBC News analysis from 2006 of Roger's legacy amongst the different communities in Northern Ireland
• 1916 Rising timeline.
• Roger Casement's speech from the Dock at the end of his trial for treason.
• Report of the British Consul, Roger Casement, on the Administration of the Congo Free State.
• Times report on his execution
• Works by Roger Casement at Project Gutenberg
• BBC Radio 4 Documentary, September 1993, plus article in Ireland's Hot Press magazine
• Roger Casement's Gravesite
• A documentary about King Leopold II of Belgium colonized the Congo.
• Short version of James J. Horan's review of the Giles report
• Kevin Mannerings and Marcel B. Matley, The “Black Diaries” Attributed to Sir Roger Casement. 2003-2004
• Sean Murphy, Irish Historical Mysteries: The Diaries of Roger Casement. A critical article