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Roger Casement

Irish diplomat, activist, nationalist and poet (1864–1916)

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. 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.

Roger Casement in 1914
Roger Casement (right) and his friend Herbert Ward, whom he met in the Congo Free State
Roger Casement's grave in Glasnevin Cemetery. The capstone reads "Roger Casement, who died for the sake of Ireland, 3rd August 1916"[1].

Quotes

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  • On Sunday evening, natives brought me a mutilated lad, who's right hand had been hacked of quite recently, the cold thread was a century of lalu longa, a Belgian trading society, when i asked why they had not appealed to their commissar, i heard from them, well it is the commissar, it is the Bula Matari, who does these things to us.
  • In 1887 i spend several months on the upper Congo, and i traveled over some of the grounds i now revisit in the absence of 10 years, the country was thickly populated, frequent and populous towns, but many of the inhabitants have been killed by the government, man and woman.
  • Of the persistent mutilation by government soldiers, there can be no shadow of a doubt, should the system maintain forced labor on this scale, i believe the entire population will be extinct in thirty years.
  • Tackling Leopold in Africa has set in motion a big movement – it must be a movement of human liberation all the world over.
  • Generally, a leading man fitted out an expedition with a few companions, partners in effort and initial expenditure, and with a gang of hired 'peons,' or, as they are called in that region, 'racionales' (half-breeds mostly who can read and write to distinguish them from the 'Indios', who are ignorant of all save forest lore), he journeyed to some part of the forest in search of tribes of wild Indians - 'infieles' or "infidels" - who could be easily subdued and reduced to work the wild rubber trees in the territory they inhabited. An Indian would promise anything for a gun or for some of the other tempting things offered as inducements to him to work rubber. Many Indians submitted to the alluring offer only to find that once in the "conquistadores'" books they had lost all liberty and were reduced to unending demands for more rubber and more varied tasks. A cacique or "capitan" might be bought over to dispose of the labor of all his clan, and as the cacique's influence was very great and the natural docility of the Indian a remarkable characteristic of the upper Amazon tribes the work of conquering a primitive people and reducing them to a continual strain of rubber finding was less difficult than might at first be supposed. Moreover, their arms of defense were puerile weapons to oppose the rifles of the "blancos."

Slavery in Peru, 1913, page 253.

  • Caoutchouc was first called 'india rubber,' because it came from the Indies, and the earliest European use of it was to rub out or erase. It is now called India rubber because it rubs out or erases the Indians.

The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement. Casement's 1910 journal, Page 85.

  • That every of of Nordenskiöld's letter to the Anti-Slavery Society is true I am quite convinced. The entire Indian population is enslaved in the montaña and whereon the devil plant, the rubber tree, grows and can be tapped. The wilder the Indian the wickeder the slavery. Where he becomes 'civilised' and can read and write and study "cuenta" [accounts] with his "patron" then he ceases to be an Indian and becomes a "Peruvian" and himself an enslaver. As to the laws - all these South American republics have excellent laws on paper - and no sense of equity in the man behind the paper. The laws are beautiful and simple books - a fool could turn the leaves and apply them - an honest fool would make an ideal judge.

The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement. Casement's 1910 journal, Page 112

  • And the charming Lizardo Arana tells me in Iquitos I shall find "such splendid Indians" here, and he feels sure the result of my journey to the Putumayo will be more capital for the Company! Yes, more capital punishment if I had my way. I swear to God, I'd hang every one of the band of wretches with my own hands if I had the power, and do it with the greatest pleasure. I have never shot game with any pleasure, have indeed abandoned all shooting for that reason, that I dislike the thought of taking life. I have never given life to anyone myself, and my celibacy makes me frugal of human life, but I'd shoot or exterminate these infamous scoundrels more gladly than I should shoot a crocodile or kill a snake.
  • Nevertheless the Barbadians were all engaged by Arana as "agricultural labourers" or "labourers", and if Arana gave them to Colombian "criminals", whose "properties" he has since entirely acquired, and whose system he has maintained, if not indeed developed. I cannot see but that he is responsible quite as much as these Colombian "ruffians", and to the British Government he is solely responsible for the use to which he has put the labourers recruited in a British Colony.
  • Against every member of the Company's higher staff, so far as I can see are not merely alleged, but have been sworn to and published in Iquitos.
  • I should dearly love to see these things with my own eyes - to be able to record the methods used there in this "commercial" and "industrial reclamation" of the Indians, but how can I? The Commission will hardly go to Matanzas, they say, or to Abisinia, the roads are long and full of water. To me, personally, it would be a real pleasure, but I am gravely alarmed for the results - the possible results. It might mean the murder of the Barbados men, under our eyes almost. Of course, it would be the "cannibals" or the "Savages" who had done it, or it would be the "injured husband" or something of that kind. No evidence possible of a crime. Besides, these men have never been punished for the most awful offences against humanity. Not one. They have been here for years committing the most hellish crimes, as we all now believe, and they were openly denounced in Iquitos three years ago, with many witnesses walking the streets of that capital asking to be brought before a court. And what followed? Nothing, absolutely nothing. They have either retired with a small fortune like Mr Rodriguez of Iquitos, or are still active agents of the Company, drawing very handsome incomes from their sections. Barnes says this man, Velarde, who is not worth £5 a year to any house of business, gets, he believes, fully £600 a year, and he has 4 or 5 "wives" free, a house built by the Indians, everything save European supplies, levied by crime from the surrounding defenseless population.

The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement. Casement's 1910 journal, Page 173

  • This Company has not got the means of paying for anything in its Provedura or Store, and yet it daily imposes onerous tasks (apart altogether from rubber collection) on the surrounding people. And they perform these tasks, patient, humble beings, with smiles and compliments and gentle speech to their oppressors. From building these huge houses (this one is fully 45 yards long and as strong as an old three-decker) ckearing great tracts of forest, making plantations of yucca, mealy, sugar canes, &c., constructing roads and bridges at great labour, for these men to more easily get at them - to supplying them with "wives", with food, with game from the chase, often with their own food just for their own pressing wants, with labour to meet every conceivable form of demand. All this the Indians supply for absolutely no remuneration of any kind, this entirely in addition to the India rubber which is the keystone of the arch.
  • The trees are valueless without the Indians, who, besides getting rubber for them, do everything else these creatures need - feed them, build for them, run for them and carry for them and supply them with wives and concubines. They couldn't get this done by persuasion, so they slew and massacred and enslaved by terror, and that is the whole foundation. What we see today is merely the logical sequence of events - the cowed and entirely subdued Indians, greatly reduced in numbers, hopelessly obedient, with no refuge and no retreat, and no redress...

The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement. Casement's 1910 journal, Page 214-215.

  • The Indians who actually prefer their forest freedom to the whip, the cepo, the bullet and the raping of their children are spoken of in terms of reprobation as lazy, idle and worthless - and this by men who never leave their hammocks all day, and whose only "work" is to work crime. They have not cultivated a square yard of ground or done one useful thing with their hands since they came here. Their only use - their sole purpose - is to terrorise and rob. And this is the function of the paid employees; the higher staff of a great English Company! Truly Mr Arana has planted a strange rubber tree on English soil!

The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement. Casement's 1910 journal, Page 250.

  • I found myself at the verge of a clearing, and saw the roof of Matanzas or Andokes Station, and the Peruvian flag flying. I decided to wait for the others, rather than to go on to meet alone and be civil to this evil-reputationed man, Armando Normand, with whom I wish to have as little and brief intercourse as possible... Found Mr Normand away at the other Station, where he lives, La China, named capriciously like Indostan, or Abisinia - which is 10 hours away, or, say, close on thirty miles.
  • There is not, so far as I am aware, any specific act of cruelty or torture attribute to these [indigenous] people even by the very men who have so cruelly wronged them for years, and who so richly deserve torture. When the Indians have killed these so-called white men, they have simply slain them outright, and think what this killing has meant to them - the rescue of wife and children, of all that was dear to them. The muchachos have been brutalisied, and made to behead and shooting, to flog and outrage. They are only another instance of the hopeless obedience of these people. What the white man orders they are only too prone to execute...**The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement. Casement's 1910 journal, Page 311
  • Crippen is caught too! but what a farce it seems - a whole world shaken by the pursuit of a man who killed his wife - and here are lots and lots of gentlemen I meet daily at dinner who not only kill their wives, but burn other people's wives alive - or cut their arms and legs off and pull the babies from their breasts to throw in the river or leave to starve in the forest - or dash their brains out against trees. Why should civilisation stand aghast at the crime of a Crippen and turn wearily away when the poor Indians of the Putumayo, or the Bantu of the Congo, turn bloodstained, appalling hands and terrified eyes to those who alone can aid?
  • 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
  • Throughout the greater part of the Amazon region, where the rubber trade flourishes, a system of dealing prevails which is not tolerated in civilised communities. In so far as it affects a labouring man or an individual who sells his labour, it is termed peonage, and is repressed by drastic measures in some parts of the New World. It consists in getting the person working for you into your debt and keeping him there; and in lieu of other means of discharging this obligation he is forced to work for his creditor upon what are practically the latter’s terms, and under varying forms of bodily constraint. In the Amazon Valley this method of dealing has been expanded until it embraces, not only the Indian workman, but is often made to apply to those who are themselves the employers of this kind of labour. By accumulated obligations contracted in this way, one trader will pledge his business until it and himself become practically the property of the creditor. His business is merged, and he himself becomes an employee, and often finds it very hard to escape from the responsibilities he has thus contracted.
  • Perhaps a greater defence than their spears and blow-pipes even had been more ruthlessly destroyed. Their old people, both women and men, respected for character and ability to wisely advise, had been marked from the first as dangerous, and in the early stages of the occupation were done to death. Their crime had been the giving of 'bad advice.' To warn the more credulous or less experienced against the white enslaver and to exhort the Indian to flee or to resist rather than consent to work rubber for the new-comers had brought about their doom. I met no old Indian man or woman, and few had got beyond middle age. The Barbados men assured me that when they first came to the region in the beginning of 1905 old people were still to be found, vigorous and highly respected, but these had all disappeared, so far as I could gather, before my coming.
  • The evidence against the Arana brothers was indeed overwhelming, and had the slightest desire existed in Iquitos to find out the precise truth or to stop the excesses on the Indians the time for action was then when the charges were first made, and publicly made in Iquitos, with a host of witnesses at hand proclaiming their desire to be interrogated and when even Indians themselves, with the scars and wheals of flagellations upon them were actually brought from the Putumayo so that the authorities might examine for themselves these victims of the crimes denounced."


  • I think the whole gang - Arana & President and Prefect & all - are liars and rogues. No offer Arana makes is to be trusted. If I had the money myself I'd buy the rogue out and go out to the Putumayo on a well armed yacht with a party of good shots and have some of the best big game shooting in the world. Why the devil men should go to Africa to shoot 4,000 head head of harmless gazelle or antelope with such fine beasts as Normand, Aguero, Fonseca to stalk - I can't imagine. I wonder if Roosevelt would take the thing up? Also I rather regret now I gave you the blow pipe and poisoned arrows - as I think the big Indian lad might attend next board meeting of the [Peruvian Amazon] Company with me - and exemplify on Arana and McQuibban how the poison arrow works.
  • During the several years that the Arana syndicates have been controlling the Putumayo, and using the government forces in the furtherance of their lawless ends against either Colombian settlers or native Indians the local value of the services rendered by this so-called trading company to the Peruvian Government must have amounted to many thousands of pounds in the matters of passage and victualling alone. The agreement no doubt worked to the satisfaction of both parties. Messrs. Arana and Co (it is really absurd to use the name of the ineffectual London Company at any stage of the business) obtained the military help and prestige of Peru in attacking, murdering and pillaging the Colombian settlers on the Cara-Paraná in securing their rubber and enslaving fresh tribes of Indians, while the government through 'this patriotic action' of the Aranas extended the frontiers of the 'national territory' and became possed of regions to which it had not any moral or lawful claim.

Quotes about Roger Casement

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  • But now that I was in Barbados, with nothing to do and with no responsibility save that of recuperating from my attack of yellow fever, I stumbled upon the one man in all the world who had set himself the task of aiding the unfortunate Weetoto Indians to escape from the abominable overlordship of the Peruvian employees of a British rubber-collecting company. Sir Roger Casement was the man. It seems strange that the generous, honest, high-principled person should have died the death of a traitor during the World War. That he was slightly unbalanced I fully believe, but I am certain that he was as sincere and as honest as a man who ever breathed. There is no doubt, of course, as to his attempt to aid the Germans - which was merely his idea of aiding Ireland. But all that came later. The World War was not to come for another three years when I met Casement, quite casually, at a bar in Bridgetown.
  • In any inclusive study of the roots of modern British socialism and internationalism, Casement’s collaboration with E.D. Morel should be cited as a critical conjuncture in a tradition of English radicalism and the struggle for the fairer distribution of land.
  • It was a grey afternoon. The windows gave on to the Thames, and against the grey sky the warehouses on the southern bank were, through the gathering mist, lined in an outline of darker grey and black, the tall chimneys uplifted above them. The tide was out, and beside the distant quayside some coal-barges lay tilted on the sleek mud of the river-bottom, with their sides washed by the silver waters that raced seaward. Against this picture, looking outward before the window curtains, stood Roger Casement, a figure of perplexity, and the apparent dejection which he always wore so proud, as though he had assumed the sorrows of the world.
  • Roger looked wonderfully tall and dignified and noble as he stood in the dock. He seemed to be looking away over the heads of the judges and advocates and sightseers, away to Ireland – probably his mind’s eye was fixed on some well-known spot such as Fair Head or Murlough Bay – certainly he had no look of one who was conscious of his awful and sordid surroundings…
    • Roger Casement remembered in London Casement's cousin Gertrude described Casement during his court appearancen in which he was ultimately sentenced to be hanged for alleged ‘treason’ on August 3, 1916.
  • Casement’s belief in solidarity and cooperation between all the people of the world is fundamentally republican. It is a principle that is often ignored or diminished by the opponents and detractors of Irish republicanism. We’re not ‘Little Irelanders’. Our vision is fundamentally internationalist. We stand with struggling people of the world – and we are confident in the fact that they stand with Ireland too. In our own day and age – we reiterate our call for a global response to the current health pandemic. A global pandemic requires a global remedy. We face an enormous responsibility. No-one is safe until everyone is safe. No-one is free until we’re all equal. That is where Casement would have stood.
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  1. ↑ Capstone ideas
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