A member of the Lords demands that their fate be revealed

The British kidnapped half a million Egyptians “in the first war” and distributed them over the colonies

• Abulghar seeks to uncover the truth.

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A symposium hosted by “Beit Al-Sinari” in Cairo, last Tuesday, revealed that the British kidnapped half a million Egyptian farmers from the villages of Upper Egypt during the First World War 1914, and they were shipped on ships in conditions similar to slavery and distributed to different parts of the world. The symposium also revealed the continuation of efforts Academic and political figures in Britain and the United States, to reveal more facts in this regard, and calls to compensate Egypt financially and morally, the most prominent of which is an academic call to compensate Egypt with three billion pounds, calculating interest and inflation, according to a study he conducted.

The Egyptian academic and politician, founder of the Social Democratic Party, Dr. Muhammad Abul-Ghar, said in the symposium held by the “Cairo Biography” in the “Al-Sinari House” of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, that “a symposium held by New York University to celebrate the 1919 revolution, in which more than 20 American history professors participated, led by To know the academic efforts, especially those made by Kyle Anderson, which led to the disclosure of the incident (the Legion) formed by the English from the peasants of Upper Egypt in 1914, where the peasants were kidnapped and shipped in what looked like slaves in temporary detention centers that included rooms that are crammed from 70 to 80 One of them is in one room, and then some of them are shipped on ships to travel with them across the seas.”

Abul-Ghar continued, “The number of peasant victims in the period from 1914 to 1917 reached more than 327,000, and in 1918 it reached half a million people. These are the elderly and children, so that we would realize how dangerous the figure of half a million kidnapped people is.”

Abul-Ghar added that “the British at first, and according to what Anderson recounted in his book (The Egyptian Workers’ Corps, Race and Place in World War I), tried to persuade the farmers to join them voluntarily, and within a fixed-term and fixed-wage contract at a value of 5-6 piasters per day. However, they - that is, the British - discovered after a period of lack of people’s turnout, so they resorted to violence and kidnappings from markets, mosques, churches and streets, and they tied people with ropes and chains, and the people were screaming and wailing after them, and the violence reached the killing of dozens of policemen during these kidnapping attempts, and while the archives spoke The British archive reported the killing of 23 policemen during that period. The Egyptian archives reported that the number of police killed in the accident exceeded 200.

The prominent Egyptian academic and politician said, “Some of these workers were taken to Syria, Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq, and others, estimated at 20 thousand people, were sent to Europe, and there are also numbers of them that were harnessed to work in Sinai, where the railway line was established from Qantara to Arish. and a water line in the same distance to support the English war effort.

Ignoring the fate of the workers

On the fate of these workers, Abu Al-Ghar said: “The documents neglected to determine the fate of these workers, especially since most of them are illiterate and did not record their itineraries, and there are estimates that the number of those who died during the war, about 20 thousand people all over the world, but there are 220 people buried in Belgium, France, England and Greece are in graves bearing their names, and there are mass graves of groups buried without names.”

Abul-Ghar said, “The documents revealed that the Corps workers protested in 1917 when they compared their conditions to the conditions of their fellow European workers. Among those protests was a rebellion in Limoles in May 1917, after one of them was subjected to flogging, which resulted in the shooting of five workers, and another rebellion in September 1917 was killed.” It killed 24 people, and dozens were injured.

Abul-Ghar said that the “legion file” was reopened weeks ago, after the British member of the House of Lords, Lady Bennett, submitted an inquiry to the British Minister of War about the fates of those who fought with Britain in the First World War, and whether they received dignified treatment during their burial or not. The British warship responded with a report in which it said that it had “released to know the locations of the graves of 23 people from the Egyptian Legion only.” At the same time, Aaron Jax, professor of economic history at New York University, called for “Britain to give Egypt three billion pounds sterling in compensation for what happened in (The Legion) incident.

documentation

It is worth noting that the Egyptian historian Amin Ezzedine made an earlier attempt to document the story of "The Legion", from the reality of the British archives, but only a novel bearing the same name appeared in the Egyptian Library.

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