11 APRIL

CHURCHILL – INDIA WILL NEVER BE INDEPENDENT WHILE I’M PRIME MINISTER

[ 11 April 1942 ]

Today in 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent British prime minister Winston Churchill a telegram. He wished to urgently remind the prime minister that it was British intransigence over allowing Indians ‘their right of self-governance,’ which was causing the ‘deadlock’ in reaching any agreement over the country’s political future, which was being negotiated between Sir Stafford Cripps, representing London, and the Indian Congress Party. Roosevelt feared that refusal to compromise might provoke Indian nationalist sentiment and increase the likelihood of a successful Japanese invasion. Churchill had little sympathy with such concerns, and responded sharply that he would countenance no such proposal in any circumstances and it would never be possible unless it happened after ‘he had retired into private life.’¹

ARMS FOR IRAQ DESPITE SUSPICION THEY MIGHT  BE USED AGAINST CIVILIANS

[ 11 April 1963 ]

On 11 April 1963, British Ministers approved a substantial batch of arms exports worth £6 million to Iraq, in the full knowledge that the equipment might be used in an  assault on Kurdish civilians. 

FOOTNOTE

1. Peter Clarke, The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire, Penguin Books,  London, 2003, pp. 22-23.

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