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 executed by the United Kingdom for treason during World War I.
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 Free State and knighted in 1911 for his important investigations of human rights abuses in the rubber industry in Peru.
In Africa as a young man, Casement first worked for commercial interests before joining the British Colonial Service. In 1891 he was appointed as a British consul, a profession he followed for more than 20 years. Influenced by the Second Boer War and his investigation into colonial atrocities against indigenous peoples, Casement grew to mistrust imperialism. After retiring from consular service in 1913, he became more involved with Irish republicanism and other separatist movements.
During World War I, he made efforts to gain German military aid for the 1916 Easter Rising that sought to gain Irish independence. He was arrested, convicted and executed for high treason. He was stripped of his knighthood and other honours. Before, during and after the trial, British security agents and police showed typescripts prepared by the Metropolitan police to influential persons. These were said to be official copies of his private journals which detailed homosexual activities. Given prevailing views and existing laws on homosexuality, this material undermined support for clemency. Disputes have continued about these diaries; a private handwriting comparison study in 2002 concluded that Casement had written the diaries, but this was contested by several scholars.
Early life Family and education Casement was born in Dublin and lived in very early childhood at Doyle's Cottage, Lawson Terrace, Sandycove, a terrace that no longer exists, but that was on Sandycove Road between what is now Fitzgerald's pub and The Butler's Pantry delicatessen.
His father, Captain Roger Casement of the (King's Own) Regiment of Dragoons, was the son of Hugh Casement, a Belfast shipping merchant who went bankrupt and later moved to Australia. Captain Casement had served in the 1842 Afghan campaign. He travelled to Europe to fight as a volunteer in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 but arrived after the Surrender at Világos. After the family moved to England, Roger's mother, Anne Jephson (or Jepson), had him secretly baptised at the age of three as a Catholic in Rhyl, Wales.Angus Mitchell, Casement, Haus Publishing, 2003 p. 11.Brian Inglis (1974, op cit.) commented at p. 115 that "...although she allowed the children to be brought up as Protestants, she had them baptised 'conditionally' when Roger was four years old." However, the priest who arranged his baptism in 1916 clearly stated that the baptism had been in Aberystwyth, from Rhyl. Confusion over the location of his baptism can be explained by Casement mistaking the placename after 48 years. Casement was later raised as a Protestant and remained such throughout his adult life.
According to an 1892 letter, Casement believed his mother was descended from the Jephson family of Mallow, County Cork,Sawyer R. Casement the Flawed Hero (Routledge, London 1984), quoted at pp. 4–5. but the Jephson family's historian provides no evidence of this.Maurice Denham Jephson, An Anglo-Irish Miscellany, Allen Figgis, Dublin, 1964. The family lived in England in genteel poverty; Roger's mother died when he was nine. His father took the family back to Ireland to County Antrim to live near paternal relatives. When Casement was 13 years old, his father died in Ballymena, and he was left dependent on the charity of relatives, the Youngs and the Casements. He was educated at the Diocesan School, Ballymena (later the Ballymena Academy). He left school at 16 and went to England to work as a clerk with Elder Dempster, a Liverpool shipping company headed by Alfred Lewis Jones.Séamas Ó Síocháin, Roger Casement, Imperialist, Rebel, Revolutionary, Lilliput Press, 2008, p. 15;
Roger Casement's brother, Thomas Hugh Jephson Casement (1863–1939), had a roving life at sea and as a soldier, and later helped establish the Irish Coastguard Service. He was the inspiration for a character in Denis Johnston's play The Moon in the Yellow River. He drowned in Dublin's Grand Canal on 6 March 1939, having threatened suicide.
Observations of Casement In a 1938 comment on Casement, which may have been coloured by knowledge of his subsequent fate, diplomat Ernest Hambloch, who knew Casement for three weeks in 1910, describes an "unexpected" figure: tall, ungainly; "elaborately courteous" but with "a good deal of pose about him, as though he was afraid of being caught off his guard". "An easy talker and a fluent writer", he could "expound a case, but not argue it". “His greatest charm was his voice, which was very musical". The eyes were "kindly", but not given to laughter: "a sense of humour might have saved him from many things".
Joseph Conrad's first impressions of Casement, from an encounter in the Congo in 1890 he judged "a positive piece of good luck", were that he "thinks, speaks well, [and is] most intelligent and very sympathetic". Later, after Casement's arrest and trial, Conrad—by then a naturalized British subject—revoked and contradicted his original judgment of a quarter century earlier: "Already in Africa, I judged he was a man, properly speaking, of no mind at all. I don't mean stupid. I mean that he was all emotion. By emotional force (Putumayo, Congo report, etc.) he made his way, and sheer temperament—a truly tragic personality: all but the greatness of which he had not a trace. Only vanity. But in the Congo it was not yet visible."
British diplomat and human rights investigator
The Congo and the Casement Report
Casement worked in the Congo for Henry Morton Stanley and the African International Association from 1884; this association became known as a front for King Leopold II of Belgium in his takeover of what became the so-called Congo Free State. Casement worked on a survey to improve communication and recruited and supervised workmen in building a railroad to bypass the lower of the Congo River, which is made unnavigable by cataracts, in order to improve transportation and trade to the Upper Congo. During his commercial work, he learned African languages.
In 1890 Casement met Joseph Conrad, who had come to the Congo to pilot a merchant ship, ('King of the Belgians'). Both were inspired by the idea that "European colonisation would bring moral and social progress to the continent and free its inhabitants 'from slavery, paganism and other barbarities.' Each would soon learn the gravity of his error." Conrad published his short novel Heart of Darkness in 1899, exploring the colonial ills. Casement later exposed the conditions he found in the Congo during an official investigation for the British government. In these formative years, he also met Herbert Ward, and they became longtime friends. Ward left Africa in 1889, and devoted himself to a career in art and sculpture, producing works that centered on Congolese subjects and culture.
Casement joined the Colonial Service, under the authority of the Colonial Office, first serving overseas as a clerk in British West Africa. In August 1901 he transferred to the Foreign Office service as British consul in the eastern part of the French Congo. In 1903 the Balfour Government commissioned Casement, then its consul at Boma in the Congo Free State, to investigate the human rights situation in that colony of the Belgian king, Leopold II. Setting up a private army known as the , Leopold had squeezed revenue out of the people of the territory through a reign of terror in the harvesting and export of rubber and other resources. In trade, Belgium shipped guns and other materials to the Congo, used chiefly to suppress the local people.
Casement travelled for weeks in the upper Congo Basin to interview people throughout the region, including workers, overseers and mercenaries. He delivered a long, detailed eyewitness report to the Crown that exposed abuses: "the enslavement, mutilation, and torture of natives on the rubber plantations". It became known as the Casement Report of 1904. King Leopold had held the Congo Free State since 1885, when the Berlin Conference of European powers and the United States effectively gave him free rein in the area.
Leopold had exploited the territory's natural resources (mostly rubber) as a private entrepreneur, not as king of the Belgians. Using violence and murder against men and their families, Leopold's private had decimated many native villages in the course of forcing the men to gather rubber and abusing them to increase productivity. Casement's report provoked controversy, and some companies with a business interest in the Congo rejected its findings, as did Casement's former boss, Alfred Lewis Jones.
When the report was made public, opponents of Congolese conditions formed interest groups, such as the Congo Reform Association, founded by E. D. Morel with Casement's support, and demanded action to relieve the situation of the Congolese. Other European nations followed suit, as did the United States. The British Parliament demanded a meeting of the 14 signatory powers to review the 1885 Berlin Agreement defining interests in Africa. 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. In 1905, despite Leopold's efforts, it confirmed the essentials of Casement's report. On 15 November 1908, the parliament of Belgium took over the Congo Free State from Leopold and organised its administration as the Belgian Congo.
Portugal In July 1904 Casement was appointed as Consul in Lisbon. This was seen in London as a comfortable and better paid promotion after his arduous service in Africa. Casement had responded that while he would take up the assignment, "it might relieve the Foreign Office of some embarrassment were I to resign from the Service."
In the event Casement found the undemanding and routine nature of consular work in a European capital to lack the challenge and satisfaction of his earlier postings. Poor health gave grounds for his returning to Britain after only a few months.
Peru: Abuses against the Putumayo Indians
In 1906 the Foreign Office sent Casement to Brazil: first as consul in Santos, then transferred to Pará,Brian Inglis, "Roger Casement" 1973, pp. 157–165 and lastly promoted to consul-general in Rio de Janeiro.See Roger Casement in: "Rubber, the Amazon and the Atlantic World 1884–1916" (Humanitas) He was attached as a consular representative to a commission investigating reports about an enslaved workforce collecting rubber for the Peruvian Amazon Company (PAC), which had been registered in Britain in 1907 and had a British board of directors and numerous stockholders. In September 1909, a journalist named Sidney Paternoster wrote in Truth, a British magazine, of abuses against PAC workers as well as Peruvians competing against Colombians in the disputed region of the Peruvian Amazon. The article was titled "The Devil's Paradise: A British-Owned Congo".