Parting Shots

by Matthew Parris

  (d) The lack of an obvious economic role for Africa. Until relatively recently, Africa has been regarded as a useful – even necessary – source of cheap raw materials, and a worthwhile market for the developed world’s finished products. But as cheaper artificial substitutes for Africa’s raw materials have become available, as well as for other reasons, the terms of trade have turned against Africa, with disastrous consequences for the continent’s earning power; and thus for its value as a market for the west’s exports. The process has been further aggravated by corrupt and incompetent management of production processes, leading to falls in the quality and reliability of African traded goods …

  (e) Perceived mismanagement by Africans of their own affairs. Again, undeniably true, although some at least of Africa’s most pressing problems are not in fact attributable to the short-comings of African leaders. However, the issue is not who is to blame for the African mess, but whether we can safely and cheaply afford to ignore it.

  It is evident that all 5 factors have substance. But the striking thing which they have in common is that they explain growing indifference to Africa: they do not justify it, nor do they demonstrate that indifference is necessarily in our own interests.

  Are we politically or economically justified in reducing our commitment to Africa?

  Africa certainly has little commercial significance. In 1988 it accounted for a mere 2.61% of world trade … However, the African countries which produce and export oil (and gas, now or soon), while relatively few in number, include Nigeria, which alone contains almost a quarter of the population of black Africa; and energy supplies from an area which is not subject to the stresses and conflicts of the Middle East are not to be sneezed at …

  Politically, the end of the great confrontation between international Leninism and western liberal values makes Africa more, not less, relevant to the kind of world we and our children are going to live in. The remaining global fault-line is that which separates the rich white (and, increasingly, brown or honorary white) section of humanity from the poor and mainly black. It is this division more than any other which now threatens future conflict, insecurity, violence and destruction. How this explosive incongruity comes to be resolved – bloodily or peacefully – will depend significantly on events in Africa. The escalating clash between western values and radical Islam, which is in part a function of the rich/poor, white/black divide, will also play itself out in Africa among other areas: the seeds of that conflict have already been planted, the first shoots manifestly appearing. It is difficult to see how a western country which aspires to a global role can contemplate even partial withdrawal of interest from one of the two or three most pressing issues of our generation; disclaim its responsibility for carrying its share of the burden; or seek to reduce its ability to play a part in bringing about a resolution of the next act in the drama.

  Finally, we have to consider the potential for a wide-spread economic and social collapse in Africa … There is at last in Africa an almost universal realisation of the calamitous mistakes and mismanagement of the decades since independence and a willingness to put things right. But it becomes more and more evident that Africa’s problems simply cannot be solved by Africa’s own unaided efforts … A very large-scale transfer of real resources to the poor countries of Africa is an absolute necessity if Africa is to stand any chance of overcoming the enormous problems of declining demand for its raw materials and agricultural products; foreign indebtedness; environmental degradation; and population growth at rates which outstrip the increase in both national income and labour productivity. All these problems can be overcome, but not without western help on an unprecedented scale.

  If that help is not forthcoming, the prospect of a general collapse, although still only a worst case scenario, is bound to become much more real. We cannot always base our plans on the gloomiest assumptions, but we need to be clear about the possible consequences of the policies we adopt. Increasing impoverishment and unemployment in the towns, spreading break-down of basic services (including health, communications, food distribution networks), failure of the security forces to contain violence and theft, growing inter-tribal and inter-regional conflicts – all this can already be seen in embryo in many parts of Africa; and if it becomes general, it will cause a swift descent into massive starvation, disease, violence and collapse. These will in turn prompt significant movements of populations in search of food, safety and a future for their children. A disaster on such a scale could not be quarantined inside Africa. The rest of the world could not turn its back while more than half a billion people were exposed to an experience of this character. But once the collapse begins, the cost of arresting it will rapidly become immense. Prevention is cheaper as well as better than cure …

  … The aid performance of the 17 major donors, including the Twelve,1 in 1987 tells, from our point of view, a sorry story. Britain’s aid as a percentage of GDP was the lowest of any of the 17 apart from Austria (an anyway embarrassing analogue) and the United States (whose total aid programme was more than 4 times as big as ours). Although a healthy share of the aid which we do give is allocated to Africa, the size of our aid in total is not something to be proud of. The promise of some increase is welcome, but nothing so far envisaged comes near to matching the scale of the need or the extent of our responsibilities as Europeans …

  Conclusions

  Nothing that is likely to occur in the foreseeable future in central or south America, in Asia or the Pacific, is likely to impinge half as directly on British and western interests as the danger of degeneration or outright collapse in Africa. Only events in Europe itself, and arguably in the Middle East, should be rated as of obviously higher priority for Britain; and whereas in the rest of Europe and in the Middle East Britain is not the principal player, in most of Africa we are; no other country has the close links, historical ties and depth of understanding with Africa that Britain has built up in the past 100 years and continues to enjoy (if that is the right word). Our influence in Africa and capacity for understanding its dynamics are important elements in our international standing. This is a national asset which, once thrown away in a fit of instant cheese-paring, could never be retrieved.

  Against this background, for Britain to start a process of disengagement from Africa, principally for reasons of financial stringency, would be widely and justifiably seen as implying at best a sad failure to understand and accept our own history; and at worst as a betrayal of that history which others in the world, and many among our own compatriots, will neither understand nor forgive.

  I am sending copies of this despatch to the Minister for Overseas Development and to HM Representatives or High Commissioners at Nairobi, Addis Ababa, Pretoria, Accra, UKMIS New York and UKREP Brussels.

  I am

  Sir

  Yours faithfully

  Brian Barder

  1. the Twelve: Until 1993 the European Economic Community consisted of twelve members.

  ‘The Bosnian poison has circulated in the veins of the UN’

  LORD HANNAY, HM PERMANENT REPRESENTATIVE TO THE UNITED NATIONS, JULY 1995

  Diplomacy used to be a largely bilateral affair. Through our ambassadors and other representatives abroad, Britain would talk directly with foreign governments, and where deals were struck, two parties would usually be at the table. But over the past thirty years or so, things have changed; the institutions of the European Union have grown in stature, along with international organizations such as the UN, and nowadays much more of what the Foreign Office does takes place within their confines. Today, multilateral diplomacy is often where the action is.

  David Hannay’s career saw him in the thick of that action. In 1970 he helped negotiate Britain’s entry into the European Community, and for most of the twenty-five years that followed Hannay continued to work on European affairs in a succession of posts, culminating in his appointment as the UK’s Permanent Representative to the EC, an ambassador-grade post. In 1990 he moved to New
York to take up the same role at the United Nations. His valedictory written upon his retirement five years later is a masterly survey of the difficulties into which the UN had by then fallen. It reads as sharply today as it did in 1995 – and gives some background to today’s complaints.

  UNITED KINGDOM MISSION

  TO THE UNITED NATIONS

  NEW YORK

  26 July 1995

  The Rt Hon Malcolm Rifkind QC MP

  Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs

  Foreign and Commonwealth Office

  London

  Sir,

  UNITED NATIONS: VALEDICTORY

  I arrived in this post almost exactly five years ago. They have been tumultuous and innovative years, with the UN in the thick of the action, in a way it had hardly ever been before and never over such a sustained period. Now, with slightly over one-third of all Security Council resolutions adopted in the United Nations’ first fifty years negotiated and voted in that time and some 20,000 outgoing telegrams from this post later, it is the moment to take stock and to make some kind of overall assessment.

  Three developments, which occurred far from New York and in which the UN played little direct role, fundamentally transformed the background to all its work. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union brought a whole series of disparate consequences … In South Africa the fall of the apartheid system and the emergence of a multi-party democracy was almost as revolutionary in its impact … And in the Middle East the transformation of the peace process from a slogan lacking any real credibility into a reality producing steady, if painful, progress removed a threat to peace which had burst into dangerous and divisive warfare on a number of occasions.

  The effect of all this on the UN was largely, if not exclusively, beneficial. When Saddam Hussein fatally miscalculated the international reaction and sought to wipe Kuwait off the map in 1990, the UN was the means chosen to reverse his aggression; and it worked … Elsewhere, in Namibia, in Cambodia, in El Salvador, in Mozambique and now, hopefully, at last in Angola too, the UN helped to broker and then to implement peace settlements which put an end to a string of civil wars … But success brought with it excessive expectations and overstretch. Heady new wine was being poured into some pretty old and cracked bottles. The UN’s peacekeeping machinery creaked and groaned as the number of active operations jumped to seventeen, the peacekeepers deployed went from about 10,000 to nearly 100,000 and budgets doubled and doubled again. The time taken to deploy troops lengthened, command and control problems surfaced with a vengeance and that dread disease ‘mission creep’ became the talk of the town. In Somalia what began as a laudable and successful humanitarian mission to put an end to mass starvation, exacerbated by the ruthless manoeuvring of warlords, slid gradually across what has come to be known as the ‘Mogadishu line’, when the peacekeepers themselves became a party in the civil strife and the level of internecine warfare was actually greater when the UN was there than after it left. In Rwanda three lightly armed battalions, sent to monitor a peace settlement, suddenly found themselves in the middle of genocidal massacres which they had no means of checking; and, when no single troop contributor showed the slightest inclination to despatch troops until the military die was cast, the UN was left with part of the blame for what had happened and much of the responsibility for clearing up the mess.

  But of course the UN’s worst headaches have come in the former Yugoslavia, in Bosnia in particular. Here too, as in Iraq, the UN was the international community’s chosen means of dealing with a major instance of new world disorder. But on this occasion it was denied the firmness of policy direction and the sufficiency of resources which characterised the handling of Iraq. The underlying problems in the former Yugoslavia were in any case far more complex and far more intractable. This was no simple war of aggression which could be ended by the expulsion of the aggressor from the territory of its victim. Rather it was a complex hybrid, a civil war with a strong dash of aggression, in which any settlement had to find an appropriate place for all the parties. The objectives pursued, of containment, of the avoidance of direct external involvement in the fighting, of humanitarian relief and of fostering a peace process were sound enough. But the insufficiency of the resources supplied for the tasks in hand, the endless, kaleidoscopic shifting in the attitudes of the main players trying to manage the crisis, the United States in particular, and above all the stubbornness, brutality and deviousness of the parties, none of whom has so far wholeheartedly sought a peaceful settlement, has resulted in an operation which looks more like a failure than it ought to. The Bosnian poison has circulated in the veins of the UN as it has in those of NATO and the EU; it may not be lethal, but it has certainly been debilitating.

  Now, in the middle of 1995, the triumph of the Gulf War and the success of several other UN missions stand in the deep shadow cast by Bosnia and Somalia. The pendulum which swung too far towards euphoria after the Gulf War has swung too far towards despair. From being an organisation which was wrongly thought capable of solving everything, the UN now tends, equally wrongly, to be regarded as incapable of solving anything …

  … We will need however to be a bit cautious and conservative about what we ask the UN to take on in future. It needs a higher success rate than it has recently achieved if it is not to be discredited. It cannot afford more Bosnias and Somalias. So enforcement should be off limits, to be undertaken either by ‘coalitions of the willing’, if possible with UN authorisation, or not at all.

  ‘Time to look at the legalisation of drugs’

  RICHARD THOMAS, HM HIGH COMMISSIONER TO BARBADOS AND THE EASTERN CARIBBEAN, FEBRUARY 1998

  Further extracts from Thomas’s despatch are on p. 322. Note that this Richard Thomas is not to be confused with his earlier namesake whose valedictory from Puerto Rico appears on p. 115.

  Close proximity for the last three years to the international drugs control scene has not reinforced my faith in the prescriptions at present favoured to deal with the narco menace. Britain spends millions, maybe hundreds of millions, of pounds every year, at home and overseas, to try to stem the flow, fight the traffickers and cure the addiction. So do all other developed countries. The United States spends billions. And yet the supply of drugs, soft and hard, shows no signs of diminishing. On the contrary, it is growing. Drugs are now the most traded commodity after oil, and almost all the trade is illegal. So not only do we have thousands, maybe millions, of people ruining their health world-wide, at the expense of scarce healthcare which could be put to other, more beneficial purposes; we also have world-wide organised crime whose sole purpose is to produce, transport and distribute these evil substances in order that the trade can grow still greater, and its perpetrators even richer. One of their objectives – perhaps the most horrible of all – is to ensure the dependence and addiction of those involved along the trading routes and at the destination. It is the criminal nature of the trade, with its ruthlessness and secondary effects such as money laundering, that first drew our attention in the Eastern Caribbean to the effect which it was having on regional security. Drugs criminals will stop at nothing, including the subversion of small, fragile democracies. If they can suborn places like Antigua and St Vincent now, who knows where they will stop in the end?

  It is time that counter-narcotics strategists started seriously to examine the merits of legalisation of all drugs, not just cannabis. There must be another way of controlling drugs abuse, and that way could well in the end turn out to be a mix of medical prescriptions for registered addicts, treatment and fiscal regulation, as for alcohol and tobacco. At present anyone who advances legalisation as an alternative policy is dismissed as simplistic. Three years of work in support of classic law-enforcement methods, with their patent lack of effectiveness, have begun to propel me into the simplistic school of thought. Legalise drugs and you pull the rug from under the feet of half the world’s organised criminals. You also, in the Caribbean, remove the main threat t
o the region’s security.

  7. Privileges and Privations

  Someone once said that, distilled, the essence of diplomacy is ‘protocol, vitriol and alcohol’ – but nobody mentioned the sweat. Privilege and privation make a strange cocktail, a cup it has been many diplomats’ experience to sip through a long career, though times have changed from the days in the 1940s when (as one despatch put it) ‘Administration was primitive and gentlemanly. You could take overseas a “reasonable” amount of luggage and servants. The borderline of reasonableness lay between pianos and grand pianos.’

  Along with the perks, the hardships could go beyond the physical. Being an ambassador was more than a day job: spouse, and sometimes children too, were bound into a routine of entertaining and being entertained. You, your house, and often your family, were always, at least a little bit, on parade. Offering hospitality went with the job. Domestically, there were cities and societies that presented particular challenges, and those diplomats whose career has taken them away from the Service’s easily defensible functions in the EU, NATO, the UN, the GATT, the WTO and other acronyms, and away from Britain’s First World working relationships within Europe and with the United States and Russia, have sometimes felt thrust into what, with bitter sarcasm, we used to call the ‘Outer Darkness’: no doubt a word-play on the division made by the despised 1960s Duncan Review, between an Area of Concentration and an Outer Area (see Chapter 2).

  Doing a sophisticated job, with the trappings of a sophisticated lifestyle, in an unsophisticated place, hasn’t got any easier as resources have been cut. Successive performance reviews of the FCO as an institution have tried to create grids of goals, roles, objectives and means, to find ways of measuring and ordering priorities, to tighten the definition of entitlements, and – ever and anon – to save money.