by Mark Curtis
The threat from the public had been previously recognised by the British ambassador in Saigon, who noted that 'mischievous publicity' about the war and the campaign of teach-ins and lobbies 'is having an effect on the policy of Her Majesty's Government'. He continued:
If the pressure continues, as it shows every sign of doing, I fear that it will become increasingly difficult to resist and that we shall find ourselves forced into policies and attitudes which are contrary to the real national interest.
Translated: the public might force a change in elite policy. He concluded by asking whether 'something cannot be done to counter this campaign by making the facts about Vietnam better known to the British public'.15
By June 1965, Foreign Office official James Cable had also become aware that there was 'every sign of an organised campaign' against the war in Britain. He stated that:
All this has not yet affected our basic support for American policy in Vietnam, but it has generated a certain preference for discretion in the outward manifestations of this support.16
The government had no intention of being swayed by mere public opinion; rather, it would have to keep its policy of strongly backing the war more secret.
The same official also provided a briefing note to ministers on 'defending the government's policy on the controversial and increasingly critical issue of Vietnam', adding: 'I think there could be considerable advantage in the same points being made, over and over again, by a number of different supporters of the government'.17 Prolonged repetition of often nonsensical positions is now a standard feature of government propaganda.
By early 1966, another official was writing that 'we have taken certain specific measures to see that British opinion is informed'. This included producing various publications, organising seminars 'to guide discussion among intellectuals to a responsible awareness' of Vietnam and organising an opinion poll 'to help analyse the views and misconceptions held by the public and to indicate what might therefore be done to counteract them', such as individual briefings to journalists.18
The British embassy noted in 1969 that 'we distribute IRD material to some twenty people in Saigon. This includes some politicians, highly placed civil servants, newspaper editors and foreign journalists'. The task of policy overall was 'to ensure accurate reporting of events here'.19
Throughout the early 1960s the British embassy in Saigon housed an 'information' expert as part of the British advisory mission. He advised the extremely repressive and unpopular Diem regime in South Vietnam on improving its 'various information services' and launching a propaganda campaign that would promote 'publicity for the government's achieve- ments'; no small task. It also involved 'clarification of what is meant by psychological warfare and, at the same time, a much closer definition of the targets and aims of "unattributable" propaganda and similar subterfuges'.20
The Foreign Office also once said that it would 'keep News Dept fed with information about N. Vietnamese misdeeds' to bring these to 'public notice'. The British ambassador in Saigon, Harry Hohler, asked the Foreign Office news department if 'there is anything you can do' in talking to the media in London 'to make them understand' Vietnam better and especially to deflect criticism of Diem and his family. He also lamented in February 1962 that 'our own parliament is now beginning to show interest in Vietnam' and feared 'more attention here from visiting British journalists who have been mercifully few and far between of late'.21
7
'HUMANITARIAN
INTERVENTION': THE
FRAUDULENT PRETEXT
One of the major aims of propaganda and 'information operations' is to convince the public that the government is acting from the highest of moral motives. In modern times, military interventions cannot be justified by – and soldiers sent to die for – sordid objectives such as grabbing oil. Rather, our leaders need to be depicted as the High Defenders of Civilisation. The basic duplicity which underlies this pretence is no recent phenomenon, however. My research on the declassified record of foreign policy reveals that the reasons publicly given for British military interventions are never those understood by planners in private.
Iraq in 2003 is not the first time that British policy-makers have fabricated a threat to justify intervention in that region; the same happened in 1961. Then, British planners feared that Kuwait, a newly independent country where Britain had major oil interests, would sever ties from London. Kuwait had signed an agreement for Britain to defend it if requested, but the solidity of this agreement was questionable. British fears were that 'as the international personality of Kuwait grows, she will wish in various ways to show that she is no longer dependent upon us'. Therefore, 'we must continue to use the opportunities which our protective role will afford to ensure so far as we can that Kuwait does not materially upset the existing financial arrangements or cease to be a good holder of sterling'.
Iraqi leader Abdul Qasim publicly claimed Kuwait as part of Iraq in June 1961 (reiterating a long-standing Iraqi claim). Foreign Office officials in London, together with the British embassy in Baghdad, fabricated a story that Iraq had ordered a tank regiment to speed south towards Kuwait. The files show that British officials in Basra, near the Kuwait border, saw no such threat; Whitehall did not even take Qasim's grandstanding seriously. However, a terrified Kuwait emir, told by British officials that Iraq was about to invade, permitted the landing of British troops. A Ministry of Defence report 11 days later finally admitted it was 'unlikely' that Iraq had ever posed a threat.1
If we turn to more recent pretexts for intervention, the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 is conventionally held up as an example of 'humanitarian intervention'; NATO forces, especially Britain and the US, are conventionally said to have come to the rescue of Kosovars being persecuted by Milosevic's Yugoslavia.
The year before NATO began its bombing campaign, in March 1999 around 2,000 people had been killed – largely the result of the civil war between Yugoslav forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The mass refugee exodus from Kosovo – the result of an horrific campaign of systematic ethnic cleansing by Milosevic – began only after the NATO bombing had commenced. The situation in Kosovo was indeed serious before this, with terrible repression by Yugoslav forces and a large number of internally displaced people, but Yugoslav forces took advantage of the NATO bombing to implement this more terrifying campaign.
The all-party House of Commons Defence Committee concluded after the bombing campaign that 'all the evidence suggests that plans to initiate [NATO's] air campaign hastened the onset of the disaster'. There is also evidence that NATO leaders knew from intelligence reports that Milosevic might launch such a campaign if they attacked, but went ahead anyway.
By the end of 2000, more than 200,000 Serbs had been forced to flee Kosovo, most of them in the first few weeks of the NATO troop deployments, as agreed in the peace accord. Killings, the burning of Serbian homes and violence against Serbs then ensued. Massive human-rights abuses were taking place under the very noses of NATO troops. No massive military intervention was required to act in defence of these human rights; simple arrest procedures might have been sufficient. But in this case, the human-rights abuses were allowed to continue (as they did, incidentally, in Chechnya and Indonesia at the same time).
Given NATO's humanitarian failure in this instance, it is worth considering alternative reasons for the bombing campaign. One motivation mentioned by Blair was that NATO's 'credibility' had been at stake over Kosovo. This was at a time when NATO was searching for a new mission as its 50th birthday approached in late April 1999. 'If NATO fails in Kosovo, the next dictator to be threatened with military force may well not believe our resolve to carry the threat through', Blair said. Yugoslavia needed to be blasted, he implied, to teach others a lesson. Other strategic Western objectives at the time were enlarging both the EU and NATO eastwards. Milosevic's Yugoslavia, with a reconstituted Communist party in power and with strong independent, nationalist tendencies, was effectively a barrier to thes
e policies. The NATO assault could be seen as an attempt to return eastern Europe to a client region of the West. These are, at the very least, considerations – ones which have rarely been mentioned in mainstream media.
Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe
There are two recent cases aside from Kosovo regularly upheld as 'proving' the government's seriousness about humanitarian intervention and speaking out against human-rights abuses – Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe.
There can be little doubt that British military intervention in Sierra Leone in May 2000 had a positive short-term impact. This makes it very unusual in the history of British post-war foreign policy.
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw contended that Britain intervened 'because we wanted to uphold the values of the UN charter, to restore the rule of law and respect for human rights, and to establish the conditions for democracy'2 – a view parroted by most commentators. But the wider context reveals a somewhat different picture.
The May 2000 British deployment provided a more secure environment for the UN to reinforce its troop presence and staved off an advance into Freetown by the Sierra Leonean rebels, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). The RUF were a truly gruesome force, having routinely terrorised the country by hacking off the limbs of around 100,000 people. The intervention was understandably broadly welcomed by the population of the capital. The small British deployment – only around 1,000 troops – shows how easy it can sometimes be for external actors to provide much-needed short-term security for victims of conflict.
There had, however, been several opportunities to demonstrate a commitment to human rights before May 2000. In January 1999, for example, the RUF killed around 9,000 people, terrorising the population as it temporarily entered Freetown; there was no British intervention at this point. Rather, in July 1999, the international community, including Britain, forged a 'peace agreement' that actually brought the RUF into the Sierra Leone government and even made RUF leader, Foday Sankoh, the Vice President. Foreign Office minister Peter Hain told parliament shortly after that 'we welcomed the signature on 7 July of the Lome peace agreement between the government of Sierra Leone and the Revolutionary United Front'.3 This agreement was widely condemned by human-rights groups as likely to lead to further abuses, which duly occurred. Britain also voted for the establishment of a UN peacekeeping force, but refused to participate in it; the result was widely recognised as an ill-equipped force.
Then in February 2000, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan pleaded with members of the Security Council to increase the size and mandate of the UN force in Sierra Leone, reiterating that it was ill-equipped to deal with the situation. Britain, along with the rest of the Security Council, voted for this but neither it nor any of the other countries with the best-equipped militaries offered substantial numbers of troops.
It was this inaction in February that contributed to the deteriorating situation in May. By this time, the UN force numbered only 8,500, rather than the mandated strength of 11,100. The RUF had by now taken 500 UN peacekeepers hostage and was on the verge of retaking Freetown. It was then that Britain intervened – in a unilateral operation outside of the UN command. It appears that this operation had been intended only to secure the airport and evacuate British nationals; it stayed on and stabilised the capital, allowing UN reinforcements.
British inaction before May 2000, especially given its responsibilities as a permanent member of the Security Council, is rather striking. If Britain had been serious about human rights, perhaps it might not have exported 7,500 rifles to Sierra Leone as part of a £10 million package in 1999. The country was already awash with weapons, whose availability contributed to the phenomenon of child soldiers. If Britain were serious about human rights now, perhaps it would try to weed out from, rather than absorb into, the reconstituted army it is currently training those past human-rights abusers.
Most important of all, perhaps Britain might become serious about addressing the poverty that is the root of the conflict in Sierra Leone. A major plank of the Blair government's view of the world is to impose failed policies of economic liberalisation' on the country, along with the rest of Africa; this is essentially a condition of British aid. In early 2002, Human Rights Watch commented that, although the human-rights situation had improved, 'the poverty and corruption which gave rise to the decade-long conflict remains much the same'. David Keen, of the London School of Economics, has commented that 'Britain's portrayal of the conflict as a struggle between good and evil served as an excuse for continuing corruption and the neglect of rural grievances'.4
There are more plausible explanations for the intervention, to me, or at the very least, reasons to strongly question the official story. Rather like Blair's statement that NATO needed to maintain its 'credibility' by acting over Kosovo, Britain is seen as demonstrating a 'great power' status by intervening in Africa. A Downing Street source, for example, specifically referred to the May 2000 intervention in Sierra Leone as showing Britain's leadership'.5 This is characteristic of Blair: posing as the saviour of Africa through grandstanding public gestures rather than effecting the simplest of policy changes that would actually make a long-term difference. The British unilateral action outside of the UN demonstrates its status as an independent actor in the world; it makes the point that London can trump the UN. West Africa is a region where historically Britain has been keen to play the 'over the horizon' great-power role, not least in rivalry with France.
There is also the issue of reinstalling a pro-British regime in West Africa, where Britain has important and growing interests in maintaining 'stability', notably in Nigeria. The latter's oil resources are the chief prize in the region. The spread of the conflict that has engulfed Liberia and bordering countries threatens to upset British plans for Nigerian oil. Intervention in Sierra Leone went some way to ensuring the kind of 'stability' most in Britain's interests.
Then there is Zimbabwe, a case regularly invoked as demonstrating New Labour's commitment to human rights. That Mugabe's Zimbabwe is a repressive authoritarian regime that thuggishly silences its opponents and has a horrendous human-rights record, is a statement of fact. But this humanrights record is no worse than many British allies and is in fact noticeably better than one other major African state, Nigeria, which enjoys close relations with London while Whitehall remains virtually silent on human-rights atrocities (see chapter 10). The dozens of deaths at the hands of Mugabe's security forces – grim enough, to be sure – compares to around 10,000 deaths in Nigeria since 1999, in many of which the Nigerian police and army are directly complicit.
Unlike Nigeria (or Russia, Israel, Colombia, Turkey and others) which enjoys the protection of Britain, Zimbabwe has been the object of consistent criticism from London ostensibly about human rights. While Britain has played a leading role in imposing EU sanctions on Zimbabwe (in February 2002), it has played an equally vigorous role in blocking calls for EU sanctions against, for example, Israel.
On Zimbabwe, the media follows the policy of the state, as normal, and Mugabe is now a byword for violence – the subject of numerous articles and documentaries – while the public could be forgiven for never having heard of Nigerian President Olesegun Obasanjo.
What explains the British policy of speaking out against Mugabe's human-rights abuses? The chronology of Britain's pressure on the Mugabe regime helps to provide a few possible explanations.
Britain publicly stepped up pressure against Zimbabwe in April/May 2000. This involved condemning the regime's violence against opponents and raising the prospect of a cut-off in EU aid; it culminated in the announcement of a British arms embargo. Before this period, throughout 1998 and 1999, Britain had been providing various military equipment to Zimbabwe while human-rights violations had already become serious and even after Zimbabwe had openly intervened in the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in August 1998. Zimbabwe was using British-supplied Hawk aircraft to devastating effect – they were 'deployed in the DRC from time to time', Foreign
Office minister Peter Hain said in April 2000. Amnesty International commented that in 1998 'Zimbabwean warplanes repeatedly bombed civilian targets and troops killed civilians during indiscriminate shelling' in the DRC. Yet the government carried on approving the export of spare parts for the Hawk aircraft until May 2000. At least 150 arms export licences for equipment were approved from August 1997 to January 2000.6
Human rights in Zimbabwe certainly deteriorated in 2000, especially around the April election campaign, when opponents were brutally intimidated. Yet in January 1998, for example, the Zimbabwean police and army had shot around 20 people, with at least 9 dying. Violations had worsened in 1999 with torture becoming widespread and increasing attacks by the regime on the media, the opposition and the judiciary. Throughout this time, not only did Britain continue to arm the regime but it retained a small military training mission in the country (which was withdrawn only in March 2001).