Web Of Deceit: Britain's Real Foreign Policy

by Mark Curtis

  Philip Hammond, a media lecturer at South Bank University, notes that ‘the refugee crisis became NATO’s strongest propaganda weapon, though logically it should have been viewed as a damning indictment of the bombing. The hundreds of thousands of Serbs who fled bombing were therefore determinedly ignored by British journalists, just as most of the killings, kidnappings, beatings and torture of Kosovo Serbs after the war were not deemed newsworthy.’ After the bombing, journalists went to extraordinary lengths to praise NATO and managed to overlook the fact that there was not the humanitarian disaster on the scale that the NATO leaders claimed, until the bombing started.41

  Some media comment reached staggering levels of support for state policy. The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee claimed that ‘there was nothing in this for anyone, no political gain for any leader, no glory, only the certainty that Milosevic’s monstrous ethnic cleansing had to be stopped’. It was an ‘honourable cause’ and ‘a brave and probably only chance for the West collectively to create a more ethical foreign policy’, showing a ‘purity of motive, freedom from self-interest’.42

  Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Guardian that it was ‘a war fought in pursuit of a humanitarian aim. The prize is not turf or treasure but the frustration of a plan to empty a land of its people’. It was ‘a noble goal’. The New Statesman’s John Lloyd wrote that it showed that ‘the most powerful states are willing to fight for human rights’.43

  The Guardian’s Hugo Young similarly explained that ‘what this action is about, for better or for worse, is humanitarian impulse’. ‘It wasn’t part of cold war geo-politics. There was no oil. It asserts a principle that is new and, progressively, admirable: the moral imperative to stop dictators brutally punishing and exterminating national ethnic groups.’44

  In fact, Young was writing four days after his newspaper reported the massacre of dozens of people in Liquica, East Timor. The perpetrator was our ally and favourite arms recipient, Indonesia. But neither the Guardian nor any of the other mainstream newspapers seemed troubled by this (or any other) rather obvious example of the complete indifference to human rights that the British government really has.

  If anything, there was more (albeit minuscule) critical comment in the right-wing press than in the Guardian and Independent. Unusually, a Spectator editorial a year after the bombing came remarkably close to the reality. It referred to NATO war crimes and ‘its criminal terror-bombing campaign’. It said that NATO’s ‘policy was to destroy Serbia’s civilian infrastructure’ and that ‘deliberately to destroy civilian targets with the intention of rendering the daily life of a population impossible is a clear breach of the very international law which Mr Clinton and Mr Blair claimed to uphold’.45

  Interestingly, one year after the war the Guardian had somewhat changed its position. During the war it had given complete ideological backing to the British government, saying it was ‘a test for our generation’. Now it said that ‘the code name “humanitarian intervention” which its proponents gave was not, of course, the whole truth. No countries go to war on the basis of altruism’. This simple truth could now be stated – and completely undermines the Guardian’s position at the time. But it still held to the view that the bombing was legitimate.46

  The amazing thing the media managed to avoid – with near 100 per cent discipline – was comment on whether the government might just have had any motives other than purely humanitarian. Commentator after commentator accepted the humanitarian rationale and the notion that Britain had no interests in the region since ‘Kosovo had no oil’. Now that the Guardian has discovered that ‘no countries go to war on the basis of altruism’, perhaps it might be able to speculate on more plausible explanations for the bombing campaign against Yugoslavia.

  The first plausible explanation is the other one provided by NATO leaders – ‘credibility’. I believe this is certainly true, as noted above. But there was little attempt in the mainstream media to explain the meaning of ‘credibility’ and how it fell just a little short of the humanitarian motives also claimed.

  But there were other obvious Western strategic objectives at the time, such as expanding NATO eastward and organising Eastern European economies to benefit Western business. These are complementary strategies geared to bringing the former Soviet bloc countries into the Western orbit. NATO’s expansion is meant to ensure Eastern Europe’s reliance on the US and its European allies for ‘security’, including lucrative arms purchases. NATO expansion is seen as an important enough strategy in NATO capitals to risk incurring Russia’s wrath as its former enemy seduces former Soviet satellites and moves its alliance borders closer to Russia.

  The US ambassador to NATO, Alexander Vershbow, explains that NATO is ‘an alliance of 19 democratic, market-oriented countries’. NATO membership provides to new allies ‘the security and stability that is a key element for participation in the multi-trillion global economy – by reassuring investors that these are stable countries worthy of long-term commitment’. Therefore, ‘continued NATO enlargement is an essential part of the Alliance’s strategy for unifying and stabilising Europe’.47

  The economies of Eastern Europe, the object of huge Western ‘advice’ and pressure after the collapse of Soviet control, have been organised according to much of the same neo-liberal economic ideology that devastated the developing world – privatisation, deregulation and liberalisation. Poverty in many Eastern European countries has shot up; absolute poverty now affects 15–20 per cent of the population across most of the region, and is as high as 40 per cent in Romania, according to the World Bank.48 Those profiting from Eastern Europe’s restructuring have included a new entrepreneurial and often criminal class, as well as Western businesses which have gained from a more favourable investment climate. In this strategy, the West has supported the most radical economic ‘reformers’ and undermined both the revamped communist parties and more progressive alternatives.

  Robin Cook told the New Statesman just after the end of the bombing of Yugoslavia that ‘our key tasks [in southeast Europe] are first of all to increase trade, open up their markets and help them with economic progress, [and] to intensify the integration with European structures’. Europe Minister Keith Vaz has similarly noted that ‘Southeastern Europe … needs to attract investors by creating a favourable climate for investment.’49

  The basic strategy to ‘open up their markets’ also applies to Kosovo and Bosnia. The EU’s economic strategy in the Balkans is based on ‘a special and demanding contractual relationship’, EU Commissioner Chris Patten explains. ‘In exchange for the assistance we offer’, Patten notes, ‘they will need to work hard on economic reform in order to build solid market economies capable of competing freely and openly with member states.’ The Rambouillet text had stated that ‘the economy of Kosovo shall function in accordance with free market principles’. Later, the British government said that the international community was aiming to create a Kosovo where ‘prosperity is based on free markets’. Britain and the EU were aiming to develop Bosnia as ‘a business-friendly, single economic space’, including by eliminating inter-entity trade barriers.50

  In November 2001, Foreign Office minister Baroness Symons gave a speech at the Confederation of British Industry directed at new Yugoslav President Kostunica, who was on his first visit to the UK. She said that in 1990 Yugoslavia was Britain’s fastest growing trade and investment partner in central and eastern Europe, but that Milosevic ruined all that. Now, however, there were again lots of business opportunities. She said that ‘Britain can continue to benefit from the reconstruction of Yugoslavia,’ the country her government had recently bombed. And she announced that Britain was to restart negotiations with Yugoslavia on bilateral investment promotion and protection.51

  It is certainly plausible that these concerns about bringing southeast Europe firmly into the Western security and economic orbit played a key role in British and NATO strategy to undermine and help remove Milosevic. The regime in Belgrade was brutal and re
pressive; it was also one of the few countries with a reconstituted communist party in power and had essentially continued Yugoslavia’s traditional stance of remaining independent of East and West. Its more independent domestic policies posed the last real barrier to openly expressed British, EU and US aims in Eastern Europe, which amount to returning the region to its historical status of de facto client area of the West.

  Final questions concern the costs of the war in Kosovo and what the alternatives might have been. One alternative might have been the diplomatic solution that NATO was never seriously interested in exploring, as noted above. Supporters of the war argued that Milosevic would have launched his campaign of ‘ethnic cleansing’ anyway, without NATO bombing. We can never know, but the chances are that such a campaign would have been less devastating had it not been conducted under the shroud of NATO bombing. The effects of NATO bombing were at least 500 civilians killed and up to 10,000 unexploded cluster bomblets left by Britain alone, not to mention the damage to the country’s infrastructure, impact on people and civil society attempts to promote peaceful resolution of tensions in the Balkans. It is true that ethnic Albanians could return to Kosovo following the NATO ‘victory’ but this return was accompanied by expulsions of ethnic Serbs.

  Then there are the consequences of the world’s powerful states again using force illegally to impose themselves on official enemies. One lesson from such actions to be drawn by dictatorships and perhaps more benign governments, not to mention terrorist groups, is that if you want to defend yourself against the world’s powerful states, you’d better acquire weapons of mass destruction. It is inconceivable that NATO would have bombed Yugoslavia if Belgrade had possessed functioning weapons of mass destruction. Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said at the end of NATO’s bombing campaign against Yugoslavia that:

  Smaller countries – among them 31 ‘threshold’ states capable of developing nuclear weapons – are looking to their own security with growing trepidation. They are thinking they must have absolute weapons to be able to defend themselves or to retaliate if they are subjected to similar treatment.52

  The ‘balance sheet’ is complex and not cut and dried. But a number of things are clear: the launching of the war was illegal; NATO conducted violations of humanitarian law and war crimes; NATO actions precipitated rather than prevented a humanitarian catastrophe; political leaders like Blair and Clinton probably knew what the terrible consequences of launching the bombing campaign would be, but still went ahead; and therefore British and US leaders’ claims to be acting from humanitarian motives were mythical. Yet these facts have consistently been suppressed or forgotten (if they were ever mentioned) in the mainstream, while the war over Kosovo has gone down in history as a great victory for humanitarian values.

  In some ways the Kosovo war was – as the Guardian claimed in a different sense – ‘a test of our generation’: a test of whether British foreign policy planners abide by international law and ethical standards in their role in the world; and of whether British mainstream political culture is able to see through a new generation of ‘humanitarian’ propaganda by leaders. The test was failed on both counts.

  7

  CHECHNYA: A CHRONICLE OF COMPLICITY

  The liberation of Kosovo and the message it sent to regimes that disregard human rights will come to be seen as a defining moment in modern history

  The government’s annual report on human rights 19991

  ONE CAN ONLY imagine the thoughts of the officials who wrote this. As Britain exuded outrage at Milosevic’s crimes in Kosovo, its Indonesian ally was directing paramilitary groups in a terror campaign in East Timor (see chapter 21), while Turkey was continuing repression throughout its Kurdish regions. Three months after the end of the bombing of Yugoslavia, Russia launched a ferocious campaign in Chechnya eliciting the barest of concerns by Western leaders.

  What was required in these cases was nothing so dramatic as military intervention, or mobilising the public to support a full-scale war, but simply to turn off the tap of support, be it on arms, trade, investment or diplomacy. The list of human rights abusers supported by Britain is long enough to make simply ridiculous the idea that the government suddenly became devoted to human rights in Kosovo in March 1999.

  In the Blair government years, a number of horrific massacres of civilians have occurred elsewhere. One was in January 1999 when Serb special forces killed forty-five people in the town of Racak, Kosovo. The official report into Racak was released on 17 March 1999, the head of the Finnish investigating team calling the massacre ‘a crime against humanity’. Foreign Office minister Tony Lloyd said that ‘we do quite clearly condemn [the Racak massacre] as a crime against international law, but specifically as a war crime’. He added that ‘only the most forthright condemnation is fitting for what did take place there’.2

  NATO leaders seized on the Racak massacre to prove that the Milosevic regime was evil, and it provided the pretext for the military intervention that NATO was bent on. ‘Spring has come early’, was reportedly what US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, on hearing of the massacre. Racak was consistently reported in the media. According to the Independent it ‘set in motion the events which led to NATO’s air campaign’. The Observer noted that it was ‘the massacre that lit the touchpaper of the war with Yugoslavia’. A week after the official report into Racak, NATO bombing began.3

  British leaders, and the media, have reacted somewhat differently to a range of other massacres of comparable size elsewhere. In Liquica, East Timor, in April 1999 – as NATO was bombing Yugoslavia – fifty-two people were killed in attacks by a paramilitary group created and supported by the Indonesian army. For at least six hours thousands of men, women and children seeking sanctuary were subjected to automatic gunfire and tear gas.4

  On 6 September 1999 in Suai, East Timor, at least fifty people were massacred in a church where 100 people had taken refuge. The church was attacked directly by members of the Indonesian army and police as well as militias, commanded by an Indonesian lieutenant. One priest was stabbed and hacked to death, and at least two other priests were murdered. Twenty-six bodies were loaded on to a truck by the commander of the attack and buried across the border in West Timor.5

  At Bumi Flora in the Aceh province of Indonesia on 9 August 2001, dozens of armed men dressed in camouflage uniforms entered one of the housing areas of a rubber and palm oil plantation, and shot thirty men and a two-year-old child to death.6

  On 24 February 2001, fifty-one bodies were discovered in the village of Dachny, less than a kilometre from the main Russian military base in Chechnya. Sixteen of the nineteen bodies that could be identified were last seen in the custody of Russian forces, many in civilian clothing, blindfolded and with their feet or hands bound. According to Human Rights Watch:

  The mass ‘dumping site’ – the bodies were dumped along streets in the village and in abandoned cottages over an extended period of time – provides striking evidence of the practice of forced disappearances, torture and extrajudicial execution of civilians by Russian federal forces in Chechnya.7

  These massacres provoked no calls for action in defence of human rights and no grandstanding speeches about the principles of military intervention. The reason is obvious – they were perpetrated by our allies.

  Britain probably has more leverage over these allies than it ever did over the Milosevic regime, but these massacres provoked no changes in British policy. Since they were not noticed by political leaders, neither were they noticed by the media – there are only one or two media mentions of these other massacres, compared to a stream of reporting on Racak. I also did a search on the Houses of Parliament database. There were sixty-eight mentions of Racak compared to six mentions of Liquica, none of Suai and none of Dachny.

  Let us now look closer at the Russian actions in Chechnya that began soon after the war over Kosovo.

  Moscow in Chechnya, London in denial


  An eight-year-old Chechen boy called Ali Makaev, living in a Chechen refugee camp in Ingushetia, wrote in a school essay:

  I do not know if Putin has a heart. But if he did he would not have started such a war. Putin thinks that human life is worth fifty kopecks. He is deeply mistaken … I’d like Putin to know that we are also human beings.8

  This is a description of one of Tony Blair’s greatest allies in the early years of the new millennium. The Blair–Putin relationship has been one of the most extraordinary developments in British foreign policy in recent years. It is instructive that the Foreign Office claims this relationship as a great success for the country’s foreign policy; in reality, it means British complicity in some of the worst horrors of our time.

  The background to the current phase in the Chechnya conflict was the Russian invasion of the territory from 1994–96, when Moscow sought to destroy Chechen demands to establish a fully independent republic. Though Chechen forces eventually managed to defeat Russia, the latter slaughtered between 60,000 and 100,000 Chechens, wounded hundreds of thousands more and left a deadly legacy of millions of landmines scattered across the territory. Russian forces used artillery and rocket barrages to destroy Chechen villages and towns, deliberately targeting civilians, and razing most of Chechnya to the ground. The Chechen capital Grozny was destroyed over new year 1995. Anatol Lieven, an analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, notes that the 1996 victory of the Chechen separatist forces was ‘one of the greatest epics of colonial resistance in the past century’ in a context of Russian imperial rule in the Caucasus.9