Web Of Deceit: Britain's Real Foreign Policy

by Mark Curtis

  Britain is much keener on providing support to the Chinese elite. When Chinese President Jiang Zemin visited Britain in October 1999, human rights issues were not raised publicly while police denied protesters the right to peaceful assembly. Officers illegally seized Tibetan flags and other banners at human rights protests in an outrageous display of support for the visitors.

  Similarly, pro-democracy activist and former prisoner of conscience, Wei Jingsheng, visited Britain and accused Robin Cook of being ‘two faced’ after Cook cancelled planned photo calls and the Foreign Office tried to prevent Wei meeting the press. He criticised Britain for leading the EU in blocking support for a UN resolution on China’s appalling human rights record. The Blair government is the first since 1989 not to support such a resolution. Wei said that the Chinese government will respond to public pressure, not the UK’s private ‘engagement’.55

  The priorities are obvious. The DTI states that ‘China is one of the fastest growing markets in the world, offering huge trade and investment opportunities for British companies.’ In a speech at London Export’s Chinese new year lunch, Foreign Office minister Baroness Symons outlined British support for China’s accession to the WTO and the need for China ‘to remove some onerous requirements for foreign investors’. These are the important things; she failed to say anything at all about any human rights problems.56

  Pledge three – We arm countries that others stop supplying

  One standard defence of British arms exports is that: ‘if we don’t supply them, someone else will’. But the truth is more like: ‘we will export as soon as someone else stops’. Again, this is standard practice.

  Britain’s massive contract to re-equip the Saudi armed forces (called Al Yamamah, worth around £50 billion) was secured once the US restricted exports to Saudi Arabia following pressure by the Israeli lobby. After India and Pakistan conducted nuclear tests in 1998, the US imposed military sanctions; Britain refused to impose formal embargoes and has in effect exploited the gap. ’Twas ever thus. In 1992 the US cut off military and economic aid to Pakistan, and asked it to return eight frigates when their leases ran out, in protest against Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons. Britain stepped in and supplied Pakistan with six frigates.57

  The US imposed a military embargo on Indonesia following the atrocities in East Timor of September 1999, and which remained in place through 2001. The EU imposed an embargo for only four months, ending in January 2000, following which Britain resumed arms sales. Most of Indonesia’s US-supplied F-16 and F-5 fighters were grounded for want of spare parts. However, Britain has helpfully continued the supply of Hawks, which partly compensated for the lack of the US aircraft.

  Pledge four – We arm even the very poorest countries

  At the October 2001 Labour party conference, Tony Blair pledged to help heal a ‘scar on the conscience of the world’ by addressing poverty and conflict in Africa. Some commentators fell over themselves eulogising Blair’s vision (see chapter 18). Three months later the value of British arms to Africa was revealed to be a record – four times that of the previous year. In 2001, Britain exported around £400 million of arms to Africa according to the Campaign Against the Arms Trade.58

  These arms go to the very poorest countries, many of which are enduring conflicts Blair said he wanted to address. Small arms have been exported to, for example, Botswana, Egypt, Eritrea, Gambia, Kenya, Malawi, Morocco, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Around a fifth of Africa’s debt comes from arms purchases, meaning that Britain’s arms push directly adds to Africa’s huge debt burden, which Blair also claims to want to reduce.

  Arms exports can also counter any beneficial impact that aid might have, skewing scarce government resources away from badly needed social programmes, enhancing the military’s role in society (and therefore undermining more democratic government) as well as being used in conflict. The British attempt to get India to spend £1 billion on Hawk aircraft is equivalent to ten years’ bilateral aid.

  It does look like a concerted arms push to the poorest countries. Under New Labour Britain has delivered 86 per cent of all its arms exports to developing countries (up from 84 per cent in 1993–96). No other country apart from China delivers a higher proportion of arms to poor countries. Under the Conservatives, arms to Africa made up 1.6 per cent of all British arms to the Third World; by 2000 that had grown to 19 per cent.59

  In January 2000, Tony Blair took advantage of a ‘family holiday’ in the Seychelles to act as salesman for BAE Systems in South Africa. A deal agreed in 1999 was for South Africa to purchase £4 billion in military equipment from European companies. BAE Systems is the largest contractor in the deal, and is due to sell Hawk aircraft (yes, more of them) worth around £1.6 billion. Blair led a delegation to South Africa to lobby for the BAE bid shortly before it was awarded.

  This is a deal the poor of South Africa can ill afford. In a country with massive poverty levels, it is worth twice the government’s housing budget and over one hundred times the amount spent on combating HIV/AIDS, from which five million South Africans suffer. But it will be tremendously profitable to BAE Systems and those in South Africa accused of the usual corruption and nepotism in signing the deal.

  Two weeks after Blair led a seventy-strong British delegation to the World Summit on Sustainable Development in South Africa in September 2002, the British government sponsored arms companies to attend an arms exhibition in Pretoria. The DTI described South Africa as an ‘under exploited and newly emerging target’.60

  Violating the export guidelines

  The arms exports ‘guidelines’ are mainly for public relations purposes, to convince people there is a ‘responsible’ and ‘well regulated’ arms trade. Nothing could be further from the truth.

  A clear indication is that, as the government admits, ‘no formal procedures exist for routinely monitoring the use that is made of British defence equipment, once exported’.61 It rejects repeated calls to establish such legislative checks on end use. Meanwhile, all arms exports to Saudi Arabia under the massive Al Yamamah deal are completely exempt from export licensing. This means that Britain really cares not a hoot what happens to them or whether they break any of its supposed guidelines.

  Equally clear is that the government has little intention of sticking to its own, or the EU’s, already very weak guidelines, which are being violated at every turn. Let us take, for example, the EU Code of Conduct on arms exports, to which Britain is legally bound.

  Britain has exported arms to Morocco, illegally occupying the Western Sahara, while the EU code states that arms will not go to countries to enable them to ‘assert by force a territorial claim’. British equipment also goes to Israel – in illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza – and to Turkey – illegally occupying northern Cyprus. The supposed distinction between arms exported for legitimate ‘self-defence’ and those which might be used for repression or aggression often simply does not exist. Human rights abusers and those illegally occupying territory regularly use equipment which has ostensibly been supplied for self-defence, such as aircraft and trucks for ferrying troops, as instruments of repression.

  The licensing of Hawk spares to Zimbabwe (which enabled Hawks to be used in the DRC) and Indonesia (used in East Timor), and arms to India and Pakistan (for possible use between the two) fly in the face of the EU criteria forbidding exports ‘if there is a clear risk that the intended recipient would use the proposed export aggressively against another country’.

  Other EU criteria forbid ‘exports which would provoke or prolong armed conflicts or aggravate existing tensions or conflicts in the country of final destination’. Hawks supplied to Indonesia (used in West Papua) and arms supplied to Sri Lanka (which London acknowledges are used against the rebel Tamil Tigers in a brutal civil war) appear to depart from these criteria.

  The EU criteria also call on member states to ‘exercise special caution and vigilance in issuing licences’ to ‘count
ries where serious violations of human rights have been established by the competent bodies of the UN, the Council of Europe or by the EU’.62 Yet British arms continue to flow to Indonesia (armoured cars persistently used), Turkey (vehicles used against Kurds), the Gulf states (arms supplied to the ‘internal security’ forces) and many others.

  Other EU criteria call on member states to ‘take into account’ the recipient’s record on its international commitments, including ‘its commitment to non-proliferation’. Yet Britain continues to provide arms to Israel, India and Pakistan, all with functioning nuclear weapons, and to Iran, suspected of developing them.

  A simple question – why do British governments all push arms exports and in particular arm human rights abusers? Arms exports are clearly profitable for the military industry, but this is not the only reason for such exports; it is a myth to believe that the choice is simply between ‘profits’ and ‘morals’, as the debate is usually framed. There is a third factor in explaining Whitehall’s support for arms exports which goes to the heart of Britain’s role in the world – of support for favoured elites.

  Supplying British arms to persistent human rights abusers who use them to promote repression is so systematic as to be, in my view, virtually government policy. I say ‘virtually’ because it is not so much explicit as a reflex on the part of policy-makers. I argue in Part II that British foreign policy is largely based on support for often repressive elites who promote British commercial or political interests. Britain has regularly gone to extraordinary lengths to install and keep such elites in power, including by covert action and military intervention. But exporting arms to foreign armies, as well as training their soldiers, are also key aspects of this strategy.

  Both arms exports and military training have long been recognised as performing a number of functions. They can help favoured elites to maintain ‘internal security’ (ie control the domestic population); enhance the domestic power of the military (often undermining democratic forces); and cement links with current and future political leaders likely to emerge from within the elite.63

  According to leaked papers from the British embassy in Jakarta in the early 1990s, referring to British military training schemes:

  The position of the armed forces in Indonesian society is such that its members are important decision-makers and opinion formers … Up to 40 per cent of the participants in Indonesia’s political fora are drawn from the armed forces and they are a target for support under FCO schemes in Indonesia.64

  According to the Ministry of Defence, military training plays a very important role in ‘the promotion of British influence and standing overseas and in support to wider British interests including defence sales’. It says that ‘some care must be taken to avoid giving the impression that our relationship is purely based on defence export marketing opportunities’.65

  New Labour continues to offer military training to many of the world’s worst human rights abusers, as did the Conservatives before them. Nearly 4,000 military personnel from over one hundred countries are currently being trained in Britain. These include such well-known defenders of democracy and human rights as Bahrain, China, Egypt, Indonesia, Israel, Morocco, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. British armed forces are also serving in around one hundred countries, including all those just mentioned.66 It is no surprise that these also tend to be the same countries that are key recipients of British arms.

  Under New Labour, Britain has if anything beefed up its military training programmes. It has, for example, established a new ‘defence diplomacy’ programme – to provide allies with short-term training teams, seconded personnel and a scholarship scheme – and a new scheme called ASSIST (Assistance to Support Stability with In-Service Training), which, it claims, promotes ‘respect for civilian government and practices, the rule of law and international human rights standards’.67 The argument that training helps improve human rights practices is simply a fig leaf for which there is little evidence. Britain has been training the armed forces of many human rights abusers for years; many have become more, not less, repressive.

  On the surface, it would be easy for a government remotely committed to ‘ethical’ policies to halt all this: it could simply stop training armies with abominable human rights records. But even this minuscule step has not been taken.

  PART II

  ELITES AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY

  The official story is that British policies are helping to make globalisation work for the poor and to eradicate poverty globally, while supporting democratic groups and governments. The reality, however, is quite different.

  Under New Labour Britain is helping to organise the global economy to benefit a transnational business elite while pursuing policies that are often deepening poverty and inequality. New Labour has, in fact, a very grandiose project, not – as it claims – simply to manage globalisation, but actively to push an extreme form of economic ‘liberalisation’ globally.

  The Blair government is also continuing the British tradition of undermining countries’ ability to pursue independent development strategies which might be successful. It is basing its foreign policy on propping up many repressive elites, especially in the Middle East, while undermining many democratic, popular forces. The reality is that the British government regularly views democracy abroad as a threat – which matches how it increasingly sees the public in Britain. These policies are being decided in an elitist and increasingly undemocratic decision-making process in Britain, which in its foreign policy is, I argue, akin to a totalitarian state.

  These policies are harming people all over the world. Even though this is hard to miss – and is shown in the following five chapters – it is largely being missed, because most commentators in a position to see have willingly swallowed New Labour’s extraordinary rhetoric. I believe that the Blair government’s worldview is actually very frightening. And if planners have their way in matters concerning the global economy, to which I turn first, things will look even more frightening in the future.

  9

  TRADING OFF INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

  We want to open up protected markets in developing countries.

  Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt

  The new liberalisation theologists

  ACCORDING TO TONY Blair, ‘real development can only come through partnership. Not the rich dictating to the poor. Not the poor demanding from the rich. But matching rights and responsibilities.’1

  This is Blair’s world – where the poor majority have no right to make demands on the rich minority. Yet this is a world where half the population lives in poverty, on an average of $2 a day, while the richest few dozen individuals command more wealth than hundreds of millions of people. In this situation, are the poor really not entitled to be ‘demanding from the rich’ rather than simply ‘matching rights and responsibilities’?

  Blair’s view is echoed by Chancellor Gordon Brown, who has outlined a ‘global new deal’ based on the poorest countries and the richest countries ‘each meeting our obligations’. The poorest countries’ ‘obligations’ are ‘to pursue stability and create the conditions for new investment’. The richest countries’ obligations are ‘to open our markets and to transfer resources’.2 One might think that the world’s poorest countries have no ‘obligations’ to us, after centuries of exploitation and enduring extreme poverty due partly to an international economic system that plainly disadvantages them. But no – those with few schools, health services and little safe water are deemed by New Labour to have ‘obligations’ to us – and those obligations are about helping our companies to make more profits (creating ‘the conditions for new investment’).

  The Blair government’s rhetoric stresses the need to ‘make globalisation work for the poor’ and calls for fairer trade rules – especially in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) – which will allow developing countries to benefit more from globalisation. Clare Short, the Secretary of State for International Development, has led this process and
constantly stresses Britain’s commitment to reaching the 2015 international development targets that seek to reduce global poverty. But Gordon Brown (on debt) and Tony Blair (on Africa) have also led new initiatives that appear to many to show a government serious about tackling global poverty. In the media and academia, the government’s ‘development’ policies have received little short of unadulterated praise. Britain is regularly seen as one of the most progressive voices for change in areas of the global economy to benefit developing countries, even as a ‘champion of the poor’.

  It is an extraordinary view. Because, putting the progressive rhetoric aside, government ministers have also made plain their other goals – which are more plausible and confirmed by their actual policies. This is easy to spot, if we bother to look.

  Britain’s basic priority – virtually its raison d’etre for several centuries – is to aid British companies in getting their hands on other countries’ resources. As Lord Mackay, then Lord Chancellor, revealed in the mid-1990s, the role of MI6 is to protect Britain’s ‘economic well-being’ by keeping ‘a particular eye on Britain’s access to key commodities, like oil or metals [and] the profits of Britain’s myriad of international business interests’. This traditional task of foreign economic and ‘development’ policy continues to be pursued by New Labour, shielded by high rhetoric (and outlined further in chapter 10).3