Web Of Deceit: Britain's Real Foreign Policy

by Mark Curtis

  Indeed, it is only we who are benevolent. As the New Statesman’s John Lloyd has written: ‘the defence of human rights – or more accurately, the aggressive promotion of human rights in an arena, such as Kosovo, where they are being brutalised – is a posture confined to the rich and secure world’.10

  Beneath this overarching concept of basic benevolence stands a set of pillars – key strategies promoted by the elite that are assumed to contribute to Britain’s benevolent role in the world and promotion of high principles. These strategies make up the single ideology on which there is consensus across the elite, as outlined in chapter 13 – such as strong support for the US, in the context of a special relationship, promotion of global economic ‘liberalisation’, support for key elites, and a strong military intervention capability. Reporting and analysis that fall outside this construct – and certainly that directly challenge it – will tend to get excluded.

  The ideological system gears into particular action during war, providing justification for the government’s resort to force and backing its (always noble) aims. In war, the public is in effect actively mobilised by the various components of the elite in support of state policy. Television news functions even more extremely ideologically at these times, in practice usually abandoning any pretence of objectivity and acting simply as the mouthpiece of the state, though trying to preserve a facade of independence. Only rarely is real dissent possible in such crises in mainstream newspapers and never on television.

  Consider how the media supported the Blair government during 1999 in mobilising the nation to bomb Yugoslavia supposedly in defence of the highest humanitarian values. This was no easy task since it soon became clear to any independent onlooker that it was the NATO bombing that precipitated, rather than prevented, the humanitarian catastrophe. At the same time, as noted in chapter 7, our allies in Indonesia were engaged in atrocities in East Timor similar to those of Milosevic; while a few months later the same values were still relevant as Putin’s Russia was committing crimes in Chechnya greater in scale than those of Milosevic in Kosovo. But in these cases the values that provided the pretext for bombing Yugoslavia needed to be buried. After a few obvious parallels were drawn between the situations in the media, the previous humanitarian pretexts used for Kosovo were indeed safely forgotten in these other conflicts.

  Criticism in the mainstream of British wars tends to be restricted to the tactics used to achieve the assumed noble aims, and whether the government has chosen the right strategy to discharge its high nobility or whether it will make ‘mistakes’.

  The debate in the mainstream on bombing Yugoslavia over Kosovo, did involve argument over whether it was a ‘just war’ or not; but both sides of this debate generally accepted that the government was seeking to achieve its stated humanitarian aims. That the government may have been acting out of other motives entirely was almost never questioned, despite the evidence.

  The same goes for much media coverage of Iraq. Most reporting assumes that British aims are basically benevolent – the more regular criticism is whether government strategy is the right one to achieve noble objectives. This contrasts with reporting on US policy, where US aims of controlling Iraqi oil, or of installing an undemocratic, pro-US regime, are more openly discussed than British involvement in the same. This said, media reporting on Iraq in 2002/3 has involved many more dissenting views than was the case over the bombing of Yugoslavia. The reason is that there is no elite consensus on war with Iraq, which is rather being promoted by a small band of people around the prime minister. Many parts of the establishment are opposed to war (for tactical reasons to achieve British objectives, not for moral reasons, which are irrelevant to them). Therefore, the media framing can be much wider and include many more critical voices.

  The Guardian’s coverage of the war in Afghanistan was a real exception to normal reporting, in that a series of comment pieces over several months put various critical perspectives and exposed much of the reality of the war and its motives. This unusual occurrence was due to one comment editor, Seumas Milne, who allowed a diversity of views – evidence in fact of how individuals can help change even well-established systems. This did not, however, stop some other reporters from toeing the state line in numerous cases elsewhere in the newspaper.

  It is interesting to note that there is only one British military intervention over the past fifty years that has been severely criticised and government motives questioned in the mainstream – the invasion of Egypt in 1956 (usually called the ‘Suez crisis’ or ‘fiasco’ in the ideological system). Since there are many horrible British interventions worthy of attention and condemnation, with effects worse than in Egypt in 1956, why is this singled out for criticism? The reason is obvious – Britain lost. It therefore deserves a lot of soul-searching within the elite. Other interventions where we successfully blasted the nips deserve no such criticism, since we won, therefore what could possibly be the problem?

  A leading US analyst of the media and foreign policy, Edward Herman, has said that ‘it is the function of experts and the mainstream media to normalise the unthinkable for the general public’.11 This role sanitises quite terrible policies and presents them as ‘normal’, current examples of which include hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq through sanctions, war crimes in Yugoslavia and mass civilian deaths in Afghanistan. When presented in the mainstream media, none of these outcomes tend to elicit the horror they deserve; all are normal.

  The French philosopher Jean Guehenno has said that ‘the worst betrayal of intelligence is finding justification for the world as it is’. But this is often the role played by experts, to explain the everyday as normal, justifiable, requiring little change, but rather ‘stability’ and few upsets to ‘world order’ unless controlled by us. In fact, the everyday is a horror for many people – the half of the planet that lives in absolute poverty, as well as the victims of torture and repression in the US and British-backed client states, for example.

  Elites throughout history have presented their policies as in the natural order of things, which helps to obscure the pursuit of their own particular interests. An important aspect of the ideological system is rendering a single view dominant or ‘natural’, presenting current policies as inevitable, and undermining the possibility of alternatives. ‘Globalisation’ is presented by elites as such a natural phenomenon, and critics ridiculed as Luddites who cannot stop the inevitable march of history. These curiously Marxist, determinist views mask the elite’s goal under globalisation of promoting total global economic ‘liberalisation’ – a far from inevitable outcome, but a strategy chosen by the liberalisation theologists of New Labour, and their allies among the transnational elite.

  If the current horrible policies are ‘normal’, the alternatives are ‘unthinkable’. Even to mention the indictment of Tony Blair for war crimes, to oppose British cooperation with the US because it is a consistent supporter of human rights abuses overseas, or even to end arms exports is ‘unthinkable’ in the mainstream and would invite ridicule.

  Take the Guardian’s Ian Black, who writes that a key aim of the International Criminal Court is to avoid:

  politically motivated or frivolous investigations – what one expert calls the ‘nutcase factor’: for instance, of the possible pursuit of [Northern Ireland secretary] Mo Mowlam or Tony Blair for crimes against humanity.

  Only ‘nutcases’ could possibly believe Our Leader could ever be guilty of crimes against humanity. (One such ‘nutcase’ is former US Attorney General, Ramsay Clark, who lodged a complaint against Britain in July 1999 for war crimes during its assault on Yugoslavia.)12

  A customary way for the elite to deflect criticism is to term it a ‘conspiracy theory’, which is common across the ideological system. There is a good reason for it. British elites have built a fundamentally secretive political system for which they are minimally accountable to the public. As noted in chapter 13, they believe the public should have only a marginal say in this syste
m outside elections, and – to judge from some of the views expressed in the Scott inquiry – neither do they think the public should even know what the decision-making processes are. Elites are especially keen to deflect criticism exposing how the system works, which is more threatening than criticising specific policies (which can be dismissed as ‘exceptions’). The term ‘conspiracy theory’ is often deployed once criticism has moved beyond the specific and is closer to exposing how the system as a whole works.

  My view is that ‘ordinary people’ – and I count myself as one of these – generally distrust their sources of information and know, ultimately, not to believe what they read or see. This is partly because ordinary people, in my view, have a much healthier scepticism of those in power than those closer to power or those aspiring to the political class. People have little stake in the elite and therefore have no reason to trust it. But I do not believe that people can be aware of the extent to which they are being misinformed. Foreign policy is different from domestic issues, where you only have to spend time in a hospital or have a child who goes to school, to know the state of public services. But with foreign policy people are overwhelmingly reliant on news rather than personal experience, which makes indoctrination much easier. Even if people have enough self-defence mechanisms to avoid being directly told what to think, it is very likely that the media tells them what to think about.

  It is not that one cannot discover much about the reality of government policy. All the sources I have used in this book are public. But you have to make a real effort, and spend considerable time, which is simply not possible for most people. It involves proactively looking for alternative sources of information, usually a variety of different sources, to piece together an accurate picture, and then weighing these against mainstream sources.

  It also involves what the great Kenyan novelist Ngugi Wa Thiongo has called ‘decolonising the mind’. Ngugi was referring to Africans needing to free themselves from ideologies often subconsciously adopted under colonialism.13 The British public needs, in my view, to do the same thing, and consciously unlearn most of what we have been informed about and ‘educated’ on regarding Britain’s role in the world. This applies not only to the media, but to school and university too. Again, these are not easy tasks.

  Overall, I believe that people are being indoctrinated into a picture of Britain’s role in the world that supports elite priorities. This is the mass production of ignorance. It actively works against our interests, which is precisely why the ideological system is critical to the elite, who essentially see the public as a threat.

  The basic fact is that anyone who wants to understand the reality of Britain’s past and current foreign policies cannot do so by relying on the mainstream. As the chapters on Kenya, Malaya, British Guiana, Iran and others have shown, the reality of British policy is systematically suppressed; whole episodes in Britain’s history have become severely ideologically treated. Interpretations of history that accord with the preferences of elites are the dominant ones. Given the extent of this ideological treatment of the past, what has happened is akin to the destruction of history. The task of any independent historian is to reconstruct real-life history, to rescue it from a self-serving web of deceit.

  In the chapters that follow in this section I try to recover from the official memory hole the terrible reality of some other buried government policies, big polices which have been excised from history across the mainstream: such as complicity in the slaughter of a million people in Indonesia, and the removal of the entire population of Diego Garcia.

  20

  INDONESIA: COMPLICITY IN A MILLION DEATHS

  I have never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change.

  Britain’s ambassador to Indonesia, letter to the Foreign Office, 1965

  IN JULY 1996, I published an article in the Observer revealing British complicity in the slaughter of a million people in Indonesia in 1965. The article was based on the release of formerly secret files available at the Public Record Office. I only just managed to persuade the editors to publish it after the Guardian turned it down. Following the appearance of the article, I did a couple of minor radio interviews. The story then disappeared into oblivion, with only one or two subsequent mentions in the mainstream media.

  I happened to be watching the ITV lunchtime news on 1 January 1997, which carried a report on just-released secret files from 1966. It mentioned two items: a row between prime minister Harold Wilson and the governor of the Bank of England over interest rates; and the world cup football match between England and Argentina. Yet the 1996 files reveal much about the British role in the 1965 slaughters – an everyday indication of media selection that keeps important issues from the public.

  The history of British complicity in massive human rights abuses in Indonesia has been buried by the mainstream media and academia. When the Suharto regime fell in May 1998, barely any journalists mentioned that Britain had supported the brutally repressive regime for the past thirty years as well as its murderous accession to power after 1965. Britain supported Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor in 1975 – killing 200,000 people, a third of the population – and proceeded to give effective support to Indonesia in its illegal occupation. This basic fact was not noticed by journalists in reporting East Timor’s independence from Indonesia in May 2002. Neither did the mainstream media appear to notice Britain’s culpability in the human rights abuses committed in East Timor around the historic election in 1999.

  The case of Indonesia shows how repressive the political culture is of basic facts when they provide the wrong picture about the role of the state. Perhaps in a democracy the truth would have been reported about British complicity in the tragedies of the peasant families massacred in 1965, the Timorese villagers sliced up by Indonesian troops in 1975, and the families forced to flee Indonesian terror in 1999. Instead, the British role in these tragic plights has been met largely by silence.

  ‘A necessary task’

  The formerly secret British files, together with recently declassified US files, reveal an astonishing story. Although the Foreign Office is keeping many of the files secret until 2007, a clear picture still emerges of British and US support for one of the postwar world’s worst bloodbaths – what US officials at the time called a ‘reign of terror’ and British officials ‘ruthless terror’.

  In his 600-page long autobiography, Denis Healey, then Britain’s Defence Minister, failed to mention at all Suharto’s brutal seizure of power, let alone Britain’s role. It is not hard to see why.1

  The killings in Indonesia started when a group of army officers loyal to President Sukarno assassinated several generals on 30 September 1965. They believed the generals were about to stage a coup to overthrow Sukarno. The instability, however, provided other anti-Sukarno generals, led by General Suharto, with an excuse for the army to move against a powerful and popular political faction with mass support, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). It did so brutally: in a few months hundreds of thousands of PKI members and ordinary people were killed and the PKI destroyed. Suharto emerged as leader and instituted a brutal regime that lasted until 1998.

  Close relations between the US and British embassies in Jakarta are indicated in the declassified files and point to a somewhat coordinated joint operation in 1965. These files show five ways in which the Labour government under Harold Wilson together with the Democratic government under Lyndon Johnson were complicit in this slaughter.

  First, the British wanted the army to act and encouraged it. ‘I have never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change’, the ambassador in Jakarta, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, informed the Foreign Office on 5 October.2

  The following day the Foreign Office stated that ‘the crucial question still remains whether the Generals will pluck up enough courage to take decisive action against the PKI’. Later it n
oted that ‘we must surely prefer an Army to a Communist regime’ and declared:

  It seems pretty clear that the Generals are going to need all the help they can get and accept without being tagged as hopelessly pro-Western, if they are going to be able to gain ascendancy over the Communists. In the short run, and while the present confusion continues, we can hardly go wrong by tacitly backing the Generals.

  British policy was ‘to encourage the emergence of a General’s regime’, one intelligence official later explained.3

  US officials similarly expressed their hope of ‘army at long last to act effectively against Communists’ [sic]. ‘We are, as always, sympathetic to army’s desire to eliminate communist influence’ and ‘it is important to assure the army of our full support of its efforts to crush the PKI’.4

  US and British officials had clear knowledge of the killings. US Ambassador Marshall Green noted three weeks after the attempted coup, and with the killings having begun, that: ‘Army has … been working hard at destroying PKI and I, for one, have increasing respect for its determination and organisation in carrying out this crucial assignment’. Green noted in the same despatch the ‘execution of PKI cadres’, putting the figure at ‘several hundred of them’ in ‘Djakarta area alone’ [sic].5

  On 1 November, Green informed the State Department of the army’s ‘moving relentlessly to exterminate the PKI as far as that is possible to do’. Three days later he noted that ‘Embassy and USG [US government] generally sympathetic with and admiring of what army doing’ [sic]. Four days after this the US embassy reported that the army ‘has continued systematic drive to destroy PKI in northern Sumatra with wholesale killings reported’.6