Blair Inc--The Man Behind the Mask

by Francis Beckett

  3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaWWw1lwwpE

  4 Authors’ interview with Ken Olisa, 2014

  5 Jonathan Aitken, Nazarbayev and the Making of Kazakhstan (Continuum, 2009)

  6 Independent, 31 October 2011: http://www.independent.co.uk/

  news/people/profiles/the-two-

  faces-of-tony-blair-6255021.html

  7 Independent, 12 March 2011: http://www.independent.co.uk/

  news/people/profiles/goga-ashkenazi-

  by-royal-ascent-2239797.html

  8 Daily Mail, 15 December 2011: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/

  news/article-2074374/Goga-Ashkenazi-

  Prince-Andrews-pal-joy-killing-wolf.html

  9 http://www.tap-ag.com/the-pipeline/

  the-big-picture/southern-gas-corridor

  10 www.bbc.co.uk, 9 October 2013: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24450227

  11 Washington Post, 9 October 2013: http://www.washingtonpost.com/

  blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/10/09/oops-azerbaijan-

  released-election-results-before-voting-had-even-started/

  CHAPTER SIX

  BURMA’S MILITARY GOVERNMENT CALL IN BLAIR

  ‘Blair doesn’t seem to have bothered to meet any grassroots or human rights groups before meeting Thein Sein and government representatives.’

  – MARK FARMANER OF BURMA CAMPAIGN UK.

  One of the many dictators to benefit from Blair’s advice is the Burmese military, though it is not paying for it – yet, anyway. In October 2012 the former PM turned up on a quiet visit to Burma with colleagues from TBA, and the British ambassador joined him in his meetings with government ministers.

  The Burmese newspaper The New Light of Myanmar reported that Blair had ‘led a delegation’ to Burma, and spoke with the lower house speaker Shwe Mann. It said they discussed ‘cooperation in bilateral ties’ and parliamentary affairs. The British Embassy said Blair was there on behalf of the Office of Tony Blair – interestingly, not for one of his charities (which would suggest pro bono work) and not for TBA (which would suggest paid work), but for the ‘Office’, which covers everything he does. It looks as though, at that stage, Blair had not decided whether Burma was a potential client for TBA, or a potential case for assistance from the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, or something else.

  He was there again in March 2013, according to information obtained from the Foreign Office under the Freedom of Information Act by the Burma Campaign UK. He met the Vice President Nyan Tun (former commander-in-chief of the navy) and Minister Soe Thein (another former naval commander-in-chief) at the presidential palace in Naypyidaw, the new capital.

  The trip was not publicised, but news got out to the independent Irrawaddy Journal. When the newspaper approached Blair’s office, a spokesperson said, ‘At the present time we are simply having wide-ranging discussions with the [Burmese] government on the development of the country because Mr Blair is interested in it.’

  He was there for a third time on 3–4 August 2013, and this time he was not accompanied by the ambassador or any of the Embassy staff when he saw the President and other government officials – he had only his own aides with him. This meeting came just a fortnight after Burmese President, General Thein Sein, was in London to meet Prime Minister David Cameron.

  This timing cannot have been accidental. It tells us that, at any rate, one of the matters on which Blair is advising Thein Sein is his relationship with Britain, and probably with the West generally. During 2014, journalists who know Burma well noticed that Thein Sein was behaving in a far more sophisticated and media-savvy way with the international community, and have speculated that he is getting advice from someone.

  ‘He’s much better with foreign governments and much better with their media than he used to be,’ says one close observer. ‘He has pre-prepared messages for the media. When he is asked a question that isn’t answered by one of his pre-prepared messages, he gives one of these messages anyway. He’s been getting some training from somewhere.’

  The old team has assembled in Burma. Jonathan Powell has turned up, training politicians in peace-making. He has arranged for Burmese political figures to visit Northern Ireland to meet the IRA and learn how they made peace – an idea suggested to the UK government by the Burma Campaign UK, but the Campaign has now been shut out and Powell entrusted with the implementation. One of Blair’s staff, Shruti Mehrotra, is working with one of the Burmese ministers, Soe Thein.

  Mehrotra is one of those bright young people whom Blair inherited from his friends in the Monitor Group (see Chapter 4). It is also the same consultancy that provided both of Blair’s men in the Emir of Kuwait’s office as well as Blair’s ‘government consultant’ covering Dubai and its neighbour Abu Dhabi. Blair began to use Monitor staff in 2008. For a while, TBA and Monitor had a very close relationship. But, in November 2012, Monitor was unable to pay its bills and was forced to file for bankruptcy protection – we shall revisit this episode in the chapter on Libya.

  Mehrotra has also managed humanitarian relief for international NGOs and worked for the World Economic Forum. Her first job for Blair was as his representative in Guinea.

  Mark Farmaner at Burma Campaign UK says, ‘Blair doesn’t seem to have bothered to meet any grassroots or human rights groups before meeting Thein Sein and government representatives.’1 What his motives are for courting Burma’s leaders are unclear, for, as Farmaner notes, ‘As Prime Minister, Tony Blair showed little interest in Burma.’ He promised to introduce tougher sanctions when campaigning for office, but backtracked once in government. ‘The most we got was a bland three-line statement on [Burmese opposition politician and democracy leader] Aung San Suu Kyi’s birthday,’ says Farmaner.2

  Now he is taking an interest, and the reason is, like most things Blair does, a closely guarded secret. Zoya Phan, one of the Burmese staff of Burma Campaign UK, wrote three times in 2013 to Blair’s office on the campaign’s behalf, and got no reply.

  The fourth time, a letter arrived in reply, which is an exemplar of the Tony Blair way of dealing with requests for information. The address on the notepaper was a PO box, and there was no signature nor even a name at the bottom – it was merely ‘signed’ ‘The Office of Tony Blair’. It was dated November 2013, rather than with an exact date. It read,

  Dear Ms Phan

  Thank you for getting in touch with your own [sic] enquiry and please accept our apologies for the delayed response.

  Tony Blair takes a keen interest in the region. During his visits to Myanmar, he has met a number of political figures, including Ministers and Aung San Suu Kyi, to discuss politics, reform and global issues.

  We are currently carrying out governance work on a short term basis, supporting the government to build delivery mechanisms to help deliver their long term strategic goals. This work is being carried out on a pro bono basis and is very similar to the work that Mr Blair does in Africa for one of his charities, the Africa Governance Initiative.

  Yours sincerely

  The Office of Tony Blair

  ‘We are currently carrying out governance work on a short[-]term basis, supporting the government to build delivery mechanisms to help deliver their long[-]term strategic goals’ is a masterpiece of drafting, designed to give not one scrap of information away. What work? What mechanisms? What strategic goals? Do these goals perhaps involve some moves to democracy, or do they involve finding ways of burnishing the image of the existing undemocratic regime?

  Is Blair, as Farmaner hopes, going to try to avert what many observers think is impending genocide? The Burma Campaign, said Farmaner, hoped at first that Blair was there ‘on behalf of his Faith Foundation, perhaps in response to the recent anti-Muslim and anti-Rohingya [an ethnic group] nationalism from some Burmese Buddhists. However, he hasn’t met with any Rohingya representatives before meeting the government or others, which seems strange.’3

  The Tony Blair Faith Foundation does take some limited interest in what is happening to the R
ohingya. According to its spokesperson, ‘We examine all sorts of aspects of religious dynamics in foreign policy and conflicts around the world through our Faith and Globalisation course, run in 23 universities. This includes looking at a wide range of conflicts with a religious dimension such as in Myanmar, where Muslims are facing persecution.’ But the issue does not seem to form any part of Blair’s intentions in his many visits to the country. So is Blair in Burma, as Farmaner fears, to ‘help Thein Sein make the transition from being a pariah dictatorship to being a normal dictatorship’?

  Nine out of ten of Burma’s 53 million people are Buddhists, including the current president and all heads of state. The generals who imprisoned Aung San Suu Kyi after she won the 1989 election were Buddhists, and the Burmese who stand to profit from the economic opening of the country (a powerful group of military-backed businessmen known as the ‘cronies’) are nearly all Buddhists. The opposition party, the National League for Democracy, is led almost entirely by Buddhists, and its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, is famously devout.4

  In May 2012, three Muslims allegedly raped and murdered a Buddhist girl in southern Arakan.5 On 4 June, Buddhists stopped a bus and invited non-Muslims to get off. Then they let the bus go on a short distance, stopped it again, dragged about ten Muslim passengers onto the street, and beat them to death.6

  After that, Buddhists launched coordinated attacks against Muslim neighbourhoods and villages all over Arakan state. Many Muslims were killed. Most of the displaced are in dozens of squalid camps across Arakan state. The penalty for leaving these camps is three months’ imprisonment – if a Rohingya is caught by the police. If caught by the wrong civilians, it could be lynching.7

  The Buddhists burned the Muslims’ abandoned homes and possessions. Some Muslims retaliated, and a much smaller number of Buddhists died or were driven into camps of their own after riots across the state. The government has not taken any sort of lead to stop this.

  Is this an occasion when the Tony Blair Faith Foundation can start to fulfil what it claims to be its main purpose, and teach those of different faiths to live together in mutual respect? Is Blair there to try to pave the way for democracy, and for the generals to stand down?

  Such evidence as we have been able to find suggests neither of these things. It suggests rather that he is assisting the generals to burnish their international image.

  Which is very bad news indeed, because former General Thein Sein is a particularly brutal tyrant, even by the standards of Blair clients. Burma’s military-backed government has one of the worst human-rights records in the world, and Thein Sein has been personally named in a UN report for human-rights abuses. The Burmese army rapes, loots, burns, tortures and kills. Forced labour is commonplace and the many political prisoners are routinely tortured. The army has child soldiers and uses rape as a weapon against ethnic minorities.

  Aung San Suu Kyi spent more than fifteen years under house arrest. Her party, the National League for Democracy, won 82 per cent of the seats in elections held in 1990, but the army refused to transfer power to her. A year after she was released, during a tour of northern Burma in 2003, Aung San Suu Kyi and her supporters were attacked by the Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA), a government-sponsored militia. Seventy people were killed and more than a hundred were arrested, including Aung San Suu Kyi.

  A rigged election was held in November 2010, and a new parliament was created, dominated by pro-military parties, in which the military have 25 per cent of the seats. A clause in the constitution bars anyone from being president who has a child who is not a Burmese citizen – a clause obviously inserted to bar Aung San Suu Kyi, whose son holds British citizenship.

  As any change to the constitution requires a majority of more than 75 per cent, the military can veto any efforts in Parliament to try to make the constitution more democratic. Real power lies with the President, the Commander-in-Chief and the new National Defence and Security Council, who are not accountable to Parliament.

  Many of the most serious abuses, such as rape, torture, executions, forced labour, use of child soldiers and deliberate targeting of civilians by the Burmese Army since the government broke the ceasefire in Kachin State, have happened after Thein Sein became President in 2011.

  As far as the British government is concerned, is Blair a standard bearer or an embarrassment? Derek Tonkin, a former British ambassador to Burma, is of the opinion that he is more of the latter than the former. He notes that the British ambassador was not photographed with Blair in any official record of the visits, indicating that they were private. Tonkin says that Blair may still have received help from the Brititish ambassador with logistics and contacts, but he doubts whether Blair’s visits to Burma would be particularly welcome to Whitehall.

  The present Government has been remarkably proactive in developing its engagement with the civilianized government in Myanmar and would not want or need any particular input from Tony Blair, who has never taken a strong interest in the country. On matters like the peace process, civil and political rights in Myanmar, the UK’s Conservative Government would wish to keep this under their control, though to the extent that Tony Blair was historically involved in the peace process in Northern Ireland, he might have been invited to attend background talks when Burmese Ministers came to London. He would also no doubt as a courtesy have given the Government a brief account of any salient points arising from his visits.

  The motive for Blair’s visits to this political pariah remains murky. The best guess is that he sees the opportunity to parlay his expertise in image rebuilding to assist a client manifestly in dire need of some cosmetic surgery. The path is open for the prime-minister-as-public-relations man to develop this assignment into a big earner.

  A LUCRATIVE KOREAN JOB

  Asia provided some wealth-making opportunities for the former prime minister. One was rather lucrative. His appointment to a paid job advising a consortium of investors led by South Korean energy giant UI Energy Corporation in August 2008 stayed under wraps for two years. It came to light in 2010, two years later, when we examined the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA) records. This was the same source that disclosed Blair’s Kuwait contract.

  UI Energy is one of the biggest investors in Iraq’s oil-rich Kurdistan region, which became semi-autonomous in the wake of the Iraq War.8 It also has extensive interests in the US. What exactly Blair did for the company has never been revealed.

  UI Energy, like the UAE’s Mubadala, another Blair client, bought up Iraqi oilfields following the Iraq War. These contracts were kept secret by ACOBA. Blair repeatedly claimed to the committee, which assesses jobs taken up by former ministers, that the existence of the deal had to be kept secret at the request of the South Koreans because of ‘market sensitivities’.9

  This claim was first made by Blair in July 2008, when the committee agreed to break its normal rules and postpone publication for three months. In October, Blair’s office went back to the committee and asked for a further six months. It promised to let the committee know as soon as the ‘market sensitivity’ had passed. But it never did.

  ACOBA had to chase up Blair’s office, and the deal was at last made public in 2010, when the former prime minister was overruled by the chairman of ACOBA, Ian Lang, the former president of the Board of Trade in John Major’s government, even though Blair was still claiming the deal was still too sensitive to reveal. About the same time came the news that UI’s CEO had been imprisoned for fraud

  Blair’s fee has not been disclosed, either. A persistent rumour that it was £1 million is as likely to be an underestimate as an overestimate. When the deal was announced, the then-Tory MP Douglas Carswell, quoted in the Daily Mail on 19 March 2010, said, ‘It seems that the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has been in the pay of a very big foreign oil corporation and we have been kept in the dark about it.

  ‘Even now we do not know what he was paid or what the company got out of it. We need that inf
ormation now. This is revolving-door politics at its worst. It’s not as if Mr Blair has even stepped back from politics, because he is still politically active in the Middle East.’

  Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker said, ‘These revelations show that our former Prime Minister is for sale – he is driven by making as much money as possible. I think many people will find it deeply insensitive that he is apparently cashing in on his contacts from the Iraq War to make money for himself.’10

  Subsequently the CEO of UI Energy, Kyu-Sun Choi, was jailed for bribery in one of his country’s most notorious corruption scandals.11 He made illegal payments to influence the awarding of lucrative contracts to run a national lottery. Korean newspapers have printed pictures of Choi and Blair together, but Blair has refused to say when, or why, he met Choi.

  Blair is also advising the China Investment Corporation (CIC), which holds a £700 million share in Thames Water and an £880 million stake in the company that owns Canary Wharf, east London. Thames Water is owned by Kemble Water Holdings, a consortium formed in late 2006 by Australian-based Macquarie Group’s European Infrastructure Funds to purchase Thames Water. Other large shareholders in recent years include: the BT Pension Scheme (13%), the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (9.9%, acquired in 2011) and the China Investment Corporation (8.7%, acquired in 2012). The CIC’s investment in Thames Water came a month after the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), a £400 billion sovereign wealth fund, purchased its holding of more than £800 million, in the same company.

  Sheik Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, is one of ADIA’s board directors. He also heads Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi state investment fund, which, as we have seen, employed TBA in 2009. Blair’s debt to this sheikh is therefore considerable, for it was the same Sheik Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan who recommended his services to the President of Kazakhstan.