Blair Inc--The Man Behind the Mask

by Francis Beckett

  AGI IN RWANDA

  The AGI has no fewer than ten employees working at the heart of President Paul Kagame’s regime, including young executives from JP Morgan. Yet the man they work for is of questionable record and character. Paul Kagame has been accused of human-rights abuses, and Human Rights Watch has said that Blair’s support of Kagame has emboldened the leader to continue corrupting elections and suppressing opposition and media.

  Kagame is also suspected of involvement in genocide. Kagame’s legitimacy is questionable, as the Tutsi leader represents only 12 per cent of the country, with the remainder Hutu; Rwanda is run by the Tutsi elite. One source in the NGO sector, a frequent visitor and commentator on the country, observed that, while Kagame claimed that he was the saviour of the country, his Rwandan Patriotic Front (the ruling party of the President in the country) had killed 200,000 people. This was in the wake of the genocide in 1994 that left 800,000 people dead and ripped apart the country. Western leaders failed to act on the genocide and a residual guilt continues to affect policy.

  Blair is part of Kagame’s so-called ‘2020 Vision’ for rebuilding the country, whose goal is to create an African Singapore, focused on high technology. The same NGO source notes that ‘Kagame pitches this sort of image at foreign leaders visiting the country, like Blair. He knows exactly what foreign donors want to hear, like anti-corruption and transparency, and people like Blair buy it. A lot of the foreign donors have lost patience with the corrupt African dictators.’ This source goes on to say that, beyond the capital city of Kigali, the poverty is widespread and untouched. ‘People like Blair are swept on rapid tours of these countries, they are swept from one perfect project to the next and they think they’ve seen the country. They meet the Rwandan elite. They don’t ask the questions. They accept what they are shown. I have seen the African laugh when they put the white man back on the plane. The African leaders manipulate the naïveté of Western leaders like Blair, who have a superficial understanding.’

  And in 2013 came one of those moments of synergy, quite frequent in Blair’s post-prime-ministerial career, when two parts of his life come together. He wants to help Rwanda; he is a consultant and paid to help JP Morgan Chase. It so happened that JP Morgan Chase & Co.’s CEO Jamie Dimon announced an investment in Bridge2Rwanda’s Financial Analyst Training Program.

  The investment made business sense for CEO Jamie Dimon. He said in 2010 he was ‘incredibly impressed’ by opportunities in South Africa and the rest of the continent. ‘The growth rate of banking in emerging markets is set to be two to three times faster than that of the United States and Western Europe where most of our investment banking is currently focused.’ The comment was made after Dimon had visited South Africa with his adviser, none other than Tony Blair.

  Blair is an enthusiast for Rwanda as well – repeating data supplied by the government without challenging the fundamentals – although this is an economy largely sourced from overseas aid and from the smuggling of minerals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The country’s limited indigenous economy is provided by mining and manufacturing; the country’s lack of infrastructure and of a literate population impedes the creation of a real economy.

  The NGO source quoted earlier doubts the effectiveness of the Blair project in Rwanda. ‘The AGI people move into a ministry with people who don’t have much experience of Rwanda, and they tell civil servants what to do. Those civil servants say it’s a marvellous idea. The moment they leave, everything returns to what it was. There is a mirage of government, but nothing is done. They go along with it, because they know their aid depends on it. They also receive a per diem payment for turning up. They pay people for attending a training session. They will also hope for a reciprocal conference in London.’ She continued, ‘Nobody pretends it is anything other than a cosmetic exercise. We are all playing the game. We pretend to learn, you pretend to teach us.’

  Blair is a personal adviser to Kagame, whose Rwandan Patriotic Front is thought to also have been behind brutal killings of opposition politicians and journalists, and Blair has access to a private jet leased by Kagame. AGI has its own office in the capital Kigali, and Blair has visited the President six times since leaving office.

  Kagame, like another Blair protégé, Thein Sein of Burma, is a far more sophisticated international operator than most dictators. A private 2010 UN report, leaked to Le Monde and the New York Times, documented atrocities committed by Rwandan government troops in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo. There were also charges that the Rwandan government is increasingly authoritarian after the opposition was effectively barred from challenging Kagame in the presidential election in August that year – an election he won by a remarkable 93 per cent of the votes. He managed the same sort of majority the time before, in 2003.

  Carroll Bogert of Human Rights Watch reported in 2010,

  Kagame has denounced the UN report as fabrications from the very institution that stood aside and let the Rwandan genocide happen back in 1994. He’s also threatening to pull Rwandan peacekeepers, among the best-trained in Africa, out of Darfur.

  The UN Secretary-General paid an emergency visit to Kigali to try to repair the damage, and has delayed formal publication of the report until October 1, when the General Assembly will be safely over and done with.

  But that won’t stop Kagame from having to face awkward questions while he’s in [New York]. The UN report accuses the Rwandan army of systematically murdering tens of thousands of Hutu civilians in Congo following its invasion of Congo in 1996.

  Meanwhile, back in Rwanda, tens of thousands of civilians are estimated to have been murdered by Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front in its march to power in 1994. Kagame’s government has thwarted any attempt by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, set up by the UN Security Council, to prosecute the crimes of 1994, to prosecute officials of the RPF.

  Then there’s the steady crushing of political dissent. The New York Times has doggedly reported on the lopsided election in August 2010 that gave Kagame 93 per cent of the vote; the exclusion of opposition parties from the race; the shooting of a Rwandan general who has broken with Kagame in broad daylight in South Africa; the fatal shooting of an independent journalist reporting on the South African incident; the grisly murder of an opposition politician; the closure of two opposition newspapers.

  Kagame’s supporters say the evidence is unscientific, and none of it has stopped Tony Blair praising Kagame’s ‘visionary leadership’ and talking of ‘my good friend Paul Kagame’ – any more than it has stopped former US president Bill Clinton from calling Kagame ‘one of the greatest leaders of our time’ who ‘freed the hearts and minds of his people to think about the future’.1

  Kagame’s cheerleaders are almost a roll call of Blair’s international chums: Blair himself; Clinton; Pastor Rick Warren of America’s Saddleback Church, the very conservative and hugely wealthy American evangelist who sits on the religious advisory board of Blair’s Faith Foundation; Michael Porter, business guru and founder of the bankrupt Monitor Group. Blair’s commitment to Kagame has certainly puzzled the far-from-radical Economist magazine. Commenting on an article (published in the Guardian) written by Blair about the country on the twentieth anniversary of the start of the Rwandan genocide, The Economist said,

  There are only two possible explanations for Mr Blair’s one-dimensional appraisal of Rwanda. One is that, despite his mission to bring ‘practical change’ to the Great Lakes region, he really has only the thinnest understanding of it. Another is that, like most informed Western apologists for Mr Kagame, he considers his abuses an acceptable bill for his successes. That may be right; though it is not a view widely shared among regional experts, who fear Mr Kagame’s reluctance to relax his grip is storing up a future explosion in Rwanda. It should also be pointed out that apologists for his regime, including Mr Blair, have a lot of personal credibility invested in Mr Kagame.

  Rwanda’s progress is a rare and oft-cited case-
study in the efficacy of development aid and the new industry in state-building to which Mr Blair is an enthusiastic entrant. That is because of how impressive it is, for any poor country, let alone one recovering from an appalling conflict. So development wonks are inordinately attached to Mr Kagame, and correspondingly forgiving of his abuses. This does not mean they are cynical or wrong. It does make them partial witnesses to his regime.2

  In fact, there are signs the US may be losing patience with Kagame (as indeed it is with Blair). It is cutting aid to Rwanda and warning Kagame that he could face criminal prosecution over meddling in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo. The White House has criticised Kagame for the suppression of political activity and made clear that it does not regard Rwanda as democratic.

  But Kagame has one high-profile international friend he can rely upon. Tony Blair is willing to defend the Rwandan president regardless of allegations of human-rights abuses, political oppression and rigged elections. He told a Rwandan press conference in 2009, ‘Our consultancy is not to tell the people of Rwanda what to do, but to help get done what the President wants.’

  However, many large Western banks have yet to seriously consider Rwanda a dollar destination. ‘For the most part, big banks don’t have a presence in Rwanda,’ said Bridge2Rwanda’s managing director Clay Parker. ‘This was a good way to involve JP Morgan. They are sponsoring an educational program for finance – something where they can see their impact.’3

  Blair’s AGI operation is so fraught with political and commercial undertones that much of its evident positive import is lost. While the work his willing team of highly competent young staff in combating the Ebola epidemic makes a worthy, if limited, contribution to the international effort, the patron’s apology for the Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame is highly damaging. Kagame has arguably more blood on his hands from the killing of Hutus than Ebola will ever claim. Blair will argue he is backing a ‘moderniser’, while quietly forgetting the means he used to obtain power.

  Pragmatism infuses the former Prime Minister’s thinking as he trumpets the good deeds his AGI organisation does in Africa. Africans are too canny to see Blair as more than fellow traveller who forever mingles opportunity with promotion, self-enrichment with self-righteousness. They do not make comfortable companions.4

  Notes

  1 www.hrw.org, 19 September 2010: http://www.hrw.org/news/2010/

  09/21/rwanda-president-crisis

  2 The Economist, 7 April 2014: http://www.economist.com/blogs/blighty

  /2014/04/tony-blair-s-latest-intervention

  3 www.bloomberg.com, 30 November 2010: http://www.bloomberg.com

  /news/2010-11-30/jpmorgan-s-ceo-jamie-

  dimon-incredibly-impressed-by-africa-opportunity.html

  4 www.hrw.org, 19 September 2010: http://www.hrw.org/news/2010/09

  /21/rwanda-president-crisis

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  DOING GOD

  ‘The Tony Blair Faith Foundation communications team and the top brass spend a long time trying to second-guess what might be embarassing for Tony Blair.’

  – MARTIN BRIGHT, FORMER EDITOR FOR THE TBFF WEBSITE ‘FAITH AND GLOBALISATION’.

  Tony Blair launched the Tony Blair Faith Foundation on 30 May 2008 to ‘educate, inform and develop understanding’ about different religions. His first major speech about it, nearly two months before the launch, was on 3 April 2008 at Westminster Cathedral. Blair said he wanted his new Foundation to organise a global campaign to mobilise young people, across religious divides, to work together towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals, ‘Faith and Globalisation’.1

  Several years on, it is still hard to understand exactly what it is for, and what good it hopes to do. The confusion seems to extend to the Foundation itself. Early in 2014 the website had this to say: ‘We aim to demonstrate the vital importance of interfaith collaboration and showcase how faith communities can be huge assets to government and international policy.’ So it is not just about improving relationships between faiths, but making the influence of religion in the world stronger. It is followed by one of those meaningless feel-good sentences in which the Foundation appears to specialise: ‘We inform, educate and inspire how religion motivates the world today.’ How can you inspire how religion motivates the world?

  By December the same year, all that had gone, to be replaced by, ‘We provide the practical support required to counter religious prejudice, conflict and extremism in order to promote open-minded and stable societies.’

  What is happening here is that, throughout its life, the TBFF has two goals, and they fight each other. One is to improve the relationship between faith communities: the TBFF aims to counter extremism in the world’s six leading religions, which it identifies as Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, and Sikhism. The other seems to be to make religion a stronger force in the world.

  No one would argue with the first – if you could stop Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Jews and the rest from killing each other, you would certainly have helped towards making a better world. The second is of course far more controversial, and the website also says, ‘The TBFF aims to promote respect and understanding about the world’s major religions and show how faith can be a powerful force for good in the modern world.’

  So is it promoting peace between religions, or is it promoting religion? It seems often to want to do the second while looking as though it is only doing the first.

  In an interview with Time magazine at the time of the launch, Blair said the Foundation was ‘how I want to spend the rest of my life’, though most of his life now seems to be going into some of the other things described in this book.

  The TBFF denies that there is, or even could be, any conflict of interest with Blair’s other activities:

  Mr Blair’s charities are independent entities with their own governance structures – including chief executives who are accountable to a board of trustees. The charities are subject to Charity Commission regulation, and completely separate from Mr Blair’s commercial operation or any of his other organisations. The Trustees and the Patron have agreed a memorandum to confirm the regulations governing the relationship, and it is the board of trustees that make decisions about the charity’s activities, and it has a legal obligation to do so.

  This is an ambitious claim: that there is no conflict of interest because Blair does not control (or perhaps even influence) his charities. It seems, on the face of it, far-fetched. Insiders, speaking to us anonymously, say that while Blair seldom comes into the building – because his presence disrupts the work – it is his perceived wishes that inform pretty well every decision. Any suggested course of action must pass the test of: ‘Are we sure this will not embarrass Tony?’

  The chief executive is Charlotte Keenan, a banker who is married to a Conservative MP. She came to the TBFF in 2008 after a career in corporate finance, partly spent working for Blair’s client JP Morgan Cazenove. She is an Oxford theology graduate, was President of the Oxford Union, and studied International Relations and Public Policy at Harvard and international affairs at Columbia. The TBFF website says she ‘has extensive experience in international capital markets and M&A advisory work. Her sector focus was in industrials, mining and energy.’

  She is in regular and frequent contact with Blair, and they often travel abroad together. While Blair seldom goes to the TBFF’s Marble Arch offices, the top brass at the Foundation are frequent visitors to Blair’s headquarters in Grosvenor Square for formal meetings with him. A fairly typical meeting in Blair’s office in early 2014 consisted of Blair, Keenan, PR consultant Kate Bearman, editor of the Faith and Globalisation website Martin Bright, and Blair’s chief of staff Catherine Rimmer, a former BBC journalist.

  Keenan’s deputy, also director of programmes, Matthew Lawrence, is another former JP Morgan Cazenove banker. He, say insiders, spends most of his time travelling the world, fundraising and visiting TBFF projects. The TBFF website says
Lawrence spent fifteen years in investment banking. So both the director and her deputy are bankers by profession.

  Other senior staff include Peter Welby, son of Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, and the operations manager, Emma Selwood. According to Martin Bright, the fact that Blair often employs old friends or the children of old friends or the children of important people such as the Archbishop of Canterbury is partly explained by the fact that the security service briefed him to be careful about whom he appoints because of the risk of accidentally employing a terrorist risk.

  Peter Welby, a York University graduate who studied Arabic in Egypt, warned about Vladimir Putin’s Russia after its annexation of Crimea. ‘I fear the Government would be wise to consider reversing some defence cuts, just in case,’ he wrote in an article published on the Faith Foundation website. One of Welby’s 2014 contributions to the website is a piece entitled, ‘What is ISIS?’ He declares with the authority of a gloom-laden Middle East analyst, ‘Buoyed by its advance, the group declared a Caliphate, a move that has split the jihadi world despite long being the aspiration of such organisations. What is more shocking is that over one month since these events, the Iraqi government is yet to make any significant gains in its counter-attack.’

  Faith Foundation communications are run on Blairite lines. There are no fewer than seven communications staff, which seems excessive given the size of the organisation and how averse it is to communicating. Heading it up is communications director Parna Taylor, and a key figure is PR consultant Kate Bearman, who, like most of the leadership of the Blairite pressure group Progress, cut her political teeth in Labour Friends of Israel. Press officer is William Neal, who worked in Parliament and is a pillar of the Blairite pressure group Progress. New in 2014, Neal is not quite as averse to talking to journalists as his predecessor, but that is a low bar to jump.