Unpeople: Britain's Secret Human Rights Abuses

by Mark Curtis

  This war, like the war in Iraq, was invariably depicted as one of civilisation versus barbarity. In reality, although atrocities were committed on both sides, the worst abuses were committed by the British forces and their local allies. Former members of the Mau Mau movement are currently trying to sue the British government for compensation 'on behalf of the 90,000 people imprisoned and tortured in detention camps, 10,000 people who had land confiscated and a further half a million who were forced into protected villages'.48

  British repression in Kenya consisted of 'resettlement' operations that forced 90,000 people of the Kikuyu ethnic group into detention camps surrounded by barbed wire and troops, and the compulsory 'villageisation' of the Kikuyu reserves. Livestock was confiscated and many people were subjected to forced labour. 'Villageisation' meant the destruction of formerly scattered homesteads and the erection of houses in fortified camps to replace them. This was a traumatic break from the traditional Kikuyu way of life. Even when not accompanied, as it often was, by 23-hour curfews, it resulted in widespread famine and death. In total, up to 150,000 Africans may have lost their lives due to the war, most dying of disease and starvation in the 'protected villages'. Their deaths were ignored by foreign-policy planners and the mainstream media alike.

  The declassified files make clear that Britain also used the war against Mau Mau as a cover for halting the rise of other popular, nationalist forces that threatened British control of Kenya. The colonial authorities imprisoned nationalist leader Jomo Kenyatta on the charge that he was leading the Mau Mau: at the time, British officials knew this was not so. Faced with the nationalist threat to continued British control of land and general agitation for full independence, this was an early example of wiping out the threat of independent development - a key strategy of British, as well as US, planners throughout the post-war era. The pretext presented at the time, the Soviet threat, was often fabricated or exaggerated – and was nonexistent in the case of Kenya. British motives in the war and occupation of Kenya were both political (to continue to determine the future of Kenya after independence) and commercial (to ensure that the country's resources lay in the correct hands).

  The opposition in Kenya were invariably depicted in public as demonic and bloodthirsty or Soviet stooges. As the files show, Whitehall planners well understood this to be false, and they privately recognised the war was against nationalist forces. In Malaya at the same time, a similarly brutal occupation depicted Britain's opponents as 'communist terrorists' and the official rationale for the war was to stop Chinese expansion. In private, however, the Foreign Office understood the war as 'very much in defence of [the] rubber industry', then partly in British hands.49 The parallels with Iraq are difficult to overlook.

  Consider also a current occupation by Britain and the US which has been largely excluded from attention. The Chagos islands – formally known as the British Indian Ocean Territory - include Diego Garcia, a US military base from which US bombers have attacked Iraq and Afghanistan, and where al Qaeda suspects may be being held in circumstances even more clandestine than those in Cuba.

  Beginning in 1968, the entire population of Chagossians was flung off their homeland islands to make way for a US military base. Some were tricked into leaving on the promise of a free voyage; others were physically removed. The islanders have long campaigned for compensation and the right to return, outside of significant international attention. But the Blair government set itself against the Chagossians and its sustained legal campaign was rewarded in 2003 with a High Court ruling that the Chagossians' claim has 'no reasonable grounds'. The Chagossians are currently appealing.

  The giant lie at the heart of British policy was that the Chagossians were never permanent inhabitants of the islands but simply 'contract labourers'. In 1969, Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart wrote to Harold Wilson that 'we could continue to refer to the inhabitants generally as essentially migrant contract labourers and their families'; therefore, it would be helpful 'if we can present any move as a change of employment for contract workers . . . rather than as a population resettlement'. This set the scene; seven successive British governments have maintained the fiction.

  Until recently, visitors to the Foreign Office website were told that there were 'no indigenous inhabitants' on the islands. Then the wording suddenly changed and now acknowledges that there was a 'settled population'. Nearly four decades since the beginning of the depopulation, the truth was quietly admitted.

  Yet the policy has not changed. The Blair government continues to fight the Chagossians in court and in other, less transparent ways. In a landmark decision in November 2000, the High Court ruled that 'the wholesale removal' of the islanders was an 'abject legal failure' and that they could return to the small outlying islands in the group but not the largest island, Diego Garcia. This was a nightmare for British and US planners, and Whitehall immediately seemed intent on defying it. It dragged out the process of researching island resettlement, and then concluded that resettlement was unfeasible anyway. A Foreign Office memo to a parliamentary inquiry stated that resettlement of the outlying islands would be 'impractical and inconsistent with the existing defence facilities'. It added that 'our position on the future of the territory will be determined by our strategic and other interests and our treaty commitments to the USA'. The memo said nothing about the government's obligations to the rights of the islanders.

  The government was in effect already preventing the Chagossians from returning to their islands, when it delivered a stunning blow in June 2004. Instead of using the normallegislative process, it resorted to a remnant of the royal prerogative and announced two 'orders in council' to bar the Chagossians from returning even to the outlying islands. Announcing the decision in parliament, Foreign Office minister Bill Rammell said that as a result of the new orders 'no person has the right of abode in the territory or has unrestricted access to any part of it'. He also said that 'these two orders restore the legal position to what it has been understood to be before the High Court decision of 3 November 2000'.50 This showed, even more clearly than in the case of Iraq, how the government had captured the legal process and was using it for political ends, a situation only usually pertaining in totalitarian states.

  Examples of past and present occupations bode ill for the future of Iraq. Yet such grotesque occupations are no more unusual than promoting 'regime change', another virtually permanent Anglo-American activity, with similar consequences. The current mainstream debate over the tension between state sovereignty and intervention, and changing the so-called traditional 'presumption against intervening in foreign countries', must surely be a joke: Attempting to overthrow unwanted governments is a systematic feature of British foreign policy.

  Consider, for example, the long list of governments that Britain has itself directly overthrown or tried to overthrow: Iran (1953), British Guiana (1953 and 1963), Egypt (1956), Indonesia (1957-1958, 1965), Yemen (1962-1970), Oman (1970), Libya (1996), Yugoslavia (1999), Afghanistan (2001). There are also numerous cases where Britain has welcomed the overthrow of governments by the US, such as: Guatemala (1954), Iraq (1963), Vietnam (1963), Dominican Republic (1965), Chile (1973), Nicaragua (1980s) and Panama (1989).

  Even a cursory understanding of past and current occupa- tions and regime change by Britain and the US provides good insight into the supposed commitment to 'democracy' and 'human rights' in Iraq.

  2

  THE IRRELEVANCE OF

  INTERNATIONAL LAW

  The March 2003 invasion of Iraq was an act of international aggression, an apparent violation of the Nuremberg principles applied to German leaders after the Second World War. It stands as the supreme international crime for which Blair and other ministers might be judged as war criminals.

  'The British government repeatedly asserts that its actions in Iraq were intended to 'uphold UN resolutions'; at the same time, its invasion was a wholesale violation of the UN charter. Faced with massive opposition to war at home and around t
he world, British officials tried to get UN cover for their actions. They attempted to secure a Security Council resolution specifi- cally authorising war; the process involved the intense lobbying of other countries and even allegedly spying on other UN members. It appears that Blair had pushed George W. Bush to secure UN acquiescence in an attack on Iraq rather than immediately acting unilaterally – on the understanding that if the UN failed to authorise a US attack, the US would act anyway, and Britain would support it.

  The UN was given an ultimatum clearly outlined by Blair in an interview in October 2002. He said that Iraq:

  is best dealt with through the United Nations . . . but nobody should be in any doubt that if it isn't dealt with in that way, it has got to be dealt with differently.1

  Former International Development Secretary Clare Short said following her resignation that the 'search for a diplomatic solution' to the crisis over Iraq was a charade. The effort was made to go through the UN 'for the sake of international public opinion' and 'they wanted to be free to act, having tried the UN, when they wanted to act'. Crucially, she also stated that 'this way of making the decision led to the lack of proper preparation for afterwards and I think that a lot of the chaos, disorder and mess in Iraq flowed from not having made the decision properly and made the preparations properly'.2

  The Blair government had also prepared itself for further ignoring the UN in case France or Russia vetoed a second resolution, by inventing a term outside international law called an 'unreasonable veto', that would allow it to proceed to war. Once it became clear that other states would not support a resolution authorising war, British officials publicly blamed France, whose refusal to support war at that time was merely consistent with almost every other state in the UN. Many parts of the mainstream media wilfully participated in the fabrication of a convenient French scapegoat.

  All the evidence indicates that the invasion was illegal, and that the government understood it to be so. The implications of this are massive: they effectively state that international law is seen as irrelevant.

  The illegal invasion

  The view of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, just before military action started, was that 'if the US and others were to go outside the Security Council and take unilateral action they would not be in conformity with the [UN] charter'.3

  Former UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, Dennis Halliday, has similarly said that the invasion of Iraq 'constitutes blatant aggression by the United States and Britain outside the bounds of the United Nations without any resolution under chapter 7 of the charter in support'. He added that 'it's an extraordinary adventure for two permanent members of the UN Security Council to undertake a war in complete breach of the charter'.4

  An overwhelming majority of international lawyers appear to agree that the war could not have been legal, since the UN charter permits military action only if conducted in self-defence or if specifically authorised by the Security Council. Even Richard Perle, a leading US neo-conservative and then adviser to President Bush, said, 'I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing', admitting that 'international law . . . would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone'.5

  The evidence suggests that the British government knew that the invasion was illegal. Doubts about the legality of the war were expressed by the entire Foreign Office legal establishment, the press has reported. The deputy head of the Foreign Office's legal team, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, resigned and later said that 'I did not agree that the use of force against Iraq was lawful'.6 The Guardian's Richard Norton-Taylor, who has extensive security and intelligence connections, wrote that 'not a single government lawyer or senior official in Whitehall has told me that the war, in their view, was legal'.7

  Also, consider the government's statements on UN resolution 1441, passed by the Security Council in November 2002.

  Much of the debate on legality has focused on whether this resolution was sufficient to legalise a military attack. It merely authorised 'serious consequences' if Iraq failed to comply, not specifically the use of force, and required the Security Council to have further discussions if Iraq were to breach the resolution. Indeed, if it had been understood by many of the states who voted for this resolution that it was authorising force, it would not have passed, since most of the world was opposed to the Anglo-American position.

  An even clearer indication that resolution 1441 did not authorise war is that both Blair and Straw had said so. Blair's statement on resolution 1441 on 8 November 2002 noted:

  In the event of Saddam refusing to cooperate or being in breach, there will be a further discussion, as we always said there would be. To those who fear this resolution is just an automatic trigger point, without any further discussion, paragraph 12 of the resolution makes it clear that this is not the case.8

  Just before the invasion, on 12 March 2003, however, Blair told the House of Commons: 'As the Foreign Secretary has pointed out, resolution 1441 gives the legal basis for this [war]'.9

  Jack Straw also said elsewhere that although resolution 1441 did not provide the trigger for war, neither was a second resolution required. He told a parliamentary inquiry on 4 March 2003 that 'in those circumstances where you have got a further material breach you then have the Council meeting for an assessment of the situation'. Straw added that 'but what the Council has to do . . . is to consider the situation, not necessarily to pass a second resolution'. Then he added that 'it is for the Security Council to confirm whether there has been a material breach' under resolution 1441.10

  After the invasion Straw told the committee that:

  It was equally accepted by us that there was no 'automaticity' in 1441. In other words there had to be a process leading towards any military action in the event of noncompliance by Iraq, which process we followed.11

  The 'process' Britain and the US 'followed' was of course one of proceeding to war; there was no substantive discussion in the Security Council that gave backing to the war lobby.

  Until just before the invasion, Attorney General Lord Goldsmith's view was that a second Security Council resolution authorising force was required.12 Only five days after this view was reported in the Guardian, Goldsmith announced on 17 March that the war would be legal. Hand-picked by Blair for his role, Goldsmith appears to have acquiesced in the demands of his political master. At the time of writing, the government has long resisted calls to publish his official advice. Whitehall dropped the case against former GCHQ employee Katherine Gun after the defence made clear it was pushing to make available in court the government's legal case for the war.

  Goldsmith argued that the authority to use force was based on the combined effects of resolutions 678, 687 and 1141 and that since Iraq was failing to comply with resolution 1441 then 'the authority to use force under resolution 678 has revived and so continues today'. Yet, on the same day, Jack Straw wrote a letter to the Foreign Affairs Committee saying the opposite:

  It is important to stress that SCR 1441 did not revive the 678 authorisation immediately upon its adoption. There was no 'automaticity'. The resolution afforded Iraq a final opportunity to comply and it provided for any failure by Iraq to be considered by the Security Council.13

  Again, there was no substantive consideration – and Straw's letter must therefore constitute a further admission by the government that it understood the war was illegal.

  As argued by Keir Starmer QC, a barrister specialising in international human-rights law, resolution 678 of November 1990 authorised force simply to eject Iraq from Kuwait. Resolution 687, passed at the end of military action against Iraq in April 1991, does not authorise the use of force; it does require Iraq to destroy all WMD but this is for the Security Council, not the US and Britain, to decide. Former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has also said that the war was illegal and that while it was possible to argue that Iraq was in breach of UN resolutions since 1991, the 'ownership' of those resolutions rested with the entire UN Security Council, not the
US and Britain.14

  The Butler report makes clear that when the government was considering the option of military action against Iraq in March 2002, its advice was that 'regime change of itself would have no basis in international law'. It could only be justified if Iraq were to be held in breach of resolution 687. Yet officials noted that for the Security Council to take this view 'such proof would need to be incontrovertible and of large-scale activity' – which it never was.15

  The Attorney General's judgement appears to be a lastminute fix based on an interpretation of international law so shaky as to be close to comical. It demonstrates above all the degree to which the personalised autocracy can demand the obedience of all organs of the state, including even its legal functions – perhaps the most worrying development of all.