by Mark Curtis
2001
November: At the World Trade Organisation summit in Qatar, Britain with EU allies tries to force ‘new issues’ on to the WTO’s negotiating agenda in face of opposition from developing countries. The latter remain united and the decision is delayed for two years.
2002
Foreign Office website continues to lie that there are ‘no indigenous inhabitants’ of the Chagos islands, while Foreign Office continues in effect to block islanders’ return.
2002
August: With full-scale war against Iraq appearing imminent, US and Britain secretly step up bombing campaign in ‘no fly zones’.
2002
October: In midst of continuing Russian atrocities in Chechnya, Tony Blair says ‘it is important to understand the Russian perspective’.
2003
March: After months of build-up, US and Britain launch war against Iraq, discarding the UN weapons inspection process and bypassing the UN Security Council.
FOREWORD BY JOHN PILGER
Mark Higson was the Iraq Desk Officer at the British Foreign Office in 1989. In a setting the great satirist Dennis Potter might have conjured, Higson sat behind a little Iraqi flag and directly opposite the Iran Desk man, who sat behind the Ayatollah’s flag. When I met him several years later, Higson described to me how ministers and officials systematically lied to parliament about illegal shipments of arms to Iraq. ‘The draft letters I wrote for various ministers,’ he said, ‘were saying that nothing had changed, the embargo on the sale of British arms to Iraq was the same.’
‘Was that true?’ I asked.
‘No, it wasn’t true.’
‘And your superiors knew it wasn’t true?’
‘Yes. If I was writing a draft reply to a letter from an MP for Mr Mellor or Mr Waldegrave (then Foreign Office ministers) I wrote the agreed line. But they knew things had changed. I also wrote replies to go to members of the public who were concerned about the gassing of the Kurds at Halabja by Saddam Hussein and wanted to know what the government was doing about it. A lot of MPs and members of the public thought the £340 million trade credits we gave to Iraq [following the Halabja atrocity] was absolutely disgusting.’
I said, ‘You and your colleagues at the Foreign Office knew that British weapons were going illegally to Iraq. Is that correct?’
‘Oh yes, yes. We were quite well aware that Jordan was being used [as the way into Iraq] … you see, Iraq was regarded as the big prize.’
‘So how much truth did the public get?’
‘The public got as much truth as we could squeeze out, given that we told downright lies.’1
At the 1994 public inquiry into the scandal of illegal arms sales to Iraq, Higson’s honesty was commended by Lord Justice Scott, the chairman, a rare accolade. Britain’s foreign policy establishment, Higson told the tribunal, ‘is a culture of lying’.
Tim Laxton, an auditor assisting the Scott Inquiry and one of the few to hear almost all the evidence, believes that had Scott’s terms of reference allowed him to conduct a truly open and wide-ranging investigation, ‘hundreds’ would have faced criminal investigation. ‘They would include’, he said, ‘top political figures, very senior civil servants from the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence, the Department of Trade and Industry … the top echelon of the British government.’
The glimpse that Scott and Higson gave us of the ruthless and mendacious nature of great power was unprecedented. British imperialism has been second to none in projecting itself as benign, wise and essentially truthful, even a gift to humanity. With every generation, it seems, come new mythologists. That the opposite is true may shock some people. ‘A truth’s initial commotion’, wrote the American sage Dresden James, ‘is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn’t the world being round that agitated people, but that the world wasn’t flat. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.’
Mark Curtis’ brilliant, exciting and deeply disturbing book unwraps the whole package, layer by layer, piece by piece. Not since Noam Chomsky’s Deterring Democracy has there been such a disclosure, whose publication could not be more timely. In the aftermath of September 11th, 2001, the truths told in the following pages will seem far from preposterous to a great many people, now made aware of the rapaciousness and cynicism of power politics by current events. They see clearly the exploitation of September 11th by George W. Bush’s gang and by Tony Blair and the unprovoked aggression against Iraq. At the time of writing these words, the claim of Blair and Bush of links between Iraq and Al Qaida, as justification for an attack on Iraq, is openly derided, having been contradicted by their own intelligence agencies. This was superceded by Blair’s ‘moral argument’ for the attack, which is scorned by a significant section of the public, aware of the hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by the Anglo–American driven embargo of Iraq. Moreover, Blair’s messianic promise to ‘reorder the world’ is increasingly referred to as imperialism: until recently, a word virtually struck from the dictionary and declared unspeakable by conservatives and liberals alike.
Those who have long sought to reclaim noble words, like democracy and freedom, peace and security, from their corrupt service to imperial propaganda, can take heart from these pages. Here, the truth is told largely from official records, whose private revelations and true intentions Curtis has assembled; I know of no other historian who has mined British foreign policy files as devastatingly. Most of these files have long been in the public domain; and it shames journalism, where history’s first draft ought to be written, that most of the facts are published for the first time.
Web of Deceit follows Mark Curtis’ other works, The Ambiguities of Power and The Great Deception. These, too, were landmark books, but through no fault of the author’s, were not widely noticed, making his arrival in the mainstream all the more welcome. I am personally grateful to Mark Curtis for the fruits of his research, especially on Indonesia. It was he who first revealed British government complicity in the bloodbath that brought General Suharto to power in 1965–6 (see chapter 20). He coined a term of exquisite, black irony, ‘unpeople’, which I adopted as a description of the victims of Western state terrorism: for example, the 20,000 unpeople who died during the British-supported American attack on Afghanistan in October 2001, whose deaths are seldom, if ever compared with the deaths of the 3,000 victims of September 11th. The American dead are worthy of our grief; the Afghan dead are not, for they are unpeople, like the Iraqis, whose deaths Madeleine Albright said were ‘worth it’.
Near the top of his long list of unpeople, victims of British foreign policy, Curtis places the 1,500 Illois who were, to use the official term, ‘removed’ from their homeland in the Chagos island group in the Indian Ocean in 1966 by the government of Harold Wilson. This ruthless dispossession, secretly executed so that the largest island, Diego Garcia, could be handed to the American military, was ‘the subject of systematic lying by seven British governments over nearly four decades,’ writes Curtis. The Ministry of Defence even denied that the island had been populated at all. Today, Diego Garcia is controlled by the American air force as a staging point for its bombers that patrol and bomb the Middle East. Little is known about the fate of its people; BBC news readers routinely refer to Diego Garcia as ‘uninhabited’.
In chapter 3, ‘Explaining the “war against terrorism”’, Curtis writes: ‘The idea that Britain is a supporter of terrorism is an oxymoron in the mainstream political culture, as ridiculous as suggesting that Tony Blair should be indicted for war crimes. Yet state-sponsored terrorism is by far the most serious category of terrorism in the world today, responsible for far more deaths in many more countries than the “private” terrorism of groups like Al Qaida. Many of the worst offenders are key British allies. Indeed, by any rational consideration, Britain is one of the leading supporters of terrorism in the world today. But this simple fact
is never mentioned in the mainstream political culture.’
Indeed, it makes a mockery of the Blair government’s own ‘war on terrorism’ as any appendage of George W. Bush’s gunslinging. For the Anglo–American intelligentsia, if not for the public, it is as if there is a grand illusion, morally and intellectually, about all of this. Richard Falk, Professor of International Relations at Princeton, once described how Western foreign policy was propagated in the media ‘through a self-righteous, one-way moral/legal screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted violence.’ As Curtis points out, in Britain and the United States, the media’s relentless channelling and echoing of a veiled, violent agenda can make the difference between war and peace and, for countless unpeople, life and death. My own view is that had the great broadcasting institutions and newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic not merely channelled and echoed the agendas and lies of government, but instead exposed and challenged them, the Bush/Blair attack on Iraq would have been made untenable.
Curtis illuminates this insidious media power in the final section, ‘The Mass Production of Ignorance’, in which he describes a virulent censorship by omission that ‘promotes one key concept … the idea of Britain’s basic benevolence. Mainstream reporting and analysis usually actively promotes, or at least does not challenge, the idea that Britain promotes high principles – democracy, peace, human rights and development – in its foreign policy.’ The truth is simply left out.
Apart from the current aggression against Iraq, the only British military intervention in the past fifty years to be condemned or even questioned in the mainstream was the invasion of Egypt in 1956; and the reason was that the British elite was divided about what it called the ‘Suez crisis’. In striking contrast, there was silence in 1965 when the Labour government supplied warships, logistics and intelligence in support of General Suharto’s bloody seizure of power in Indonesia. The slaughter of perhaps a million people was simply ignored; the headlines said that communism had been defeated and ‘stability’ restored. Many years later, the BBC correspondent in Southeast Asia, Roland Challis, told me: ‘There were bodies being washed up on the lawns of the British consulate in Surabaya, and British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the Malacca Straits so that they could take part in this terrible holocaust … There was a deal, you see. In establishing the Suharto regime, the involvement of the IMF and the World Bank was part of it. Sukarno had kicked them out; now Suharto would bring them back. That was the deal.’ None of this was reported at the time. ‘It was a triumph for western propaganda,’ said Challis. ‘My British sources purported not to know what was going on, but they knew …’.
At the Labour party conference in 2001, Tony Blair declared his ‘moral commitment’ to the world. ‘I tell you,’ he said, ‘if Rwanda happened again today as it did in 1994, when a million people were slaughtered in cold blood, we would have a moral duty to act.’ The following day, this statement was reported without a single journalist reminding the British people that their government had contributed to the slaughter in Rwanda. Curtis describes how the British government ‘used its diplomatic weight to reduce severely a UN force that, according to military officers on the ground, could have prevented the killings. It then helped ensure the delay of other plans for intervention, which sent a direct green light to the murderers in Rwanda to continue. Britain also refused to provide the capability for other states to intervene, while blaming the lack of such capability on the UN. Throughout, Britain helped ensure that the United Nations did not use the word ‘genocide’ so the UN would not act, using diplomatic pressure on others to ensure this did not happen.’ Not a word about this appeared in the media at the time.
British support for the apartheid gang in South Africa and death squad regimes in Central America, British abandonment of the Chechens in Russia and the Kurds in Turkey and Britain’s long history of terrorism in the Middle East, from the use of poison gas to cluster bombs and depleted uranium, have all been consigned to what George Orwell famously called the memory hole. Curtis describes one of the major terrorist acts of the 1980s, the car bombing in Beirut in 1985 outside a mosque which killed eighty men, women and children and left more than two hundred injured. The aim of the bombers was to kill Sheikh Fadlallah, the Shia leader. He escaped. Those responsible – the CIA, Saudi intelligence and Britain’s MI6 – have never been exposed in the mainstream media.
The lessons are all too urgent in 2003. At the time of writing, the British Defence Secretary, Geoffrey Hoon, has crossed a threshold by threatening, almost as a boast, to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states. This, and the Blair government’s extraordinary military interventionism, writes Mark Curtis, ‘are sending a clear signal to others: any regime wanting to take on the West – or perhaps even any nation serious about pursuing an independent course of development – should now acquire nuclear weapons. If a country does not have these weapons, it may be threatened with destruction and pulverised, as in Afghanistan, Yugoslavia and Iraq … This lesson is surely being drawn by every repressive regime around the world, not to mention terrorist groups and perhaps some more benign governments too.’
For the rest of us, the immediate lesson to be drawn from this superb history is that a previously unidentified enemy of sanity and peace in international affairs is close to home, and that only we can do something about that.
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION
Since achieving power in 1997, New Labour government ministers have ceaselessly made extraordinary claims about the morality of their foreign policies and wanting to be a ‘force for good in the world’. Never in British history has there been such a gap between government claims and the reality of policy.
The reality is that Britain under New Labour is a systematic violator of international law and ethical standards in its foreign policy – in effect, an outlaw state. It is a key ally of some of the world’s most repressive regimes that is consistently condoning, and sometimes actively aiding, human rights abuses. During a so-called ‘war against terrorism’, Britain is in fact one of the world’s leading apologists for, and supporters of, state terrorism by allies responsible for far more serious crimes than Al Qaida or other official threats. And, in the era of globalisation, Britain under Labour is championing a fundamentalist economic ideology that is promoting the increasing takeover of the global economy by big business.
A web of deceit is obscuring this picture. People in Britain are largely unaware of what has been done in their name, even as government policies undermine our own interests. The public’s understanding of Britain’s real role in the world is being obscured by an ideological system – principally, the mainstream media – that is largely accepting at face value New Labour’s rhetoric on its moral purpose.
Current British foreign policies are generally not only immoral, but also dangerous, for the British public as well as others. These policies are helping to make the world more insecure, unequal and abusive of human rights. In the post-September 11th world, the threat of terrorism by organisations like Bin Laden’s Al Qaida is certainly real, but it is the policies of our own government, and our principal ally, the US, that are in reality the greatest threat to the public. It is in our self-interest, therefore, to press for fundamental changes to Britain’s role in the world.
Blair government claims are often extraordinary. Labour’s first Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, spoke of ‘putting human rights at the centre of foreign policy’ and outlined an ‘ethical dimension’ to foreign policy one month after taking office. Tony Blair promises to help heal the ‘scar on the conscience of the world’, referring to poverty and conflict in Africa, and to ‘fight for justice’ globally. He ceaselessly stresses the concept of global interdependence and has outlined ‘a new doctrine of international community’, saying that national interest is ‘to a significant extent governed by international collaboration’. ‘We are all internationalists now�
�, he declared in a speech in Chicago in April 1999.1
Former Foreign Office minister Peter Hain has written of ‘our mission to conquer world poverty and build international peace and a world based upon justice, equality and human rights’. The International Development Secretary, Clare Short, says that British aims are to ‘systematically reduce poverty and promote sustainable development in the poorest countries’. Even the Trade Secretary, Patricia Hewitt, says at every available opportunity that Britain is promoting ‘fair trade’ globally and is on the side of developing countries in the international trade negotiations that are reshaping the global economy. Officially, Britain is on the side of the angels.2
Never before has the public of a democratic country been subject to such an extraordinary ongoing tirade of propaganda. For the government is, quite generally, promoting actual policies that are directly opposite to this rhetoric.
The reality of Britain’s current and past role in the world can be shown by taking an independent look at current policy using a variety of sources beyond the mainstream and by revealing the formerly secret, now declassified government planning files. This book argues that we need to extricate ourselves from the web of reporting and analysis that obscures this reality and from the deceit promoted by the elite – and that behind the diplomatic language and presentation of policy-makers lies a peculiar British viciousness, evident all around the world, past and present. It is not that British elites are evil or that everything they do is immoral and dangerous. There are some exceptions to promoting generally unethical foreign policies – but they are few and pale in comparison with the broader picture.
