Web Of Deceit: Britain's Real Foreign Policy

by Mark Curtis

  Ministers permitted exports of much ‘dual-use’ equipment knowing they would be used to make weapons and help Baghdad build up its arms industry and develop weapons of mass destruction: this was clearly revealed in the Scott enquiry into arms to Iraq in the mid-1990s, brilliantly analysed by Guardian journalist Richard Norton-Taylor.58 A secret June 1988 report by MoD official, Lt. Col. Richard Glazebrook, for example, warned ministers that ‘UK Ltd is helping Iraq, often unwillingly, but sometimes not, to set up a major indigenous arms industry.’ He stated that Britain’s contribution to Iraq included establishing a research and development facility to make weapons, machinery to make gun barrels and shells, and a national electronics manufacturing complex. Taken together, the exports represented ‘a very significant enhancement of the ability of Iraq to manufacture its own arms and thus to resume the war with Iran.’59

  Machine tools from the company Matrix Churchill played a major role in this. Its final batch of exports was approved on 17 July 1990, two weeks before Iraq invaded Kuwait, sold knowing they would be used to make shells and missiles. Indeed, even after the invasion of Kuwait, Britain sold 5,000 shells to Jordan, despite knowledge that it was a diversionary route for exports to Iraq.60

  One of the absurdities of the current crisis is that London and Washington are attacking Iraq supposedly on the basis of the latter’s development of weapons of mass destruction aided by London and Washington. Exports from Britain included three tonnes of sodium cyanide and sodium sulphide, that can be used as nerve gas antidotes, delivered in April 1989, and plutonium, zirconium, thorium oxide, and gas spectrometers, all essential for nuclear technology. A 1992 UN report noted that Matrix Churchill machine tools exported to Iraq had ‘technical characteristics required for producing key components needed in a nuclear programme’. An unnamed nuclear inspector told the Independent in November 1992 that machinery supplied by Matrix Churchill was at an engineering complex used for producing gas centrifuges and at a manufacturing site involved in producing calutrons, needed to make nuclear weapons.61

  In March 1989, the government agreed to provide export credits to underwrite goods from Matrix Churchill that a civil servant warned were bound for an Iraqi ‘chemical weapons factory’. The previous month, ministers approved another batch of Matrix Churchill exports to Iraq that included computer-controlled lathes capable of making shell casings or centrifuges for enriching uranium. In 1990, Foreign Office minister William Waldegrave approved an Iraqi order for integrated circuits capable of being customised for use in nuclear weapons, chemical and biological warheads and delivery systems. In the end this equipment was not provided because Baghdad delayed providing letters of credit.62

  The month before Iraq invaded Kuwait, the US tried to persuade the Foreign Office to prevent Britain’s export of vacuum furnaces to Iraq since they could ‘enhance Iraq’s nuclear or missile capabilities’. Waldegrave nevertheless approved this export but the August invasion made it academic.

  Defence Intelligence Staff warned in the 1990s that there was a ‘strong possibility’ that British chemicals exported to Egypt were being passed to Iraq; nevertheless, many licences were granted by ministers. Exports to Egypt also included parts for ground-to-ground missiles which could be adapted to fire chemical weapons. After the Gulf War, UN inspection teams in Iraq discovered missiles of the same type fitted with nerve-gas warheads. International Military Services, a wholly owned subsidiary of the MoD, supplied chemical agent antidotes to Jordan despite repeated warnings from the Defence Intelligence Staff that they were likely to be diverted to Iraq. Thatcher personally signed a £270 million military package to Jordan in 1985, which included the sale of 1,000 chemical warfare training suits. In fact, Britain sold Iraq 10,000 NBC (nuclear, biological and chemical) protective suits which the Iraqis might have used for their first experimental use of poison gas against Iranian troops in late 1983.63

  This trade continued throughout the late 1980s when Baghdad was ordering the destruction of 3,000 Kurdish villages in a gruesome terror campaign (the same Kurds we now are ‘defending’ out of our natural humanitarianism). A key date is March 1988, when Iraqi forces used poison gas at the town of Halabja, killing 5,000 Kurds, an event now invoked to show that the Saddam regime is the personification of evil. While this is surely true, London’s reaction then was instructive.

  As noted above, many military-related exports were approved to Iraq after March 1988; in fact, London deepened its military support for Saddam after Halabja. First, the government expressed its outrage over the use of chemical weapons by doubling export credits for Baghdad, which rose from £175 million in 1987 to £340 million in 1988. A DTI press release of November 1988 cheerfully boasts that export credits ‘are almost double those for 1987’ and ‘this substantial increase reflects the confidence of the British government in the long term strength of the Iraqi economy and the opportunities for an increased level of trade between our two countries following the ceasefire in the Gulf war.’64

  Second, the government made it easier to sell arms to Iraq by relaxing the export guidelines. Five months after Halabja, Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe noted in a secret report to Thatcher that with the Iran-Iraq peace deal agreed in August ‘opportunities for sales of defence equipment to Iran and Iraq will be considerable’. The secrecy of this policy was vital, since, as one Foreign Office official noted, ‘it could look very cynical if, so soon after expressing outrage about the treatment of the Kurds [at Halabja], we adopt a more flexible approach to arms sales.’

  In October 1989 Foreign Office minister William Waldegrave noted of Iraq that ‘I doubt if there is any future market of such a scale anywhere where the UK is potentially so well-placed’ and that ‘the priority of Iraq in our policy should be very high.’ The government had already allowed numerous British companies to exhibit equipment at the Baghdad arms fair in April, attended also by arms salesmen from the government’s Defence Exports Services Organisation.65

  Third, the government only went through the motions of protest at Iraq’s use of chemical weapons. For almost a year after Halabja Whitehall refused to concede that Iraq had definitely used chemical weapons, stating that the evidence was ‘compelling but not conclusive’. Only in January 1989 did it admit that the evidence was ‘convincing’. The US organisation Human Rights Watch recently said that when it collected evidence of abuses at Halabja and elsewhere in the Kurdish region at that time, the Foreign Office ignored it. It also said that the government was ‘singularly unreceptive’ to its campaign to indict the Iraqi regime at the international court of justice.66

  Consistent with a key theme of this book that Britain tends to side with aggressors, Whitehall did manage at this time to block some chemical warfare-related exports to Iraq. A story on 26 April 1988 in the Independent noted that British export restrictions were preventing a group of scientists and doctors sending defensive equipment to Kurdish civilians attacked with poison gas. The report noted that ‘according to the group their attempts to buy equipment have been rebuffed by companies acting on instructions from the Ministry of Defence.’67

  Britain’s backing for Saddam in the 1980s also ensured that London turned a blind eye to Iraqi assassinations of political opponents abroad, including in London – a form of terrorism, that is, at which our leaders now supposedly reel in horror. Britain even helped train the Iraqi military under Saddam, though little is publicly known about this programme. MI6 is believed to have put Barzan Tikriti, then Saddam’s chief of intelligence, into contact with former SAS officers to train Iraqi special forces at a sensitive military location in Iraq.68

  The extent of US aid in developing Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction has recently emerged in reports by the US Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. They reveal that the US sold anthrax, nerve gas, West Nile fever germs and botulism to Iraq up until March 1992, even after the Gulf War, as well as germs similar to tuberculosis and pneumonia. Britain sold the drug pralidoxine, an antidote to nerve ga
s, in March 1992. US assistance included ‘chemical warfare-agent precursors, chemical warfare-agent production facility plans and technical drawings, chemical warfare-filling equipment, biological warfare-related materials, missile fabrication equipment and missile system guidance equipment’.69

  Soon after Halabja, the US approved the export of virus cultures and a $1 billion contract to design and build a petrochemical plant the Iraqis planned to use to produce mustard gas. ‘The use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern’, Walter Lang, a former senior US defence intelligence officer recently told the New York Times.70

  The third test: Forgetting Turkey

  If London’s support for Saddam during brutalities against Kurds is widely known, what is not widely known is a worse recent case of similar atrocities committed by our ally, Turkey, again with British backing. Tony Blair has said that Britain ‘could not allow in the case of Kosovo ethnic cleansing and genocide to happen right on the doorstep of Europe and do nothing about it’.71 But this is simply untrue, if we look at this other country on the doorstep of Europe, next door to Iraq, which further reveals the British government’s attitude towards human rights.

  Then Defence Secretary George Robertson said in 1998:

  I hope that the Turkish government will use their discretion and wisdom when the world community is focusing on the iniquities of Saddam and will be as generous and humanitarian to the Kurds as they have been in the past.72

  These astonishing words were said of a Turkish government that over the previous four years had destroyed 3,500 Kurdish villages, made at least 1.5 million people homeless and internally displaced, and killed untold thousands more. Turkish abuses committed in the campaign against the PKK Kurdish organisation in the southeast of the country reached their peak in 1994–6, but have continued in the New Labour years.

  In that peak period of atrocities, the British government under John Major stepped up arms exports to Turkey and continued trade links and normal diplomatic relations. The figures show that Britain delivered more weapons (£68 million worth) to Turkey in 1994 – the year Ankara began major offensive operations against the Kurds – than in previous years. Exports trailed off the following year and reached a new peak of £107 million in 1996. Britain also provided export credits for arms and military equipment in this period, reaching £265 million worth in 1995. British equipment was used by Turkish forces for repression, including armoured cars and the Akrep vehicle, produced locally in Turkey under licence from Land Rover, which was used by Turkish forces pursuing Kurds over the border into northern Iraq.73

  Only eleven export licence applications for arms and military equipment to Turkey were refused between 1 January 1994 and November 1997, spanning the end of the Conservative government and the beginning of the Blair government.74

  Atrocities substantially decreased at the end of the 1990s since the scorched earth policy succeeded in terrorising the population and pacifying the region. The PKK renounced the armed struggle in 1999 and its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, was captured by the Turkish authorities. However, abuses against Kurds in the southeast of the country are ongoing, a story now almost totally buried in the media, while Blair’s claims to be acting in defence of human rights in the region go largely unchallenged.

  Kurds had been forced from their homes by government gendarmes and ‘village guards’ whom Ankara had armed and paid to fight the PKK. This was an arbitrary and violent campaign marked by hundreds of ‘disappearances’ and summary executions. Villagers’ homes were torched, and their crops and livestock destroyed before their eyes. As of early 2003, hundreds of thousands of people forced out of their homes by Turkish security forces in this way are unable to return to their homes. Most live in poverty and conditions of overcrowding in cities across Turkey. Local governors and gendarmerie are forbidding some returns on the grounds that villages are within restricted military zones. Others have found that village guards have occupied their lands while many are too afraid to return lest they be detained and harassed. Governors are often refusing villagers the right to return unless they sign a form relinquishing all rights to compensation. The form also contains a declaration that excuses the state from criminal responsibility for the displacements.75

  According to Human Rights Watch, ‘the government village return programme is largely fictional and most abandoned settlements remain no-go areas, in some cases occupied by government-armed village guards.’ Turkish forces are continuing sporadic forced evacuations and destroying houses in the Kurdish areas. In a number of recent judgements, the European Court of Human Rights has said that security forces are responsible for house destruction, torture, ‘disappearance’ and extra-judicial execution in the southeast of the country.76

  Ankara scored a major success in January 2000 when the EU decided to make it a candidate for joining the EU (to be reviewed in 2004). Since then Turkey has tried to convince the world that it is drastically improving its human rights record. Human Rights Watch initially noted that Ankara’s strategy ‘consisted mainly of vague and general undertakings that were clearly designed to delay or avoid significant change’. For example, in October 2001 the government announced constitutional changes supposedly to improve human rights; but within forty-eight hours, a book by a Kurdish writer was banned, a local Kurdish politician was detained, trade unionists were indicted for preparing invitations to a meeting in the Turkish and Kurdish languages, a journalist was sentenced to twenty months’ imprisonment and a magazine was shut down. By early 2002, Amnesty International was saying that ‘no concrete steps have been taken at grass roots level to effect real improvement in the human rights situation.’77

  Major human rights improvements did occur in 2002, however. In August the Turkish parliament voted to lift many restrictions on the use of the Kurdish language in broadcasting and education, ending decades of discrimination. Yet numerous restrictions on human rights remain: Turkish law continues to heavily constrain free expression, Kurdish former parliamentarians such as Leyla Zana remain in jail after a plainly unfair trial, and police torture remains systematic and widespread.

  A former president of Turkey’s parliamentary human rights commission has said that 90 per cent of imprisoned children have been tortured in police custody. Many lawyers and human rights defenders say the use of torture and ill treatment has increased in recent years while ‘the climate of impunity for torture [has] remained unchanged’, according to Human Rights Watch. It remains to be seen whether the new Turkish laws will have any effect on torture.78

  How has New Labour reacted to this situation of horrific and ongoing human rights abuses on the doorstep of Europe and just over the border from Iraq? The government issued 101 export licences for arms and military equipment to Turkey in its first half year in office, from May to December 1997, rejecting just one application. Arms exports were worth £84 million in 1998, dropping to £9.5 million in 1999 before rising to £34 million in 2000 and £179 million in 2001.79

  Dozens of Turkish military officers are undergoing training in Britain, as are the Turkish police, guilty of many of the worst human rights abuses. The police staff college at Bramshill even trained a chief superintendent from Northern Cyprus, brutally invaded by Turkey in 1974 and remaining under illegal occupation.80

  Arms exports and training are to the real power brokers in Turkey, the military. The military’s National Security Council does not make government policy and its role is technically an advisory one, but in reality it sets the parameters within which government policy is made. It can effectively remove prime ministers, as it did in the military coup of 1980 that instituted a bloody regime. It also did so in June 1997 when elected prime minister Necmettin Erbakan of the Islamist Welfare party was forced to ‘resign’ in an effective coup by the military.

  A wire story just before the coup noted a classified report presented to Bill Clinton characterising Erbakan as having an ‘unfriendly stance’ towards the US, especially on the ‘def
ence accord Turkey signed with the United States’. The report said that the Welfare party was threatening the country’s secular status which ‘was working perfectly for seventy years’ and hailed the military as a ‘guardian of the Turkish republics’ secular character’.81

  This effective coup against an elected leader elicited not the slightest concern from the British government, or media, as far as I can tell: testimony to the same contempt for democracy evident in the case of Russian destruction of Chechnya under elected president Maskhadov; and indeed evident throughout the post-war period (see chapter 10).

  Turkish Chief of the General Staff, General Kivrikoglu, said in October 2001 that as long as there was a ‘reactionary danger’ – code for the threat of Islamist parties gaining ascendancy – the military would be ready ‘for a thousand years’ to intervene in politics. Human Rights Watch comments that ‘there can be little confidence in the stability of democracy and law while the military openly threatens democratically elected politicians in this way.’82

  Britain has consistently downplayed massive human rights violations by Iraq’s neighbour, and never seriously pressed the Turkish government. London says that ‘Turkey is an important partner for Britain and the EU, a NATO ally which provided vital support in the Gulf and Kosovo crises and a major market for UK exporters’. In 1998 Britain identified Turkey as ‘a top emerging market’ and initiated a campaign entitled ‘Turkey – Positioned for Business’, before tripling the number of trade missions in the country. Britain is the largest recipient of Turkish direct investment and its third largest export market.83

  London has also aided Ankara by labelling the PKK a ‘terrorist organisation’, continuing Conservative policy. This supports Ankara’s false framing of the conflict as a war against terrorism, and is similar to helping Russia in its framing of the conflict in Chechnya (see chapter 7). The Blair government has helpfully banned the PKK in the post-September 11th clampdown. While the PKK certainly committed atrocities, the Turkish government has committed far more and has been systematically repressing the culture and identity of the Kurds as it has proceeded to obliterate their homes. Despite this, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee can still note that because of Turkey’s ‘utter commitment to fighting terrorism, Turkey is an extremely valuable ally in the ongoing war against terrorism.’84