Web Of Deceit: Britain's Real Foreign Policy

by Mark Curtis

  This is perhaps not surprising. Although they may seem independent and critical of government policy, most northern NGOs receive government funding and are afraid of criticising government policy outside of narrow limits. My experience is that almost all are so conservative in their basic political outlook and are themselves run undemocratically along polyarchic lines, that they could barely spot the difference between polyarchy and popular democracy anyway.

  In the earlier postwar period, the West propped up a series of straightforwardly repressive elites who did its bidding – dictators such as Mobutu in Zaire, Suharto in Indonesia, the Shah in Iran and so on. These authoritarian regimes provided the crucial ‘favourable investment climates’ for Western business. Support for repressive regimes – especially in the Middle East and Gulf – remains a cornerstone of British and Western foreign policy, and is deepening under the ‘war against terrorism’. However, under globalisation, polyarchy has been seen as a better guarantor of Western interests in most parts of the world.

  Promoting authoritarianism had previously meant the West supporting right-wing political forces, often the extreme right. Under polyarchy, the centre-right or even the centre-left can be the favoured parties. The West has backed the emergence of polyarchic political systems in, for example, Russia and other Eastern European countries, the Philippines, Chile, Nicaragua, South Africa and Haiti. These countries have all discarded authoritarian regimes but what has emerged are systems that have staved off more radical change towards popular democracy, largely preserved the social order and the role of elites and are promoting economic policies favoured by the advocates of global liberalisation.

  Take South Africa. The betrayal of South Africa, as it emerged from decades of institutionalised racism to black majority rule under the African National Congress (ANC) has been one of the most tragic episodes of recent years. Following apartheid, the advocates of global liberalisation – inside and outside the country – have created a South African economy geared to offering a generally favourable climate for investment by business. At the same time, the threat of radical change that might have principally benefited the majority of the population living in poverty has been staved off.

  Britain’s former Foreign Office Minister, Peter Hain, noted that ‘where South Africa was once the reactionary pariah of Africa, now it is the radical and progressive model’. Identically, another former Foreign Office Minister, Tony Lloyd, noted that South Africa’s ‘economic and political success acts as a model and a catalyst for other sub-Saharan African countries’.17

  The reality of South Africa’s ‘success’ has actually been persistent poverty, under which most South Africans continue to live. 100,000 jobs in the public sector and over 500,000 in agriculture have been lost in recent years. The group that has gained most, apart from whites who have retained their control of much of the economy, has been the black middle class – 20 per cent of black wage earners now take home nearly two-thirds of all income brought in by black workers. These effects derive from the ‘neo-liberal’ economic strategy imposed by the South African government with the support of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, foreign businesses and governments such as Britain.

  From the mid-1980s the issue for the US was not so much whether apartheid would be dismantled but how South African capitalism and the interests of the transnational elite in the region could be preserved following a transition period. US analyst William Robinson notes that ‘the US objective was not to disregard the ANC or Mandela, but to check the growing radicalism among the black population by developing counterweights to popular leadership through US political and economic aid programmes’.18

  In Mandela’s last month in prison in 1990 the ANC was still saying that ‘the nationalisation of mines, banks and monopoly industries is the policy of the ANC and a change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable’.19 But by the time the ANC had achieved power in 1994, free enterprise and property rights were enshrined in every major economic policy statement as well as in the Constitution itself.

  A somewhat progressive economic and social strategy – the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) – was ditched within two years, as the government adopted ‘neo-liberal’ policies that pleased foreign investors and that geared South Africa towards a more favourable investment climate. Many of the RDP’s promised reforms were never delivered and some reversed. Critical policies for the poor – such as building millions of housing units for the urban poor, radically improving terrible urban municipal services like water supply, and adopting a radical land reform programme – were undelivered or abandoned.

  South Africa expert Patrick Bond notes that ‘the consequences of a market-centred approach to low-income housing delivery were disastrous’ in the ANC’s first term. ‘The effect of the neo-liberal policy was to transfer state resources that should have gone into public or social housing, into the private sector, with little to show for it in return. Massive incentives found their way to banks and developers.’

  A key role has been played by the World Bank and the IMF. Bond notes that ‘the persuasive power of World Bank/IMF intellectual arguments … was partly to blame for the fact that a decades-old liberation movement disappointed its constituents’ entirely reasonable aspirations within months of coming to state power’. He notes further that ‘there were probably no more effective advocates for the interests of rich, white South Africans in post-apartheid South Africa than the quiet, smooth bureaucrats of the World Bank’. In virtually every area of social policy, Bank staff have worked behind closed doors and advocated policies that entrenched status quo wealth and power relations. The World Bank has been an important player in the post-1994 market-driven housing and land policies: the ‘user pays’ approach to water delivery, the increasing privatisation of infrastructure and services, and the cuts in spending on education, health and social welfare.

  On his visit to South Africa in January 1999, Tony Blair said that Pretoria’s economic strategy ‘has set South Africa on a course to tackle the needs of the disadvantaged while retaining the confidence of the markets’.20 Blair was referring to the Growth, Employment and Redistribution Strategy (GEAR), which promotes a restricted role for the state in redistribution, the restructuring of trade and industrial policies towards a more export-oriented strategy, market-led reforms to create an environment favourable to foreign investors, and privatisation across the board. The GEAR is based on regarding government spending as excessive and corporate tax rates as too high. It was not surprising that then deputy president Thabo Mbeki could bait journalists in 1996 to ‘call me a Thatcherite’, while a leading South African newspaper, the Mail and Guardian, dubbed Finance Minister Trevor Manual as ‘Trevor Thatcher’.21

  ‘We have no doubt about South Africa’s attractiveness as a business partner for UK companies’, Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt notes. British companies are currently the largest investors in South Africa, amounting to £11 billion.22

  Britain’s Department of Trade and Industry noted that business ‘opportunities exist across the board and include privatisation/restructuring of the ports, railway, power and water sectors, consultancy, telecoms and IT/electronics, the environment and water, healthcare, tourism, creative industries and agriculture’. Also, ‘South Africa’s healthcare sector offers significant opportunities for UK business’ while ‘there are many more opportunities for UK water utilities and contractors to win future business’.23

  Thus the ‘elite transition’ in South Africa has preserved much of the wealth relations and economic order under apartheid. It is continuing to offer Western businesses an attractive climate for investment as the top priority for economic policy, rather than policies to primarily address mass poverty.

  11

  OUR ALLIES, THE GULF ELITES

  Why do we support reactionary, selfish and corrupt governments in the Middle East instead of leaders who have the interest of their people at heart?

  Stafford Cr
ipps, Chancellor in the Attlee government, 1945–511

  FORMER SAS OFFICER, Peter de la Billiere, the commander of British forces in the 1991 Gulf War to eject Iraq from Kuwait, makes an extraordinary comment in his personal account of the war. He notes Saudi Prince Khalid telling him of his need to ensure that the Saudi ruling family remained in power after the war, to which de la Billiere replied:

  I fully understood the Prince’s difficulties and sympathised with him, but my understanding attitude was not entirely altruistic. As we, the British, had backed the system of sheikhly rule ever since our own withdrawal from the Gulf in the early 1970s, and seen it prosper, we were keen that it should continue. Saudi Arabia was an old and proven friend of ours, and had deployed its immense oil wealth in a benign and thoughtful way, with the result that standards of living had become very high. It was thus very much in our interests that the country and its regime should remain stable after the war.2

  The ‘system of sheikhly rule’ in Saudi Arabia to which de la Billiere casually refers is one that systematically imprisons, tortures or beheads all political opponents in one of the world’s most repressive states. That a military commander can write of Britain’s interests in the continuation of Saud family rule says a lot, to me, about the values of British elites. That it can be said in a best selling book without creating a furore says a lot about the deafening silence on Britain’s complicity in massive human rights abuses in the Middle East.

  British policy in the Middle East is based on propping up repressive elites that support the West’s business and military interests. This is having two outcomes. The first is that Britain is often undermining the prospects for the emergence of more popular and democratic governments. The second is that it is helping to fan the flames of religious extremism that is often the only alternative available to those being repressed. Britain’s role in the region is far from benign and is, frankly, dangerous to its inhabitants as well as – perhaps increasingly – people in Britain and the West. These are truisms about all British governments, but New Labour is continuing the policy, indeed with real enthusiasm.

  The importance of Britain’s role in the Middle East should not be underestimated. Although the US is clearly the major power in the region, Britain has an array of close diplomatic and military relations with the regimes in Oman, Bahrain and Kuwait and it has the world’s largest arms deal with Saudi Arabia, whose brutal internal security forces it is continuing to train. Britain has been responsible, with the US, for the continuation of sanctions against Iraq and the policing of the ‘no fly zones’ over the north and south of the country. It is traditionally the only major country to have actively and unequivocally supported US violence in the region, as in the 1991 Gulf war against Iraq, in various missile attacks, and in Afghanistan. London has also traditionally been a primary apologist for massive human rights atrocities in Turkey and is a current diplomatic champion of Turkey’s attempts to joint the EU (see chapter 1). Britain under Blair has also played an extraordinary role in adopting a pro-Israel position in the context of increasing violence in the occupied territories (chapter 5).

  There has been no greater myth since September 11th than that everything has changed as a result. Rather, in the post-September 11th world, Britain – and the US – have continued their traditional policies of supporting the existing repressive regimes in the Middle East. The only change appears to be a deepening of this support as many states use the ‘war on terrorism’ as a new cover to repress their people, as noted in chapter 3.

  Robert Fisk, Britain’s most outstanding journalist on the Middle East, has noted that:

  In Egypt, I have catalogued the systematic torture of Islamist prisoners by the state security police; conducted dozens of interviews with torture victims in Cairo, Assiut and Beni Suef and identified the floor of the Lazoughli Street police headquarters where electricity is used on prisoners. The Egyptians have both denied the evidence and pointed out that they are fighting ‘international terrorism’. But gross human rights abuses have merely grown worse. Britain and other Western governments have put no pressure on the Egyptians to halt these practices. President Mubarak is called the West’s most faithful Arab friend.3

  The pattern of human rights abuses is the same across the Middle Eastern regimes supported by Britain and the West, where torture, discrimination against women, the complete suppression of dissent, free speech and association and the banning of political alternatives are all the norm.

  Britain’s current commitment to the Gulf regimes is so great that, according to the Ministry of Defence, ‘all of the [Gulf] countries have an expectation that we would assist them in times of crisis’.4 All six states in the Gulf Cooperation Council – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – have military officers being trained in the UK while all (except Bahrain) are housing British military forces.

  The fundamental Western interest in the region is of course oil, outlined in chapter 1 and elsewhere. An additional factor is that the Gulf elites should spend their stupendous oil incomes on Western arms or invest the revenues in the Western banking system. Repressive Middle Eastern elites understand these priorities, and also that their role in this system helps keep them in power locally; the West could withdraw its support for them if they got any wayward ideas.

  The policy of supporting elites in the Gulf, and aiding their internal repression, is long-standing, as I outlined in my previous book, based on declassified documents.5 The Gulf sheikhdoms were largely created by the British to ‘retain our influence’ in the region. Policy was to defend them against external attack but also to ‘counter hostile influence and propaganda within the countries themselves’. Training their police and military would help in ‘maintaining internal security’. The US shared these concerns, noting that British and US interests in the region could be preserved by recognising the challenges to the West and ‘to traditional control in the area’. US planners based their policy on supporting the ‘fundamental authority of the ruling groups’.6

  The chief threat to these regimes was never Soviet intervention but what the Foreign Office called ‘ultra-nationalist maladies’. The Cabinet Secretary, Norman Brook, told the Prime Minister in 1961 that ‘we are fighting a losing battle propping up these reactionary regimes’ in the Middle East. The declassified documents show that British planners recognised that they were opposed to the ‘rising tide of nationalism’ and ‘the force of liberalism’.7 Thus, along with support for repressive elites has been more or less permanent opposition to popular regimes or groups in the Middle East. In 1957, the Foreign Office identified the danger of the existing rulers ‘losing their authority to reformist or revolutionary movements which might reject the connexion with the United Kingdom’.8

  The same goes today. The West has continually failed to support the democratic rights of the Kurds in Iraq and Turkey, preferring brutal regimes to keep order from Baghdad and Ankara. The West opposed Yasser Arafat ‘in opposition’, when the Palestine Liberation Organisation was more a popular, legitimate representative of the Palestinians; until recently at least, it supported Arafat as Chairman of the Palestinian Authority when his rule had become increasingly repressive.

  Britain and the US have also generally refused to offer support to opposition groups in repressive regimes which are advocating peaceful, political change, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Committee for the Defence of the Legitimate Rights of the Saudi People in Saudi Arabia. Egyptian President Nasser in the 1950s and 1960s – popular, nationalist – was an official enemy; current Egyptian President Mubarak – repressive, unpopular – is official friend.9 There are many other examples. Only in Iraq does Britain support opposition groups posing alternatives to the current regime and even there the West appears more interested in a similarly repressive replacement.

  London and Washington have throughout the postwar period connived with Middle Eastern elites to undermine popular, secular and nationalist groups which ha
ve offered some prospect of addressing the key issues in the region – the appalling levels of poverty and undemocratic political structures. Postwar US planners, for example, recognised that ‘among increasing numbers of Arabs there is … a conviction that we are backing the corrupt governments now in power, without regard for the welfare of the masses.’10

  With the undermining of these secular, nationalist opposition groups, the field has been left open for anti-Western Islamic groups to offer themselves as the major political alternatives.11

  Britain and the West are not anti-Islam, in my view. They quite happily support Islamic extremists in power when they do the West’s bidding – as in Saudi Arabia, the most ‘fundamentalist’ of all ruling elites. It is when groups cross the line in threatening fundamental Western interests that they become official enemies. However, the ‘Islamic threat’ is likely to prove increasingly useful to British and Western elites in coming years.

  Liberal, more democratic or popular groups and regimes – in the Middle East as elsewhere – are generally viewed as a threat; our allies are repressive regimes. This simple truth about British policy cannot be expressed in the propaganda system. Let us consider two examples in more detail.

  Supporting Saudi repression

  Under New Labour Saudi Arabia remains a key British ally, the recipient of huge quantities of British arms, while London remained virtually completely silent on human rights abuses. But the British government is not only complicit in failing to speak out, it is more actively contributing to domestic repression.

  In Saudi Arabia there is no freedom of association and expression, peaceful anti-government demonstrations are banned, women are pervasively discriminated against and there are no moves ‘towards a more open and tolerant society’, according to Human Rights Watch. The regime practices torture and corporal and capital punishment, with over 200 people beheaded during 2000 and 2001. There are no political parties, non-governmental organisations, trade unions or independent local media. The ruling family’s refusal to allow any institutions outside its control puts the family ‘beyond public reproach and accountability’. No one in the country dares report on human rights abuses, while international human rights organisations are banned from entering.12