Web Of Deceit: Britain's Real Foreign Policy

by Mark Curtis

  The only justification I can see for sustaining this breach would be (a) that we are dealing with very exceptional circumstances not contemplated by the Convention and (b) that we are not offending against the spirit of the Convention which was framed primarily to prevent the exploitation of labour … I should be grateful to know of any further considerations there may be to strengthen the case for compulsion.

  The Governor replied that he had ‘re-examined the position’ and was ‘very anxious not to embarrass you. I now think that by a combination of economic inducements and use of sanctions under existing law … it may well be possible to attain our objective.’33

  Dependent independence

  Britain’s main objectives in Kenya were achieved largely by a combination of straightforward violence and repression. But the transition to a friendly government at independence in 1963 could not have been achieved without substantial manoeuvring in the political and economic fields as well.

  The cultivation of an African elite who would preserve British interests after independence was not an easy one, since Britain had imprisoned many of the most able political leaders in 1952. Two months after the declaration of the state of emergency, the Colonial Office suggested ‘giving moderate and loyal Africans some positive part to play in the present crisis’. Of course, ‘there can be no question, so long as the emergency lasts, of any constitutional change at the centre’; the declaration of the state of emergency had been intended precisely to prevent this.

  The Colonial Office suggested establishing interracial advisory committees. ‘We are not so naive as to think that advisory committees will bring much increase in wisdom to bear on immediate problems.’ Their importance was that ‘they can … play a useful part in associating with the process of government persons who would otherwise be condemned to more sterile and therefore frequently dangerous activities’. This was ‘of particular value in Kenya at the present when there is really so little that you can do to give moderate Africans a sense of purpose’.34

  Britain also engaged in various covert activities to ensure the dominance of ‘moderate’ policies following independence. It was behind the creation of the Kenyan African Democratic Union (KADU) party, set up to unite African moderates against the stronger and more popular Kenyan African National Union (KANU) – the successor to the KAU – under Kenyatta. KADU received covert funding from British business interests in Kenya and also from the colonial authorities in advance of the 1963 election. However, at the final Lancaster House conference before independence, the British government realised that unfortunately KANU would win the election and abandoned KADU. MI6 also recruited Bruce McKenzie, an influential white settler politician who had moved over from KADU to KANU. After independence McKenzie was appointed Minister for Agriculture, and also had responsibility for overseeing the defence treaty with Britain.35

  In the economic sphere, it was land reform for the White Highlands that was the most significant scheme for preserving British interests. The purpose of the Swynnerton Plan of the mid 1950s was to enable richer Africans to acquire more land and poorer farmers less, which had the effect of creating a landed and a landless class, the latter growing to around 400,000 people.36

  In the land transfer schemes of the years shortly before independence, new African ‘settlers’ were forced to pay for land that they regarded as theirs and which had been taken over by European settlers. The majority of landless people were unable to raise even the basic sums needed as a downpayment for the purchase of land, so that over half the land was transferred almost intact to wealthy Africans in partnerships or limited liability companies. Those who were able to buy land did so by indebting themselves to cover the high prices paid to the European settlers. This meant that many poor African peasants were paying back debts to the ex-colonisers for decades after independence to compensate the latter for the land they originally stole.37

  The World Bank and Britain’s Commonwealth Development Corporation (the then aid programme) provided financial aid for these schemes, which ‘reflected the European and colonial hopes of using foreign investment to bolster a moderate nationalist state and to preserve European economic (and political) interests’, according to Gary Wasserman in his analysis of land ownership in Kenya. The African middle classes who were rich enough to acquire land through land titles and loan repayments ‘were expected to acquire a vested interest against any radical transformation of the society’. There was the obligation to repay the loans, to maintain an economy favourable to private investment, to limit nationalisations, and to maintain the chief export-earner – European dominated capital agriculture, and an economic structure congenial to it – hence to refuse to expropriate Europeans or place limits on land holdings. Overall, ‘the decolonisation process aimed to preserve the colonial political economy and, beyond that, to integrate an indigenous elite into positions of authority where they could protect the important interests in the system’.38

  Ongoing disenfranchisement of the poor was therefore assured after independence. Political power now rested in the hands of the previously unreliable Kenyatta, who as the first President after independence accepted the validity of the land transfers, one of the worst aspects of colonialism. Subsequent policy aimed to ‘Africanise’ the economy while accommodating the interests of the transnational corporations who held – and continue to hold – a significant stake in the country. In 1958, one third of privately owned assets in Kenya were owned by non-residents, mainly TNCs. By 1978, fifteen years after political independence, analysts Bethwell Ogot and Tiyambe Zeleza note that ‘Kenya was still a dependent export economy, heavily penetrated by foreign capital from all the major capitalist countries, so that she was more firmly and broadly integrated into the world capitalist system than at independence’.39

  A 1978 International Labour Organisation report highlighted the effects of the British plans that post-independence leaders essentially implemented. Those who benefited from the rapid economic growth since independence included the elites who replaced the British ‘in the high level jobs’, some African settlers who had bought land from European farmers, and employees in the modern, urban sectors who secured increases of between 6 and 8 per cent a year in their real incomes. However, ‘the group of persons who have failed to derive much benefit from the growth generated since independence includes the great majority of small holders, employees in the rural sector, the urban working poor and the urban and rural unemployed’.40

  By the mid 1970s, the richest 20 per cent of the population received 70 per cent of total income, while the majority of the population continued to suffer from grinding poverty. Today, Kenya’s income and ownership distribution remain heavily skewed in favour of a minority elite. This situation owes much to British priorities in the dying days of formal colonialism. As a recent report on Kenya’s land laws by the Nairobi-based Kenya Human Rights Commission notes: ‘The failure to reconsider these unjust laws after independence has meant that our government has continued the treatment of poor Kenyans as second-class citizens while the ruling class of Kenyans and foreigners enjoy the fruits of independence.’41

  16

  MALAYA: WAR IN DEFENCE OF THE RUBBER INDUSTRY

  The hard core of armed communists in this country are fanatics and must be, and will be, exterminated.

  Sir Gerald Templer, High Commissioner in colonial Malaya

  BETWEEN 1948 AND 1960 the British military fought what is conventionally called the ‘emergency’ or ‘counter-insurgency’ campaign in Malaya, a British colony until independence in 1957. The declassified files reveal that Britain resorted to very brutal measures in the war, including widespread aerial bombing and the use of a forerunner to modern cluster bombs. Britain also set up a grotesque ‘resettlement’ programme similar to that in Kenya, that provided a model for the US’s horrific ‘strategic hamlet’ programmes in Vietnam. It also used chemical agents from which the US may again have drawn lessons in its use of agent orange.

  Defend
ing the right of exploitation

  British planners’ primary concern was to enable British business to exploit Malayan economic resources. Malaya possessed valuable minerals such as coal, bauxite, tungsten, gold, iron ore, manganese, and, above all, rubber and tin. A Colonial Office report from 1950 noted that Malaya’s rubber and tin mining industries were the biggest dollar earners in the British Commonwealth. Rubber accounted for 75 per cent, and tin 12–15 per cent, of Malaya’s income.1

  As a result of colonialism, Malaya was effectively owned by European, primarily British, businesses, with British capital behind most Malayan enterprises. Most importantly, 70 per cent of the acreage of rubber estates was owned by European (primarily British) companies, compared to 29 per cent Asian ownership.2

  Malaya was described by one Lord in 1952 as the ‘greatest material prize in South-East Asia’, mainly due to its rubber and tin. These resources were ‘very fortunate’ for Britain, another Lord declared, since ‘they have very largely supported the standard of living of the people of this country and the sterling area ever since the war ended’. ‘What we should do without Malaya, and its earnings in tin and rubber, I do not know.’3

  The insurgency that arose in Malaya threatened control over this ‘material prize’. The Colonial Secretary remarked in 1948 that ‘it would gravely worsen the whole dollar balance of the Sterling Area if there were serious interference with Malayan exports’. One other member of the House of Lords explained that existing deposits of tin were being ‘quickly used up’ and, owing to rebel activity, ‘no new areas are being prospected for future working’. The danger was that tin mining would cease in around ten years, he alleged. The situation with rubber was ‘no less alarming’, with the fall in output ‘largely due to the direct and indirect effects of communist sabotage’, as it was described.4

  An influential big-business pressure group called Joint Malayan Interests was warning the Colonial Office of ‘soft-hearted doctrinaires, with emphasis on early self-government’ for the colony. It noted that the insurgency was causing economic losses through direct damage and interruption of work, loss of manpower and falling outputs. It implored the government that ‘until the fight against banditry has been won there can be no question of any further moves towards self-government’.5

  The British military was thus despatched in a classic imperial role – largely to protect commercial interests. ‘In its narrower context’, the Foreign Office observed in a secret file, the ‘war against bandits is very much a war in defence of [the] rubber industry.’6

  The roots of the war lay in the failure of the British colonial authorities to guarantee the rights of the Chinese in Malaya, who made up nearly 45 per cent of the population. Britain had traditionally promoted the rights of the Malay community over and above those of the Chinese. Proposals for a new political structure to create a racial equilibrium between the Chinese and Malay communities and remove the latter’s ascendancy over the former, had been defeated by Malays and the ex-colonial Malayan lobby. By 1948 Britain was promoting a new federal constitution that would confirm Malay privileges and consign about 90 per cent of Chinese to non-citizenship. Under this scheme, the High Commissioner would preside over an undemocratic, centralised state where the members of the Executive Council and the Legislative Council were all chosen by him.

  At the same time, a series of strikes and general labour unrest, aided by an increasingly powerful trade union movement, was threatening order in the colony. The colonial authorities sought to suppress this unrest, banning some trade unions, imprisoning some of their members and harassing the left-wing press.

  Thus Britain used the emergency, declared in 1948, not just to defeat the armed insurgency, but also to crack down on workers’ rights. ‘The emergency regulations and the police action under them have undoubtedly reduced the amount of active resistance to wage reductions and entrenchments’, the Governor of Singapore – part of colonial Malaya – noted. In Singapore, the number of unions ‘has decreased since the emergency started’. Colonial officials also observed that the curfews imposed by the authorities ‘have tended to damp down the endeavours of keen trade unionists’. Six months into the emergency the Colonial Office noted that in Singapore ‘during this period the colony has been almost entirely free from labour troubles’.7

  Britain had therefore effectively blocked the political path to reform, as in Kenya. This meant that the Malayan Communist Party – which was to provide the backbone of the insurgency – either had to accept that its future political role would be very limited, or go to ground and press the British to leave. An insurgent movement was formed out of one that had been trained and armed by Britain to resist the Japanese occupation during the Second World War; the Malayan Chinese had offered the only active resistance to the Japanese invaders.

  The insurgents were drawn almost entirely from disaffected Chinese and received considerable support from Chinese ‘squatters’, who numbered over half a million. In the words of the Foreign Office in 1952:

  The vast majority of the poorer Chinese were employed in the tin mines and on the rubber estates and they suffered most from the Japanese occupation of the country … During the Japanese occupation, they were deprived both of their normal employment and of the opportunity to return to their homeland … Large numbers of Chinese were forced out of useful employment and had no alternative but to follow the example of other distressed Chinese, who in small numbers had been obliged to scratch for a living in the jungle clearings even before the war.8

  These ‘squatters’ were now to be the chief object of Britain’s draconian measures in the colony.

  The reality of the war

  To combat an insurgent force of around 3,000–6,000, British forces embarked on a brutal war which involved large-scale bombing, dictatorial police measures and the wholesale ‘resettlement’ of hundreds of thousands of people.

  The High Commissioner in Malaya, Gerald Templer, declared that ‘the hard core of armed communists in this country are fanatics and must be, and will be, exterminated’. During Templer’s two years in office, ‘two-thirds of the guerrillas were wiped out’, writes Richard Clutterbuck, a former British official in Malaya, which was a testament to Templer’s ‘dynamism and leadership’.9

  Britain conducted 4,500 airstrikes in the first five years of the Malayan war.10 Robert Jackson writes in his uncritical account:

  During 1956, some 545,000 lb of bombs had been dropped on a supposed [guerilla] encampment … but a lack of accurate pinpoints had nullified the effect. The camp was again attacked at the beginning of May 1957 … [dropping] a total of 94,000 lb of bombs, but because of the inaccurate target information this weight of explosive was 250 yards off target. Then, on 15 May … 70,000 lb of bombs were dropped.

  ‘The attack was entirely successful’, Jackson declares, since ‘four terrorists were killed’.

  The author also notes that a 500 lb nose-fused bomb was employed from August 1948 and had a mean area of effectiveness of 15,000 square feet. ‘Another very viable weapon’ was the 500 lb fragmentation bomb, a forerunner of cluster bombs. ‘Since a Sutherland could carry a load of 190, its effect on terrorist morale was considerable’, Jackson states. ‘Unfortunately, it was not used in great numbers, despite its excellent potential as a harassing weapon.’ Perhaps equally unfortunate was the case of a Lincoln bomber, once ‘dropping its bombs 600 yards short … killing twelve civilians and injuring twenty-six others’.11 Just one of numerous examples of ‘collateral damage’ from the forgotten past.

  Atrocities were committed on both sides and the insurgents often indulged in horrific attacks and murders. A young British officer commented that, in combating the insurgents: ‘We were shooting people. We were killing them … This was raw savage success. It was butchery. It was horror.’12

  Running totals of British kills were published and became a source of competition between army units. One British army conscript recalled that ‘when we had an officer who did come out w
ith us on patrol I realised that he was only interested in one thing: killing as many people as possible’. British forces booby-trapped jungle food stores and secretly supplied self-detonating grenades and bullets to the insurgents to kill the user instantly. SAS squadrons from the racist regime in Rhodesia also served alongside the British, at one point led by Peter Walls, who became head of the Rhodesian army after the unilateral declaration of independence.13

  Brian Lapping observes in his study of the end of the British empire that there was ‘some vicious conduct by the British forces, who routinely beat up Chinese squatters when they refused, or possibly were unable, to give information’ about the insurgents. There were also cases of bodies of dead guerillas being exhibited in public. This was good practice, according to the Scotsman newspaper, since ‘simple-minded peasants are told and come to believe that the communist leaders are invulnerable’.14

  At Batang Kali in December 1948 the British army slaughtered twenty-four Chinese, before burning the village. The British government initially claimed that the villagers were guerillas, and then that they were trying to escape, neither of which was true. A Scotland Yard inquiry into the massacre was called off by the Heath government in 1970 and the full details have never been officially investigated.

  Decapitation of insurgents was a little more unusual – intended as a way of identifying dead guerillas when it was not possible to bring their corpses in from the jungle. A photograph of a Marine Commando holding two insurgents’ heads caused a public outcry in April 1952. The Colonial Office privately noted that ‘there is no doubt that under international law a similar case in wartime would be a war crime’. (Britain always denied it was technically at ‘war’ in Malaya, hence the use of the term ‘emergency’.)15