Unpeople: Britain's Secret Human Rights Abuses Read online

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  PART I IRAQ Chapter 1 OCCUPYING IRAQ: THE ATTACK ON DEMOCRACY

  Chapter 2 THE IRRELEVANCE OF INTERNATIONAL LAW

  Chapter 3 DECEIVING THE PUBLIC: THE IRAQ PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGN

  Chapter 4 THE NEW MINISTRY OF OFFENCE

  Chapter 5 MASSACRES IN IRAQ: THE SECRET HISTORY

  PART II PROPAGANDA, REALITY Chapter 6 PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE BEYOND IRAQ

  Chapter 7 'HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION': THE FRAUDULENT PRETEXT

  Chapter 8 FROM THE HORSE'S MOUTH: WHITEHALL'S REAL GOALS

  PART III TERROR, AGGRESSION Chapter 9 FRIENDLY TERRORISTS: NEW LABOUR'S KEY ALLIES

  Chapter 10 NIGERIANS: WAR FOR OIL

  Chapter 11 INDONESIANS: TOOLS OF COVERT ACTION

  Chapter 12 VIETNAMESE: SECRET SUPPORT FOR US AGGRESSION

  PART IV COUPS, DICTATORS Chapter 13 UGANDANS: THE RISE OF IDI AMIN

  Chapter 14 CHILEANS: PROTECTING A DICTATOR

  Chapter 15 GUYANANS: A CONSTITUTIONAL COUP

  Chapter 16 ARABIANS: DIRTY WARS

  TABLE BRITAIN AND GLOBAL DEATHS

  CONCLUSION

  Notes

  Index

  UNPEOPLE

  Mark. Curtis is a former Research Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) and has written extensively on British and US foreign policies. His hooks include The Ambiguities of Power: British Foreign Policy since 1945 (Zed, London, 1995); The Great Deception: Anglo-American Power and World Order (Pluto, London, 1998); Trade for Life: Making Trade Work for Poor People (Christian Aid, London, 2001); and Web of Deceit: Britain's Real Role in the World (Vintage, London, 2003). He has worked in the field of international development for the past eleven years and is currently Director of The World Development Movement. His website is:

  www.markcurtis.info.

  ALSO BY MARK CURTIS

  Web of Deceit: Britain's Real Role in the World

  Mark Curtis

  UNPEOPLE

  BRITAIN'S SECRET HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  ISBN 9781409020028

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Vintage 2,004

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Copyright © Mark Curtis 2004

  Mark Curtis has asserted his right under the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act 1988 to he identified as the

  author of this work

  This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in Great Britain by

  Vintage, 2.004

  Vintage

  Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

  London swiv 2SA

  Random House Australia (Pty) Limited

  20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney,

  New South Wales 2061, Australia

  Random House New Zealand Limited

  18 Poland Road, Gienfield,

  Auckland to, New Zealand

  Random House South Africa (Pty) Limited

  Endulini, 5A. Jubilee Road, Parktown 2193. South Africa

  Random House UK Limited Reg. No. 954009

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 9781409020028

  Version 1.0

  INTRODUCTION

  This book is an attempt to uncover the reality of British foreign policy since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It also analyses several major episodes in Britain's past foreign policy, exploring in detail formerly secret government files which have been ignored by mainstream commentators. They expose the truth behind British governments' supposed commitment to grand principles such as human rights, democracy, peace and overseas development.

  Britain is bogged down in an unpopular occupation in the Middle East, the state has become widely distrusted by the public, accusations of spying on the UN have further undermined its international role, while Britain has effectively been marginalised in the EU. Seen from within the establishment, Tony Blair has become the greatest public liability since Anthony Eden, whose mistake was not his invasion of a foreign country (normal British practice) but his defeat, in the Suez crisis of 1956.

  Massive public opposition to the invasion of Iraq has troubled the government and may prove to have deterred it from other ventures. Yet the course of New Labour's foreign policy since the invasion has been disastrous in terms of human rights, and is continuing to occur outside any meaningful democratic scrutiny.

  British foreign policy is guided by a tiny elite – not just the handful of ministers in successive governments, but the civil servants, ambassadors, advisers and other unaccountable Whitehall mandarins around them, who set the country's agenda and priorities, and define its role within the world. Since March 2003, these decision-makers have been implementing a series of remarkable steps: first, Britain is deepening its support for state terrorism in a number of countries; second, unprecedented plans are being developed to increase Britain's ability to intervene militarily around the world; third, the government is increasing its state propaganda operations, directed towards the British public; and fourth, Whitehall planners have in effect announced they are no longer bound by international law.

  The principal victims of British policies are Unpeople – those whose lives are deemed worthless, expendable in the pursuit of power and commercial gain. They are the modern equivalent of the 'savages' of colonial days, who could be mown down by British guns in virtual secrecy, or else in circumstances where the perpetrators were hailed as the upholders of civilisation.

  The concept of Unpeople is central to each of the past and current British policies considered in this book. Through its own intervention, and its support of key allies such as the United States and various repressive regimes, Britain has been, and continues to be, a systematic and serious abuser of human rights. I have calculated that Britain bears significant responsibility for around 10 million deaths since 1945 (see table), including Nigerians, Indonesians, Arabians, Ugandans, Chileans, Vietnamese and many others. Often, the policies responsible are unknown to the public and remain unresearched by journalists and academics.

  In this book, I aim to document for the first time the secret record of certain episodes in government planning. The declassified files to which I refer are instructive not only for the light they throw on the past. They are also directly relevant to current British foreign policy surrounding Iraq, military intervention and the 'war against terror'. British interests and priorities have changed very little over time; essentially, the only variation has been in the tactics used to achieve them.

  Of the basic principles that guided the decisions taken in these files, there are three which seem particularly apposite when consid
ering current events.

  The first is that British ministers' lying to the public is systematic and normal. Many people were shocked at the extent to which Tony Blair lied over Iraq; some might still be unable to believe that he did. But in every case I have ever researched on past British foreign policy, the files show that ministers and officials have systematically misled the public. The culture of lying to and misleading the electorate is deeply embedded in British policy-making.

  A second, related principle is that policy-makers are usually frank about their real goals in the secret record. This makes declassified files a good basis on which to understand their actual objectives. This gap between private goals and public claims is not usually the result, in my view, of a conscious conspiracy. Certainly, planned state propaganda has been a key element in British foreign policy; yet the underlying strategy of misleading the public springs from a less conscious, endemic contempt for the general population. The foreign-policy decision-making system is so secretive, elitist and unaccountable that policy-makers know they can get away with almost anything, and they will deploy whatever arguments are needed to do this.

  The third basic principle is that humanitarian concerns do not figure at all in the rationale behind British foreign policy. In the thousands of government files I have looked through for this and other books, I have barely seen any reference to human rights at all. Where such concerns are invoked, they are only for public-relations purposes.

  Currently, many mainstream commentators would have us believe that there is a 'Blair doctrine', based on military intervention for humanitarian purposes. This is an act of faith on the part of those commentators, a good example of how the public proclamations of leaders are used unquestioningly to set the framework of analysis within the liberal political culture. If there is a Blair doctrine, it does indeed involve an unprecedented degree of military intervention – but to achieve some very traditional goals. The actual impact of foreign policies on foreign people is as irrelevant now as it ever has been.

  PART I

  IRAQ

  1

  OCCUPYING IRAQ:

  THE ATTACK ON

  DEMOCRACY

  Current British policy towards Iraq is in many ways nothing new. Many aspects of the invasion and occupation are normal, permanent features of British foreign policy, in particular: the violation of international law, the government's abuse of the UN, its deception of the public and its support for US aggression.

  Yet what the Iraq episode has revealed to large numbers of people is the nature of British foreign policy-making: a cabal of unelected advisers around its chief, the Prime Minister, taking decisions in an unaccountable and increasingly centralised way and contemptuous of restrictions on its authority from public opinion and international law.

  Indeed, the British and Iraqi public have something in common: they are both seen as a threat to policy-makers, to be overcome with violence in the case of Iraq and propaganda in the case of Britain. There is a symmetry between the attack on democracy in Britain (evident in the invasion, opposed by the majority of the public) and the attack on democracy in Iraq (evident in the occupation, which is attempting to impose Anglo-American priorities on an increasingly popular resistance movement).

  British democracy in action

  The three key actors at the centre of the Iraq episode – Downing Street, parliament and the media – illustrate the current nature of 'democracy' in Britain.

  Blair's cabal – consisting of his closest foreign policy advisers in Downing Street – has been heading an unprecedented propaganda campaign to deceive the public, and has appropriated the power of the state to an unprecedented degree, even to the point of capturing its legal functions. Britain's 'democratic' political system has been revealed as more a kind of personalised autocracy. There are, moreover, no formal mechanisms within the British political system to restrain it. The Hutton and Butler inquiries were set up by the Prime Minister and predictably cleared the government of acting in bad faith or for 'sexing up' intelligence on Iraq, in defiance of all the evidence. They suggest a stage-managed lack of accountability which would be hard to match outside the former Soviet bloc.

  Consider also the failure of the various all-party parliamentary committees to hold the government to account. For example, the Foreign Affairs Committee's report on the decision to go to war found that 'ministers did not mislead parliament' and agreed with the government that Iraq was 'a real and present danger'. It also concluded that the claims made in the government's September 2002 dossier, alleging all manner of threats from Iraq which have since been shown to be nonsense, were 'well-founded on the basis of the intelligence then available'.1 These select committees are the primary means by which policy-making is scrutinised on behalf of the public.

  On the eve of the invasion the majority of the British public. 58 per cent, were shown to be opposed to the war. Air Marshal Brian Burridge, Commander of British forces in the invasion, later noted that 'we went into this campaign with 33 per cent public support'.2 Yet parliament still backed war; indeed, more MPs voted to oppose the government over the proposed ban on fox-hunting than did over the invasion of Iraq – perhaps evidence that to those who supposedly represent the British people, animals are more important than (un)people. Following the parliamentary debate on the Butler report in July 2004, only 41 MPs voted against the government. At the same time, an opinion poll showed that 55 per cent of the public believed that Tony Blair lied over the war. The 'democratic deficit' in British political culture is now gaping.

  The invasion of Iraq highlights the need for a transformation in the way Britain is governed – something which now seems obvious even to some supporters of the war. Keeping discussion of this largely off the mainstream media agenda must count as one of the great elite propaganda successes, another sign of the extreme lack of democracy in mainstream British culture. While many in the media praise themselves for not letting Blair 'draw a line' under the Iraq affair, they have indeed done so on its most important aspect.

  In this light, the media's increasing criticism of Blair personally is a sideshow: it is the system, not the individuals that preside over it, which is the problem. Protecting the system is a basic function of the mainstream media – we can expect that once Blair falls and different faces are in power (no doubt promoting essentially the same policies), the real issue will become even more deeply buried. Indeed, many in the media are now openly calling for Blair to resign precisely because he has become a liability to the system: ever larger mimbers of the ptiblic no longer trust it, and know that 'democracy' is a facade, thus posing a threat to the wider elite. Yet the problem for that elite is that it is hard even for them to remove the Blair cabal since the beast they have created is indeed so centralised.

  It is true that, since the occupation began, there has been considerable criticism of government policy in the mainstream media, and some thorough reporting of the revelations from the Hutton inquiry in the Guardian and Independent. This stance is partly explicable by the media's need to defend itself against Alastair Campbell, Blair's former Director of 'Communications', and from the Hutton report's attack on the BBC. It is also worth remembering that the parameters of acceptable debate have been widened from within the establishment, much of which was opposed to invading Iraq, for self-interested reasons: the April 2004 letter, speaking out against British policy in Iraq and Israel and signed by 52 former senior diplomats, shows how Blair's cabal has succeeded in alienating even members of its own elite.

  Yet the government was able to invade and occupy Iraq because of much of the media's failure to expose obvious propaganda and to be regularly willing simply to parrot it. By the time the September 2002 dossier was published, it was clear that Blair's cabal was bent on invading Iraq and would find any justification for doing so. Yet the mainstream media failed systematically to ridicule the document as obvious state propaganda. Much of it has been taken at face value, not only by the tabloid press, with only mild crit
icisms and analysis. From then until the invasion period, the litany of British and US government claims of Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and links to al Qaeda was consistently reported uncritically.

  Just as unquestioning has been the portrayal of the 'intelligence' agencies and the 'security services' as independent, neutral actors providing objective material for a government to act upon. Yet much of the 'intelligence' agencies' work is to promote disinformation, a role discussed in chapter 3.

  Also absurd has been the media's compliance in a portrayal of Britain as a force bent on reducing WMD. Not only is Britain a leading nuclear power with no intention of abolishing its own arsenal (in defiance of its international obligations), it is also developing a new generation of such weapons. While the debate over Iraqi WMD was taking place, the British delegation at the UN was opposing several General Assembly resolutions calling on the nuclear states to reduce and abolish their arsenals. In the 57th session of the UN General Assembly, which began in September 2002, Britain voted against three such resolutions and abstained on two others. In all of these votes, more than a hundred states voted in favour, while Britain could count less than five allies (one of which was invariably the US).3 None of this has been reported in the mainstream media, which preferred to take seriously New Labour's moral commitment to abolishing WMD.