Web of Deceit: Britain's Real Role in the World
by Mark Curtis
256pp, Vintage, £7.99 Recent revelations will have made unsettling reading for those
who still believe in Britain's essentially benign approach to world affairs: evidence
of British collusion with loyalist paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland engaging in
"targeted assassinations" of suspected IRA members, for example, and the mounting
anger over the way in which the government not only doctored intelligence reports on
weapons of mass destruction, but also misled the House of Commons, and indeed the
whole country, over the nature of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
In his brilliant and deeply disturbing new book, Mark Curtis demonstrates that these
cannot be brushed aside as isolated cases, and delivers a powerful challenge to the
notion that Britain's foreign policy is basically benevolent: that it promotes
democracy, peace and human rights. The truth, according to Curtis, is that Britain
supports terrorism. Indeed, "violating international law has become as British as
afternoon tea".
But if New Labour has raised hypocrisy and double standards to the level of a new art
form, ("never in history has there been such a gap between government claims and the
reality of policy"), the route they are pursuing is hardly a new one. Curtis
convincingly shows that contempt for international law has passed easily from
Conservative to Labour, and from the colonial era to the present. By imposing regime
change in Iraq, for example, Tony Blair is not so much following the US as continuing
a national tradition.
And Curtis marshals a formidable armoury of documented evidence to substantiate his
case. Drawing on formerly secret government files, he analyses not only Britain's role
in recent events in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, but also British complicity in the
slaughter of a million people in Indonesia in 1965; the depopulation of the island of
Diego Garcia; the overthrow of governments in Iran and British Guiana; and repressive
colonial policies in Kenya, Malaya and Oman. He relentlessly peels away layers of
deception until, with the aid of painstaking research and analysis of declassified
files, he lays bare in graphic detail a shocking exposé of British aggression and
double-standards.
It could scarcely be more timely. A joke circulating during the war on Iraq was that
the reason British government ministers are so sure that Saddam had WMD is simple:
they still have the receipts. In Curtis's chapter on Iraq, those receipts are
documented in a devastating analysis of Britain's systematic arming of Saddam Hussein.
Just five months after the poison gas attack on Halabja in 1988, the foreign
secretary, Geoffrey Howe, noted in a secret report to Margaret 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".
But dealing with concern about "looking cynical" is something the proponents of
British foreign policy learned as far back as 1953, during the forgotten British
invasion of British Guiana. "To secure the desired result, some preparation of public
opinion seems to be essential," noted the British delegation to the UN. Democratic
elections had resulted in victory for a popular, leftist government committed to
reducing poverty. Its plans threatened the British sugar multinational, Bookers, which
pleaded with London to intervene. Britain dispatched warships and 700 troops to
overthrow the government, ruling out elections on the grounds that "the same party
would have been elected again", according to the colonial secretary.
Curtis's thesis, that people are systematically misinformed about this country's real
role in the world, reaches a powerful climax with his analysis of Britain's role in
the 1994 Rwanda genocide. From official files, he 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", and, in late April 1994,
along with the US and China, secured a security council resolution that rejected the
use of the term "genocide", so that the UN would not act.
If, as Curtis demonstrates, the government's contribution to something as massive as
the slaughter of a million people can be buried across the entire mainstream political
culture, he is surely right to conclude that anyone who wants to understand the
reality of Britain's foreign policies cannot do so by relying on the mainstream. "The
task of any independent historian is to reconstruct real-life history, to rescue it
from a self-serving web of deceit," he asserts. And indeed Curtis has performed a
remarkable rescue operation. His book is a powerful call to action for all those who
strive to understand how the world has been shaped by western powers in order that
they may change it.
Caroline Lucas is an MEP for the Green party.
The Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Uganda is in anarchy"
Groupe de communication Mulindwas
"avec Yoweri Museveni, l'Ouganda est dans l'anarchie"
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