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Ignoring Our Victims By James Quinney
The British journalist William Digby, writing in 1901, looking back at the role of the British Empire in the 19th century, prophesized that for future historians its principal and most notorious monument would be the merciless and unnecessary deaths of millions of people in the third world at the hands of their imperial overlords. Writing at that time, it seems Digby could not foresee the scale of the efforts to reconstruct the history of these years so as to place the role of Britain in a more favorable light. A recent article in the Financial Times notes that, outside of Britain, crises in Pakistan and Kenya have elicited a “wave of criticism about Britain’s relations with its former colonies”, but within Britain itself the “self-regardingly rosy account of our imperialist heritage” is the accepted norm.(1)
These days, the most commonly held opinion, as expressed by Prime Minister Gordon Brown (then Chancellor) and relayed with enthusiasm by the Daily Mail (Britain's second biggest-selling daily newspaper), is that “Britain no longer [has] to make excuses for its record as a colonial power”. Rather than dwelling on the calculated policies of slave labor, concentration camps, forced migration and mass starvation, we should instead focus on "great British values" of “freedom, tolerance, civic duty - to be admired as some of our most successful exports”. The occasion for these comments was a visit to the former British colony of Tanzania, the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, having given his personal backing to the sale of a British-made military air traffic control system to Tanzania, one of the world's poorest countries, some years previously. The deal, worth £28 million to the notorious British arms firm BAE Systems, is one of the “great British exports” that Mr. Brown neglected to mention. It obviously does not do to draw attention to this kind of callous profiteering from a country so poor that half the population has no access to running water and children die from preventable diseases.(2) |
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It is a guiding principle of our intellectual culture, that we must devote enormous energy to exposing the atrocities of officially designated enemies, but we must take great pains to avoid this practice in the case of our own crimes. By logical extension, it requires virtually no evidence to write of "Britain's reputation as both a respecter and champion of human rights” ('Rights and wrongs', The Guardian, March 6, 2000). In the overwhelming majority of the commentary that arises on the subject this benevolence is just implicitly assumed. However, this “self-regardingly rosy account” has little in common with the really existing goals of Britain’s foreign policy, which in conjunction with our US “senior partner”, mainly revolve around ensuring the global economy benefits Western businesses. From these goals flow many policies that consign much of the world’s population to the status of, what historian Mark Curtis defines as ‘unpeople’ - the hidden victims of British policy.(3)
With this in mind we may turn to the official response issued by the Prime Minister's Office to the petition calling for a ban on the manufacture and continued use of M85 submunitions.(4) As the world’s second-largest arms exporter, the UK is hardly at the “forefront of international non-proliferation”, as the response claims. Last year the NGO Saferworld documented that we have exported at least £45 billion worth of arms in the past 10 years, with little concern as to their final destination. This could also be just the tip of the iceberg as government statistics show the destination of only a quarter of all arms exports - the public are simply not told where the rest goes. The government has consistently armed states violating human rights. In the past three years Britain has exported arms to 19 of the 20 countries identified in the Foreign Office's own annual human rights report as "countries of concern".(5)
Similarly, we may evaluate the government’s “efforts to reduce the humanitarian impact of cluster munitions” by their widespread and continued use against populated areas in Iraq, causing enormous and entirely predictable levels of civilian casualties. In the first three weeks of the air war on Iraq, Human Rights Watch reports that in addition to the US, “The British used an additional seventy air-launched and 2,100 ground-launched cluster munitions, containing 113,190 submunitions. Although cluster munition strikes are particularly dangerous in populated areas, U.S. and U.K. ground forces repeatedly used these weapons in attacks on Iraqi positions in residential neighborhoods.”
The top UK market research company ORB has recently reported that the number of post-invasion violent deaths in Occupied Iraq could be well over a million people, this being consonant with an estimate of 0.8 million violent deaths (as of October 2007) from top American medical epidemiologists from Johns Hopkins and Columbia, published in the top medical journal The Lancet and endorsed in a public letter by 27 top medical experts.(6) According to statistics provided by The Lancet study's authors, 50% of all violent deaths of Iraqi children under 15 years of age, between March 2003 and June 2006, were due to coalition air strikes. These air strikes have left the country littered with live bomblets from US and British attacks, injuring at least 15 people a day since Saddam Hussein's government fell on April 9 2003, the vast majority of which have been children.
Not only have we yet to hear one word of regret or remorse from any of the major architects of Britain’s participation in this supreme international crime, but they have also gone to some effort to downplay credible evidence of its extent. As the Financial Times accurately reported, the government repeatedly tried to discredit the Lancet study, even though “the same sampling method has been used by the same team in Darfur in Sudan and in the eastern Congo and produced credible results.” This, we are to understand, is what the government defines as striving “to reduce civilian casualties to the minimum” - by scrupulously ignoring their existence.(7)
Another example of contemporary Newspeak employed by the British government, is the cynical attempt to bargain for a definition of cluster bombs that would simply exclude all modern makes. The government’s claim that it is “committed to improving reliability of all munitions, including cluster munitions, with the aim of achieving lower failure rates and leaving less unexploded ordnance” is demonstrably at odds with the current operational use of cluster bombs in contemporary conflict.
Despite claims about the reliability and low failure rates of the M85, UN forces working to clear cluster bombs in Lebanon have reported finding “large numbers of unexploded M85 submunitions that have failed to detonate as designed and failed to self destruct afterwards. In effect these submunitions are more dangerous than other types because the self destruct mechanism makes them more problematic to deal with.” What is more, whereas landmines are usually laid down in more or less expected places, unexploded bomblets dropped from the sky can wind up virtually anywhere.
In 2006 Israeli forces strategically used M85s as a kind of modern alternative to landmines, deliberately rendering large areas of Southern Lebanon uninhabitable. Human Rights Watch reported that 90% of the total cluster bombs dropped by Israeli forces were done so in the 72 hours after the UN Security Council passed the resolution that effectively ended the war. The veteran Israeli journalist Meron Rapoport has since reported that his newspaper, Haaretz, has evidence that Israeli forces’ use of cluster munitions was “pre-planned” and undertaken without regard to the location of Hizbullah positions.(8)
Similarly the British journalist Patrick Cockburn reported in 2006 that “casualty figures will rise sharply in the next month as villagers begin the harvest, picking olives from trees whose leaves and branches hide bombs that explode at the smallest movement. Lebanon's farmers are caught in a deadly dilemma: to risk the harvest, or to leave the produce on which they depend to rot in the fields.” He also does not fail to ask: “Why did the Israeli army do it? The number of cluster bombs fired must have been greater than 1.2 million because, in addition to those fired in rockets, many more were fired in 155mm artillery shells. One Israeli gunner said he had been told to ‘flood’ the area at which they were firing but was given no specific targets.”(9)
Against this backdrop of Israel's deliberate and systematic destruction of Lebanon's social infrastructure, in 2006 the UK licensed £14.5 million’s worth of arms for export to Israel while simultaneously providing Tel Aviv with the political cover to continue the war by delaying the ceasefire for as long as possible and thereby ensuring maximum carnage. The Financial Times reported on July 27th that delegates at an international conference in Rome, which aimed to bring an end to the destruction, had said “virtually all countries had sought a quick end to hostilities but were forced to agree to a milder statement by the US”. Tony Blair, in the face of criticism from his cabinet, also resisted calls to endorse an immediate unconditional ceasefire or to condemn the Israeli bombing.
A report by the British foreign affairs committee in August of last year noted that a quicker response from the government in July 2006 "could have led to reduced casualties amongst both Israeli and Lebanese civilians whilst still working towards a long-term solution to the crisis" although stopped short of mentioning any direct culpability. A more honest account might have noted that while Bush and Blair were hindering diplomatic efforts to bring about an immediate ceasefire in Rome, the onslaught on Lebanon, and on Gaza continued unhindered - and in fact was militarily aided by the US and UK. The Times reported on July 28th 2006 that “The [British] Government will allow more American aircraft carrying arms to Israel to stop over in Britain... Both the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Downing Street suggested that two more requests by America to send planes carrying missiles as well as components over the next fortnight will go through.”
James Quinney lives in the UK and writes political analysis and comment articles for UKWatch.net, Znet and Z Magazine. (http://www.ukwatch.net/; http://www.zcommunications.org/znet; http://www.zcommunications.org/zmag/)
(1) http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/426d904c-bc83-11dc-bcf9-0000779fd2ac.html (2) http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,17129-2451185,00.html (3) http://markcurtis.wordpress.com/2007/02/04/unpeople-britains-secret-human-rights-abuses/ (4) http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/M85submunitions/ (5)http://www.saferworld.org.uk/images/pubdocs/The%20Good,%20the%20Bad%20and%20the%20Ugly%20rev.pdf (6) http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=88 (7) http://www.medialens.org/alerts/05/050905_burying_the_lancet_part1.php |
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