Many people in Britain I speak to struggle to understand how their government can acquiesce in, still less support, Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
We see the killing, maiming and destruction on a daily or even hourly basis, in real time, knowing our government is complicit. It seems incomprehensible to many.
But it’s only hard to understand if one has little knowledge of Britain’s foreign policy in recent decades, or an overly rosy picture of just what Whitehall stands for in the world.
And if people do suffer from that historical ignorance, it is not their fault, but the fault of a media system that refuses to tell people the truth about our past as well as our present.
The reality is that, tragically, the UK establishment’s complicity in genocide is nothing new. There is a long history to Britain backing forces committing genocide – defined as an attempt to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.
Two of the closest parallels to the current horror of Gaza come from the 1960s.
The Labour government under Harold Wilson secretly armed and backed Nigeria’s aggression against the secessionist region of Biafra during 1967-70. This was a brutal genocidal campaign that produced the worst humanitarian crisis of the time.
During the three years of war, up to three million people died, as Nigeria enforced a blockade on Biafra, causing widespread starvation.
Even as pictures of malnourished or dead children made it into the UK press, the British government rode out significant public opposition to its policy of giving constant support to the Nigerian government.
The public was right to protest because the declassified files later revealed just how complicit the British government was. Those documents show that UK ministers secretly provided large quantities of arms to Nigeria, helping facilitate its massacres.
They did so to preserve the unity of the country, and curry favour with Nigeria’s leaders, largely to promote British oil interests, especially those of BP and Shell.
RELATED
‘Terror campaign’
Just before Biafra, the British Conservative government armed another genocide in Iraq. UK ministers stepped up arms exports to Iraq’s regime after it launched what British officials recognised as a “terror campaign” against the Kurds in 1963.
Declassified files show that Britain sent thousands of rockets to Baghdad knowing they would be used to destroy Kurdish villages in the north of the country.
British ministers also approved the export of hundreds of armoured personnel carriers which, they recognised, were “possibly for use if needed against the Kurds”.
Alec Douglas-Home, foreign secretary in Harold Macmillan’s government, was “anxious that in general Iraq’s arms requirements should be met as quickly as possible”, one file reads.
“There are considerable commercial advantages to be gained”, a ministerial committee stated, and “the scope for military exports is considerable”.
In another echo of Gaza now, the British also attempted to ensure the United Nations would not discuss allegations of genocide in Iraq.
And by 1965, as the war continued, the new Labour government under Wilson was ignoring pleas from Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani to prevent Iraq beginning possible chemical weapons attacks against Kurds.
‘Future market’
A quarter of a century later, similar priorities emerged when Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, launched another campaign of genocide against the Kurds.
Most despicably, his forces used chemical weapons against the Kurdish town of Halabja in March 1988, killing over 3,000 people.
How did the UK government under Margaret Thatcher respond?
Five months after Halabja, Iraq and Iran signed a peace agreement ending the long-running war between them. Although Whitehall condemned Saddam’s chemical attacks, UK foreign secretary Geoffrey Howe noted in a secret report to Thatcher that “opportunities for sales of defence equipment to Iran and Iraq will be considerable”.
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”.
This didn’t matter. The UK had already provided an array of arms to Saddam during the early 1980s. In October 1989 foreign minister William Waldegrave noted that “I doubt if there is any future market of such a scale anywhere where the UK is potentially so well-placed”.
He added: “The priority of Iraq in our policy should be very high.”
The UK had by then already allowed numerous British companies to exhibit equipment at the Baghdad arms fair in April 1989, attended also by weapons salesmen from the government’s Defence Exports Services Organisation.
Human Rights Watch documented the “campaign of extermination against the Kurds of northern Iraq” during 1987-9, concluding that this resulted in the wholesale destruction of 2,000 villages and the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands.
Siding with the aggressor
The previous decade had witnessed another of the postwar world’s worst mass killings, when the Indonesian military regime under General Suharto brutally invaded the territory of East Timor in 1975.
The declassified files show the Wilson government backed the invasion.
Britain’s ambassador in Jakarta, John Ford, wrote: “Certainly as seen from here it is in Britain’s interest that Indonesia should absorb the territory” of East Timor “as soon and as unobtrusively as possible”.
“If it comes to the crunch and there is a row in the United Nations we should keep our heads down and avoid siding against the Indonesian Government”, he added.
This is what the UK did, and around 200,000 Timorese were killed in the next few years.
Wilson’s successor as prime minister, James Callaghan, proceeded to sell combat aircraft to Indonesia which were used in its ongoing repression campaign, and to help defeat a popular movement for Timorese independence.
RELATED
Genocide in Africa
British policy-makers had a hand in two other genocides, both in Africa, which have also passed into the historical memory hole.
Newly independent Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe conducted atrocities against the Ndebele people of Matabeleland, in the southwest of the country, in a series of mass killings between 1983-87.
Documents show UK officials and the British Military Advisory Training Team on the ground had detailed knowledge of the Matabeleland massacres, which resulted in the death of between 10,000 and 20,000 people.
Yet those officials minimised the magnitude of the atrocities and chose to adopt a policy of wilful blindness towards them. Britain was motivated by maintaining the training team in the country and nurturing a positive relationship with Mugabe — somewhat ironically as Zimbabwe’s authoritarian leader soon became the UK’s bête noire.
A decade later, an even more calamitous genocide occurred. The Rwanda slaughter of 1994 is perhaps the best-known recent case of genocide to the general public, but the UK role in it is still not widely understood.
‘Beyond comprehension’
After the killings of members of the Tutsi ethnic group began in Rwanda in early April 1994, the UN security council, instead of beefing up its peace mission in the country and giving it a stronger mandate to intervene, decided to reduce the troop presence from 2,500 to 270.
It was Britain’s ambassador to the UN, Sir David Hannay, who proposed that the UN pull out its force, to which the US agreed.
This decision sent a green light to those who had planned the genocide that the UN would not intervene. A small UN military force arrived merely to rescue expatriates, and then left.
Belgium’s senior army officer in the UN peace mission believed that if this force had not been pulled out, the killing could have been stopped.
Canadian general Romeo Dallaire, who commanded the UN force in Rwanda, later said that this evacuation showed “inexcusable apathy by the sovereign states that made up the UN, that is completely beyond comprehension and moral acceptability”.
By May 1994, with perhaps hundreds of thousands already dead, there was another UN proposal – to dispatch 5,500 troops to help stop the massacres. This deployment was delayed by pressure mainly from the US ambassador, with support from Britain.
Dallaire believes that if these troops had been speedily deployed, tens of thousands more lives could have been saved.
Similar to the present day in Gaza, and Iraq in the 1960s, British officials went out of their way to ensure the UN did not use the word “genocide” to describe the slaughter in Rwanda. This would have obliged states to “prevent and punish” those guilty.
In late April 1994, a security council resolution drafted by the UK that rejected the use of the term “genocide” was passed with support from the US and China.
A July 1994 resolution spoke of “possible acts of genocide” and other security council documents used similarly restrained language.
The role of the West in Rwanda’s genocide has been carefully documented by journalist Linda Melvern but still largely escapes media coverage in anniversaries and references.
RELATED
No accountability
How is it that UK governments can be consistently complicit in genocide overseas?
The principal reason is that they are not motivated by concerns about international law or supporting human rights. These principles might occasionally inform policy-making at the margins but only when there are no other higher priorities to be pursued, such as securing oil interests, arms exports, or geopolitical gains.
High moral principles are largely espoused only for the cameras and complicit journalists, who regularly parrot them as though they are important to Whitehall planners. In reality, the UK is concerned about the law and rights only when it comes to enemy states, as a means to pressure and isolate them for public relations purposes.
Another factor is that ministers are never held accountable for their complicity in crimes overseas, and therefore there is no deterrent for current ministers. They know they can get away with it.
Indeed, this impunity is built into the British system. The UK’s unwritten constitution is permeated by the concept of Crown immunity. This deems that ministers cannot commit a legal wrong and do not act as persons but as agents steeped with Crown authority, and are therefore untouchable under the law.
If a minister breaches the criminal law outside of his public duties, she is subject to criminal law like anyone else. But if she makes decisions as a minister, however reprehensible or incompetent, these are considered as acts of government and not for the criminal courts.
This is why the International Criminal Court, and other world bodies, are needed to hold British ministers to account for their complicity in war crimes, as now over Gaza.
Partnerships
In the case of Gaza, Palestinians are seen as unpeople since supporting them holds little merit or gain for British planners. What does Palestine have to offer Whitehall in comparison with Israel?
In supporting Israel, Whitehall can demonstrate British subservience and usefulness to its major ally, the US. Israel is a buyer of British arms, a strategic ally to police the region and an increasing, albeit still fairly small, trade partner.
And a quarter of the UK’s entire parliament of MPs has received funding from the Israel lobby, buying an influence over UK policy-making that is way beyond anything the Palestinians can induce.
Unless and until we make our governance system promote basic moral values, and hold elected officials to account for crimes abroad in a democratic way, the UK will keep acquiescing in genocides in the decades to come.
