By attacking an independent state over government-sponsored repression within its own borders, Nato has created a powerful but potentially ominous precedent. The emerging consensus that there must be some scope for human rights-based interventions will be destroyed unless they are made exclusively on the basis of recognised rules and explicit support from the UN or other universally accepted regional bodies. Without those safeguards, the risk must be of increased international conflict, as governments become judges in their own cause and the world’s most powerful states commandeer the new doctrine to promote their strategic interests.2
(15/4/99)
Sierra Leone: Raising the crusader’s flag in Africa
Any thought that the aftermath of Nato’s Kosovan imbroglio might have dimmed Tony Blair’s enthusiasm for ‘humanitarian wars’ has been swiftly dispelled. His government has emerged as the most interventionist British administration since decolonisation. No opportunity is now to be passed up, it seems, to raise the twenty-first-century crusader’s flag across the globe.
The increasingly grim Sierra Leone adventure, with its kidnappings and bloody military rescues, is the third time in eighteen months that New Labour has used British armed force outside UN control. It has also been the biggest independent British overseas military operation since the Falklands war.
Thirty-nine years after the union flag was hauled down in Freetown on almost two centuries of bloody colonial rule, British squaddies have now been back in force for months, their commanders directing the conduct of a gruesome and intractable civil war. With barely a murmur of public debate at home, British troops are once again killing Sierra Leoneans in their own land, while Royal Navy gunboats patrol the West African coast and the limb-hacking rebels of the Revolutionary United Front are routinely compared to Nazis, the standard designation for all post-1945 British enemies.
The British ‘training mission’ and its backup security units, denounced by the UN’s commander for their ‘Rambo tactics’, are now embroiled in a growing conflict with renegade British-armed militias, among others. The declared intent is not only to rescue hostages and maul the formerly pro-government ‘West Side Boys’, but also to take back control of Sierra Leone’s lucrative diamond fields.
The Blair administration’s intervention sprees began with the four-day Anglo-American onslaught against Iraq in December 1998. Bombing raids have continued ever since, outside UN resolutions and opposed by a majority of the permanent UN Security Council members, while the US and Britain’s enforcement of the failed sanctions regime is now almost universally recognised as having created a humanitarian disaster. US Democratic congressman David Bonnier described the sanctions as ‘infanticide masquerading as a policy’.
It was Nato’s self-proclaimed war of values over Kosovo that triggered Blair’s clarion call last year in Chicago for a new wave of worldwide intervention. It would be based, he declared, on a ‘subtle blend’ of self-interest and moral purpose, echoing the liberal imperialists of the late nineteenth century. A year on, reverse ethnic cleansing proceeds apace in Nato-occupied Kosovo.
But the full flowering of Blair’s new doctrine has been in Africa, where the United States still fears to tread in the wake of its Somali debacle of the early 1990s. After weeks of interference in Zimbabwe’s internal crisis – with British ministers defending the cause of the white landowners who stood behind the racist Rhodesian regime – Blair’s paratroopers were despatched to Freetown to fill the vacuum left by the disintegrating UN peacekeeping force Britain refused to join a year ago.
The fact that Iraq, Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone are all former British colonies doesn’t trouble the cheerleaders of the new ‘doctrine of international community’, enveloped as they are in a blanket of cultural amnesia about the horrors of Britain’s colonial past. It is less than half a century since British soldiers shot dead striking Sierra Leoneans on the streets of Freetown, nailed the limbs of Kenyan fighters to crossroads posts and posed for pictures with the severed heads of Malayan guerrillas.
With such a record, Britain might be thought the least suitable country on the planet to sort out the ‘savagery’ of its one-time colonial subjects. The world, we are told, has moved on. But for the people of Africa – burdened with Western debt, arms, mercenaries, mineral-hungry multinational companies and commodity prices that have been falling for forty years – it has not moved on enough.
After supporting one corrupt dictator after another in Sierra Leone, Britain has thrown its military weight behind President Kabbah and his supporters, who Tony Blair insists are the democratic ‘good guys’, against the rural-based RUF, led by Vice-President Foday Sankoh until his capture by British soldiers in May.
But the 1996 elections which brought Kabbah to power, held when the country was already engulfed in civil war, did not include the RUF and were racked by violence and ballot rigging claims. While the RUF has the worst record of atrocities, according to Amnesty International, Kabbah and his Kamajor militias have also been heavily involved in torture and extra-judicial killings—and his ally Johnny Paul Koroma is responsible for the mutilation and massacre of thousands of civilians. These are the people British troops are supporting – or were, until Koroma’s former protégés, the West Side Boys, started kidnapping British soldiers.
The reality is that Britain and its corrupt friends are part of the problem in Sierra Leone, and no outside force can impose the necessary internal settlement. If Blair wants to build a genuine international community, he should be working through the UN and universally accepted regional bodies – rather than, as Nelson Mandela charged earlier this year, playing ‘policemen of the world’ with the US, and ‘introducing chaos into international affairs’ by acting unilaterally.
The record shows that the more effective peacekeepers in Sierra Leone have been regional forces, including Nigeria’s. The most useful contribution Britain and other Western states – which still refuse to write off the debts of countries such as Nigeria – could now make to Sierra Leone would be to support an African solution to an African crisis.3
(11/9/00)
Israel: Men of blood and global justice
Governments and their leaders can no longer hide from global justice, we have been repeatedly assured. They cannot shelter behind national jurisdictions and state sovereignty. Those responsible for human rights abuses, ethnic cleansing atrocities and, most of all, war crimes, must and will be pursued regardless of national boundaries in an interdependent world.
That was the theme of Nato’s ‘humanitarian war’ against Yugoslavia – enthusiastically championed by Tony Blair – and of the hunting down of Serbian and Croatian warlords. It was the argument behind the plans for an international war crimes court and the millions of dollars handed out by the US congress for the prosecution of Iraqi leaders and their families.
It was also the message of the citizen-led attempt to prosecute the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and the rupture of political relations between Austria and the rest of the European Union in response to the rise to power of Jörg Haider’s far-right Freedom Party in Austria. But the partisans of this brave new ‘doctrine of international community’ have been strangely subdued since the election of the extreme right-wing general Ariel Sharon as Israel’s prime minister. It has been business as usual with the man held personally responsible for the largest massacre of civilians in the history of the Arab–Israeli conflict.
The British prime minister had a reportedly cordial chat with Sharon on Wednesday, while Foreign Secretary Robin Cook looked forward to ‘building on common ground’ and ‘moving the peace process forward’ with a politician whose swaggering provocation in Jerusalem last year triggered the current Palestinian uprising – and whose suggestion for dealing with demonstrators was to ‘cut off their testicles’. President Bush meanwhile promised Sharon that US support for Israel was ‘rock solid’.
Of course, governments deal with all sorts of leaders with ugly records. But Sharon is more than that. By any reasonable reckoning, he is a war criminal. This is a man