Complicity in a million deaths

By Mark Curtis

Chapter in John Pilger (ed), Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs, Jonathan Cape, London, 2004. Available at: http://www.word-power.co.uk/catalogue/0224062883

“I have never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change.” (Britain’s ambassador to Indonesia, letter to the Foreign Office, 1965)

In July 1996, I published an article in the Observer revealing British complicity in the slaughter of a million people in Indonesia in 1965. The article was based on the recent release of formerly secret files available at the Public Record Office. I only just managed to persuade the editors to publish it after the Guardian turned it down. Following the appearance of the article, I did a couple of minor radio interviews. The story then disappeared into oblivion, with only one or two subsequent mentions in the media.

I happened to be watching the ITV lunchtime news on 1 January 1997, which carried a report on just-released secret files from 1966. It mentioned two items: a row between prime minister Harold Wilson and the governor of the Bank of England over interest rates; and the world cup football match between England and Argentina. Yet the 1996 files reveal much about the British role in the 1965 slaughters – an everyday indication of media selection, that keeps important issues from the public.

The history of British complicity in massive human rights abuses in Indonesia has been buried by the media and academia. When the Suharto regime fell in May 1998, almost no journalists mentioned that Britain had supported the brutallly repressive regime for the past 30 years as well as its murderous assumption to power after 1965. Similarly, Britain supported Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor in 1975 – killing hundreds of thousands of people, a third of the population – and proceeded to give effective support to Indonesia in its illegal occupation. This basic fact was not noticed by journalists in reporting East Timor’s independence in May 2002. Neither did the media notice Britain’s culpability in the massive human rights abuses committed in East Timor before the historic election in 1999.

The case of Indonesia shows how repressive the political culture is of basic facts when they provide the wrong picture about the role of the state. Perhaps in a democracy the truth would have been reported about British complicity in the tragedies of the peasant families massacred in 1965, the Timorese villagers sliced up by Indonesian troops in 1975, and the families forced to flee Indonesian terror in 1999. Instead, these tragic plights have been met largely by silence.     

“A necessary task”

The formerly secret British files, together with recently declassified US files, reveal an astonishing story. Although the Foreign Office is keeping many of the files secret until 2007, a clear picture still emerges of British and US support for one of the postwar world’s worst bloodbaths – what US officials at the time called a “reign of terror” and British officials “ruthless terror”.

In his 600-page long autobiography, Denis Healey, then Britain’s Defence Minister, failed to mention at all Suharto’s brutal seizure of power, let alone Britain’s role. It is not hard to see why.

The killings in Indonesia started when a group of army officers loyal to President Sukarno assassinated several generals on 30 September 1965. They believed the generals were about to stage a coup to overthrow Sukarno. The instability, however, provided other anti-Sukarno generals, led by General Suharto, with an excuse for the army to move against a powerful and popular political faction with mass support, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). It did so brutally: in a few months hundreds of thousands of PKI members and ordinary people were killed and the PKI destroyed. Suharto emerged as leader and instituted a brutal regime that lasted until 1998.
 Close relations between the US and British embassies in Jakarta are indicated in the declassified files and point to a somewhat coordinated joint operation in 1965. These files show five ways in which the Labour government under Harold Wilson together with the Democratic government under Lyndon Johnson were complicit in this slaughter.

First, the British wanted the army to act and encouraged it. “I have never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change”, the ambassador in Jakarta, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, informed the Foreign Office on 5 October.

The following day the Foreign Office stated that “the crucial question still remains whether the Generals will pluck up enough courage to take decisive action against the PKI”. Later it noted that “we must surely prefer an Army to a Communist regime” and declared: “It seems pretty clear that the Generals are going to need all the help they can get and accept without being tagged as hopelessly pro-Western, if they are going to be able to gain ascendancy over the Communists. In the short run, and while the present confusion continues, we can hardly go wrong by tacitly backing the Generals”. British policy was “to encourage the emergence of a General’s regime”, one intelligence official later explained.

US officials similarly expressed their hope of “army at long last to act effectively against Communists” [sic]. “We are, as always, sympathetic to army’s desire to eliminate communist influence” and ”it is important to assure the army of our full support of its efforts to crush the PKI”.

US and British officials had clear knowledge of the killings. US Ambassador Marshall Green noted three weeks after the attempted coup, and with the killings having begun, that: “Army has… been working hard at destroying PKI and I, for one, have increasing respect for its determination and organisation in carrying out this crucial assignment”. Green noted in the same despatch the “execution of PKI cadres”, putting the figure at “several hundred of them” in “Djakarta area alone”[sic].

On 1 November, Green informed the State Department of the army’s “moving relentlessly to exterminate the PKI as far as that is possible to do”. Three days later he noted that “Embassy and USG generally sympathetic with and admiring of what army doing” [sic]. Four days after this the US Embassy reported that the army “has continued systematic drive to destroy PKI in northern Sumatra with wholesale killings reported”.

A British official reported on 25 November that “PKI men and women are being executed in very large numbers”. Some victims “are given a knife and invited to kill themselves. Most refuse and are told to turn around and are shot in the back”. One executioner considered it “his duty to exterminate what he called ‘less than animals’”.
A British official wrote to the Ambassador on 16 December, saying: “You – like me – may have been somewhat surprised to see estimates by the American embassy that well over 100,000 people have been killed in the troubles since 1 October. I am, however, readier to accept such figures after [receiving] some horrifying details of the purges that have been taking place… The local army commander… has a list of PKI members in five categories. He has been given orders to kill those in the first three categories… A woman of 78… was taken away one night by a village execution squad… Half a dozen heads were neatly arranged on the parapet of a small bridge”.

The US Consulate in Medan was reporting that “much indiscriminate killing is taking place”: “Something like a reign of terror against PKI is taking place. This terror is not discriminating very carefully between PKI leaders and ordinary PKI members with no ideological bond to the party”.

By mid December the State Department noted approvingly that “Indonesian military leaders’ campaign to destroy PKI is moving fairly swiftly and smoothly”. By 14 February 1966 Ambassador Green could note that “the PKI has been destroyed as an effective political force for some time to come” and that “the Communists…have been decimated by wholesale massacre”.

The British files show that by February 1966 the British ambassador was estimating 400,000 dead – but even this was described by the Swedish ambassador as a “gross under-estimate”. By March one British official wondered “how much of it [the PKI] is left, after six months of killing” and believed that over 200,000 had been killed in Sumatra alone – in a report called “The liquidation of the Indonesian Communist Party in Sumatra”. By April, the US Embassy stated that “we frankly do not know whether the real figure is closer to 100,000 or 1,000,000 but believe it wiser to err on the side of the lower estimates, especially when questioned by the press”.

Summarising the events of 1965 the British Consul in Medan said: “Posing as saviours of the nation from a communist terror, [the army] unleashed a ruthless terror of their own, the scars of which will take many years to heal.” Another British memo referred to “an operation carried out on a very large scale and often with appalling savagery”. Another simply referred to the “bloodbath”.

British and US officials totally supported these massacres, the files show. I could find no reference to any concern about the extent of killing at all – other than constant encouragement for the army to continue. As the files above indicate, there is no question that British and US officials knew exactly what they were supporting. One British official noted, referring to 10,005 people arrested by the army: “I hope they do not throw the 10,005 into the sea…, otherwise it will cause quite a shipping hazard”.

It was not only PKI activists who were the targets of this terror. As the British files show, many of the victims were the “merest rank and file“ of the PKI who were “often no more than bewildered peasants who give the wrong answer on a dark night to bloodthirsty hooligans bent on violence”, with the connivance of the army.

Britain connived even more closely with those conducting the slaughter. By 1965, Britain had deployed tens of thousands of troops in Borneo, to defend its former colony of Malaya against Indonesian encroachments following territorial claims by Jakarta – known as the “confrontation”. British planners secretly noted that they “did not want to distract the Indonesian army by getting them engaged in fighting in Borneo and so discourage them from the attempts which they now seem to be making to deal with the PKI”.

The US was worried that Britain might take advantage of the instability in Indonesia to launch an offensive from Singapore “to stab the good generals in the back”, as Ambassador Gilchrist described the US fear.

So the British Ambassador proposed reassuring those Indonesians who were ordering mass slaughter, saying that “we should get word to the Generals that we shall not attack them whilst they are chasing the PKI”. The British intelligence chief in Singapore agreed, believing this “might ensure that the army is not detracted [sic] from what we consider to be a necessary task”. In October the British passed to the Generals, through a US contact, “a carefully phrased oral message about not biting the Generals in the back for the present”. The US files confirm that the message from the US, conveyed on 14 October, read: “First, we wish to assure you that we have no intention of interfering Indonesian internal affairs directly or indirectly. Second, we have good reason to believe that none of our allies intend to initiate any offensive action against Indonesia” [sic].

The message was greatly welcomed by the Indonesian army: an aide to the Defence Minister noted that “this was just what was needed by way of assurances that we (the army) weren’t going to be hit from all angles as we moved to straighten things out here”.

According to former BBC correspondent Roland Challis, the counsellor at the British embassy, (now Sir) James Murray, was authorised to tell Suharto that in the event of Indonesian troops being transferred from the confrontation area to Java, British forces would not take military advantage. Indeed, in his book, Challis notes a report in an Indonesian newspaper in 1980 that Britain even helped an Indonesian colonel transport an infantry brigade on confrontation duty back to Jakarta. “Flying the Panamanian flag, she sailed safely down the heavily-patrolled Malacca Strait – escorted by two British warships”, Challis notes.

The third means of support was propaganda operations, mainly involving the distribution of false anti-Sukarno messages and stories through the media. This was organised from Britain’s MI6 Phoenix Park intelligence base in Singapore. The head of these operations, Norman Reddaway, told the BBC’s Southeast Asia correspondent to “do anything you can think of to get rid of Sukarno”.

On 5 October Reddaway reported to the Foreign Office in London that: “We should not miss the present opportunity to use the situation to our advantage… I recommend that we should have no hesitation in doing what we can surreptitiously to blacken the PKI in the eyes of the army and the people of Indonesia”.

The Foreign Office replied: “We certainly do not exclude any unattributable propaganda or psywar [psychological warfare] activities which would contribute to weakening the PKI permanently. We therefore agree with the [above] recommendation… Suitable propaganda themes might be… Chinese interference in particular arms shipments; PKI subverting Indonesia as agents of foreign communists”. It continued: “We want to act quickly while the Indonesians are still off balance but treatment will need to be subtle… Please let us know of any suggestions you may have on these lines where we could be helpful at this end”.

On 9 October the intelligence agent confirmed that “we have made arrangements for distribution of certain unattributable material based on the general guidance” in the Foreign Office memo. This involved “promoting and coordinating publicity” critical of the Sukarno government to “news agencies, newspapers and radio”. “The impact has been considerable”, one file notes. British propaganda covered in various newspapers included fabrications of nest-eggs accumulated abroad by Sukarno’s ministers and PKI preparations for a coup by carving up Jakarta into districts to engage in systematic slaughter (forerunners of current modern propaganda on Iraq).

The fourth method of support was a “hit list” of targets supplied by the US to the Indonesian army. As the journalist Kathy Kadane has revealed, as many as 5,000 names of provincial, city and other local PKI committee members and leaders of the mass organisations of the PKI, such as the national labour federation, women’s and youth groups, were passed on the Generals, many of whom were subsequently killed. “It really was a big help to the army” noted Robert Martens, a former official in the US embassy. “They probably killed a lot of people and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad. There’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment”.

The recently declassified US files do not provide many further details about this hit list, although they do further confirm it. One list of names, for example, was passed to the Indonesians in December 1965 and “is apparently being used by Indonesian security authorities who seem to lack even the simplest overt information on PKI leadership at the time”. Also, “lists of other officials in the PKI affiliates, Partindo and Baperki were also provided to GOI [Government of Indonesia] officials at their request”. 

The final means of support was provision of arms – although this remains the murkiest area to uncover. Past US support to the Indonesian military “should have established clearly in minds Army leaders that US stands behind them if they should need help [sic]”, the State Department noted. US strategy was to “avoid overt involvement in the power struggle but… indicate, clearly but covertly, to key Army officers our desire to assist where we can.”

The first US supplies to the Indonesian army were radios “to help in internal security” and to aid the Generals “in their task of overcoming the Communists”, as British Ambassador Gilchrist pointed out. “I see no reason to object or complain”, he added.
The US historian Gabriel Kolko has shown that in early November 1965 the US received a request from the Generals to “arm Moslem and nationalist youths…for use against the PKI”. The recently published files confirm this approach from the Indonesians. On 1 November Ambassador Green cabled Washington that: “As to the provision of small arms I would be leery about telling army we are in position to provide same, although we should act, not close our minds to this possibility… We could explore availability of small arms stocks, preferable of non-US origin, which could be obtained without any overt US government involvement. We might also examine channels through which we could, if necessary, provide covert assistance to army for purchase of weapons”.

A CIA memo of 9 November stated that the US should avoid being “too hesitant about the propriety of extending such assistance provided we can do so covertly, in a manner which will not embarrass them or embarrass our government”. It then noted that mechanisms exist or can be created to deliver “any of the types of the materiel requested to date in reasonable quantities”. One line of text is then not declassified before the memo notes: “The same can be said of purchasers and transfer agents for such items as small arms, medicine and other items requested.” The memo goes on to note that “we do not propose that the Indonesian army be furnished such equipment at this time”. However, “if the Army leaders justify their needs in detail…it is likely that at least will help ensure their success and provide the basis for future collaboration with the US”. “The means for covert implementation” of the delivery of arms “are within our capabilities”.

In response to Indonesia’s request for arms, Kolko has shown that the US promised to provide such covert aid, and dubbed them “medicines”. They were approved in a meeting in Washington on 4 December. The declassified files state that “the Army really needed the medicines” and that the US was keen to indicate “approval in a practical way of the actions of the Indonesian army”. The extent of arms provided is not revealed in the files but the amount “the medicines would cost was a mere pittance compared with the advantages that might accrue to the US as a result of ‘getting in on the ground floor’”, one file reads.

The British knew of these arms supplies and it is likely they also approved them. Britain was initially reluctant to see US arms go to the Generals for fear that they might be used by Indonesia in the “confrontation”. The British files show that the US State Department had “undertaken to consult with us before they do anything to support the Generals”. It is possible that the US reneged on this commitment; however, in earlier discussions about this possibility, a British official at the embassy in Washington noted that “I do not think that is very likely”.

The threat of independent development
 
The struggle between the army and the PKI was “a struggle basically for the commanding heights of the Indonesian economy”, British officials noted. At stake was using the resources of Indonesia for the primary benefit of its people or for businesses, including Western companies.

British and US planners supported the slaughter to promote interests deemed more important than people’s lives. London wanted to see a change in regime in Jakarta to bring an end to the “confrontation” with Malaya. But commercial interests were just as important. Southeast Asia was “a major producer of some essential commodities” such as rubber, copra and chromium ore; “the defence of the sources of these products and their denial to a possible enemy are major interests to the Western powers”, the Foreign Office noted. This was a fancy way of saying that the resources will continue to be exploited by Western business. Indonesia was also strategically located at a nexus of important trading routes.

British Foreign Secretary Michel Stewart wrote in the middle of the slaughter: “It is only the economic chaos of Indonesia which prevents that country from offering great potential opportunities to British exporters. If there is going to be a deal in Indonesia, as I hope one day there may be, I think we ought to take an active part and try to secure a slice of the cake ourselves”.

Similarly, one Foreign Office noted that Indonesia was in a “state of economic chaos but is potentially rich”. “American exporters, like their British counterparts, presumably see in Indonesia a potentially rich market once the economy has been brought under control”.

For the US, Under Secretary of State George Ball had noted that Indonesia “may be more important to us than South V-N [Vietnam]”, against which the US was at the same time massively stepping up its assault. “At stake” in Indonesia, one US memo read, “are 100 million people, vast potential resources and a strategically important chain of islands”.

US priorities were virtually identical in Vietnam and Indonesia: to prevent the consolidation of an independent nationalist regime that threatened Western interests and that could be a successful development model for others. President Sukarno clearly had the wrong economic priorities.

In 1964, British-owned commercial interests had been placed under Indonesian management and control. However, under the Suharto regime, the British Foreign Secretary told one Indonesian army General that “we are…glad that your government has decided to hand back the control of British estates to their original owners”.
The US Ambassador in Malaysia cabled Washington a year before the October 1965 events in Indonesia saying that “our difficulties with Indonesia stem basically from deliberate, positive GOI [Government of Indonesia] strategy of seeking to push Britain and the US out of Southeast Asia”. George Ball noted in March 1965 that “our relations with Indonesia are on the verge of falling apart”. “Not only has the management of the American rubber plants been taken over, but there are dangers of an imminent seizure of the American oil companies”.

According to a US report for President Johnson: “The government occupies a dominant position in basic industry, public utilities, internal transportation and communication… It is probable that private ownership will disappear and may be succeeded by some form of production-profit-sharing contract arrangements to be applied to all foreign investment”. Overall, “the avowed Indonesian objective is ‘to stand on their own feet’ in developing their economy, free from foreign, especially Western, influence”.

This was a serious danger that needed to be removed. Third World countries are to develop under overall Western control, not by or for themselves, a truism about US and British foreign policy revealed time and again in the declassified files.
It is customary in the propaganda system to excuse past horrible British and US policies by referring to the Cold War. In Indonesia, the main threat was indigenous nationalism. The British feared “the resurgence of Communist and radical nationalism”. One US memo says of future PKI policy: “It is likely that PKI foreign policy decisions, like those of Sukarno, would stress Indonesian national interests above those of Peking, Moscow or international communism in general”.

The real danger was that Indonesia would be too successful, a constant US fear well documented by Kolko and Noam Chomsky in policy towards numerous other countries. A Special National Intelligence Estimate of 1 September 1965 referred to the PKI’s moving “to energize and unite the Indonesian nation” and stated that “if these efforts succeeded, Indonesia would provide a powerful example for the underdeveloped world and hence a credit to communism and a setback for Western prestige”. One critical area was the landlessness of the poor peasants – the source of the grinding poverty of most Indonesians – and land reform more generally, the key political issue in rural areas and the smaller cities. The PKI was recognised by British and US officials as the champion of the landless and poor in Indonesia.

Britain was keen to establish good relations with Suharto, that were to remain for thirty years. A year after the beginning of the slaughter, the Foreign Office noted that “it was very necessary to demonstrate to the Indonesians that we regarded our relations with them as rapidly returning to normal”. Britain was keen to establish “normal trade” and provide aid, and to express its “goodwill and confidence” in the new regime. British officials spoke to the new Foreign Minister, Adam Malik, of the “new relationship which we hope will develop between our two countries”. A Foreign Office brief for the Cabinet said that Britain “shall do all we can to restore good relations with Indonesia and help her resume her rightful place in the world community”.

There is no mention in any of the files – that I could find – of the morality of engaging with the new regime. The slaughter was simply an irrelevance. Michael Stewart recalled in his autobiography that he visited Indonesia a year after the killings and was able to “reach a good understanding with the Foreign Minister, Adam Malik”, a “remarkable man” who was “evidently resolved to keep his country at peace”. Suharto’s regime is “like Sukarno’s, harsh and tyrannical; but it is not aggressive”, Stewart stated. Malik later acted as a primary apologist for Indonesian atrocities in East Timor. In 1977, for example, he was reported as saying: “50,000 or 80,000 people might have been killed during the war in East Timor…It was war…Then what is the big fuss?”.

A combination of Western advice, aid and investment helped transform the Indonesian economy into one that, although retaining some nationalist orientation, provided substantial opportunities and profits for Western investors. President Suharto’s increasingly corrupt authoritarian regime kept economic order. Japan and the United States, working through consortia and the multilateral banks, used aid as a lever to rewrite Indonesia’s basic economic legislation to favour foreign investors. Western businesses moved in. By the mid-1970s, a British CBI report noted that Indonesia presented “enormous potential for the foreign investor”. The press reported that the country enjoyed a “favourable political climate” and the “encouragement of foreign investment by the country’s authorities”. RTZ, BP, British Gas and Britoil were some of the companies that took taken advantage.

With Suharto gone after May 1998, British ministers were able to talk frankly of the regime they had supported. It could now be admitted that under Suharto there was “severe political repression”, the “concentration of economic and political power in a few, extremely corrupt hands”, and the “involvement of the security forces in every tier of social and political life”, for example. All these things had been miraculously discovered. 

Introduction to: ‘John Pilger: Documentaries that changed the world’

by Mark Curtis 

The DVD collection can be found at: http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=146

John Pilger is surely the most outstanding journalist and film-maker in the world today and these twelve films are testimony to that. No other film-maker has consistently exposed the reality of Western governments’ policies and revealed their lies to us, the public. As an historian working in this area, I, and others in my generation, owe Pilger’s investigations a great debt. For example, he revealed secret British military training of forces allied to the gruesome Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1990s; massacres by Indonesian forces of East Timorese protesting at their country’s occupation; and the horrific effects in Iraq of depleted uranium weapons fired by the British and US military. These films are full of such revelations, not to mention incriminating admissions from officials, such as in the film, Breaking the Silence, where US Secretary of State Colin Powell is shown before the invasion of Iraq conceding that Saddam Hussein has no nuclear weapons capability.

But more importantly, Pilger’s films have brought urgent issues to the attention of large numbers of people for the first time. For years, Britain provided arms to Indonesia which helped sustain the latter’s brutal occupation of East Timor, in which around 200,000 people died. Yet the mainstream TV channels barely reported the conflict, let alone Britain’s complicity in it. It was Pilger’s film, Death of a Nation, much of which was secretly filmed, which brought home the reality of life in Timor to the public in Britain for the first time. Following the film, thousands of people wrote in for more information or wrote directly to the Foreign Office to protest about British policy.

The most recent film in this collection, Stealing a Nation, is about people of whom most of the British public has probably never even heard. The media, especially television, has largely failed to report Britain’s forced depopulation of the Chagos islands, which includes Diego Garcia, now a US military base used for intervention in the Middle East. ‘What upsets you the most?’, Pilger asks Olivier Bancoult, the Chagossians’ leader in exile. ‘The lie that we didn’t exist’, he replies.

A secret document drawn up by British planners in 1968 was called ‘maintaining the fiction’, and argued (knowing it was untrue) that the Chagos islanders were not permanent inhabitants. The author, one Anthony Ivall Aust, then a legal adviser to the Foreign Office, was subsequently awarded a CMG in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. The story is a good indication of mainstream British political culture – buried in the media, the perpetrators of crimes against foreign unpeople shower honours on themselves while the US is appeased.

John Pilger’s films have been commercially successful and watched the world over. They give the lie to the argument that the public is disinterested in ‘serious issues’. Indeed, these films are a living indictment of the failure of mainstream television to reveal what is being done in our name. This collection should be viewed as a corrective to the stream of disinformation that we are otherwise bombarded with on television. It is worth dwelling for a moment on this point. The public is essentially kept in the dark about the reality of Britain’s – and the US’ – role in the world. Television is where many people get most of their information on what is happening in the world.

Yet in mainstream television, many Britain policies are simply not reported, relevant history is ignored and government statements are regularly parroted without criticism. The Glasgow University Media Group concludes that ‘the news is not a neutral and natural phenomenon; it is rather the manufactured production of ideology’. And that TV news is ‘a sequence of socially manufactured messages which carry many of the culturally dominant assumptions of our society’. On issues where the state is very sensitive, it notes that ‘the news can become almost one-dimensional – alternatives are reduced to fragments or disappear altogether’.

The ideological system promotes one key concept that underpins everything else – the idea of Britain’s basic benevolence. Mainstream reporting and analysis usually actively promotes, or at least does not challenge, the idea that Britain promotes high principles – democracy, peace, human rights and development – in its foreign policy. Criticism is certainly possible, and normal, but within narrow limits that show ‘exceptions’ to, or ‘mistakes’ in, promoting the rule of basic benevolence. It also means that government statements on  always noble intentions are invariably taken seriously and almost never ridiculed. These assumptions and ways of reporting are very deep-rooted.

Much television simply encourages us to disengage. It can convey that political forces are simply too great to be influenced by anyone. Or, more usually, simply fail to show what our – Britain’s – role is in whatever is being reported. This serves to pacify us, render us apathetic and simply as viewers rather than actors.

It is this ideological system that Pilger has successfully challenged in these films. They contribute to what the great Kenyan novelist Ngugi Wa Thiongo has called ‘decolonising the mind’. Ngugi was referring to Africans needing to free themselves from ideologies often subconsciously imposed under colonialism. But the British public needs, in my view, to do the same thing, and consciously unlearn most of what we have been informed about and ‘educated’ on regarding Britain’s role in the world. This is the corrective that Pilger’s films offer. Of course, by taking on the establishment (in the media as well as in government), Pilger has been regularly vilified and dismissed in the mainstream. There could be no higher accolade for a journalist – in what is simply an occupational hazard.

Pilger’s films are about people, and the effects on them of ‘our’ policies and priorities. Chagossians, Palestinians, Afghanis, Burmese, Cambodians, Vietnamese are centre-stage – the voiceless given a voice here. Pilger’s interviews with Palestinians in Palestine is Still the Issue are among the most moving, such as with Liana Badr, the Director of the Palestinian Cultural Centre, just after it has been hideously destroyed by Israeli soldiers. In Paying the Price, Pilger interviews doctors in Iraqi hospitals showing us their pitiful health facilities as a result of economic sanctions maintained on the country by the US and Britain. Although Saddam is gone, and Iraq now plunged into a further era of horror, this film of life under sanctions still demands to be watched. The British government, throughout the 1990s, contributed to the deaths of over a million people – a whole generation of Iraqis. 

Are these really ‘documentaries that changed the world’? After all, horrible foreign policies are still being conducted in our name, notably currently in the Middle East. But I think Pilger’s films have helped make large numbers of people more politically conscious, indeed more angry, and they have contributed to a rising and more forceful public movement in more regular opposition to government policies. For example, the film Flying the Flag reveals Britain’s role in supplying arms to repressive regimes that abuse human rights, along with the corruption that often accompanies it. Terribly, this still goes on, but the hurdles governments need to overcome to flog arms to dictators are higher now thanks to increasing public scrutiny and opposition that makes it more difficult for governments to get away with their policies.

Unfortunately, even scandalous policies change only gradually – taking on powerful government and stopping their well-entrenched strategies is no easy thing. But the public is increasingly acting as a deterrent to the worst government policies. Massive public opposition to the recent invasion of Iraq failed to stop it; but what was stopped, at least temporarily, were well-laid British plans to join in other military interventions in the Middle East. As Britain’s leading ‘dissident’ film-maker, Pilger’s films have surely played a part in the development of this new radical sense among the public.

John Pilger’s films are empowering as well as enlightening. They can change our perceptions and ways of thinking about the world, which is the first step to changing the way we act as individuals in the world. There is much that we can do to change things for the better, and this collection of films from the past two decades of the British and US impact on the world provides us with the strongest reasons why we must.

Mark Curtis is an historian and journalist. His most recent books are Unpeople: Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses (Vintage, 2004) and Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World (Vintage, 2003). www.markcurtis.info.

Britain and the G8: A champion of the world’s poor?

Mark Curtis

Chapter in Gill Hubbard and David Miller (eds), Arguments against G8, Pluto, London, 2005, available at http://www.plutobooks.com/cgi-local/nplutobrows.pl?chkisbn=0745324207&main=&second=&third=&foo=../ssi/ssfooter.ssi

In 2005, Britain is hosting (or by the time you read this book will have hosted) the summit meeting of the G8 countries in Gleneagles, Scotland. New Labour ministers have been clamouring to publicly demonstrate their commitment to global development issues. But how seriously should we take these public positions?

According to Prime Minister Tony Blair, ‘real development can only come through partnership. Not the rich dictating to the poor. Not the poor demanding from the rich. But matching rights and responsibilities’. This is Blair’s world – where the poor have no right to make demands on the rich. Yet this is a world where half the population lives in poverty, on an average of $2 a day, while the richest few dozen individuals command more wealth than hundreds of millions of people. In this situation, are the poor really not entitled to be ‘demanding from the rich’ rather than simply ‘matching rights and responsibilities’?

Blair’s view is echoed by Chancellor Gordon Brown, who has outlined a ‘global new deal’ based on the poorest and richest countries ‘each meeting our obligations’. The poorest countries’ ‘obligations’ are ‘to pursue stability and create the conditions for new investment’. The richest countries’ obligations are ‘to open our markets and to transfer resources’. One might think that the world’s poorest countries have no obligations to the rich, after centuries of exploitation and enduring extreme poverty due partly to an international economic system that plainly disadvantages them. But no, those with few schools, health services and safe water are deemed by New Labour to have ‘obligations’ to us concerning helping our companies to make more profits (creating ‘the conditions for new investment’).

Yet Blair and Brown are regarded throughout the mainstream media and liberal political culture as champions of the world’s poor. Their policies on aid, Africa and even trade are routinely widely praised, as demonstrating that, more recently, even though they might be liars and criminals over Iraq, on global development they are committed internationalists. It is an extraordinary view. Because, putting the progressive rhetoric aside, government ministers have also made plain their other goals – which are more plausible and confirmed by their actual policies. This is easy to spot, if we bother to look.

The new liberalisation theologists

The basic fact is that Britain under New Labour is one of the world’s leading champions of the neo-liberal economic model that is essentially being imposed on the much of the rest of the world, and which is generally increasing poverty and inequality. Britain’s basic priority – which I have tried to document in recent books – is to aid British companies in getting their hands on other countries’ resources. The explicit goal is to break into foreign markets. Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt has said that ‘we want to open up protected markets in developing countries’. A new World Trade Organisation round of negotiations ‘is the best way of ensuring that our businesses can benefit from, and contribute to, future economic growth anywhere in the world’, she stated in July 2001.

‘Opening up markets and cutting duties around the world’ will ‘create new opportunities for our service sectors’, Hewitt adds. Similarly, Trade Minister Baroness Symons assured a big business lobby group on services that the government was committed ‘to work with you to bring those [trade] barriers down’. She said that ‘there is still a lot to be done in India – and other markets – to facilitate market access for industry’.

Former Trade Secretary Margaret Beckett wrote in the Financial Times that a key objective of the Department of Trade and Industry is: ‘to continue developing the conditions, at home and abroad, in which British business can thrive… Britain’s businesses need to be able to trade throughout the world’s markets as easily as they can in home markets without facing high tariffs, discriminatory regulations or unnecessarily burdensome procedures’.

Essentially the same goal was repeated in the government’s white paper on trade produced in July 2004: ‘The UK government has a key role to play at the international policy level to ensure that any distortions created by other government interventions are minimised so that the UK can compete in global markets, while deriving the maximum benefit from competition from increased imports’.

Securing business’ access into foreign markets is the aim of economic ‘liberalisation’. Under New Labour, Britain has been perhaps the world’s leading champion of trade ‘liberalisation, which it wants to see applied in all countries. Policies like import tariffs and subsidies, raised by governments to protect their markets from competition that can undermine domestic industry or agriculture, are seen as essentially heretical for developing countries (‘trade-distorting’, in the theology). ‘Trade liberalisation is the only sure route’ to economic growth and prosperity for developing countries, Tony Blair says with religious conviction.

The rich North’s aim is to ‘lock in’ all countries to this agenda, while the WTO has become in effect an organising body for the global economy. Peter Sutherland, former Director-General of the WTO, for example, has said that an aim of the trade negotiations was to extend liberalisation ‘to most aspects of domestic policy-making’ affecting international trade and investment. The promotion of this one-size-fits-all economic ideology mainly benefits transnational corporations (TNCs). As the Chief Trade Economist of the World Bank has said: ‘The dynamic behind the WTO process has been the export interests of major enterprises in the advanced trading countries’. The purpose of global trade policy, explained Lawrence Summers, a former World Bank chief economist and Clinton administra¬tion official, is to ‘ensure viable investment opportunities for OECD companies’.

If a prize were to be given for exploiting September 11th for one’s own ends, then Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt would surely be one of the front-runners. An aide to Transport Secretary Stephen Byers suggested in an internal memo that the government take advantage of September 11th to push through some unpopular policies; the aide and Byers were hounded by the media for weeks, contributing to Byers’ eventual resignation. By contrast, Hewitt said something worse openly – that the attack on the World Trade Centre ‘was also an attack on global trade’. ‘So we must respond by launching a new trade round’ and ‘fight terror with trade’ in the upcoming WTO negotiations, which were then two months away. Thus the dead of September 11th were being used to push further ‘liberalisation’ on the world’s poor.

At that WTO summit in Qatar, the British government led the way in pushing for a new trade round that would have added new issues – such as investment and  procurement – to the WTO’s negotiating remit. This was opposed by developing countries, who by adopting a united stance just managed to prevent the rich countries’s securing this goal. Two years later, Britain and the EU continued to push these new issues in the run-up to the Cancun ministerial meeting in late 1993 – developing countries again remained united and eventually forced the EU to back down.

A key British aim in the WTO has been to secure a global agreement on investment that would require all govern¬ments to give ‘equal treatment’ to foreign as to domestic businesses in many important economic policy areas. This would be a disaster for many developing countries – all successful developers in the past have strongly discriminated in favour of their domestic companies, nurturing them to become competitive, to aid national development. If foreign companies are treated equally, an important development policy is removed and local markets can be dominated by foreign enterprises. In turn, profits can simply be repatriated back to the home country and poor countries drained of scarce resources.

Britain has been pushing for ‘treating inward investors exactly the same as domestic investors – ownership of the company should not be relevant to the application of national laws and regulations’. The aim of a global agreement, Baroness Symons explains, is to ‘help lock in individual countries’ own investment reform efforts’ – that is, ensure they promote the one-size-fits-all model.

Britain was one of the strongest supporters of the proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) that Northern countries tried to negotiate in the OECD, but which was eventually scuppered in 1998, partly due to an NGO campaign against it. If passed into law, the MAI would have massively increased the power of corporations over elected governments, greatly expanding their investment rights all over the world. After the talks collapsed, the British government immediately said that ‘it is better to start afresh in another forum’ than the OECD given its ‘long-standing objective’ of pursuing investment negotiations in the WTO.

Asked by a parliamentary committee whether an inter¬national investment agreement was needed, then Trade Minister Brian Wilson replied that:
‘As to whether there is a demand from UK companies for some such agreement, I can assure you that this is a subject that is raised with us very regularly by UK companies which invest abroad’.

The government has also consistently acted as an ally to big business in the ongoing WTO negotiations on services. Trade Minister Baroness Symons has told members of International Finance Services London – a big business pressure group – that Whitehall is seeking ‘an international trading environment in which UK business can compete and thrive’. She added: ‘I hope you will view this government as your greatest ally in moving that agenda forward’, including through the WTO. After the Qatar ministerial, Symons said that the WTO negotiations ‘offer a huge opportunity to European and British businesses’. In services, ‘we need to continue to ensure that the UK’s key offensive interests are reflected’.

Services are big business to Britain, which is the second largest exporter of services in the world, amounting to £67 billion in 2000, and the fourth largest importer. Symons notes that for Britain ‘trading services internationally is of far greater importance than it is to a number of countries’, which explains why to New Labour’s liberalisation theologists ‘open markets are a major economic interest and essential to our own economic performance’.

The importance of DFID

New Labour created a new instrument for promoting these interests – the Department for International Develop¬ment (DFID). Under the present government an extremist economic project is being pursued under a great moral pretext – that global ‘liberalisation’ will promote development and the eradication of poverty. A variety of initiatives have been established, and numerous ministerial speeches made, to reassure business of the benefits of New Labour’s policies, and emphasising that business is a ‘partner’ in development. Indeed, DFID has not hidden the fact that it acts as a high level global lobbyist for big business. Consider then International Development Secretary Clare Short’s speech to business leaders at Lancaster House in April 1999: ‘The assumption that our moral duties and business interests are in conflict is now demonstrably false… I am very keen that we maximise the impact of our shared interest in business and development by working together in partnership… We bring access to other governments and influence in the multilateral system – such as the World Bank and IMF… You are well aware of the constraints business faces in the regulatory environment for investment in any country… Your ideas on overcoming these constraints can be invaluable when we develop our country strategies. We can use this understanding to inform our dialogue with governments and the multilateral institutions on the reform agenda’.

So, DFID is offering itself as an instrument for business to shape the policies of multilateral institutions and developing country governments. This is at least an honest admission, and has been the subject of various other speeches by DFID and DTI ministers.

DFID policy is to help minimise the risks for private investors in developing countries and ‘to develop an investor friendly environment’ and ‘a more favourable business environment’. Its Business Partnership Unit is a first point of contact for business and looks at ‘ways in which DFID can improve the enabling environment for productive invest¬ment overseas and how we can contribute to the operation of the overseas financial sector”. DFID is also working with the World Bank’s Business Partners for Development programme, involving governments, businesses and some NGOs in the water, transport and extractive industries sectors. Its bilateral aid programmes ‘provide governments of developing countries with the advice and expertise to help attract private finance’. It also supports the World Bank’s Private-Public Infrastructure Advisory Facility, which provides ‘advice’ on regulatory frameworks to attract foreign investment.

Domestically and internationally, the government is actively campaigning for the minimum regulation of business. Clare Short said that: ‘By far the best approach is for enterprises themselves to ensure that they respect the rights of workers, protect their health and safety and offer satisfactory conditions of employment… Voluntary codes… are often more effective than regulation’.

It might be thought astonishing that a Labour leader believes that businesses should be left to themselves to ensure they respect the rights of workers! But not if the strategy is to act as a great protector of transnational business. New Labour’s consistent rejection of proposals for legally binding regulation of corporations to protect people contrasts starkly with its vociferous support for legally binding WTO rules that benefit business. An obvious agenda for any British government concerned with promoting a positive development agenda would be to rein in the worst aspects of TNC activities. Labour has chosen the opposite route – working to empower TNCs and actively lobbying in their favour. I can find no statement where the government has even seriously criticised TNCs for the harmful effects they can have on the world’s poor.

Under New Labour the aid programme has been overtly used to push corporate globalisation, as the World Development Movement (WDM) is increasingly uncovering. Christian Aid found that in Ghana, the British government was in effect tying the release of British aid to Ghana’s government privatising water services. DFID was with¬holding £10 million in aid for the expansion of water supply in the city of Kumasi until company bids for the leases of Ghana’s urban water supplies had been received. DFID had commissioned the Adam Smith Institute – a wholesale advocate of privatisation – to ‘advise’ the British government on restructuring the water sector in Ghana. British water and construction companies have been waiting in the wings to take advantage of privatisation.

A recent War on Want report reveals that the government has provided over £100 million of taxpayers aid money to consultancies such as the Adam Smith Institute, Halcrow and KPMG to push privatisation. The government is pressing for the privatisation of water supplies and other services across the planet. DFID’s chief civil servant notes that ‘we are…extending our support for privatisation in the poorest countries from the power sector in India to the tea industry in Nepal’.

The difference between developing countries choosing and being forced to accept the Northern countries’ agenda is often wafer thin. A number of levers are used by Northern countries to secure their goals. Indeed, even though the WTO agreement does not formally require developing countries to liberalise their services sectors, for example, this is in practice happening thanks to pressure outside the WTO, as in Ghana. As Baroness Symons explains, privatisation ‘is a growing phenomenon worldwide… This is occurring quite independently of the GATS negotiations’.

Government arguments

What of the government’s arguments that it is pursuing a positive development agenda? First, it should be said that this case can only be made by ignoring the wealth of evidence concerning the very clear strategy of promoting corporate globalisation and the empowerment of business outlined above. Yet three cases in particular are still routinely made: on trade, aid and debt.

On trade, the government’s slogan is that it is promoting ‘free and fair trade’ – a conflation of two generally conflicting policies that, one might think, would generally be ridiculed. Not so, however; the government receives widespread praise, in some NGO circles as well as the mainstream media, for championing the cause of opening up EU markets to developing countries by removing trade barriers. Certainly, the EU’s blocking such market access at the same time as forcing open developing country markets is gross hypocrisy, and the British government has been outspoken on this. But the reality is that the government sees market access for developing countries as a sweetener for poor countries to do likewise.  According to former Trade Minister Richard Caborn, access to EU markets ‘is the message we need to hammer home if we are to get the developing world to agree to another round of WTO talks’, that is, further liberalisation. It is a myth that mutual liberalisation creates a level playing field from which all countries will benefit equally; rather, it is mainly TNCs who gain, poised as they are to take advantage of newly opened markets.

A second area where the government is often praised is in increasing overseas aid. New Labour has increased the aid budget significantly, from a low point at the end of Conservative rule. But, as noted above, aid is routinely used to press developing country governments into promoting neo-liberal economic policies, which can completely undermine the positive impact that better aid could have. For example, Gordon Brown’s widely praised flagship aid initiative – the International Finance Facility (IFF) – is billed by the government as doubling overseas aid. WDM’s analysis is that the IFF will actually result in less aid over the long term; moreover, such aid remains conditional on developing countries ‘opening up to trade and inmvestment’. The government has abolished formal tied aid – aid given on the specific condition that it is used to buy goods from the donor – but the use of such “globalised aid” has been increasing.

The same goes for debt relief. In this area, Britain has a more positive record than other G8 governments. It was largely public pressure – notably through the Jubilee 2000 debt campaign – that pushed the government into its more progressive stance. Yet debt relief is also only provided on condition that countries implement World Bank/IMF programmes that require policies of economic liberalisation – in effect, a reward for developing countries promoting policies that will further impoverish them, perhaps a bit like a doctor offering a patient an aspirin at the same time as injecting them with a deadly disease. The fact that debt relief is such a lever over developing countries – a tool in the armoury of promoting corporate globalisation – plausibly offers one explanation for why New Labour has become keen on it.

In this context, the task of campaigners is to ensure that government rhetoric is exposed and that the public sees accurately what policies are being promoted in their name. In the short term, a more effective campaigning challenge needs to be mounted to government policies; in the long term, efforts need to be stepped up to enhance the global justice movement to reverse corporate globalisation and promote just alternatives.