week, Turkey sent a 5,000-strong force, backed up by fighter aircraft and attack helicopters, to hunt down PKK units in northern Iraq, where US and British bombers have also been in action again, ostensibly to protect Iraqi Kurds from Saddam Hussein.
And while Nato bombs rain down on Yugoslavia, Israeli warplanes have also been back in action in Lebanon against Hizbullah fighters in and around the Lebanese territory it has held for the past twenty-one years – along with the Syrian and West Bank territory it has occupied for rather longer – in violation of a string of UN resolutions. Meanwhile, Israel has accepted 112 Kosovan refugees, while well over two million Palestinian refugees and their families are still unable to return to their homes, in many cases more than fifty years after they were forced out of them.
There is no lack of other Kosovo parallels around the world. The significance of these particular instances of repression and war is not simply that the West is failing to act against the three states responsible, but that all are long-standing staunch Western allies and continue to be armed and funded by the US, Britain and other Nato states, even while the occupations and atrocities roll on. Indeed, Turkey, which also illegally occupies half of Cyprus, is not only a Nato member but also an enthusiastic participant in Tony Blair’s ‘war of values’ against Yugoslavia.
That is not an argument for air strikes against Jakarta, Ankara or Jerusalem. But if Nato’s self-proclaimed new internationalism is to amount to more than a modernised version of gunboat diplomacy and Liberal imperialism, it must at least mean that Western support is withdrawn from those states carrying out some of the very crimes for which it says it has gone to war with Serbia.
Nothing of the kind, of course, is going to happen. But what credibility can there be in a policy which claims to be based on a moral imperative, but only punishes ethnic cleansing and human rights abuses by regimes that refuse to toe the Western line? This is the fourth air assault on a sovereign state by the US, supported by Britain, in eight months, following those against Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan. None was carried out in response to aggression against another state, and none has been sanctioned by the UN.
Even by Nato’s own lights, this war has scarcely been a success. It has self-evidently generated a worse humanitarian disaster than the one it was supposed to bring to an end – a point horrifically underscored by yesterday’s aerial slaughter of refugees – and failed to contain the conflict, while risking a wider war in the region.
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
