The red smoke screen Ronald Mutebi THE AMBIGUITIES OF POWER
by Mark Curtis
Zed Books, £14.95, pp. 250
'Britain bears considerable responsi- bility for many of the horrors which have afflicted people in the Third World throughout the post-war era' writes Mark Curtis in this engrossing and impressively researched book. He argues that British foreign policy since the war has been pur- sued with the purpose of promoting and protecting economic 'interests — contrary to stated aims of peace, democracy, human rights and alleviating world poverty — and that this design has contributed to much of the misery and suffering that grips the developing world.
The old policies of Empire died with the end of the second world war, and the most pressing conCern became the need to con- tain the Soviet empire and to protect British interests against Soviet expansion- ism, and several military campaigns were mounted to contain this expansionism — in Malaya, British Guyana and throughout the Middle East. Mr Curtis seems to be unconvinced of Soviet expansionism and he believes that the Communist threat was a smoke screen, a deceit put up by the British and their American allies to sup- press nationalist movements clamouring for self-rule and which posed a threat to the interests of the West: If nationalist development could simply be presented as 'Communist', it could more eas- ily be ascribed to the machinations of the Kremlin, which was presented as being behind Communist movements everywhere. Western leaders thus obtained a ready-made cover for their interventions: they could be described as a response to the Soviet Union.
He is very convincing; as in his descrip- tion of the overthrow of Mussadiq in 1953 when MI6 and the CIA colluded to under- mine a nationalistic government which had tried to wrest control of Iran's oil resources away from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Compa- ny, Mr Curtis has unearthed official papers which state, candidly, that the 'purpose of [British policy] was to frighten the majority of Iranians into believing that a victory for Mussadiq would be a victory for the Tudeh [The Communist Party], the Soviet Union- and irreligion' and that 'our policy, was to get rid of Mussadiq as soon as possible'.
There were other ventures in the Middle ' East — Egypt, Oman, Aden and Jordan — all attempts to secure the flow of oil to the West. And old-style gun-boat diplomacy was used to unseat Chedi Jagan's demo- cratically elected People's Progressive Party in British Guyana. Jagan's mildly socialistic economic reforms tried to address the question of the foreign control of the British Guyana economy. But the Colonial Office branded him a dangerous communist.
But if Mr Curtis tends to play down the global ambitions of a Soviet state whose fundamental creed was to set free the oppressed masses through world domina- tion, he is on firmer ground when he dis- cusses the human cost of promoting Western-style democracy as spelt out by British policy makers. The measures used to combat insurgency in Malaya and Kenya in the 1950s still rank among the worst human rights horrors in modern history, but it was regarded as essential to keep control of Malaya's vast mineral wealth and Kenya's rich lands.
And of course the violation of human rights in the pursuit of national interests does not have to be first-hand. The places where Britain still exercises direct power in the world are few and far between, but there are many countries whose govern- ments oppress people and with whom Britain does business. Mr Curtis highlights Britain's dealings in Chile and in Uganda in the 1980s. In Chile Britain sold weapons and equipment to a regime where torture was routine and thousands 'disappeared', never to be seen again. And in Uganda Britain continued to have strong trade links with the Obote government even after the US State Department had publicly stated that it had been responsible for having killed between 100,000 and 200,000 of its own citizens. The Foreign Office's response to this was that 'there was no evidence to substantiate these figures'. In 1986, after the government had been overthrown, Amnesty International visited the country and reported having seen 'rows of skulls and other bones and human remains laid out at the roadside or stuck on sticks'. The Foreign Office had got it spectacularly wrong.
One doesn't have to buy the whole of Mr Curtis's package to appreciate that the gist of what he is saying is true. Governments — unless they are exposed, challenged and resisted — will behave shamefully in furthering their national interests.
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