This is an edited transcript of a speech given at the G8 Alternatives Summit in July
Im used to reading a lot of tosh in the mainstream media but I have to say that the reporting on British policy towards poverty in Africa really does take the biscuit. To read the mainstream media now is to enter a fantasy world where Blair and Brown are seriously regarded as the saviours of Africa. Treasury press releases are forming the basis of whole articles and absurdities spouted by British leaders are being reported uncritically. Unreported is what Britains real agenda is, which is actually very easy to discover, because you only really need to read Gordon Browns speeches that are on the on the treasury website. British elites basic aim in the world is to aid British companies getting their hands on other countries resources. So secret files from the late 1960s state: we should bend our energies to help produce a world economic climate in which our external trade, our income from invisibles and our balance of payments can prosper. The key is to protect sources of raw materials in the Middle East, South East Asia and Southern Africa, to promote freer global trade and increase our efforts to open up new markets in Europe, Latin America, the Far East and elsewhere. Within the hundreds of declassified files that Ive seen on UK policy towards Africa Ive never seen anything at all on human rights or even the wishes and needs of Africans. This is purely for the cameras.
Now reshaping the global economy in the interests of corporations is the basic New Labour project and Gordon Brown is the clearly identified leader of that strategy. He couldnt have spelled it out more clearly in his speeches. Browns whole strategy is based on this concept of the poor countries and the rich countries each meeting our obligations, and the poorest countries obligations are to pursue stability and create the conditions for new investment. Now the naïve might think that the poorest countries have no obligations towards us, particularly those countries where thousands of people are dying every day of poverty. But in fact they do, and they are about creating the conditions for our companies to make more profits. That is the basis of Browns strategy. In speech after speech Brown has hammered it home that countries must create the right domestic conditions for business investment. And in article after article the media has failed to mention it. And I think the reason why New Labour is so keen on debt relief is precisely because it provides them with a lever to reshape the global economy in the interests of private investment. Brown has delivered speech after speech reassuring business of the governments pro-business agenda; again, just look at the treasury website. And the aim of the project is very explicit and should be clear what it is. In Browns words it is to remove, one by one, all the barriers in the way of enterprise. And that is to be pursued domestically and globally.
Now this championing of business interests is probably rivalled in government only by the Department for International Development, which is meant to be the aid ministry. Let me just read to you from a document of DFIDs called partnerships with business: most of DFIDs partner countries are commercially important to the business sector not just as export markets but also for sourcing inputs and raw materials for foreign investment and joint ventures. Business may become involved in the identification of key policy and regulatory constraints to the business environment and thereby in the design and implementation of reform. Now this is not a secret agenda, this is an open agenda, which explains why ministers have never said anything critical at all at any stage over the last eight years under New Labour about transnational corporations. And it seems to me that talking about international development without mentioning transnational corporations is a bit like talking about malaria without mentioning mosquitoes.
On trade, we want to open up protected markets in developing countries. Thats not Lord Palmerston, thats Patricia Hewitt, who recently ended her term as Trade Secretary. You cant get more explicit than that. Aid – well, the Foreign Office described aid, in files from 1958, as a weapon in the armoury of our foreign policy. Now aid is being used to force water privatisation on poor countries and most British aid is tied in to World Bank/IMF economic programs forcing free market conditions onto poor countries. Now poor countries dont need more aid of this kind, in fact less aid would probably be more in their interests. And they dont need more debt relief when it comes with those strings attached and they dont need more trade with rich countries when poor countries are forced to open up their markets as well. And I think the great danger of where things stand currently is that the G8 will achieve its goal of deepening the corporate liberalisation project precisely through the aid and debt proposals currently on the table.
Now the time to start really worrying is when the British government starts showing an interest in any region of the world. Britain has a long history of complicity in many of Africas worst horrors. Britain did not do nothing during the Rwandan genocide. The record shows that British diplomats actively used their diplomatic muscles to prevent a UN intervention that could have halted the slaughter. For 50 years Britian was the strongest Western supporter of the Apartheid regime in South Africa. I recently uncovered government files showing that the Heath government welcomed the coup that brought Idi Amin to power in office as he consolidated his gruesome rule and went on to kill 300,000 people. In Kenya in the 1950s Britain killed over 100,000 people to defeat the Mau Mau movement, setting up dozens of Nazi-style concentration camps. The files show that the Wilson government secretly supplied the Nigerian military with mountains of weapons to brutally crush the Biafra secession in the late 1960s which killed up to three million and the motive then was the same as now – British company profits from Nigerian oil. Which explains Blairs current close relations with the Obasanjo government in Nigeria. 10,000 people have died under Obasanjo in Nigeria in a record that makes Robert Mugabe look benign. Its yet to be mentioned in the mainstream media about these close relations. Just like the Blair-Putin special relationship, the Blair-Sharon special relationship and the Blair-Uribe special relationship in Colombia are yet to receive any serious mention.
All of these allies, you cant really fail to notice one other thing about them – theyre all major sponsors of state terrorism. During the so-called war against terrorism its seriously hard to miss that Britain is in fact one of the major sponsors, defenders and supporters of terrorism in the world today.
In fact my research over the last fifty odd years of looking at British government policy convinces me that if anything, Labours foreign policy has been even worse than the Conservatives. It was the Wilson government that depopulated the Chagos Islands in the late 1960s, secretly supported every stage of US military aggression against Vietnam in the 1960s – which the files again clearly reveal; private support while Wilson was claiming to adopt a neutral stance. It was Labour who gave covert aid to the Indonesian generals in their slaughter, bloodbath, in Indonesia in 1965 that brought Suharto to power. And who supported the Indonesian invasion of East Timor again secretly in 1975 which led to another half a million deaths. And who armed Baghdads regime of terror in the mid-1960s – secretly arming Baghdad as it engaged in the first terror campaign against the Kurds, something which a young Saddam Hussein would have witnessed at that time and seen Western complicity in Baghdads aggression against Kurds, something which he would probably have learnt from.
So what are we to do about all this? Well, this is a huge agenda and a ruthless government that lies constantly and that pursues policies which in general are opposed to the things it claims to support. Well Ive got a very brief, if I may, seven point plan:
The first thing is to keep campaigning because campaigning works. Theres one huge success that the anti-war movements had over the last couple of years: in December 2003, nine months after the invasion of Iraq, the government produced one of the most worrying documents Ive ever seen. Its the Defence White Paper and it calls for a new phase of global military intervention, a new generation of aircraft carriers, attack helicopters, cruise missiles, power-projection, expeditionary operations, very clearly outlined. Iraq was seen as mission one. Thats what British planners were seriously thinking. The anti-war movement has stopped that, at least for the time being. The public has acted as a deterrent to further military interventions, so far. Thats a huge success and we should be very, very pleased about that.
Second, we have to make the global justice movement bigger and I think that one of the major blocks on that is the mainstream media which is just spouting an awful lot of rubbish. It does make me very concerned what many people even on the left sometimes appear to believe about Gordon Brown. So I would like to see the movement targeting the mainstream media more directly and exposing it to larger numbers of people.
Third, the movements not about simple improvements in aid, trade and debt. Its about an end to corporate control of the planet and genuine democracy. So I think we need to be exposing mainstream NGOs more and helping to radicalise them.
Fourth, I want to see us continuing to expose the reality of British policy in all this and expose New Labours project and not allow the government to get away with the massive propaganda campaign, which it pretty much is at the moment.
Fifth, why dont we set up set up a mini-campaign to demand that rock stars are not able to cream off so much money in the first place.
Sixth, Id like to see development groups engaging in much more hard-hitting campaigning including direct action. Why is the development lobby so polite, when 30,000 people are dying every day of poverty?
Lastly just for us to recognise really that the future of Africa I dont believe actually is in the hands of eight men. Its in the hands of us, its mainly in the hands of Africans, and us working in solidarity with them and around the world. And weve got a huge agenda, weve got to keep making successes, and I think we can must do more.
Thank you.
Mark Curtis, until recently director of the World Development Movement, is author of Unpeople: Britains Secret Human Rights Abuses. He is an adviser to UKWatch.
This is an edited transcript of a speech given at the G8 Alternatives Summit in July
Im used to reading a lot of tosh in the mainstream media but I have to say that the reporting on British policy towards poverty in Africa really does take the biscuit. To read the mainstream media now is to enter a fantasy world where Blair and Brown are seriously regarded as the saviours of Africa. Treasury press releases are forming the basis of whole articles and absurdities spouted by British leaders are being reported uncritically. Unreported is what Britains real agenda is, which is actually very easy to discover, because you only really need to read Gordon Browns speeches that are on the on the treasury website. British elites basic aim in the world is to aid British companies getting their hands on other countries resources. So secret files from the late 1960s state: we should bend our energies to help produce a world economic climate in which our external trade, our income from invisibles and our balance of payments can prosper. The key is to protect sources of raw materials in the Middle East, South East Asia and Southern Africa, to promote freer global trade and increase our efforts to open up new markets in Europe, Latin America, the Far East and elsewhere. Within the hundreds of declassified files that Ive seen on UK policy towards Africa Ive never seen anything at all on human rights or even the wishes and needs of Africans. This is purely for the cameras.
Now reshaping the global economy in the interests of corporations is the basic New Labour project and Gordon Brown is the clearly identified leader of that strategy. He couldnt have spelled it out more clearly in his speeches. Browns whole strategy is based on this concept of the poor countries and the rich countries each meeting our obligations, and the poorest countries obligations are to pursue stability and create the conditions for new investment. Now the naïve might think that the poorest countries have no obligations towards us, particularly those countries where thousands of people are dying every day of poverty. But in fact they do, and they are about creating the conditions for our companies to make more profits. That is the basis of Browns strategy. In speech after speech Brown has hammered it home that countries must create the right domestic conditions for business investment. And in article after article the media has failed to mention it. And I think the reason why New Labour is so keen on debt relief is precisely because it provides them with a lever to reshape the global economy in the interests of private investment. Brown has delivered speech after speech reassuring business of the governments pro-business agenda; again, just look at the treasury website. And the aim of the project is very explicit and should be clear what it is. In Browns words it is to remove, one by one, all the barriers in the way of enterprise. And that is to be pursued domestically and globally.
Now this championing of business interests is probably rivalled in government only by the Department for International Development, which is meant to be the aid ministry. Let me just read to you from a document of DFIDs called partnerships with business: most of DFIDs partner countries are commercially important to the business sector not just as export markets but also for sourcing inputs and raw materials for foreign investment and joint ventures. Business may become involved in the identification of key policy and regulatory constraints to the business environment and thereby in the design and implementation of reform. Now this is not a secret agenda, this is an open agenda, which explains why ministers have never said anything critical at all at any stage over the last eight years under New Labour about transnational corporations. And it seems to me that talking about international development without mentioning transnational corporations is a bit like talking about malaria without mentioning mosquitoes.
On trade, we want to open up protected markets in developing countries. Thats not Lord Palmerston, thats Patricia Hewitt, who recently ended her term as Trade Secretary. You cant get more explicit than that. Aid – well, the Foreign Office described aid, in files from 1958, as a weapon in the armoury of our foreign policy. Now aid is being used to force water privatisation on poor countries and most British aid is tied in to World Bank/IMF economic programs forcing free market conditions onto poor countries. Now poor countries dont need more aid of this kind, in fact less aid would probably be more in their interests. And they dont need more debt relief when it comes with those strings attached and they dont need more trade with rich countries when poor countries are forced to open up their markets as well. And I think the great danger of where things stand currently is that the G8 will achieve its goal of deepening the corporate liberalisation project precisely through the aid and debt proposals currently on the table.
Now the time to start really worrying is when the British government starts showing an interest in any region of the world. Britain has a long history of complicity in many of Africas worst horrors. Britain did not do nothing during the Rwandan genocide. The record shows that British diplomats actively used their diplomatic muscles to prevent a UN intervention that could have halted the slaughter. For 50 years Britian was the strongest Western supporter of the Apartheid regime in South Africa. I recently uncovered government files showing that the Heath government welcomed the coup that brought Idi Amin to power in office as he consolidated his gruesome rule and went on to kill 300,000 people. In Kenya in the 1950s Britain killed over 100,000 people to defeat the Mau Mau movement, setting up dozens of Nazi-style concentration camps. The files show that the Wilson government secretly supplied the Nigerian military with mountains of weapons to brutally crush the Biafra secession in the late 1960s which killed up to three million and the motive then was the same as now – British company profits from Nigerian oil. Which explains Blairs current close relations with the Obasanjo government in Nigeria. 10,000 people have died under Obasanjo in Nigeria in a record that makes Robert Mugabe look benign. Its yet to be mentioned in the mainstream media about these close relations. Just like the Blair-Putin special relationship, the Blair-Sharon special relationship and the Blair-Uribe special relationship in Colombia are yet to receive any serious mention.
All of these allies, you cant really fail to notice one other thing about them – theyre all major sponsors of state terrorism. During the so-called war against terrorism its seriously hard to miss that Britain is in fact one of the major sponsors, defenders and supporters of terrorism in the world today.
In fact my research over the last fifty odd years of looking at British government policy convinces me that if anything, Labours foreign policy has been even worse than the Conservatives. It was the Wilson government that depopulated the Chagos Islands in the late 1960s, secretly supported every stage of US military aggression against Vietnam in the 1960s – which the files again clearly reveal; private support while Wilson was claiming to adopt a neutral stance. It was Labour who gave covert aid to the Indonesian generals in their slaughter, bloodbath, in Indonesia in 1965 that brought Suharto to power. And who supported the Indonesian invasion of East Timor again secretly in 1975 which led to another half a million deaths. And who armed Baghdads regime of terror in the mid-1960s – secretly arming Baghdad as it engaged in the first terror campaign against the Kurds, something which a young Saddam Hussein would have witnessed at that time and seen Western complicity in Baghdads aggression against Kurds, something which he would probably have learnt from.
So what are we to do about all this? Well, this is a huge agenda and a ruthless government that lies constantly and that pursues policies which in general are opposed to the things it claims to support. Well Ive got a very brief, if I may, seven point plan:
The first thing is to keep campaigning because campaigning works. Theres one huge success that the anti-war movements had over the last couple of years: in December 2003, nine months after the invasion of Iraq, the government produced one of the most worrying documents Ive ever seen. Its the Defence White Paper and it calls for a new phase of global military intervention, a new generation of aircraft carriers, attack helicopters, cruise missiles, power-projection, expeditionary operations, very clearly outlined. Iraq was seen as mission one. Thats what British planners were seriously thinking. The anti-war movement has stopped that, at least for the time being. The public has acted as a deterrent to further military interventions, so far. Thats a huge success and we should be very, very pleased about that.
Second, we have to make the global justice movement bigger and I think that one of the major blocks on that is the mainstream media which is just spouting an awful lot of rubbish. It does make me very concerned what many people even on the left sometimes appear to believe about Gordon Brown. So I would like to see the movement targeting the mainstream media more directly and exposing it to larger numbers of people.
Third, the movements not about simple improvements in aid, trade and debt. Its about an end to corporate control of the planet and genuine democracy. So I think we need to be exposing mainstream NGOs more and helping to radicalise them.
Fourth, I want to see us continuing to expose the reality of British policy in all this and expose New Labours project and not allow the government to get away with the massive propaganda campaign, which it pretty much is at the moment.
Fifth, why dont we set up set up a mini-campaign to demand that rock stars are not able to cream off so much money in the first place.
Sixth, Id like to see development groups engaging in much more hard-hitting campaigning including direct action. Why is the development lobby so polite, when 30,000 people are dying every day of poverty?
Lastly just for us to recognise really that the future of Africa I dont believe actually is in the hands of eight men. Its in the hands of us, its mainly in the hands of Africans, and us working in solidarity with them and around the world. And weve got a huge agenda, weve got to keep making successes, and I think we can must do more.
Thank you.
Mark Curtis, until recently director of the World Development Movement, is author of Unpeople: Britains Secret Human Rights Abuses. He is an adviser to UKWatch.
http://www.markcurtis.info