Society
After years of exposing Britain's role in the abuse of human rights, Amnesty is now playing politics
Published 02 October 2000
Amnesty International has just published UK Foreign and Asylum Policy: human rights audit 2000. When Kate Allen, Amnesty's UK director, was interviewed on the Today programme, she agreed that new Labour could claim "seven out of ten" for its human rights record. Astonishingly, Amnesty describes a "record of real achievement - including the constructive role the UK has periodically played in crises around the world . . ."
Really? In the past 18 months, the Blair government has surpassed the record of the Tories by using military violence outside United Nations control and international law on three occasions. The bloodstained adventure in Sierra Leone, during which the Parachute Regiment massacred 25 people in their own country while rescuing other British troops captured on some dubious, secret mission, is described as an "achievement".
The Amnesty report ignores completely the death of half a million children in Iraq, documented by Unicef and numerous other agencies, as a direct result of a UN policy driven by the US and Britain. The almost daily illegal bombing of Iraq by the RAF, in which civilian casualties are frequently reported, gets three lines under "concerns".
What is remarkable about this rhetorical document is that most of its message and tone - benevolent new Labour doing right by the world, but could do better - is contradicted by Amnesty's own published research. Two years ago, I read out to the late Derek Fatchett, then a Foreign Office minister, an Amnesty document listing 64 licences granted for the sale of British arms to Indonesia, including machine-guns used by special forces to mow down people in East Timor. After Tony Blair had wept at Dunblane, his government continued to sell handguns to countries where atrocities on a par with the Scottish tragedy were common. Most of these deals were secret, lied about by Foreign Office officials and done within weeks of Robin Cook's announcement of an "ethical dimension" in foreign policy.
Yet Amnesty's "audit" describes the government's "swift international action on East Timor crisis" as one of its "achievements". It is referring here to British support for bringing the UN to East Timor last year, yet there is no mention of the crucial role played by the Foreign Office in insisting in New York that Indonesia's murderous "security forces" guaranteed the referendum and its aftermath. This effectively signed the death warrants of countless East Timorese massacred by the military-run militias. The report also ignores that Britain, in common with the US and Australia, was forewarned in detail of the Indonesian military's plans to sabotage the referendum, but did and said nothing to its client in Jakarta.
The government's "constructive role to end [the crisis]" in Kosovo is also awarded "achievement" status. The subsequent ethnic cleansing of almost a quarter of a million Serbs and Roma, overseen by Nato, is nowhere to be found in the report. Nor is the disclosure in August that international forensic teams had found no genocide, thereby exposing the propaganda used by Blair to justify the bombing.
An Amnesty spokesman explained to me that the great suffering in Iraq was omitted because the organisation never commented on sanctions. This would apparently compromise its "impartiality". He also noted that "almost half the world" was subjected to American-inspired sanctions. One of the report's numerous contradictory statements is this: "The UK plays an important diplomatic role in seeking to prevent or resolve conflicts abroad, but then it fails to control the activities of British brokers who ship arms to those countries where they may be used to commit abuse."
Again, Amnesty's own research shows that the majority of British weapons and other lethal equipment goes to countries ruled by repressive regimes - or, in the case of India and Pakistan, neighbours on the edge of war. Second only to the US as the world's biggest arms dealer, Britain sends swags of the stuff to places where impoverished people struggle to survive under the "globalised" neo- liberal policies promoted so vigorously by the "constructive" Blair regime.
Having issued, year upon year, meticulous reports that, put together, demonstrate Britain's role as a major, systematic abuser of human rights, Amnesty is now playing politics - "encouraging some people in government who are interested in human rights", I was told. Peter Hain is apparently one of these people. Hain's shameful journey from activist to Foreign Office apologist goes on. Such is his enthusiasm for the genocidal sanctions on Iraq that he has even refused to provide parliament with a list of British companies that, under the Tories, gave Saddam Hussein the technology for his weapons of mass destruction.
One of the difficulties for Amnesty is that, from its foundation in 1961, its declared impartiality, "independent of any government . . . regardless of ideology", is influenced by a liberalism with ideological roots in the cold war. In the post-cold-war era, the language of human rights has been stolen by western power; variants of "human rights", such as "humanitarian intervention", are now used by the lone superpower and its British lieutenant as camouflage for the pursuit of their material and strategic "interests". As a recent, typically thorough Amnesty report spelt out, Britain's biggest arms deal is with the atrocious regime in Saudi Arabia, which executes people for adultery. Ascribing false benevolence to a British government with such a record is propaganda, which ill becomes a great organisation such as Amnesty and, worse, erodes its credibility. Too many voiceless people depend on it.
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