Comment/OpEd, Latest ArticlesComments Off on Rwanda, Britain, and the Strange Case of General Karake (Politico Aug. 19, 2015)
Why Does Europe Hound Rwanda – A self-reliant, tough, no-nonsense country is hard to patronize, perhaps?
Supporters of Rwandan General Karenzi Karake celebrate after he was granted bail | Getty
Travelers queuing at London’s Heathrow airport two months ago witnessed something peculiar: the very public arrest of Rwanda’s intelligence chief, Lt. Gen. Karenzi Karake, as he was leaving the country. It is extremely rare for government officials of such high rank to be taken into custody while traveling abroad, especially in the U.K.
Ministers from the most reviled rogue regimes routinely travel through London and other European capitals. What made this detention particularly bizarre is that Rwanda is a close British ally. Karake is a frequent visitor to the U.K. who had come to London specifically to meet with his counterparts in British Intelligence.
It was the Metropolitan Police that took him into custody. They did so on the basis of a European Arrest Warrant. That in itself was odd, as European Arrest Warrants are controversial in the U.K., where European standards of criminal justice are regarded as lower than those in Britain. Their execution is relatively rare. During the many times that Karake had visited London since the warrant was issued in 2008, there had never been any indication that U.K. authorities were inclined to take it seriously.
Rwanda under Kagame, probably the greatest development success story of Africa, has become a particular object of suspicion and dislike
Quite apart from the substance of the warrant, Rwanda and the U.K. have very close relations — Rwanda is a major recipient of British foreign aid, and its capital Kigali has been a regular destination for British prime ministers and cabinet members for more than a decade.
President Paul Kagame’s Rwanda is probably the greatest development success story of modern Africa, widely praised for its good roads, rapid economic growth, high literacy and minimal corruption. To U.K. politicians, and especially Prime Minister David Cameron, it has provided comforting evidence for the claim that the huge sums the U.K. spends on development aid can make a difference to African poverty.
* * *
The charge against Karake is a serious one: war crimes. The general is one of 40 Rwandan officials indicted in 2008 by Fernando Andreu Merelles, a Spanish judge, causing considerable controversy at the time. The indicted Rwandans were not former members of the infamous Hutu Power regime or its Interahamwe militia that carried out the horrific 1994 genocide in that country. On the contrary, they were Tutsis, members of the ethnic group who were the victims of six weeks of slaughter that took almost a million lives. All were members of the predominantly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), the rebel force that overthrew the genocidaire regime and formed the subsequent government.
Andreu’s mass indictment had nothing to do with the genocide itself. It related to the revenge massacres of Hutus allegedly carried out by the Tutsi RPF during the war to overthrow the genocidaire regime, and cited later war crimes said to have been carried out by the Rwandan army when it sent troops into Congo to attack former Hutu regime elements based there.
Much of the information on which Andreu’s indictment relies came from left-leaning “humanitarian” NGOs with links to the FDLR, a Hutu organization founded by former genocidaires whose militia is based in Congo and has been labeled a terrorist organization by the U.S. government.
The organization is said to have had discreet support from France, which was a key ally and defender of the Hutu Power regime even after the genocide. (Paris actually sent troops to set up a sanctuary for the Hutu fighters who were the agents of that genocide — the notorious Operation Turquoise.)
A contemporary U.S. diplomatic cable published by Wikileaks quoted the U.S. ambassador to Rwanda saying the indictment was “outrageous and inaccurate,” and politically motivated.
The similar arrest in Germany in 2008 of a Rwandan official named Rose Kabuye — who was subsequently transferred to France for trial — resulted in embarrassment after a court held that there were no charges to answer.
None of this is to say that Kareke is innocent of all charges, still less that he is a good man, just that there is something fishy about his indictment.
* * *
The fact that British police arrested Karake out of the blue baffled observers and enraged Rwanda. Some have even wondered if his arrest has to do with rivalry between the MI5 and MI6 intelligence agencies: Karake was in London to meet the latter but his arrest is likely to have been overseen by the former.
All too likely it has much to do with the way Rwanda under Kagame has become a particular object of suspicion and dislike for that part of the British establishment that takes its opinions from the Guardian.
Rwanda’s recovery after the horrors of the mid-1990s has been astonishing.
The Rwandan government’s undoubted restrictions on press freedom and authoritarian approach to political dissidence get considerably more attention than countries with much nastier, brutal kleptocratic dictatorships: Kagame’s push to change the Rwandan constitution to secure a third term in office has prompted rather more condemnation than similar efforts in Venezuela, Turkey, and Cuba; Rwanda’s intelligence agency is blamed for all kinds of dark and improbable achievements, in the manner of the CIA and Mossad; and the country gets far more than its fair share of blame for the chaos in neighboring Congo, violence that has resulted in at least a million deaths over the last decade.
So why do many activists, humanitarian NGOs and left-wing groups hate Paul Kagame and pay him so much more attention than, say, Equatorial Guinea’s monstrous kleptocrat Teodoro Obiang, Burkina Faso’s Blaise Compaoré or Cameroon’s Paul Biya?
As Central Africa researcher and writer Andrew Wallis puts it, “Paul Kagame is a love-hate figure — for many in the West there seems to be no way they can hold a neutral line on him or Rwanda. He’s the African leader of the moment, and he’s become an international figure of note.”
By most accounts Rwanda’s recovery after the horrors of the mid-1990s has been astonishing. As the New York Times’ Jeffrey Gettleman has written: Under Kagame, this small country “has made enormous strides fighting poverty, corruption and AIDS. The streets are safe. The street lights even work. It all adds up to a small miracle, especially remarkable because of Rwanda’s recent genocide, its overpopulation and its notable lack of resources.”
Gettleman characterized Rwanda as a “tough, suspicious, post-genocide Israel-like [country] whose national ethos, simply stated, was Never Again.”
These are not qualities that necessarily touch the hearts of people in the NGO world. You often hear people imply that the Rwandans ought by now to have abandoned their hostility to the international community, given that it’s been two decades since the genocide. To them, fact that Kagame and his regime have been so effective at re-building and maintaining ethnic peace all but implies that the bloodletting of the mid-1990s can’t really have been that bad.
* * *
It is possible that if Rwanda were a failed or failing state like many other African autocracies and semi-democracies, rather than a thriving, remarkably efficient one, it might receive less hostile press, subject only to the limited scrutiny accorded countries like Guinea and Cameroon.
It may not have helped that while Kagame has welcomed and made good use of foreign aid, he persistently denounces Western paternalism and African dependency. His stated desire to make Rwanda into the Singapore of Africa and his admiration for the late Lee Kwan Yew’s benign dictatorship were never likely to make him popular with Western liberals.
But the turning point seems to have been Goma.
Goma, in what was then Zaire, was the center of a vast international humanitarian operation established to house and feed the Hutu Interahamwe militias and their families who fled Rwanda after the genocide-government was overthrown by the Tutsi RPF. The giant, chaotic refugee camps set up by hundreds of competing aid agencies quickly became a base for more murderous attacks. Neither the Mobutu government in Kinshasa nor the international community did anything to stop the raids. After two years, Kagame sent his army across the border, together with a force from Uganda, and stormed the camps. Ever since, Kagame’s regime has been an object of increasing loathing for Western liberals and much of the NGO world.
Goma was bad enough. But once Rwanda joined the various African nations routinely intervening in and ruthlessly exploiting the chaos in Congo, it started to be portrayed as a uniquely malign player.
Kagame’s regime has been an object of increasing loathing for Western liberals
The media often likes to portray Rwanda’s sponsorship of M23, one of the brutal, rapacious mini-armies taking part in Congo’s civil war, as somehow unique or the primary cause of Congo’s chaos. Neither is true. Burundi, Uganda, Angola, Zimbabwe and even far-off Chad and Namibia have all sent troops into Congo, either to attack rebels hiding in its forests or steal its mineral wealth, or both.
That doesn’t excuse all or even most of Rwanda’s actions, but it does make it easier to understand why the Tutsi RPF is so ruthless in defending its borders and so willing to use force to protect threatened Tutsi populations like the Banyamulenge of Congo. Nor is it surprising that a country ruled by the survivors of an attempt at extermination has little respect for those who ignored or even abetted that genocide, and shows contempt for their espousal of “international humanitarian law.”
Kagame’s internal authoritarianism may be justifiable, given the country’s potential for civil strife and the benefits that development is bringing about.
In any case, there is more to the anti-Kagame sentiment manifested by the Spanish warrant and Karake’s arrest in London than Rwanda’s restrictions on press freedom or its persecution of dissidents abroad.
* * *
Five days after his arrest Karake was released on £1 million bail, thanks to the efforts of his lawyers — who include Cherie Booth, wife of former Prime Minister Tony Blair — but forbidden to leave the U.K. He was told he would be tried in September. Before any action could be taken by the Justice Ministry, the Westminster Magistrates Court dismissed his case.
According to press reports, the offenses specified in the warrant are not extraditable under U.K. law: In Spain you can be tried for war crimes committed abroad; in the U.K. you may not. And for a European Arrest Warrant to lead to extradition, the offense has to be triable in both the country where the indictment was made and the country of arrest. This should have been obvious right from the start. One murky and mysterious action by U.K. authorities has been followed by another.
You could be forgiven for thinking that something about Rwanda and its travails brings out the secretive, dishonest, hypocritical worst in European governments and officialdom, and not only in Paris, Brussels and Madrid.
The controversial Indian politician Shashi Tharoor sparks a polemical debate at the Oxford Union
LONDON — An Oxford Union debate in which a senior Indian legislator, Shashi Tharoor, made a very funny speech last week calling for Britain to make reparations to India for the sins of the Raj, ignited a social media firestorm that culminated in Prime Minister Modi echoing the call as if it were serious.
Leave aside for the moment how demeaning it would be for a nation as powerful as modern India to revel in victimhood and call for reparations from only the most recent of its many conquerors. Consider instead the sparkling performance and personality of Tharoor, the author, politician, diplomat and socialite who for three decades has cut a suave figure in salons from New Delhi to New York.
Tharoor’s speech was witty, perfectly timed, elegantly delivered, glib, historically dubious, superficial, sophistical and shamelessly crowd-pleasing in exactly the way that Oxford (and Cambridge) Union speeches are supposed to be. In other words it had all the qualities — and all the flaws — of the traditionally frivolous upper-class British intellectual style.
To challenge that speech it wouldn’t do to resort to the hoary arguments always trotted out by old-fashioned defenders of the Raj: the usual litany of railways, the rule of law, cricket, the unifying lingua franca of English, the rediscovery of Sanskrit literature and the abandoned treasures of Ajanta, the irrigation of the Punjab, the introduction of the idea of fair play, the education, medicine and roads brought to remote areas, the establishment of great trading cities like Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, or the suppression of the abominable practice of sati. Few people today would argue that such things make up for the humiliations, hypocrisy, arrogance, exploitation and occasional cruelty entailed by British colonial rule, even if British India was hardly the Belgian Congo.
That said, Tharoor’s speech probably shouldn’t be taken too seriously by the likes of India’s prime minister or anyone who cares about history in terms of what the German scholar von Ranke called wie es eigentlich gewesen — how it really was.
* * *
Tharoor cites India’s relative prosperity in the late 18th century to imply that an Edenic society was shattered and an imminently golden economic future was destroyed by British predation. But there is little evidence that for all the skill of its craftsmen, India would have been able to compete with industrializing capitalist countries or was anywhere near the cusp of industrialization when the East India Company took over. (Only one Asian, indeed non-Western, society has ever industrialized without being colonized and that is Japan, and it turned out to be a ruthless imperialist itself as the inhabitants of Manchuria and Nanking discovered.)
It’s also hard to believe that Tharoor doesn’t know that handloom weaving in Britain was destroyed by the Industrial Revolution almost at the same time as it was destroyed in India. Just as he probably knows that Britain was losing money on India for decades before independence, and that the deindustrialization of India by Britain is for the most part a nationalist myth with little more basis in fact than Hindu-chauvinist claims that ancient India had nuclear power and spaceships.
Push Tharoor — who after all studied history at the prestigious St. Stephen’s College, in Delhi — on whether India was really enjoying a golden age of unity, peace, stability and prosperity before the East India Company and its Indian allies defeated the French and their Indian allies and he’d probably demur. (It wasn’t as if a united subcontinent was in the offing in 1700 any more than it had been in 1500, or as if conquest by the French or Dutch would have been more benign — just compare the experience of India with Indochina and Indonesia.)
Everything about his performance was so British that it was more British than most British people could ever hope to achieve.
The strongest charge in Tharoor’s speech concerned the horrific Bengal famine of 1943. There is much serious historical debate about the causes of the famine and why it was so disastrous, and the extent to which it was caused by actual food shortages or a combination of inflation and hoarding. Tharoor’s version is rather more simplistic, and very different in its ascription of all blame to a malevolent Winston Churchill than that of India’s Nobel Laureate economist Amartya Sen.
Of course none of this is really the point in a debate like the one at Oxford last week. The point is to be entertaining and clever and urbane and charming, and Tharoor was all those things in spades, in an almost absurdly and ironically British way.
Tharoor may have been wearing a very smart Nehru jacket rather than black tie (the former are very fashionable among British Sloane Ranger males), but everything about his performance was so British that it was more British than most British people could ever hope to achieve.
Indeed, as POLITICO’s contributing editor Tunku Varadarajan, joked on Facebook, surely the only real reparation that the U.K. owes India is for inflicting on the world Tharoor’s astonishingly plummy English accent.
But there is a serious point implied in the joke.
Shashi Tharoor epitomizes in many ways, good and bad, the English-speaking, political, cultural and social elite that hastened the end of the Raj, assumed power in New Delhi in 1947, and then through the Congress Party misruled India for more than six decades, all the time becoming increasingly arrogant and corrupt, and seeming almost as insulated from ordinary Indians as their British predecessors had been.
There is little doubt that Britain, or at least her elite universities, must bear a healthy share of the blame for the attitudes and ideology of that party (founded of course by a Briton), and all the economic delusions, Fabian paternalism, naiveté about Soviet communism, and snobbery about business (which unfortunately meshed with Brahmin prejudices against the trader caste) that were to keep hundreds of millions of Indians in wretched poverty for decades after independence.
Although no one in Congress has ever apologized for it, it was that party with its Oxbridge-educated leaders who were responsible for the miserable “Hindu rate of growth.” Indian talent and entrepreneurship should have made it a prosperous country long before the end of the century. But because of the ruling elite’s neglect of basic education and literacy, their obsession with socialist planning, their fostering of the “License Raj,” and their corrupt deals with a handful of monopolistic business families, countries like South Korea and even Mexico overtook India in per capita GDP between 1950 and 1980.
Moreover it was British colonial attitudes to centralized power, to freedom of speech, to censorship, to the conquest and annexation of neighboring states — that were adopted and sometimes exaggerated by that elite in ways that are problematic even today.
* * *
Of course not all of the ills of Indian governance nor the brutality of the many campaigns against separatist movements in Kashmir, Punjab and the ethnically distinct North East can be blamed on British mentorship. The first in particular has always owed much to the ways of doing business imported by the Mughal Empire — which ruled India much longer than the British.
The ongoing cultural fallout of Mughal as opposed to British rule raises an important question about reparations for empire in the Indian case. Why should reparations begin or end with the British Raj? After all, India or large parts of it, have been ruled by foreign conquerors for most of the last 2,500 years.
For reparations for the Moghul conquest and three whole centuries of occupation and exploitation, India could theoretically demand cash either from Uzbekhistan, birthplace of Babur, or, perhaps less profitably, go for the Mongol ancestors of the Moghuls and demand it of Mongolia. On the other hand, the Persian and Turkish elements of Moghul rule might well justify demands from Tehran and Ankara.
Oddly enough you never hear calls for reparations for Moghul rule, just as the occasional clamour to demolish the bungalows of Lutyens Delhi as symbols of imperial humiliation are never paralleled by calls to tear down the Red Fort, the Qutub Minar or Humayun’s tomb.
There’s probably little point in going to Athens and asking for money to compensate for Alexander the Great’s conquest of Northern India.
But I’d like to hear Tharoor’s thoughts on that… though preferably not at the Oxford Union.
Culture/MannersComments Off on Elgin Debt Relief – A modest proposal to help Greece (Politico Jul.10, 2015)
Britain should help the Greeks out with the IMF; in return, Greece should relinquish the Marbles.
Visitors look at the Parthenon Marbles, also known as the Elgin Marbles, at the British Museum in London | EPA
There is so much resentment and anger on both sides in the Greek debt crisis that you wish someone could do something to help, something that might bring out the best rather than worst in everyone involved.
It turns out that the U.K. could do just that.
Right now, Greece owes €1.6 billion in interest to the IMF, which was due at the end of June. That is approximately £1 billion. The U.K. could pay that £1billion — which is not a great deal given her enormous and growing economy — on Greece’s behalf as a gesture of solidarity.
The U.K. is of course fortunate not to be one of Greece’s furious creditors in the eurozone. But Britain and Greece have a profound historical connection that goes back centuries. The gift would honor that historical connection in Greece’s hour of need, and act as a powerful expression of sympathy for the profound distress of the Greek people.
As a return gesture of gratitude and fellow-feeling, Greece would agree to stop claiming the Elgin Marbles as its own.
Obviously the U.K. would never, even implicitly, concede that the Greek government had any legal or moral right to own the marbles. If Britain paid the €1.6 billion debt, it would simply be a gift with no formal or explicit expectation of anything in return. A gesture of friendship and compassion.
As for Greece, its commitment to stop agitating for the removal of the marbles from London to Athens would not be a contractual obligation but an open-hearted act of appreciation and friendship.
It’s worth remembering that both countries have much to appreciate in one another. And that Britain has come to Greece’s aid before.
History lessons
In 1821 Britain was the primary enabler of Greece’s independence from the Ottoman Turks (who had ruled the country for almost four centuries, ever since the fall of the Byzantine Empire). One of Britain’s greatest poets, Lord Byron, died in that independence struggle.
It was because the British ruling class was so steeped in all things Hellenic that British archeologists played (and continue to play) such a key role in discovering and restoring Greece’s antiquities.
When Greece was invaded by fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in World War II, London sent the RAF and 62,000 British Empire troops to defend her, although doing so undermined the effort in North Africa. More than 4,000 of them were lost fighting for Greece in a campaign (mostly familiar today from the film “The Guns of Navarone”) that some allied leaders believed was inspired more by sentimental Philhellenism than strategic wisdom. It was British troops that finally liberated Athens in 1944 and subsequently ended the ensuing civil war.
And it goes almost without saying that ancient Greek history and literature profoundly influenced British culture for centuries. Philhellenism — a love for both classical and modern Greece — has been a more powerful force in Britain than in any other country. It was because the British ruling class was so steeped in all things Hellenic that British archeologists played (and continue to play) such a key role in discovering and restoring Greece’s antiquities.
Greece has been a home and an inspiration for some of our greatest writers and cultural figures, starting with Byron of course, but also including the likes of Robert Graves, Laurence Durrell, Patrick Leigh Femor, and John Fowles. And of course Greece has welcomed generations of British holidaymakers, and there is a long tradition of Greek immigrants who have enriched U.K. society.
Simultaneous gestures of goodwill would be in the interests of both countries.
If Britain paid off even this small part of Greece’s debt, it would assure a traumatized Greek population that their suffering has not gone unnoticed. Greece would see that Putin’s Russia is not its only ally. As the potential Labour leader Liz Kendall has pointed out, it’s not in the U.K.’s interest for Greece to become a Russian outpost in the Mediterranean.
Contributing that £1 billion is a chance for the U.K. to demonstrate itself as a “good European,” regardless of whether the U.K. is to stay in the EU.
As for the Greeks, they would send a signal to the rest of Europe that they are not merely compulsive debtors or consumers of wealth created by harder-working countries. Far from the spoiled adolescent portrayed in German editorials, Greece would show that it is a society that has retained a capacity for gracefulness, generosity and elegance despite the most difficult circumstances.
Aid for the Greeks
Many might think it unfair to impose an additional burden on the British taxpayer. Why subsidize a country in which tax fraud is endemic?
The money for Greece could and should come out of the U.K.’s £12 billion aid budget. Britain’s Department for International Development is infamously swamped by the excessive amount of money it’s been handed by the Cameron governments and has been unable to administer and spend it efficiently. By paying off Greece’s £1 billion debt to the IMF, Britons could at least be sure that it was doing genuine good, rather than enriching African kleptocrats or subsidizing India’s space program.
It is true that £1 billion is only a fraction of what Greece owes. But it’s money that Athens could spend on feeding its population in the traumatic scenario of a Grexit and return to the drachma, or in the case of a bailout involving more reform and austerity.
Ideally, Britain’s generous example would inspire — or shame — some of Greece’s creditors to be less harsh and more compassionate.
And who knows, becoming the recipients of such a gift might prompt Greeks who’ve been unwilling to admit any responsibility whatsoever for the country’s parlous state to be less resentful and more reasonable.
Sadly, this is a long shot. But Britons have the chance to do something genuinely constructive. And perhaps when the Greeks can once again afford to travel, the British Museum could arrange special exclusive viewing times in its classical galleries.
It’s been obvious for a while that the Prime Minister is exasperated by the way American and other allied officials – including President Obama himself – keep expressing concern about Britain’s rapidly shrinking defence capabilities and the prospect of yet more defence cuts.
David Cameron also dislikes being reminded that he lectured other Nato leaders about meeting the alliance’s minimum of spending 2 per cent GDP on defence, when by any honest calculation the UK is not going to meet that target.
He hasn’t responded directly to the multiple warnings from Washington. This is presumably because overtly contradicting the President, the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defence of the United States could raise the profile of an issue that he’d prefer to go away as quickly and as quietly as possible.
Instead, both the PM and his defence secretary have given irritable interviews proclaiming that neither Britain’s global influence nor her military capacities are shrinking in the least. They have also dismissed critical articles by various former heads of the UK armed forces.
In those interviews Cameron and Michael Fallon trotted out dubious or misleading justifications in almost identical terms, garlanded, of course, with ritual praise for the courage of the armed forces.
The UK has the fourth or fifth largest defence budget in the world, they claim. Our flagship is saving lives in the Mediterranean. Our nuclear submarines are providing a deterrent 365 days a year. Our aircraft are flying sorties over Iraq and some will go to the Baltic to protect those countries against a threatening Russia.
The reality is that we have sent a force of just eight creaking Tornado warplanes to carry out airstrikes against Isis, fewer than the Dutch, and far fewer than the French. The four Typhoons we hope to send to the Baltic will hardly have Putin shaking in his boots. HMS Bulwark, an amphibious landing vessel that became a flagship of our shrunken, feeble 19 warship Navy after the premature retirement of the aircraft carrier Ark Royal in 2011, is only doing what all ships are expected to do when confronted by sinking boats crammed with passengers. And because we don’t have maritime patrol aircraft to protect our submarines when they go in and out of port, their deterrent effect is very much diminished.
As for the defence budget, which the government has variously claimed to be the world’s fourth or fifth largest in the world (but is actually the 6th largest according to the reliable Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) the sad fact is that Israel, France, India and other countries with smaller defence budgets have considerably more combat power than we do.
So far, so misleading, albeit in a traditional way that is par for the course for governments engaged in cutting any departmental budget, and which should certainly be familiar from the past Tory governments that have treated the forces as a soft target for cuts.
But Cameron and Fallon have recently engaged in a form of disingenuousness about defence that is new and different and oddly ideological. For them British defence policy is peculiarly and inextricably linked with aid policy. As more experts at home and abroad have questioned the wisdom of cutting further Britain’s already crippled and demoralised armed forces, they have talked more and more about aid as if it were a clever modern substitute for military strength.
This was merely a rhetorical gambit until last month when Fallon suggested that the UK’s aid spending could be reclassified as defence spending so that the UK could then, theoretically, meet its Nato obligation to spend a minimum of 2 per cent GDP on defence.
To characterise this as ‘sleight of hand’ as some outraged backbenchers did is perhaps too kind. Fallon was advocating an act of dishonesty, the purpose of which was itself sleazy: to enable the government to escape a commitment to its allies and to provide PR cover for more crippling cuts to the armed forces. You could call Fallon’s suggested ruse ‘Potemkin defence spending’, after the fake villages erected in Crimea to give the Russian Empress a false impression of prosperity, except that unlike Potemkin, Fallon sees no reason to keep his planned deception a secret.
Unfortunately this dishonourable suggestion did not provoke as much opprobrium as it should have because it was misread by many commentatorsto imply precisely the opposite of the defence secretary’s plan: namely that the aid budget would be used to compensate the armed forces for their use of very expensive people and equipment in humanitarian missions.
That would actually be a very sensible and fair proposal.
Naturally the idea provokes paroxysms of rage among an aid lobby dominated by DfiD contractors and left-leaning large NGOs like Oxfam. But it would solve three problems at once: DfID’s inability to spend its vast budget effectively, the political damage caused by the Prime Minister’s fanatical refusal to cut that budget, and the armed forces desperate shortage of money.
Moreover, many big-ticket military purchases, like helicopter carriers and hospital ships are very much ‘dual-use’ in that in practice they are more frequently used in humanitarian missions than they are for warfare. If DfID were to contribute to their cost it would be a rational and effective use of the aid budget even though it would upset some of the purists and pacifists in DfID and the ‘aid community’.
Sadly, this is unlikely to happen given the apparent determination of the government to spend even less on the armed forces, regardless of international commitments or the damage to their capabilities, and given its notion that foreign aid is an effective substitute for spending on defence or diplomacy.
According to the PM, our £12 billion aid spend will prevent terrorism and mass migration, presumably by bringing even more stability and prosperity to troubled countries than achieved when the aid budget was only £9 billion four years ago.
Last week the Defence Secretary echoed this notion in a conversation with the BBC’s Andrew Marr. It was strange enough that the Defence Secretary should trespass on the bailiwicks of the Foreign Secretary and Secretary for International Development by giving on the benefits of foreign aid. (You might after all assume he is an especially busy minister given challenges like Isis, Russian adventurism in Europe, an imminent Defence and Security Review and collapsing morale in the UK military.) It was odder still that the man whose job it is to fight on behalf of the armed forces seems to believe that aid magic is so powerful it renders conventional armed forces all but unnecessary and obsolete.
A few days later he proudly announced that, although the UK isn’t really spending the 2 per cent GDP on defence obligated by Nato membership, he has found a way to declare to the world that it is exceeding that minimum. The trick was to recategorize some of the spending of several other government departments as defence spending. From now on, all or part of the £1Bn cross-departmental ‘Conflict Pool‘ – which includes contributions from the Foreign Office, DfID and the MOD, would count towards defence spending.
The Conflict Pool is a relatively sensible joint venture. In theory it brings together the expertise of all three departments in a combined effort to try to prevent conflicts flaming up abroad. But it’s essentially a foreign policy and aid talking shop. There’s nothing about it that even remotely relates to the mission and needs of the forces or the UK’s military obligations to its allies. That doesn’t matter though, because the government has clearly been preparing the ground for this fudge since before the election, and is committed to pretending that aid spending can substitute for defence spending.
I say pretend because it’s hard to believe that Fallon genuinely believes that ‘well-focused aid’ can stabilise countries torn by civil war or wrecked by corrupt and incompetent regimes, and even, ‘prevent conflict breaking out’.
To do so he would have to be almost completely ignorant of the real history of five decades of aid and to have confused heart-tugging Oxfam advertisements with reality. No intelligent or informed person thinks that aid might have prevented or yet might fix the chaos of oil rich Libya, the savagery of civil war in Syria and Sudan, the Russian-sponsored conflict in Ukraine, the ongoing fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Islamist violence in Nigeria and Mali or the devastating endless warlordism of the Congo.
Moreover, even in the aid industry, serious people admit that aid can sometimes keep conflicts going or actually make them worse, as it did at various times in places like Ethiopia and Sudan.
Fallon may not have read Linda Polman’s devastating ‘War Games’ or be familiar with other modern critiques of international aid, but by all accounts he’s not a foolish or stupid man. When he makes absurd claims on behalf of aid spending, and employs them in support of a dishonest scheme to hide defence cuts, he is not doing so out of ignorance. He is merely being a good apparatchik and putting loyalty to the Prime Minister before duty to his office and his country.
Jonathan Foreman is a Senior Research Fellow at Civitas and author of ‘Aiding & Abetting’
Telling young men that ISIS is ‘dangerous’ will only encourage them to go
“The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had’
When we were both sixteen, my then-best friend Dave carved the above lyric on his school desk. It was from the song ‘Mad World’ by the band Tears for Fears and we both thought it ineffably cool. It’s a line that elegantly evokes the self-pity and nihilism that afflicts so many teenaged boys.
Every decade has songs that hit a nerve because they are similarly doom-laden and grandiose. But the important point is that many adolescent boys fantasize about death, killing and suicide – melodramatic, shocking gestures that might free them from their sense of powerlessness as they flail between childhood and the adult world.
One of the reasons why the authorities have failed to stem the flow of young Britons to ISIS’s ‘caliphate’ may be because they have forgotten the extent to which many teenage boys live in a world of macho fantasy. It is certainly not something overlooked by jihadi recruiters, as even a quick glance at their propaganda will show.
Those in charge of counter-radicalisation may also have underestimated the profound appeal to the adolescent mind of adventure, risk, and sacrifice – all things that play a big role in jihadi recruitment materials, but that can be hard for young men to find in mainstream British life.
Today one of the key elements of the UK’s ‘Prevent’ counter-radicalisation strategy involves police visiting schools in cities such as Bradford and Birmingham. Their central message? Going to Syria and Iraq to join ISIS is very dangerous.
But the danger is one of the most appealing things about it. You’re not drawn to ISIS because you hanker for comfort and safety, any more than you’d join the SAS because you want a cosy 9-5 job. This is true not just for the criminals and gang members converted and recruited so effectively in British prisons, but also for the geeky South Asian boys who are radicalized online.
So it’s hard to imagine a more useless exercise, or one that better demonstrates to those students how laughably out of touch the authorities seem to be. In that way, the ‘Prevent’ strategy is a bit like those naive adult interventions of previous decades, when police or social workers visited schools to warn of the dangers of smoking or alcohol. The more earnest the warnings, the cooler it was to be one of the kids who smoked or drank.
During the last two years ISIS has made jihadism more enticing than ever before. And for certain types of young man, especially but not exclusively in the British Pakistani community, it was already powerfully attractive.
After the 7/7/2005 bombings, our commentariat often agonized about why British born young men would blow up trains and buses in London. It was generally assumed that the roots of home grown terror must lie in phenomena such as lack of opportunity, social exclusion, racism, poverty, ‘Islamophobia’ or the percieved wrongs of British foreign policy. After all, the logic went, to commit such a terrible crime you must surely be angry about some terrible wrong. For middle-aged politicians, home office officials, policemen and social workers – people for whom killing or dying for a cause seemed almost unimaginably extreme – no other explanation made sense.
They did not really register that all the suspects in the British bomb plots were young men in their teens or twenties, that there were no angry elderly or middle-aged men, no angry women, and at least in the UK, no angry girls seeking to set off explosives in buses and tubes.
It did not occur to them, even before the advent of ISIS, that jihadist recruiters were offering their potential cadre something positive and idealistic, an intoxicating cocktail of adventure, discipline, belonging, manliness and glamour.
To boys rebelling against their immigrant parents and caught between cultures, they offered not just community but a particularly intense form of it: membership in a proud international brotherhood of warriors fighting on behalf of a global umma.
To youths humiliated at school by their lack of confidence with girls, they promised a future in which they would (finally) get respect from women; not just respect, but the respect due to heroes.
By joining the movement in Britain they could become jihadi James Bonds and Jason Bournes. They would enter a world of subterfuge and conspiracy, defying the entire security structure of a modern state, and carrying in their hands the technology to terrify a nation. And if they were to fail, then they could embrace a martyrs doom.
This was exciting enough for some. But ISIS offers even more, and it does so using methods cleverly designed to attract a generation shaped by social media, computer gaming and online avatars.
What ISIS proffers is something equally attractive to poor young men in Yemen, humiliated Sunnis in Iraq, and science graduates from Birmingham. It offers participation in Victory. To identify with ISIS is to identify with a winner, an unstoppable world-changing force.
Moreover, their dazzling successes against vastly larger armies and governments recall those of the original empire-shattering Muslim conquest of Arabia, North Africa, Persia and Central Asia. When recruiters tell their targets that Allah is on their side, it’s not hard for them to make a convincing case.
ISIS offers the opportunity to take part in a real war, and the chance to enjoy the fruits of victory in a real caliphate. Just days from London it could be you cradling an assault rifle, racing down dusty streets in your heavily-armed Toyota pickup (no driving license necessary) on your way to buy a pair of Yazidi slave girls or to watch the beheading of a Shia prisoner. It certainly trumps joining a local British street gang and controlling the dreary streets of a depressed midlands post code, or the wing of a prison.
Moreover, you don’t have to be genuinely tough to join. Indeed, in the UK, ISIS actively recruits computer geeks and science nerds. It needs them for its cyber warfare, to make its propaganda videos, and to run its thousands of blogs and social media feeds.
And, unlike any other potential employer, ISIS promises it will let you kill someone. If the UK’s authorities are to have any chance at countering the appeal of ISIS, they will have to start acknowledging aspects of human nature and the male psyche that British society prefers to keep tidied away.
Jonathan Foreman is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas think tank.
BOTH David Cameron and George Osborne have stated at various times that the defence of the realm is the first duty of any government.
Despite this and despite the PM’s urging fellow Nato leaders to spend the required minimum of two per cent GDP on defence, the Government has announced that the UK’s fast-shrinking and demoralised Armed Forces are to be subject to even more devastating cuts.
This is in the face of pleas from our closest allies including President Obama.
And it is despite the fact the UK is apparently rich enough to spend more on foreign aid than any other Western European country.
Indeed the Government is giving even more money to the “ring-fenced” Department For International Development (DFID), an institution notorious for mismanagement and its inability to handle its increased budget.
The PM apparently believes that increased foreign aid can more than compensate for his cuts to the Armed Forces and the Foreign Office.
He has said several times that foreign aid is the key to addressing the root causes of terrorism, mass migration and instability.
It’s a ludicrous claim.
No one with any knowledge of the major conflicts blighting the globe believes that more development aid could have prevented them or could fix them.
The brutal chaos of oil-rich Libya, the savagery of the civil wars in Syria and Sudan, the Russian-sponsored conflict in Ukraine, the ongoing fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Islamist violence in Nigeria and Mali and the terrifying war lords of the Congo – these are surely matters for foreign policy not foreign aid, however much the PM may disdain the former and revere the latter.
Given these spreading, worsening conflicts it seems equally obvious that it was a mistake to cut the Foreign Office budget by a third and to make such deep cuts to the Armed Forces that they will soon be unable to mount the kind of humanitarian interventions that saved so many in places such as Sierra Leone and East Timor.
The only people, besides David Cameron and his team, who maintain with a straight face that more aid will magically fix terrorism, illegal immigration and the spread of extremist violence are those who have a direct interest in a bigger aid budget. After all it is extremely difficult to deliver aid that actually makes a difference.
The worse governed, the more impoverished and chaotic a country is, the less likely it is that foreign aid will get to the people it’s supposed to help or do any good at all.
Giving more and more money does not translate into doing more and more good or helping more and more people.
For there is a huge difference, one that development ministers and charity bosses like to pretend doesn’t exist, between allocating money to fix a problem and actually fixing it.
Historically aid has not prevented any wars or mass migrations, quite the opposite. And it is far from clear that increasing the amount we or other countries spend on aid (and we already spend a lot: more than a $1trillion has gone into development aid in Africa since the 1950s) would change that.
Certainly if you look at the countries that have received the most aid per capita – Somalia, Haiti, Nepal and the Palestinian territories, the evidence is hardly encouraging.
Indeed all of them became more chaotic, violent and impoverished after becoming major aid recipients.
It is not surprising because in unstable and poor countries aid is a bit like oil or mineral resources: something to fight over.
A dark truth is that all too often foreign aid has kept conflicts going and made wars worse.
In places such as Ethiopia and Sudan rebel groups that would have been forced to surrender survived thanks to the “taxes” they levied on aid agencies and the food aid they requisitioned for their armies. Again and again aid has enabled governments to avoid coming to the bargaining table.
The result has been massive human suffering such as that which is driving millions of people from violence-plagued parts of North Africa and the Middle East.
Of course humanitarian or emergency aid is undeniably vital in many places.
But it is a much more morally and politically ambiguous thing than most people realise.
Even when refugee camps don’t get taken over by militias and become bases for raiding and terrorism, as they have throughout Africa and the Middle East, the presence of the foreign aid circus can wreck local economies.
Even in countries that aren’t in conflict, foreign aid can undermine stability by encouraging corruption and by subsidising political leaders to go their own irresponsible way.
So it is simply not true, as a DFID spokesperson claimed last week, that: “Investing 0.7 per cent of our national income in overseas development in 2015 and beyond is creating a safer, healthier and more prosperous world.”
Nor is it true that foreign aid can somehow make up for the Government’s lack of attention to foreign policy and its cuts in the Foreign Office and BBC World Service.
And the idea that foreign aid will somehow protect British interests and maintain our security after cuts have crippled the Armed Forces is foolish almost beyond belief.
Comment/OpEd, Latest ArticlesComments Off on In Defense of Tony Blair, Peace Envoy (Politico.eu May 28, 2015)
The former prime minister worked hard on the Middle East. But it was an impossible job.
LONDON — You don’t have to be a devoted fan of Tony Blair to see that the mockery he has received concerning his resignation as Middle East peace envoy is unfair.
Much of the criticism he received during his eight years as Special Envoy for the International Quartet (comprising the US, the UN, the EU, and Russia) was disingenuous and overtly biased. That certainly included a June 2014 open letter to the Guardian whose signatories included George Galloway, conspiracy-theorist Baroness Tonge, and several other luminaries of the UK’s anti-Israel lobby.
Both that criticism and more recent derision (like the tweet sent on Blair’s resignation by a former British diplomat saying “Good news at last from the middle east!”) is informed by prejudice against a leader who in recent years has become one of the most reviled public figures in the UK and its media, and by ignorance of the realities of the region and the role he was supposed to play in it.
As the Quartet’s envoy, Blair’s task was to work for Palestinian economic empowerment, the theory being that economic development, along with money poured into political institutions, would make a Palestinian state more viable, and less likely to fall under the domination of Hamas or another extremist organization.
Blair successfully pushed for fewer Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank, (though there are still a great many and no Israeli government will get rid of them altogether, short of a larger peace agreement). He helped make it much easier for Palestinian businesspeople to use the Allenby crossing to and from Jordan.
Blair could come across as imperious and entitled in his dealings with local politicians on both sides, but he clearly understood that quiet, consistent work would achieve more on the ground than the kind of grandstanding that is all too common when Europeans try to get involved in the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
As the Middle East commentator Tom Gross says, “Blair had the right idea much more than he is given credit for. He wanted to build peace from the ground up rather than just make grand gestures or take part in photo-ops”
Blair quickly saw the vital need for improvements in governance and institution-building in a Palestine that still lacks the attributes of modern statehood found even in much poorer but less dysfunctional unrecognized countries like the Somaliland Republic and the Kurdistan Regional Government.
The effective sacking of reformist Palestinan Prime Minister Salam Fayyad by President Mahmoud Abbas in 2013, however, killed off any serious effort by the Palestinian authority to deal with corruption as well as damaging what was left of the peace of process.
Still, in the years since Blair took up the position in 2007, the rate of Israeli settlement-building went down, as did terror attacks on Israel mounted from the West Bank.
So, arguably, Blair’s performance in the post has actually been not bad, especially given the fact that it is actually an impossible job, and given that, it has only been a part-time occupation (undertaken for no salary).
The rest of former prime minister’s time was apparently taken up by his (controversial) business activities, by the requirements of running or fundraising for the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, and by the commitments inherent in living the international celebrity/politician/philanthropist/socialite lifestyle.
It is an impossible job because there can be little progress even on minor issues, let alone a broader peace settlement, unless the Israeli and the two Palestinian leaderships want it.
For both Netanyahu and Abbas, the current situation probably feels livable for the time being, especially given the chaos and economic ruination in neighboring countries. There may not be peace in the Western European sense in the Holy Land , but it’s certainly peaceful compared to Aleppo or Ramadi.
Ramallah is visibly prosperous and the Palestinian leadership has hugely enriched itself in the now traditional way through corruption and by the diversion of the billions in aid that the international community has provided the West Bank and Gaza. Meanwhile, Israel feels relatively secure from terrorist attacks coming from the West Bank, is presumably taking comfort from Hezbollah’s bloody involvement in the Syrian civil war, but is deeply concerned by the Iranian nuclear program and President Barack Obama’s courting of Tehran. That’s not a situation that necessarily offers much leverage to someone in Blair’s position, even if that person were better equipped personally for the job, perhaps with the charisma and prestige of Bill Clinton.
* * *
To the extent that he has always lacked gravitas and often comes across more as a capable performer than a man of profound conviction, Blair was a rather unlikely candidate for the job. He was never able to overcome the impression that he had taken it partly because he did not know what to do after leaving Downing Street at the age of 54, and partly to restore a reputation that at least at in the UK seemed to be as bad as a politician’s can be short of an accusation of child molestation.
Indeed Blair’s unpopularity in the UK, especially among the political and media class, is such that Britons wrongly assume that he is equally disliked abroad. In fact, when Blair left office he was a figure of high repute in the United States, in Eastern Europe and much of Asia. In some places, like Kurdistan, Kosovo and Sierra Leone, he was and is considered a liberator and hero: his photograph graces mantelpieces and children are named after him.
His subsequent PR work for Central Asian autocrats certainly disillusioned those who had admired the way Blair had put the promotion of democracy and “liberal interventionism” at the heart of British foreign policy.
Still, it was rather odd than anyone would expected the Israelis or the Palestinians to pay much heed to any former British prime minister — both groups feel they have ample historical reason to be distrustful of the Brits. Indeed the fact that a Briton sought, and was given, the post looks like yet another manifestation of the peculiar delusion that there is a South Asian level of affection and respect for Britain to be found in the parts of the Middle East it once ruled.
Moreover, for the envoy to enjoy real influence, he would have to have the full backing and engagement of the Quartet, and access to some of the carrots and sticks in their possession. Even if the former were available, the latter would require the full-time commitment of an unusually adroit and powerful individual.
Those who criticize Blair’s performance in this post tend to miss the fact that Middle East has changed profoundly in the last few years. Even the phrase “Middle East Peace,” if used in the traditional way to refer exclusively to the Israel and its conflicts with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbours, has become brutally absurd. It is now about Syria and ISIS, not to mention Yemen, Iraq, Iran and — a cartographical stretch but not a geopolitical one — Libya.
After all, at least 210,000 people have been killed during the four years of Syrian civil war — more than double the toll of those who died in six decades of Arab Israeli conflict. Some 60,000 more have been killed in Iraq since the ISIS invasion, and the Libyan civil war took at least 10,000 lives in just eight months, more than both Intifadas, both Gaza Wars and the Israel-Hezbollah war put together. Moreover, as these wars continue to roil and to spill over into countries like Yemen, they are creating a gigantic refugee crisis in the middle east that will affect the region for decades to come.
So Blair could be forgiven for thinking that he had been working in a backwater on an issue whose relative importance has massively diminished.
Blair must also have been all too aware his Quartet employers had much bigger foreign policy fish to fry. All of them would be remiss if they were not concentrating on Ukraine, the crisis in the EU highlighted by Greece’s default, tension in the South China Sea, nuclear proliferation in the Gulf, and the bloody increase in Islamist guerilla violence in Mali, Nigeria and Kenyaamong other challenges. .
This is not to say that the Israel-Palestinian conflict has no objective importance. But the competition for urgent global attention is now so much more intense. It would be surprising if someone like Blair, who likes to be at the center of things, hadn’t recognized this a while ago, and is getting out while there’s still a chance for him to play in the big leagues. Who knows, maybe he has an eye on the Labour party as it lies adrift.
* * *
It will be interesting to see what Tony Blair does now, if he will throw himself even more forcefully into moneymaking by means that are likely to earn him yet more opprobrium. If he does do that it will be sad, given that Blair is hardly the demon he is often made out to be in the UK.
Indeed the fact that he is so loathed by people on both sides of the British party spectrum makes you wonder if there isn’t some complicated psychology at play, if Blair-hatred isn’t a kind of British self-loathing.
This is especially true in party politics. After all, it is no secret that Prime Minister David Cameron and his circle consciously modeled themselves on Blair and have aped (and even exceeded) his use of modern branding and marketing techniques; or that some in the Labour party are now desperately trying to rediscover the Blairite values that made it an election winner.
Blair of course remains the only Labour leader to have won a British general election in 40 years, yet after 2007 he went from being perceived as the savior of the Labour movement to a hate figure on the level of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Emmanuel Goldstein.
On the other hand, it’s hard to warm to what Blair has become today. His reaction to what is in essence a forced exile from his own country has not been attractive. Although he’s hardly the first former premier to be excited by the company and amorality of what once was called the jet-set, Blair has pursued wealth and glamour with extraordinary intensity.
Perhaps he is as disillusioned with politics as his former supporters are with him, and has become a ruthless cynic. It would help explain the Clintonesque sleaze of his PR efforts for the kleptocrats of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, the strange cultish nature of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, and the business relations with sinister Russian and Gulf billionaires. But it would not explain his taking — or giving up — the job of Middle East Peace Envoy. Blair worked hard at it for eight years, but it was an inherently hopeless and thankless task.
Jonathan Foreman, the author of Aiding And Abetting: Foreign Aid Failures And The 0.7% Deception, is a commentator in London.
On foreign policy and defense, David Cameron’s UK is behaving like a second Belgium.
It’s the sort of charge that you might expect to hear from a Tory backbencher on the Right. But the Labour leader was actually echoing warnings from centrist establishment sources like the Financial Times, which ran an editorial in February worrying about “Britain’s drift to the foreign sidelines” pointing out that “as global challenges mount, the UK is increasingly absent.”
The Economist, equally Europhile and internationalist, was even tougher on the Coalition. In a scathing leader titled “Meet Little Britain, a shrinking actor on the global stage” it said that a cautious post-Tony Blair foreign policy would be understandable but that David Cameron has been “not so much cautious as apathetic, ineffective and fickle.”
Shrinking Clout
Witness a paradox. Even as the British economy has strengthened, and even though London is more than ever a global hub, and even though the UK has access to reserves of human capital unequalled in Europe, British power and influence has gone into steep decline since Cameron first became prime minister.
That decline was not an issue during the election campaign. The only foreign policy matter the Tories were keen to talk about was a referendum on membership of the EU — prompted by the need to counter UKIP.
But the decline has been been noted by the UK’s friends and enemies around the globe. And there was embarrassing proof of it only 48 hours before Britons went to the polls, when the US Navy began escorting British commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz.
Britain had discreetly asked for ships to be chaperoned after Iran seized a cargo ship flagged to the Marshall Islands on April 28. The request was an admission that the Royal Navy has shrunk to such a size that it can no longer protect British shipping in the strategic waterways that were, until recently, a British zone of influence. This zone includes: Yemen, to whose collapse the UK has had no response. Britons had to be evacuated from Aden by Indian and Chinese vessels.
Although these manifestations of British weakness and the Cameron government’s seeming indifference to Britain’s influence escaped notice in the UK , previous ones did not.
David Cameron saw no reason to get involved with the emergency talks about Ukraine that saw Angela Merkel and François Hollande rush to Moscow. This was despite the fact that Britain was one of the three guarantors of Ukrainian security (in return for that country giving up its nuclear arsenal) under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Any hopes that Cameron’s refusal to get involved in Ukraine might soothe British relations with the Putin regime were quickly scotched as the UK became the subject of increasingly aggressive probes by Russian bombers and warships. Cameron’s apparent unconcern about Ukraine prompted the recently retired top British commander in NATO, General Sir Richard Shirreff, to complain that the Prime Minister is a “bit player…nobody takes any notice of” and that Britain is becoming “a foreign policy irrelevance.”
Shirreff might also have pointed to Cameron’s notable absence from the international negotiations about Iran’s nuclear program. Or the fact that despite Cameron’s typically impressive rhetoric about the “generational threat” from Islamist radicalism (a phrase he used in support of the robust French intervention in Mali) the UK has done considerably less than other Western states to combat it.
The UK’s contribution to the campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, has been in the words of the Commons Defense Select Committee “strikingly modest.”
Much smaller countries like Denmark have contributed more troops to train and advise Iraqi Kurdish forces, and the Netherlands has deployed more fighter jets. The UK is limited in its ability to carry out airstrikes by the shrinkage of the RAF to only 6 fast jet squadrons, down from 11 during the first Gulf War. Outside the Kurdish region of Iraq, the UK has only three personnel training and advising Iraqi forces; Australia, Spain and Italy have sent 400, 300 and 280 troops, respectively.
No account of Cameron’s retreat from the world would be complete without reference to the scuttle from Afghanistan while claiming a mission accomplished.
British allies in ISAF were dismayed by the UK’s decision not to play a role in the successor to ISAF — Operation Resolute Support. In the UK’s absence, the lead in that 12,000-man effort is being taken by Germany, Italy, Turkey and the US.
The Cameron government decided to limit future military assistance to a small team working at the Afghan National Army Officers Academy, nicknamed the ‘Sandhurst in the Sand”. Rumors from inside the MOD say that the Cameron government is planning to renege even on that minimal commitment.
Allied disappointment in Afghanistan was dwarfed by the sense of betrayal among the thousands of Afghans who have worked with British during the last decade; the latter were understandably baffled by British assertions that the war in Afghanistan is “over.”
Vanishing Soft Power
There was a point early in his first term when Cameron sounded as if he were inclined to follow an assertive foreign policy. Although he had at first treated foreign affairs as primarily the promotion of British commerce, the Arab Spring caught his imagination. By early 2013, Cameron had become an early advocate of imposing a no-fly zone over Libya and enthusiastically supported the French campaign in Mali. There was even some excited talk of a “Cameron Doctrine.”
But things changed rapidly after Cameron lost a Commons vote in August 2013 that would have authorized limited intervention in Syria after the Assad regime used chemical weapons. Stung by the defeat, the Prime Minister seemed to turn against foreign affairs in general. Even after a British aid worker was decapitated by a (British) ISIS executioner, he was reluctant to join in any international intervention against the organization.
Any doubt about the low priority of foreign affairs after the Syria debacle should have been dispelled soon after the sudden resignation of William Hague as foreign secretary in July last year. Cameron proceeded to hand the office once held by Canning and Castlereagh to a party apparatchik named Philip Hammond, who had not previously shown any particular aptitude for (or interest in) foreign policy, and whose previous tenure at the Ministry of Defense was unimpressive even by the low standards of Tory defense secretaries.
But there is an argument that Cameron and his team were never really interested in foreign affairs in a traditional sense. Why else would they have been so sanguine about imposing severe cuts on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) soon after taking office?
The “Cameroons” cut the FCO’s annual budget by almost a third from an already inadequate £2.4 billion in 2010 to £1.7 billion in 2014. As the FT pointed out, the sum is less than the UK spends subsidizing the heating of pensioners.
Embassies and consulates have closed and diplomatic missions have shrunk. This means that the UK will have less intelligence on which to base foreign and security policy, and that the UK’s “soft power” — much boasted of by Cameron at the beginning of the last government — will diminish.
The Cameron government’s failure to give the FCO adequate resources has been particularly damaging for British interests in Latin America. Relations with Chile and Brazil, key allies during the Falklands War, have been neglected despite Argentina’s aggressive rhetoric about the Falklands and the likelihood that Russia may soon sell Buenos Aires game-changing warplanes.
The cuts to the FCO budget, like the even more damaging defense cuts (about which more later), cannot simply be explained by economic necessity.
After all, the Cameron government simultaneously increased spending on the already much bigger Department for International Development (DfID) by more than £2.5 billion pounds per annum. (This year the DfID budget will actually hit £12 billion in total, in accordance with the goal of spending 0.7 percent of GDP on aid).
Ring-fenced from austerity measures to which all but two other government departments have been subject, the Foreign Aid behemoth is now so lavishly funded its staff have had difficulty making good use of its wealth.
Cameron justified giving additional billions to DfID with the claim that foreign aid can prevent war, terrorism and mass migration (he has never distinguished between development aid and humanitarian/emergency aid and may not even be aware of the difference).
However, successive reports have found that DfID’s spending is inefficient and often fails to accomplish much good in the countries where it works.
It is not clear if Cameron truly believes that foreign aid has a magical ability to bring about global stability, or if it’s merely the only form of foreign engagement that he feels comfortable dealing with.
But if he and his circle were truly as interested in the projection of British Soft Power as they have been in softening the Tory brand, you would expect them not to put all their eggs in the Aid basket and to have boosted expenditure on the Foreign Office and the British Council, and above all on the BBC’s World Service.
The latter has long been the most important source of British soft power. But during the last five years its influence has diminished, thanks to swingeing budget cuts. In 2011 for example, World Service radio stopped broadcasting to Asia in Mandarin Chinese. It had been doing so for 70 years and its news reports played an important role during the 1989 Democracy protests.
If that weren’t bad enough, in 2014 the government also switched the source of the World Service’s funding from the Foreign Office budget to that of the main BBC, where it is an orphan vulnerable to that Corporation’s internal politics (and, therefore, further cuts).
It’s almost as if the Cameron government were unaware of the regard in which the World Services’ broadcasts are held in many parts of the world, that it reaches at least 170 million people a week even after the cuts, and is unconcerned that countries like China, Russia, Qatar and Iran are all heavily investing in international broadcast networks explicitly inspired by the World Service.
Vanishing ‘Hard’ Power
British hard power has also been devastated since 2010 by deep, ill-considered cuts in a defense budget that was already too small for a country with the UK’s commitments, standing and global interests.
Britain’s NATO allies were horrified by the debacle of the 2010 Strategic Defense and Security Review. Its arbitrary 8 percent cut in the overall defense budget resulted in what was arguably a 30 percent cut in capacity across all three services. Its recommendations were clearly determined by Treasury priorities rather than any informed consideration of the country’s current and future needs. Even the liberal Guardian’s defense correspondent called it “an embarrassing and unseemly shambles.”
Few foreign observers could understand the logic behind the rush with which the country’s only aircraft carrier was scrapped and all the Royal Navy’s and RAF’s Harrier jets were sold off at fire-sale prices to a bemused but grateful US Marine Corps.
Critics pointed out that simultaneous cuts in the Army’s troops to pre-Napoleonic levels might be appropriate if all international signs pointed to a new global era of peace and harmony. But they made rather less sense given the upheavals in the Middle East, the increasing belligerence of Russia and the many indications that the world is becoming more a dangerous place.
US officials have publicly expressed worry about the British defense cuts and the likelihood that the UK is ceasing to be a “full spectrum” ally able to deploy a division-sized force alongside American troops in a future conflict. They included Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton, Chief of Army Staff Ray Odierno and President Obama himself. You might have expected Cameron to be embarrassed by the latter’s admonishment, but the American warnings seemed to have had little effect on government direction. Only a month before the general election, the Chancellor of the Exchequer indicated that UK defense spending will likely drop below 2 percent of GDP. The latter is not only required by NATO membership, it’s the amount that experts consider to be the absolute bare minimum for the “special relationship” to continue.
Already, the US military, despite its affection for and ties to the UK’s armed forces, increasingly sees France as its primary partner abroad. Paris has more influence in Washington than at any time since the 1950s, despite the French economy. It is also reaping the other benefits of being perceived as Europe’s leading military power — including the sale of Rafale jets to Qatar, India and Egypt. Having recently opened a Naval base in Abu Dhabi, France can protect its cargo ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
‘Not Good At Foreigners’
There are cultural and personal explanations for Cameron’s retreat from the world.
While it may not be true that his marketing gurus perceive the military as irredeemably “uncool” and spending on it as unhelpful for the Conservative Party’s “detoxification” agenda, it is easy to get the impression that George Osborne and some of his colleagues believe the country’s armed forces are a rather silly indulgence in the modern world.
“There are no votes in defense” (a quote attributed to Philip Hammond during the campaign) and also no votes to be won on foreign policy. That is not a perception limited to the Tories, but something everyone in Britain’s political class now believes.
Of course, you hope that even the most cynical politicians will, at a certain point, look beyond their self-interest and balance what wins votes with what seems best for the national interest. As Iain Martin pointed out, it’s impossible to imagine Margaret Thatcher thinking that “There are no votes in defense.”
Another factor may be what the British media calls the Cameroons’ “essay-crisis” approach to government. This is a reference to the habit of many Oxbridge undergraduates to postpone engaging with important assignments until the night before they’re due. Insider accounts from inside Downing Street confirm that Cameron’s way is to deal with political challenges at the last possible minute. Because Cameron is clever and lucky, it’s an approach that often works. But good foreign policy tends to require medium to long-term planning, calm consideration, and timely advice from a range of experts.
Another explanation for the retreat may be that Cameron recognizes that he is just “not good at foreigners” in the sense that his unquestionable political and people skills do not travel well. Unlike Tony Blair, he has not forged strong bonds with any important foreign leader. Moreover his failed attempt to stop the selection of the Anglophobic Luxembourger Jean-Claude Junker as European Commission President bodes ill for his promised renegotiation of the UK’s place in Europe.
The UK’s withering global influence may further decrease British leverage within the EU, making it less likely that Cameron will win concessions that has promised the public. That in turn increases the possibility that the UK electorate may vote to the leave the EU in the referendum Cameron promised largely in order to neutralize the threat from UKIP.
Will Things Change?
After five years of Coalition rule the UK is now punching well below its weight. In spite of its permanent seat on the UN Security Council, a nuclear deterrent, the second largest population in Europe, the fifth largest economy in the world and globe-spanning commercial, cultural, institutional, military and political interests, Britain is behaving like a second Belgium.
It may be that the man who is most responsible for this will now seek to turn the situation round. After all, now that he has a solid majority and his ongoing premiership is assured, Cameron no longer has to worry about LibDem sensibilities, tomorrow’s opinion polls or the state of the Tory “brand”. He has the opportunity to be a global statesman as well as a successful domestic politician, and it is possible that he may be guided in that direction by one of the ablest members of his cabinet, Justice Minister Michael Gove, who has a deep, long-abiding interest in foreign affairs, and who really should have been William Hague’s successor at the Foreign Office.
Unfortunately the portents for change are so far not good. Philip Hammond was reappointed to head the Foreign Office, and Defense Minister Michael Fallon (who provided one of the few laughs of the campaign by accusing Labour of being weak on defense) has also kept his post.
In the past the ability to wield both hard and soft power has enabled Britain to achieve good things in the world, to stand up for human rights and the rule of law, as well to as protect her own citizens and interests. If Britain continues to hemorrhage both its European and American alliances, it won’t be able to do these things, and David Cameron’s legacy will be an isolated, enfeebled, much-diminished country.
BlogComments Off on Strange Days – On the UK election
It’s refreshing to experience a general election in which the polls and the pundits are proved massively wrong.
It’s especially invigorating when the stakes are as high as they were on thursday. After all, a different result could have had huge domestic and international ramifications in fairly short order, beginning with a collapse of the pound and perhaps culminating, in theory, in the UK’s nuclear disarmament and departure from the UN Security Council.
But the unexpectedness of the final result also makes you wonder how disconnected from the electorate the political and media classes really are. The whole computer-assisted modern apparatus of marketing, polling and focus grouping seems not to work as well as advertised when the country is in the midst of a tectonic political shift.
Among other things, the election proved that the celebrated “detoxification” of the Tory brand was not, in fact all that successful. But it indicated at the same time that that Tory “toxicity” may not really matter, at least in the current economic and political climate. After all, tens of thousands of people apparently lied to pollsters and journalists about their intention to vote conservative, and then went ahead and ticked the Tory box…
That said, one great danger for the new government is that Cameron may believe that the resulting Tory victory was attributable to his own qualities and actions rather then the unattractiveness of the Labour alternative combined with the surge of Scottish nationalism.
It seems likely that millions of people in England and Wales were simply unwilling to gamble Britain’s relative prosperity and low unemployment on a return to the old-fashioned socialism believed in by Ed Miliband. Others weren’t willing to gamble on a socialist project if it was to be led by such a smug and untrustworthy-seeming young man.
In the old industrial cities of England, a significant number of traditional working class Labour voters who might have supported Miliband’s economic policies were probably alienated by the way the Labour leader personified the domination of the party by upper-middle-class metropolitans like himself.
The fact that Miliband’s personal toxicity was not fully reflected in the polls or journalistic coverage suggests that both operated with some kind of pre-existing bias in favour of the Labour party.
In Scotland, the problem with Labour was different: a population steeped in 1970s-style socialism was no longer willing to vote for a local Labour party that had become offensively complacent, lazy and corrupt after years of unchallenged dominance.
Indeed one of the underlying themes of the 2015 election, and one that Cameron and other party leaders will ignore at their peril, is the deepening alienation of many working class voters from both the “London-centric” political and media elite, and from established party machines in the big cities
It is an alienation that simultaneously manifests itself in UKIP votes in England – more than three million of them, and in 1.5 million SNP votes in Scotland, 50% of the total cast there. It’s easier to overlook the former than the latter because of the weird distorting effect of Britain’s “First Past the Post” system as currently constituted: with the SNP getting 58 seats for 1.5 million votes, and UKIP getting one seat for almost 4 million votes.
The fact that UKIP won fewer seats than expected and that its leader Nigel Farage failed to get in and had to resign, should not distract observers from the fact that UKIP proved itself to be a truly national party, gaining significant votes all over England and Wales, and often coming in third or even second place. There’s also little question that many UKIPers, especially in the South, voted tactically, their desire to keep out a Labour-led coalition overcoming their disillusion with or dislike of David Cameron’s Tories.
It now seems possible that Labour could go into catastrophic decline in much the same way that the Liberal Party did in the years after World War I, despite having played a dominant role in British politics for more than half a century. Certainly the results from London suggest that Labour may become more and more reliant on the votes of immigrant communities and racial minorities.
At the same time, if UKIP survives Farage’s resignation or if another alternative party should emerge that can appeal to white working class voters who are tribally allergic to the Tories, then Labour’s vote may well shrink much further in the midlands and industrial North.
As for the LibDems, their extraordinary rout felt like karmic punishment for their hypocritical and dishonest refusal to support customary redistricting of electoral boundaries while in the Coalition with the Tories. The actual mechanism of their defeat though, seems to have been partly a matter of tactical voting by a British public that had a taste of coalition government and doesn’t like it. But it may also have had a lot to do with the disillusionment of those voters who foolishly believed before the formation of the Coalition that the LibDems were principled outsiders, unsullied by and immune to the compromise and corruption that comes with political office.
Some of the lessons offered by the election are contradictory. In large parts of the Kingdom, many voters seem to have made a cool calculation that their material interests would be served by the continuation of relatively responsible, cautious and competent economic management, an option which was offered by only one main party. But elsewhere, and especially in Scotland, large numbers of people were motivated by intense political emotion and by concerns about identity and national pride. All of the latter were noticeably absent from the campaigns by the Westminster leaders. But then none of the three are as obviously talented and appealing as the SNP’s Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon.
But the big reveals are yet to come. For instance, will a David Cameron unrestrained by coalition partners behave differently now that he has an actual majority? Critics within the Tory party have long worried that he lacks a vision for the country, that the only thing he believes in is own suitability for the top job. Arguably he has never had to demonstrate political courage by leading public opinion or standing up for a potentially unpopular person or policy, all of which may be necessary if he is steer a country rattled by a massive electoral shifts.
It is possible that Cameron will decide that the collapse of Labour and the Lib Dems vindicates his “essay crisis” style of leadership, his faith in “branding”, his lack of interest in foreign affairs, his downgrading of the armed forces, and his insistence on a lavish foreign aid budget at a time of austerity elsewhere.
But now that there are no LibDems to blame for broken promises, humiliating compromises or the shambolic execution of government policy, Cameron will find himself under much more pressure from Conservative MPs whom he prefers to be quietly deferential and whose opinions he has shown little respect for.
At the same time he will have to confront a new SNP bloc that is considerably further to the left than the Labour party, and which because of its youth, inexperience and Anglophobia, (not to mention its desire to break up the Union, not necessarily shared by all SNP voters) may turn out to be a disruptive force in Parliament.
More important, Cameron and his team are going to have deal with national challenges that make questions of NHS funding and mansion taxes seem insignificant. Not least the constitutional reforms that may be needed to keep the country together. But there are also other important issues that went all but unmentioned by everyone during the campaign: foreign alliances, immigration, defence, freedom of speech, foreign aid, the crises in Ukraine and the Middle East, social cohesion, and the special relationship with the United States, all of which demand a vision of the country the UK is going to be and the role it will play in the world.
BlogComments Off on In Honour of General Election Day….
A brace of pieces I did for James Delingpole’s Breitbart London site in the run-up to today’s General Election.
The first is about the Resistible Rise and Fortunate Fall of Lutfur Rahman, former mayor of Tower Hamlets and Britain’s answer to Boss Tweed, the founder of New York’ Tammany Hall machine. It’s real subject is the arrival in the UK of South Asian-style electoral fraud, the naive vulnerability of the British election system to such fraud, and the remarkable inadequacy of the police response to voter intimidation. It’s here or here:
The second piece is about the permanent Establishment that retains at least cultural hegemony regardless of election results, and which is not the Establishment of yesteryear. It’s here or here:
Rwanda, Britain, and the Strange Case of General Karake (Politico Aug. 19, 2015)
Why Does Europe Hound Rwanda – A self-reliant, tough, no-nonsense country is hard to patronize, perhaps?
Travelers queuing at London’s Heathrow airport two months ago witnessed something peculiar: the very public arrest of Rwanda’s intelligence chief, Lt. Gen. Karenzi Karake, as he was leaving the country. It is extremely rare for government officials of such high rank to be taken into custody while traveling abroad, especially in the U.K.
Ministers from the most reviled rogue regimes routinely travel through London and other European capitals. What made this detention particularly bizarre is that Rwanda is a close British ally. Karake is a frequent visitor to the U.K. who had come to London specifically to meet with his counterparts in British Intelligence.
It was the Metropolitan Police that took him into custody. They did so on the basis of a European Arrest Warrant. That in itself was odd, as European Arrest Warrants are controversial in the U.K., where European standards of criminal justice are regarded as lower than those in Britain. Their execution is relatively rare. During the many times that Karake had visited London since the warrant was issued in 2008, there had never been any indication that U.K. authorities were inclined to take it seriously.
Rwanda under Kagame, probably the greatest development success story of Africa, has become a particular object of suspicion and dislike
Quite apart from the substance of the warrant, Rwanda and the U.K. have very close relations — Rwanda is a major recipient of British foreign aid, and its capital Kigali has been a regular destination for British prime ministers and cabinet members for more than a decade.
President Paul Kagame’s Rwanda is probably the greatest development success story of modern Africa, widely praised for its good roads, rapid economic growth, high literacy and minimal corruption. To U.K. politicians, and especially Prime Minister David Cameron, it has provided comforting evidence for the claim that the huge sums the U.K. spends on development aid can make a difference to African poverty.
* * *
The charge against Karake is a serious one: war crimes. The general is one of 40 Rwandan officials indicted in 2008 by Fernando Andreu Merelles, a Spanish judge, causing considerable controversy at the time. The indicted Rwandans were not former members of the infamous Hutu Power regime or its Interahamwe militia that carried out the horrific 1994 genocide in that country. On the contrary, they were Tutsis, members of the ethnic group who were the victims of six weeks of slaughter that took almost a million lives. All were members of the predominantly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), the rebel force that overthrew the genocidaire regime and formed the subsequent government.
Andreu’s mass indictment had nothing to do with the genocide itself. It related to the revenge massacres of Hutus allegedly carried out by the Tutsi RPF during the war to overthrow the genocidaire regime, and cited later war crimes said to have been carried out by the Rwandan army when it sent troops into Congo to attack former Hutu regime elements based there.
Much of the information on which Andreu’s indictment relies came from left-leaning “humanitarian” NGOs with links to the FDLR, a Hutu organization founded by former genocidaires whose militia is based in Congo and has been labeled a terrorist organization by the U.S. government.
The organization is said to have had discreet support from France, which was a key ally and defender of the Hutu Power regime even after the genocide. (Paris actually sent troops to set up a sanctuary for the Hutu fighters who were the agents of that genocide — the notorious Operation Turquoise.)
A contemporary U.S. diplomatic cable published by Wikileaks quoted the U.S. ambassador to Rwanda saying the indictment was “outrageous and inaccurate,” and politically motivated.
The similar arrest in Germany in 2008 of a Rwandan official named Rose Kabuye — who was subsequently transferred to France for trial — resulted in embarrassment after a court held that there were no charges to answer.
None of this is to say that Kareke is innocent of all charges, still less that he is a good man, just that there is something fishy about his indictment.
* * *
The fact that British police arrested Karake out of the blue baffled observers and enraged Rwanda. Some have even wondered if his arrest has to do with rivalry between the MI5 and MI6 intelligence agencies: Karake was in London to meet the latter but his arrest is likely to have been overseen by the former.
All too likely it has much to do with the way Rwanda under Kagame has become a particular object of suspicion and dislike for that part of the British establishment that takes its opinions from the Guardian.
Rwanda’s recovery after the horrors of the mid-1990s has been astonishing.
The Rwandan government’s undoubted restrictions on press freedom and authoritarian approach to political dissidence get considerably more attention than countries with much nastier, brutal kleptocratic dictatorships: Kagame’s push to change the Rwandan constitution to secure a third term in office has prompted rather more condemnation than similar efforts in Venezuela, Turkey, and Cuba; Rwanda’s intelligence agency is blamed for all kinds of dark and improbable achievements, in the manner of the CIA and Mossad; and the country gets far more than its fair share of blame for the chaos in neighboring Congo, violence that has resulted in at least a million deaths over the last decade.
So why do many activists, humanitarian NGOs and left-wing groups hate Paul Kagame and pay him so much more attention than, say, Equatorial Guinea’s monstrous kleptocrat Teodoro Obiang, Burkina Faso’s Blaise Compaoré or Cameroon’s Paul Biya?
As Central Africa researcher and writer Andrew Wallis puts it, “Paul Kagame is a love-hate figure — for many in the West there seems to be no way they can hold a neutral line on him or Rwanda. He’s the African leader of the moment, and he’s become an international figure of note.”
By most accounts Rwanda’s recovery after the horrors of the mid-1990s has been astonishing. As the New York Times’ Jeffrey Gettleman has written: Under Kagame, this small country “has made enormous strides fighting poverty, corruption and AIDS. The streets are safe. The street lights even work. It all adds up to a small miracle, especially remarkable because of Rwanda’s recent genocide, its overpopulation and its notable lack of resources.”
Gettleman characterized Rwanda as a “tough, suspicious, post-genocide Israel-like [country] whose national ethos, simply stated, was Never Again.”
These are not qualities that necessarily touch the hearts of people in the NGO world. You often hear people imply that the Rwandans ought by now to have abandoned their hostility to the international community, given that it’s been two decades since the genocide. To them, fact that Kagame and his regime have been so effective at re-building and maintaining ethnic peace all but implies that the bloodletting of the mid-1990s can’t really have been that bad.
* * *
It is possible that if Rwanda were a failed or failing state like many other African autocracies and semi-democracies, rather than a thriving, remarkably efficient one, it might receive less hostile press, subject only to the limited scrutiny accorded countries like Guinea and Cameroon.
It may not have helped that while Kagame has welcomed and made good use of foreign aid, he persistently denounces Western paternalism and African dependency. His stated desire to make Rwanda into the Singapore of Africa and his admiration for the late Lee Kwan Yew’s benign dictatorship were never likely to make him popular with Western liberals.
But the turning point seems to have been Goma.
Goma, in what was then Zaire, was the center of a vast international humanitarian operation established to house and feed the Hutu Interahamwe militias and their families who fled Rwanda after the genocide-government was overthrown by the Tutsi RPF. The giant, chaotic refugee camps set up by hundreds of competing aid agencies quickly became a base for more murderous attacks. Neither the Mobutu government in Kinshasa nor the international community did anything to stop the raids. After two years, Kagame sent his army across the border, together with a force from Uganda, and stormed the camps. Ever since, Kagame’s regime has been an object of increasing loathing for Western liberals and much of the NGO world.
Goma was bad enough. But once Rwanda joined the various African nations routinely intervening in and ruthlessly exploiting the chaos in Congo, it started to be portrayed as a uniquely malign player.
Kagame’s regime has been an object of increasing loathing for Western liberals
The media often likes to portray Rwanda’s sponsorship of M23, one of the brutal, rapacious mini-armies taking part in Congo’s civil war, as somehow unique or the primary cause of Congo’s chaos. Neither is true. Burundi, Uganda, Angola, Zimbabwe and even far-off Chad and Namibia have all sent troops into Congo, either to attack rebels hiding in its forests or steal its mineral wealth, or both.
That doesn’t excuse all or even most of Rwanda’s actions, but it does make it easier to understand why the Tutsi RPF is so ruthless in defending its borders and so willing to use force to protect threatened Tutsi populations like the Banyamulenge of Congo. Nor is it surprising that a country ruled by the survivors of an attempt at extermination has little respect for those who ignored or even abetted that genocide, and shows contempt for their espousal of “international humanitarian law.”
Kagame’s internal authoritarianism may be justifiable, given the country’s potential for civil strife and the benefits that development is bringing about.
In any case, there is more to the anti-Kagame sentiment manifested by the Spanish warrant and Karake’s arrest in London than Rwanda’s restrictions on press freedom or its persecution of dissidents abroad.
* * *
Five days after his arrest Karake was released on £1 million bail, thanks to the efforts of his lawyers — who include Cherie Booth, wife of former Prime Minister Tony Blair — but forbidden to leave the U.K. He was told he would be tried in September. Before any action could be taken by the Justice Ministry, the Westminster Magistrates Court dismissed his case.
According to press reports, the offenses specified in the warrant are not extraditable under U.K. law: In Spain you can be tried for war crimes committed abroad; in the U.K. you may not. And for a European Arrest Warrant to lead to extradition, the offense has to be triable in both the country where the indictment was made and the country of arrest. This should have been obvious right from the start. One murky and mysterious action by U.K. authorities has been followed by another.
You could be forgiven for thinking that something about Rwanda and its travails brings out the secretive, dishonest, hypocritical worst in European governments and officialdom, and not only in Paris, Brussels and Madrid.
http://www.politico.eu/article/europe-hound-rwanda-uganda-rebel-us-germany-karake/