‘As Used on the Famous Nelson Mandela’ by Mark Thomas
Comedian Mark Thomas does an incredible job of uncovering the evils of the arms trade.
Language is a malleable thing. Take euphemism as an example. Where one might have said ‘bombing’ we now say ‘surgical strike’. The latter suggests an exactness, a cleanness that the former entirely lacks. Where once it would have sufficed to say ‘kidnapping’, we now have ‘extraordinary rendition.’ The former can be perpetrated by anybody; it takes a government to commit the latter. In place of the commonplace ‘torture’, we now hear of the application of ‘special methods of questioning.’
Another example is the way things are named. When Germany was carved up at the end of the Second World War the Communist half was called The German Democratic Republic. North Korea is more properly known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. I once travelled through a sliver of the Democratic Republic of the Congo – three days there was enough and strange as this may sound I was rather glad to then slip into Angola and escape the inspissated atmosphere of Kinshasa.
Why do I mention all of this? And what is the connection between naming conventions and politically correct euphemism? Simply because you get a good idea of what the ‘New’ in ‘New Labour’ meant, how their arrival in 1997 heralded rather less change than had been hoped for, and you can guess what language would come to be used to describe military procedures in general, and the arms trade specifically.
Before two weeks had passed in the New Labour era, Robin Cook gave a speech about foreign policy under the new government.
“Our foreign policy must have an ethical dimension and must support the demands of other peoples for the democratic rights on which we insist for ourselves. The Labour government will put human rights at the heart of our foreign policy.”
Robin Cook is one of many ambiguous figures to emerge from Mark Thomas’s book about the arms trade, ‘As Used on the Famous Nelson Mandela.’ Cook played a prominent role in the ‘Arms to Iraq’ backlash against the Tory government. After Cook’s death in 2005, John Kampfner wrote,
“His single-handed destruction of the Major government over the arms-to-Iraq scandal in 1996 has been attributed to his forensic skill. But there was passion and raw anger too.”
Cook later resigned from his post of leader of the Commons in 2003 to protest the Blair-led second war with Iraq. He resigned,
“[W]ith a speech so good that it was given the only standing ovation ever recorded in the Commons. MPs may have been startled, as much as anything, by the spectacle of a resignation on principle from the party of shift and spin.” (Robin Cook Obituary, The Economist)
All of this suggests a man of unparalleled virtue, certainly as much as any politician of the modern age could be credited with, and yet as Kampfner then says,
“Even as he resigned, however, Cook sought to minimise the damage to the government. He could have made his departing speech at the start of the crucial debate on Iraq, but allowed himself to be convinced by [Director of Communications and Strategy Alistair] Campbell not to.”
Thomas takes Cook to task for the many mistakes he made in his first years as Foreign Minister, especially those pertaining to the arms trade.
For example, in 1994 Robin Cook argued against allowing the sale of BAE Hawk jets to Indonesia, where he feared they would be used in bombing runs in East Timor. The Conservative government approved the contracts just before losing power, and it was widely expected that when New Labour came in Cook would block the sale. He didn’t.
Then in 2001, before a routine select committee, Cook caused a minor scandal when he openly spoke about the sale by Royal Ordnance of arms to Morocco. At the time Morocco was heavily involved in military action against the Western Sahrawis, a people whose lands they had claimed for themselves. Royal Ordnance had applied for a licence to refurbish thirty 105mm Howitzer cannons, and to sell a further six, back in 1998, but their request had been turned down as the deal was seen to be at odds with Criterion Four of the EU Code of Conduct. The negotiations dragged on with appeal after appeal, until in 1999 the refurbishment aspect was agreed to. Whilst Cook was not the man who approved the licence – that honour went to Geoff Hoon – it was Cook who came in for major criticism after he made the details public.
On the other hand, in his book ‘Point of Departure’, Robin Cook came out very clearly against the government deal to service the Hawk jets sold to Robert Mugabe under the Conservatives. And perhaps Cook can be forgiven for his earlier mistakes as well; his high-profile divorce at the very start of his time as Foreign Secretary goes unremarked in Thomas’s book, and if it is true that Blair came to exert his power over Cook, it should hardly be a surprise that Cook’s time should have been so frequently clouded.
Thomas is generally scathing in his comments about politicians, especially those involved in any way with BAE systems, by far the biggest villains in his story. He uses a Robin Cook quote to great effect to describe how insidious the company had become:
“I never once knew of Number Ten to come up with any decision that would be incommoding to British Aerospace.”
But again the ambiguous nature of the arms trade comes to play. Claire Short assists Thomas’s work to expose the arms dealers, and at the Quadripartite Select Committee meeting on the arms trade the Tory MP Robert Key seems especially supportive of Thomas’s actions – a fact that causes Thomas some consternation. In every story that Thomas details, in every sting action, there is a sense that nobody properly knows what is going on. The arms dealers try their best to disguise or hide from the consequences of their actions, and in the case of Tony Lee, discovered to be brokering electro-shock batons from his home in South London, exhibit naiveté and a lack of awareness of the law.
The law itself is a problem, and one of the main thrusts in Thomas’s work is to raise the issue of arms trade treaties. At the time of writing, he complains that too many countries have their own regulations, so if it is not possible to export a particular weapon to a particular country, it might be possible if you do a deal with a company in a different nation to achieve the same result.
There is a lot to learn in this book, much of it surprising. For a start, I had no idea of the sheer banality of the arms trade, and how, properly speaking, it looks terribly like any other kind of selling. To all intents and purposes many of the men and women involved could as well be selling batteries.
One of the characters that Thomas sets up is a Finn, Olli Salo, whose grand scheme for bypassing the arms trade laws is simply to change the ‘import’ labels for ‘tranship’ ones when the goods arrive in Finland.
“The mechanics of barbarity are stunningly mundane. No midnight runs across borders or high-powered speedboats. Just lurking in a bonded warehouse with a false set of labels. There is no dark romance, no amoral enigma; there is no mystery or suspense-cling to his petty thuggery. Olli Salo, the gunrunner, has all the dangerous allure of a shoplifter in a gardening centre.”
Later he escorts arms dealer Mick Ranger for an interview with a group of students at Lord Williams Upper School in Thame. Ranger had been having problems with the airline Virgin, who had refused to allow his shipment of shotguns onto a plane.
“Mick Ranger’s phone is constantly ringing as he fields questions about paperwork and returning calls. All of this is peppered with his fury at a petty official, the airport employee who will not let his shotguns on the plane. It is all too easy to identify with the feeling of hopelessness and rage in the face of incompetent bureaucracy.”
The students Thomas introduced to Mick Ranger had already worked as his accomplices; together they had formed a company called Williams Defence to prove, with shocking ease, just how easy it was to broker arms deals. The passages involving the teenagers, and later a nun and a group of Presentation school girls in Portlaoise, Ireland, are well-relayed, and Thomas wisely allows the paradoxical humour of the situation to come out as naturally as possible.
However, throughout his book Thomas’s wit is sorely lacking. He is an excellent comic and his stand-up and television shows are compelling, but on the page his jokes are sadly lacklustre. They suffer from being too obvious, from being too verbose, and from an over-reliance on length for effect. A joke about Phil Collins takes up a meaty paragraph that detracts from the story he is trying to tell. The description of a meeting at the public prosecutor’s office in Monza, Italy, yields this example, which is about the average for the book as a whole:
“The office is big enough to swing a cat but I wouldn’t want to try anything further up the food chain. Not without a mop and plenty of disinfectant.”
Clearly a case of trying too hard.
Ambiguity reigns supreme in every area, from politics to the description of the arms traded (in some cases the parts being sold are for civilian equipment, but can be re-purposed for military use) to the people doing the trading. Arms trading provides yet more examples of the kind of euphemism I was talking about earlier. It is illegal to sell leg irons in the UK, but not to sell ‘over-sized handcuffs’, which are effectively the same thing. And what do we find the aggressors calling themselves in the countries that use these items? ‘Defence’.
But one area where Thomas is unambiguous is the morality of fighting in the first place. Speaking about the Western Sahrawis and their battle against Morocco to reclaim their land,
“[It] doesn’t matter how justified a cause is, or how downtrodden, wretched and oppressed the people are in whose name the cause exists: taking a human life is a brutal act.”
This is certainly true, but it is the first step on the slippery slope of moral equivalence. In the case of Iraq, it is clear that the British public was misled, as were a great many politicians, about the danger that Saddam Hussein’s regime posed. Robin Cook was right to make a stand and to resign, and his ethical stance I think went a long way to making up for the mistakes he made at the start of his career in office. However, there is an argument in favour of intervention which is most eloquently made by Christopher Hitchens, who pointed out many times that Hussein was guilty of acts of genocide against the Kurds in the North. There always comes a time when one must ask precisely what is worth fighting for, even if it requires ‘a brutal act.’
‘As Used on the Famous Nelson Mandela’ was published in 2006. Since then the UK’s exports of arms has grown from $855 million to $1054 million in 2010, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The trade between the UK and, shall we say, less enlightened governments was suitably brisk: between 2005 and 2010, the UK sold €119.35 million of arms to the Gaddafi regime in Libya (Figures from The Guardian).
But it isn’t all bad news. Thomas reports on the sale by BAE of a military radar system to the impoverished nation of Tanzania, a sale that nearly bankrupted the country and was, to add insult to penury, not even capable of providing national air traffic coverage. There was a very bad smell that lingered around the deal. After a six year probe into claims of bribery in the original deal, the UK’s Serious Fraud Office ordered BAE to pay Tanzania £29.5 million; though here again is another example of euphemism, as the company only admitted it had ‘inaccurately accounted’ for $12.4 million in payments to a Tanzanian businessman.
As the French say, the more things change…
