Is Britain Better?

Although Britain has signed up to the ICC, its own record on war crimes is questionable, despite what our top brass claims.

Days before Trump’s Blackwater pardons, Britain’s top soldier General Sir Nick Carter gave a speech lambasting Russian mercenaries and proclaiming the West’s moral superiority. Carter assured us: ‘Western states draw legitimacy from their respect for the rules, conventions, and protocols of war. Where we see morals, ethics and values as a centre of gravity, authoritarian rivals see them as an attractive target.’

Carter is yet to comment publicly on the Blackwater pardons, unlike the United Nation’s Working Group on Mercenaries, which quickly warned the move would ‘violate US obligations under international law’ and embolden other states to flout the rules on armed conflicts.

Whitehall has no love for this important UN group, which is one of the few international watchdogs holding mercenaries to account. In September 2019, the UK actually voted against renewing its mandate in a resolution at the UN Human Rights Council. Emails I obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show British officials commented privately: ‘The UK has always voted against this resolution […] It crosses what essentially are red lines.’

Whitehall resents the UN group’s broad mandate, which covers both mercenaries and what British officials view as ‘properly regulated and responsible private security companies’ which provide ‘an essential service supporting diplomatic, commercial and humanitarian activity.’

In truth Britain has long opposed efforts to constrain mercenaries and their crimes. After the bloodshed in Nisour Square, there was pressure for a UK ban on mercenaries. Labour Foreign Secretary David Miliband opted instead for a voluntary code of conduct for the private security sector.

He was following decades of Whitehall strategy to keep mercenaries above the law. Throughout the 1980s, while British mercenaries were flying helicopter gunships and training paramilitaries in Sri Lanka, Thatcher’s government repeatedly obstructed attempts at the UN to ban mercenaries. British negotiators were instructed to ‘watch out for opportunities to kill the matter’.

Meanwhile, the Foreign Office was fully aware that the British mercenaries, from a company called KMS Ltd, were closely involved with war crimes against Tamil civilians in Sri Lanka.

UK diplomats sat on the incendiary evidence for 30 years, until some of the files were declassified at the National Archives and published in my book on KMS in 2020. In response, the Metropolitan Police’s tiny war crimes unit belatedly launched an investigation – but by that time many of the key mercenaries had passed away.

Of course, the UN itself is not perfect, and has struggled with holding its own peacekeepers to account for sexual abuses in Haiti and the Congo. But at least the UN framework provides some international standards, which Britain and the US appear keen to depart from.

Veteran Lawfare

In his December speech, General Carter hit out at ‘lawfare’, but allowed that ‘we need to update our legal, ethical and moral framework to properly hold our forces to account if they break the law, while ensuring they have appropriate freedom of action to seize fleeting opportunities on the battlefield.’

Carter was alluding to the government’s Overseas Operations Bill, which would make prosecutions for war crimes, including murder and torture, far more difficult – by introducing a five-year statute of limitations. It follows years of contentious (and sometimes botched) litigation against British troops for their actions in Iraq, which prompted a preliminary probe by the ICC.

In December, the ICC’s Bensouda said there was ‘a reasonable basis to believe that members of the British armed forces committed the war crimes of wilful killing, torture, inhuman/cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity, and rape and/or other forms of sexual violence’ in Iraq. Her report warned that the Overseas Operations Bill could in future make British troops more likely to end up in the Hague in front of the ICC, if British courts are unwilling to prosecute them domestically.

While debating the Bill in Parliament, Conservative Defence Secretary Ben Wallace told Labour exasperatedly that ‘much of the mess we are having to come and clean up today is because of your illegal wars’ in Iraq and Afghanistan. By breaching the omertà in this Trumpian moment of brutal honesty, Wallace reminded us how discontent at the War on Terror and its abuses can be mobilised by right- as well as left-wing populists.

As former Labour foreign minister Chris Mullin recently noted, it was the Stop the War movement that ultimately propelled Corbyn from street protester to leader of the opposition. Yet while Corbyn’s stance against the war was hugely popular, the conflict also created a generation of predominantly working-class veterans who have since been disaffected and prone to radicalisation. The issue of their welfare has been monopolised by the likes of Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage, who blame veteran homelessness on Iraqi and Afghan asylum seekers taking council houses – rather than on costly foreign wars squandering billions of pounds that could better be spent at home.

It is this group, which exists on both sides of the Atlantic, that politicians like Trump have managed to draw upon and hope to satisfy with pardons for the Blackwater mercenaries. And unless the Left shifts the debate to amplify valid demands shared by veterans, such as for better housing and healthcare, anti-war activists risk being seen as going after individuals, rather than after the vicious warfare state itself.