Written evidence submitted by Mr Carne
Ross, Director, Independent Diplomat
TESTIMONY TO HOUSE OF COMMONS FOREIGN AFFAIRS
COMMITTEE: COMMENTARY ON FCO WHITE PAPER "ACTIVE DIPLOMACY"
INTRODUCTION
1. I was a member of the FCO from 1989 to
2004, when I resigned after giving evidence to the Butler review.
As a member of the so-called "fast stream" of the Diplomatic
Service, I served, inter alia, as head of the Middle East Peace
Process section (1995-97), speechwriter to the Foreign Secretary
(1997-98), and First Secretary (Political) at the UK Mission to
the UN, New York, where I was responsible for the Middle East,
and in particular Iraq (1998-2002). I served briefly in Afghanistan
after the US/UK invasion and was seconded to the UN mission in
Kosovo in 2003-04. By the time I resigned, I had joined the Senior
Management Structure of the FCO.
2. Most of my work in New York dealt with
Iraq and in particular Security Council resolutions on weapons
inspections and sanctions. The evidence I gave to the Butler review
explained three concerns: that the government's public presentation
of the evidence on WMD did not accurately reflect its own internal
information or assessments; that the government had not properly
considered or attempted available alternatives to invasion, such
as the use of strictly-targeted sanctions on the Saddam regime;
that the UK's conduct at the UN Security Council in the run-up
to the invasion amounted to deceit, and that its invasion was,
in the light of the many resolutions on Iraq that I had helped
negotiate (and in particular that establishing UNMOVIC), unlawful.
My evidence to Butler is not public, but my unclassified views
on the issue were explained in a long article in the Financial
Times in January 2005, attached as the first annex to this evidence.
[1]
3. Since my resignation I have founded the
world's first non-profit diplomatic advisory group, Independent
Diplomat, which gives advice and assistance in diplomacy from
a global network of diplomatic experts and lawyers to marginalised
or inexperienced governments and political groups, including the
governments of Kosovo and Somaliland, and the Polisario Front
of the Western Sahara. The aim of Independent Diplomat is to reduce
the risk of conflict by helping those denied a voice to be heard
in the closed forums of international diplomacy.
"ACTIVE DIPLOMACY"
4. The FCO strategy document is written
at a level of generality and vagueness that risks platitude. Its
predictions about the future are common knowledge: climate change,
accelerating globalisation, migration, energy security etc. Its
prescriptions for addressing that future are vague—strong
relationships, a robust international system, etc (example (p
17): "the international community need[s] to reduce conflict,
make globalisation work for the poor and provide new resources
for development"). Like an oil slick, the opaque words of
this document help conceal the troubled if not disastrous reality
of British foreign policy today, and certainly discourages, perhaps
deliberately, informed parliamentary and public debate.
5. One striking example of the paper's character
is that it makes only glancing reference to Britain's military
occupation of two countries—Afghanistan and Iraq. [2]This
is not because the paper refers only to the future: there are
for instance descriptions of the UK's EU and G8 Presidencies,
or the UK's role in negotiating Turkish accession to the EU. By
this vagueness, even obfuscation, the paper obscures a number
of serious policy and systemic issues in current British foreign
policy:
POLICY PROBLEMS
6. When I joined the FCO, I was taught that
British diplomacy stood for international law and a "world
of rules", regardless of which political party was in government.
"Active Diplomacy" makes similar claims. International
law was undermined by the invasion of Iraq. One of Britain's primary
diplomatic tools is its permanent membership of the UN Security
Council, the pre-eminent arbiter of law on war and peace. The
authority of the Council is today weaker: witness our inability
to impose the necessary UN peacekeeping force in Darfur, or the
Council's vacillation over the nuclear danger in Iran. Similarly,
it may prove difficult to persuade the Council to endorse the
necessary independence of Kosovo this year or early next. Although
each of these issues is complex, underpinning all of them is a
reversal in the late 1990's momentum toward international acquiescence
if not endorsement of intervention, and law-based activism—a
trend which, at the time, Britain led. Thanks in part to our own
behaviour, we have stepped back toward an international culture
of Hobbesian "might is right".
7. The ill-named Global War on Terror or
"GWOT" has contributed to this trend. The UK acquiesced
in a US approach which from 2001 dismissed international law as
an impediment to what needed to be done to stop terrorists, and
has established living repudiations to human rights law, such
as Guantanamo Bay and the practice of "extraordinary rendition".
I negotiated for the UK the 12 September 2001 UN Security Council
resolution condemning the attacks of the day before. Never had
I seen such solidarity with the US (and with those, like Britain,
whose citizens were also killed). The metaphor of war rather than
law has damaged the law without advancing the war. US tactics,
in which the UK is complicit, have legitimised the terrorists
and increased their support. Our alliance in this "war"
with "friendly" but undemocratic Arab regimes (Saudi
Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, to mention only a few) has permitted their
abuse of human rights and deepened the popular suspicion that
our interests in this region are purely selfish. Associated with
this is the collapse of any sense of direction or conviction over
Israel-Palestine. In contrast to all its predecessors since 1967,
the government barely mentions that the core issue is one of occupation
and the need for international law (in particular Security Council
resolutions 242 and 338) to be implemented. This inconsistency
is present elsewhere, for instance in how we treat those who breach
the Non-Proliferation Treaty (in particular the strange triplets
India, Pakistan and Israel), and indeed our own commitments under
that treaty. This inconsistency undermines UK authority across
the board and feeds the accusation of "double standards"
in our approach to international law.
8. Glimpses of this loss of conviction can
paradoxically be seen in otherwise praiseworthy British initiatives,
such as the FCO's pursuit of a global treaty on small arms. Such
treaties will not solve the world's problems and our support for
them has nugatory effect in comparison to the damage wrought by
our actions elsewhere. What might help stabilise a turbid world
is a return to a law-based but active approach to crises, such
as Sudan and Israel-Palestine, building on the trend of international
opinion epitomised in the "Responsibility to Protect"
agreed by all 191 states at the UN in 2005. At present, such declarations
are weak. They can only be made strong if those who offer themselves
as the protectors of international law—such as the FCO in
this paper—live by its rules, and implement them consistently.
SYSTEM PROBLEMS
9. Contributing to these policy failures
are four systemic problems in foreign policy-making in the UK.
Policy-making in the UK government and the FCO in particular remains
a "closed box". Ministers are but the tip of the iceberg
of decision-making. Officials are anonymous and unaccountable.
Foreign policy now touches on more and more issues in our domestic
lives (food standards, climate change, terrorism), yet policy
is still decided by small groups of officials invisible to the
public in whose name they are acting. This lack of transparency
and accountability risks bad policy. Indeed, the greater the range
of what is included today in "foreign policy", the more
likely are poor decisions within the closed box. The FCO's talk
of transparency, "open days" and public meetings merely
scratches the surface.
10. Meanwhile, thinking about foreign policy
in the British government and civil service remains dominated
by state-centric notions of a world order based on states and
their institutions, as well as the arbitrary and indeed invented
calculus of "interests". All evidence however points
to more divers and chaotic forces at work in the 21st century,
from non-state violence to global warming. While paying lip-service
to these factors, the FCO remains deeply attached to state-based
solutions to these problems, agreeing treaties and discussing
problems in forums which are ever more disconnected from reality.
To affect events in another country, whether human rights in China
or corruption in Angola, any actor needs to work in coalition
not only with other governments, but also with business, NGOs
and an expanding range of other non-state actors. With its extensive
resources, government can lead such coalitions. But there is little
evidence that the FCO is actively doing this.
11. While decision-making remains in the
closed box, parliamentary scrutiny is negligible. In my career,
which dealt with issues ranging from the Middle East peace process
to the invasion of Afghanistan, I was not once interrogated or
in any way scrutinised by the Foreign Affairs Committee. The committee's
series of reports on the Iraq war stand as acute evidence of this
failure to scrutinise. Inside the FCO, the recommendations of
the FAC are given little attention. The FCO will politely pretend
otherwise, but it is in reality able to carry on its business
without fear of significant intrusion. Parliamentary questions,
foreign affairs debates and occasional single topic debates, are
straightforward for officials and ministers to fob off with stock
and bromidic answers, and thus form a kind of theatre—a
sham of democratic accountability, when in reality there is none.
This is not a criticism of the current government. It was always
so. [3]But
the consequences today are more dangerous.
12. Something has happened to the FCO in
the course of the failures since 2001. It has become both marginalised
and politicised. The FCO would vehemently rebut this, but promotion
to senior positions has been in part based on the political sympathies
of officials. Those closely associated with Number Ten, and who
are seen to be sympathetic to the Prime Minister's prejudices,
are swept up into senior positions. The FCO has been reduced to
an entirely subordinate role (its lack of confidence and imagination
is amply illustrated in "Active Diplomacy"). Another
consequence is easy to predict: officials increasingly tell ministers
what they wish to hear. The culture of official impartiality,
and the ability of officials to tell ministers necessary truths,
is undermined. The time may have come to make a virtue of this
reality, and shift to a US system whereby senior civil service
positions are politically-appointed. This is the de facto situation
in any case.
CONCLUSION AND
RECOMMENDATIONS
13. In "Active Diplomacy" and
in general, the FCO and government proclaim their knowledge of
the world and ability to deal with its challenges: here is the
world, they say, and here is how we intend to deal with it. It
is an illusion comforting to those in government and the public
alike. The evidence however suggests that parliament—and
indeed the public—is unwise to accord them this responsibility
unquestioned. The last few years have been disastrous for British
foreign policy, and no one is held to account. [4]The
edifice of human rights law and norms, which took half a century
of careful work to construct, has been undermined by those who
claim to defend it. Maybe 500,000 people have died in Iraq and
the rage that fuels terrorism against us has been amply stoked.
Meanwhile, the US/UK invasion of Afghanistan, which was legitimate
under Article 51 of the UN charter (self-defence), is now risking
failure, because too few troops were deployed in the first place.
This was very evident from the beginning. When I served in Kabul
immediately after the Taliban feel, I was told then by British
officers that forces were being held back for Iraq—this
was in April 2002. If this adventure fails too, our security will
be endangered further. But perhaps worse is that we will have
failed the inhabitants of both countries to whom we have both
a legal duty—under the Geneva conventions—and moral
obligation.
14. We are so inured to the rhetoric of
anti-terrorism and macho posturing about building democracy while
fostering chaos, that it is hard to imagine an alternate direction
for British foreign policy. But it is available, as it always
was. This alternative lies in consistency of application of international
law and a robust defence (including intervention when necessary,
as in Kosovo and Sierra Leone) of those under assault or oppression.
It lies in remedy to the "diplomatic deficit" whereby
those affected by our—and others'—foreign policy have
no capacity to influence it while those in whose name policy is
carried out—us, the public—also have scant means to
affect it. Together, such changes will produce a more just and
therefore more stable world. [5]
15. The whole discourse of what is important
in foreign policy tends to work off a US agenda: Iran, North Korea
etc which, while important, attract diplomatic energy to the detriment
of other worthwhile issues. A distinctive and positive British
foreign policy is possible, for instance on Israel-Palestine,
or the Horn of Africa, which in part through international neglect
is now descending once more into chaos and war. In little-noticed
Kosovo, the UK is playing a very constructive role in bringing
that last piece of the Balkans puzzle to stability. As a permanent
member of the UN Security Council, the UK has a unique ability
to improve the credibility of that damaged institution, including
by encouraging its reform. In the Security Council and more broadly,
the world needs an international system that gives a legitimate
voice to all those affected by others' foreign policy (that means
not just states). This is the goal Independent Diplomat is working
towards. The Prime Minister himself has claimed that Britain stands
by the oppressed, wherever they are. It is not too late for the
policy reality to match that rhetoric, but it does require change,
perhaps even a revolution.
Carne Ross
6 November 2006
1 Not reproduced. Back
2
There is a vague reference to "international engagement"
in Iraq on p19. Perhaps in recognition of the allied failures
in these countries, we are told of the establishment of a "post
conflict reconstruction unit" on p 31. There is a reference
to Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan (p 49). Back
3
There is need for a deeper debate about the nature of parliamentary
scrutiny of foreign policy. Any committee led by a member of the
governing party is inevitably less inclined to the aggressive
scrutiny necessary. The British committee system is also much
less well resourced, for research and investigation for instance,
than its US equivalents. Back
4
It is not only the current administration which is blameworthy
in this regard. Those officials and ministers responsible for
Britain's disgraceful inaction over Bosnia, for instance, have
also escaped scrutiny and accountability for their roles. Indeed,
many have received promotion and public honours. Back
5
This argument is elaborated in the second attached article, "We
must hear the unheard for a more stable world" Financial
Times, 6 April 2006. Back
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