mark curtis

The worst aspect was arming Zimbabwe. The Mugabe regime had been a standard destination for British arms exports, including machine guns, ammunition and, in the 1980s and 1990s, around a dozen Hawk aircraft, with military training. The Foreign Affairs Committee notes that in the government's annual reports on arms exports for 1997 and 1998 'no indication was given... that any particular special [arms exports] regime was being applied to exports to Zimbabwe.

Let me summarise the British government's contribution to the genocide in Rwanda. Britain used its diplomatic weight to reduce severely a UN force that, according to military officers on the ground, could have prevented the killings. It then helped ensure the delay of other plans for interventiuon, which sent a green light to the murderers in Rwanda to continue. Britain also refused to provide the capability for other states to intervene... Throughout, Britain helped ensure that the UN did not use the word 'genocide' so the UN would not act, using diplomatic pressure on others to ensure this did not happen. British officials went out of their way to promote these policies and rebuffed personal pleas to stop the killings from the UN Secretary General and the commander of the UN force.

London deepened its military support for Saddam after Halabja. ... The government expressed its outrage over the use of chemical weapons by doubling export credits for Baghdad, which rose from £175 million in 1987 to £340 million in 1988.

For almost a year after Halabja Whitehall refused to concede that Iraq had definitely used chemical weapons, stating that the evidence was 'compelling but not conclusive'.

In the last 25 years of the cold war, Britain cast twice as many vetoes in the security council as the Soviet Union - 27 compared to 13, mainly to support the racist regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia.