‘The shadow for the substance … the word for the deed’
THOMAS SHAW, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE
KINGDOM OF MOROCCO, MARCH 1970
If it is clear that Morocco today must be counted an Arab country, it is a relief to find that, like Austrians and Germans, Moroccans are Arabs mit mildernden Umständen.1 Geographical position, the population mixture, the incidents of history and a definite sense of Moroccan personality, all lead them to differ in mode from their Eastern Arab brothers … The opening towards the Arab world is not matched by any similar movement towards Africa south of the Sahara … [T]he natural attitude of the Moroccan towards the black African is little short of contempt. As Houphouet-Boigny2 remarked to my Ivoirian colleague recently: ‘Ils nous traitent toujours d’esclaves.’3 Nevertheless there are so many habits and attitudes of mind in Morocco which ring a familiar West African bell that I cannot help wondering whether the connections are not stronger than a Moroccan would admit. The disregard of time is probably too general to point anywhere in particular; but the ability to take the shadow for the substance or the word for the deed, stem as easily from Africa as from the Arab world; the tendency to treat foreign Ambassadors like a troupe of performing monkeys is reminiscent of ex-President Apithy, or indeed of the Kings of Abomey4 before him; the sacred pools and trees, even the style of drumming, have much in common with black Africa; and it is a fact that only here and in the Ivory Coast has my household depended on me to change an electric light bulb …
Twenty-five years of absence elsewhere have confirmed one early conclusion in a field which, alas, impinges particularly on the likes of us: that Moroccan servants are as bad as any in my wide experience. It took me some months … to discover that my Moroccan servant had throughout his employment with me and for at least some of his employment with my predecessor combined his domestic functions and wages with the duties and wage of a point-duty policeman. I sacked him finally when I found him using my toothbrush.
‘Big Brother is watching’
PETER TRIPP, HM AMBASSADOR TO
LIBYA, MARCH 1971Two reports here from British ambassadors in Libya, spanning the first decade of Colonel Qadhafi’s rule after the 1969 coup which brought him to power. Reading these despatches the striking thing is how little the essential nature of the dictatorship seems to have changed from those early days right up until the revolution and subsequent NATO campaign that toppled Qadhafi from power in 2011.
The fault lines under the regime seem equally ancient. Peter Tripp’s prediction in 1971 that the eastern half of the country around Benghazi had an independent streak ‘which could yet cause Libya’s present rulers trouble’ of course came true, in the end.
The 1977 report from Tripp’s successor-but-one, Anthony Williams, hit the nail on the head too, in its analysis of Qadhafi himself. The file shows that Williams’s Head of Department, C. D. Powell, considered this despatch ‘a shrewd and amusing piece, which strips down Libya and its leader to their bare essentials. The latter are more attractive when spread out on Mr Williams’ groundsheet than when assembled into their unappealing whole.’
‘Incidentally,’ continues the memo, ‘the experts say the Libyans were not always cheats, at least of each other, and probably learned it from Western carpet-baggers!’
| (CONFIDENTIAL) | Tripoli, |
2 March, 1971.
Sir,
The Post Report said one should not imagine Tripoli and Benghazi to be Mediterranean towns like Nice and Monte Carlo! The author of that advice must himself have had a very fertile (or over-worked) imagination. To most people Tripoli must seem a dump and Benghazi like limbo. The vastness and variety of Libya comes as a surprise. Driving to Benghazi – ten hours and 650 miles away – brings home to one the distance separating Tripoli from Cyrenaica, and illustrates the problem of maintaining cohesion between the two parts of the Embassy in those two places. The further drive to Cyrene, Apollonia, Beida, Derna and on to Tobruk presents a different vista and another climate: green hills, deep gorges, waterfalls, Scotch mists. I have not yet seen the Fezzan and the sand seas, another 8–12 hours’ drive to the south and south-west.
Libya could never have been effectively one country – but it suited the convenience of its former transitory rulers to pretend that it was. The ruins of Sabratha, Leptis Magna, Apollonia and Cyrene testify to the attempts by former governors to establish centres of power from which to dominate and exploit the region. The present rulers by centralising the ‘action’ (and Government institutions) in Tripoli have effectively given to Tripoli a new predominance in a unified Libya. There is still, however, an independence about Cyrenaica which could yet cause Libya’s present rulers trouble.
As a capital – as a town even – Tripoli is a mess. Despite its 450,000 inhabitants, only the main streets are paved, and many of those are increasingly potholed. Side streets are festooned with electric cables; drains scarcely cope with winter rain-water, and vacant lots are flanked by half-completed buildings. Tatty, revolutionary posters, surmounted by mis-shapen eagles, offend the eye at every turn: ‘UNITY: SOCIALISM: FREEDOM’ they proclaim. Double bills of the Leader with his latest foreign guest succeed each other on dilapidated walls. (Frequent official visits heralded by a military band in saffron tunics thumping out ‘Daisy, Daisy …’ are recurrent and tedious chores for the corps, called to wait for hours at the airport.) The police, in their Bulgarian-bought RAF-blue uniforms are everywhere – lounging ineffectually at street corners, outside Embassies, or miserably huddling in the slashing rain of January against walls and in doorways …
Old-established Embassies continue to occupy imposing residences. My own house is a barracks of a place (originally built for an Italian admiral) with erratic electricity, intermittent water and an aura of The Great Eastern Hotel about to go into liquidation. Before coming here I could not have known that within a fortnight I should be emulating Batman, climbing after dark up the sheer side of the house in a Force 8 gale to investigate and remedy an interruption in our water supply. The expulsion of the Italians removed almost all competent artisans and one must be able to turn one’s hand to anything. Our very tenure of the residence seems insecure: a Municipal bulldozer recently breached our garden wall and was advancing on the tennis court before I drove it back. The Municipality had apparently expropriated part of the garden for a new road. We are now engaged in seeking a compromise which would leave us undisturbed. Meanwhile, the wall has been repaired – without prejudice.
What of the people? The inhabitants of Tripoli seem crushed and frightened: silent and suspicious. They are surprised if one greets them and slow to respond. Shopkeepers are reluctant to sell and will only grudgingly admit to having what one asks for. Women (of whom few are seen about) are generally shrouded in their coarse off-white ‘barakans’ – a length of cloth wound round the figure leaving one eye and a pair of (usually red) football stockings exposed. Foreign women and girls in Tripoli are stared at. Young girls are likely to have their bottoms pinched by young Libyans – an Italian legacy? Television, education and the Press are all of such an abysmally low standard that change is likely to be slow. The best hope lies in a leaven of foreign-educated students. The family, usually a powerful influence in Arab countries, is unlikely to provide much impetus for change, as the women are so confined. Libyan women tend not to go out. Husbands are afraid: Big Brother is watching.
‘There are, I think, three Qadhafis inside one skin’
SIR ANTHONY WILLIAMS, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE GREAT SOCIALIST PEOPLE’S LIBYAN ARAB JAMAHIRIYA, JULY 1977
CONFIDENTIAL
FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICEDIPLOMA REPORT No. 245/77
| NFB 014/4 | General / Economic (Q) Distribution |
LIBYA,
5 July, 1977
THE LIBYAN ARAB WHAT?: LIVING WITH QADHAFI’S JAMAHIRIYA
Her Majesty’s Ambassador at Tripoli to the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
| (CONFIDENTIAL) | Tripoli, |
5 July, 1977.
After six months and many thousand miles, it may seem late to record first impressions of Qadhafi’s Libya. In a more straightforward country it would indeed be tardy. But here genuine and valid impressions – above the level of the travelogue – come few and far between. There would be little difficulty in dilating once again on the splendidness of Libya’s Roman and Greek ruins or the awfulness of its hotels; but to form an impression on one’s own – disregarding equally a catch phrase like ‘maverick’ and the self-perpetuating myths dispensed by old Tripoli hands – to attempt a critical yet sympathetic understanding of this angular and abrasive country, with its angular and abrasive leader, requires, as I have myself discovered, a lot of torn-up drafts.
One difficulty in such an attempt is the almost total inaccessibility of Qadhafi and his camarilla, not only to diplomats of whatever colour, but even to his own officials … When the Prime Minister has so little access, diplomats can scarcely complain of having less: though for them the barrier to communication goes surprisingly far down the line. This must surely be the only country where not only are credentials presented no higher than to the Minister (now Secretary) of Foreign Affairs, but where even to do this may involve a delay of several months. While Ministers and Heads of Mission wait long hours to hear Qadhafi’s (consistently wildly unpunctual) speeches, they are kept carefully apart and never, never mix. Nor, for diplomats, are there favourites exempted from this quarantine. It is at least some consolation for us ex-Imperialists to observe the hurt astonishment of brother Arabs, fellow members of the oppressed Third World – and even our Soviet colleague and his associates – when they first come up against this contemptuous blank wall …
Meanwhile, the Jamahiriya1-watcher fares ill compared with his equivalents in Moscow and Peking, where lack of personal access is to some extent compensated by a mass of deliberately or unintentionally revealing literature. After nearly eight years of power, Qadhafi has published no more than the first chapter of his pensées; a promised second chapter to this ‘Green Book’ is more than a year overdue. The two officially authorised dailies contain exceptionally little worth reading, either on or between the lines. Speeches we have galore, but when they are not by Qadhafi himself, they are rarely more than ritual mouth noises, safe for the speaker but uninformative for anyone else. What we do have, of course, is Qadhafi’s own speeches, rambling, discursive, sometimes Hitlerian; but spontaneous thinkings-aloud, which do throw occasional beams of light on the workings of a strange and complex, not unimpressive mind – always thinking, thinking inside its own closed cage of ignorance, prejudice and distorted information.
To begin to understand, even more to attempt explaining, the workings of that mind, as they have become manifest in its brainchild, the Libyan Jamahiriya, one must first go back to the origins from which it came. The Libyans, I have come to conclude, are not only very peculiar people, but even peculiar Arabs. Although they share some apparently recurrent Arab characteristics – the totally un-European lack of sympathy for artefacts or materials which makes them congenital false screwers and their shop stocks all shop-soiled; the pessimism over good being returned by good which leads them to get in the first cheat when they can; the resigned fatalism which accepts the results of incompetence as the will of God – yet they do not fall into established patterns. The Senussi were not, as became sadly apparent, another kind of Hashemites, nor are the un-nomadic Tripolitanians at all like the un-nomadic Egyptian fellahin. While, I understand, France has left a whole cultural imprint over Tunisia, Morocco and Algiers, and there is much still identifiably British in Egypt or the Gulf, all that Mussolini seems to have left in Libya are, in the bureaucracy, an Italian reluctance to take responsibility, in petty officials like the customs, a quasi-fascist arbitrariness, and among the sheep one finds tethered in side streets, a surprising willingness to live off left-over macaroni.
To identify the Libyanness of the Libyans, one must, I think, begin further back with their predecessors – in Tripolitania and along the coast, the Barbary Corsairs; behind and beyond them the great desert caravaners of ivory and ostrich plumes and, above all, black slaves. The peculiarity of that culture, from which the modern Libyans derive, was that it was essentially managerial and profit-taking, rather than creative or profit making. And those managed – the people who rowed the ships, tended the date palms, plied the trades, ornamented the mosques and palaces – were slaves, white as well as black, but probably more white than black. The source of white slaves was the merchant shipping of those Mediterranean powers not strong enough to protect their own – Spain, Sicily, Genoa, the Papacy and even, into the 19th century, the US. The source of the blacks was just those areas beyond the arid hell of the Sahara crossing, where Qadhafi now seeks clients and cheap labour: what are now Chad, Niger and the Central African Empire.
A thin time, of course, followed the great days of this slave-based society, but the Italian attempt, between 1911 and 1942, to reverse the roles was singularly unsuccessful. Now oil wealth can summon foreign white labour with even less trouble than was previously needed to capture it, and the Libyans have, it seems to me, fallen back very easily and naturally into the master’s role. Even if unconsciously, the European outside his own continent tends to expect at least the remnants of that consideration to which the mere colour of his skin used to entitle him. One must accept that, to a large extent, this does not even occur to a modern Libyan of the managerial class. What is more, he has the – not exclusively Arab – characteristic of those who can hire skills without having to master them; that he has little respect for them or understanding of their difficulties and limitations. If concrete does not dry in time for the new (earlier) deadline, then one must bully the engineer.
Another factor which separates many Libyans, not only from Europeans but even from other Arabs, is their religious background. In summary and for a variety of reasons, there is a patriarchal element here – to which Qadhafi’s family in particular belongs – which is not just Moslem, but holier-than-thou Moslem. Whether he practises it with genuine devotion or whether he has to be shovelled blind drunk off any aircraft that takes him temporarily abroad, the average Libyan, in fact, is convinced of the superiority of his religion over that of others (Moslem or non-Moslem). He claims the right, moreover, to be actively critical of those who decline to subscribe to it. The practice of Christianity in Libya is scarcely tolerated above the level to which there is toleration in the UK of homosexuality between consenting adults.
This religious certitude is another aspect of what I believe to be the Libyan’s peculiar self-confidence. It is the accepted truism that brashness comes from an underlying lack of self-confidence. On the whole, I do not think this is generally true here, but rather that the average Libyan’s total self-assurance makes a solid base for that typically rather didactic and even censorious air of superiority which (while no more than faintly bizarre for the European) is so indescribably irritating to fellow Arabs.
It is, perhaps, another product of this underlying self-confidence that the Libyans are, meanwhile, so difficult to move, so pawky, so unanxious to please; compared with the generous and mercurial Egyptians, the Libyans seem extraordinarily curmudgeonly. They do not like bargaining and rarely show any great interest even in effecting a sale. Their street accidents are low-voiced and totally undramatised. I have never yet attended a public speech, even by Qadhafi (and I have attended many) where the crowd was not smaller at the end than at the beginning; beyond the compact, spot-lighted cheer-gangs, the audience listens impassively and then drifts away …
A bare 15 years ago the first significant oil revenues began to come in … The material transformation which has resulted is, of course, flabbergasting. Roads and universities, hospitals, granaries, apartment blocks, generating stations, petro-chemical plants have appeared in inchoate clusters. Much of this effort is ill-co-ordinated or, indeed ill-conceived, based on a simplistic confusion between autarky and self-sufficiency. But, even so, the gap between then and now is enormous. And the psychological transformation has certainly been much greater – or should have been, were it not that, for the peculiar reasons I have set out, the Libyans have taken it all so comparatively calmly, so much as their inherent due.
They were not unconscious, of course, that they themselves lacked the human resources either to exploit this new-found but temporary wealth on their own, or to convert it into the machinery of more permanent prosperity. But they have shown no hesitation about their own ability, not only to hire and fire, but to keep a master’s choleric eye on, those who could be summoned to do the job for them. What is indeed above all notable – even in the time of King Idris, but much more since those young and apparently inexperienced officers round Qadhafi seized power in September 1969 – is the percipience and effrontery with which the Libyans have judged to a nicety the extent of harrying penalisation and general ‘heads-I-win-tails-you-lose’ to which oil companies and foreign contractors can be subjected, without driving them into packing their carpet bags and going.
In fact Qadhafi, Jalud and the other Revolutionary officers won their spurs by demanding, within weeks of achieving power, far more of the Americans, British and Italians than their elderly predecessors had ever dared – and getting away with it. The lesson of this experience and the kudos it earned have never been forgotten. There are little more than two million Libyans altogether, and the proportion of those who have any education, expertise or public spirit is minute. It is a tribute to the sheer dominance of personality among that quite small elite, which has now been raised to a supervisory role over the foreign oilmen, bankers, engineers and administrators who animate Libyan economic development, that few if any among the latter (even in their cups) admit to cutting corners with the Libyans. There are quite a number who ruefully admit that the Libyans have outmanoeuvred them …
There is about Qadhafi an element of that ruthless singleness of purpose, that blind disregard of obstacle or objection, which marks exceptional men. But, behind this, there lies the strength of the self-confidence, the self-righteousness, the lack of either awe or a desire to ingratiate which he inherits from his own people. There lies there also the weakness which derives from a stand-offishness, a failure to absorb the common Mediterranean and twentieth century cultures, a lack of intellectual interplay (or, of course, any glimmer of humour) which are just as typically Libyan.
In fact there are, I think, three Qadhafis inside one skin, only the first of whom is this strangely intuitive idealist of Notting Hill,2 this emperor in new clothes which even his subjects half believe in. The second, not wholly unattractive either, is a kind of well-heeled Don Quixote, who insists that his revolution is ‘international and humanitarian’ and proclaims the rightness of Libya devoting her new oil wealth not just to her own betterment but to the betterment of all who are still struggling against odds up the path to development. Unfortunately this second character is even more bedevilled by illusions than the Knight of La Mancha; and moreover he is too busy a meddler, too eager a self-appointed lecturer on the lessons of mislearnt history, to escape easily from his own illusions. Starting over-confidently in the belief that all ill can be ascribed to imperialism and irreligion, that all good would flow from more Islam and more national liberation, it is only now, after years of misguided intervention, that he is perhaps beginning to learn that it is all more complicated than he thought – that the IRA are not liberating the Irish, that ‘progressives’ and Moslems are not necessarily on the same side.
Alas, behind both these ingenuous and muddleheaded originals, there lies another and more sinister character who bides his time and calculates his strike with unfailing tactical skill, who believes men can be bought and that he has the money to buy them – or buy their elimination; a shrewd, secretive, spiteful, sharp-clawed creature less reminiscent of Quixote than of the Thane of Cawdor, acknowledging no claim on himself of loyalty or gratitude, demanding nothing less than unquestioning compliance from others.
‘The torturable classes’
JOHN ROBINSON, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE
DEMOCRATIC AND POPULAR REPUBLIC OF
ALGERIA, NOVEMBER 1974Robinson achieved notoriety in the Foreign Office for recommending the closure of the embassy in Algiers – rather a risky move, as it was his first post as ambassador.
The new Ambassador made a down-payment on this strategy after surveying the Algerian scene in a First Impressions despatch notable for its pessimism. Having judged there was little chance of advancing British interests in the country, Robinson decided entirely on his own initiative to cut his headcount at the embassy, and sent some of his staff home. This was a remarkable thing to do, given that most ambassadors make constant pleas to London for more resources, not fewer.
CONFIDENTIAL
BRITISH EMBASSY,
ALGIERS,
1 November 1974
THE RIGHT HONOURABLE
JAMES CALLAGHAN, MP
Etc., etc., etc
‘This bloody country’ (my Egyptian colleague). ‘A people organised for theft’ (my Ghanaian colleague). I have not lived in an Arab country before, and it is twenty-two years since I worked in a developing country. So I feared my own first impressions of Algeria would be too severe and too superficial. I did not report them. My second impressions, after eight months in this post, are little better. But they are at least based on more facts and more reflection, and may help to qualify the bullish tone about Algeria’s prospects which I found in London before I came out here …
[T]here is no Algerian nation, as the first nationalists had to admit. There is a common religion but no common language, and little feeling of national unity. There were more Algerians fighting for the French than against them in Algeria, even at the end of the war for independence; and probably as many, perhaps more, Algerians tortured and mutilated and killed by the F.L.N.,1 as by the French. The bulk of the people, well over half of whom are still illiterate, were, and are, apolitical: the ‘torturable class’, or as the Algerian Foreign Minister recently described ‘the people’ to a televised audience of trade union leaders, ‘human dough’ …
Fear and secrecy are the most apparent characteristics, with an aggressive inferiority complex. Fear of assassination or ablation if you are at the top; fear of arbitrary authority if you belong to the torturable class. I shall not forget Boumediène’s2 uneasy glance at a folded envelope which remained in my hand when I gave him my Credentials; nor (he has since been dismissed) the Secretary General’s face when his office window blew open at a clap of thunder. Whether at or away from work the tradition of clandestinity is deep-rooted. It weighs heavily on the Algerians’ own efficiency, on the ability of foreign firms and advisers to help them, and on the normal operations of every diplomatic mission here …
Algeria’s Industrial Revolution is in the first year of its third plan. Targets have been raised sharply since the increase in oil prices a year ago … Algeria has no hope of realising her current plan … [There are] obstacles: shortage and poor quality of management and suspicion of imported management advice; the state of the ports and internal communications, which already show signs of strain; the poor quality and rigidity of the bureaucracy; the belief that you have achieved something if you have decreed it … Machinery deteriorating in the docks; customs settling a score with the oil monopoly by detaining an urgently required computer for eight weeks or blocking the entry of a Soviet gift of much-needed welding goggles for over a year; scarce (and poor quality) draughtsmen drawing screws to scale because the floor workers are half-literate or less. Examples could be multiplied. ‘Quality’ in local Arabic is a French word … And over all, the physical waste and the feeling that it is not worth an effort; your pay will look no different, and you’ll get on if you’re well-connected, not otherwise …
Algerian agriculture is in a bad way … The last four-year plan aimed to increase production by 5%–6% a year, but growth was zero … My former Bulgarian colleague, who had worked with Bulgaria’s economic planning for some years, told me: ‘They are making all the mistakes we made from an even lower starting point.’ And my North Vietnamese colleague tells me that there is far more profit incentive for collective farmers in his country.
But there is more involved here than the charge of importing and the dissatisfaction of the consumer. There are land-owners who stand to lose influence as well as land, as the revolution proceeds. There are all the implications of a situation in which the government is seen to take over ultimate responsibility for agricultural production. And there is, still on the horizon, the prospect that once the peasants have been made politically conscious, which is a main object of the revolution, the ‘human dough’ will begin to rise …
No one knows how many people live in Algeria. The figure given by the Algerians to the IMF is 14.6 millions … But ordinary Algerians do not like to declare more daughters than they have sons, and many more live undeclared, for tax or other reasons, in the big cities … [T]he population will probably reach 25-millions in ten years’ time and over 40-millions by the end of the century. Over half the population is thought to be under 19, and they breed young. Every difficulty which Algeria faces, and they are legion, is made more acute by the growth of population …
If I were paid to write history, I could be kinder to the Algerians: history has not been kind to them. But we have to deal with them as they are, and on the basis of what they are likely to become. In assessing their prospects, I am conscious that in comparison with some other developing countries Algeria’s future may look more hopeful. Some aspects of Algeria today recall Southern Italy immediately after the war. But Southern Italy had Northern Italy, Algeria separated from her economic North in 1962. She is now engaged in a race against time (a phrase heard constantly in Algeria), to industrialise while oil reserves last and the oil price holds; while foreign confidence lasts; before the pressures of population and consumption become critical; while the régime lasts. My Saudi colleague remarked that the Algerians had yet to learn that building was more difficult than destroying. (Algerians ‘debaptise’ French street names, where others would ‘rebaptise’.) … An Egyptian doctor who worked in the maquis for the FLN during the Algerian war and stayed on in enthusiasm afterwards has described to me how utterly changed the atmosphere here is today, and how disillusioned he has become. The fire seems to have gone out, despite the strained efforts to rekindle it with calls for more struggle and more revolution.
(‘We can’t eat Palestine.’) Those who are able to reinsure abroad do so, and lethargy seems widespread. I do not see Algeria winning her race.
I have the honour to be Sir
Your obedient Servant
John Robinson
‘Violence, escalating and uncontrollable’
SIR ANTHONY REEVE, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE
REPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA, NOVEMBER 1991Diplomats crave interesting postings, and few would have been more so than Pretoria in 1991. Nelson Mandela had already been released from jail when Sir Anthony Reeve took up his role as British Ambassador, but the Nationalist government was still firmly in power. Apartheid was clearly doomed, although still the political dispensation; only whites could vote in a referendum the following year as to whether the government should proceed in negotiations with the ANC.
The direction of those negotiations was, at the time, clouded in uncertainty. Many, like Reeve, were resigned to a protracted process, and saw risks on all sides. In the event, the talks were wrapped up quickly. The Multiparty Negotiating Forum, involving all of the main political groups, agreed the outlines of an interim constitution in November 1993.
Reeve was right to worry, however, that violence had the potential to knock the process off course. The momentum behind the initial CODESA (Convention for a Democratic South Africa) negotiations ran into the bloody sand of the Boipatong massacre in 1992, which saw forty-six dead. And the final talks at Kempton Park near Johannesburg succeeded despite the dramatic intervention in June 1993 of an armoured car crashing through the glass windows of the World Trade Centre, followed by some 3,000 right-wing Afrikaner paramilitaries who stormed the venue in a last-gasp protest against inevitable change.
Those incidents aside, the largely peaceful transition of power from minority white to majority black rule in South Africa was one of the greatest achievements in twentieth-century politics. Nelson Mandela won the country’s first universal elections in April 1994 with 62 per cent of the vote. The same year South Africa rejoined the Commonwealth after three decades of self-imposed exile, and in 1996 Sir Anthony Reeve left Pretoria not as ambassador but as High Commissioner.
BRITISH EMBASSY PRETORIA
1 November 1991
THE RT HON DOUGLAS HURD MP
Foreign & Commonwealth Office London SWl
SOUTH AFRICA: FIRST IMPRESSIONS
Sir,
In a country as large and diverse as South Africa, anyone’s first impressions are bound to be rather arbitrary. I have travelled a lot in the past four months, visited all the main cities, and far more townships and squatter camps than most white South Africans. I have lunched in a score of board-rooms, taken tea in pathetic shacks pervaded by the stench of raw sewage, opened classrooms and science labs, listened to countless children’s choirs, attended the Currie Cup Final (Rugby being the white religion) and explored a diamond mine. I hope I have also developed a working relationship with the politicians, both major and minor: de Klerk and his Ministers, Mandela, Buthelezi and other non-‘independent’ homeland leaders, the high priests of the PAC1 and AZAPO,2 die-hards of the Communist Party (among them Joe Slovo), right-wing fanatics and left-wing lunatics. This indigestible mish-mash has of course left me confused, but some tentative conclusions have begun to crystallise.
I am surprised, first of all, not to have actually seen any corpses during my travels, though there was no shortage of pock-marked buildings, spent cartridges and burnt-out vehicles. I mention this only because any newcomer to South Africa cannot fail to be struck by the violence of this society. The political violence is a small part of the total. Last year there were nearly 18,000 murders of which more than 15,000 had no connection with politics. Most of the victims were black, killed by other blacks. Violence, and the fear of it, pervades South African society at all levels and the media (even the supposedly quality newspapers) revel in the details. The carrying and use of guns is commonplace. One bizarre example: a (white) doctor is trapped in his burning car after a collision. A (white) passer-by steps forward, borrows a gun from an onlooker, and shoots the doctor through the head, ‘to put him out of his misery’, as he afterwards tells the police. And another: a white farmer, in dispute with a black worker, welds the man to a metal table by his ankles and wrists and then sets him alight with petrol. The farmer has just escaped a gaol sentence by paying compensation of R40,000 (£8,000) to the worker (who survived). These two cases are unusual. Most of the violence is more mundane: seemingly endless shootings, stabbings, batterings of wives, children, husbands.
It is fashionable to argue that the violence is a by-product of apartheid, and to some extent this must be true. But violence in South Africa has a far longer history than apartheid. Shaka, the first Zulu king (who ruled in the first half of the nineteenth century when population levels were far lower than now) is said to have been directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of two million people. Violence, escalating and uncontrollable, must still pose the greatest threat to the political transition that lies ahead.
The squalor of the life lived by most blacks remains the most vivid impression of my first four months here. In some ways it is a pity that there is so much international focus on Soweto which, by black standards, is a respectable address: a huge community, pretty seedy for the most part, but also provided with essential services, such as electricity and water-borne sewerage. It is home for many successful black businessmen, and for religious and political leaders. Their houses are not often palatial but they are comfortable. A short distance away, in the squatter camps of Phola Park or Orange Farm, living conditions are much more typical: no sanitation, no electricity, a stand-pipe in the street serving dozens of families. All over South Africa the picture is the same, in the formal townships it is not uncommon to find four or five families squatting in the backyard of each house and paying rent for the privilege. Most disturbing of all is the speed at which these urban squatter shacks are increasing …
What are the prospects for negotiated political change? I find myself oscillating, on an almost daily basis, between optimism and pessimism. At one level, the three main protagonists (Government, ANC and Inkatha) have declared their readiness to begin early negotiations; and the hitherto wide differences between them over mechanics and procedures seem to have narrowed significantly. At another level, the objectives of the government and the ANC seem quite difficult to reconcile. De Klerk has made it quite clear that he has no intention of surrendering power but is willing to share it. The ANC’s position is much less clear-cut: the moderates among them may settle for power-sharing though most of them probably expect to win sufficient support in an election to make power-sharing unnecessary. A more radical faction within the ANC leadership tend to regard negotiation as a device for building up the pressure on de Klerk, in the hope that he himself might be forced to offer more and more concessions or that he might eventually be replaced by a hard-liner against whom a confrontation would be easier to justify. It is this faction, I believe, which is also responsible for the hard line on economic policy: seeking to maintain sanctions and attempting to block new loans to South Africa as a means of further weakening de Klerk’s position. It will not be easy for the ANC to fudge such a fundamental internal difference …
Of course, blacks blame the Government for their plight but they are also expecting their own leaders to produce results. Mamphela Ramphele, the mother of Steve Biko’s3 child and now Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Cape Town University, quotes the township lady who said ‘Nelson Mandela has been out for six months now. Where is my house?’ It may be self-evident to outsiders that the repeal of the Apartheid laws and the onset of negotiations will not of themselves improve the conditions in which most black South Africans have to live, but many blacks hope otherwise …
Over this ramshackle organisation, Nelson Mandela presides rather uneasily. He looks and sounds like a statesman though his increasing criticism of de Klerk (over his failure to deal with the violence) seems strident and incomprehensible to many whites, for whom the killing of blacks by other blacks in the distant townships is not an immediate concern. The pressures on him are great – far greater, as he admitted to me, than they were on Robben Island. There he led an orderly life, rising at dawn and dividing his day between study, physical exercise and discussion. He was usually in bed by seven. Now, in Soweto, he finds himself constantly badgered by his supporters wanting help, protection, food …
[W]e will need to monitor the shifts of political power and ensure that we are abreast of them. The re-distribution of power will be complicated and could happen quite slowly (for example through a lengthy phase of interim government). We will need to guard against the temptation of clinging too long to the old regime or equally, of moving too hastily in the direction of the new. It could be very damaging to our interests to miscalculate on this score. At the same time we should not make assumptions about the outcome. A betting man would probably put most of his money on the ANC but in our case, the race-course is best avoided …
Whatever some blacks may say to the contrary, the changes which President de Klerk has introduced cannot be reversed. And the need for a further election under the existing tri-cameral constitution by (at the very latest) early 1995 effectively imposes a deadline by which date we should know who is to rule the new South Africa. The unpalatable alternative for de Klerk is to call a further election before then, which he might lose (to the Conservative Party), and which could precipitate an all-out confrontation with the non-enfranchised blacks. The constitutional negotiations which lie ahead will inevitably be protracted and difficult since the prize is power. If the moderates on all sides can retain control, there is reason for some optimism about the outcome, but that is a sizeable if. Compromises by all concerned are likely to be portrayed by the extremists in their constituencies as betrayal: and the extremists in this country are well-armed. My own belief is that an agreement will be reached, though it may prove only the first stage of a more far-reaching transition. I am nevertheless relieved that a First Impressions despatch does not require me to make hard-and-fast predictions.
I am sending copies of this despatch to HM Representatives in Washington, New York and neighbouring posts.
I am, Sir,
Yours faithfully
ANTHONY REEVE
‘Christianity and ju-ju’
SIR JOHN CURLE, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE
REPUBLIC OF LIBERIA, NOVEMBER 1967
| (NO. 10. CONFIDENTIAL) | Monrovia, |
21 November, 1967
Sir,
I have the honour to convey to you my first impressions of Liberia, the odd man out whenever African States are divided into categories, being americophone and in the dollar zone. The American influence and presence immediately strikes the new arrival: military and police uniforms, letter boxes and street signs are copies of those in the United States, Cadillacs carry rich Liberians about, whilst the personnel of the large American Embassy, the United States Aid Mission and Military Mission and the Peace Corps are to be seen everywhere … There is also an older and pervasive American influence of a different kind dating from the circumstances of the foundation of the country a century and a half ago by liberated slaves and other free persons of colour from the United States. The effect of this early settlement was much as though some epidemic had wiped out the white population of, say, ante-bellum South Carolina, leaving the negroes to take over their houses and habits. From that time date a few charming red brick porticoed houses which would not be out of place in Charleston, formal habits of dress, inflated oratory, a lethargy which probably owes as much to the Southern States as to West Africa and a feeling that law, politics and religion are the most suitable occupations for gentlemen.
That rulers and ruled are the same colour disguises the fact that in essentials Liberia is still a colonial regime (albeit with no metropolitan power). As the freed slaves extended their sway from the coastal settlement over the tribes of the interior, they introduced forced labour not far removed from slavery and were eventually in trouble with the League of Nations over this and similar practices. It is less than 40 years since the last tribal revolt was suppressed …There has been a good deal of intermarriage between the tribes and the Americo-Liberians (a description no longer permitted in public): the latter, who scarcely thought of themselves as Africans, are now encouraged to emphasise their African identity. On suitable occasions, some of the wives of the Honourables exchange their Dior dresses for even more becoming lappas and head-kerchiefs, whilst President Tubman has become, perhaps no less surprisingly than Emperor Haile Selassie, a respected elder statesman of the Organisation of African Unity.
On his first Sunday here the new arrival is struck by the fact that the Americo-Liberians are a church-going people. This again is the effect of their history. Protestant Christianity on American lines was as much a sign of the ‘civilised’ Americo-Liberian as a top hat, and for high office in the Government it is almost as important to belong to one of the Protestant denominations as to be a Freemason … It would be presumptuous to speculate whether belief has even less effect on conduct here than in other Christian communities, but where honesty and chastity are concerned they do seem to have particular difficulties. Corruption is part of the way of life. President Tubman himself has peopled the country with bastard children and is said to hold the view, evidently shared by his compatriots, that monogamy is not suitable for Africans. Christian observances co-exist with ju-ju among the tribal Liberians. In the past three months there have been in Monrovia itself at least three ju-ju murders (parts of bodies being necessary for some of the ritual) and the practice continues of trial by the ordeal of drinking a poisonous concoction which only the innocent are supposed to be capable of vomiting or voiding. President Tubman denounces such things, but it is sometimes suspected that Christianity and ju-ju not only co-exist but overlap. Last year, the Hon. Clarence Simpson, a former Vice-President and Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s and a pillar of the Episcopal cathedral, was publicly accused of procuring the murder of a woman in order to use her eyes and scalp for ‘big political ju-ju’. It was generally accepted that the accusation had a political motive, but there seems to have been no feeling that the story was so wildly impossible as to be laughed out of court.
‘Much more French than France’
JOHN TAHOURDIN, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE
REPUBLIC OF SENEGAL, FEBRUARY 1967
CONFIDENTIAL
THIS DOCUMENT IS THE PROPERTY OF
HER BRITANNIC MAJESTY’S GOVERNMENT
| JE 1/3 | Foreign Office and Whitehall Distribution |
SENEGAL
21 February, 1967
Section 1
Mr. TAHOURDIN’S FIRST IMPRESSIONS
Mr. Tahourdin to Mr. Brown. (Received 21 February)
| (NO. 5. CONFIDENTIAL) | Dakar, |
17 February, 1967
Sir,
Now that I have been at this post for three months the time has come to set down, as is customary, my first impressions of Senegal which I have the honour to submit herewith.
Having had some slight experience of French colonial policy and practice in former French Indo-China, both before and after the Second World War, and having read something of Senegal before arrival, my first impressions of Dakar included few surprises. A French provincial town of the more elegant variety, neatly planned complete with tree-lined avenues, smart shops, and restaurants; white blocks of flats and villas set in attractive gardens; French housewives in their ‘deux chevaux’1 going about their daily shopping; Frenchmen sipping their aperitifs at pavement cafes. There are Africans too, but somehow they seem to merge naturally, and not too obtrusively, into the dominant French background.
Here one needs to add a significant qualification. Dakar is a French town, but there is an oddness which eludes one until one realises that it is a museum piece of provincial France of the Third Republic, untouched by the war and inhabited by a French community still 25,000 strong with an outlook mainly rooted in the past, both politically and economically, and oblivious of the enormous changes which have meanwhile taken place in the homeland of today. This explains why in Dakar one tends to find only French things. French cars, hoardings still proudly displaying only French merchandise. One searches in vain for the Italian delicacies or German gadgets now part of the normal stock-in-trade of the metropolitan French supermarché. Here it is all much more French than France …
This sense of artificiality is heightened the moment one leaves Dakar. With the exception of St. Louis, the former capital, with its more authentic because less pretentious 19th-century charm and a few nondescript urban centres, what I have so far seen of the rest of the country is flat, featureless and abysmally poor. This is where the other 80 per cent of the population live, eking out a subsistence living from a stubborn soil which they have yet to learn to cultivate. They are ground down by a version of Islam (the other major external influence in Senegal), which even my Saudi Arabian colleague considers reactionary and which, it must regrettably be said, was protected and encouraged by the French for reasons of colonial administrative convenience …
[T]he deep imprint left on this country by the French has had profound consequences, not only economic but also political.
To take the economic consequences first, no one even pretends that this country enjoys economic independence. She is completely dependent on French aid, financial, commercial and technical. Such is the variety of aid involved, that even the French Aid Mission here appears genuinely unable to state its total value. It is generally estimated to be around £20 million per annum. While the basic reason for the continuation of aid on this scale is undoubtedly political, the French also expect to reap solid material advantages and in fact have succeeded in ensuring that a substantial proportion of their aid finds its way back to France … [F]or example, all the imported wheat and flour, 90 per cent of the commercial vehicles, 80 per cent of the tinned food and most of the textiles come from France. Not one single aspirin of other than French manufacture can be imported legally – not even from the other five Common Market countries. It is all beautifully and unobtrusively managed … The second instrument is that of massive technical assistance. There are still in this small country, dispersed throughout the administration in key positions of influence, about three times as many ‘conseillers techniques’ as there were Britons required to run the Indian Empire in the last years of the Raj …
The French have been here for over 300 years, the origins of their presence dating back to Richelieu. President Senghor is proud to recall that in 1789 the people of St. Louis sent a remonstrance to the States-General at Versailles. Ever since 1848, the inhabitants of the four main townships in Senegal have enjoyed full French citizenship and the right to send a deputy to the National Assembly in Paris. By 1872 these townships had acquired self-governing status. In 1917 the privilege of French citizenship was extended to any Senegalese enlisting in the French Army and the end of the Great War saw black colonels in command of white troops. By 1939 nearly 80,000 Senegalese enjoyed French citizenship …
The psychological confusion which inevitably results from this spiritual and cultural identification with France extends to the Senegalese establishment, most of whom also completed their education in France and often, like Senghor, have French wives, own property in France and go there on annual ‘home’ leave, many still travelling on French passports. Consciously or sub-consciously, they continue to think and act as Frenchmen rather than as Africans. My Nigerian colleague regards them contemptuously as French ‘slaves’. In running the country they have, by and large, taken over where the French left off, not only by maintaining the same administrative structure (our own former dependencies have often done the same), but by pursuing virtually identical policies. In other words, we witness here a continuation of the French colonial system under black auspices. It is a remarkable French achievement.
‘Bongo will not be moved’
ANTHONY GOLDS, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE
REPUBLIC OF CAMEROON, GABON AND EQUATORIAL
GUINEA, SEPTEMBER 1970Christened Albert, the young President of Gabon changed his first name to Omar upon conversion to Islam in 1973. It was his surname, however, that ensured this Head of State always raised a smile among the English-speaking members of the Diplomatic Corps.
President Bongo received the credentials of the new British ambassador, Anthony Golds, after three years in office. Golds flew in from Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, where the British Embassy was situated, to endure this ordeal. The ambassador’s First Impressions despatch captures well what Golds describes with understatement as the ‘difficulties of non-resident accreditation’.
Bongo was often criticized by other Africans for being too sympathetic to the former colonial power, France, and to European interests in general, a stance Golds recognizes in the President’s views on South Africa and Rhodesia. At a time when most freshly minted independent African leaders were wont to berate British ambassadors with long lectures about the evils of neo-imperialism, President Bongo was a one-off.
Golds’s despatch was warmly but faintly condescendingly received in Whitehall as ‘pleasant light reading’, and given wide circulation. ‘I recommend that this despatch be printed,’ scribbled one senior clerk on the minute sheet. ‘Especially in view of the forthcoming visit of President Bongo.’
‘I endorse the recommendation,’ wrote another, adding a flourish: ‘I understand it is common practice for the President to refer to himself in the third person – “Bongo will not be moved”, which can confuse strangers.’
The President’s state visit to London in 1970 did much to cement his reputation as a comic turn. ‘President Bongo’s illusions of grandeur do only too often make him seem faintly ridiculous to outsiders,’ wrote one of Golds’s successors, Christopher MacRae, in a despatch from Libreville in 1980, looking back on the visit. ‘Maybe, just as he feels constrained to wear high heels in public (to jack up his height of five foot or so),’ wrote the Ambassador, ‘so the small population of his country has to be compensated for, whenever he goes abroad, by a suite of fifty. Whatever the reason, this trait has hardly endeared him to Head of Protocol the world over.’
(MacRae’s despatch, incidentally, also told of the demands placed on foreign ambassadors by Gabonese official nightlife – ‘dances at President Bongo’s marble palace, which went on until four o’clock, with armed guards on the gates to prevent the less energetic members of the Corps from sneaking off early’.)
Still in his early thirties, Bongo may indeed have been somewhat gauche when patronized by Mr Golds in 1970, but in the end it was the President who had the last laugh. Omar Bongo went on to lead Gabon for another thirty-nine years, and died in office as one of the world’s longest-serving rulers – a Big Man (despite his small stature) of African politics. He became one of the continent’s richest men, too, having misappropriated over many decades much of Gabon’s oil wealth. Investigators were eventually able to trace thirty-three properties in France as well as millions stashed in bank accounts in New York – assets linked to Bongo that were probably only the tip of the iceberg.
Upon his death in 2009 Omar was succeeded as President of Gabon by his son, the equally memorably named Ali Bongo.
CONFIDENTIAL
PRESENTATION OF CREDENTIALS IN GABON AND SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS
The British Ambassador in Cameroon to the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
YAOUNDE,
4 September, 1970.
Sir,
I have the honour to report that, as instructed in your despatch PF 20126 of the 4th of June, 1970, I presented to President Albert Bernard Bongo, at Libreville on the 29th of August, the Letters accrediting me as Her Majesty’s Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Gabonese Republic.
I enclose the text of the speech which I delivered on that occasion. Since President Bongo decided, in an abrupt access of bonhomie, to abandon his prepared reply midway and to improvise freely neither I nor his own staff have as yet any approved record of his words. Nevertheless they were, though syntactically obscure in places, essentially very friendly and welcoming. He particularly asked me to convey, together with his respectful greetings to Her Majesty, his warm thanks for the friendly interest which the United Kingdom was showing in Gabon. He claimed that this interest was all the more remarkable and meritorious because of the differences which there had been between us in the past. He did not specify what these were but seemed to imply that they had been as much the fault of Gabon as my country; that therefore the present ceremony was the conscious burying of some hatchet; and that Her Majesty’s Government had shown great tolerance and generosity in not only sending him an Ambassador but even gifts as well (in the shape of Bedford lorries and Land Rovers). As proof of his own goodwill and gratitude he had decided to re-establish a resident Embassy in London and also to go on a private visit and see my country for himself.
This exchange of oratory took place, as does much else that concerns President Bongo, before the unwinking stare of television and ciné lights. Every detail of all the attendant ceremonial was likewise recorded. The result was reproduced by Gabonese television, with some skill, in a programme lasting about thirty minutes at the ‘peak-viewing’ time of 8 p.m. on that same Saturday.
The lights and cameras were present too in the President’s private study, at the beginning and the end of my tête à tête with His Excellency. This lasted some fifty minutes and so, I was told, beat all previous records by a large margin … [T]he President rapidly dispersed the formal atmosphere of the occasion by first calling for whisky and champagne and then bounding furiously across the room to silence his personal telephone, acting the part of an outraged A.D.C.1 as he did so – ‘No! The Chief of State cannot be disturbed … How dare they try to interrupt? He is receiving Letters of Credence … They must be told that His Excellency will speak to no-one. Say that the President of the Republic is not in!’
Thereafter, President Bongo fairly bubbled over with high spirits. He told me, as I have separately reported by telegram, of his plan to visit the United Kingdom on his return from the United Nations General Assembly and of his hope that he might have the honour of repeating to The Queen personally all the professions of renewed good will for Herself, for Her Government and for Her Ambassador which he had just been expressing to the latter …
He praised the virtues of British vehicles and informed me that while in England he proposed to buy himself a Rolls Royce, that Queen of cars. He had noticed, on the Côte d’Azur, that everyone who was anyone – including the French – had a Rolls. Moreover hardly anything ever went wrong with a Rolls; and if it did a skilled mechanic – ‘un vrai blanc’ – was always sent out to deal with the problem. No bush-service for a Rolls! At this point the President summoned in several members of his staff to acquaint them of these verities and also to remind them that the Land Rover with which he had just been presented, as well as the Rolls which he was about to buy, were strictly for the personal use of the Head of State.
We discussed the question of possible arms sales to South Africa. The President warmly agreed that many ‘sottises’ 2 had been said on this subject … he saw no reason why we should not sell arms to the South Africans in order to keep communists out of Africa … He added that his fellow African leaders had neither the wit nor the strength to confront South Africa – nor Rhodesia. Apartheid was all wrong but you would never change the minds of the whites down there by trying to isolate them. The present attitude of the South African was little different from that of the French colonist in the bad old days. Until they saw it begin to happen, no Frenchman believed that a man with a skin as black as this (clutching his own wrist) could govern his own affairs like a man with a skin as white as that (clutching mine). After all if you want to tame a dog, you do not pick up a big stick (seizing a heavy blunt ornament from his table) and say ‘Grrr, come here dog or I’ll kill you!’ (baring his strong white teeth in a highly alarming manner). You make friends with the dog and then you teach him. That is what must be done with the South Africans. They should be asked to see for themselves what Black Africa can do … President Bongo also congratulated us on our Rhodesia policy, said that we were quite right not to use force, and informed me blandly that it was not possible for the Gabonese Government to dictate to people about trading with the Smith regime. Trade was a private matter with which Governments must not meddle. When I pointed out that this was scarcely Her Majesty’s Government’s policy over sanctions he hastily denied that any trade with Gabon was taking place – or, if there was, then no Gabonese were involved in it …
The President thanked me for bringing with me, for Gabon television, an English-by-television serial (the ‘Walter and Connie’ series3). He said that he would arrange a private showing for himself at the Palace that very evening. He wanted everyone to learn English. Unfortunately His Excellency seemed to be under the impression that ‘Walter and Connie’ were a couple of free-lance crime investigators. The Director of Gabon Radio had to be called in to help me to disabuse him. Whereupon we understood the President to enquire whether there was not a famous B.B.C. ‘feuilleton’4 for television called ‘Le Sein’5 – or something similar! He would like to get a French-dubbed version of it and anything else like it. Neither the Radio Director nor I thought that we had heard of any such B.B.C. feature; though it might of course be I.T.V. Fortunately, after a little while we realised that he was talking of ‘The Saint’ and I undertook to enquire whether copies of it, and of certain other television serials were available for leasing to Gabon Radio.
After again inspecting the mighty troops of Titipu (who formed a very impressive guard of honour and gave a most tender Mozartian rendering of our National Anthem) I was escorted once more to my hotel by the numerous Presidential outriders, sirens blowing and flags flying. There the Gabon television recorded every canapé and bottle at what they described as the ‘Grand Vin d’Honneur’ which I offered to the President’s and Foreign Minister’s staff, to the Heads of local diplomatic missions and to the members of the small British community. They also recorded all the technical marvels of the president’s Land Rover Dormobile – from its butane gas stove and expanding roof to its slogan Don du Gouvernement Britannique. On the television screen the vehicle appeared as long as a railway train and evoked many an ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’. A number of Gabonese told us that they intended to try to buy one for themselves …
During my four and a half day visit I was accompanied by Mr Roger Westbrook, Third Secretary … In addition both of us were greatly helped by my son, Mr Richard Golds, who had come to Africa on holiday (from public-school teaching in Cornwall) but found himself temporarily drafted on to my staff – at the express desire of the President’s staff, in order to keep the British numbers up. This followed the frustration of my Head of Chancery’s efforts to attend by the failure of Air Afrique to honour a guaranteed connection. The whole occasion from this Embassy’s point of view thus became something of an object lesson in the difficulties of non-resident accreditation and in the art of improvisation. Mr Westbrook and Mr Golds junior alternated in performing vis-à-vis the Gabonese, the duties of my personal secretary, Land Rover expert, cultural adviser, public relations officer and note-taker. Mr Golds junior was also offered and politely declined the post of Professor of English at the new University of Gabon (when formed). Finally he and Mr Westbrook were congratulated on having achieved in Gabonese eyes the status of ‘petits frères’ and assured of a permanent welcome in Gabon …
In view of President Bongo’s prospective visit I will conclude with some brief personal impressions of him and of his country. In everything but stature he is larger than life. Physically he is short, slim and wiry, with alert and restless eyes and a fearsome bandit moustache (like Castro without the beard). He always appears full of energy though I am told that he eats very little. He orders his staff around with good-humoured ferocity and is unquestioned master in the Palace, the Government and the country at large. He is a stickler for protocol in public but readily dispenses with it in private and has a keen but not very sophisticated sense of humour. He takes perverse delight in upsetting the majority of the local diplomatic corps by insinuating that they are ‘stuffed shirts’ whose only function is ‘le bla-bla-bla’ as distinct from helping him to develop Gabon … In general he gives the impression of being shrewd, ruthless, competent and wholly self-assured …
I am sending copies of this despatch to H.M. Representatives at Lagos, Paris, Washington, New York (United Nations), Addis Ababa, Cape Town and Kinshasa.
I have the honour to be,
With the highest respect,
Sir,
Your obedient Servant,
A. A. Golds
‘Like Guildford with sun’
BRIAN DONALDSON, HM HIGH COMMISSIONER
TO THE REPUBLIC OF NAMIBIA, 1999
SUBJECT: NAMIBIA: FIRST IMPRESSIONS
After a career spent mainly in Africa, Windhoek has come as something of a surprise. Urbanisation is as big a problem here as elsewhere in Africa, and the out of sight, cardboard city close to the former township of Katatura grows bigger by the day. But the rest of Windhoek is clean, well run and sophisticated, with modern, well stocked shops, supermarkets and department stores filled with apparently affluent shoppers. Its restaurants and busy pavement cafes are full of happy, smiling, well dressed people – both black and white – and there is hardly a tramp or beggar to be seen. Some of Windhoek’s posher residential areas, built on barren, rocky hills, seen on more than 300 days a year under the deepest of clear blue skies, would not look out of place in Provence. To the British holiday-makers arriving here in increasing numbers it must look very much like Guildford with sun.
‘A cross between nineteenth century Montmartre and medieval London’
BRIAN DONALDSON, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE REPUBLIC
OF MADAGASCAR, DECEMBER 2002
From: Swift Incoming Telegrams (Machine 1)
Sent: Monday, December 16, 2002 8:14:12 AM
TELNO 145
INFO ROUTINE PARIS, UKREP BRUSSELS, UKMIS NEW YORK, WASHINGTON
SUBJECT: MADAGASCAR: ANNUAL REVIEW AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS
A late night arrival in Antananarivo has little to commend it. Facilities at the international airport are chaotic, and the customs officers even more unreasonable and avaricious than usual. The drive through dark, mean streets to the city centre reveals scenes both from nineteenth century Montmartre and medieval London – with only the occasional parked car or street lamp providing a reality check.
Daylight reveals a spectacular city sprawl of two million people, with tightly packed buildings on and around numerous hills, and extensive paddy fields – helping meet Madagascar’s needs as the world’s largest consumer of rice. Poverty is much in evidence, even in the city centre – where street dwellers are common, and two out of ten pedestrians still go barefoot. Slow-moving, impossibly heavy hand carts transporting timber and building materials block the narrow, traffic-bound cobbled streets, and street hawkers, both pavement-bound and mobile, add to the general impression of intense commercial activity and total confusion …
Madagascar has a long history of failure. But it would be a mistake to write it off as just another basket case. It is not. Despite all its problems, it has extensive mineral deposits, sapphires and emeralds; fertile soil; high rainfall (with a few exceptions); good stocks of fish and seafood; unique bio-diversity – with all that means for the successful development of eco-tourism – and a willing, hard-working labour force. The root of Madagascar’s problems over the past 25 years has been poor governance, due to costly experimentation with far left socialist policies, sheer inefficiency, corruption and unadulterated greed.
‘Petty tyrant, megalomaniac, figure of fun’
SIR ROBIN HAYDON, HM HIGH COMMISSIONER TO THE
REPUBLIC OF MALAWI, AUGUST 1971‘There is a problem about circulation,’ reads a memo prefacing this despatch with its brilliant pen-portrait of Dr Hastings Banda. Haydon’s despatch ‘says a number of things about President Banda which can hardly be described as flattering’. The Office chose against tradition not to distribute the despatch, for fear it might leak. ‘This sharply worded critique is eminently quotable,’ wrote one official, who forwarded it on to a select group ‘on a strictly “need to know” basis’.
Four decades on, and Britain’s high commissioners in Malawi continue to shoot from the hip, London now less patient with Malawi. In April 2012 an electronic cable by Fergus Cochrane-Dyet, Britain’s man in Lilongwe, leaked and was published in a Malawian newspaper, the Nation. The High Commissioner criticized President Mutharika, the then Head of State, as ‘ever more autocratic and intolerant of criticism’. The ‘governance situation continues to deteriorate’, wrote the British diplomat ‘in terms of media freedom, freedom of speech and minority rights’.
The Malawian government gave the High Commissioner seventy-two hours to pack his bags and leave the country – thereby vindicating in their response the very criticism Cochrane-Dyet had set out to make. Mutharika died and his regime collapsed in 2012.
There is something Victorian about Malawi though it is hard to define. There is a deal of cant, outward respectability and puritanism. Beneath the surface there is corruption and extortion, people are murdered, girls are bought and sold …
This outwardly placid, pleasant, rather cheerful little country is a dictatorship … Over everything there is the Flemingesque, slightly menacing figure of His Excellency the Life President, Ngwazi Dr. H. Kamuzu Banda. Is he statesman, fearless leader, beloved father of the nation, far-sighted realist, and man of peace and racial harmony in Southern Africa? Or is he an African Papa-Doc, a tycoon, petty tyrant, megalomaniac, figure of fun, hated oppressor of freedom? Is he mad?
I do not believe he is mad or even unbalanced, but I do think he is a bit of all the other things and that your attitude towards him depends on who you are. I should, I am sure, loathe and fear him were I a Malawian opposed to his policies.
I have seen a lot of him, and were he not the Head of State and I the British High Commissioner, I should enjoy talking to him; occasionally! He is highly intelligent, gets through mountains of work, and has the courage of his convictions. He can be very charming, has a good sense of humour, a great knowledge of history, knows many British personalities well, and can be fascinating in conversation. But I suspect his judgment and doubt his honesty; he is full of prejudices; he can be a crashing bore, he is ruthless and cruel. He is a tremendous old ham …
I have the impression that he is out of touch with his people who do not respond to the old speeches which are trotted out again and again. Recently, he spoke in public at inordinate length about the beastliness of the European habit of dancing with others’ husbands and wives. Who really cares? Not the Malawians. The lack of enthusiasm from the crowds when the President appears before them has been an eye-opener to me. The police sometimes lock the doors of Kamuzu Stadium to keep the people in when the Kamuzu speaks. I think Malawians see him too often, at least in Blantyre and Zomba. The cheer-leaders, and ululating women are not incidental nowadays; they are essential …
His attitude towards Britain and the British is indeed intriguing. I think he is nearly obsessed by us. He proclaims on the one hand that he will not be pushed around by expatriate advisers and civil servants (which means Britons) and he criticises permissiveness in Britain. He is always reminding people that Malawi is no longer a colony as though that were a news flash. On the other hand, he says London is his second home, he can get sentimental about his days as a GP in Willesden, he speaks affectionately and in some awe of The Queen … He is a bit mixed up about us, in truth.
‘Clearly of a superior race’
JOHN BENNETT, HM AMBASSADOR TO BURUNDI AND
RWANDA, APRIL 1964This is a rather disgraceful despatch.
Around 800,000 people died in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. While the scale of the violence was unprecedented, the struggle between Hutus and Tutsis had in fact erupted before. In the early 1960s, as the country emerged from Belgian colonial role, the long-downtrodden Hutu majority staged a revolution. The Tutsi elite, who under the Belgians had occupied a position of relative importance, were massacred in their thousands; those who survived fled to neighbouring Burundi.
When John Bennett arrived in Usumbura in 1964 this violence was still playing out. Dismayingly, his First Impressions despatch is less notable for its witness of these events than for its selective racism.
In preferring the Tutsis, the Ambassador was, it is true, swimming with the contemporary current. The tribe was already ascendant over the Hutu majority long before the colonial era, but it was the Belgians who systematized the relationship. Belgian ethnologists measured skulls – the Hutus, traditionally farmers, were said to have smaller brains – and judged the Tutsis superior for their taller frames and lighter skins. Using such dubious methods (and worse – ownership of ten or more cattle also made a Rwandan a Tutsi), the colonial administration divided the population into two groups and made every individual carry a racial identity card. It was this policy of divide and rule that laid the kindling for so much violence in the 1960s, and a generation later in the 1990s.
Subsequent scholarship has, however, found the genetic differences between Hutu and Tutsi to be small. The two peoples share the same language and culture, and the distinction that inspired so much killing appears to be primarily one of social class rather than ethnicity. Today, the Rwandan government says its people are of one blood, the Banyarnwanda. This despatch is striking testimony to the ability of perfectly professional people to buy into the ruling myths of their era, without (it appears) making any serious independent evaluation.
CONFIDENTIAL
THIS DOCUMENT IS THE PROPERTY OF HER BRITANNIC MAJESTY’S GOVERNMENT
| JN 1015/3 | Foreign Office and Whitehall Distribution |
BURUNDI
April 13, 1964
Section 1
Mr. BENNETT’S FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF RWANDA AND BURUNDI
Mr. Bennett to Mr. R. A. Butler (received April 13)
| (NO. 9. CONFIDENTIAL) | Usumbura, |
April 4, 1964
Sir,
I have the honour in this despatch to record my first impressions of Burundi and Rwanda. It was on the 23rd of January that I arrived by air at Usumbura to find myself immediately plunged into trying to analyse and sort out the truth about the massacres of Batutsi in Rwanda – a subject that was on the lips of everyone to whom I spoke. As if it was not enough to be the principal topic of conversation in Usumbura, I had to receive a telephone call direct from London from a leading newspaper within 48 hours of my arrival asking for facts about the massacres. At that time, my ignorance of happenings within Burundi and Rwanda was almost complete, but I hope that I have been quick to sort out fact from fiction – and this was necessary – especially after an episode at my first luncheon when my hostess mentioned casually that if the fish I was about to eat was tough it was, according to her cook, because it had been feeding off the eyes of Batutsi which had been washed down into Lake Tanganyika! So it was that I was brought sharply up against the problem which was to exercise my attention in my first weeks in Central Africa …
Burundi and Rwanda are scenically two of the most beautiful countries I have ever visited. Fine high mountains, startling land-locked lakes, especially Tanganyika lake which comes to life at night with the fishing fleets and their acetylene lamps, impressive and impenetrable primeval forests and a countryside green and lush. Few countries can have such natural beauty. Animal and bird life abounds and collectors of wild flowers can have a heyday. Unfortunately it is not really possible to enjoy this natural beauty. Hotels are poor and offer no amenities except at the Kagera National Park. Roads are bad and it is a toil to drive over them – there are only 25 km. of hardtop road in both countries. Since both countries are over-populated, one cannot go off for a quiet picnic without being overrun by swarms of African children. Nothing, in short, has been done to develop either country for travelling or tourism, although there is undoubtedly a future in this field and as a result one suffers from general frustration.
As for the people, I find the local Hutu (80 per cent of the people) poor, dirty, ill-clad, prone to drink, unreliable, idle and dishonest. For me the Hutu has little charm. The Tutsi, on the other hand, is graceful and dignified, and is clearly of a superior race. (This does not mean that he does not drink and is not lazy.) The Tutsi is also of a different intellectual level, and only last week the Anglican Bishop mentioned that in his experience at his mission stations where Bahutu and Batutsi have equal opportunities, it is always Batutsi who come out on top.
I have been surprised to find an almost complete colour bar in both countries, not imposed by the ‘whites’ but rather by the ‘blacks’. One never sees an African at any club – sporting or civic – although I am told that there are two African members of the Burundi Riding Club. I have yet to see an African at the home of a Belgian other than the Ambassador. At the homes of diplomats it is very much the exception than the rule to find an African among the guests. The Africans I am afraid in these two countries mistrust the ‘white’ face.
The fact that no newspapers other than mission vernacular are published in either country was unexpected, and virtually no book except the Bible has been published in either of the local languages. Other surprises have been that I have found no shops owned by Africans. All the shops in Kigali and Usumbura and other larger towns are run either by Europeans or Asians. Similarly, restaurants and hotels, bars and nightclubs are all owned by non-Africans … Except for one small house which is being enlarged there is no construction work going on anywhere in the country that I have been able to see. The atmosphere is one of lethargy and nonchalance …
I shall conclude with one or two anodyne remarks. Conditions of service in Central Africa are very different from conditions in other countries in which I have served. One has to go through a sharp adjustment in order to face the local scene and local problems. This comes the harder if one has not had previous service in Africa. For me it will be the first time that I shall have served in a country without being able to get to know the people. As I have said earlier in this despatch, the African of Burundi wants to keep himself to himself and I fear that there is little chance of my breaking down this barrier.
‘The Jews remain different from anybody else’
SIR BERNARD LEDWIDGE, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE
STATE OF ISRAEL, APRIL 1973
Israel was reborn 25 years ago and since then it has grown apace. Nearly three million Jews now live where there were only some thousands as recently as 1918, and only 650,000 when the State of Israel was proclaimed in 1948. These Israelis are fascinating people. At times they remind me of their ancestors in the Old Testament, for instance when I see them going up to Jerusalem en masse for the Passover. They go by car nowadays but they are obeying the ancient injunction. At times again they seem more like one’s idea of 19th century Americans with their lack of distinctions in class and dress, their prickly egalitarianism, their abounding energy, and their indifference to the beautiful unless it coincides with the useful. But the population is not so predominantly European in origin as one might think. Nearly half of them were born in Israel, mostly of European parents it is true, while the rest come about equally from Europe and the Arab world. Those from Arab lands, particularly the Yemen, tend to be second-class citizens. Most of the levers of power are held by Ashkenazi Jews from Russia and Poland, but one cannot call them a ruling élite. Israel belongs to no continent. It is sui generis. Here, as elsewhere, the Jews remain different from anybody else …
The sustained military effort of the last 25 years has stultified the traditional Zionist dream of creating a new model society, egalitarian in spirit and rich in opportunity for all its citizens … It is not only the vision of equality that has been partially sacrificed to military needs. Beauty and elegance have gone by the board as well, and strictly utilitarian standards have been applied in building the State. Tel Aviv, thrown together in concrete without taste or plan, must be one of the ugliest cities in the world. Perhaps there are other reasons as well as military ones for the ugliness of Israel’s modern towns and cities. The artistic gift of the Jewish people seems to be much more verbal than plastic. Israel produces writers, scholars and musicians in abundance, but her painters are indifferent and her architects are bad. The instincts of a nomadic race are still strong. Priority is given to the more portable forms of artistic expression. The Israelis build almost as if they were not sure how long they were going to stay here. In this they are conforming to the tradition of their race. The Jews of antiquity do not seem to have built much of importance except the Temple in Jerusalem, and even that was erected to house a mobile Ark. The historic buildings of religious importance in the Holy Land today are all Christian or Moslem. Apart from the Wailing Wall, the Jews hold in veneration only a few tombs, all of them probably spurious. To the Jews it is not so much a particular place, even Jerusalem apart from the Temple precinct, that is holy. It is the land itself.
‘You never have to say things twice’
SIR JOHN MASON, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE STATE OF
ISRAEL, JANUARY 1977
| (CONFIDENTIAL) | Tel Aviv, |
14 January, 1977
Sir,
I submit my first impressions of Israel after only one month in the country. There are two reasons for this: first I have always believed that first impressions should be just that, and not considered views; second, and more important, impressions crowd in so overwhelmingly and fascinatingly on the newcomer here that, if he does not set them down quickly, he will speedily find himself already into his eighth or ninth edition of them.
The problem for a newcomer is not to formulate his first impressions: I could dictate 20,000 words of them without hesitating. It is to select, to decide which particular shake of the kaleidoscope is most representative of the overall pattern …
The land …
The Israelis have both improved and damaged the appearance of their land. The irrigated agricultural lands, where the desert has been made to grow, are a joy to behold. They put the surrounding Arabs to shame. But the setting of Jerusalem, compared with when I last visited it, from Damascus, 13 years ago, has suffered from the extensive housing development since 1967. Moreover, the whole country, wherever the Jews have settled, tends to look, in my wife’s words, like a dress that someone has made and started to wear, without bothering to finish the hem. Tel Aviv is not exactly an eyesore, but there are few parts of it, or aspects of it, which are restful to the eye. Encampments, temporary or permanent, of the superbly efficient Israel Defence Forces, look like rubbish dumps. So does almost everywhere else.
I am perhaps being too harsh. Not all that the Israelis have built is bad: the campus of the Weizmann Institute is beautiful by any standards. It is just that it is so often a pity that the hem was not finished, nor, if my initial impression is correct, ever likely to be. Life in Israel may turn out to be full of drooping hems …
The people
I am baffled to know how to encapsulate my first impressions of the Jewish Israelis. On first acquaintance, they are the most stimulating and fascinating society in which I have ever found myself. I had expected life in Tel Aviv to be like life in Manhattan; but in a strange way it is not, I think because Manhattan Jews are more Americanised than one realises when one is among them. Life in Tel Aviv is in fact more intense. To my mind, although it is a comparison which I do not make to the Israelis, Tel Aviv less resembles Manhattan than Warsaw, as I knew it 20 years ago. Like the Poles, the Israelis have survived against all odds because to be Israeli, as to be Polish, is more important than anything else. Like the Poles, the Israelis love gossip, the more scurrilous the better, and speak well of their friends to strangers only after they have said something entertainingly unkind about them. We find them great fun to be with.
Members of my staff reading the last paragraph will think how much the new Ambassador has still to learn. Foreigners who have been here for some time tell me how infuriating the Israelis come to be. They finally get fed up with Israeli jostling, ill manners, aggression and incompetence. They say they have to get away from time to time for a break from the claustrophobic intensity of the atmosphere here, where no one ceases for one moment to bash one’s ear …
It may be that in due course, like others, I shall be driven close to distraction by the pressures of Israeli society. For the present, I am content to enjoy the advantages. These include the fact that everyone one meets talks interestingly and interestedly, almost always in excellent English, about any subject under the sun. To sum it up in a sentence, the great joy is that you never have to say things twice; your interlocutor is with you or ahead of you.
‘There are, for better or worse, far more bagpipers than security men’
GLENCAIRN BALFOUR PAUL, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE
HASHEMITE KINGDOM OF JORDAN, SEPTEMBER 1972‘I have always thought that Mr Balfour Paul writes supremely well,’ wrote Anthony Parsons, then an Under-Secretary at the FCO in Whitehall, ‘and this despatch is in his best tradition.’ Another note in the file commends the despatch as an ‘excellent contribution’, and it was duly copied to the Foreign Secretary and, a rare distinction, to the Prime Minister. Another despatch from Amman by the same ambassador, albeit on a more light-hearted note, is on pp.115–20.
Balfour Paul arrived in Jordan a year after a civil war. King Hussein’s forces had taken on the fedayeen, paramilitary groups drawn from the vast numbers of stateless Palestinians in Jordan. Despite support from Syrian tanks, in July 1971 Yasser Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organization were defeated and fled the country. The presence in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere of more than 4 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants remains a threat to regional stability even today.
‘There would be no Jordan without the Hashemites,’ wrote the Ambassador elsewhere in this abridged despatch, and ‘no Hashemites without Jordan’. Both the country and its monarchy were, he thought, an asset to the West, and despite the recent war, Balfour Paul thought the Hashemite dynasty’s ‘genius for survival’ would see them through. The Ambassador was right; King Hussein ruled without interruption until his death in 1999.
Pity, though, the poor Crown Prince. As junior partner and heir designate, Hassan gave King and country three decades of loyal service (putting to rest Balfour Paul’s concern that through overwork Hassan might expire before reaching ‘active middle-age’) – only to be denied the throne. In 1999 the King on his deathbed wrote a letter accusing his younger brother of various misdemeanours and gave him the sack, passing the crown instead to his own son Abdullah.
The country’s capital – a top-heavy symbol of the whole – sprawls over the bare and bumpy knuckles of biblical Ammon, like a rocky foreshore at low tide plastered with limpets awaiting, eagerly or apprehensively (for who can read the minds of limpets?), the next high tide. The two big camps of the first Palestinian diaspora, knocked up in the immediate neighbourhood in 1948, are now (one notices) absorbed and enveloped physically by the expanding city and are almost indistinguishable (save that the schools look better) from the rest. Physically but not, one fears, psychologically absorbed. For one thing that the luminous atmosphere of this harshly beautiful landscape – shadowless at noon, technicolour at tea-time – does not reveal is the psychology of the inmates of these or any of the country’s other cellular and swarming clusters of Palestinian exiles, numbering one-half of the total population. Are they bees’ nests resigned to making what little honey they can out of the sparse flora, or wasps’ nests waiting to sting? … Something or other, and something deserving our respect, keeps the mass of ordinary refugees above the deadline of despair: hope, one supposes, springing eternal – much as the women proudly continue embroidering their marvellous guftans, the only things in the camps that do not share the colour of the rancid soil.
But since for the present the Palestinians in Jordan, whatever their aims, are powerless to pursue them, I may as well turn to where power (in the limited sense applicable in Jordan) lies, on Jabal Hashemi. For despite the facade of Parliament and the Ministerial system (and there are men of quality in both), it is of course in the person of the King, and now also increasingly in that of his brother the Crown Prince, that authority is concentrated: Hussein and Hassan, vicar and the curate of this truncated Arab parish who have been ex-communicated by the Bishops of Confrontation but who continue to serve the Mass (or the masses) faithfully after their own dissident doctrine.
The first thing that strikes one about them, apart from their resilience, their dedication, and their shirt-sleeves, is how harmoniously they complement each other, the division of parish work between the pair suiting their respective turns of mind. The King concerns himself with external affairs and public relations, the Crown Prince with internal affairs, planning and economy. (The middle brother, Mohammed, having inherited from his hapless father not only his gentle charm but also his less marketable features, has been put out to grass, though his functions as Head of the Tribal Council are not purely honorary.) King Hussein needs, so to speak, no introduction. His hair is thinner and his work schedule even more devastating than in the descriptions of my predecessors; but his sense of destiny is unchanged and his addiction to water-skiing keeps him physically a match for it, presenting as he does, when stripped on his beach at Aqaba, the physique of an Olympic featherweight. Prince Hassan, on the other hand, has surely altered since last presented. I have seen no sign of the earlier abrasiveness. As a man to meet and talk to, he outclasses the King. (‘C’est un enfant intelligent’ was the testimonial given him some years ago by General de Gaulle – not a man to toss off testimonials lightly.) At 26 his powers of intellectual concentration, though his ideas may not be original, are formidable, his jokes sophisticated, his English distinctly more fluent than mine. But his average work-day is apparently 14 hours and he allows himself no physical relaxation. Bullets apart, I would demand a higher insurance premium on his survival into active middle-age than I would for the King. As for the rest of the Hashemites (the impressive Chief of Staff, Zaid bin Shakir, excepted) they recall Eliot’s Prufrock – ‘ones that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two …’ – Rosen bin Krantz and Gilden bin Stern al Hashemi …
In the past 30 years I have served in many Arab countries, have experienced Arab kindliness in all of them, and am well aware how little substance may lie behind it. I have never met it in more startling degree than here. It may even be that Jordanians really rather like the British. After many visits to Jordan over the years I still detect, fancifully perhaps, something in the make-up of its citizens that distinguishes them from other Arabs. (It is the only Arab country in which – years back – I have been arrested and the only one in which the case would have been dismissed, and coffee ordered instead of imprisonment, simply because I was a Briton and pleaded guilty in Arabic.) My Tunisian colleague also credits the Jordanians with a superiority over other Arabs, of an unexpected kind. ‘The rest of us,’ he said to me, ‘always fix even the most important appointments for hawali as-s’a ashera (about 10 o’clock). We are a nation of approximators,’ he went on; ‘and that is why, for instance, our anti-aircraft shells never actually quite hit those aeroplanes. The Jordanians are different. They are punctual, therefore precise and practical. They do what they set out to do. Must be the British influence’, he added.
Thinking over the Tunisian’s tribute later that day while I waited three-and-a-half hours in the King’s ante-room, I found myself unable for the moment to share his admiration for Jordanian sense of time. But maybe there is something in the rest of his tribute. Even the ubiquitous policemen give the impression, unprecedented in other Arab countries, of actually being there for a purpose – quite apart from their amiable disposition to spring (more or less) to attention, shake one by the hand and exchange the time of day. Not that the purpose is sinister. Despite all the khaki and gun-barrels, Hashemite Jordan is emphatically not (as so many of its Arab neighbours are) a police State. There are, for better or worse, far more bagpipers than security men …
I certainly look forward to my assignment with interest. And a country where, in the tense aftermath of the Munich horror,1 the cricket elevens of the Palace and the British Embassy assemble to find the ground staff moving up and down the pitch not with rollers but (as if it were the most natural thing in the world for groundsmen to be doing) with mine-detectors, can hardly be dull. My own innings, short but painful, left me with the feeling that the pitch would have been a good deal less explosive if it had been rolled instead. There is doubtless a moral somewhere.
You will recall, Sir, that just after all the King’s horses and all the King’s men had been observed (by Alice) running confusedly through the woods, and further fighting for the Crown was about to break out all round the Town, an Anglo-Saxon Messenger arrived. Being somewhat out of breath, the Messenger asked the King if he would be good enough to stop a minute. ‘I’m good enough,’ said the King, ‘only I’m not strong enough’; and he asked first for one ham sandwich, which he devoured greedily, and then for another. ‘There’s nothing left but hay now,’ the Messenger said, peeping into the bag (or Bag). ‘Hay then,’ murmured the King faintly. Perhaps there is a moral somewhere there too.
‘A land of revolutions – and earnest revolutions at that’
SIR JAMES CRAIG, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE
SYRIAN ARAB REPUBLIC, DECEMBER 1976Readers of Parting Shots will recall Sir James Craig’s terrific valedictories from Dubai and Damascus. The leading Foreign Office Arabist of his generation, Craig first served as ambassador in Syria. Three years in Damascus bred in him a deep dislike of the regime in power, but Craig retained the affection he felt for the country itself throughout his long career in foreign service. In 2011 he told us that in fact he regards Syria as his favourite country. The Ambassador’s mystification at Syrians’ willingness to tolerate their joyless despotism has its resonances as we go to print.
CONFIDENTIAL
FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE DIPLOMATIC REPORT NO. 13/77
| NFY 014/4 | General Distribution |
SYRIA
20 December, 1976
Her Majesty’s Ambassador at Damascus to the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
| (CONFIDENTIAL) | Damascus, |
20 December, 1976
Sir,
Hardly first impressions, for 26 years have passed since I came to Damascus as a young student and walked, every evening between the afternoon and the sunset prayers, through the streets of the old town. In those days I could sit in one of the old-fashioned cafes watching the women swing by in their veils and the men in their tarboushes and baggy trousers, and – with determination rather than delight – smoke the hubble-bubble and sip the traditional sherbets. Ah, bliss was it in that dawn … The romanticism which you may detect in those purplish phrases has gone from my mind. Just as well; for it has gone from Damascus too. Syria in the interval has been a land of revolutions – and earnest revolutions at that – prouder of its cement factories than of its mosques and bazaars, known for its rigid ideologies and its secret police, its Regional Command Councils and its Five-year Plans. How different from the life of our own dear caliphs.
I had been told before I arrived that six years ago, with the advent of President Asad, a reaction had set in. The doctrinaire policies of the rather presbyterian Ba’ath Party had been modified by a new, pragmatic liberalism: speech was freer, government was more tolerant, Ministers were more accessible; the famous merchants of Damascus and Aleppo, sharp as needles, were once again free to buy and sell and cheat and profit. My first thought, when I had settled in, was that I had been deceived. The atmosphere of Damascus seemed to me pretty much as I had pictured an Eastern European capital: in the quarter where I live hard-faced (and rather rude) men in civilian clothes stand on every street corner, carrying sinister sub-machine guns; few consumer goods are on sale and there are sudden shortages – of candles, of bread, of glass; the electricity breaks down frequently; there are too many soldiers and policemen for a Westerner’s liking; although in the old town the remnants of antiquity distract you from the shabbiness and the dirt, the new quarters are simply a dump; streets, hotels, shops are drab and tasteless; the Parliament is a timid claque, the Press a Government hand-out, unreadable and, I suspect, unread; the graces and entertainments that adorn Western society do not exist.
But I was unkind. I have remembered, after the first surprise, that many of Syria’s deficiencies are endemic to the Middle East, whatever the political regime: there are no graces and no readable newspapers in Saudi Arabia, which is hardly a Socialist revolutionary country. And I find that everyone I meet, without exception, is agreed that things are better now than they were before Asad took over.
So at last I have reached some conclusions. Damascus is not the old oriental town of labyrinthine alleys and Turkish baths and over-laden donkeys. That is dying and will soon be dead, except for a few monuments preserved like the Tower of London in the aspic of the Department of Antiquities (itself a new and welcome phenomenon). Nor is it the levantine beehive of private enterprise which, without Palestine and the Ba’ath Party, it might have become. Some of that will survive because the Syrians are mercantile people (how do they tolerate the stuffy old Ba’ath?). But the free for all days are gone for ever. Yet neither is it the stern, puritanical, authoritarian, repressive don’t-talk-of-frivolities-we-are-all-dedicated-to-the-cause regime of the ’sixties …
[M]y strongest single impression (and one shared by all my colleagues, Arab and foreign alike) is of the shortage of news and of informed comment. I have already mentioned the papers: their news pages contain little more than the President’s diary and the usual overblown slogans about struggle and national destiny and shouldering our responsibilities … Ambassadors, alas, are equally in the dark. Only half a dozen Syrians at the top know what is really going on – and they are not talking. So the Government’s case is seldom properly presented and meanwhile everyone can listen to Radio Jerusalem.
Still and all, Damascus is an exciting place to be. Parts of the countryside are very beautiful and the whole of it is an archaeologist’s dream. The Syrians are a hardy and likeable people, with a zest for life and progress. The amount of interest, and admiration of Britain has surprised me, given the estrangements between us over the past 25 years. Even the Ba’ath leaders I have met have been friendly and amiable (though I should not like to be alone with some of them on a dark night). I hope we may find ways of responding.
I am sending copies of this despatch to Her Majesty’s Ambassadors at Beirut, Amman, Cairo, Baghdad, Tel Aviv, Washington and Moscow and to Her Majesty’s Consul-General at Jerusalem.
I have, etc,
JAMES CRAIG.
‘A kind of perpetual Nescafé society’
SIR PAUL WRIGHT, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE
REPUBLIC OF LEBANON, MARCH 1972
I must confess that hitherto I had never been able to take the Lebanese entirely seriously. Poised uneasily between Europe and the Orient, Christianity and Islam, the country, for all its beauty, seemed not really to belong anywhere. It appeared to be inhabited by a type of quintessential wog with a rich patina of French chic, ready to trade with anyone in any commodity at his own price, existing in a kind of perpetual Nescafé society, hoping that the problems of the real world would somehow disappear if not looked at too closely, and concentrating on the sensible occupation of making money. ‘Always count your fingers after shaking hands with a Lebanese,’ as they say in the souks. Added to this, it must be admitted, there was in my case, a certain respect for the historical antiquity of the coastline, a misty glamour surrounding the names of Tyre and Sidon, due perhaps to the strange prominence given in our history books to the arrival of the Phoenicians in Cornwall sometime during the second millennium BC.
It was to be expected that this somewhat superficial and simpliste view would be considerably tempered by the experience of living and working in the country, even for the few months that I have been here. And although certain aspects of the picture remain true there is, of course, more to Lebanon and the Lebanese than that. To begin with, the beauty of the country is far from being only coast deep. The Beka’a, lying between the two mountain ranges, is surely one of the most beautiful places on earth … The Lebanese, it is true, are hard bargainers and slick operators. But they have great charm, a refreshingly uncomplicated zest for life and, above all, tolerance …
[I]nvestment is far below that required for healthy growth. Indeed the Lebanese economy, in spite of many advantages of geography and temperament, seems to be in some ways a self-perpetuating confidence trick of a kind most dear to Lebanese hearts: a legalised near-fiddle in which wealth is somehow produced by fast talk and waving arms and by being that much quicker-witted than the next man. There is nothing much wrong with this so long as it lasts; but it is a precarious basis for long-term development in an increasingly competitive world.
‘One vast building site’
COLIN BRANDT, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE
STATE OF QATAR, MAY 1978
BRITISH EMBASSY,
DOHA QATAR,
| 014/2 | 1 May 1978 |
Sir
FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF QATAR
A 14th Century Cotswold wool merchant once inscribed over his new house:
It is the sheep hath paid for all.’
Though the praise in Qatar may be faint – or absent – it is certainly the hydrocarbon molecule ‘hath paid for all’ here and should continue to do so well into the 21st Century.
The wonder, as Dr Johnson would have observed, is that Qatar should have existed at all. Until the development of oil, this long low, desert peninsula, jutting out into the Arabian Gulf like a sore thumb was only sparsely settled – by Bedouin tribes who came in overland from Saudi Arabia, and seaborne arrivals from elsewhere in the Gulf and India. Even in 1959 Doha was still only a modest little town of 50,000 people, with few roads or other services, and only the most rudimentary attempt at civilisation. Twice in the previous 150 years, such small fortunes as Qatar had enjoyed were broken by events in the world beyond: piracy was put down by the British Navy in the 19th Century; and pearling was destroyed by Japanese imitation pearls, and the post-war depression, in the first decades of the 20th. During the worst days of the last war, poverty and hunger had reduced Doha’s population to perhaps less than 10,000.
Oil has changed all that. Doha has grown and prospered mightily since the 1960’s – especially in the four years since OPEC quadrupled the world’s price of oil – and is now a thriving town of some 200,000. Where once the camels were driven off the runway of the primitive little airport to allow the daily ‘Dove’ to land, the Tristars and Boeings thunder in across the harbour at regular intervals, skimming the roof of the luxurious new Doha Club, (which itself would not look out of place in Monte Carlo). The chrysalis of old Doha has split irretrievably, spilling modern hotel and office blocks along the reclaimed waterfront Corniche Road, and projecting the latest cars along the wide dual carriageway avenues radiating out from Doha, which at night transform what was once desert into long necklaces of light. From the confines of the original Doha one vast building site now spreads to the horizon in various stages of activity under the tower cranes (today’s fertility symbol), replete with all the ugly detritus of cast-off civilisation …
All this has been paid for (or is due to be paid for) by the proceeds from Qatar’s two oilfields … Moreover, a belatedly benign Providence has now been found to have awarded Qatar a glittering consolation prize of huge deposits of offshore as well as onshore gas …
The irony of the situation is that all this material wealth has emerged at the feet of such a minuscule number of people, in a small, backward, tribal and Bedu society. It has been a fascinating experience to see how that society has so far coped with the wave of wealth, and to assess its chances of survival without too intense a strain on this small body politic.
Basically, it is the 50,000 or so native Qataris who are the natural heirs to all this wealth. If one can generalise, they appear on the surface to be a good-natured, soft-spoken lot, happy to cash in on their new found fortunes for all these are worth, and content to enjoy the Divine Right of Qataris to a privileged cut at the State’s revenues from oil. So Qatari nationality is still a jealously guarded meal ticket with many social and commercial advantages attached. Many of the Qataris have jobs in the Administration (where they are frequently ‘carried’ by their Palestinian or British expatriate staff) or the modest-sized Armed Forces. Even more are engaged in business. They make quite good businessmen … [O]n the surface, they seem to bear no resentment against the foreigner, whether on ideological, social or political grounds. (The Palestine problem has nothing like the emotive power it has in other Arab countries.) But basically they have the mean streak of the camel-trader. And doubtless thanks to experience gained abroad a nucleus of the younger generation here has come to regard European women as fair game for harassment, which is causing us problems at present.
At the top of the Qatari social scale, the Ruling Family, the Al Thani, are virtually a law unto themselves, and dominate all Governmental and business activity. Viewed dispassionately they seem, with a few exceptions, an un-attractive bunch, possessing little natural ability or power of leadership. I see them collectively as the local equivalent of The Mob. Prolific propagators, (if nothing else) they are now one of the largest and most widely-dispersed ruling families in the Gulf … Since they control the Army, the Police and the Ministries, no-one can hope to best them. Their extravagances in new Palaces, farms, cars and boats go unchecked. And their attitude to marriage and women continues to be medieval. Wives and women are acquired frequently and almost casually, though any public immodesty in women is officially viewed with pious horror, (and alcohol is still a fruit forbidden to the populace at large).
‘Like a dilapidated farmyard’
MICHAEL EDES, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE YEMEN
ARAB REPUBLIC, DECEMBER 1971
According to a traditional Arab saying, Yemen is ‘the birthplace of the Arabs’. Perhaps. But certainly it is an extremely ancient country. It has been continuously inhabited for a very long time … If Yemen is an historian’s delight, she is also a photographer’s, let alone a mountaineer’s. Much of its total area (some 75,000 square miles, or about the size of England and Scotland combined) is dominated by high mountain ranges, rising in places to well over 10,000 feet. These ranges, which form Yemen’s massive central backbone, run right through the country from Saudi Arabia in the north to the People’s Democratic Republic of the Yemen in the south – a distance of some 400 miles … [T]he views from these and the high passes below them are, quite literally, breathtaking. I have not seen anything more lovely or dramatic, the Alps not excluded. It is in a sense sad, if selfish, to think that Yemen is bound in time to attract the tourists, that the awesome solitude of her magnificent mountains will not stay undisturbed for too much longer …
Those Yemenis who survive the infant mortality rate of about 50 per cent and the quite ghastly diseases from which this country suffers, develop into tough, wiry and on the whole, little people with a well-deserved reputation for endurance and bravery in war. The climate in the Central Highlands and Middle Heights is conducive to hard work and the Yemenis are the hardest working folk in the Peninsula. They generally indulge their craving for ‘qat’, a mildly narcotic plant grown in abundance here, in the afternoons and evenings, i.e. after work. Its adverse effects can perhaps be rather exaggerated. Of course, given the basically inhospitable nature of their country, the Yemenis have always had to work just to survive. But they combine this attractive quality, so uncharacteristic of Arabs elsewhere, with quick-wittedness, intelligence, kindness and humour of a high order. Yemenis often remind me – dare I say it – of the Scots. They even have their Calvinist equivalents …
Finally, Sir, I should perhaps try to convey some flavour of the kind of life in which my staff and I at present live, move and have our being here. In doing so, I shall have to stress the sheer rurality of it all. The rubble in the streets, the endless dust, the pungent smells and general squalor – these are all too like a dilapidated farmyard. As elsewhere in the Arab world, the city ‘cleansing department’ is mainly staffed by packs of semi-wild pye dogs which do their work – and howl incessantly – by night, with the able assistance of the buzzards and crows by day. A decrepit, toothless tribesman lovingly feeds, by hand, his camel in the morning just outside my gate. Another severed ox head – but at least it is not a man’s – lies rotting in the road outside the Ministry of the Interior, as tribal expiation for some offence against the customary law. A fox was seen untroubled in Independence Square not so long ago. But there are some compensations – the perennial sunny days, the sunsets over Sana’a and the surrounding hills, the crisp, cold and starry nights and the early morning call to prayer, unless distorted by modern electronic gadgetry.
I am sending copies of this despatch to Her Majesty’s Ambassadors in Cairo, Jedda and Aden.
I have, etc.,
MICHAEL EDES.
‘Either we live with the Soviet Union or we die with them’
SIR CURTIS KEEBLE, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE
SOVIET UNION, JULY 1978In the early 1970s East–West relations were looking up. Détente bloomed, with the first of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) leading to a treaty limiting anti-ballistic missiles, and the Helsinki Accords promoting mutual understanding in Europe.
But by 1978 when Sir Curtis Keeble arrived in Moscow, the limitations of détente had become clear. The USSR continued to sponsor the spread of Communism in the Third World, while America, shamed by Watergate, had lost prestige in Vietnam. In rhetoric and outlook new leaders such as President Carter sought to challenge rather than conciliate the Soviets. Renewed fears in Washington over a perceived ‘missile gap’ saw American military spending rise sharply as the decade wore on. Not to be outdone, by the early 1980s 15 per cent of Soviet GDP was being spent on defence.
Relations were at a low ebb. Acknowledging this, and the scant prospect of their improvement, Keeble used his First Impressions despatch to describe the essence of the Soviet regime as he found it, trapped in deadlock with the West. The despatch is notable for the light it casts on the psychology of the Politburo, the ‘tightly knit little group of conspirators’ around Brezhnev who through a blend of suspicion, fear and secrecy exercised total control on policy in the USSR.
The file shows that Sir Reginald Hibbert, then Deputy Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, commended Keeble’s despatch to ministers, while cavilling at some of the Ambassador’s language, minuting that ‘it can be dangerous to use emotive adjectives such as “evil” in relation to the Soviet Union’. (President Reagan would of course have disagreed.) The problem in handling the USSR ‘is not the degree of its evilness’, wrote Hibbert, ‘but the degree of danger which it constitutes’. A very Foreign Office view.
Nevertheless the despatch is notably pacific in its tone and implicit policy advice. Britain at that time was gripped by a debate about whether the West should ‘match’ Soviet aggression with a bellicosity of its own, or whether efforts should be bent towards calming tensions. Keeble’s conciliatory tone is underpinned by an argument that was surprisingly little heard at the time, but which later came to be decisive: that the Soviet economy was failing anyway. These, remember, were the years in which the Leader of the Opposition, Margaret Thatcher – whom Moscow had dubbed the ‘Iron Lady’ – was striking a note some thought warlike, others precautionary. Keeble is not on her side here.
A year after Keeble wrote his despatch, the Cold War became chillier still. The USSR invaded Afghanistan, plunging East–West relations into a deep freeze which saw sixty-five countries boycott the Moscow Olympic Games in 1980.
Despite the Ambassador’s protestations about lack of access to Soviet decision-makers, by the time he left Moscow in 1982 Keeble had in fact established quite close relations and was able to count the Russian Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko, as a personal friend. As a parting gift Gromyko gave the ambassador and his family a tour of the inner sanctum of the Kremlin, somewhere few foreigners had ever set foot. One can imagine the satisfaction this must have given Keeble, a glimpse behind the imperial ‘facade’ which in this account seemed so impenetrable.
CONFIDENTIAL
BRITISH EMBASSY,
MOSCOW,
12 July 1978
THE RT. HON DR DAVID OWEN MP
etc etc etc
Sir
FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE SOVIET UNION
I was in two minds about offering you the traditional first impressions. The Soviet Union and its system of government, its personalities and its policies have been subjected to more than enough expert reporting, analysis, comment and controversy. First impressions from here run a greater than normal risk of being superficial, platitudinous or plain wrong. But even so they are perhaps worthwhile. The relationship between the Soviet Union and the West is in a peculiarly uneasy state. It matters that we should get it right. It matters that we should make as good a guess as we can about the way this country’s policies will develop. So, with all possible reservations, I offer the impressions made on someone who first set foot in Moscow three months ago.
I am told that one of the Tsars, when receiving foreign Ambassadors, kept a bowl of water handy so that he might wash away the taint. Perhaps the story is apocryphal. But it well illustrates the position of an Ambassador in Moscow today, indeed, in some respects I envy my predecessors. They at least met the Tsar. I have not yet met his successor or, for that matter, the Prime Minister, Foreign Minister or any member of the Politburo … I have had easy access at Deputy Minister level within the Foreign Ministry, and at Ministerial level in those technical Ministries which have business with Britain. Russians stream into the Embassy on every social occasion. I can visit factories, mines and hospitals. Yet there remains a sharp contrast between the amiable but unrevealing working contacts and the virtually total exclusion of foreign Ambassadors from contact with the real centres of power in the Soviet Government and party. There is, of course, nothing new in this. The Marquis de Custine’s observations on Russia in the 1830s are rather over-quoted, but his comment that one might ‘over run the Empire from one end to another and return home without having surveyed anything but a series of facades’ is depressingly valid today. It is applicable also to the Soviet citizen, but he is perhaps less bothered about seeing behind the facade and into the process of policy-making. Fortunately, because the facade is maintained with great care, close scrutiny can give quite a good idea of the nature of the building. After all, when the astronauts first set foot on the moon they found few surprises.
The obsession with secrecy and the sharp distinction between the formulation of policy and its proclamation are not just a source of frustration to foreign observers. They are in themselves factors in determining the policies which emerge because they lead to policies which reflect a conspiratorial view of both domestic and international affairs. One has here the odd sensation of dealing at one and the same time with an age-old Russia and a newly legitimised revolutionary regime. The instincts of the two sometimes conflict and at others coincide with alarming force …
If the new arrival is struck by the force of Russian tradition, he is struck every bit as forcefully by the total grasp of Soviet power. It was tight central control which made possible the establishment and maintenance of a Leninist state. Sixty years of development may have reduced the element of irrational terror, but not the obsession with power and security. To oppose that power is to threaten the basic structure of the state …
The combination of tight central control, absolute secrecy and repression of individual expression is not just an evil way of running a country. It is also not peculiarly efficient. In the Soviet economy it has produced results with which we have long been familiar … A centrally planned economy is by its very nature ill-equipped to respond to the vagaries of consumer demand, so the qualitative deficiencies are not surprising. What is remarkable is that even today there should be such absolute shortages of everyday items. A former Pakistan colleague of mine once described Communism as a car with only bottom gear – fine for getting out of the mud, but not much good on a motorway. The Russian economy is now on the motorway. Expectations rise when one gets onto the motorway and the leadership are aware that they are not being fulfilled. One is conscious of a vast amount of engine noise, not much acceleration and rather hard seats …
It is Soviet foreign policy that has recently given rise to the greatest degree of concern in the West. What is their principal objective, security or expansion? Everything that has happened since I have been in Moscow has shown that they covet both. I think the obsession with security is dominant. It is a folk memory from Russian experience, reinforced by the appalling experience of 1941–45. That experience – though I hesitate to make the comparison – has seared them as it seared the Jews. I do not think we should judge their arms policies by rational western standards. Where their security is concerned they seem in fact to be guided by emotion rather than reason. It is a state of mind which needs to be handled with firmness and patience.
Clearly, however, Soviet foreign policy is not just the foreign policy of a super-power obsessed with the need for security. One has the impression that Mr Brezhnev and the elderly men around him see themselves at one moment as the statesmen ruling a super-power, at the next as the guardians of an ideology determining the future of mankind and then suddenly as a tightly knit little group of conspirators menaced on all sides. They are influenced not merely by their own habits and emotions formed over the sixty years of Soviet power. They are also carried forward by the impetus of an elaborate machine which in part they control, but which also in part controls them. I do not suggest that it does so directly or that on really major issues there is any risk of their being unable to control events, but rather that the machine serves them with a view of the world which they have been conditioned to expect and that they feed back to it responses conditioned in part by their own philosophy, in part by habit, in part by an assessment of Soviet interests and in part by the danger of challenging any of the basic tenets on which their power rests. The end result is that a desire to negotiate sensible agreements, like SALT II,1 seems from time to time about to founder under the weight of suspicion, fear, distortion and polemics which it has to carry …
The Prime Minister posed the basic problem when he said, ‘Either we live with the Soviet Union or we die with them.’ If we are going to live with them at all satisfactorily we need to overcome the mixture of fear and aggressiveness which inspires their policy. We need in fact to make them realise that they face no external military threat, that the real external ideological threat is largely a reflection of their internal repression and that the biggest single step they could take towards their own well-being would be to humanise their system … The time may not be far off when the leadership will begin to see that their ideology, a sick and ageing doctrine conceived for the conditions of primitive 19th century capitalism, lacks any effective international appeal. If at that point they also see themselves as encircled geographically and threatened militarily they will be more dangerous than they are today …
So, infuriating though the rulers of the Soviet Union are, I hope that we shall be able to keep on the kind of quiet steady course we have been pursuing. We should not refrain from speaking our mind about Soviet repression at home or abroad, from exposing Soviet hypocrisy, from resisting Soviet expansion. We should not be deterred by the infinite Soviet capacity to bore and to insult …
We may appear to reap little reward … [W]e shall get no dramatic victories in human rights, but we may help to bring about a detente which means something, to move to a slightly safer rather than a significantly more dangerous world, and to ensure that when this rather nasty system decays, as it will, it does not bring us down with it.
I am sending copies of this despatch to HM Ambassadors in Washington and Peking.
I have the honour to be
Sir
Your obedient Servant
Curtis Keeble
‘Shabby gentility’
RICHARD SYKES, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE
REPUBLIC OF CUBA, JUNE 1970
| (CONFIDENTIAL) | Havana, |
2 June, 1970
Sir,
In 1948 a benevolent Personnel Department chose Nanking, at that time the capital of China and the seat of Chiang Kai-shek’s Government, to be my first post overseas. Within a few months of my arrival the ‘People’s Liberation Army’ had carried all before them and the Government of Mao Tse-tung was ruling from Peking. To some more generous-minded than brash post-war entrants there was a tang of Wordsworthian bliss in the air. Reality proved different. But it was a stimulating experience; and it was therefore with lively interest that I found myself, some 20 years later, accredited to another unorthodox Communist regime, my first impressions of which, in accordance with custom, I now have the honour to convey …
Has Cuba found the Utopian solution for which liberal sentiment has been seeking ever since the Russian and Chinese revolutions so clearly turned sour? Should middle-aged parents confess their errors, and admit that their children in glorifying Fidel and Che have found the right road? Of course not. Cuba is no Utopia. And though parents may still be wrong, Fidel and Che are no reliable guides to the New Jerusalem.
The price Cuba is paying for the achievement of its Government is a heavy one. I have yet to travel much outside Havana (though I doubt if things are so very different in the provinces) and so must judge largely from my experience of the capital. It presents a sad sight. The visual impact of the city on a new arrival is essentially one of seediness – of shabby gentility and of having come down in the world … In its corrupt and capitalist heyday Havana must have been beautiful. But now every building badly needs paint. Elderly vehicles lacking silencers and exhaust gaskets make a hideous noise. There are pot-holes in every side street (and many main ones) which never seem to be filled in, and the piles of rubble on the pavements have obviously been there for months. There are queues everywhere – for food, for clothing, for the ice-cream parlour when there is ice cream. There are queues today for tickets permitting you to queue at a restaurant tomorrow. The small shopkeepers were nationalised in 1968 and all distribution is now by the State. There is no starvation (I see stale bread in dustbins from time to time) but food is far from plentiful and clothing scarcer still. People are shabbily if adequately dressed. There is little elegance but no rags. The weather helps here of course. A short straight dress for a woman and a shirt and slacks for a man are adequate climatically. But I passed a shoe shop the other day with a notice which read ‘This branch is open on Fridays from 7.30 p.m. to 11.30 p.m’. There are no bars; and no night clubs except on Saturdays and Sundays, and very few of them. I have yet to discover where, if you are an ordinary Cuban, you buy a ball of string, a packet of envelopes, a needle and thread. I do not think you do.
‘They lack animation’
SIR LESLIE FRY, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE PEOPLE’S
REPUBLIC OF HUNGARY, JANUARY 1955In the Parting Shots radio series we had great fun spotting the predictions made by British ambassadors in their valedictory despatches which ended up proving wide of the mark. In 1967 our ambassador in Bangkok confidently predicted that ‘the days of the coup d’état are probably over for good’, only to see the military sack parliament four years later (since then Thailand has seen eight further successful or attempted coups, the most recent in 2006). In 1965 Lord Harlech, Britain’s ambassador in the US, predicted President Johnson would serve eight more years in the White House; the fates tempted, Johnson of course stood down at the next election. We found another miss from 1988, when Sir Bryan Cartledge was Britain’s ambassador in Moscow and Gorbachev’s perestroika was already transforming Russia. The Ambassador thought change needed a ‘timescale of twenty years, perhaps of a generation’ to bear fruit. ‘I do not believe that Gorbachev and his allies can bring about a moral, social, psychological, political and economic revolution in the Soviet Union more quickly than that.’ Fifteen months later the Berlin Wall came down, though maybe Cartledge’s doubts about psychological change were right.
Sir Leslie Fry’s despatch from Hungary is in a somewhat similar vein. He saw in the population ‘apathetic resignation’ to Communist occupation and foresaw ‘no hurtful kicking against the pricks’. But, just twenty months after he wrote those words, the same Hungarian people whose courage the ambassador so scornfully doubted mounted a spontaneous nationwide revolt. The Hungarian Uprising of October 1956 stunned the world. Within days the government fell, and the new liberal revolutionaries announced they would withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. Their optimism was short-lived of course. The following month Soviet tanks rolled back into Budapest, crushed the uprising, and installed a new government loyal to the USSR.
‘Prediction is very difficult,’ said the physicist Niels Bohr. ‘Especially about the future.’ The wisest diplomats avoid it altogether. As another old Moscow hand, Sir Rodric Braithwaite, sees it: ‘The only people who have ever been able to predict the future are Roman augurers, by cutting up chickens.’
January 2, 1955.
Sir,
I have been in Hungary for two months, near enough to the term usually regarded, I believe, as the normal period of gestation for a report on one’s first impressions of a new post; and the end of the year seems in any event to mark a point of time beyond which I may no longer look on myself as a newcomer. I therefore have the honour now to submit this conspectus of my impressions.
Budapest cannot be despoiled of its beauty. The scars of extensive war damage which still disfigure it could be healed. The shabbiness of streets and houses, the untended gardens, could soon be put to rights. These things, and the paucity of traffic on the roads, are the first to impress the senses; but they are almost as superficial as the red stars which form no pleasing addition to the more prominent public buildings.
It is the people themselves who make the second and much deeper impression. They lack animation. Even the children, seemingly well cared-for, are unnaturally subdued, at any rate in public. Almost the entire nation, soldiers and sportsmen apart, gives the appearance of physical and mental dejection. Well it might. Power (under Moscow) is in the hands of Mr Rákosi, veteran Stalinist, one of the few survivors of the old guard of Communist leadership in Central Europe. Food is expensive although of indifferent quality, and meat, bread and eggs are frequently scarce: the common belief is that everything is going to Russia. Shoddy consumer goods are displayed with more art than prodigality in shop-windows; prices are extortionately high, wages low. Living accommodation is grossly over-crowded, public transport is antiquated and insufficient. Highways are poor, while most of the byways outside the capital are no better than rutted tracks. Schools and hospitals are drab and ill-equipped. Such new buildings as I have seen appear to be hastily constructed, utility-pattern affairs. The press, perhaps needless to say, is rigidly controlled and sickening in its adulation of the U.S.S.R., ‘the liberators’ to whom all thanks are due. To a country proud of its history, the Eastern bastion (as the Magyars used to claim) of Western civilisation, the red flags flanking the Hungarian tricolour wherever it appears must be a bitter affront. Above all, though the police and military forces are not in much public evidence, fear of indictment, deportation or worse is everywhere …
The Magyars are not Slavs; indeed, they have long regarded themselves as a master-race born to rule Slavs. They have strong links with the West, and a background of Western culture. They are sensitive and artistic, with mental resources and a lightness of spirit greater, I suspect, than those of most of their present associates. They are volatile and, not least among their characteristics, they have a keen sense of humour. They are not, in brief, of the stuff of which reliable Party members are made: the active supporters of the regime are still placed at no more than 5 to 10 per cent of the population.
Foreign domination, however, is no strange event and the national genius (which does not appear to include the frequent production of leaders) is for survival rather than for successful revolt. Even if courage were among the more notable Hungarian qualities, the geographical features necessary to a Resistance movement – mountain, forest or seaboard – are lacking; and even if there were no Soviet troops in Hungary, she has a common frontier with Russia. There will accordingly be no hurtful kicking against the pricks. Rapid advantage will be taken … of any laxity of control from Moscow, but it is highly improbable that a bold hazard will be attempted. Apathetic resignation, the compromise of ‘go slow but don’t strike’, sums up the general attitude.
‘A sense of slight inferiority’
DESMOND CRAWLEY, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE
REPUBLIC OF BULGARIA, FEBRUARY 1967
CONFIDENTIAL
THIS DOCUMENT IS THE PROPERTY OF HER BRITANNIC MAJESTY’S GOVERNMENT
| NG 1/2 | Foreign Office and Whitehall Distribution |
BULGARIA
13 February, 1967
Section 1
Mr. CRAWLEY’S FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF BULGARIA
Mr. Crawley to Mr. Brown. (Received 13 February)
| (NO. 2. CONFIDENTIAL) | Sofia, |
8 February, 1967
Sir,
There can be few more interesting contrasts than a transfer direct from a small African country such as Sierra Leone, to a small European Communist country such as Bulgaria. Here there are for us no racial nor colour nor immigration problems, no imperialist past to live down vis-à-vis the natives of the country itself, no non-official British community to act as a listening post or to support in its difficulties, no questions as to whether we are or are not extending as much economic or technical or defence aid as we materially could or morally should. One does, however, find the familiar situation of a comparatively backward agricultural country, not naturally very richly endowed otherwise, trying to develop industrially too fast. One watches one’s Russian colleague at social functions, rather larger than life, surrounded by attentive Bulgarians, and one hopes that he is being put through his paces for ever more assistance as would be the lot of any British High Commissioner in any new, post-war Commonwealth country. If he is under such pressures, he at least has the advantage over us that such controversies as may exist are conducted in private. In any event, there is ample evidence of Russian economic and technical aid to this country on an impressive scale …
It is therefore inevitably with a sense of less direct involvement that I have the honour to submit my first impressions of an East European country. Unlike some of my more distinguished colleagues at present serving in Communist posts (but, judging from their biographies, in common with some six of my eight post-war predecessors), I arrive immaculate from previous service in any East European country. One’s total ignorance is not even impaired by any great historical funds, as it were, of mutual Anglo-Bulgarian knowledge. This has never been a country of which many of our compatriots have known much, or in which more than a few have ever lived for long. One has read Mr Gladstone’s pamphlets on the Bulgarian atrocities;1 of the diplomatic achievements of that great Times correspondent, J. D. Bourchier;2 of King Boris3 and his passion for railway engines. One is aware that the first classic example of a Communist take-over after the war took place here, and that in order to win a war it is wise to note first which side Bulgaria joins before joining the other. The Bulgarians, on the other hand, equally ignorant of us but being an eminently practical people, are more inclined to recall Lord Beaconsfield’s association with the Treaty of Berlin4 rather than his adversary’s liberal prejudices; that the British bombed their capital during the last war; and that they are supposedly dedicated by political conviction to work for the elimination of our own chosen way of life. This is not, in short, a very promising stock-pile of mutual understanding …
Early December of a continental winter is not, of course, the best time to arrive. Touring, though possible, is not as rewarding as at other seasons of the year; industrial and especially agricultural workers are, one finds, inclined to hibernate, regardless of norms and productivity targets. This gives one, however, all the more leisure to explore Sofia itself, a spacious, but hardly the ‘elegant city’ as recently defined in The Times. Allowing for their dour and not conspicuously personable qualities, Bulgarians seem to be, generally speaking, a sturdy, orderly, amiable and usually friendly people, albeit with a peasant caution, and a peasant suspiciousness of strangers. It also strikes me that there is something of an undue diffidence, almost a sense of slight inferiority, in their national make-up, which has to be carefully taken into consideration. Communism does not seem to rest too heavily on them; they are accustomed through the ages – as is their persecuted but resilient Church – to shrug off their rulers and to bend to the prevailing wind. There is more in the stores, a more plentiful public transport system, more signs of reasonable social and financial well-being than somehow one expected. Appearances are admittedly drab, and accommodation continues to be of comparatively low standards. The city – at any rate in winter – would be only half as drab if there was anything approaching the standard of town lighting of any Western city; if such filthy, smog-spawning, brown coal was not consumed in such abundance; if the exteriors of buildings were kept reasonably decorated; if people did not usually wear such dark clothes; or if such simple and relatively inexpensive skills as that of shop window-dressing were not so lamentably neglected.
Only the Press in its infinite tedium – compulsive reading that it entails – exceeds one’s worst forebodings. But culturally the Bulgarian is very much alive. In a country of some eight million people, mostly agricultural or industrial workers, the opera, the concert, the theatre, the ballet, and above all choral singing, flourish exceedingly … I must confess that I have enjoyed such modern Bulgarian painting and films as I have seen more than I am told I should. Even their sculpture similarly gives pleasure by the very immensity of, for example, the Communist human form. There is a certain masochistic and nostalgic satisfaction to be derived from surveying colossal statuary, some of it erected in honour of the Russians during a period when so much of the rest of the world was busy demolishing monuments to the British and other former imperial peoples.
‘If two Englishmen constitute a club, three Serbs constitute a civil war’
SIR ARCHIBALD WILSON, HM AMBASSADOR
TO THE SOCIALIST FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF
YUGOSLAVIA, NOVEMBER 1964
Yugoslav individuals seem to be, if such a thing is logically possible, more unique than others. Most diplomats need only hear the noise in their own kitchen to conclude that, if two Englishmen constitute a club, three Serbs constitute a civil war. The racial differences in Yugoslavia, of course, aggravate the problem. At the Belgrade Opera House, it is possible to hear a Slovene tenor holding the principal role in Italian against a flood tide of Serb around him, on the ground that he does not know the language of his capital. An almost arrogant self-confidence is apt to go with this individuality. It has been said that the first word normally uttered by a Yugoslav baby is not ‘Mama’, or even ‘Papa’, but ‘Znam’ (‘I know’, and by extension ‘I don’t need telling’ or ‘I know better than you’.) This self-confidence remains very much alive in Yugoslavia to-day. I was treated to a good example of it recently, when I answered the questions of an old Macedonian peasant about my identity. ‘You foreigners,’ he said, ‘talk about Ambassadors. We Yugoslavs call them Consuls.’
‘Comically awful Embassy premises’
RICHARD SAMUEL, HM AMBASSADOR TO LATVIA,
APRIL 1992The fall of the Iron Curtain led Britain to move swiftly to reopen embassies in the newly independent states in the Baltic and elsewhere. This brought career opportunities for up-and-coming diplomats sent to run the revived British missions. As (for the most part) relatively young, first-time ambassadors, they put up with the poor living and working conditions.
In 1993 John Everard, for instance, had as his first embassy in Minsk a small shabby room furnished ‘student bed-sit style’ inside the former East German Consulate. Seen in these surroundings the new British Ambassador to Belarus seemed more like a ‘village cricket captain’, according to the Independent, ‘than emissary of a great nation’. The locally engaged administrative staff supporting HM Ambassador shared a desk tucked away under the stairs. Richard Samuel’s first impressions despatch from Latvia describes a similar scene.
British Embassy
Riga
15 April 1992
The Rt Hon Douglas Hurd CBE MP
Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
London SW1
Sir,
FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF LATVIA AND CHRONOLOGY FOR 1991
When Soviet forces invaded Latvia in June 1940 they ordered all diplomatic missions out of Riga, including the British Legation. Its staff left in good order, but had to leave the building as it stood, still identified as the Chancery by a brass plate inscribed in Latvian and English, with the crest of HM King George V. The Russians then took the building over, but unknown to us, the nameplate was kept in safe hands throughout the Soviet period. Last month the ‘Twenty One Club’ of Riga, a political association, organised a presentation ceremony at which it was returned to us, resplendently polished, with a graceful speech about our two countries’ traditional friendship from the Chairman of the Foreign Relations Commission of the Latvian Parliament. At another ceremony two months before that, the Riga Municipality formally transferred back to us the old Legation building itself, in Riga’s equivalent of South Kensington. Both events are of a piece with the welcome the Latvians have given us since the Embassy, after fifty-one years’ absence, opened its doors – more precisely our hotel bedroom doors, on 5 October …
The often uncertain expressions I encountered last autumn when I said where I was going encourage me to begin with a snapshot of this attractive if troubled country. Even to those in the UK who knew something of them before the summer, the Baltic States must have seemed small, remote, and never likely to impinge much on our own affairs. In fact their populations, taken together, equal that of Sweden; Latvia itself, with its 2.7 million people, is greater in size at least than Switzerland or the Netherlands and is physically closer to the UK than an EC applicant such as Finland. Furthermore, if the UK’s interests here are perceived in London as less than vital, this seems not to be the case for important partners of ours like Denmark, Germany and Sweden.
Riga itself is a green and handsome city, whose fine pre-war buildings and old town in the Hanseatic style have more than enough presence to face down the shoddy and pretentious Soviet additions of the post war period. Lenin’s overbearing monument was carted off as soon as possible after the coup in Moscow. The city centre is once again dominated, unchallenged, by the Freedom Monument from the first republic; amazingly, the Russians never got round to demolishing it. The undulating and fertile Latvian countryside, despite areas of industrial pollution, has much undramatic beauty, with lakes, rivers and extensive forests of birch and pine. With their own distinctive and archaic Indo-European language, closely related only to Lithuanian, the Latvians have managed to preserve a rich musical heritage and folk traditions despite hundreds of years of colonisation by Swedes, Germans, Poles and Russians. The vitality of that culture made Latvian independence possible after World War I, and is the reason for its recovery last year. Certainly their two modest decades of independence before World War II do not make the Latvians feel any less a part of European civilisation than nation states with a much longer history. Their economic and political objective now is to rejoin the European mainstream as soon as they can overcome the enormous problems they now face …
Where does the UK now stand in Latvia and how should we develop our relations in the coming months? The Latvians were gratified at the speed of our response to their independence. Our recognition of it on 27 August, together with other EC states, was rapidly followed (on 1 September) by the Prime Minister’s meeting with the Baltic Prime Ministers in Moscow and by the Minister of State’s visit to Riga (as well as to Tallinn and Vilnius) on 4/5 September. A resident Embassy followed within a month and though our cramped and dingy rooms in the Riga Hotel made for almost comically awful Embassy premises for the first four months, we are now enjoying the spacious if temporary facilities of the former Communist Party Central Committee offices – a nice irony. We hope to move into the refurbished Legation building in Alunana street in stages, beginning this summer. The political symbolism of that return means much to the Latvians …
‘Australia is “the lucky country” all right’
SIR DONALD TEBBIT, HM HIGH COMMISSIONER
TO AUSTRALIA, SEPTEMBER 1976
CONFIDENTIAL
FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE DIPLOMATIC REPORT NO. 342/76
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AUSTRALIA
20 September, 1976
AUSTRALIA: FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF “THE LUCKY COUNTRY”
The British High Commissioner at Canberra to the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
| (CONFIDENTIAL) | Canberra, |
20 September, 1976.
Sir,
‘Here perhaps, more than anywhere, humanity had a chance to make a fresh start … Nothing in this strange country seemed to bear the slightest resemblance to the outside world; it was so primitive, so lacking in greenness, so silent, so old.’ Alan Moorehead: Cooper’s Creek.
‘The immigrants … found it no land for loving at first sight. Only time would make friends of the unbending gums whose branches with their thin perennial leaves spread stiffly above the reach of man.’ Mary Durack: Kings in Grass Castles.
‘And the sun sank again on the grand Australian bush – the nurse and tutor of eccentric minds, the home of the weird, and of much that is different from things in other lands.’ Henry Lawson: The Bush Undertaker.
‘It is a country that is rich in mines, wool, ranches, trams, railways, steamship lines, schools, newspapers, botanical gardens, art galleries, libraries, museums, hospitals, learned societies; it is the hospitable home of every species of culture and of every species of material enterprise, and there is a church at every man’s door and a race-track over the way.’ Mark Twain: 1897.
‘When I invented the phrase in 1964 to describe Australia, I said: “Australia is a lucky country run by second rate people who share its luck.” I didn’t mean that it had a lot of material resources … nor did I mean the Bondi Beach syndrome … I had in mind the idea of Australia as a derived society whose prosperity in the great age of manufacturing came from the luck of its historical origins … In the lucky style we have never “earned” our democracy. We simply went along with some British habits.’ Donald Horne: Death of the Lucky Country, 1976.
From a distance, Australia looks like a straightforward, uncomplicated, homogeneous, prosperous kind of place; from the inside, the reality is surprisingly complex.
Materially, Australia is ‘the lucky country’ all right. It has so few mouths to feed, such an abundance of agricultural and mineral resources and so much room for development. Only with gross mismanagement could it bring upon itself a serious balance of payments problem. Despite the problem of the aborigines, it still has a more or less homogeneous population: there is no good reason why the ‘new Australians’ who have come in since the Second World War from countries like Italy, Greece, Turkey and Yugoslavia should not assimilate well in time with the older Australians of predominantly British and Irish stock and the million or so who have themselves come from Britain since the war …
Australia is a friendly place. Mark Twain said what he met here was ‘English friendliness with the English shyness and self-consciousness left out’. That is accurate but there is more to it. The Australian personality and the Australian way of life have been created out of British stock and inherited British attitudes by the battering and baking of a remote, harsh, yet ultimately fruitful, environment. It has been a triumph of mind – and of character – over matter. Yet the victory has left scars: the Australian is genuine and full of good will but externally rough; generous but conformist; courageous and a good mate rather than a special individual; a loyal upholder of group values but one who sometimes makes poor distinctions between them. Like ourselves, the Australians are pragmatists; but pragmatists who, given the right cause may turn into heroes or may equally cut off their nose to spite their face. An interest in sport, natural enough in its way, is incredible in its intensity and is an emblem not only of virility but almost of respectability. For all that, the Australian girth grows larger over the age of 20 as players join spectators and easy living softens the traditional impression of the Australian as a tough bushwhacker. There is a need to be respected and even to be loved; but this is made harder to achieve because Australians, to an unusual degree, combine thinness of skin with forthrightness of expression, offering to the foreigner, as Jan Dawson pointed out, ‘a baffling mixture of arrogant nationalism and self-deprecatory comment’. Paradoxically, it has probably been all the harder for Australians to strike an easy natural balance between their heredity and their environment because Australia has never had to fight for her political freedom. Consequently the very things that some Australians cherish as their birthright are seen by others as irrelevant or even as antiquated wrappings of their infant tutelage.
The environmental element too is divisive. The original, authentic Australia is the Australia of the bush and of the outback. The large, modern and increasingly sybaritic coastal cities with their advanced and opulent life style provide a startling antithesis to the background of the farm and the mine. Physically, the Australian continent is over 30 times the size of the UK, yet with only a quarter of its population … [I]n Australia, distance breeds differences and misunderstanding more often than it lends enchantment … ‘The tyranny of distance’ has separated Australians not only from each other but from nearly all the inhabitants of the globe with whom they have most in common. Australia is placed in a corner of the world where she feels no natural, spontaneous sense of identity with her neighbours, apart from New Zealand. There are significant overtones in the advertising slogan of the national airline: ‘Quantas [sic] will fly you to the world’.
‘Despite any line on the map, the same India’
MAURICE EADEN, HM CONSUL-GENERAL IN
KARACHI, DECEMBER 1975Eaden arrived in Pakistan fresh from a posting in Belgium, another country whose sense of identity rather bled into that of the neighbours next door. In Karachi the Consul-General was much taken with the existential question of whether, since splitting from India, Pakistan had managed to establish itself as a nation as well as merely a state.
Writing back, R. J. O’Neill of the South Asian Department offered an answer: ‘Is not the final reason for the existence of Pakistan the fact that there is now, at least, no alternative?’
‘That is putting things very low,’ admitted O’Neill. ‘But may it all not be rather like being Belgian? It is not very exciting, but who would really want to throw in his lot with any of the neighbouring states?’
CONFIDENTIAL
| 1/2 | 31 December 1975 |
Sir Laurence Pumphrey KCMG
British Embassy
ISLAMABAD
Sir
IMPRESSIONS OF KARACHI AND SIND AFTER SEVEN WEEKS
Coming to Karachi after three years in Brussels and before that a spell in Bombay has been and is a fascinating experience. After seven weeks, as after one day, the abiding impression is one of familiarity. The same hooded crows, parakeets, kites and hoopoo birds as in our garden in Bombay. The malis, dhobis, chowkidars and the Goan drivers all so familiar. The same shanties and mansions, ceiling fans, tenements and white paint in the cantonments and the civil lines, the same trees and the circuit houses. And despite any line on the map, the same India.
Differences of course there are – the most noticeable in the city being the almost complete absence of women from the street scene, with a consequential drabness and loss of colour. The physical setting is quite different – there torrential monsoon rains, here desert. And no sacred cows here to hold up traffic (but plenty in the bureaucracy). One could list a good many more such differences but somehow they all seem rather peripheral and detract little from the basic oneness which is perhaps best illustrated by the mosques covered by a small forest of small poles with little red and green flags making them look just like Hindu temples.
Perhaps the most familiar aspect of all, and certainly the pleasantest, is the ease of social contact with educated Pakistanis, in business, in government and in the professions, and with their wives. This stands out all the sharper after three years of unfruitful struggle to get to know Belgians. I cannot speak of pre-1971 Pakistan1 nor of present day India but my guess is that getting on with Pakistanis is now easier than with Indians. Defeat has removed much of the arrogance the Pakistanis may have had. Victory certainly had the opposite effect in India in the months I was there following the Bangla Desh war …
I have the distinct feeling that a good many leading Pakistanis are in regard to their country like the agnostic who badly wants to believe and recites the creed several times a day without, however, ever really becoming convinced. They are good Muslims and are naturally doing their best to get what they can out of their wealthy co-religionists. But their real interest is in the Sub Continent. Early on in almost every conversation I have with a Pakistani I meet for the first time, I am asked ‘Have you been in this part of the world (i.e. the Sub Continent) before?’ They show polite interest in other parts of the world. What really interests them is India. There is little we can do to promote better Indo/Pakistani understanding, in fact to try would probably be counter-productive. But when it happens I hope that we shall cheer.
‘This windblown island of boredom’
JOHN BENNETT, HM HIGH COMMISSIONER TO
BARBADOS, DECEMBER 1967
The Barbadian in many ways continues to live in the shadow of the end of nineteenth-century England. The pace is slow – hippies and flowers are absent – mini-skirts are rare – crime is minimal – Sunday sees the family walking to their place of worship (the choice is large with at least 16 active denominations) – gambling and night life, except for the infamous Harry’s are absent – cricket is the main relaxation. The country remains firmly democratic and is one of the few ex-colonial territories which has absorbed the democratic customs and institutions of Whitehall. The Bajan is prepared to fight hard to retain them. The ‘whites’ live apart from the ‘blacks’ but, to date, this poses no particular or acute problem. Her Majesty – Queen of Barbados – continues to enjoy a very special place in the hearts of all the people, regardless of colour or creed. Through the monarchy the Barbadians, with nostalgia, look to the Mother Country. There is much truth in the saying that Barbados is ‘Little England’.
So, in many ways, Barbados is an anachronism in this modern world and not quite part of it. The slow pace, the honesty, the stability have a certain charm, but also disenchantments, since, with little or no stimulations – cultural, economic or political – the average Bajan is a bore, narrow-minded and self-satisfied. The atmosphere was well described in a recent writing of Mankowitz when he referred to Barbados as ‘this windblown island of boredom’.
‘This is no tropical paradise’
KENNETH CROOK, HM GOVERNOR OF THE
CAYMAN ISLANDS, JANUARY 1972When Kenneth Crook became Governor of the Cayman Islands in 1972 it was clearly still a very hands-on job. His predecessors in the role had learned the nitty-gritty of how to run a country in the Colonial Service. Unfortunately for Crook that anachronism had been abolished six years earlier. While Crook’s own career path in the Diplomatic Service had been stimulating, knowing how to navigate the complex politics of Bangladesh and Pakistan was of little use in the Caribbean.
Sir Athelstan Long, the previous governor (1971–2), told us he suspects Crook ‘may have been given a rather flattering picture by the Secretary of State in order to get the post filled’.
‘It obviously did not live up to his expectations,’ said Long. ‘None of the comforts of a diplomat, and no time to write clever and well-phrased despatches and letters giving wise advice to London – plus no expatriate support staff. He was very much “The Boy on the Burning Deck”, with problems and responsibilities which must have been completely new and rather overwhelming.’
The Cayman Islands are still a British possession. Under the latest constitution, enacted in 2009, ultimate legislative and executive authority still resides in the Governor – who remains an FCO appointee.
| (CONFIDENTIAL) | George Town, |
26 January, 1972
Sir,
Governors do not I believe usually write first impressions despatches. But it was suggested to me that you, Sir, and the office as a whole, might find some interest in the first reactions of a pair of Diplomatic Service eyes and ears (two pairs, if you count my wife’s) to this basically colonial situation. I have the honour, therefore, to submit the following first thoughts.
It is hard to be sure whether they derive from comment made when I first heard of the posting a year ago, comment heard when I visited the place in June (disguised, like Nanki-Poo,1 as a second trombone), or things learned since I arrived. However this may be, one thing stands out. This is no tropical paradise. I could enlarge, in terms of a magnificent but mosquito-ridden beach; of a fairly new but rather ill-designed and sadly-neglected house; of a pleasant but very untidy little town; of swamp clearance schemes which generate smells strong enough to kill a horse; of an office which will one day ere long collapse in a shower of termite-ridden dust … But enough! The point is made.
This is certainly an odd appointment for a Diplomatic Service officer, and the main difference which at once emerges concerns responsibility. How many of my colleagues, like myself, contemplating the inanities of some Head of State to whom they had the misfortune to be accredited, have said to themselves ‘If only the fool would do so and so, how easy it would be.’ But have they really thought how it feels to be the fool in question? One minor and very superficial example will illustrate the point. My wife, faced with roads likely to daunt a Sahara explorer, said aggrievedly, ‘Why don’t they do something about this?’ And got the terse if ungrammatic reply, ‘Not they – me!’ It makes a difference! I might also invite my colleagues to try running a Parliament in the best Westminster tradition, in which one Member leaves, and as a result throws the entire Finance Committee into confusion for want of a quorum, because he has to drive the school bus – which he owns. It seems a bit unfair to have to learn at one and the same time (a) how to run a Parliament, (b) how to bend its rules so as to get it out of such self-created messes. What extraordinary demands modern diplomacy makes of her servants!
‘But a stroke of green between an immensity of sea and sky’
JOHN SMITH, HM GOVERNOR OF THE GILBERT
AND ELLICE ISLANDS, NOVEMBER 1973You won’t find the Gilbert and Ellice Islands in a modern atlas. As with so many other former British possessions, the coming of independence saw the old colonial names disappear. A string of tiny islands in the Pacific a thousand miles north of Fiji, they were hard to find on the map even before the late 1970s, when independence saw the Gilberts incorporated into Kiribati, and the Ellice reborn as a separate country, Tuvalu.
Judging by this despatch, John Smith seemed to like the locals more than he did his subordinates in the colonial administration. Back in Whitehall the final paragraph presented a problem to Mr J. Nicholas in the Pacific Dependent Territories Department, who was tasked with having the despatch printed and circulated to all diplomatic posts. Fearing that the full version would cause ‘great offense’ to the officers concerned, and spark off an ‘anti-Smith campaign’, Nicholas took the rare step of asking the Governor to amend his text before having it printed. Smith acceded to the request to end his despatch with a ‘fairly non-controversial statement’ instead. We print here the original version.
The Governor’s views on resettlement were also somewhat maverick. Smith supported the aspirations of many of the islanders to emigrate in search of work, and believed that a lack of economic opportunity, combined with population growth, would see most of the atolls deserted within fifty years. Today, with less than a decade to go, this prediction looks set to be confounded.
The spectre of uninhabited desert islands has not gone away altogether, however. At just 4.5 metres above sea level, Tuvalu is perilously vulnerable to climate change. Rising sea levels over the next few decades threaten to poison the water table and force the islanders out for good, with New Zealand the most likely destination. At the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in 2009, Tuvalu rejected a compromise deal on carbon emissions. ‘We are being offered thirty pieces of silver to betray our people,’ the country’s representative Ian Fry told the conference. ‘Our future is not for sale.’
| CONFIDENTIAL | 13 November 1973 |
The Right Honourable
Sir Alec Douglas-Home KT MP
etc etc etc
Sir
GILBERT AND ELLICE ISLANDS IN 1973 – FIRST IMPRESSIONS
Sir Arthur Grimble1 has written so ably and so popularly about these remote and unusual islands that it is as impossible for a newcomer not to feel intimidated about offering first impressions as it is to arrive without preconceptions. But just as the Grimble who emerges from the files is not quite the sympathetic and kindly man who emerges from his books, so, too, the islands and their peoples are no longer quite the same as those with whom he first came into contact half a century ago. The record deserves re-examination and first impressions are of value because the absolute sameness of atoll ecology and equatorial climate quickly blunt the edge of perception, while the background of sun, surf and sand encourage the unwary to fall into the mood of island life which remains so relaxed that the only thing I have been pressed to do as governor is to attend parties …
For years it was assumed that it would be possible to graft on to the traditional economy and culture only the barest trimmings of the western world. Over centuries the Islanders had evolved a pattern of life which made their chosen atoll homes tolerable at a level of existence which would seem affluent to the poorer peoples of South East Asia … There is an abundance of fish, coconuts, pandanus and ‘taro’ which provide a balanced diet, shelter, and the accoutrements of culture. Born into a world in which the land is but a stroke of green between an immensity of sea and sky the Gilbertese have achieved their highest expression of art in the construction of canoes. Capable of great turns of speed the sailing canoe has reduced the loneliness of atoll existence, kept the people together and enabled a homogenous culture to survive.
But it has not been possible to contain the intrusion of the Western world with its whalers, traders, missionaries and finally colonial administrators. Exposure to an external economy has introduced exchange where it was hardly needed, encouraged specialisation which was previously tolerated only as demonstration of exceptional skill in canoe building or dance, and brought incentives to a society by custom suspicious of the individual who stepped out of line …
While seafaring and commercial fishing can provide additional employment and income the natural limitation of resources sets not only a level on the standard of living but a time scale as well. The population, despite a widely understood and accepted control programme, is growing apace … It is now time to seek opportunities not only for other external employment but for settlement as well. The total population is not large. It could be absorbed in a single year’s immigration quota into Australia and still leave room for as many again … Whole island communities are hefty dumplings for a racial stew pot, but I have yet to meet the young Gilbertese or Ellice Islander who has seen something of the outside world who does not want to go back there and who would not, if given the chance, opt to settle … potential migrants would be English speaking, accustomed to the rule of law and Western democratic institutions, cash motivated and of proven assimilability. A group already happily settled in Melbourne through marriage may be pioneers of a new pattern of migration which will probably leave most of the atolls uninhabited fifty years hence. The alternative is for the rest of the world to pay for the technology necessary to keep the Gilbertese at home. It is an alternative which could quickly degrade and reduce a decent and deserving people into decadence …
If the road ahead is difficult, it is also exciting. I would be more sanguine about the challenge if the expatriate civil service were not predominantly contract and, encouraged by remoteness and a narrow way of life, in many cases unduly obsessed with its own conditions of service. Recruitment attracts some running away from an unpleasant reality and others inspired by cultural romanticism or touristic interest. There is little of the commitment and perception which once characterised Her Majesty’s Overseas Civil Service. Britain’s understandable inability in these days to service a dependency with the staff it deserves is in itself a compelling reason to persuade the Gilbertese and the Ellice Islanders to stand on their own feet and make independence their goal.
I have the honour to be Sir
Your obedient Servant
John Smith
Governor
‘In bed with the French … Two things to do … We have tried sleeping and it is time for the other’
ROGER DU BOULAY, HM RESIDENT COMMISSIONER
IN THE NEW HEBRIDES, JANUARY 1974Vanuatu, an archipelago in the Pacific, won its independence in 1980. Before that, as the New Hebrides, it was administered by Britain and France in a joint condominium, a form of government unique in the colonial world.
At the top, British and French ‘Residents’ exercised equal control. Further down the ranks the principle of dualism was taken to farcical extremes. For each French bureaucrat or technician, Britain posted an exact equivalent, so that the staffs of the two residences were almost totally symmetrical. The tiny administration was burdened with two currencies, two education systems, two police uniforms and two different legal codes (in the event that the rival judges disagreed, a nominee of the King of Spain would be asked to arbitrate).
The diplomats on the ground tasked with implementing this byzantine fudge tried their best. Du Boulay’s despatch was titled ‘First Impressions of a Franco-British Partnership That Works – After a Fashion’. His successor as British Resident in Vila, John Champion, was less kind, describing having to split every decision with the French as ‘wasteful and inefficient’, and the Condominium as an ‘absurd predicament’.
On the political side Du Boulay’s fears of unrest below the surface were well founded. A few weeks before Vanuatu gained its independence a breakaway faction on the island of Espiritu Santo seized the airport and hoisted the flag of the Republic of Venerama, their own putative state-within-a-state. The ensuing struggle saw rebels armed with bows and arrows defying the Condominium government, and was soon tagged ‘The Coconut War’. Troops sent from Papua New Guinea eventually brought an end to the quaint insurrection.
CONFIDENTIAL
FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE DIPLOMATIC REPORT NO. 84/74
| FWA 014/5 | General Distribution |
NEW HEBRIDES
2 January, 1974
NEW HEBRIDES: ANNUAL REVIEW AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF A FRANCO-BRITISH PARTNERSHIP THAT WORKS – AFTER A FASHION
The British Resident Commissioner in the New Hebrides to the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
| (CONFIDENTIAL) | New Hebrides, |
2 January, 1974
Sir,
The first thing that strikes the newcomer to the New Hebrides is how much there is to be done. The real development is only just starting; in most fields we are still in the law and order, care and maintenance stage. It is also as salutary to the recruit from the Foreign Service to be reminded that we actually have to run the place, keep the peace and mend the drains and build the future – something more than analysing and reporting on how this is being done or not done by others – as it is interesting to find that negotiating with the French on running the colony presents all the problems and frustrations, and requires all the same qualities, as negotiating with them on [European] Community problems.
Only slightly less striking at first glance is the difficulty of the task, in this remote and scattered group of islands, with few natural resources but the sea and sunshine, rain and coconuts; with more than 100 different languages among less than 100,000 people; with little or no traditional system of authority or hierarchy on which to base a system of indirect rule; and with a climate and custom that conspire to make inaction the easiest option. Then there is the Condominium – or more specifically the French. In some ways the most surprising discovery for the latter-day Captain Cook is that in this corner of the Pacific we and the French have been achieving, over the past 60 years, a partnership that actually works in practice and has succeeded despite all difficulties in delivering the goods …
The Condominium may be the second clumsiest system of government yet invented – after Brussels – and it is easy to make fun of it (as almost every recent foreign observer, in Stars and Stripes, and the BBC and le Monde, has most amusingly done). But to my mind the surprising thing is, not how badly it works, but that it works at all. The system of dual control makes an already difficult task almost impossible. Like an aircraft with dual controls and two separate, but equal, pilots, the machine will only keep flying if both agree on where they are going and how they will get there. Yet historically there has been no such agreement. The British Government got sucked into the South-West Pacific against their will and proclaimed policy to protect ‘the natives’, curb the excesses of the British (mainly Australian) traders and settlers, prevent the exploitation of one by the other and exclude the French from sole control. They gave their Resident Commissioner a relatively free hand …
The French by contrast came here to spread the blessings of French language and culture, to promote the interests of their settlers and to help them to exploit the natural resources of the group including its indigenous inhabitants. They seldom stinted money and delegated financial control, but kept political control decisively at the centre. Their aim was first to make the New Hebrides totally French – by harassing, boring and frightening the British out – and then to keep it that way.
These disagreements have obliged us to perform the aeronautically impossible feat of keeping the machine stationary in mid-air while the pilots bickered over the controls and charts. But it has kept flying – partly because of necessity and the good sense of the officials on the spot, and also because the requirements of administration were until recently minimal; but mainly because of the docile good nature, the lack of sophistication, education, social cohesiveness and elementary political organisation of the New Hebrideans themselves. There was no pressure from below, and, provided things were quiet and expenditure kept within bounds, none from above or outside …
Matters will not stay like this. The bay which shelters the port of Vila is, I am told, an old crater lake, and, according to some, but not the better, authorities, the island in the middle of it on which I live is the remnant of the volcano’s core or plug, a sort of giant champagne cork, in fact. Although many volcanoes in the Group are still active, it is unlikely, I understand, that I shall be suddenly translated into the upper atmosphere with a Krakatoan pop (to form part of the Western sunsets in the ensuing months). But the daily earth tremors remind us that the crust is thin and the fires burn beneath. We could do worse than bear this in mind when we survey the political scene …
For better or worse, then, we have been, and should remain, in bed with the French. There are only two things you can conveniently do in bed. We have tried sleeping and it is time for the other. I believed before I arrived here that the key to progress lay in Paris, and everything I have seen since confirms me in this view. The trick must be to persuade Paris to move … When I asked earlier this year … what the [French Foreign] Minister wanted from the New Hebrides, the answer was essentially, Tranquillité. Nothing must be allowed to obstruct the extraction of nickel from New Caledonia and the development of the H-bomb in the central Pacific. The best way, it had been thought in Rue Oudinot,1 of achieving this desired tranquillity was to resist political advance, encourage French settlement … and lock the New Hebrides firmly into the French system. It is now clear at least to some of the French on the ground that this will not work … We have to persuade the French to take the small but giant step on political evolution that will unlock the door to reform across the board. Once we start along the road towards self-government, the process will take on its own momentum …
A normal report on first impressions of a dependent territory would, I daresay, deal exclusively with the political, economic and social scene. My report naturally covers these things, but its theme is Franco-British partnership (that essential word for which there is no French equivalent), because that is what the Condominium is about, and that is what dictates and determines its progress. May I therefore end with a reference to the first of my predecessors, Mr King, the only one unfortunate enough so far to have got himself into the history books? Of him it has been said that ‘he maintained a politeness in the face of many provocations as invariable as his inertness, and displayed a reluctance to discommode his French colleague if it was at all possible to oblige him, which exasperated his fellow British …’ Another observer of the scene at the beginning of the century remarked that ‘ … the British officials all seem weighed down with the immense responsibility of sustaining the Entente Cordiale … The French on the other hand do not worry about the matter at all and are out for all they can get …’
It could, I suppose, be maintained that these remarks apply as well today as they did in 1906; and I must declare my prejudice when I say that I love the French even in their colonies as much as I am exasperated by them. But my aim will be to ensure that this particular piece of history does not repeat itself precisely, and that if we strive to emulate the suaviter in modo of our predecessors, it will be accompanied by a great deal more fortiter in re.2
In one other respect, too, I must disclaim any ambition to emulate Mr King: he held his appointment for 17 years.
I have, etc.,
R. W. H. du BOULAY.