Free Life Commentary,
an independent journal of comment published on the Internet
Issue Number 32
4th June 1999
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Clare Short:
La Pasionaria of the Serbian War
by Sean Gabb

Ever since it started in late March, right through to the sort of finish it seems to have reached in early June, I have been denouncing British involvement in the Serbian War. Our Government has joined in attacking a country that has not raised a finger against any legitimate British interest. This attack has been horribly expensive, at £35 million a day. It is almost certain to bring endless further expense in British money and eventually in British lives. It has been conducted by means equally incompetent and vicious.

All this would be the case no matter who was in the British Government. But what adds to the immorality of our involvement in the War is the hypocrisy of those who have involved us in it. A few weeks ago, I sat myself down at a computer terminal and called up a service called FTProfile. This is an electronic database containing the text of just about every newspaper article published in this country during the 1990s, plus a large number published during the 1980s. To keep my search within reasonable limits, my key words were "Clare Short" and "War". I could have been less specific, and I could have looked up everything said over the past two decades by other Ministers. Even so, my findings were very interesting. I could digress here into asking why the real journalists—the ones with degrees in the subject and full time writing jobs—have not gone looking. But it is obvious why they did not. Toilers in the Ministry of Truth know what to do when old news comes out of the memory hole: they stuff it back in and carry on with the new stuff. So let us forget about the journalists and get on with the news.

For those who do not know her, Clare Short is the Secretary of State for International Development. She is also absolutely committed to fighting the Serbian War. She has spoken in its defence even when her duties did not require her to do so. On the 24th April, speaking in the House of Commons, she declared it a "just war". A week earlier in the same place, she had attacked her fellow members in the Parliamentary Labour Party who did not share her opinion. She was "ashamed" of them, she said. They were no better than those who had appeased Hitler in the 1930s.[1]

The day before, she had also defended the bombing of the Serbian television studios in Belgrade. This had happened after the Serbs had refused to carry six hours every day of NATO propaganda. The bombing killed at least ten people, including Yelitsa Munitlak, a 27-year-old makeup artist who was so badly burned that her body was only identified by the rings she was wearing. Tony Blair had immediately welcomed the bombing, making his usual IRA style shift of responsibility to the Serbian authorities—they had brought it on themselves, he said, by not doing as they were told by NATO.[2] Miss Short agreed, adding to some sceptical journalists:

You work in the information business. You know how powerful information is. And the constant stream of completely false information in Serbia is prolonging the war. It’s as simple as that.[3]

When further pressed, she was unable to explain why the NATO bombs had fallen on a studio building crowded with media people rather than on unmanned transmitting stations—especially since this might have kept Serbian Television off air for longer.[4]

In her active support, Miss Short is almost the La Pasionaria of the Serbian War. Whenever NATO bombs another civilian target, there she is, giving comfort to NATO, smearing her opponents as cowards and fascists. Anyone seeing her in action for the first time this past month would think her a longstanding militarist—a veteran, indeed, of the battle fought by the Labour leadership in the 1980s against the pacifist and unilateralist wing of the Party. A veteran she is – though not, oddly enough, of the pro-NATO faction. Half an hour in the memory hole of FTProfile reveals for those who cannot or will not remember a very different Clare Short.

She was a supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1980s. Nor was she against only nuclear war. She seems to have opposed war in general. In 1984, I find, she attended a vigil in Trafalgar Square to draw attention to the thousands of "peace workers" and conscientious objectors held in prison throughout the world.[5] Later in the decade, she opposed efforts to reverse Labour’s commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament.

Most famously, she was one of the leading opponents in this country of the 1991 war against Iraq. She was then a member of The Supper Club, a group of 30 Labour MPs who met regularly to coordinate opposition to the leadership’s support for the war. In those days, she was very concerned about civilian casualties, and the widening of war aims. Accusations of "appeasement" were the last things she seems then to have been avoiding. Take, for example, this from the 14th February 1991:

It’s the nature of the bombing that I’m worried about. People not having water and food…. The continual bombing of Iraq goes well beyond preventing them having the capability to supply their troops in Kuwait. It’s about smashing a country to bits and terrorising the people.[6]

Or take her accusation in Parliament on the 19th February 1991, that the Allies were breaking the Geneva Convention by continually bombing Baghdad.[7] Or take her stated revulsion after its end at the human cost of the war:

We have to face this. We have to look at the coffins and mourners and say: What we did includes all this.[8]

Why this change of stated opinion? Why this maturing from a virtual pacifist into a warmonger?

For an explanation, we must now widen our view to take in her colleagues, for Miss Short is not alone in her shedding of principle. Her opposition to the Gulf War was shared by Robin Cook, John Prescott and George Robertson. All these now sit beside her in the Cabinet, and are with her now among the chief projectors of the Serbian War. For every pacific statement by Miss Short made in the past, I can find another by each of her colleagues. See, for example, this warning from Mr Cook—now Foreign Secretary—on the 14th February 1991:

There must be a real danger that last night’s bombing will inflame Arab opinion and make it more difficult to achieve peace and security.[9]

Or, coming closer to the present war, look at this from Mr Robertson—now Defence Secretary—in 1993, following an earlier call for armed intervention in the Balkans:

The Labour Party believes in the Washington agreement to protect safe areas which include Sarajevo and that the appropriate troop levels should be put in place. But force can only be used in self defence.[10]

All this reminds me of the famous shift made by the Comintern in June 1941 over the Second World War. The day before Russia was invaded, they were denouncing a "war between capitalist states"; the day after, they were demanding every ounce of resolve in a "war against fascism". Or there is the parody in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. This present change of stated principle is not so famous, but it does stem from similar motives of cowardice and moral turpitude. I suggest two explanations:

First, these people are now in the Government. They have nice salaries and official houses and cars. They have status. They have everything they have ever schemed and clawed their way towards. So what
if the price is unconditional obedience to every American whim? Principles are for opposition. This can be seen in Mr Straw’s adoption at the Home Office of every police state measure that before the last election he attacked Mr Howard for bringing forward. It can be seen in foreign policy—something in which no British Government since the 1950s has had more than the shadow of independence from Washington.

I have Labour friends who find this deeply upsetting. I find it scandalous, but a long familiarity with Conservative politicians has hardened me to hypocrisy. I do not know any politician who has more regard for honour and decency than the average crack-addicted rent boy. Is it so shocking that Miss Short is no different from people like David Mellor and Jonathan Aitken?

Second, this is a lefty war. Though it was really about maintaining a big military-industrial complex, the Cold War was at least in public a crusade against Communism. The Gulf War was at least partly about oil concessions. But this war against Serbia is a war for the New World Order. As such, it is about raising up an edifice of unshakable international power and status for people like Miss Short. To quote from an article ghosted by Mr Blair for Newsweek,

[i]n this conflict we are fighting not for territory but for values. For a new internationalism where the brutal repression of whole ethnic groups will no longer be tolerated. For a world where those responsible for such crimes have nowhere to hide.[11]

That is, we are fighting for a world in which an elite of unelected, canting tyrants can tell the rest of us exactly what to do. If, by some democratic upheaval, they can be cleared out of one country, they will remain firmly in control elsewhere, ready for when the democratic impulse fades or can be beaten down again. In this respect, they are like bedbugs in a rooming house. No one in the Government cares about the Kurdish repression against Turkey, or what the Americans are supporting in Colombia, or what British arms exports are enabling in Indonesia. Moral condemnation is reserved for little countries like Serbia and Iraq that can be safely bombed into the stone age and made an excuse for politically correct imperialism.

I like to think that Miss Short is a deeply unhappy woman. After all, she is committing what she and her friends would once unhesitatingly have called war crimes. Perhaps she is. As she herself has said,

I think the quality of politics depends on how political recruitment takes place…. [A]t the moment it’s only triggered among abnormals. If you start being politically active and they make you and officer, you end up with a meeting to go to every night. So the only people who can be political activists are people who don’t love anybody and nobody loves them.[12]

Looking through FTProfile, I noticed that her private life has not been entirely fortunate. Bearing in mind how many murders she has aided and abetted in the past few months, I hope she rots for a long time to come in her own private little Hell.

Notes

1. "Public Back ‘Just War’ Despite Press Doubts, Says Short", Press Association, London, 24th April 1999.

2. Julian Manyon and Ben Rooney, "TV attack entirely justified, says Blair", The Daily Telegraph, London, 24th April 1999.

3. Ibid.

4. Mark Lawson, "Flattening a few broadcasters", The Guardian, London, 24th April 1999.

5. Paul Brown, "CND vigil in Trafalgar Square", The Guardian, London, 21st August 1984.

6. Patrick Wintour, "The Gulf War: Short quits front bench in protest", The Guardian, London, 15th February 1991.

7. "Parliament and Politics: Short accusation", The Financial Times, London, 20th February 1991.

8. Janet Watts, "Voice of the People: Doubts that linger beyond the slaughter", The Guardian, London, 3rd March 1991.

9. Philip Webster, "Short fifth casualty as Ruddock and Cook escape", The Times, London, 15th February 1991.

10. Patrick Collerton and Nancy Daniel, "Saving Sarajevo: MPs join call for military intervention", The Independent, London, 29th July 1993.

11. Tony Blair, A New Generation Draws the Line, Newsweek, New York, 19th April 1999.

12. Lynn Barber, "Clare Short: Labour’s Everywoman", The Observer, London, 5th January 1997.

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Free Life Commentary 32—4th June 1999

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