Robin Cook tackles human rights

Robin Cook tackles human rights

British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook arrived in Jakarta
yesterday on his four-nation Southeast Asian tour, taking the
first vital step toward dealing honorably with the British
colonies which still span the globe. It was difficult for Britain
to deal with this vexed human rights question while it was still
the sovereign power in Hong Kong, our Asia correspondent Harvey
Stockwin reports. But now Cook has promised some constructive
engagement, with the vital issue of human rights, in the next six
months.

HONG KONG (JP): On June 25, as the Sino-British ceremonies for
the Hong Kong handover got underway, a volcano in the Caribbean
Sea sent the British government a very pointed reminder.

During the handover, one of the cliches constantly used by the
British and American press was that the event finally marked "the
end of empire".

The reminder administered by the eruption of the Soufriere
Hills Volcano on the island of Montserrat was that, to the
contrary of the cliche, the sun still has not set on the British
Empire, just as it did not in the days of Queen Victoria.

But, in the last few days and on the eve of his tour of
Southeast Asia, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook belatedly
got the message. He overruled a left-winger in the Labor cabinet,
who had just displayed the manners of a colonial diehard, and
promised long overdue action on the delicate question of human
rights -- the very topic which Cook now intends to raise with his
Southeast Asian hosts.

Moreover, unless Cook decides to quickly adopt a monumental
policy of late colonial scuttle, which is unlikely since it would
make his advertised emphasis on human rights totally
hypocritical, the sun will still fail to set on the British
Empire well into the 21st century.

Britain, after all, is most unlikely to abrogate a solemn
agreement with the United States.

The British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), which includes the
strategic base of Diego Garcia, is on a 50-year lease to the
U.S., signed in the 1960s, plus a provision for an optional 20-
year extension. BIOT is uninhabited. The native Diego Garcians
having been moved, in a rather dubious maneuver, to Mauritius.

By the time the sun sets on BIOT, it has risen on the western
end of the Mediterranean and the Rock of Gibraltar, claimed by
Spain but still a possession of the British. It will remain that
way if the Gibraltarians have anything to do with it.

In stark contrast to Hong Kong, which was denied the
privilege, Gibraltar was allowed a referendum on its future, and
99 percent voted to stay British.

Long before the sun sets on Gibraltar, it is shining on the
colonies in the Atlantic Ocean. In the North Atlantic there is
Bermuda, which also voted compellingly -- though not
overwhelmingly -- against independence in a referendum a few
years back.

Hong Kong, incidentally, has a vested interest in a self-
governing Bermuda staying British for a long time to come. Since
the famous firm of Jardines led the way in the mid 1980s, much to
Beijing's annoyance, British Hong Kong firms, Hong Kong Chinese
firms and even a few communist Chinese firms, all operating in
Hong Kong, have chosen to register themselves under British law
in Bermuda.

In the South Atlantic, there are the three remote colonies of
Ascension Island, St. Helena and Tristan da Cunha. The latter was
once evacuated, also because of a volcano, and St. Helena is
still remembered as the place where Napoleon Bonaparte was sent
into exile.

Ascension is the only one of the three with an airport. This,
too, is used by the United States Air Force -- so much so, that,
according to some accounts, the British had to ask the Americans
for permission to use the base when they set out to reconquer the
Falkland Islands 15 years ago.

The Falkland Islands (plus the associated territory of South
Georgia) remains the Malvinas for Argentina but their
inhabitants, having experienced conquest, feel even more strongly
than the Gibraltarians and the Bermudans about the need to retain
their British link.

Slightly to the west of the Falklands, but far to the north,
lie the Caribbean territories, reminders of the days when, in the
centuries following Christopher Columbus, the British, Dutch and
French contested their rivalry in the balance of power by
seeking, exchanging or retaining West Indian islands.

London tried hard to wind up the Caribbean Empire with a West
Indian Federation but, as in East Africa and Malaysia, which
included Singapore, it did not work.

So the Union Jack still flies over the Turks and Caicos
Islands, the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands,
Anguilla, and, of course, Montserrat.

Long before the sun goes down over the West Indian colonies,
it has risen over the most remote, least populated colony of all,
Pitcairn Island and the three uninhabited islands in the Pitcairn
group.

The 50-odd population of Pitcairn do not even merit a Governor
in residence -- their Governor's main job is being the British
High Commissioner far away in New Zealand.

It is a close-run thing -- since they are separated by 10
hours actual time, and, across the international dateline, by 22
hours calendar time -- but on a normal day the sun has not set
over Pitcairn in the Pacific when it rises over BIOT in the
Indian Ocean.

The British take little pride in their globe-circling
possessions. The map of the world can no longer be colored with
great swathes of red. Most Britons would probably be unaware of
their remaining colonies, let alone be able to find them on a
map.

The more important point is: will the British take proper
responsibility for the colonies which do not or simply cannot
seek independence? Its record so far is a poor one, scarcely
justifying Robin Cook's desire to lecture other nations on their
human rights observance.

The record is poor largely because 13 remaining colonies have
been caught in the political slipstream of Hong Kong in British
politics.

Even before Hong Kong's fate was negotiated with China,
British conservative governments concluded -- understandably but
not admirably -- that Britain simply could not risk the future
arrival of three million Hong Kong British subjects. So Hong Kong
Chinese-born British became a lesser breed, a newly-created
category called British dependent territory citizen (BDTC).

In fact, the risk Britain should have taken was that few Hong
Kong British would have left their home and to retain them, as
first-class British passport-holders, would have strengthened
Britain's hand in its difficult negotiations with China. But that
is history.

What was unforgivable was that the British, not wishing to
discriminate and seeking to be consistent, made all the
inhabitants of the residual empire BDTCs too.

Apart from anything else it was an offensive term, reminding
the inhabitants of distant and remote outposts that they really
could not stand on their own feet. Additionally, of course, it
deprived them of the right to freely reside in the country upon
which they were dependent.

Subsequently, in relation to the Falklands and Gibraltar, the
offense given by BDTC status became too blatant, even for the
British, and the people of both territories were given back the
right to first-class British passports.

The false British calculation -- that all BDTCs yearn to swamp
Britain in a new wave of immigration -- has been pointedly
demolished by the people of Montserrat, as the volcano has
wrecked the southern and developed half of their homeland,
including the capital city, Plymouth.

Clearly the British too quickly assumed that the people of
Montserrat would want to leave for somewhere else, and so
encouraged them to go to another island in the Caribbean.

Short of the volcano also demolishing the northern and
undeveloped part of the island, it transpires that most of those
Montserratians who still remain on the island want to go on
staying there, if it is humanly possible to do so.

It would be a step in the right direction, showing a real
concern for human rights, if the new British Labor government
quickly amended the British Nationality Act of 1981 so as to give
all residual residents of the empire the unqualified right to
full British citizenship.

Prime Minister Tony Blair's "New Labor" certainly got off on
the wrong foot, in this regard. Baroness Symons, the foreign
office minister responsible for the residual territories,
rejected any such move on the grounds that "it would be seen as
highly cynical" to do this just after Britain had ended its
sovereignty over Hong Kong.

As Edward Mortimer, writing in the Financial Times bitingly
phrased it, this would be like arguing that "Britain must treat
the remaining BTDCs as badly as it treated the BDTCs of Hong Kong
for the sake of consistency".

That was not all. Minister for International Development Clare
Short presented an aid package to Montserrat with a typically
colonial "take-it-or-leave-it" attitude, for which she has been
rightly condemned.

One Labor member of parliament, Bernie Grant, put his finger
on the situation when he said: "I think this is a really shabby
end of the British colonial empire and I believe that they have
been treated disgustingly."

At least the Souffriere volcano, the missteps, and the
criticisms awoke Cook to the fact that he faced a mess-in-the-
making. He moved with alacrity to take bureaucratic charge of the
Montserrat crisis and promised to undertake a six-month review of
the best solutions for the residual empire.

One of the few writers to even notice the remaining British
colonial territories, Simon Winchester, suggested a few years ago
that they should now be integrated and governed as if they were
counties of the United Kingdom.

Other imaginative constitutional solutions will perhaps be
explored if Cook's review is as thorough as it promises to be.

Obviously one way that would satisfy all those who yearn for
"the end of empire" would be to decree that all those inhabiting
the empire, on which the sun still does not sets, no longer be
imperial subjects or BDTCs. They would be just plainly and simply
British. They might even be given a seat or two in the House of
Commons.