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.