6. THE TELEGRAM OR HOW TO BE IGNORED

UN Security Council and Tindouf, Algeria

One of the principal artifacts of diplomatic business is the encrypted telegram between the embassy and the capital. In the British Foreign Office, telegram writing is a highly fetishized business. The drafting process is stylized and hierarchical, in a way an unconscious metaphor for the whole business of diplomacy.

If a junior diplomat writes the first draft, it must be checked by a senior diplomat before being “signed off”. Particularly important dispatches must be checked by ambassadors themselves, since it is their name that goes at the end of the message (itself an unconscious reinforcement of the hierarchicalism of the system).

When you join the diplomatic service, you are instructed in the “house style” which strives for clarity, conciseness, detachment and, above all, objectivity. Drafting skill is highly rated. Some ambassadors become known for writing particularly well-crafted and witty missives and the best telegrams are circulated widely on an informal network as a kind of salute to the author.

But the telegram is also the embodiment of what diplomacy is about. In the British service, it is divided into Summary: a few lines; Detail: the main body of reportage; and finally the all-important Comment: what the embassy thinks of what is being reported and what policy they recommend to London. Thus a telegram may read something like this:

Immediate

To: FCO London

From: British Embassy Ruritaniaville

Classification: Confidential

Summary

1. Coup in Ruritania. An opportunity for the UK: new President a good friend. No change recommended for travel advice.

Detail

2. At 0200Z[32] today, a small band of army officers led by General Potato seized the national radio station, main army barracks and all principal government buildings. There was a brief stand-off at the presidential palace, but otherwise little fighting and few casualties. Former president Tomato has been imprisoned by Potato’s men, who have announced that he will be tried for corruption and other “anti-state” crimes.

3. In a radio address at 0700Z, Potato declared that the coup is for the “people of Ruritania” to deliver them from the corruption and economic chaos of the Tomato regime. While declaring himself “transitional” President, Potato has announced that there will be general elections within six months or “as long as it takes for stability to be restored”.

4. The situation in Ruritania is generally calm. Some demonstrators have come on to the streets to celebrate the coup but otherwise there is little disturbance.

Comment

5. This coup has been brewing for some time (as other information has suggested).

6. While we [i.e. the UK] may disapprove of Potato’s method of removing the government, Tomato’s regime was a disaster for Ruritania, causing economic collapse and massive social unrest. Potato (whom I know well) has a level head and seems committed to the restoration of democratic government as soon as the security situation allows. We must insist that he keeps his word.

7. Potato’s arrival offers an opportunity for us. I have dined privately with him frequently. Unlike Tomato, he is well-disposed towards the UK (he attended Oxford for one term). We should immediately reexamine our commercial and military export strategy.

8. We will keep the security situation under close review, but I see no need at present to alter our current travel advice.

BACON [the surname of the ambassador]

Almost all such messages are classified from Restricted, the lowest level, up to Top Secret. The Foreign Office has succeeded in encouraging officials to downgrade the classification of many documents, for the more highly-classified a document, the greater the cost and awkwardness of circulating and storing it. However the vast bulk of such internal communications remain classified in some form. Thus a vast, effectively secret discourse is created.

Hundreds of such communications (though few of such drama) emanate from embassies all over the world every day. There is an unspoken, almost instinctive, understanding that the most important parts of the world demand the most attention, so the British embassy in Washington, a huge office with many hundreds of officials, will send thousands of messages a year, while the two-person embassy in Ulan Bataar will only bother London a couple of times a month – or when there’s a coup.

Historians may regard such written records as crucial manifestations of what is “really” going on inside a government — the core of its private deliberations. This is true, but only up to a point. In the crafting of these documents, to which diplomats devote considerable care, there are often distorting factors at play.

First, the documents are circulated widely in the foreign ministry and beyond, including to senior officials and ministers. They are thus, in the closed world of government, the most public demonstration of the skill and achievement of the author. This encourages all but the most unassuming ambassadors to play up the depth and intimacy of their political contacts: note (above) the fictional Bacon’s emphasis on his close personal relationship with the new president. It is also worth remarking that this kind of analysis reinforces and perpetuates the view that governments — and the individuals comprising them — are the determining factors in international relations: that they are what really matters. The quality of relations with key local actors is the kind of thing which wins a big tick in the performance appraisal box when the ambassador is considered for promotion. Likewise, such telegrams will invariably stress the embassy’s deep comprehension of the local scene. Never will they confess that they have little idea about what is going on.

I will here admit one shameful episode from my own career: when I was posted to Kabul, I was telephoned by the department in London and asked for a report on “the car bomb in Jalalabad”. I acknowledged the request and put down the phone. I had no idea what they were talking about. I duly went to the BBC website on the internet (whence presumably London had heard about it too), and took down a few details of the attack. Thus informed, I composed a short telegram back to London, classified it “restricted” and sent it.

Second, the division between “detail”, i.e. fact, and “comment”, i.e. judgment, in any such telegram implies such a separation in the mind and reporting of the ambassador. The separation makes sense in a system where readers need to know what is fact and what is opinion, but such a division belies the reality that the choice of what is reported at all implies a judgment in itself. Recall how in Bonn (chapter 2) my examination of the condition of the Roma did not justify a telegram. What embassies choose to report — what they see as a credible part of the discourse — is of course a judgment and a highly value-laden one at that.

Third, such telegrams are written to give the impression that they are offering considered and objective policy choices to the capital. When I was negotiating at the UN in New York, we would often in the “detail” (i.e. allegedly the “facts”) section of the telegram describe the negotiations in such a way to persuade the reader (a senior official or a minister) of a particular course of action. For instance, if we in the mission disliked a proposal that London had asked us to put forward in a particular negotiation, we would often exaggerate in our reports the degree of opposition in order to encourage London to drop it. This was a subtle skill, but one in which we became very artful. I am sure we were not alone in this practice, though I doubt whether any serving diplomat will admit it. It would therefore be wrong to take such reports as fully accurate accounts of what they purport to be recording.

Finally, and perhaps most subtly, such communications do not necessarily communicate what the author really thinks. In my diplomatic career there are many telegrams I wrote that stand out in my memory. One commemorated the culmination of a year’s grueling negotiation to reestablish the UN Security Council’s approach on Iraq (resolution 1284 (1999), which is I think the longest Security Council resolution of all time — see chapter 8); another, on 12 September 2001, reported the Council’s condemnation of the attacks the day before. A third — in late 1998 — reported Iraq’s promise of cooperation with the weapons inspectors, thus stopping the bombers which were already in the air from striking Iraq, although Iraq’s promise was not fulfilled and the bombers nonetheless attacked later that year. I remember that when I composed this telegram, my hands were shaking so hard I could hardly type.

But one sticks out above all, not least because it was about an issue I have come to know very well, now from both sides of the table. The telegram was about the Western Sahara, one of the issues I was responsible for as head of the Middle East section at the UK Mission to the UN.

Few people have heard of this issue. Those who campaign about it argue that this is because the benighted people of Western Sahara (or Saharawis, as they are known) have never, unlike the Palestinians, resorted to terrorism. The Polisario, the organization that represents the Saharawis, has never used violence as a political tool, except in direct resistance to the forces which occupy the Western Sahara in a guerrilla war which ended in 1991.[33]

The history is straightforward. When Spain, the colonial power, left the region known as Western Sahara in 1975, Morocco immediately invaded and occupied the territory. The inhabitants of the region were offered no choice in this invasion, and their representatives, the Polisario, have ceaselessly campaigned for the Saharawis to be given the right to self-determination. In the early years, between 1975 and 1991, this campaign took the form of a sporadic guerrilla campaign. The Polisario decided to end the fighting in 1991 when the UN Security Council agreed a process, known as the Settlement Plan, whereby there would be a referendum in the territory on self-determination. Morocco threw up incessant obstacles to the plan’s implementation. One of its techniques was to encourage Moroccan settlers in the territory to file thousands of objections to the voter registration lists prepared by the UN, thereby interminably delaying the preparations for the referendum. The Moroccans had also managed to convince their allies the French and US that if they lost the referendum, they would refuse to accept it.

In 2000, the UN Secretary-General appointed James Baker, the former US Secretary of State, as his Personal Representative on Western Sahara. His mandate, undeclared officially but unofficially understood by the permanent members of the Security Council, was to break this “deadlock” (a way of characterizing the problem so that the main cause of it is absolved). In 2002 Baker offered three options to the Security Council: one to continue with the Settlement Plan, the second to offer the Saharawis a more limited autonomy (with the promise of a referendum on the territory’s final status within five years) but under Moroccan sovereignty, and the third was to give up. The thrust of the recommendations — to abandon the Settlement Plan — was obvious: in other words, that the Security Council should abandon its own agreed approach to resolve the dispute simply because one of the parties was obstructing it.

In early 2000 the Foreign Office asked various of its embassies and missions, including New York, for their views on what “we” should do about Western Sahara. It fell to me to write the telegram from New York. My telegram duly reported what the UN Secretariat thought, what the French and US missions thought (notably, I did not seek the views of the Polisario representative, a charming and somewhat woebegone figure who ceaselessly tramped the corridors of the UN), and then what “we” thought. As was and is the practice, I divided the telegram into Summary, Detail and Comment. The Detail comprised my reports on what the UN, French and Americans had told me. These three actors had concluded that the Settlement Plan was running into trouble and that neither the US nor France was prepared to overcome Moroccan obstruction of the referendum. These were supposedly the “facts” on which I based my judgments, though, as I have noted, these facts did not include some details, such as the views of the Sahrawi representative, which to some might have seemed pertinent.

And just like our review of policy on Iraq sanctions, these “facts” did not include one word about the reality of life in Western Sahara for the Saharawis, Moroccans or indeed anybody else. I had never visited the Western Sahara. When eventually I did, in the autumn of 2005, I was appalled by the futility and suffering of some 150,000 Saharawi refugees who to this day remain in tented refugee camps in the western reaches of the Sahara, waiting for the “international community” to restore to them the justice they have been denied.[34] Having told “London” of the facts — which were merely the positions of the other “key” players — I then produced my judgment on what should be done about the Western Sahara problem. And here another deeply entrenched habit was put into play, namely that of identifying, in an entirely arbitrary and subjective way, what were Britain’s, or rather “our” interests in this affair. This is what the summary section of my telegram said:

“We should take a back seat: we have no dog in this fight.”

Elsewhere, in the “Comment” section of the telegram, I wrote, “We have no national interest at stake”, before recommending that we acquiesce, through quiet support, in the UN’s impending decision to seek some alternative to the Settlement Plan and its referendum, an approach which we had many times endorsed and was supported in international law.

Why did I write this? I was, as a British diplomat of some ten years’ experience, firmly gripped by a way of seeing the world which orders it in terms of states and their interests. From this perspective it was and is indeed the case that “Britain” had no national interest at stake in doing anything about the dispute. On the contrary, it had, by the traditional analysis, some measurable interest in not doing anything. Britain’s exports to Morocco amounted in 2000 to some £402 million. Most of these exports were purchased directly by the Moroccan government and comprised armaments. For Britain to take a stand on the Western Sahara issue would have jeopardized that trade, particularly that with the government. So by this measure it was clearly in “our” interests to do nothing about Western Sahara.

What are our interests anyway, and how are they calculated? As elsewhere in the rarefied business of foreign policy, there is no “how to” guide or textbook to guide one. In the British Foreign Office, it is subliminally instilled into you that “our” interests generally consist of three things: trade, security and what are mysteriously called “values”. I have talked to many diplomats from other countries who tell me that their policies are based on similarly-termed analyzes. In the British Foreign Office, we were not taught this calculus during our induction course, but it is something one infers from the endless disquisitions one subsequently reads where what “we” want is put into these terms. This is an arbitrary process. Very rarely are meetings held where ministers ask or even state what British “interests” are in any particular case. It is all pretty much assumed. Even to divide this amorphous set of interests into three subsets — trade, security and values — is to give a definition and rigor that this type of thinking rarely employs. Indeed, such is the subjectivity and arbitrariness of the components of foreign policy, that even to define them in this way is likely to be disputed. But for the sake of our own clarity of analysis, I must.

Economic “Interests”

Trade is the first obvious one. British trade with foreign countries is an easily measured variable. Such statistics appear in every annual review from embassies and in every analysis of bilateral relations with country x or y. These statistics give the trade factor a weight and psychological impact in any debate about policy. In the case of Western Sahara, my telegram put trade very much as primus inter pares in terms of our “interests”, and I suspect that its statistical quality played a role. There is indeed some psychological research evidence which strongly suggests that people give more weight to clearly quantified data — numbers, percentages, etc.

It is assumed in places like the Foreign Office and in governments world-wide that trade is what their countries “want”. But this of course is a very big assumption. The foundation of this assumption is of course what underpins neo-classical economics, namely that individuals seek to maximize utility through consumption, i.e. people want more things. Writ on the national scale, this assumption is expressed as more trade and more growth. But there is growing evidence — and good, hard empirical data too — that this is not in fact the case.

At the most basic level — that of the individual — there is plenty of evidence to suggest that individuals are not primarily motivated by the desire to maximize their own wealth. For example, Professor (now Lord) Richard Layard has given a remarkable series of lectures (now a book[35]) showing that the pursuit of wealth has not made us any happier. Once people rise above a level of abject poverty, their level of happiness stagnates, despite increases in wealth. In the western world, the last fifty years have seen massive increases in wealth, but there has been no corresponding increase in happiness. The evidence he cites is not the nice, hard statistics of economics which have no measure of happiness, but psychology, where neuroscience has produced some compelling evidence in support of Layard’s claims. Layard’s assertions seem to be borne out by more global evidence. Global opinion surveys, such as those conducted by the Pew Center and Gallup International, suggest that while the escape from poverty is a primary global concern, other concerns, particularly once wealth levels rise, become more pressing.[36] These concerns, including things like crime, corruption and disease, do not fit easily, or even at all, into the assumptions of conventional economics on what motivates us.

This evidence fits in with well-established psychological theory about human needs and wants, such as Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs”. This claimed that the highest level of human motivation was the need to achieve self-fulfillment. Below that were other levels of need, each of which had to be satisfied before people could progress to the next. At the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid of needs were the basics of life such as food, water and material comforts. Next were safety and security needs. Then came love and belongingness, including the desire to feel accepted by the family, the community and colleagues at work. After that came the need for esteem — both self-esteem and other people’s respect and admiration. Then finally, at the top, came what Maslow called self-actualization — the point at which people achieved the happiness that came from becoming all they were capable of becoming. At this level people might seek knowledge and esthetic experiences for themselves and help others to achieve self-fulfillment.

The measurement of happiness is inevitably a messier business than that of, say, GDP. But the evidence clearly suggests that Maslow’s hierarchy is in operation. The poorest are least happy; the better off generally more happy. But once a certain basic level of income is reached, which may only be as little as $10,000 per head per year, then levels of happiness stabilize. Increases in income and wealth do not subsequently trigger increases in happiness. In fact, levels of happiness can even decline.

This insight, which is occurring to more and more economists, suggests many consequences. One is that the well-being of the world would be increased by greater redistribution from rich to poor, as the poor benefit from increases in income much more than the rich do. But it also suggests that the central objective of governments in the richer countries — the endless campaign to maximize national wealth — may be the wrong one.

Taken to its fullest extent, this would mean a fundamental reorganization of conventional political and economic thought. But at a minimum, it would suggest that the conventional assumption of foreign policy does not stand up: that a core “interest” of any particular country is exports and the maximasation of national growth.

Security “Interests”

Let us now look at the second great set of “interests” which states are commonly assumed to represent. This set is usually presented as a responsibility: to provide for the security of a state’s citizens. This is such a widely-accepted norm of what states are meant to do that it has become an axiom, if not to say a tautology, of how we think about states and the world system: states exist to provide security for their citizens, ergo states must provide security for their citizens.

However, there is room to suppose that within this tautology there lies a self-perpetuating cycle. States exist to provide security. Therefore, in order for states to exist, they must ceaselessly prove that there are threats to their existence, thereby reaffirming their indispensability. The original reason why states exist, one is taught at most universities in the west, is to provide security for their citizens. Without the state, there is chaos. You will find this assumption everywhere in the core academic texts on foreign policy. In his essay “Perpetual Peace”, Immanuel Kant repeats the assumption, routinely believed even in his day, that the state of nature — i.e. what the world would be like without states — is a perpetual one of war and lawlessness. Therefore the state is indispensable, and those who arbitrate what it wants are indispensable too.

One does not have to think too hard to realize that state élites have an interest (to use their terms) in making themselves indispensable, and to do so they must endlessly prove that the state is under threat. More dangerously still, they may actually behave in a way that encourages threats against the state. One way they do so is by emphasizing the competitive or realist model of international affairs, a world of interacting and inevitably competing “interests”. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, they say. Eat or be eaten.

There are many examples of how government élites have exaggerated the threats against the state. During the Cold War the CIA overestimated the size of the Soviet economy and thus the resources that could be devoted to military production by at least a factor of two. More recently both the US and British governments exaggerated the extent of the threat posed by Iraq to the peoples of Britain and the US in order to fight a war that can only have been motivated by other reasons.[37] In this latter case, unable to prove an existential threat to their states themselves (even Saddam didn’t have weapons capable of harming the US or British territories), both governments claimed that Iraq was a threat to their “interests”. These were never clearly defined.

The exaggeration of threats is very much a function of the competitive, “realist” model of foreign policy thinking that is so pervasive today. To think in any other way — to claim, for instance, that economic and security “interests” may not be primary among a country’s policy concerns — is instantly to exile oneself to the wildernesses outside policymaking circles.

If instead you are a member of a foreign policy élite – say in the British Foreign Office or the US National Security Council, or, in the US, one of the think-tanks staffed by the sort of people who might end up in the NSC – you will already tend to think in the realist way (if you do not, your career in such places is likely to be short). The simplifications that you use to summarize what your state wants (usually unmodified by any relationship with the opinions of real people), prettifying these things by terming them as “interests”, you will also tend to employ when thinking about other states: we want this; they want that. A model that inevitably emphasizes competition, for only in a world of unlimited plenty can all wants be satisfied. The need for a clarity which any order requires inevitably encourages a tendency to polarize Us from Them. As Sartre once put it, we are defined by what we oppose.

The competition model is a deeply-rooted habit of thought and behavior among nation states, clear even to those who are fresh to the scene. A relative newcomer to the world of international diplomacy is Luiz Inacio da Silva, the President of Brazil. Preparing to attend his meeting with the Group of Eight (G8) industrialized nations in June 2003, he commented on the leaders he would meet, “Politicians are like football coaches, they may like each other but they want their team to win. Chirac, Bush, Blair may like me but they’re passionate about their own people”.[38] In British newspapers, summits and international meetings are treated as diplomatic football matches, where success or failure is judged on the basis of whether We have got Our Way.

Values

This is an altogether more contested area of what should drive foreign policy. There are plenty of people who today contend that “values” is what British foreign policy is primarily “about” (you will find such claims in the Foreign Office annual report or its website; such claims are repeatedly made in ministerial speeches). American leaders are even more forthright in claiming their mission to be the propagation of freedom, democracy and other American values. Some commentators go so far as to suggest that in this era of “post-modern” international order, values are a more important motor of foreign policy than more traditional indices of states’ interests. This process parallels the evolution of supranational forms of organization (the European Union is often given as the primary example), replacing the state as the principal unit of the international order.[39] Indeed, it is instilled in you from the very beginning of your career in the British foreign service that “British values” are what you are meant to represent. At first sight, these are simple things like democracy, accountability, the rule of law and open markets. More recently, the promotion of human rights has joined the list of “values” that “we” promote (at least in some places).

Before I joined the British Foreign Office, I had never given much thought to what British values were. Indeed, I would have thought it rather ridiculous to attempt to summarize them. This reservation had disappeared when, after about six years as a diplomat, I attended a conference of young British and European “opinion-formers” — journalists, trade unionists, civil servants and the like. It was not a very diverse group: there were no writers, painters or musicians and only a few people of color. The predominant social designator was white, urban and middle class. Quite intentionally the conference was designed to reach “opinion-formers” — it was an élite.

The question arose: what were British values? Already steeped in the uncritical complacency of the government view of the world, I ventured an answer: decency, tolerance (I do not recall, thank God, that I said “fair play” but I could easily have done). I naïvely thought that this description would kick off a friendly consensual discussion but instead my description was vehemently denounced by another participant. He used words like élitist, arrogant and short-sighted. My critic was a white, thirty-something policeman with cropped hair whose beat was where I had been born, Lewisham in South London. This example simply illustrates that there is little consensus on what British values are. More problematic still is how you prioritize and weight them: above all, how you pursue them.

In his essay “The Pursuit of the Ideal”, Isaiah Berlin gives a measured yet devastating critique of all those who pursue absolutist, ideal solutions to the problems of mankind. He concludes that in deciding what to do, the only option, in private life as in public policy, is to engage in tradeoffs: rules, values, principles must yield to each other in varying degrees in specific situations, adding that “a certain humility in these matters is very necessary” since we have no guarantee that any particular course we choose will be right.

One will rarely find such care among international policymakers. Rare now are the diplomats or political leaders who will claim their motives as purely selfish. Everyone now claims that “values” — whether they are imposition of democracy or the preservation of peace (the ubiquitous motive of “security”) — are the motive. The Foreign Office is no different. In policy submissions and telegrams offering views on what to do about a particular situation, one will almost invariably find references to democracy, human rights or another “value”.

It is, I suppose, a good thing that values are now reified to a higher place in the hierarchy of “interests”, though I question whether “values” have not simply become a more palatable and politically-correct excuse for realist “business as usual”. The trouble is that the absence of consensus on what values are important or even what those values signify has given rise to enormous confusion. Relatively simple concepts like “democracy” are open to discussion about whether certain types of representation are more or less democratic than others. When it comes to concepts like “freedom”, meanings are even more contested. Throw into the mix other vague objectives like “stability” and “security” and you can get very confused about which is more important than the other and even what these terms actually mean.

The result is, as Humpty Dumpty said to Alice: “when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less”. This translates to a total reliance, in places like the Foreign Office, on highly subjective judgments of what values are and which priorities to adopt. Although, like most people, I prefer to believe that I am a moral person, I have nevertheless many times lied and cheated in the name of British diplomacy, which is in theory supposed to represent “British values”. Now that I have left the Foreign Office I do not make any claim to know what the values of the British people are. I doubt whether anybody else can have such an idea. We may talk about things like democracy, fairness and decency, and I would agree that these are things that many people in Britain think are important. But I would not know. Ask others outside Britain about what they think British values are and they are likely to offer a more discomfiting view. Bosnian Muslims will present a rather different answer from the one I gave at the conference. For that matter, why not ask British Muslims? But of course no one in British diplomacy ever does ask anyone else, least of all the people they are supposed to represent, what British values are.[40] From the first day they enter the office, they are encouraged to believe that they know.

Economic interests, security interests and values are the three ingredients that generally make up the subjective mix of assumptions that underpin foreign policy calculations, even in relatively open and democratic countries like Britain.

And it was this type of analysis that British policy on Western Sahara adopted both before and since my involvement in the subject. The diplomatic situation has changed not one iota since then: there is still scant prospect of a referendum, and zero pressure, from the UN or its members, on Morocco to have one. The Saharawi refugees remain in their camps. In this case “values” do not make much of an appearance in the calculus, although I suspect that a close reading of the files (when they are opened in thirty years’ time) will reveal that values such as “realism” and “pragmatism” are given prominence in the internal policy analyzes. In the case of Western Sahara, the more traditional interests of trade and security point heavily in the direction of not standing up to the Moroccan government. British trade may be jeopardized by doing so. Meanwhile, the Moroccan government has become one of Britain’s supposed “allies” in the “war against terrorism”, i.e. by helpfully locking up Islamist terrorist “suspects” usually without trial or access to lawyers, according to Amnesty International.[41] Thus our security “interest” is reinforced; this is also true of the US, which has reportedly sent terrorist suspects to Morocco for interrogation in the program known as “extraordinary rendition”. Clearly in this case our “values” are not held sufficiently strongly to trump the other two sets of interests.

I thought I was being rather clever in putting this blunt example of realpolitik in the form “we have no dog in this fight.” These were, infamously, the words used by James Baker in 1992 to declare that the US had no interest in intervening in the war in the collapsing state of Yugoslavia. My phrase was meant as an ironic echo of his, but if there was irony in my choice of words, the joke was on me because the telegram betrayed a deep and unconscious cynicism not only about British foreign policy, but about myself.

Looking back, this moment represents the triumph of the “we” over the “I” of me, the instant when my own personal values were subsumed and annihilated by the groupthink of “British national interests”. If you had asked me then and now what I think about the Western Sahara issue, I would say that a great injustice was being done to the Saharawi people and that their rights was being ignored because no country was prepared to sacrifice its “interests” by putting real pressure on Morocco to grant the Saharawis their right to self-determination. But this is not what my telegram said; instead I wrote “we have no dog in this fight”. My bosses approved the telegram and off it went to London, so they clearly agreed with me. And telegrams from other embassies and missions said more or less the same thing. If I had written that the Saharawis were being screwed sideways and something should be done, I have little doubt that my draft would have been returned to me with the comment that I should be more “realistic” or “less emotional”.

What is bizarre and troubling about the episode is that most of my colleagues, and certainly those who dealt with Western Sahara at the Mission, all felt that a horrible injustice was being done. Our personal sympathies were very much with the Saharawis. We would say so to each other whenever we discussed the issue. Indeed, in later years, the UN envoy dealing with the matter told me that most diplomats he talked to felt the same way. But none of us said so in our official telegrams, minutes and letters. Somehow we felt that to do so would be “naïve” or “not done”. Our selves had been subsumed into a broader identity, one that had very little to do with what we each thought but with what we all thought we ought to think.[42]

I have often wondered since then who “we” were to make such judgments about what “Britain” wanted. If even the diplomats involved felt that an injustice was being ignored, what about “ordinary” British people? Would their reaction be that exports were more important than large-scale human misery? The truth is that I do not know. I certainly didn’t know when I wrote the telegram saying what I thought “our” interests were. The British people were never consulted and they never will be.

In theory popular wishes are mediated through parliament where MPs are supposed to hold ministers to account. But the conflictual nature of the House of Commons, like Congress, encourages all parties to focus on those most contentious issues — Iraq, the Euro — rather than on other less fashionable cases like Western Sahara. Rare is the MP who knows about Western Sahara, rarer still the one who raises it in the House or writes letters to ministers. If an MP does raise Western Sahara, he or she will be given a sensible-sounding but very much a stock answer by the minister,[43] prepared by a desk officer like me. If they’re lucky there might be an opportunity for a brief follow-up question, but that is all. Yet the UK’s role as a permanent member of the Security Council is important and has the potential to be crucial, if only it would use it (I now speak as the frustrated campaigner, rather than the cynical insider). In the US the Western Sahara is barely discussed at all, despite America’s enormous potential to influence Morocco.

Take away this democratic input, and it is left to officials more or less to make up what they think “our” policy should be. Ministers of course take the decisions, and theirs is the ultimate responsibility, but the choices they are presented with are invariably premised on exactly the kind of thinking that I have described, i.e. a calculus of what “we”, the state, want, based on an assessment — invariably subjective — of what those “interests” are. The suffering of the Saharawis is not ignored, and I assume that it concerns both the officials and ministers involved, but it is not given the weight of other factors.

The lesson here is obvious and depressing. For the Saharawis it is not enough to have right on their side and enjoy the personal sympathies of those who deal diplomatically with their situation. Somehow they must register on the scale of what matters to states, “interests” and realpolitik. It would be little wonder therefore if groups like theirs (but notably not them, yet), marginalized in the conventional discourse of what foreign policy should be about, were to resort to more violent methods to get noticed.