15th February 1955: A twelve-year-old Sea Cadet trying out a new Sterling Sub-Machine Gun, the weapon at the center of James Edmiston's arms-to-Iraq trial. SOURCE: Reg Speller/Fox Photos/Getty Images[/caption]
Like much in British history, this is a story with two radically discordant sides. On one side are the machinations of a declining colonial power, played out in the grand buildings and verdant suburbs of London, the UK’s capital. Every few years, a new piece of evidence—a new development—in the politically fraught history of Britain’s supply of military equipment to Iraq is unveiled to the public. On the other side is the often-neglected story of a country in many ways the opposite of Britain: a desert country, thousands of miles from the small island in the north Atlantic, torn apart by decades of bloody, armed conflicts and often-brutal dictatorial rule.
It is a convoluted and often contradictory story that goes back to 1930s; the time of both Britain’s border treaty with Saudi Arabia that created modern Iraq, and of Britain’s export control law that was implicated in the government’s ability to legally export armaments to foreign governments. It has seen the fall of governments: John Major’s in Britain, but also of Ba’athist Iraq, which was supplied, legally and illegally, with British-made armaments for more than three decades before being brought down in 2003 by a US-led coalition of forces including the UK. (A 1976 memo from the Foreign Office held by the National Archives in the verdant London suburb of Kew show that during the early years of Ba’athist rule, even before Saddam Hussein became leader in 1979, Britain was supplying millions of pounds' worth of military equipment to the Iraqi government each year.)
By the early 1980s, both countries were changing rapidly. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein had come to power and almost immediately embarked on a long, bloody war with Iran. Somewhat more prosaically, Britain was in the throes of a serious recession, Thatcher was in her first term in office, and a program to privatize nationally-owned industries was just beginning. Among the first of these companies—a test subject—was British Aerospace, the formerly government-owned aircraft and defense-systems manufacturer. While the government no longer had a direct stake in the armaments industry, it remained one of Britain’s largest exports, and so Whitehall was willing to allow the export of non-lethal military goods to suspect regimes abroad even in the face of formal sanctions. By the end of the decade, Britain had become the second-largest exporter of military equipment in the world—up from fifth place in 1980—largely due to Thatcher’s policies.
*****
[inset_right]Clark: Well it's our old friend "being economical", isn't it?
Lawyer: With the truth?
Clark: With the actualité.
-Conservative MP Alan Clarke, testifying at the Scott Inquiry regarding his responses to questions in Parliament over export licenses to Iraq[/inset_right]
In 1983, a shipment of arms nominally bound for Jordan was seized in the London suburb of Greenwich, long the home of both a major London port and a naval college. HM Customs suspected the weapons were bound for Iraq, which was at that time fighting the Iran-Iraq War; Britain was officially neutral in the conflict and supported trade embargoes against both sides. Two men were arrested on suspicion of breaking those sanctions, the former CEO of the Sterling Armament Company, James Edmiston, and arms dealer Reginald Dunk.
It was one the first of a spate of arrests of people suspected of supplying Iraq with embargoed goods—and at first, the accused were presented as mere rogue arms dealers. Eventually, a different story would emerge: the British government had tacitly or actively encouraged the supply of a great deal of non-lethal military equipment. Most famously, it enlisted a machine tooling firm named Matrix Churchill, which due to a near-insolvency had become owned by Iraqis, to collect intelligence in the late 1980s. When the management of that company were brought to trial on suspicion of breaching the sanctions the government famously attempted to rely on public interest immunity certificates to suppress evidence that it had been aware of the shipments, an act that was interpreted as the government scapegoating innocent people to cover up its own involvement.
What followed from these many trials was a long and embarrassing mess for Britain’s Tory government, later dubbed the “arms-to-Iraq” scandal. Its resolution in Britain was almost as jarringly dull and legalistic as the attacks perpetrated by Iraqi forces with British-made military equipment were grievous and sensational. (In an ironic twist, the Iraqi military even used British-supplied equipment against Her Majesty’s Armed Forces, who fought Saddam’s Iraq in both Operation Desert Storm in 1990–1991 and in the 2003 invasion that eventually toppled him.)
A public inquiry was called, headed by Lord Justice Scott. He examined more than 100,000 documents and 200 witnesses to produce a five-volume, 1,800-plus page report that took three years to write. The Scott Report, published in 1996, strongly criticized the behavior of key ministers in the Thatcher and Major governments; the scandal is widely seen as a key reason for the landslide victory of the Labour Party in the 1997 elections. (While Britain was holding inquiry and holding elections, Iraq and its military were engaging in brinkmanship with UN weapons inspectors and the Security Council-endorsed “oil for food” sanctions were causing immense human suffering—and building another scandal that would be uncovered only after the 2003 invasion.) Through the Scott Report, the British public learned that its government had been involved not only in a supposedly-illegal arms trade with Iraq, but also of several obscure instruments that had legalized the deals, and of the involvement of the government in several miscarriages of justice in the trials of several British citizens.
[inset_left]I thought it was extraordinary and unacceptable that legislation brought into being with a view to the emergency of World War Two should be being relied on.
–Lord Justice Scott[/inset_left] The Lord Justice implicated what was supposed to have been an emergency law passed before the outbreak of the Second World War, the Import, Export and Customs Powers (Defence) Act 1939. Under that Act, the government could make orders “prohibiting or regulating . . . the importation into, or exportation from, the United Kingdom . . . of all goods or of goods of any specified description.” It was supposed to have lapsed at the end of that war, in 1945, but the government continued to rely on the Act until it was incorporated into a new export control law in 1990. What was so controversial in the arms-to-Iraq imbroglio was that following the Iran–Iraq ceasefire in 1988, Whitehall had decided to allow exports of certain non-lethal military equipment to Iraq—but it had never informed parliament.
*****
With few windows, the Old Bailey—Central Criminal Court—squats formidably alongside one of the City of London’s main thoroughfares. The only light coming from the building is usually reflected off a statue of Lady Justice perched several stories above the main entrance. Executions were once routinely carried out on the site (then a prison), but while the gallows are history the modern building is hardly welcoming. A sign on the entrance to the public gallery informs the public that no personal items are allowed into the building; a dingy off license over the road offers to hold bags and mobile phones for a small charge. Overall, it gives the impression that this building is not the paradigm of a free and open count, but rather a place where secrets go to be buried.
It was nearly so for both Dunk and Edmiston, who were tried there in 1985. Dunk entered a guilty plea and was fined £20,000; his conviction was quashed in 1994 when evidence emerged that senior Customs and Excise officers had encouraged Iraqi and Jordanian diplomats not to testify at his trial. His reflection on his fight for justice was prescient; he was eventually awarded an unprecedented £2.1 million in compensation by the Foreign Office in 1999, although the government did not admit fault. "I may have lost a few battles in the process,” he said, seemingly playing off the militant theme of his profession and the offense of which he was convicted, “I haven't come out of it all unscathed, but I have won the war.”
Edmiston was the CEO of the Sterling Armaments Company, best known for producing a sub-machine gun that is as famous and glamorous as a weapon could possibly be: it has been featured in the Bond films and is said to have inspired the weapons carried by the Stormtroopers in the Star Wars franchise. After his arrest in 1983 over the shipment detained in Greenwich, he was tried in 1985 and acquitted. During the Scott Inquiry, it emerged that Foreign Office officials had worked with Customs and Excise to prevent key witnesses from appearing at his trial. He was awarded compensation for that suppression of evidence in 2005; others, notably his co-defendant Reginald Dunk and Matrix Churchill managing director Paul Henderson, were also awarded compensation for victims of the miscarriage of justice under a scheme established in 1905.
But in a book published on 15 October, The Sterling Redemption: Twenty-Five Years to Clear My Name, by James Edmiston and Lawrence Kormornick, a new side of the story becomes clear. It shows, at last, a more human side of a scandal that has long been entangled in obscure and technical aspects of the British legal system and constitution, ignoring the human cost both in Iraq and, more modestly, in Britain. Edmiston was forced to sell Sterling due to the charges; he was eventually forced to declare bankruptcy and suffered a divorce in 1990. He details his struggle to find work after the trial, and his tireless crusade to win compensation from the government that manipulated his trial so unfairly. His co-author, Lawrence Kormornick, was also his his solicitor-advocate; he represented a number of the other arms-to-Iraq defendants in their quest for compensation.
There is still an arms embargo on Iraq. It was implemented in UK law to comply with EU and UN measures, and allows the export of military equipment to Iraq for the use of the new Iraqi government or the multinational force, so long as an export permit is secured. The glossy Department of Innovation and Skills website that allows potential exporters to apply for permits online seems like only the latest phase of the sanitized British portrayal of its long involvement in arms deals with the country. It is unlikely that this new book (or the slick BIS website) is the final chapter of the arms-to-Iraq scandal; too many questions remain unanswered. Ministers who were involved in the suppression of evidence at the trials were not only not sacked—they were often later promoted. The compensation scheme was controversially and somewhat suspiciously disbanded without consultation in 2006, a year after Edmiston's compensation package was announced and before several other victims of the scandal were able to claim compensation. Some, including Kormornick, argue that the written announcement by then-Home Secretary Charles Clarke was made in part to prevent further massive payouts from public funds in the wake of the miscarriages of justice. It is to be hoped that eventually, the Iraqis involved with and affected by these exports will tell their story; in the mean time, we finally have a first-hand account of some of the key players.
