Can foreign policy have foundations in ethics?
Can foreign policy have foundations in ethics?
In view of daily news of military actions in flagrant disregard for international law or any moral principle, an incident from the 1970s could be worth re-visiting.
When David Owen was appointed UK foreign secretary, at the age of 38, he declared in the House of Commons on 1 March 1977 that ‘without respect for human rights we cannot hope for peace and stability in the long run’ and that therefore ‘abuses of human rights, wherever they may occur, are the legitimate subject of international concern’. Within a year, his idealistic stance was to be put to the test.
From June 1976 on, the British government had been making arrangements to sell 12 Saladin armoured cars and three Ferret scout cars to the government of El Salvador. This plan provoked deep distress in many quarters, in view of the proven record of the Salvadoran government in violently suppressing political unrest, especially among farmers, and in assassinating priests supporting the farmers. In The Tablet (22 July 2023), Patrick Hudson told the story of how coordinated action by the Catholic Institute for International Relations (CIIR), Archbishop Oscar Romero and Cardinal Basil Hume succeeded in preventing the export.
The CIIR was able to arrange to have a question on the matter raised in the House of Lords on 8 December: ‘To ask Her Majesty’s government whether human rights considerations were taken into account when the decision was made, as reported in The Times newspaper of 17 November, to sell armoured cars and other military equipment to the government of El Salvador’. When the minister’s answer proved anodyne, Lord Byers, prominent in the Liberal Party and not on the CIIR list to know of the question in advance, was provoked: ‘I wonder if the noble lord could answer the question which was asked?’ This led to a set of lively interventions, with Bishop (as he then was) Robert Runcie, demanding assurance that the cars would not be used ‘in brutally repressive acts against peasant communities’. Lord Brockway, an 89-year-old atheist of the Labour left, stood up: ‘My lords, as the right reverend prelate has put a question on behalf of the peasants, may I put a question on behalf of the Church? Is it not the case that the Church in El Salvador has been brutally suppressed?’
Journalists such as the Sunday Times political editor Hugo Young and Hugh O’Shaughnessy at the Financial Times, kept the armoured cars question in the public eye. The dockers in Woolwich said they would not load them for shipment.
When Cardinal Hume heard that Archbishop Romero of El Salvador hoped that the armoured cars contract cancelled, he wrote both to the Foreign Secretary and to Prime Minister James Callaghan. He argued that ‘that in this deteriorating situation [in El Salvador] the proposed sale of British military equipment which would certainly be used for internal repression runs counter to this assurance [that the UK would express its concern about human rights abuses at a suitable opportunity]. I would further suggest that a cancellation of the proposed sale would provide “a suitable opportunity” for the British government to express its concern…’
Eventually, at a meeting on 18 January 1978 which Prime Minister Callaghan opened by producing a visibly well-thumbed letter from his pocket, the decision was made that armoured cars would not go to El Salvador. The official reason given was that the government could not rely on the Salvadoran government’s assurance that the cars would not be used in support of its ally Guatemala in a possible attack on the British garrison then stationed in Belize. To be frank about acting for ethical reasons, it seems, might have jeopardized future arms sales.
Author
Bernard Treacy O.P.