Following the collapse of the case against the Matrix
Churchill company executives accused of busting the embargo on military
exports to Iraq, at least four government ministers should resign at once.
Michael Heseltine, the President of the Board of Trade,
Kenneth Clarke, the Home Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, the Defence Secretary, and
Tristan Garel-Jones, a junior Foreign Office Minister, all signed "public
interest immunity certificates” designed to prevent evidence reaching court
showing the extent of Government encouragement of military-related exports to
Saddam Hussein's Iraq between 1987 and 1990. If their efforts had not been
ruled out of order by the judge in the Matrix Churchill trial, the three
defendants could well have gone to prison for long terms.
The ministers say that they were only following orders, that
they were under a legal obligation to attempt to prevent the secret documents
from entering the public sphere. That is hogwash. So too is their claim that
signing the certificates was not motivated by any desire to suppress relevant
evidence. The only conceivable reason for their course of action was to cover
the government's tracks. If any of the four culprits had any decency, they
would already have quit.
Instead, of course, the government has adopted the
time-honoured strategy of announcing a public inquiry into the whole affair. It
hopes that this gambit win turn what is currently a government-threatening
scandal into a dull, technical matter with which the public and the media will
be bored rigid.
Labour's task is to make sure that this does not happen -
and the way to do that is to make sure that the main story is kept constantly
in the public eye.
The story, in case anyone has missed it, is simple. Despite
having announced an embargo on sales of military equipment to both sides during
the Iran-Iraq war, the government did everything in its power to maximise
exports to Iraq, deliberately turning a blind eye to what it knew were exports
with a primarily military use and deliberately taking no notice at all of the
brutality of Saddam's regime.
Meanwhile, it deliberately misled Parliament and the British
people about its policy. Finally, since Saddam's invasion of Kuwait exposed its
encouragement of military exports as, at very least, a monumental error of
judgment, it has continued to go out of its way to attempt to suppress the
truth.
The four ministers caught lying about the relevance of the
secret documents to the Matrix Churchill trial should be only the first
casualties of the scandal. Both the Prune Minister, John Major, and the Foreign
Secretary, Douglas Hard, have played crucial roles in pulling the wool over the
eyes of Parliament since the question of British exports to Iraq was first
raised in the wake of the execution of the journalist, Farzad Bazoft, in 1990.
Even more crucially, Mr Major and Mr Hurd were the
successive Foreign Secretaries responsible for running the disastrous
"arm Iraq" policy from July 1989 to July 1990.
Given that it is extremely unlikely that the two most senior
members of the government will easily resign, let alone face charges for
embargo-busting as they should, it is up to Labour in Parliament to hound them
remorselessly until they are forced out of office. Mr Major's inquiry should
be treated as the attempt to cover up a cover-up that it really is.
