Since Glenys Kinnock was parachuted into the House of Lords as Gordon Brown's new Europe minister, there has been understandable media excitement over Open Europe's calculation that, for their 10 years on the EU gravy train, she and her husband were rewarded with more than £10 million in salaries, expenses and pension rights. But little attention has been paid to what Baroness Kinnock was actually doing for our money during her 10 years as an MEP. In various roles, she was much occupied with Africa, and thus became involved in two of the nastiest and longest sagas ever reported by this column. The first was the tragic story of how, since 1996, the Botswanan government has used every means, including shooting and torture, to force the few hundred remaining bushmen off the Kalahari Central Game Reserve (which was constitutionally guaranteed them in perpetuity when Botswana won independence from Britain in 1966). Claiming that the bushmen needed access to modern educational and health facilities, the government herded them into a hellish settlement at New Xade, dubbed by the bushmen "the place of death". In 2002, Mrs Kinnock made a regal visit to New Xade as "EU spokesman" (filmed for an admirable BBC documentary, The Last Dance of the Bushmen), though to local ears it seemed she simply retailed the propaganda of the Botswanan officials accompanying her. When the bushmen's dignified leader, Roy Sesana, rose to give the other side of the story, the microphone was snatched off him. He said later: "She wasted money coming from London. I am crying when she says these things. She should pay the money back." The other horrible story concerns the catastrophe which befell a large rural community outside Nairobi, when in 1989 an Italian company embarked on an EU-funded motorway scheme. Carving right through the settlement was bad enough, but a barrier in the middle of the highway caused dozens of deaths, as villagers tried to jump over it to reach schools, shops, friends and relatives. But much worse was the appalling damage done by the blasting and crushing of a million tons of rock for roadbuilding materials, creating a 97ft-deep crater right in the middle of Rungiri village. Homes and schools were damaged by flying rocks. I spoke last week with Francis Gautugata, a Kikuyu elder, and his niece Rosemary Wambui, recalling how the whole area was carpeted for five years in dense, choking dust, killing animals and crops and leaving some 2,000 villagers with serious health damage. Blasting destroyed the area water table and the quarry filled with water, in which, to date, more than 40 villagers have drowned, many falling from steep rocks while trying to wash their clothes in the only filthy water left to them. When, with the aid of Ann Usher, a Nairobi-based British nurse, the villagers began to plead for help, Glenys Kinnock, as a new MEP in 1994, expressed concern at what had happened and wrote: "I will pursue it". In 1995, a letter to the British government from a senior Brussels official claimed there had been only "minor damage" to a few houses. All who suffered had been "duly compensated"; the villagers had been provided with drinking water; the quarry was now safely fenced off; and a dead boy, Mr Gautugata's nephew, only drowned through "lack of swimming practice". This was all so blatantly untrue that it prompted a storming response from six MEPs, including Mrs Kinnock. They pointed out that the project had clearly been "fundamentally flawed", and that, under the Treaty of Rome, the EU was liable for damage caused by "its servants". It must "accept responsibility" for a "series of failings" which had led to "human misery" and "material harm". Help was pledged by the head of the EU delegation to Kenya, but the promised aid never arrived. In 2002, after I reported this story, the case was taken up by another Labour MEP, Philip Whitehead. Brussels offered to provide two boreholes, which were finally installed in 2006. When Mrs Usher wrote again to Mrs Kinnock, setting out the story in harrowing detail – health problems were worse, villagers were still drowning and being killed on the road – the new head of the local EU delegation, Eric van der Linden, drafted an extraordinary reply. The EU had done all it could to help, he said, implying (in the face of a mass of medical evidence) that most of the compensation claims were bogus. He ended: "There is nothing more to be done on this matter". Mrs Kinnock sent on this chillingly contemptuous letter to Mrs Usher and the Kikuyu community, noting: "I hope this response is helpful." In May, this year Mrs Usher wrote yet again to Mrs Kinnock but received no reply. Now that Baroness Kinnock is our Europe minister, the least she can do is ensure that justice is very belatedly done to those thousands of Africans whose health and livelihood has been destroyed by this disaster which, 13 years ago, Lady Kinnock readily acknowledged the EU had a responsibility, under the Treaty, to make good. Lessons of our Iraq defeat are not being learned Gordon Brown’s announcement of what threatens to be yet another fudged inquiry into the Iraq war neatly followed an admirable piece by Stephen Gray in Monday’s Guardian. Some of our leading defence correspondents were quoted attacking the Government’s ruthless news management over the increasing failure of our military presence In Afghanistan. “We have constantly been told that everything is fluffy and good,” said The Daily Telegraph’s Thomas Harding, “when we and the public have been lied to.” As usual, most of the concern over the latest Iraq inquiry has centred on the well-worn theme of how we got into the war. But the real interest should centre now on how the Ministry of Defence managed to cover up the dismal failure of our six-year occupation which followed. As my colleague Richard North has chillingly set out in his new book Ministry of Defeat, it is astonishing how successful the MoD was in hiding from view one of the most humiliating chapters in the history of the British Army, culminating in our forces being contemptuously ordered out of Iraq last Christmas. Now, as Gray described (and as North chronicles on his Defence of the Realm blog), something very similar is happening in Afghanistan. The MoD and the Foreign Office ruthlessly censor any front-line report which does not conform with their “fluffy” chosen narrative. The new Iraq report could do nothing more valuable than describe how the British people were systematically kept in the dark over what was happening through those six years in Iraq, because it might prevent such duplicity being repeated. But the report won’t contain anything so useful, and the duplicity is already being repeated. The real Iranian opposition is still being ignored It was painfully comical last week to see how the media, led by the BBC and Channel Four News, continued to misread the drama unfolding in Iran. Those vast crowds out on the streets crying “Death to the dictator!” were not supporting the “moderate reformer” Mr Mousavi. They were calling for the overthrow of the whole murderous regime of the mullahs under their Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei. The “opposition” candidate Mousavi is as much a hardline creature of that regime as the “victor” in the fraudulent charade of an election, President Ahmadinajad. The real opposition to the dictatorship, supported by many of the demonstrators – thousands of whom were arrested and imprisoned, many to be tortured, dozens to be shot – centres on the National Council of Resistance in Iran, led by Mrs Maryam Rajavi from exile in Paris. Several times last week, the Supreme Leader acknowledged this in his public statements. But of the NCRI and its largest component, the People’s Mojahideen of Iran (PMOI), there was scarcely a mention in the Western media. Yet in Paris yesterday, tens of thousands of their supporters staged the largest ever demonstration by Iranians outside Iran, supported by hundreds of MPs from all over Europe. Therein lies the best hope of transforming Iran into a secular, democratic, non-terrorist country – if only our media could grasp the real story.When will Glenys Kinnock keep her promise?
She wasted money coming from London. She should pay the money back , says Christopher Booker.
Sunday 21 June 2009
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