UK launches 83 military interventions since 1945: Declassified UK

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British website Declassified UK published a report by Mark Curtis that documents the UK armed forces' interventions or threats to use military force "much more in the postwar world than is conventionally remembered or believed."

Declassified UK has documented "83 interventions by the UK armed forces since 1945, in 47 different countries," the report said, noting that the most striking of uses of force have been "the overt invasions or armed attempts to overthrow governments such as in British Guiana (now Guyana) in 1953, Egypt in the 1950s, Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011."

The document sheds the light on the "brutal colonial counter-insurgency wars of the 1950s and 1960s in Kenya, Malaya, Aden, and Cyprus" which involved a "widespread use of torture, often insidious operations to displace large numbers of people to control the local population."

"In Malaya between 1948 and 1960, British forces herded hundreds of thousands of people into fortified camps, heavily bombed rural areas, and resorted to extensive propaganda to win the conflict," the report said, adding that "British brutality fighting ‘Mau Mau’ forces in Kenya demanding independence from the UK resulted in tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of deaths, often from starvation in concentration camps."

Colonial Control

This pattern of armed intervention, which was as per the report "of course routine during the nineteenth-century empire", was in the postwar period set immediately after Allied forces defeated Japan and Germany in 1945. 

In the postwar world, Britain’s first interventions "sought to suppress budding, popular movements fighting European imperialism. In 1945-46, British forces intervened in Vietnam and Indonesia to restore French and Dutch, respectively, colonial control. In Vietnam, the British rearmed defeated Japanese imperial troops to fight pro-independence forces."

The deploying force continued over the decades, "notably to prop up favoured regimes. Armed forces were dispatched to Oman (1957), Nyasaland (now Malawi, 1959), Brunei (1962), Anguilla (1969) and Jordan (1970) to bolster pro-British governments being threatened by independence or popular movements."

"In 1964, British forces put down army mutinies in three countries in close succession in East Africa - Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania - to shore up pro-British governments just after they had become independent," the report added.

Read: British academia to soften British colonial violence narrative

Covert wars in Ukraine, Albania, and Yemen

Covert wars "have been planned by Whitehall officials in numerous instances where their strategy would be unpopular at home or controversial abroad. British governments have if anything become less and less transparent about these covert operations over time," the report revealed.

The beginnings after the war were when UK forces aimed "to stir up opposition to emerging communist rule in Albania, Ukraine, and the Baltic States in the late 1940s - operations which all failed to prevent these countries coming under communist control."

Such military operations kept going in the 1950s in Indonesia, "in an attempt to promote a rebellion against nationalist president Sukarno - and in the 1960s in Yemen - in a war to bog down the forces of Egypt’s leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, in which tens of thousands of people died," the report said.

"In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s government executed Britain’s largest postwar covert operation to date, in backing mujahideen warriors to counter the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan," it added.

The strategy did not just involve providing weapons and training for combat inside Afghanistan, it also involved "the sabotage of Moscow’s supply lines inside the then Soviet republics of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan."

The covert wars of the UK have recently proliferated again in view of the unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "In 2011-13, Whitehall planners secretly launched at least four covert wars involving special forces on the ground in Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Mali," according to the report.

Overt intervention

After Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, "the UK acted as the US’ junior partner in a ferocious bombardment of Iraq the following year that destroyed much of the country’s civilian infrastructure."

The two partners' bombing of Iraq lasted for a decade after the Gulf War until the 2003 invasion.

The British military has many times been used to counter threats to favored allies from neighboring countries, "such as the deployment to Kuwait in 1994 to deter a threat from Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and the dispatch of troops to Aqaba in Jordan in 1949."

"The UK intervened at least four times in British Honduras (which became independent as Belize in 1981) - in 1948, 1957, 1962, and 1977 - to deter Guatemala from its claims over the territory. The Falklands war of 1982 - after Argentina invaded the islands - was far from being the first time a Latin American state had claimed territory it saw as a relic of the colonial period," Curtis wrote.

Not included

The report concludes by stressing that the list of interventions is "far from exhaustive," as "it is unlikely to have found all the British military deployments for combat since 1945. Further, it does not include mercenary operations by British personnel, often backed by Whitehall, or purely intelligence operations to overthrow governments."

The report comes simultaneously with revelations ranging from how the heir to the throne Prince William allegedly pushed Harry to the ground in a 2019 row to how he lost his virginity, did drugs and murdered 25 people in Afghanistan sparked both criticism and mockery.

Prince Harry's memoir "Spare" drew condemnation from the media, commentators, army veterans, and even the Taliban on Friday, but Buckingham Palace remained silent on the widely leaked contents.

Harry reportedly admitted in his book that he killed 25 people in Afghanistan. Rubbing salt into the wound, he likened his actions to removing "chess pieces" from a board.

Such acts, if proven, amount to “war crimes”. Harry's revelations were deemed boastful and inappropriate, causing a huge shock and a wave of indignation justified worldwide. 

Harry served in the British military for ten years, all the way up to the rank of captain.

He served twice, first as a forward air controller ordering in airstrikes in 2007 and 2008, and then as an attack helicopter pilot in 2012 and 2013.