Assange: Captive of a captive state

ALL eyes are on London.” These words were much on the lips of fevered British commentators during the 2012 London Olympics, and may be heard again during the London Paralympics. Deep in the British psyche, it often seems, resides a compulsion to proclaim the centrality of Great Britain in human consciousness — and a corresponding dread that the world might have forgotten the existence of the geographical entity otherwise known as the United Kingdom.
Yet not seldom all eyes are on the British capital. Hardly had the 2012 Olympics finished than the international media was camping outside a small London embassy, where the government of Ecuador is giving sanctuary to the director of WikiLeaks, the Australian whistle blower, Julian Assange, whom the Swedish authorities wish to extradite in connection with rape allegations but who has sought refuge above all because he fears he could be handed over to the United States. Not that there is much British rejoicing that London is the present highly publicized address of a cyber warrior whose exposure of US “classified information” has put him high Washington’s “most wanted” list.
It is a curious experience to wander round Knightsbridge, the London district where the Ecuador embassy is situated. With the exception of the police, ethnically British or English people are not greatly in evidence. Indeed, the whole area — famous as the home of the up-market department store, Harrods — is apt to seem like a rainy outpost of the Middle East, thronged as it habitually is by Arabs and Iranians.
It is a bizarre circumstance that an Australian critic of the United States should be immured in a Latin American embassy in the capital of Great Britain, where he is surrounded by people of Middle Eastern background, very many of whom no doubt share his hostility to US foreign policy.
The paradox is that while London has become one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities — and a major center of global media and communications — the country to which it belongs seems ever more inward looking, ever more detached from reality. Assange has become for all practical purposes a fugitive from US “justice” in a land which, while purporting to be a sovereign state, is in many ways nothing but an American satellite, with no more freedom to pursue its own foreign policy than was enjoyed by the “Warsaw Pact” countries under the heel of the erstwhile Soviet Union.
There can be no doubt that when the other day the British Foreign Office threatened to flout international protocol and have Assange arrested inside the Ecuador Embassy, it was in response to the dictates of Washington. Indeed, it is a measure of Britain’s status as a servile US client state that the British Foreign Office could contemplate a course of action whose public articulation has compromised the security of British embassies across the world. Though it has since denied it had any intention of entering the embassy, the mere fact that its government proposed such a gross breach of protocol has done incalculable damage to Britain’s global image — and at a time when the country has been strutting the world stage, flaunting its successful stewardship of the Olympics.
In so far as the Assange affair has been discussed in the British media, it has been mainly in relation to the issue of the rape allegations that have been brought against him, with many suggesting he has incriminated himself by evading the British government’s efforts to comply with the Swedish government’s extradition request. It is true that Assange needs to answer the allegations. Yet why should he be required to travel to Sweden to do so when no formal charges have been brought against him and when he has no guarantee that he might not rapidly find himself in US custody, with the prospect of facing indefinite detention, or worse? Why could not the Swedish authorities come to Assange? Alternatively, why could he not be interviewed via a video link?
What makes a mockery of the British government’s insistence that it is bound to abide by international law and respect its extradition arrangements with Sweden is that in an earlier controversy over extradition, 12 years ago, Britain declined to accede to Spanish attempts to extradite the ex-military dictator of Chile, Gen. Pinochet, despite overwhelming evidence that he was guilty of crimes against humanity.
The truth is that it is far less uncomfortable for the British media to discuss Assange in connection with claims of sexual misconduct than to acknowledge what his predicament implies about Britain’s diminution as a sovereign state. For the issue of Britain’s grotesquely unequal relationship with the United States is effectively inadmissible in public discussion. Indeed, it is an issue about which British politicians and not a few British people are in a state of chronic denial. And after all, who readily confesses to having no choice but to do as they are told? It is especially pathetic that British governments scarcely need to wait for Washington’s orders. Their obedience — consider Prime Minister David Cameron’s instant echoing of US President Barack Obama’s threat to take military action in Syria if it employed weapons of mass destruction — is automatic.
Following the demise of the Soviet Union, the US and the West celebrated the triumph of the free world, of the so-called “open society”. Yet for all that its capital remains a world city, Britain is surrendering its credibility as an open culture. Increasingly, it is country with a stifling atmosphere where much cannot be publicly uttered. The old boast about Britain as the “home of liberty” has become risible. Imprisoned in Ecuador’s London embassy thanks to a foreign power, Julian Assange symbolizes among other things Britain’s own captive condition.