The Labour leader’s campaigns have provided inspiration for supporters and ammunition for his detractors. Ewen MacAskill takes a close look at the record

Andrew Murray, Jeremy Corbyn’s longtime friend and adviser, ticks off a list of foreign causes that the Labour leader has pursued over almost half a century: Chile, South Africa, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, among others.

For Murray, it is an honourable record, and one that has been distorted or lost amid the abuse and vilification Corbyn has faced since he stood for the Labour leadership in 2015.

The Labour leader has been accused of racism and antisemitism; of being too close to the men of violence. During last year’s general election campaign, the Daily Mail, under the headline “Apologists for terror”, said Corbyn “personally has spent a political lifetime courting mass murderers in the Middle East, Ireland and elsewhere in the world”.

Returning to the theme this week, newspaper articles have implied – in a story subsequently disputed – that Corbyn had paid homage in 2014 to Black September, the Palestinian group responsible for the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes.

Since Corbyn became leader, there have been tensions within his office as well as within the parliamentary Labour party about whether his record on foreign affairs is a negative or a plus.

One school of thought is that he should just shut up about it to avoid attracting the kind of controversy he has faced over the last few weeks, and that, anyway, general elections are won or lost on domestic, not foreign, policy. The alternative view is that Corbyn has a good story to tell and his foreign policy positions are more popular than the political classes believe.

Corbyn has ended up somewhere in the middle, not hiding his record but not shouting about it either, making only a handful of speeches devoted specifically to foreign policy. He delivered one apologising for Labour’s role in the Iraq war, he did another in London during last year’s general election campaign, another in response to the Manchester bombing and one in Geneva in December last year.

He is planning another in the next few months.

For many rightwing commentators, the left lost the ideological battle when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The left, however, counters with a list of foreign policy issues on which it has been proved right, going back to the Vietnam war, and Corbyn’s supporters see him as the personification of this.

For them, he has been a consistent opponent of misguided western military intervention, a supporter of countries and people fighting for self-determination, an advocate of peace through dialogue, totally opposed to violence, and not in thrall to armed struggle.

David Clark, who was a special adviser on foreign affairs to the late Robin Cook, arguably the most leftwing foreign secretary the UK has had, agrees Corbyn has been proved right on many issues. But this is heavily qualified, with Clark dismissing Corbyn’s “simplistic anti-imperialist stance” and what he sees as a reflex response of opposing every western military intervention.

“If you oppose every intervention, you are going to be right from time to time,” Clark said. “Much like a clock that is stuck telling the right time twice a day, Corbyn has been right on some of the issues.”

Murray does not see it like that. “Jeremy has called every major policy issue in the last 40 years – from apartheid to Iraq and Libya – right, when the establishment has been mostly or unitedly wrong,” Murray said.



Latin America

Corbyn’s interest in foreign affairs can be traced back to a trip that straddled 1969 and 1970, taking in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile.

These were heady days on a continent full of drama: military coups, liberation theology and the US secretly conspiring with the right to undermine leftwing governments and movements. In 1969, Corbyn took part in a student demonstration in São Paulo against Brazil’s military dictatorship.

It was Chile, however, that had the greatest impact. He was in the country in 1970 when Salvador Allende, who was on the left, became president. He was overthrown three years later in a brutal military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. Corbyn had found a cause.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Corbyn at an anti-Pinochet demonstration by Amnesty International. Photograph: Martin Argles/The Guardian

By contrast, Margaret Thatcher, on becoming prime minister in 1979, restored diplomatic relations with Pinochet’s Chile, which had been broken off by the previous Labour government. When Pinochet was arrested in the UK in 1998 in response to an extradition request over human rights violations, Thatcher treated him like an honoured guest, visiting him at his temporary home in Surrey.

In his Geneva speech, Corbyn praised Allende and derided Pinochet for turning Chile “into a laboratory for free market fundamentalism”.

Corbyn’s interest in Latin America has never waned. During internal policy discussions, he has often blindsided others by unexpectedly raising issues such as the recent election of the leftwing populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador as Mexican president.

While there is a general consensus that Corbyn has been right about Chile, views are polarised over his unwavering support for the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, a persistent opponent of the US, and his reluctance to criticise his successor Nicolás Maduro.

South Africa



Corbyn was an early opponent of apartheid, serving on the national executive of the Anti-Apartheid Movement. One of the best-known pictures of him shows him being arrested in 1984 for protesting outside South Africa House in London.

He was later exonerated and awarded compensation, which he donated to the Anti-Apartheid Movement and to Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress.

While the late Mandela is now generally venerated, that was not the case in the 1970s and 80s, with Thatcher describing the ANC as a “typical terrorist organisation”.

Corbyn recalled this in a tweet earlier this year opposing Theresa May’s invitation for Donald Trump to visit the UK. “Margaret Thatcher was on the wrong side of history when she supported apartheid,” he wrote.

Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) Margaret Thatcher was on the wrong side of history when she supported Apartheid just as Theresa May is on the wrong side of history today. pic.twitter.com/Ni56Mdx8z1

Thatcher’s position has undergone attempts at revision. Robin Renwick, the British ambassador to South Africa from 1987-91, said Thatcher had opposed apartheid and, behind the scenes, had pressed the South African government to release Mandela.

Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya

One of the keys to understanding Corbyn is the Stop the War coalition, founded less than two weeks after the 9/11 attack. Labour MPs who joined included Tony Benn, George Galloway and Corbyn, who went on to chair it for four years. Murray was also a member.

Stop the War helped organise the London march on the eve of the 2003 Iraq war, one of the biggest protests in British history, and opposed intervention in Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. Corbyn spoke at an estimated 1,000 events around the country, a dress rehearsal for his Labour leadership campaign.

Setting out his opposition to the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, Corbyn put the blame for the rise of the Taliban on America: “The Taliban were formed with US weapons. Al-Qaida was founded by US trainers. What goes around comes around.”

His interest in Iraq predated the invasion. In the 1980s, when the US and UK governments were backing Saddam Hussein in the war against Iran, supplying him with arms, Corbyn was opposed. As an MP, he was among the first to condemn Saddam’s chemical attack on Iraqi Kurds at Halabja in 1988.

He opposed UK military involvement in Kosovo in 1999, Libya in 2011 and Syria in 2015, and described UK participation in airstrikes in Syria this year as legally questionable.

Clark says not all military interventions are necessarily wrong, citing the Nato airstrike on Serbia to protect Albanian Kosovans and the subsequent invasion of Kosovo, which Corbyn opposed.

Clark also argues that the Libyan intervention was well-intentioned, to stop a massacre, and the failure was in the subsequent lack of nation-building.

Corbyn denies he is a pacifist and has said he does not rule out supporting UN military intervention, though the only example he will cite is UN intervention in East Timor in 1999.

Israel-Palestine



Corbyn’s support for the Palestinians has caused him more problems than any other foreign policy issue. A long-time member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, he has been accused of being too close to Hamas, the elected government in Gaza, and to Iranian-backed Hezbollah, the anti-Israeli paramilitary organisation based in Lebanon.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jeremy Corbyn joins protesters at a Remember Gaza demonstration in central London. Photograph: Alamy

His involvement in the Palestinian cause is at the root of accusations against him of antisemitism, which have dominated Labour politics for the last two months. According to one of those close to him, Corbyn has been more upset by this than all the previous vilification campaigns he has faced, believing it is it much more intense and personal.

Some of those around him will say privately they feel he has been the victim of a smear campaign. But even some of these find him culpable for allowing the row to drag on, citing the rewriting of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition.

Corbyn and political violence



Newspapers this week carried stories about Corbyn’s presence at a Palestinian cemetery in Tunis in 2014.

One story read: “A memorial wreath in hand, Jeremy Corbyn stands feet from the graves of terror leaders linked to the Munich Massacre … Buried in the cemetery in Tunisia are members of Black September, the terror group which massacred 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics.”

A number of problems emerged with the story, not least that none of the members of Black September who carried out the massacre are buried in Tunis. Another is that the wreath-laying ceremony was to commemorate members of the Palestine Liberation Organisation who were killed in a 1985 Israeli air raid on Tunis, a raid condemned by Thatcher at the time.

There have been other such stories linking Corbyn to armed groups in the Middle East and elsewhere, including Ireland.

The writer Ronan Bennett, who worked as a research assistant for Corbyn at Westminster in the 1980s, said he had never heard Corbyn support the idea of armed struggle.

“As a leader, Jeremy is not without flaws, and his ideas may not always be fully worked out, but he is principled. He said to me the whole point of engagement is to persuade people to put away the guns,” he said.

Bennett, whose presence at Westminster caused a stir at the time, with him having been a prisoner at Long Kesh in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, said: “He really has only one speech, one theme: that we should all get together and be nice to one another. Jeremy is a kind of vegan, pacifist idealist, one with a clear understanding of politics and history, and a commitment to the underdog.”



One of the charges against Corbyn is that he is hypocritical in presenting himself as an independent arbiter while in fact being an activist. That he is pro-Palestinian rather than neutral. His supporters see no contradiction, arguing it is possible to take a side and still promote dialogue.



Murray said: “He is not a neutral intermediary like Acas [the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service]. Jeremy takes sides in disputes but he also genuinely wants a peaceful solution. It is wrong to suggest he supports violence against anyone.”

Russia

Corbyn came under attack from both Conservative and Labour MPs in March after refusing to blame Russia for the Salisbury nerve agent attack.

He might have got away with such an expression of scepticism a week later. Instead, it created another row, another distraction, including accusations he is soft on Russia.

Corbyn has never been one of those on the left who was close to the Soviet Union.

George Galloway, a friend of Corbyn for 40 years who was also a parliamentary colleague and campaigned alongside him at Stop the War, said: “He was never, unlike myself, pro-Soviet. He is not an orthodox Trotskyist communist. He is more woolly Californian. He has more in common with Michael Foot than Karl Marx. He is a pacifist who will speak to anyone.”

While not an adherent to the Soviet Union, Corbyn is opposed to Nato, which puts him out of line with party policy. He described the US-led coalition as “a danger to world peace”.

He reflects a view common on the left that, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US and Nato had a chance to embrace Russia but instead expanded eastwards, taking in former members of the Soviet bloc.

Clark, who has established a reputation as a Russia specialist, sees Corbyn’s instinctive hostility towards US dominance as problematic. “His simplistic anti-imperialist position leads him to be insufficiently critical of regimes such as Russia. People around him see Putin as a counter-balance to western imperialism.”

Clark said the problem with such an approach was that Putin’s transgressions tended to be overlooked. “The Ukraine crisis is a point in question. Corbyn’s reaction was to blame the aggression on Nato rather than the aggressor. That is the conclusion you come to if you share Corbyn’s anti-western world view.”

Ireland

It is debatable whether Ireland should be on a foreign list, given Northern Ireland is part of the UK. But Corbyn has been a longtime supporter of a united Ireland.

He courted controversy in October 1984 when he invited two former republican prisoners – Linda Quigley and Gerry MacLochlainn, the latter jailed on explosive charges – to the Commons just two weeks after the bombing of the Tory conference in Brighton.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Corbyn with Jerry MacLochlainn (L) and Francie Molloy of Sinn Féin during a march in 1992 to mark 20 years since Bloody Sunday. Photograph: Jim James/PA

In May last year, Northern Ireland again dogged Corbyn. In what can be seen as a prelude to the Tunis cemetery controversy, the Labour leader was asked during a televised election debate about attending a meeting of the republican Wolfe Tone Society in 1987 at which there was a minute’s silence for eight IRA members killed by the SAS.

He said: “The contribution I made to that meeting was to call for peace and dialogue.”

Danny Morrison, Sinn Féin’s former head of communications and a former member of the Northern Ireland assembly, recalls Corbyn visiting them in west Belfast in 1984.

“At no time did he express support or solidarity for the armed struggle,” Morrison said. “The point is, Jeremy Corbyn never ever supported physical force in Ireland. You can have this position and still sympathise with those who died like Bobby Sands. It is scandalous and ridiculous to suggest there is a link between Corbyn and the IRA.”

Such meetings were controversial but Corbyn can claim vindication by revelations the British government was engaged in secret meetings in the same period, a dialogue which eventually brought about the 1998 Belfast peace agreement.

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Corbyn’s campaign team expected from the day he first put himself forward to be leader that his foreign policy record would be picked over by opponents.

One of those close to him, reflecting on the last few weeks, acknowledged it had been tough, but said: “He has been through it before. And he will face it again.”