Adding Color to Britain’s Military

In World War I, whiskered Lord Kitchener pointed sternly from a famous British army recruiting poster. Now, the “Your Country Needs You” poster is back, but this time it is Ghanaian-born Capt. Fidelix Datson or Warrant Officer Ashok Kumar Chauhan indicating the military future.

Stung by accusations of racism, Britain’s volunteer modern army is deploying public relations and advertising campaigns to improve its image and boost the number of minority soldiers in its ranks.

“We are determined to provide genuine equality of opportunity for everyone irrespective of their sex, marital status, race, ethnic origin, color or religious belief,” said Gen. Roger Wheeler, chief of the general staff.

The goal is that within five years the army should more closely reflect the fact that ethnic minorities make up 7% of British society. Right now, about 1,100 minority soldiers serve in the army--about 1% of the 112,200-member force. In the civil service, by contrast, minorities total about 5%.

“What is stopping minorities joining is that the army is perceived as structurally, if not actively, discriminatory. We have said mea culpa,” Brig. Robert Gordon said. “We’ve had a policy of saying that the army is colorblind, and as a result we never did any monitoring. We have now learned that this is not a good thing to do.”

When Mark Parchment enlisted in the Royal Marines in 1988, he was given a spear, not a rifle, and called “Badingi.”

“Everyone thought it was a great joke, but I felt quite humiliated,” said Parchment, who went AWOL. Caught after five years, he was formally dismissed from the Marines because “his services were no longer required.”

Heir to the throne Prince Charles once complained that there were no black faces among mounted honor guards for the royal family. Richard Stokes was recruited by the Household Cavalry in 1990 but resigned after racial abuse and having bananas thrown at him.

Mark Campbell, the first black in 400 years in the Life Guards, encountered his bed soaked in urine, racial taunts and a note saying, “There is no black in the Union Jack.”

Well-documented cases of blatant discrimination weigh against the army, but spokesman Gordon says the worst of them occurred in the early ‘90s. “Things have changed dramatically in the past two years,” he said.

The Defense Ministry, though, is being sued by 70 former service members claiming physical and sexual assaults during “initiations,” according to the Sunday Times. One was so badly beaten that his face had to be reconstructed. Others were rubbed raw with steel brushes and sprinkled with bleach.

Solomon Raza, an infantry private, tried to hang himself after being harassed during a tour in Bosnia-Herzegovina. “I felt safer out in the field being shot at by Bosnia than in my own camp,” Raza told the paper.

Under the new policies, the army will attack racism and discrimination within its ranks through better education and tougher investigatory and disciplinary procedures, Gordon said. At the same time, it will establish mechanisms through which victims of racial or sexual harassment can appeal.

Similar initiatives are in the works at the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force, he said.

The idea is to open the door to the army wider without formally favoring any group, which is illegal here. New plans include the creation of army teams to investigate complaints and a confidential phone line--staffed by civilians--for soldiers wishing to complain.

The army will also begin recruiting actively, using special teams of minority soldiers to spread the army’s new word.

Spokesman Gordon says the tide is turning. The highest-ranking minority officer in the army now is a full colonel. “But watch this space,” he said. “In another 10 years, we’ll have many more senior minority officers around.”