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Michael Harbottle 1937.
Michael Neale Harbottle was born in Littlehampton, Sussex, on 7th February 1917. Educated at Marlborough College, he was rejected for a place at Britannia Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, on account of bunions, so commenced at Sandhurst in 1935. Captain of cricket at the Academy, he was commissioned into the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry in 1937.
During the Second World War, Harbottle served as a company commander in the Italian campaign, being wounded and MiD. Remaining in the army post-war, he commanded the newly formed 1st Green Jackets from 1959 to 1962, was garrison commander in Aden from 1962 to 1964, commander of the 129th Infantry Brigade (TA ) based in Oxford from 1964 to 1966 and, finally, the chief of staff of the UN Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus. When this tour ended, he was so highly regarded that U Thant, the UN secretary-general, requested that he remain in post. Despite this, the MOD refused to extend Harbottle’s posting, so he retired from the army.
Employed as chief security officer for a British mining company in Sierra Leone, he wrote a book, The Knaves of Diamonds, describing the exploitation of the local population by both big corporations and local militias – ominously predicting so-called blood diamonds and the civil war of the 1990s. From the early 1970s onwards, he became a high-profile peace campaigner as vice president of the International Peace Academy and a visiting lecturer on peace studies at Bradford University. During this time, he collated the Peacekeeper’s Handbook, which is still in use throughout the UN and wrote several books on peacekeeping. A passionate believer in the UN, he stated that the greatest weapon of a soldier at a checkpoint was not his weapon – but his credibility. From 1980 to 1982, he was general secretary of the World Disarmament Campaign and one of the founder members of Generals (Retired) for Peace and Disarmament, bringing together like-minded former NATO senior officers.
In the dying days of the Cold War, the generals met with their Eastern European counterparts to foster cooperation rather than confrontation. After the efforts of the group were praised by the Soviet ambassador to Washington, a whisper campaign began in Whitehall to undermine the group, with some going as far as to call Harbottle a
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