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The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Mr. William Waldegrave) : I am delighted to have been asked to surrender a littlof my time to allow for the excellent speeches of my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, South (Mr. Thorne) and of the hon. Member for Tooting (Mr. Cox). They have put on record the up-to-date and accurate account of the situation in Romania. I say that I have surrendered my time, because The Observer, which does not understand the procedures of the House, once put me in the "quote of the year" for saying that I had only five minutes to speak in an Adjournment debate on Cambodia.

This has been a short debate, but it is important that both my hon. Friend and the hon. Member should have put their views to the House. There is little that I can add to the historical background that was put forward by my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, South. Both my hon. Friend and the hon. Member spoke of the admiration of the British people for those young people and students who stood up to the authorities in Romania. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, South said, I do not think that we fully understood the extent of the security

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apparatus that the Ceausescu regime had established. It was not like a normal secret police force. It penetrated every area of national life and had a network of informers everywhere. We now know that football teams were members of the Securitate. There was almost a state within a state, which condemned the country to live in perpetual fear. The country was right to live in fear because the slightest sign of dissidence was ruthlessly punished. Western diplomats were roughed up and mistreated in various ways. I was glad to hear the warm tributes paid by my hon. Friend and the hon. Member to the embassy staff and to the ambassador. I should also mention the ambassador's wife and children, who went through extreme peril when, in the middle of the fighting, the embassy residence was destroyed after Securitate people put machine gun posts on the roof. I am glad to record that tribute, and we will pass it on. We share the hon. Gentleman's view of the horrors uncovered at the end of the regime. I do not think that anybody has guessed their extent, in human rights terms or in the scale of the disaster. My hon. Friend referred to the ecological and environmental disaster which has resulted in the establishment of the Ecology party, whose representatives I met. I found it impressive that they could get an environment movement going from a standing start.

The health horrors that have been uncovered were also mentioned. We have seen the appalling account of the AIDS-infected children, abandoned to die without any care. Britain and other countries are taking emergency steps to try to get help. The last time that I spoke to the House about Romania I announced that we were sending disposable syringes. I am happy to announce that we are doing more. We are to contribute another £20,000, which has been requested for training in the handling of AIDS patients. These are small matters, but help has been requested, and we are able to get it there quickly.

I pay tribute to the work done by my local television company, HTV, which filmed some of the so-called mental asylums--they are not asylums but prisons in which brain-damaged children were left to die. The brain damage is largely the result of environmental pollution on the one hand--heavy metals have damaged children--and on the other Ceausescu's appalling and mad policies to make all forms of contraception illegal, and to make abortion illegal. That meant that there was a huge back-street abortion industry, which produced many more abortions every year than live births, and left many brain-damaged live children.

I am happy to announce that we have responded to a project suggested to us by the Marie Stopes International Institute for a programme of family planning, to try to deal with the extraordinary situation in which there were

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300,000 live births in Romania last year and some 1.2 million abortions. It would be awful if, as I fear has happened in some other eastern countries, abortion became the recognised method of family planning. Therefore, we will fund emergency training by the Marie Stopes institute. A project, costing £53,000, is to go ahead straight away. Again, that is a small thing, but it is something that we can do quickly.

My hon. Friend and the hon. Member were quite right in saying that first, major programmes of emergency aid should be put in place, and they have been, largely by the European Community which sent £7.5 million worth of help quickly, and another £27 million package has been agreed since.

All those steps will help with the emergency, but the hon. Member and my hon. Friend are absolutely right. The long-term future of Romania depends on the building of free, democratic and genuine institutions. We cannot run Romania from here and we should not try. The Romanian people must have the democratic institutions to deal with the problem in the long term.

I entirely agree with the hon. Member for Tooting, who used exactly the words that I would have used, when he said that we should not be squeamish about using our power. It would be a betrayal of those people who fought so bravely if we were to allow the gains to be lost and the old gang--as he put it--to get back into power. We have been a little anxious about some of the symptoms of that which appeared during the past few weeks, and we have made our views clear, both bilaterally and through the European Community, whose medium-term economic aid, like our own, is conditional on steps towards the establishment of free economies, democratic institutions, and the rule of law. Commissioner Andriessen has been very good and very stalwart about making it clear that that is so, as did Secretary of State Baker in his brief visit to Bucharest, and so have we. The whole of the western world should make that clear. I entirely agree with what has been said on the subject.

Not everyone in the Salvation Front should be regarded with suspicion. We have had talks with Pastor Tokes, who still allows his name to be lent to that organisation. On the other hand Doina Cornea, who is someone that we greatly rspect, has resigned from it. It is not for us but for the Romanian people to choose who represents them. However, we have the legitimate right under the Helsinki Final Act to insist that those elections are properly conducted and that there is equal and proper access to the media before those elections take place.

The motion having been made after half-past Two o'clock, and the debate having continued for half an hour , Madam Deputy Speaker-- adjourned the House without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order .

Adjourned at five minutes past Three o'clock .

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