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Animals may be at risk from unexploded mines. The region is at best economically marginal and we should be keenly aware of the consequences.There will be a huge consequential effect on marine life. The world often ignores marine pollution even when we take account of land pollution. It is an example of out of sight, out of mind. Wildlife, fish and marine ecosystems will inevitably be damaged and the time scale for their recovery is uncertain. Previous spillages in the Gulf have added to the present problems.
Lastly, there appear to be direct consequences in the form of sand encroachment, not least through sand storms, as a result of the disruption to the ecology of the middle east. That will have an effect on human settlements and agricultural settlements. We must pay full cognisance to that.
It is easy for us, in the comfort of an unaffected western society, to underestimate the consequences of environmental disruption., The results mean literally life or death for those who live much closer to nature than most of us in this society ever do.
Secondly, we need to have equal concern about the consequences of oil spillage and oil slicks. It seems that 3 million to 7 million barrels of oil have been discharged into the Gulf. Minimum bird mortalities are estimated at 10,000 ; the estimated current maximum is 20,000 birds. These include cormorants, grebes and potentially will include migrants which arrive in due course. There will be an effect on the fishing and shrimp industries as a result of the oil spill. The mud-flats will be affected. A series of beings in the food chain of the marine ecosystem are, without any doubt, affected already as a result of the oil spillages. The results are dramatic. Desalination plants are at risk. Most importantly, there is unknown damage to the coral reefs in the middle east. Power stations and palaces can be rebuilt but coral reefs cannot. They are the rain forests of the sea. They support hundreds of species. They are a vital link in the food chain. We do not even know the damage that has been wrought to the reefs.
Thirdly, we know that Iraq and Kuwait were effectively a chemical and petrochemical cocktail. It is possible that 26 toxic substances have been released from petrochemical and other industries as a result of the conflict. I, too, pay tribute to the Medical Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons and the work that has been done so far, but we do not know yet how many plants, refineries and storage tanks have been damaged. My right hon. Friend the Member for Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale (Sir D. Steel), the former leader of the Liberal party, has expressed concern about the damage that would be caused by the release of toxic substances. There has been disruption of low-grade nuclear facilities in Iraq, and it is likely that there is contamination in small areas around those plants. Ground and drinking water must be monitored urgently, especially in Baghdad where the risk to human health is the greatest.
Mr. Jeremy Corbyn (Islington, North) : The rationale for bombing chemical weapon and biological weapon establishments was that the intense fire that ensured would destroy the contents within the establishments. I have always thought that to be an extremely dangerous rationale. There was no guarantee that that would happen.
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There is no way in which we can monitor the fall-out. The experience of Halabja tells us that fall-out can continue for quite a long time after the event.Mr. Hughes : I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman. It is one of the areas in which the evaluation of the consequences of military activity was never properly undertaken.
That leads me to the political conclusion, which I want to reach in a way that will give support to the motion of the hon. Member for Linlithgow. The Government have given £1 million to the International Maritime Organisation and three oil skimming vessels to the Government of Bahrain. I congratulate them on doing that, but that response was inadequate and belated. When I saw the European Environment Commissioner in Brussels before Christmas I told him of my concern that European governments and the European Community had not considered formally how it might anticipate what might happen to the environment in the middle east. I fear that we did not anticipate what might happen.
On 6 February, the Secretary of State for the Environment wrote a letter entitled
"Oil spills in the Gulf"
to all hon. Members. In it he said :
"It is impossible to anticipate or prevent all acts of this kind." Of course it is impossible to anticipate or prevent all--I stress all--such acts. It may have been impossible to prevent Saddam Hussein spilling the oil. However, it was not impossible to anticipate his doing that, but the international community did not anticipate or prepare for that eventuality.
Mr. Jacques Arnold : The hon. Gentleman said that the Government's contribution to the International Maritime Organisation's international trust fund of £1 million was belated. How can it be belated if we were the first country to make a contribution? It is impossible to get much further up the pecking order than that.
Mr. Hughes : My point is that the Government's response to the possible environmental situation in the middle east was months late. Nothing happened until the oil was spilt and fires occured. Hardly any work had been carried out before.
Mr. Arnold indicated dissent.
Mr. Hughes : It is no good the hon. Gentleman shaking his head. No work was carried out. If he can prove that work occurred, I should be interested to hear the evidence. We reacted after the event when we should have reacted before. I should be happy to let the hon. Gentleman intervene if he can provide the House with evidence that this country reacted and was prepared.
Mr. Arnold : I was responding to the specific point about the IMO and the fact that Britain made the first contribution to the fund.
Mr. Hughes : Our reaction to the environmental catastrophe in the middle east was belated because that catastrophe could and should have been anticipated. We failed in that respect.
Mr. Dalyell : It must also say something about Parliament when, in debates following the Consolidated Fund Bill, hon. Members plead with the Government to
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act. It is not a matter of hindsight. The matter was foreseeable and foreseen, predictable and predicted. To that extent, a certain amount of recrimination is justified.Mr. Hughes : I entirely agree. The call for the world to be prepared for the consequences of the political decisions taken last year did not simply come from this House.
There are billions of pounds worth of contracts now up for grabs in the middle east. I do not know how many of them are for environmental improvements. This country leads the world in marine and terrestrial pollution technology. We have the best qualified people to carry out an environmental impact assessment of the damage in the middle east. Such a course was proposed by the global environment research centre at Imperial colleage, and I invite the Minister to agree that we should make such an offer to provide those people.
When the Secretary of State for the Environment meets Environment Ministers in the Environment Council next week, I suggest that he proposes that such an initiative should be set up, which perhaps Britain could offer to lead, to collaborate on behalf of the European Community with the relevant states in the Gulf and carry out that environmental impact assessment. He should suggest to his European Community partners that in each Community country and in the Community as a whole we should set up a liaison body with the Governments of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere including, if possible, Iraq to facilitate the necessary environmental work. If the City-Kuwait group could be set up in this country to facilitate contracts for rebuilding the physical environment of the middle east, for heaven's sake we should be able to set up a similar body to provide money for the environmental reconstruction of the area. We can of course use the IMO as a clearing house for anti-pollution advice and for environmental rescue measures. However, we should do more than that. More money is needed and I am not alone in making that statement. It is supported by the world conservation centre, an arm of the United Nations Environmental Programme, which has stated :
"Every effort is being made however lack of available funds, shortage of staff and lack of equipment is limiting progress." We must all be aware that Kuwait is effectively starting absolutely from scratch.
I also want to repeat a point that I put to the Secretary of State during the war in the Gulf--a point that he was courteous enough to say he would consider. We should stop being reactive and start being pro-active. We should learn from the lesson of our failure to have in place an agency that could be more effective on the environmental issues.
The United Nations Environmental Programme should be strengthened to become the United Nations environmental protection agency. It should, by a further Geneva convention, have the same protection, responsibility and authority as the Red Cross or the Red Crescent. It should be able to enter areas of conflict to protect the environment, just as others go in to protect the injured and the ill. If there has been a sea change in the Conservative party's attitude to Europe, there is an opportunity next week for the Secretary of State for the Environment to make that change clear with his partners in respect of this most important issue on the environmental agenda. Unless we react coherently and immediately, we risk famine as
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marine and terrestrial food stocks diminish in the middle east. The refugee crisis and the human suffering will be worse.There should be no argument about the matter. Only when we have acted in such a way shall we be able to answer the question asked by the hon. Member for Clwyd, North-West ; only when we have responded to and dealt with the environmental catastrophe shall we be able to judge whether Operation Desert Storm was a success. If we do not follow the military action with environmental rescue, that operation may be a very costly failure.
11.27 am
Mr. Peter Bottomley (Eltham) : The motion moved by the hon. Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell) has been helpful. I hope that this debate will have the consequences requested by the hon. Member for Southwark and Bermondsey (Mr. Hughes), although I do not suppose that that can be said about every debate in which the hon. Member for Linlithgow and I are involved.
Action on the European level is one of the ways in which we can achieve an international grouping. I am sure that the House would agree that such a grouping is necessary. I am touched by the fact that I have a copy of a similar proposal from a committee of experts on road safety led by Mr. Christian Gerondeau and other European experts. This proposal suggests how to reduce the number of road casualties. It is of interest because in the United States and the European Community combined over the next five years we will kill 500,000 people on our roads.
In parenthesis, perhaps I should draw a contrast between the human costs of war and the toll on our roads. During the Falklands conflict in which the hon. Member for Linlithgow was interested, 255 British service men were killed. Over those same weeks, 311 British motor cyclists died. One group received a memorial, but the others did not. In the year before I went to serve in Northern Ireland as a junior Minister, 183 people there were killed on the roads and 63 people lost their lives as a result of bombs and bullets.
If one could wish away war or the loss of life on roads, one would wish away war because it does more than cause loss of life and change to the environment and in this case, sadly, to the ecology. It is also an obstacle to what people in the Catholic Church call the preferential option for the poor, which is that when one has a choice of making life easier for the rich or making it easier for the poor there is an obligation to help those who are worse off. War is an obstacle to prosperity and, by definition, it is the opposite of peace. There will not be justice or development while there is war. The European Community has taken a useful initiative aimed at reducing road casualties, like the 5 million ecu going towards a similar approach to deal with the environment. It will also be useful. In part, they will be useful because they can bring together the pathfinders and the scouts and enable them to put on the pressure to ensure that we overcome what was described in a recent article in The Financial Times as the biggest plague on this earth. That is AIGS--apathy, ignorance, greed and stupidity.
It is most important that ignorance is overcome, and for that reason I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Minister. As well as being able to answer some of the questions put by the hon. Member for Linlithgow, and
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those that will no doubt be asked by subsequent speakers, he will be able to tell us how to build on what has been done. It is good to know that Britain has been leading the way within bodies such as the International Maritime Organisation. That does not deal with the query about whether our help was early enough or whether more could have been done by, for example, using booms. These details do not matter as much as raising the awareness of the opportunity to reduce avoidable disadvantage, distress and handicap. That must be what was underlying the interest shown by the hon. Member for Linlithgow. A long time ago, under a previous Government, the hon. Gentleman and I used to meet occasionally to play tennis. We did not quite get to the point of playing without a net in the way that we did a week or so ago after an intervention of mine. Since my last, somewhat truncated, discussion with him, I have been to El Salvador to observe the elections and to help the country to establish an electoral system. That in turn will help to end the civil war.El Salvador may not have the ecological problems that have been thrown up by the conflict in the Gulf but in a country with a population smaller than that of London, 75,000 people have been killed since I first went there 13 years ago. That murdering went on without being awarded the attention of the House or other bodies. It has been called the country where Catholics kill priests, such as Archishop Oscar Romero, who was once one of the saints of this world, and the six Jesuits and their two household staff, who were taken out and had their brains blasted out on the lawn of the university that they had set up. That was in the best university in central America. There is evil in people, and that evil needs to be confronted. We could debate how that could be done, but the important thing is to overcome it. There are good people who are trying to cope with it. That often means saying inconvenient things that are sometimes unpopular and may not even be right. If we all kept quiet until we could be convincing because we had evidence to produce, we should never get anywhere and there would be no need to have a Parliament. Every one of the 160 or 170 countries has a Government. There is no problem with that, but the difficulty is being able to tell one's Government that they have got it wrong and that there is an opportunity to get it right or to suggest that the country goes in for some collaborating, risk taking or co-operation.
In issues such as the environment and the ecology, it is clear that what appear to be simple solutions will not work. When the oil was deliberately being poured into the Gulf, booms around the affected area would not have been of any help because that area was not controlled by the coalition forces, although it was later on. Booms would have been helpful in places such as Bahrain or anywhere with a desalination plant. However, that is only a detail and my contribution will not be valid if I concentrate on picking up such points.
However, perhaps I may be allowed to pick up a possible answer to the question that I put to the hon. Member for Linlithgow. I asked him about the extra consequences of the localised, partial combustion in a concentrated area, as compared with the more complete combustion of the refined product spread around the
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world in our motor cars, in our power stations or our central heating systems. That is the question that the scientists should address.Mr. Dalyell : The question is about to what extent the soot rises towards the stratosphere. If it goes high, the monsoons could be affected, with terrible consequences for the food chain for millions of people. If it goes low--nobody knows how it will behave--the regional effect would be concentrated and terrible.
Mr. Bottomley : That is the question. I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who allowed me to intervene in his speech to put my question. Others may be able to answer it during the debate. One of the reasons for reading the New Scientist over the years has been the hon. Gentleman's column. If more people were aware of that column, more people would be willing to hear his unasked-for guidance so that he would have more opportunity for getting allies. He does not need help in getting attention for his views. I had the misfortune, or the fortune, when the Parliamentary Private Secretary to my right hon. Friend the Member for Woking (Mr. Onslow) when he was a Minister at the Foreign Office after the tragedies in the south Atlantic, of hearing him.
It is not for me, as a junior Member of Parliament, to give the hon. Member for Linlithgow too much gratuitous advice on how to create coalitions and alliances. However, if we more often heard from him speeches that we could support, we would achieve more together than we would by making personal and partisan remarks. Sometimes, those remarks are provoked, but we should not give in to such provocation because there are better ways and higher levels of debate. We could not be criticised as being the members of the awkward squad.
One of my pastimes is buying books written and printed in the middle and late 1930s. It is interesting to read what people were saying in Germany and this country and to see why we allowed ourselves to be treated in the way shown in the Low cartoon of 1936. It showed the League of Nations cowering in the corner away from one, aggressive looking man--Hitler.
The issue that is not at stake in today's debate, but underlines our consideration of the subject, is whether it would have been possible to persuade Saddam Hussein not to invade Kuwait. Although Saddam Hussein has been involved in other activities before that, in Iran, with the Kurds and with the majority of his population, who have never had much opportunity for a say in the political direction of their country, the war started on 2 August with the invasion of Kuwait. We shall never know whether it would have been possible to persuade him to live up to his promise not to invade. The right hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr. Benn) went to see Saddam Hussein in the autumn of last year. He could not persuade Saddam to get out of Kuwait. Sadly, that argument did not work, but could we have achieved its purpose in other ways?
Having prevented Saddam Hussein from moving on to take Saudi Arabia after Kuwait and, presumably, moving on to his way of resolving the Palestinian issue--with all that that means for the Israelis' fears about their future would it have been possible to stop a third world war starting? I believe that there was no prospect of stopping Saddam Hussein's aggression, other than joining the war which he started. I say that with no pleasure.
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On Saturday, I was in a village in El Salvador, where I talked to people about their elections. I was there when small arms fire broke out. That reminds me of the newspaper headline, "Small earthquake in Peru--no one hurt." No one was hurt in those 15 minutes at Los Ranchos, near Chalatanango. We crouched on a site near where mortars had fallen two or three days before. The next day, I was with a doctor near another place where a mortar had fallen. The mortars in El Salvador had no more military purpose than the Scuds that were sent to Tel Aviv and Riyadh.It is frightening to be under fire. It is ghastly for those who have to go through it. It is to be avoided if possible. With Saddam Hussein, it was not possible. I hope that we can now clear up the consequences of his actions. I hope that it is possible for Iraq to reach the stage of choosing its own Government and that there are not the massacres in Iraq, as people fight for political control, that, sadly, have occurred in El Salvador and many other countries. Most hon. Members present are the type of people who are involved in Amnesty International, trying to stop individuals being persecuted, or in aid organisations. There is an hon. Member here who served with Voluntary Service Overseas and one who was a director of a charity involved in such work. I spent six years as a trustee of Christian Aid. None of us is under any illusion about the amount of misery and hardship faced by people because they have not had a chance to have a political system that delivers peace, prosperity and justice. This is a never-ending quest. I suspect that in 10 or 20 years' time we shall have the same debates about the same problems. We cannot turn our back on what is happening. Every one of us has a responsibility to do as much as any other person. The hon. Member for Linlithgow can be given credit for having done more than any of us for the environment and the ecology.
11.42 am
Mr. Jeremy Corbyn (Islington, North) : In opening what I hope will be a brief contribution, I put on record my warm tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell) for choosing this subject for debate and for his consistent work on the environment in the middle east and the potential catastrophe that a war there would cause. My hon. Friend outlined the matter well in an Adjournment debate before Christmas, detailing the consequences for the environment in the region of oil spillages, burning oil wells and chemical and biological warfare during a conflict. My hon. Friend deserves full credit for doing that.
My hon. Friend has stood out on many issues at many times, often from a lonely position. It is a credit to him that he stood up to much of the nonsense said about him and that he pointed out the truth of many issues, such as that of the Belgrano and what is happening now. I remember standing beside him in Trafalgar square when he said that the words "I told you so" were not very becoming to politicians. In this case, my hon. Friend has a right to use those words. He predicted what would happen if there was a war in the Gulf. He should be applauded, respected and listened to for doing that.
In considering the history of the region and the consequences of the war, we should cast our mind over history, including its more recent history. Only three years ago, the problem of the Kurdish people in northern Iraq
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was brought to the world's headlines when chemical weapons were used against them in the village of Halabja. That was not the first time that chemical weapons were used against the Kurdish people by Iraq's first army and it was not the last.Several of us raised protests in the House. The Government protested and raised the issue of chemical weapons at a conference held in Paris in September 1988, but they did not take action on Britain's relationships with Iraq. I clearly recall a delegation of which I was part, with my hon. Friend the Member for Leyton (Mr. Cohen), the then general secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Meg Beresford, members of the National Peace Council and several Kurdish people, which went to the Foreign Office to ask exactly what the Government's policy was. We strongly pointed out the carnage that was occurring in Halabja through the use of chemical weapons, the destruction of Kurdish villages in the north of Iraq, and the forcible movement of Kurdish people to the south of Iraq. To be fair to the Minister, the right hon. Member for Bristol, West (Mr. Waldegrave), he agreed with us about the horror of the use of chemical and biological weapons and said that they were illegal under the terms of the 1925 Geneva protocol. He did not agree that the British Government should stop supplying trade and credits to Iraq. We believed that the British Government should stop subsidising trade with Iraq and should stop allowing other countries to export weapons to Iraq. There was a ban on the export of weapons from this country, but the funding of trade with Iraq gave that country hard currency with which it could buy weapons elsewhere.
I have a plan, which was produced in the Bangkok Post early in February and which was recently sent to me, showing that weapons came from the USSR, France, China, the United States, West Germany, Brazil, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Chile, Jordan, Spain, Egypt, South Africa, Switzerland, Libya, Austria, Saudia Arabia, Romania and Kuwait, which sold Iraq 50 tanks. Iran has been selling Iraq weapons since the end of the war between those countries. We should think carefully about relationships and the trade between countries. The problems in Iraq are a consequence of those relationships.
The environmental problems to which my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow referred are not new--there have been such problems in Iran and Iraq for a long time, although they are much worse now because of the war. In much of the reporting of and discussions about the war and its consequences, people have deliberately forgotten the role played in modern civilisation by the Mesopotamia valley. In many ways, it is the cradle of civilisation. The Tigris and the Euphrates have brought much learning and much discovery to the world. They brought agriculture to the world when there was no proper agricultural system in this country. There were universities in Baghdad long before they existed in this country. Iraq is a place of enormous civilisation and much learning, but much of that was ignored during the war because it did not fit in with the image presented when some people wanted to go to war against that so-called dangerous regional power.
More recently, there have been environmental problems in the area. There have been endless discussions and disputes about the use of water from the Tigris and Euphrates and about who draws off water at certain places. During September, when I was in eastern Turkey, I travelled to Diyarbakir and down to Cizre, on the
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frontier with Iraq. I looked at the problems of water supply and at the over-irrigation that occurs in certain parts of south-east Turkey and northern Iraq. The drawing off of too much water leads to problems further down. There will be continual conflict on environmental matters in the region until the problem of water supplies and the sharing of those supplies is resolved. Future wars in the region could be about water, as this war was, I believe, about oil.We must also recognise that there is fundamental political instability in the region. It stems from the attitude taken at the end of the first world war, at the time of the Versailles conference and the treaty that followed it. The treaty envisaged the right to self-determination for the peoples in the region. I believe that it acknowledged implicitly the rights of the Armenian, Kurdish and Palestinian people to have their own states. Those wishes were denied because of the creation in 1922 of modern Turkey and its frontiers and because of the British operation of the Palestinian mandate. They were denied partly because of British and French political activity in the area and because of the drawing of the modern frontiers. I believe that those frontiers will be a cause of future instability. We should also remember that the Royal Air Force took part in the bombardment of Kurdish villages in 1922 and used chemical weapons to bomb Kurdish people who were fighting for their liberation in 1922 in northern Iraq. That is not very long ago in the mind of a historian or in the popular memory of the people of Kurdistan, who feel bitter about what the RAF did in 1922 and about the damage caused to their community and their environment. We must recall those issues in our discussions about the war.
I opposed the war, and I continue to do so, because I believe that it was the wrong way to solve the conflict. I regret the consequences that we are now seeing--the loss of life of American and British soldiers, of conscripted soldiers in Iraq, of the Republican Guard and of hundreds of civilians in towns and villages all over Iraq. The latest figure of the total number of dead in Iraq is likely to be more than 140,000. The idea that we should hold a victory parade in the near future is distasteful.
War is a disaster in terms of costs, for the environment, for the people of the region and for the region's political systems. The environmental disaster was predictable. Oil slicks at sea caused by the bombardment of tankers and the deliberate setting off of oil well sluices by Iraqi forces have caused terrible environmental carnage throughout the Gulf, as my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow said. The slicks will destroy sea algae, sea mammals, fish and the ability of sea plants to produce oxygen, which will result in the deoxidation of the sea. It is possible that the sea, or at least a part of it, will be dead.
The burning of the oil wells, which is likely to continue for years, will blot out much of the sun. That will damage the ability of Kuwait--and especially that of southern Iraq--to produce the necessary food. Clearly, that will cause long-term problems. There are already health problems in Kuwait, in Basra, in Baghdad and in other cities in the area. Any community that relies on a centralised water supply and sewage disposal system is vulnerable to air attack. That must have been known when the American
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and British air forces carried out their bombardments. The destruction of the sewage facilities and of the water system will quickly lead--if it has not already done so--to the growth of cholera and other diseases in the area.We are dealing with a complete disaster, but our ability to cope with it and to get relief and aid to Iraq and Kuwait is clearly hampered by the lack of a political settlement. I am worried that the political complexion of the area is being decided by the United States on the basis of its own interests rather than according to the needs of the people of the area. Until there is a political solution and the Kurdish and the Palestinian peoples have a right to self-determination, the political conflict will continue. The environmental destruction will continue as the lack of resources in the area means that oil well fires are not extinguished, water supplies restored and sewage disposal systems repaired. There should be a massive deployment of resources to resolve those problems. From August, however, there was such a massive deployment of resources to the region. To date the conflict has cost Britain £3 billion--it will cost the United States much more. I accept that Kuwait has offered to pay towards the cost, but, in that sense, it all becomes mercenary. Such expenditure is distasteful when millions of people face starvation in Africa. Similar resources have not been deployed to save them.
The middle east is facing an environmental disaster, but countries have been unwilling to offer adequate resources to stem the flow of oil and to put out the fires. There must be a commitment to protect that environment.
People in the poorer countries witness the determination of the west to get involved in military conflicts and to gain commercial advantage from them. That advantage is being gained at this moment in the city where the reconstruction contracts for Kuwait are being shelled out. The victims of Bhopal have been ignored. The landless people of Brazil believe that they have been thrown out of the Amazon rain forest because of the logging operations of multinational corporations. Those people believe that the only thing in which the western industrialised countries is concerned is self-interest and looking after their own political power.
I hope that this debate will draw attention to the deep concern throughout the country that the environmental consequences of the Gulf war will be horrific, not just for the immediate area, its people and wildlife, but for the rest of the world. If the oil-induced cloud continues, the effect on rainfall throughout the region will be considerable--it will have a similar effect on the Indian sub-continent.
Once one starts upsetting a climatic system, the effects know no boundaries. I hope that the Minister will demonstrate a true commitment on the part of the British Government to get resources into the region to resolve some of the environmental disasters we are now witnessing.
11.56 am
Mr. Jacques Arnold (Gravesham) : I am most grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell) for initiating the debate. I describe the hon. Gentleman as such advisedly. He has many obsessions, most of which I do not share, but I share his obsession for the tropical rain forests of Latin America and with the ecological consequences of the Gulf war. However, sometimes the
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hon. Gentleman seems to be an outrider for the Apocalypse. We must put the problems of the Gulf in context and then we must tackle them.The World Conservation Monitoring Centre has undertaken a useful assessment of the situation in the Gulf. In its briefing paper, prepared a few days ago, it states :
"The smoke cloud is relatively low with a ceiling of 10-15,000 ft. This is not high enough to affect stratospheric climate circulation, so predictions of widescale disruptions of rainfall and monsoon patterns are exaggerated Many of the wells in the Saudi/Kuwait Neutral Zone require pumping to bring the oil to the surface". It says that the fires that are now disfiguring the middle east will soon die out through lack of fuel. It also states that the soot that has been thrown up by those massive fires is harmless, but "black rain frightens people."
We must assess the problems that we face and we can and must tackle them. It is worth recalling the cause of the ecological disaster in the Gulf. It can be summed up in two words, Saddam Hussein. That brutal and callous President of Iraq is still at large. He caused the ecological disaster because of the way in which he went about his business. We should have known that man for what he was, as he showed no compassion for human life when he gassed the Kurdish people. However, he understands international media and opinion and he knows that we care about the environment. He let loose his dreadful action because he knows that we care about the birds, turtles, dugongs and fish to be found in the Gulf region and he hit us where it hurts. We must consider, first, the problem of the oil slick caused by Saddam Hussein on Friday 26 January when Iraqi troops deliberately released 300,000 tonnes of oil into the Arabian Gulf in an attempt to contaminate Saudi Arabia's desalination plants and hinder the allied war effort. The damage has been extensive. His action created an oil slick 80 miles long and 14 miles wide--one of the largest ever known. The oil came from the Iraqi shelling of Khafji oil tanks, the deliberate release of oil from tankers and sea terminals at Al Ahmadi and Mina al Bakr, and from the offshore platforms in Iraq and Kuwait, both under his control at that time. Secondly, in the final week of Saddam Hussein's occupation of Kuwait, he set alight the Kuwaiti oil fields and caused 650 separate fires.
Clearly, we must understand the problem and tackle it. In the case of the oil slick, the World Conservation Monitoring Centre boiled the matter down to facing and coping with the scale of the problem. It tells us :
"The slick along the Saudi coast has shown virtually no movement for the last two weeks. It is now packed into Musallamiyah Bay, held by booms and sand barriers to the south of Abu 'Ali--it is present as hundreds of acres of solid oil, 5-6 inches deep' ".
We must tackle that problem and the problem of the other oil slicks and patches, although those are on a much smaller scale.
The centre's brief on the ecological problems and the oil clean-up is specific about the scale of the problem and what must be done. Its report that very little co-ordinated action is being taken to clean up the area is worrying. It says :
"Every effort is being made by MEPA and volunteers to rescue and clean birds of oil and to clean oil from shores. However lack of available funds, shortage of staff and lack of equipment is limiting the progress. Meanwhile, little is being done other than putting out booms around key industrial sites
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and desalination plants. Only some 40- 50,000 barrels have been recovered. The problem is lack of equipment and lack of cash." Time and again, it returns to lack of resources. I welcome the International Maritime Organisation's newly established international trust fund to clean up the Gulf.The House can take pride from the fact that Britain made the first donation of £1 million. We still need instant donations from the undamaged Gulf states--Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and the Emirates--which are most concerned with the current problems. Britain has not been backward in coming forward, not only with cash but with technical support. The Department of the Environment has sent pollution control and ecological experts to help in the Gulf. The Government have ordered three oil recovery skimmers, worth £300,000, to be sent to Bahrain, and 90 tonnes of anti -pollution
equipment--mostly booms--from industrial stocks held in Britain were flown out at the end of January when the scale of the problem was identified.
We can also take pride from the work of our Meteorological Office, which has adapted its computer models to give the best possible predictions of the likely behaviour of the oil slick. It is also analysing the impact of the oil fires' smoke clouds. Will my hon. Friend the Minister and the Department find ways of assisting the Meterological Office with the practicalities to enable it to observe those filthy clouds? It needs to take measurements on this unprecedented phenomenon.
The Department of Trade and Industry should also be commended for the work that it has done. It has got its act together and produced an admirable publication "Restructuring Kuwait", which is subtitled :
"Proposed United Kingdom contribution to the reconstruction of Kuwait."
I was glad that one section of the publication is devoted to environmental protection and United Kingdom companies' experience and involvement in Kuwait and the Gulf.
The document states :
"UK companies have experience in toxic/flammable gases, clean-up of oil and chemical spills, assessing the stability of sites and structures, determination and monitoring of ecological damage, effluent and groundwater pollution problems, water system sterilisation and requirements for the general decontamination of the site and those parts of the installations that can be salvaged or retained. Effective product management and control are essential factors in the successful execution of these tasks. UK companies with specialists in these fields are ready to respond to Kuwait's needs." The report gives details of the companies that can help, including the British Oil Spill Control Association, a trade organisation which represents a number of United Kingdom companies and deals with all aspects of marine and industrial pollution. Such organisations should be given every opportunity to get cracking with the job that needs to be done.
Another major problem involves the fires, too many of which still rage out of control. The oil industry is already getting to work on that problem. The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology has produced a useful briefing note on the subject, which states : "the oil industry has had much experience in extinguishing fires at well heads using explosives to blow out the fire, after which the well head can be sealed."
It describes how, in more complex cases, the technology in the oil industry exists--through drilling, blocking and other means--to control those dreadful fires.
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The Gulf crisis produced some benefits. Out of that tragedy may well have come a new world order. For the first time ever, the five permanent members of the Security Council stood together, despite the stresses and strains of the crisis. No fewer than 30 nations sent armed forces contingents. They were sent from the United States, the old Commonwealth, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, west and east Europe, including Czechoslovakia and Hungary. They were sent from 11 Muslim countries and even from Latin America and black Africa. There were small but significant contingents from Argentina and Niger. The United Nations has come into its own. It won the war and now it must win the peace--but with that peace, we must link the world environment. Signs are emerging that the same co-ordinated effort towards achieving that peace is not being achieved in coping with environmental tasks. I urge the Government to push for a co-ordinated initiative to be taken, perhaps through the United Nations, rather than to leave this serious problem to individual Gulf states, individual oil companies and individual under-resourced environmental organisations.12.10 pm
Mr. Harry Barnes (Derbyshire, North-East) : If, after the debate, the hon. Member for Gravesham (Mr. Arnold) reads the United Nations charter, he may feel that that organisation's commitment to seeking to resolve disputes by negotiation, arbitration, peace and other methods could have been sorely damaged by what has taken place in the Gulf.
On the other hand, there are agencies operating under the aegis of the UN, such as UNICEF and the World Health Organisation which are doing valuable work. The position of the UN cannot easily be judged one way or the other by what has happened in the crisis, for sometimes its right hand is trying to undo what its left hand has achieved.
The oil fires alone in the Gulf represent a massive human catastrophe, despite what the hon. Member for Gravesham said to try to alleviate the nature of that catastrophe. The situation is undoubtedly far worse than the disaster at Chernobyl and it might even be judged to be worse than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Disastrous though those happenings were in terms of numbers of people killed, we must consider the potential that is beginning to flow from the crisis in the Gulf in terms of climatic conditions and the lives of people in the third world. We must be very concerned indeed if we are facing something that disastrous.
Hon. Members will have received copies of New Arabia , which have been sent out by the Kuwaitis. It includes an article entitled "Fires worse than nightmares" which deals with some of the points referred to in the debate. The nightmare that my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell) predicted has probably, in the event, turned out to be even worse than that which he painted today. It is more disastrous and more oil fires are occurring, though perhaps my hon. Friend was deliberately being modest about such matters to give impact to the points that he made.
Mr. Dalyell : I admit freely that I was wrong on two points. There was talk of 346 deep mined oil wells. I
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thought that more than 20 would ignite-- that number would have been bad enough--because of the absence of oxygen. I was profoundly wrong about that. Secondly, although we predicted the obliteration of Kuwait, we said that there would also be effects in Iraq, Iran, the Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain. It did not occur to us that the black acid rain would extend as far as Turkey.Mr. Barnes : My hon. Friend makes a valuable intervention which reveals the extent of the danger. The best scientific predictions did not reveal the depth of the problem that was to emerge.
New Arabia contains a diagram illustrating many of the issues that hon. Members have raised. Rather than discuss the detail of the article, I will cite the headings to give a flavour of the depth of the problem. The article refers to dramatic falls in temperature that can occur because of the sun being blotted out for long periods ; the loss of wildlife ; the spread of smoke ; the loss of marine life, disease through contamination ; soil and water contamination ; and massive air pollution. We must not be complacent about those problems.
There are other massive problems. For example, the activities of the tanks on both sides and the general movement of the armies has resulted in small stones and pebbles being dislodged from desert areas. Scientists are claiming that because of that movement, the sands of the desert are unlikely to be contained in winds as readily as they have been in the past. That puts villages, encampments, airstrips, townships and other places in danger, which may be minor when compared with other considerations, but could have serious effects in the future.
The task of dealing with the oil slick is immense. A whole host of problems about how it is to be tackled still remain. There might be the possibility of dropping incendiaries on certain slicks, though the experience of the Torrey Canyon suggests that that is not the most viable method. There are also possibilities of chemical dispersants, booms and skimmers. As the hon. Member for Gravesham said, they are vessels that can begin to take the oil away if the area can be contained. There is also the possibility of using bacteria to break down the oil slicks and to make them more easily tackled.
The problems of disease and refugees have already been stressed. Half the tonnage that was dropped in the European theatre during the second world war was dropped on Iraq in 39 nights of bombing. Although we are talking about a different technology, the consequences are horrendous. We do not yet know the depths of what occurred, but we do know that precision bombing went disastrously wrong at Al Ameriah. As has been said, a 60-mile column of conscripts and Kuwaitis were fleeing along the road from Basra.
We do not yet know all that much about what happened in Basra. We are used to having reports from Baghdad and know a great deal about the Rashid hotel and the area around it, which is not typical of Baghdad, although parts of Baghdad have been built up by Saddam Hussein into a prestige area, with similar complexes. Basra has suffered probably far more than anywhere else. My hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow described what occurred in Baghdad and Kuwait. Basra's power supply, water supply, health and emergency services and sewerage systems have been dramatically damaged, causing serious
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