House of Commons Hansard Debates for 3 Jul 1991

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forces and the threat to engage in pinpoint bombing to destroy it, and the relatively lax approach to the acquisition of ordinary weapons by countries in the middle east. A double standard seems to be developing whereby western powers are prepared to stop the development and acquisition of sophisiticated weaponry by powers in the middle east, but are happy to sell them anything short of weapon systems that could be widely destructive to the rest of the world. That must stop. At a time when our defence industries are shrinking there is surely scope for turning some of those resources to the necessary construction and engineering work associated with the refugee problems.

5.54 pm

Mr. Ivan Lawrence (Burton) : The right hon. Member for Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale (Sir D. Steel) has made some exceedingly good points on which we can all agree across party lines, particularly his last point about the need for arms control in the region, which the Foreign Affairs Select Committee will address in its forthcoming report which should be before the House in the next two or three weeks before it rises. When we took evidence we were appalled by the speed with which countries in the region are building up their arms. In particular, a number of the countries seem to have Scud C missiles, against which the Patriot missile provides no defence. That is an extraordinary worrying aspect of the problem to which we shall come in due course.

In the interests of comparative brevity and so as not to be too repetitive of remarks which have already been so excellently made by my colleagues whom I was privileged to be with when we visited the camps in Iran, let me select two points. First, the appalling problem of the Iraqi refugees is the result of the international community's failure to respond adequately to the evil of Saddam Hussein. Yes, of course there was the magnificent response of the United States forces with the British and other members of the coalition to the invasion of Kuwait and the remarkable success of the war aim, and yes, the United Nations--I believe for the first time-- provided the cover of lawful authority for the coalition to use force to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait but no further.

There could hardly have been greater international justification for going to war with Saddam Hussein, and there could hardly have been less sense in starting a war which did not finish him off along with his aggressive capability. Therefore, is there not something wrong with a United Nations process which could authorise a war so limited that the evil aggressor survives, mostly intact, to continue his aggression, to threaten the other nations in the region and to cause fear and terror to the refugees within his own country whom we are now considering?

If there is one major lesson that must be learnt from the whole tragic episode, it is surely that, if the power to deal with the breakdown of international law and order by the enforcement of its resolutions, particularly when occasioned by the invasion of one country by another in breach of those resolutions, is to remain vested in the United Nations itself, that power must be greatly strengthened. If the United Nations imposes sanctions upon any country for the breach of international laws, it must have at its command the effective power to enforce those laws.

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It is said that the reason why the United Nations resolutions went no further than to authorise the driving of Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait is that, under chapter 1, article 2.7 of the UN charter, that august body is prevented from interfering in the domestic jurisdiction of any state, and that China was too concerned about a precedent for United Nations interference in Tibet and the Soviet Union was too concerned about the precedent for United Nations interference in its problems with the states within the union to allow more to be done.

In that case, if the United Nations is not to be a paper tiger or a toothless guard dog and thereby encourage aggression, either the UN must give up enforcement authority to NATO or some similar grouping or to action by the United States in a peacekeeping capacity, or it must change its rules to prevent China and the Soviet Union or any other permanent member of the Security Council in the future putting its concerns before the world order or the humanitarian needs of the moment.

In my view, the United Nations should draw some encouragement from its first hesitant military action in Kuwait, and should go on boldly to develop internal rules to allow intervention to end

aggression--both the kind of action that was taken by Saddam Hussein when he invaded a neighbouring country, and the kind represented by his turning on ethnic groupings of his own people. In particular, such intervention should be permitted if genocide would otherwise be likely to occur.

Mr. D. N. Campbell-Savours (Workington) : Is there not a possible halfway house which would avoid the wholesale breach of the principle of article 2.7? Could not that article be amended to allow the United Nations to interfere in a state's internal affairs if such interference arose from previous authorised actions taken by the Security Council?

Such an arrangement would have overcome the difficulty in Iraq. It was the intervention of the United Nations--through the authorising resolution, 678 --that led to the conflict within the country.

Mr. Lawrence : That is an interesting suggestion ; however, it would not cover circumstances in which a country that had not previously offended against the international rule of law did so for the first time.

What we are now discussing is precisely how such an extension of the United Nations' effective power can be achieved. It has already been asked in this debate whether a change in article 2.7 is necessary, or whether it is sufficient for the general authority of the United Nations declaration on human rights--which is there among other things to prevent genocide--to prevail over that article. Should any such United Nations involvement proceed by way of separate resolutions, specifying the need to ensure peace and stability in the region concerned? Such a resolution was adopted at the time of the Gulf war.

Let me state the obvious : in that instance, the use of the resolution did not prevent Saddam Hussein's withdrawal from Kuwait with much of his republican guard and goodness knows how many divisions of his army intact ; with hundreds of tanks ; with 150 aeroplanes and 500 helicopters ; with the capacity for nuclear, chemical and biological warfare ; and with 100 Scud missiles. Equally disturbing are the impertinent--but none the less deeply worrying--repeated Iraqi declarations of intent to reoccupy Kuwait, Iraq's refusal to allow inspections of its potential nuclear sites and the continuous broadcasts

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on a number of radio stations throughout the region, telling their Arabic audience that the war had really been won by Saddam Hussein and that all declarations to the contrary were merely United States propaganda following that nation's defeat. All those developments have merely followed the adoption of the separate resolution : clearly, it did not solve the problem.

It would be presumptuous and impertinent of me to suggest at this stage that I had the answers, and I make no such suggestion. Surely, however, we can all agree that the UN's powers must be strengthened, and that this is a good time to do so. When the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs saw UN officials in Washington, we gained the strong impression that they were apologising for the fact that any military support had been necessary.

At a moment when the UN had just risen like a new born foal standing up for the first time--at a moment when the world should have been looking to that organisation for greater purpose and determination, and a wish to strengthen its approach--we were hearing apologies. We should watch that tendency carefully, and do what we can to strengthen the resolve of whoever succeeds Mr. Perez de Cuellar as UN Secretary-General.

My second point concerns the plight of more than 2 million refugees--mainly the Kurds in the north and the Shi'ites in the south--who have fled in terror from Saddam Hussein. It is time that the international community united to provide a more effective, more efficient and therefore more life- saving system to deal with humanitarian disasters of this kind, and also with national disasters. It was satisfying to hear from the mouths of the Iranians that the quality of the United Kingdom's response had been perceived as good, and also that, in terms of the quantity of emergency relief to Iran, we ranked third in the list of donors. I believe that we have contributed more than £80 million in humanitarian relief alone. The hon. Member for Cynon Valley (Mrs. Clwyd) said that the Government's aid contribution had fallen below the gross national product level at which we are aiming. Let me tell the hon. Lady not only that we were thanked and praised for the amount of financial aid that we were providing, but that, throughout our visit, I heard no one say, "If only the British Government could provide more money." As further disasters occur, we may well have to find more money because we have given so much to the Iraqi refugees ; but we are here debating aid for those refugees. [Interruption.] Let me assure the hon. Member for Cynon Valley, and any other doubters on the Opposition Front Bench, that no one else has brought to our attention any such complaint.

There can be little doubt that hundreds--perhaps thousands--of Iraqi lives have been saved by the Prime Minister's initiative in establishing safe havens where Iraqi citizens can be protected from attacks by the military forces, and by the deployment of between 3, 000 and 5,000 British troops. Thousands of people, some of them starving, have been brought down from the mountains, fed and sheltered and provided with life-saving medicines.

Outside those havens, in the Iranian refugee camps, we found great cause for concern. What will happen when the bad weather comes--and, indeed, when boredom strikes, if it has not done so already? Tens of thousands of people are living in impossibly cramped conditions with nothing to do--many of them people of action, former members of the Peshmerga guerrilla group. If confidence does not

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return--sadly, the Select Committee did not think that it would, given the existing circumstances--action will be urgently needed. What is needed, if efficiency is to be improved, and what is barely available in the case of the Iraqi refugees, is a United Nations force of sufficient strength to deter an aggressor from further action against his victims. The United States does not want its troops to stay in the Gulf, where they believe that they are not welcome and where they are terrified of developing a long-term commitment of the Vietnam kind. The British and the other coalition forces are similarly unenthusiastic, and feel unable to take on such a commitment. It is possible that the Turkish army, the Syrian army, another army or a combination of all those will have to provide for the protection of ethnic minorities in the region ; certainly, a Gulf security system will have to be worked out. The next report of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, which is due shortly, will address that issue.

No one can deny that it is regrettable that comparatively few of the intended 500 United Nations field service officers have materialised. There are about 135 United Nations staff in Iraq, plus 70 seconded from Nordic non-governmental organisations and Governments, but there are only 48 field officers, of whom nine have now left.

That has meant that the coalition forces will have to remain, perhaps indefinitely, to provide reassurance for the Kurds so that they will return to their homes without fear. As we say in our report, it would be wrong for the coalition forces to leave them to the mercy of Saddam Hussein's troops. Something more must be done urgently for the United Nations to get its enforcement powers together.

The second element required is a far more efficient system of organising and distributing aid. Those of us who saw the Kurdish camps in Ziveh and the Shi'ite camp in Shush were most impressed by the work done by the NGOs to feed, shelter and provide medical treatment for the refugees. However, we heard stories about total lack of co-ordination, some of which have been mentioned in the debate. We hear such stories repeated in disaster after disaster. We heard that sometimes the wrong type of tent or the wrong sort of food supplies are sent. Supplies that are surplus to requirements in one camp are sometimes not available in another camp where they are desperately needed. We heard about the duplication of medicines and sometimes the wrong sort of medicine, the sending of a large number of unnecessary helicopters and second-hand unserviceable equipment. We heard of the sending of high- energy biscuits when the need for them had passed and the only use for them was to use the wrappers to provide shelter and warmth.

We heard of dedicated NGOs duplicating each other's efforts and nearly getting in each other's way. One NGO group--I think that it was a French group--returned home in pique and disgust. We have heard of hesitancy from some sources in providing financial assistance because of uncertainty about the use to which it would be put. We understand that there are pressures against efficiency.

Mr. Campbell-Savours : Is it not time to let somebody else speak?

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Mr. Lawrence : There will be plenty of time. The hon. Member for Workington (Mr. Campbell-Savours) takes up an enormous amount of the House's time by asking all sorts of impenetrable questions. It would be much more helpful if he were to remain silent.

There is a desire for democratic Parliaments clearly to identify visible aid projects, like so many tonnes of wheat or so many helicopters, and they desire not to have their money disappear into book-keeping or be wasted because the distribution system from the ports is inadequate or wasteful.

All that points to a desperate need to have somebody or some groups to co- ordinate all the aid activities. It is astonishing that, in this electronic age, there seems not to have existed in this disaster a computerised information system to identify the places of urgent need, the sort of aid on offer and the areas where no offers of the right type of aid have yet been made. Such a system could co-ordinate the offers of aid with the correct areas. It is almost incredible that no computer appears to be planning the routes available for distribution and delivery vehicles.

We need a blueprint for future responses to international disasters. We need rules about when the Government of the disaster-riven country take control and when they do not. We need rules about who takes control when the Government of the country is incapable. We need a rule book of actions that can speedily bring together, co-ordinate and redirect the substantial aid that is available from the world at times of heartbreaking disaster, whether natural or manmade. It should not be necessary to start from scratch with every new disaster, learning the same lessons again. The British Government, in co-operation with the British people, have acquitted themselves well in providing resources, assisting our NGOs, helping to co- ordinate European Community assistance, bringing about safe havens, in getting resolutions past the Security Council, pursuing an initiative with the Germans for the appointment of a senior United Nations co-ordinator and, of course, providing the military assistance necessary to end the instability and anarchy in the region. If the Government could convene a conference in the near future of all those involved in the recent emergency planning and field work to draw up a blueprint for the future, they will have made an outstanding contribution to the cause of humanity.

6.14 pm

Mr. Ted Rowlands (Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney) : Like many of my colleagues who visited the camps, I came away with a number of impressions. Many observations have been made by hon. Members who visited the camps and I do not want to repeat them.

I should like to draw to the attention of my hon. Friends and the Minister one or two observations about the position of the refugees before dealing with the broader issue, which is that the Kurdish and Shi'ite refugee problem is not only an aid problem but, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley (Mrs. Clwyd) said, a political problem. It is a problem of international order and political decision.

We must not let the House forget that the potential for a further huge influx of refugees is considerable. The Iran-Iraq border was heavily fortified during the eight-year war and, ironically, the bombing of all the

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bridges made movement of people across that border almost impossible. That has meant that the refugee problem in the south could be understated.

It is sickening to realise when one visits the camps that every refugee crisis, even if it is three quarters solved, leaves behind yet another residue of permanent refugees. In one of the camps that we went to see there were many thousands of Kurdish refugees who had been there since 1975. The Iranian authorities reminded us--I had forgotten but I am sure that other hon. Members have not--that they are permanently maintaining under their refugee programme 2.5 million refugees from the Afghan war. We have had many quarrels and differences with the Iranian regime, but we must compliment the Iranian authorities on their work in refugee camps. The Iranian Red Crescent is one of the most efficient and compassionate organisations. Iran opens its borders to large numbers of people. It was pointed out to us by people representing United Nations agencies that, curiously, national Governments now feel a desperate need to respond to crises in a macho and virile way. There is almost an aid race in which every Government want to show their electorate that they are responding to the latest crisis. As a consequence, there is often a lack of co- ordination, duplication and considerable waste.

In an eloquent appeal, my hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley said that we need a form of investment in United Nations agencies so that we can co- ordinate our activities through the United Nations rather than conducting the aid race in a macho and virile way while Governments are attempting to prove that their aid programme is bigger, better and more effective than anybody else's.

The plight of the Kurds and the Shi'ites represents a broader political issue. We must admit that until we saw on our television screens the plight of the Kurds on the mountains there had been remarkably little interest in their dilemma. They have been a mild embarrassment to the international community for generations because they do not fit into an easy, tidy, nation-state pattern. They have been a special embarrassment to Iranian, Turkish and Iraqi Governments for some time. I must say--I hope that I do not enter a jarring note into a consensual debate--that that attitude was exemplified by the Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office. When he appeared before the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs on 30 January, I pressed him on the Government's attitude to autonomy for the Kurds and he could barely conceal his impatience. At the end of our exchange, the Chairman said :

"I think the Minister is telling us we have enough on our plate !" On 30 January, the Kurdish issue was not of great ministerial concern.

The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Mr. Douglas Hogg) : I do not have a record of our exchange, but I recall that thhon. Gentleman was suggesting that we should support a policy of creating an independent Kurdistan.

Mr. Rowlands : I have the record. I asked the Minister : "Is there not a case for championing some particular autonomy which would recognise the very distinctive characteristics of the Kurdish people ?"

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I was not pressing for a Kurdish state ; I was questioning whether the Kurds would be a problem. The Minister rightly said that we must maintain territorial integrity and national boundaries, but in January the general attitude was that the Kurds were a problem and an embarrassment. They became a global embarrassment only when we saw their suffering on our television screens.

Hon. Members have said that the Kurds and Shi'ites represent a new challenge to the way in which we conduct international affairs and to the new international order that may emerge in the wake of the Gulf war, but the United Nations seems to recognise international disorder only when there is an act of aggression by one state against another. Experience of Yugoslavia and Iraq shows that international regional disorder occurs not only when one state attacks another but when the inherent structural problems of the societies on which we base international order--the notion that nation states are inviolate--are not recognised by the international community. As the cement of the empire, in its broadest sense, dissolves at the end of the century, those issues will become increasingly prominent.

That problem is demonstrated by the disintegration of the Ethiopian empire and the emergence of traditional rivalries. The dissolving of the cement of the Soviet communist empire is causing similar tension and rivalry in traditional relationships. The same is happening in Yugoslavia and will happen in the middle east.

On our travels, I spent my time on planes reading one of the most authoritative accounts of the origins of Iraq. Everybody knew that we just drew lines on a map. Minutes of memoranda of the great debates on the birth of the artificial state of Iraq disclose chilling prophesies that now seem relevant, despite their being written 40 or 50 years ago. One internal commentator said :

"You are flying in the face of four milleniums of history if you try to draw a line around Iraq and call it a political entity". At the time of the birth of Iraq, the minutes of a Foreign and Commonwealtth Office official said :

"Almost 2 million Shi'ite Moslems in Mesopotamia would not accept domination by the minority Sunni Moslem community yet no form of government has been envisaged which does not involve Sunni domination."

He described the nature of that domination as essentially military domination.

Although I am not saying that we should be trapped by history--50 or 60 years later, events may have made those early judgments wrong--it is chilling to note the assessments that were being made during the artificial creation of a state such as Iraq because, in different ways, they are now manifesting themselves. We must ask ourselves the awkward and painful question whether Saddam Hussein, whom we all detest and believe must go, is not at least partly the creature of the state that was created. If the answer is yes, do we say for ever and a day that a state that was artificially created for a host of wrong motives should be the basis on which we maintain international order? I realise what a dangerous minefield one walks through when one makes such comments, but, given the dissolution of empires in the late 20th century, these issues will crop up time and again. I shall complete my brief historic footnote by saying that, curiously, the 1920 treaty of Sevres, which was drafted and approved but never implemented, recognised

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that such issues would arise and tried to write in autonomy for the Kurds, the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis--areas that have now become hot spots.

A number of hon. Members have asked to what extent the new international order will continue to uphold the principle of non-interference in nation states, especially if they are not necessarily cohesive or do not have sound bases of language, culture and national identities. That problem will not go away.

The dilemmas of the Kurds and Shi'ites in Iraq, the fact that we have established safe havens and sent rapid deployment forces to defend them and to guarantee the rights of minorities within the inviolate nation state of Iraq point in the long term to a new international order based on, dare I say it, some form of world government. Unless we learn the lessons and realise that, I am afraid that this last episode will be a footnote in the sad history of Kurds rebelling and being betrayed.

6.27 pm

Mr. Jacques Arnold (Gravesham) : I believe that we have two lessons to learn from the Kurdistan refugee crisis : first, the potential effectiveness of the European Community as a powerful forum for initiative in foreign affairs ; and, secondly, the key role that is being played by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister.

We all watched the events of the Kuwait campaign and the 100 hours to the ceasefire. That ceasefire has left Saddam Hussein in charge, but was due, after only 100 hours, in no small part to the scars of Vietnam on the American nation. We are all aware of the reluctance of the United States to become involved in foreign adventures, and its fears of getting bogged down.

In Europe, and in Britain in particular, the reaction was very different. The public were concerned. We were all extremely moved by scenes on our televisions of masses of civilian populations who were totally unprepared for their movement into the mountains. Rightly, in Europe there was a wave of humanitarian revulsion at what we were seeing, and a demand for immediate action.

The initiative of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister at the European Community summit in Luxembourg on 8 April got the bandwagon going. The agreement between European Community leaders to take action caused the United States to make an active response, which we saw on 16 April with the joint announcement by the United States, France and Britain that they would send troops to northern Iraq to co-ordinate the relief work and to establish safe encampments. We now know that it met with considerable success. Most of the Kurdish civilians have come down from the mountains. Some went into the camps and are still there, but most have been moved back to their original homes in Iraqi Kurdistan. There has also been a European initiative to transport refugees back from Iran.

The lessons to learn are that we have a Prime Minister who has rapidly gained in international stature to give a lead in effective action on the world stage, and that the European nations, working in concert, carry a mighty diplomatic clout which can precipitate action on a world scale and can influence the United States to change its position.

However, problems remain. We must somehow maintain the confidence of the Kurds who have returned home and persuade them to stay put in their homes and to

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feel secure. The allied forces in the area are currently providing that security, but there is a real fear of their withdrawal. However, the sending of United Nations guards to the area is no effective solution. That is exemplified by a letter sent by the

Secretary-General of the United Nations on 30 May to the president of the Security Council.

The annex to the letter contains descriptions of the deployment of those guards. For example, it states :

"The number of Guards in the Contingent will be kept under review as further units are dispatched, but will not exceed a total strength of 500."

When one considers the residual strength of the Iraqi armed forces and the vast size of the Kurdish populations involved, one realises that the number is wholly inadequate.

The annex to the letter continues :

"The number of Guards assigned to the various regions will be decided in consultation with the Government authorities concerned"-- which means mainly Iraq--

"but would not exceed 150 in any one region."

Again, that is wholly inadequate in view of the scale of the country.

It is even more farcical that the annex continues :

"United Nations Guards will be authorized to carry side-arms (pistols/revolvers), which will be provided by the Iraqi authorities".

Clearly, the United Nations guards can play only a symbolic role. They are poorly funded even for the limited job that they have been sent to do. I understand that a special fund has been established within the United Nations. It is interesting that the United Kingdom is the largest contributor and is way ahead of others--notably the United States. Will the Minister confirm the leading role that we are also playing in that respect?

To answer the question why a United Nations force has not been sent and why we are confined to the services of valiant doorkeepers, one has only to read The Economist of 22 June, which summed up the matter neatly :

"Neither the Soviet Union nor China would approve action"-- the dispatch of a United Nations force--

"on the Kurds' behalf in the full glare of the Security Council. They feared the precedent such intervention could set for, say, Tibet or the Baltic republics. Other countries, standing by the clause in the UN charter that bars it from internal disputes, felt the same." That highlights the continuing practical limitations of the United Nations, which is, of course, bound up in the various legalities which were dealt with so well by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence). It is tragic that the United Nations did so well with the nation of Kuwait, but is largely paralysed over the internal problems of Iraq, notably those in Kurdistan.

It is clear that we must maintain a strong military presence until the establishment of an adequate intervention force by the allies. In particular, we must ensure that the airborne capacity is adequate for the task.

6.36 pm

Mr. Dennis Canavan (Falkirk, West) : I was also a member of the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs which visited the refugee camps on the Iran-Iraq border about six weeks ago. We had the opportunity to talk to Kurdish

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refugees from the north and to Shi'ite refugees from the south of Iraq who had been forced to flee from the forces of Saddam Hussein. Despite what the hon. and learned Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) said about evidence of inefficiency--and I agree with at least some of what he said--I pay tribute to all the organisations over there-- governmental and non-governmental--that are doing their very best to deal with difficult circumstances. I pay a special tribute to the Iranian Government and to the Iranian Red Crescent, because it is largely due to their efforts that what we observed was not nearly as bad as I had feared before I went.

I have visited refugee camps in other parts of the world with the Select Committee. For example, a few days ago I visited refugee camps on the Sudan -Ethiopia border where the smell of death permeated the atmosphere and where sick, starving and dying children were everywhere to be seen. By contrast, the children whom we saw in the camps in west Azerbaijan and Khuzestan looked, for the most part, healthy and in very good spirits. However, I do not want to underrate the horrific experience that those children and their parents must have undergone. It must have been an ordeal for them, first, to literally run for their lives from the killing machine of Saddam Hussein and then to be faced with the threat of death from starvation on freezing mountain tops.

When we visited the camps in late May the worst seemed to be over, at least for the time being. I emphasise the latter phrase. The reason why the worst seemed to be over at least for the time being was that the various aid agencies appeared to be getting to grips with the basic needs of the refugees. However, there is no room for complacency--there is much more to be done, bearing in mind that there are about 2.5 million refugees or displaced persons in that part of the world. Winter is approaching and, looking further ahead, we cannot and must not expect those people to live in refugee camps for ever. We must step up our efforts to find a permanent long-term solution, including a political settlement. That means trying our best to find a peaceful and democratic solution to the internal problems which still exist in Iraq and it also means going some way to meeting the legitimate aspirations of the Kurdish people for a degree of self- determination or autonomy.

The Kurds were suffering atrocities at the hands of Saddam Hussein long before he invaded Kuwait and the Gulf war has, arguably, made things worse instead of better for them. We therefore have a duty to do everything possible to help them in their immediate plight and in the longer term.

I want to comment on the British contribution to the crisis. By 1 May this year, the Overseas Development Administration had committed a total of £61.5 million, but it is important to point out to the House that only £30 million of that is new money from the Treasury's central reserve. In other words, more than half that money comes from the existing, over- stretched ODA budget. If we take the new money--£30 million--and divide it by the 2.5 million people involved, it works out at the princely sum of £12 a head. It is not a huge amount when considered in those terms.

It is also worth considering that the ODA was charged by the Ministry of Defence for much of the relief operation carried out by the armed forces. I hope that the Minister will reply in his summing up to the Select Committee

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recommendation that there should be a new arrangement between the ODA and the Ministry of Defence. I should prefer there to be no transfer payment from the aid budget to the defence budget, but if there is, it should take into account the training element for the armed forces in the refugee operations. That is an explicit recommendation in the Select Committee report.

According to the Government, the Gulf war cost them £2.5 billion. That is probably an underestimate, but the truth will come out at the end of the day. The total ODA commitment of £61.5 million to help Iraqi refugees alone is the equivalent of three Tornado aircraft. Perhaps that brings the matter into perspective. Why are the Government's spending priorities such that they spend so much on a destructive war that cost more than 100,000 lives and yet spend relatively little on trying to help the refugees who are the victims of the aftermath of that war?

I hope that, as a result of this debate, more priority will be given to helping not just Iraqi refugees, but the many others throughout the world who find themselves the innocent victims of disaster, whether it be famine, flood, earthquake or the ravages of war. For the sake of humanity, we owe help to those people, especially if we have been partly responsible for precipitating the action and thereby partly responsible for causing the desperate situation in which they find themselves.

6.42 pm

Mr. D. N. Campbell-Savours (Workington) : I shall be brief and truncate my remarks. I found the speeches of my hon. Friend the Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Mr. Rowlands) and of the hon. and learned Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) most interesting, although the latter's speech was too long. They addressed the central issue arising from the Gulf conflict of how we deal with the question of article 2.7 which deals with intervention in the internal affairs of nation states. When the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs examines the matter, it should do so from a wide perspective, and it should do a lot of work because it will be making a contribution to the international debate on the matter.

I refer to the implementation of resolution 688 by the United Nations, especially the section in paragraph 2, which deals with ending the repression. Mr. Talabani and his advisers told me and my hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley (Mrs. Clwyd) in Istanbul only a week and a half ago that the Kurdish leadership had had no contact with the United Nations monitors in the field. It was we who had to advise them to make contact. Even when we asked Mrs. Ogata--the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees--yesterday whether that contact had been made, she was unable to tell us. Only when that contact is made will evidence of repression be proven to the international community and especially to the Security Council of the United Nations. Only when that evidence has been proven and reported back can any rapid action force deployed in Incerlik in southern Turkey or elsewhere be used. It is the linkage between the reporting back by the United Nations monitors to the Security Council through Mr. Van de Stoehl, the former Dutch Foreign Minister, and the threat of action by the rapid action force based in southern Turkey which will force Saddam Hussein to realise that the major powers mean business in exercising resolution 688, which refers to the need to end repression.

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The second part of resolution 688 which is important to the debate is the part that deals with the need--I think that the word "insist" is used--for the Iraqi regime to give access to the United Nations humanitarian effort wherever in Iraq it is required. Following our meeting with Mrs. Ogata in the House yesterday, it is my view that the resolution is not being implemented. The Iraqi Government are preventing access by United Nations personnel to various parts of Iraq. Furthermore, the United Nations has simply not put in place the number of people necessary to ensure adequate coverage of the whole of Iraq in providing humanitarian relief.

Significantly, whereas the United States was prepared, acting on the basis of paragraphs 12 and 13 of resolution 687 which deal with nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons technology, to issue the threat of foreign intervention if necessary to secure implementation of those paragraphs, to date it has not been prepared to threaten Iraq on the basis of that country's failure to permit access under paragraph 3 of resolution 688, which deals with the need for Iraq to allow passage to United Nations represen-tatives for the purposes of humanitarian relief. I hope that my comments will be taken on board by Ministers because the debate will turn on both matters in the coming months.

A number of my hon. Friends asked why, at the end of the war, we did not proceed to block off Saddam Hussein's forces and, as many have argued, go as far as Baghdad. The answer is simple, and the British people should understand that answer. As politicians, as Ministers, or as representatives of the American Government, we all had to give undertakings on British television and in the rest of the British media that the war aims of the coalition were confined to getting Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. I remember the Chairman of the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs being interviewed on television and having to make the point that our war aims were restricted. He referred to the possibility of dealing with the matter in a later Select Committee report. I hope that he does not go further than his comments on British television only three months ago. He could not go further. The pressure did not come only from American public opinion, but in the House, when many of my hon. Friends--and, indeed, many Conservative Members--demanded that a restriction be placed on the war aims. Furthermore, we were conscious of the rioting in major capitals throughout the region, such as Cairo and Tangiers. There were objections even in Saudi Arabia to the way the war was going from some Shi'ite groups. In Pakistan and Iran, there were demonstrations in capital cities. There were demonstrations in Syria. People forget that we were circumscribed by international opinion. That is why we did not go further, and that is why we were correct not to go further. People should not change the debate now that the conflict is all but over--apart from these remaining matters.

Some argue that sanctions should be removed. In my view, they should not be removed ; they should stay. It is the responsibility of the United Nations to resolve the problem of humanitarian relief inside Iraq. If the United Nations officers in the field feel that they do not have what Mrs. Ogata described yesterday as "the wherewithal" to deal with the problems, they must report back to the Security Council the needs of Iraq in terms of humanitarian relief. Those arguments should take place in the United Nations. It is not for western Governments unilaterally--or, indeed, for the United Nations--to end

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sanctions. It is for western Governments, through their United Nations relief programmes, to intervene and provide whatever is required.

6.49 pm

Mrs. Maria Fyfe (Glasgow, Maryhill) : I am in a little difficulty, as I understood that the Front-Bench speakers wished to begin winding up the debate at 6.50 pm. I see my hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley (Mrs. Clwyd) shaking her head, so I shall continue quickly. Other hon. Members have spoken about the future possibilities for a new international order. I hope that the day will come when we have that, but it will have to be a genuine new order, with all the nations in the United Nations, not, as we have now, an order dominated by the five permanent members of the Security Council. Some of us would have believed more readily in those countries' intentions concerning the Gulf war if we had not seen the important United Nations nations, at the behest of the United States, standing back and doing little about repression in Cambodia, Palestine and Nicaragua.

Paragraph 1 of the report of the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs says that the resources to provide aid for Iraqi refugees are "severely stretched". Many of us wonder when the day will come when the nations of the world will spend on anything like the same scale to save lives as they have spent to kill people. The coalition forces spent £100 billion on the war, yet when the United Nations sought relief support for the refugee problem it managed to get only £58 million to help what it then thought would be about 400,000 refugees. In fact, by mid-April there were 400,000 refugees on the Turkish mountains and 400,000 more in Iraq near the Turkish border, 1 million in northern Iran and 70,000 in southern Iran--a total of 1,870,000. The aid was indeed thinly spread.

If I were to encourage people to rise up against their oppressors--for instance, by encouraging the Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein--I should feel some responsibility if they took me at my word, and would have financed that uprising. People were cynically left to rise up and given practically no support. Then they were left in appalling conditions in the mountains.

It is not true that this Government came hastily to the refugees' aid. They did so only after the British people had seen the refugees' plight on their television screens and kept complaining about the Government's lack of response. The same thing happened when the American people saw the plight of the Kurdish refugees on television. Only then did western Governments start responding to the refugees' plight.

The huge responsibilities taken on by Iran in caring for the refugees both now and in past years put yesterday's Government statement about refugees coming into this country in a poor light. A paltry few hundred people are arriving here, yet the Government go to great lengths to resist their being allowed in. They say that those people should stop off at the first available safe country instead of heading here. What an ungenerous response in comparison with the responsibilities thrown on to the shoulders of Iraq's neighbouring countries.

The Government dithered during April and said that they were worried about intervening in the internal affairs of Iraq, although our forces had already bombed Iraq

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