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5.16 pm
Sir Russell Johnston (Inverness, Nairn and Lochaber): I congratulate the hon. Member for Romsey and Waterside (Mr. Colvin) on the informed and balanced way in which he introduced the debate, and on the work that he does in the Defence Committee. In the absence of my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Fife, North-East (Mr. Campbell), who would usually do this sort of thing, I warmly welcome from this Bench the decision to go ahead with replacements for HMS Fearless and HMS Intrepid, an announcement about which the hon. Member for Romsey and Waterside spoke at the start of his remarks.
The hon. Gentleman did not speak exclusively about the role that our troops play in Bosnia. I shall speak more widely later, but before doing so I shall repeat what all hon. Members who have so far spoken have said about the excellence of the standards that British troops are maintaining, and the very effective way in which troops from different countries are combining and working with one another under the NATO umbrella. That is a matter for congratulation and pleasure.
Many hon. Members have spoken about Dayton, because it represents the background to what our troops may or may not be called on to do in future. Dayton stopped the guns firing. That was a very good thing, but it has other not so desirable aspects.
I vividly remember a special meeting of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe immediately after David--now Lord--Owen had been appointed to operate on behalf of the European Community. He had been in Croatia and witnessed one of the occasions when refugees were driven by the Serbs across into Croatia. Many of them were shot in the process. He had been extremely moved by the experience, and he made a long and passionate speech lasting nearly an hour and a half, much of which was unscripted--to the horror of his officials. He said that all the refugees must return to their homeland, that we on the continent of Europe must never allow such events to be perpetrated and that we would not rest until the last refugee was rehoused in his own home. Some of us were wondering who would achieve that.
The Dayton accord has authorised ethnic cleansing and separation with what the hon. Member for Romsey and Waterside described, technically correctly but in reality not so near the truth, as a "unitary state". I fear that few, if any, refugees have returned, and I do not see them returning in the near future. Current events in Herzegovina, Croatia and Republica Srpska mean that the separation will last for a long time.
Everybody has said, rightly, that IFOR has been much more effective than UNPROFOR. That is simply because its mandate is much more effective, and that must be maintained. As my right hon. Friend the leader of the Liberal Democrats said in an article that he wrote shortly after a recent visit to Bosnia, the problem with UNPROFOR was that it had no choice between using a light tank and having a strategic air strike. There was no graded capacity for response. That is different in IFOR's case, and it is desirable to sustain that difference.
Many hon. Members have referred to war criminals. I agree that Karadzic and Mladic should come to justice, but it is not easy, and to pretend otherwise is silly. Who appointed Mladic? Who sustained Karadzic during the period of ethnic cleansing? The answer is President Slobodan Milosevic. So is not he a war criminal in the same way? The disagreement, which has been publicly aired, between the views of Carl Bildt and the Americans about what we should do now shows the practical difficulties and uncertainty about, first, the effect on the Serbs of seizing those two gentlemen and, secondly, the effect on the Muslims of doing nothing. One is caught between those two positions.
We must remember that, if Karadzic and Mladic are taken to The Hague, the people they will leave behind in charge will hold exactly the same views as them. I remember meeting Biljana Plavsic, the lady who has already practically replaced Karadzic officially. I sat in a tree while, 200 yds away, a mass grave of Serbs who had been killed by the Croats was dug up. I knew that she was a tough lady but on that occasion I felt that she was vulnerable. She told me how various members of her family had been killed. She does not disagree with Karadzic about anything and we must face the fact that there are deep divisions in the community which will not go away for a long time.
Several hon. Members have raised the issue of how long IFOR will stay. My hon. Friends and I find it unthinkable that IFOR should withdraw. As the Minister knows, the French Foreign Minister has already suggested extending IFOR's stay for at least two years. We should support that suggestion. As the hon. Member for Blaydon (Mr. McWilliam) said, it was never realistic to think that matters could be resolved in a year.
At the beginning of September last year, I was in the Pentagon on a Western European Union visit. We heard a presentation by a general about Bosnia and what the Americans intended to do. The President had said that it would all be over by December and I said, "Who are you kidding? That is not possible. Don't tell me that you will pull out just when, I hope, you are beginning to make a mark on stability in the region." The poor general was tied by official White House policy, but I could see that he was extremely unhappy because it was never realistic to think that it would all be finished in a year. Despite the fact that the matter is, as the hon. Member for Blaydon said, ensnared in American presidential election politics, I do not think that the Americans will withdraw, and I am sure that we will lend all our efforts to ensuring that they stay.
There are two arguments about staying. The first is that no announcement should be made until after 14 September. The second is that, according to the advice of the military, for planning reasons, the beginning of September is effectively the latest that we can announce what we intend to do. Staying would also have a positive effect on the election process.
Although most people recognise that there is official uncertainty, Governments have basically accepted that IFOR will continue, although it has not been officially announced. Staying would have a positive effect on the elections of 14 September, while the opposite would encourage--if they need encouragement--the nationalists, who will dominate the elections in any event.
The hon. Member for South Shields (Dr. Clark) referred to the extremely good work done by the Overseas Development Agency in conjunction with the Army. I agree that it has done some excellent work and deserves great praise for it. I have not been to Bosnia recently, but I expect to be a Council of Europe monitor at the elections. Most people who have been there recently believe that one of the notable failures arising out of Dayton is the failure to send a police force to Bosnia.
When my right hon. Friend the leader of the Liberal Democrats was there recently, military people told him that having some British policemen there might be as valuable as having troops--in certain circumstances, even more valuable. As the United Kingdom has yet to send even one policeman to Bosnia, will the Minister way whether we are trying to do something about that? It would be a valuable contribution to controlling lawlessness, which is a deep and continuing problem in large areas on both sides of Bosnia.
Mr. Calum Macdonald (Western Isles):
I am not a member of the Defence Committee, but I have read the report and I admire its technical expertise. I have a great interest in the subject of today's debate. I welcomed the Defence Committee's conclusion about the future of IFOR and whether there should be a follow-on force. I believe that there will be a follow-on force. It has been raised as an open question, but I think that the decision makers have already made up their minds--and that they had probably made up their minds at the outset of the operation. The timing of the decision is no coincidence: it will come shortly after the United States presidential election. Once the election is out of the way, a follow-on force to IFOR will be announced.
I believe that whether there will be a follow-on force is not the real question--the real question is what the follow-on force will do and whether it will continue to work on what is essentially a minimal mandate. If that continues, it could lead it to acquiesce in what will be the creation of three apartheid statelets on the European mainland. Are we going to grasp the nettle and look again at the force's mandate and try to match the military force of IFOR with the political will to make a reality of the Dayton principles?
I have seen the British forces at work on a number of visits to Bosnia over the past few years, both as a member of UNPROFOR and as a member of IFOR. I went to Banja Luka during the Whitsun recess and I had a useful discussion with the British forces commander, General Mike Jackson. My impression of the soldiers has always been the same, whether in UNPROFOR or IFOR: they are extremely keen about their task, highly motivated and well informed, and extremely capable and good at the job that they are asked to do. They are succeeding in accomplishing their present mission with the same brilliance that they have displayed on other occasions.
However, I believe that they are capable of doing a lot more--they need the right kind of political direction and the right kind of political will behind them.
Hon. Members have mentioned the shortcomings of UNPROFOR, which preceded IFOR. We have to look hard at what went wrong with UNPROFOR because of the damage that was done to the reputation of the United Nations. We must not let the credibility of NATO be damaged in the same way by a future failure of the IFOR mission. I believe that if we do not look again at IFOR's mandate, the credibility of NATO will be damaged in the long term.
It is helpful to look back at the failure of UNPROFOR, which culminated just over a year ago in the fall of Srebrenica to the Serb ultra-nationalist forces. However, we now know that they were not purely Serb forces and that tanks from the Yugoslav army participated in that onslaught. Srebrenica was a United Nations safe area and it was defended by European soldiers--by Dutch soldiers--but they were incapable of stopping the onslaught, and we now know the consequences as they have been recently recorded in gruesome detail at the international tribunal in The Hague.
What could have been done to prevent Srebrenica and the other massacres in the preceding three or four years? How could we have rescued UNPROFOR from its predicament at an earlier stage? The answer was given by General Rupert Smith in August 1995, when he co-ordinated air and artillery attacks on the Bosnian Serb army. Contrary to everything that we have been told about the dangers of another Vietnam, the Bosnian Serb army was routed at the first serious use of force against it. If I had any doubts about that, they were dispelled when I visited Banja Luka earlier this year and I was told by the local Serbs how convinced and frightened they were at the time that their town was about to fall to Croatian and Bosnian forces.
Banja Luka is the largest town in the Bosnian Serb territory--without it, there could have been no real credible Bosnian Serb state. In other words, we were within a week of seeing the collapse of the Bosnian Serb regime and the complete defeat of General Mladic and of Radovan Karadzic. At the last minute, the offensive was halted--thanks, many believe, to British diplomatic intervention which persuaded the Americans to back off and which persuaded the Croatian and the Bosnian Governments to back off as well. It seems that British diplomacy could not save Srebrenica but it managed to save Banja Luka.
In the course of saving Banja Luka, we saved Mladic and Karadzic to another day--and the consequences of that plague us to this day in the form of an ultra-nationalist regime still in power in the Serb entity and Mladic and Karadzic still in control of the levers of power. That is the real crisis, the real problem, facing British soldiers now based in Banja Luka and it is a direct consequence of the shortcomings and failures of a year ago.
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