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Sir John Stanley (Tonbridge and Malling): To be clear on that point, the Foreign Office officials received that critical document from the British high commissioner who had previously received it from Sandline; and the British high commissioner, Mr. Penfold, passed it to the Foreign Office the day after he received it from Sandline.
Mr. Rowlands: Yes, that is a factual statement. It is commendable that Foreign Office officials obtained that information with such speed.
The officials, however, did absolutely nothing. They did not inform their senior officials, and they certainly did not inform the Foreign Secretary's private office, let alone the Minister of State responsible. I hope that the Minister of State will confirm that he did not know that the document on Operation Python was available in the Department. It was an extraordinary state of affairs.
As the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife (Mr. Campbell) said, and as we know from the television programme, the Customs office knocked on the FCO's doors and raided the files, but the permanent under-secretary did not feel it sufficiently important to write even the simplest of minutes to tell the Foreign Secretary that he should be aware of what had occurred. This conjunction is incredible, and requires explanation.
Mr. Mackinlay:
My hon. Friend puts his finger on the bulk of our criticism. The Foreign Secretary did not tell us, but perhaps the Minister of State will, why the Government consider the Committee's criticism to be disproportionate and unfair. Why do they take that view, given the points made by my hon. Friend?
Mr. Rowlands:
My hon. Friend asks the question, and we await an answer from the Minister.
Given the circumstances that I have described, I do not believe that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State was fair in claiming that by holding our inquiry we were putting officials in double jeopardy, and that officials could not speak for themselves. Anyone reading the burden of our evidence in the lengthy transcripts will see that many members of the Committee--it was certainly the burden of my questions--were almost pleading and begging officials to explain what had happened. We did not want to reach those conclusions: it was the last thing we wanted. We tried as hard as we could to discover why this failure to pass information through officials to Ministers had occurred.
I am not a natural critic of the FCO: one of the greatest privileges in my parliamentary and political life was to serve in that Department. I have enormous respect for the FCO, and I understand and appreciate the excitement of serving in such a post. I have tried, therefore, to search for an explanation. Initially, I thought that it might be a structural problem. There have been considerable changes in the way in which the FCO is organised and administered. There has been a growth of command structures: the autonomous, self-financing portions of the FCO. I have once or twice wondered aloud whether the decision-making process had been affected by that autonomy, and whether the chain of communication had been broken, because I had thought that information was passed on quickly. I found no evidence for that explanation, and no support for it when I asked about it. I am as mystified and as dumbfounded about what happened as are other members of the Committee and many others, including Sir Thomas Legg.
The most important thing is that this failure of communication should never happen again. We cannot write a code or a manual on ministerial-civil service relations. All the textbooks in the world cannot describe the curious chemistry of the working relationship between a Secretary of State, a Minister of State, the private office and officials. It cannot be laid down in tablets of stone. I criticise the Opposition motion, because if there is one message that should go out from the House tonight it is that we must not allow such a total breach of communication between officials and Ministers as occurred in this case to happen again.
Mr. Malcolm Savidge (Aberdeen, North):
Do not paragraphs 10.56 and 10.57 of the report imply that criticism should be levelled less at individuals in the Department--who are described as loyal and conscientious--than at the institution that had been inherited from the last Government?
Mr. Rowlands:
I think that we all understand the incredible pressures experienced by a small, understaffed Department dealing with west Africa. We must remember that the arrival of all this vital information coincided with the beginning of the Nigerian assault--the assault by ECOMOG--on Sierra Leone. There are mitigating circumstances, which are mentioned in the Legg report; but they cannot explain, or erase, the breach of communication that our report demonstrates so vividly--and, in my view, not inaccurately, unfairly or unjustly.
Let me mention two other aspects of the matter. One is the whole issue of the use of force. I believe that the Government experienced a genuine dilemma in that regard. If they were to restore President Kabbah by some
form of military means, they had two options. They could accept support from a Nigerian regime that was apariah in the international community, including the Commonwealth; or--and this option was undoubtedly bound up with the Sandline contract--they could arm the Kamajors in Sierra Leone.
Understandably, that second option was queasily opposed by those in the Foreign Office--rightly, in my view. I believe, and document after document states,that it would have been wrong to arm, or rearm, the Kamajors, because that would have inflamed and accentuated the civil war. That is made clear by a number of statements, and by documents from the Cabinet Office. The Sandline contract, however, was designed to do precisely that: arm the Kamajors . Whether or not there was a breach of the UN embargo, the Sandline contract certainly constituted a breach of Government policy in every meaningful sense, and that is one of the saddest aspects of the affair.
In his evidence to the Committee, Mr. Spicer of Sandline pleaded ignorance of the UN arms embargo. That is curious. On 2 March, in a letter to President Kabbah describing the difficulty that he had experienced in delivering the contract, Mr. Spicer invoked the embargo as the obstacle. That was before any Customs raid had taken place. I view some of the pleas of total ignorance with a degree of incredulity.
Like everyone else, however, I feel that the issues must be seen in the broader context of the terrible tragedy of Sierra Leone itself. Diamonds and mercenaries have not proved to be Sierra Leone's best friends, in any sense. If there is another lesson that we can learn, it is that we should act on the whole question of arms brokerage and mercenary activity. It worries me that the idea that mercenaries could or should be used legitimately in certain circumstances is being mooted in fashionable quarters. Experts have said as much on television. It is being suggested that we should return to an earlier age of privatised warfare. If the privatisation of war is to be the bequest of the late 20th century to the 21st, that will constitute an horrific illustration of how little we have learned from our history.
I hope that, when the arguments are over, my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary, and the Government, will find time to promote, wherever possible, a broader international consensus on how mercenary activity should be dealt with. The position is extraordinary. How in the name of heaven did Ukrainian mercenaries manage to reach Sierra Leone? We know, or suspect, how they were paid--they were paid in diamonds, in one way or another--but how did they get there? What was the chain, and what international connivance allowed it to happen? In the answer to those questions lies one of the important lessons that can be learned from the whole affair.
Sir John Stanley (Tonbridge and Malling):
I am pleased to be able to follow the pertinent and experienced speech of the hon. Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Mr. Rowlands), with much of which I agreed. I shall devote most of my own speech to what I regard as the most neglected aspect of the affair: the Government's overall policy on Sierra Leone.
I want to make two observations relating to the Select Committee report. One concerns officials, the other Ministers. When the Foreign Secretary made his statement about the Legg report on 27 July last year, he said at the outset that he was making it on the first available sitting day following his receipt of the report. He is to be commended on his promptness in coming to the House.
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