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Mr. Benn: I have only a short time, because so many people want to speak. I hope that the House will allow me to continue, unless I provoke anyone unduly, which I do not mean to do. I have an opinion, but I do not intend to express it in language designed to provoke.
When we are told that so many extra thousand people have become refugees in the past few days, we have to recognise that the air strikes have made the situation worse. The monitors have been withdrawn because of the bombing, so there is nobody there to look after the area--and faced with the likelihood of an attack, the Serbs have moved their troops across the country. Whether their troops are there to repress the Kosovars or to defend their border I do not know, but if this country were threatened with a possible invasion, we would send people all over to prepare.
I do not accept for one moment the reason given by Ministers for the war. They say that it is a war for humanitarian purposes. Can anyone name any war in history fought for humanitarian purposes? Would the Red Cross have done better with stealth bombers and cruise missiles? Of course not. War is about power, for the control of countries and resources. The other humanitarian crises that have been mentioned are informative--the Kurds, the Palestinians and the people of East Timor. The British Government are still arming the Indonesian Government when they are repressing the people of East Timor. What is the basis of that? I am not asking the Government to go to war with Indonesia, but do they have to go on arming the oppressors?
Those arguments create doubts about the credibility of the operation. Up to 5,000 Iraqi babies die every month according to the Quaker Irishman Denis Halliday, who was in charge of the United Nations oil for food programme. Is that humanitarian? When I hear Ministers say that we have gone to war to prove that NATO is credible, by God I shiver. The argument that we have to kill people to show that we are strong does not carry any weight with me or with the rest of the House.
Many people have spoken about the history, including my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Derbyshire (Mr. Barnes). Kosovo has been in Yugoslavia for many centuries. The Yugoslavs were under the Turks for a long
time and fought them very hard. Then they were under the Austro-Hungarian empire, which they also fought very hard. The Archduke was killed at Sarajevo by a Serb nationalist. I have been to the spot where it happened.
During the war, the Nazis set up a fascist Croatia and, as the right hon. Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Mr. Clark) said, hundreds of thousands of Serbs died. Fifty years ago tomorrow, Prince Paul of Yugoslavia signed a treaty with Hitler. The following day he was overthrown by Simovic. In the House of Commons,Mr. Churchill, who was not talking about the leadership of any particular Yugoslav Government, said:
If I may be allowed one other personal reference, I joined the Home Guard that week. I was 16. I was given a tin hat, a uniform, a gas mask and a rifle and was sent out at night with a bayonet because we were told that the Nazis might land by parachute. We were also told that they might come disguised as nuns. I am glad that I never met a nun on those nights. By God, even if we forget our history, the Serbs do not forget. A Serbian woman of about 85 rang and told me the story. She said that she was in Belgrade when Simovic overthrew Prince Paul.
The House suffers from its lack of knowledge of history. I was in a debate on television with a fellow Labour Member of Parliament who said that he thought that the Serbs had fought with the Germans. I do not blame him for not living through it, but an interest in history is a requirement for credible politics.
My hon. Friend the Member for North-East Derbyshire rightly pointed out that the International Monetary Fund broke up Yugoslavia by imposing such a debt that the richer republics thought that they would do better outside. As the hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford said, Genscher helped to break it up. He boasted when he left the German Foreign Office that the disintegration of Yugoslavia was his greatest achievement. Why we went along with that--whether it was as a trade-off for our Maastricht opt-out--is a matter for speculation, but it is certain that we did and now we are witnessing a war for control of the Balkans.
The Kosovo Liberation Army--some people might call them terrorists, but I do not want to use extravagant language--is armed and supported by the Germans and the Americans. Who did the Americans put in charge of the monitoring forces? Ambassador Walker. And what was he doing 10 years ago? He was financing the Contras against the Nicaraguan Government under the authority of Reagan, for whose actions Clinton has recently apologised. Is it not worth looking back a little before the day that we were born? We have provided the KLA with an air force and called it NATO. That is what it wanted all along. We are told that Kosovo is to be a protectorate. Has international law advanced to the point where, if we do not like a country we can take one of its provinces and call it a protectorate? That reminds me of Victorian England, which was a bit before my time.
This is a war of aggression, I regret to say, because the United Nations is the only body authorised to use force, but Britain and America will not go to the Security Council, because they are afraid that Russia would use its veto. Russia has a greater geographical interest than we have. The Americans can hardly use the veto as an argument, as they have used 27 vetoes to protect Israel when the Security Council would have disciplined it for many breaches of resolutions, including when it invaded southern Lebanon.
What this is all about, apart from the domination of the Balkans, is the setting up of NATO to replace the United Nations. Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic have been brought in. It seems to me that, with all those countries' problems, the need to rearm would be one of the lowest priorities of all, but the arms industry in America will do very well out of the extension of NATO. NATO is redefining its objectives. Its main objective now is to cut itself loose from the discipline of big power unanimity, which lies at the heart of the UN charter.
It upsets me when British Ministers describe anything that the Prime Minister and the President do as "the international community". That claim does not bear examination. We are in a minority in the world on many issues. I greatly regret the fact that we take our orders from Washington. That is not because I am in any way against the Americans, as some of the most radical traditions in the world are American.
Six months ago, the Americans bombed Sudan on the grounds that chemical weapons were being made there, and the British Government went along with it, but nobody believes that there were any chemical weapons in Khartoum. We took our orders from Washington. I do not want to be disrespectful, but when President Clinton makes a statement, I no longer feel obliged to believe that it is necessarily the truth.
I do not want to be a scaremonger, because we do not know what will happen, but bombing does not usually achieve its objective, although it may have some marginal influence. The Prime Minister said that it would take 100,000 to 200,000 ground troops to occupy Serbia, and I doubt whether the Americans are ready to put in that number of bodies, because of the Vietnam war. They would be happy for the Europeans to go in, but the Americans would be happier outside in their stealth bombers and behind their cruise missiles.
The Serbs have always fought extremely hard. There is a danger of the conflict spreading. As my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell) asked, if Russia decides to send support to Serbia, will the planes be shot down and the ships attacked? Will it be held to be a breach of the United Nations charter? We are breaching it, but we are told that that is for humanitarian reasons.
People talk of appeasement. Some of the most valiant chairborne soldiers in the country live in the House of Commons, some of them on the Labour side. Anyone who has been in the Army knows what the chairborne troops are: they fight from their office desks. There was no appeasement of Hitler before the war: Chamberlain supported him. That is a much more serious charge.
Anyone who has read the captured German Foreign Office documents will know that Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, was sent to see Hitler in Berchtesgarten--I have the transcript at home--and said, "Herr Chancellor, on behalf of the British Government I
congratulate you on crushing communism in Germany and standing as a bulwark against Russia." Like it or not, that was not appeasement but support. If we had taken a position against Hitler earlier--I am not suggesting a war--we could have stopped the matter there.
"I therefore turn to the story of Yugoslavia. This valiant, steadfast people, whose history for centuries has been a struggle for life, and who owe their survival to their mountains and to their fighting qualities".--[Official Report, 9 April 1941; Vol. 370, c. 1592.]
When the Serbs took on Hitler, Russia was neutral and America--the great America--had not come into the war because it had not yet been attacked at Pearl Harbour. The Serbs took on the Nazis and until the day that I die I shall be grateful for that.
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