House of Commons Hansard Debates for 25 Mar 1999 (pt 19)

Mr. Tony McNulty (Harrow, East): What my right hon. Friend is saying is extremely interesting but will do nothing at all for the people of Kosovo. What is the alternative strategy?

Mr. Benn: My hon. Friend may not come to the House often, but I have been arguing it--[Interruption.]

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. Until now, the debate has very good-natured and temperate. We must keep it that way.

Mr. Benn: I know that it is very offensive to people to hear an argument that they do not like, but I am giving it and--[Interruption.]

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. There is a lot of noise in the Chamber. The worst thing that can happen is if the Deputy Speaker keeps getting to his feet, so that no one gets to speak except the Deputy Speaker. I do not want that.

Mr. Benn: I will come to the question of what should be done at the end, which is where one would normally put one's proposals. There is great opposition to the war, and not only from a little left-wing clique, as was demonstrated by the speech of the hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford. Henry Kissinger is against the war, as are 41 senators. Sky Television had a poll yesterday--although I do not have much time for Murdoch or polls--and 55 per cent. were against the war and only 45 per cent. in favour.

Do not believe that wars are popular. They are marvellous the day they break out and everybody is happy, as they sell newspapers and boost ratings and make commentators into world statesmen but, by God, when the consequences become apparent there might be a very

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different attitude. I was opposed to the Suez war and spoke against it in the House. Looking back, I have no regrets for issuing a warning on that occasion.

We are asked what should be done. The hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford told us: the United Nations should convene a peace conference, without the threat of bombing that came from NATO. The Russians and the Chinese would support that, the bombing would halt and the humanitarian aid would go in. If we are in a jam, so is Milosevic. He has to find a way of living with the people of Kosovo. For him to be faced with the reality that confronts him is the best chance of peace, but killing people does not automatically solve problems. It did not work in Iraq.

No amendment has been tabled, as that is not permitted, but as in the Norway debate in 1940, we can vote against the Adjournment. I shall do that tonight, with a very heavy heart. I have been in the Labour party for 57 or 58 years and have been a Labour candidate 17 times in parliamentary elections, and I never thought that I would be asked by my party to vote for a war against the charter of the United Nations, in a way that could make the situation that confronts the world far more serious.

I hope that the House will accept that for me to go into that Lobby tonight will be one of the most difficult things that I have done, but it is something that is absolutely essential if we are to stand true to the values on which the Labour party rests, of internationalism, peace and the peaceful settlement of disputes.

3.19 pm

Sir Patrick Cormack (South Staffordshire): Nobody could for a moment doubt either the sincerity or the passion of the right hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr. Benn). He is an adornment to the House, and rightly won a recent award as speech maker of the year. I pay tribute to him as a parliamentarian par excellence and I share his love of history, but I am afraid that I cannot share his interpretation of it. I believe that his speech, passionate as it was, was profoundly wrong in many particulars.

The right hon. Gentleman said that he could not remember a time when we went to war for a humanitarian cause. I would say that going to war against Hitler was going to war to suppress evil.

Mr. Benn: In all fairness--this is an important point--we did not fight Hitler because of his persecution of the Jews; we fought because he challenged the power of the west. When Hitler died in 1945, the obituary in The Times did not mention the holocaust. I contributed in a minor way to the war, but that war was not about human rights--it was a bit more than that.

Sir Patrick Cormack: I am afraid that the right hon. Gentleman and I will have to agree to differ on that. [Interruption.]

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) must be quiet in the Chamber. She has come in late in the day, and I can hear her quite often. I enjoy listening to her, but not at the moment.

Sir Patrick Cormack: Hitler was monumentally evil, and we went to war to defeat the monumental evil that Hitler represented.

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My hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr. Wells) made an excellent speech--but, again, it was a speech with which I could not agree. He made some perfectly valid and interesting points about the recognition of Croatia. However, he did not say that at the time Croatia was being recognised--December 1991--Milosevic's tanks had already done terrible damage. Milosevic had already unleashed an onslaught against innocent people. His evil was already apparent.

I do not like to say, "I told you so", but I wish to refer to the very first debate that took place in this House on the Balkan war. It took place in the small hours of the morning on 12 December 1991--a debate on the Consolidated Fund, which we do not have now. I initiated the debate on the situation in Croatia because I was deeply disturbed by what was happening. I said that we should take as a reason for intervening the fact that Dubrovnik, a world heritage site, was being shelled, and that there was proper reason for us to put in a naval and air patrol to deter Milosevic at that time.

I said in the debate:

"I hope that a message can go out that there is a new resolve in the west and that we are determined to ensure that the killing, the destruction and the brutality stop".--[Official Report, 12 December 1991; Vol. 200, c. 1162.]

It did not stop, because it was not possible for the west to get together and to act against Milosevic.

A year later, I went to Edinburgh at the time of the Edinburgh summit to take part in a rival summit, called to highlight the problems in Bosnia. At that rival summit, the then Foreign Secretary received most courteously Haris Silajdzic, the Bosnian Foreign Minister, who made one of the most moving speeches that I have ever heard.

Haris Silajdzic said that we may have thought that there was nothing worse than killing a child, but there was--killing a child after having tortured it. He said that we may have thought that there was nothing worse than raping a woman with the most ghastly force, but there was--doing that, and then herding women into rape camps and killing them. It is under Milosevic that those things have happened, and they have happened year after year.

We have seen nearly a decade of unmitigated evil under the leadership of one of the evil geniuses of the20th century. If NATO has any justification at all, it must have a moral imperative. To allow these things to happen in our continent is, frankly, shaming to us all.

I support without reservation and with absolute fervour what the Government are doing. I support totally the statesmanlike and supportive speech from the shadow Foreign Secretary, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard), today. I am delighted that Members on the two Front Benches are in such accord--as they should be at a moment of international crisis.

I regret that action has taken so long, as does my right hon. and learned Friend, but I understand that the Government--like the Conservative Government over Bosnia--tried time and time again to bring Milosevic to the negotiating table, to get him to agree and to get him to act as a decent human being.