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3.28 pm
Mr. Ken Livingstone (Brent, East): If my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Mr. Benn) divides the House tonight, it will be the first time in my 12 years in the House that I will find myself in an alternative Lobby on an issue of international politics. I have had no disagreement with my right hon. Friend's principled opposition to what has happened in many other conflicts. Like him, I have no doubt that the question of Iraq and Kuwait was solely about oil.
However, in my constituency, I have seen over the last decade a stream of refugees--many of them tortured--coming from Milosevic's war zone. I can confirm virtually everything that the hon. Member for South Staffordshire (Sir P. Cormack) said. I believe that Milosevic has used the worst evil possible to rise to political power, to divide his people, to trade on fear and to operate a regime of systematic mass rape, murder and genocide.
The only scandal that remains with western Governments is that we have not indicted Milosevic for war crimes. Too often, we have had to co-operate. Too
often, we have negotiated with him while, year by year, he has dragged his feet as his butchers have worked their way through one part of the former Yugoslavia after another.
I agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield that one is mad to consider any political issue until one has looked at the history.
When I consider the history of Yugoslavia, however, I find many matters that my right hon. Friend has not discovered. Like most analysts of this conflict, he started with the second world war, and the heroic Serb opposition to Hitler. I salute that service, but Yugoslavia was not created during the second world war. Nor was it created with the consent of its component peoples. Yugoslavia is a totally artificial state, created by the great colonial powers at Versailles in the aftermath of war. I cannot conceive of any role for a socialist in defending that legacy of Victorian imperialism.
Yugoslavia was cobbled together across an international dividing line that had existed for 1500 years. The eastern and western Roman empires bisected the land between what are broadly the Croat and Serb areas. It was divided then between the west and the Ottoman empire. A nation was later created by imperial powers for their convenience at the end of the first world war, without consultation with any of the component populations. It brought together people who had a history of warfare, and who shared no common religion and no common language. It is simply amazing that Yugoslavia survived as long as it did.
I remember being in the House in 1991 when the then Foreign Secretary told us, in the aftermath of free and democratic votes by the peoples of Slovenia and Croatia, the British Government's view that there should be no change in the status of Yugoslavia. I asked why. Why, when we celebrate our own independence and nationalism day after day, were we denying the rights to exercise the same freedoms to people who had been subordinated in a wider federation?
When Yugoslavia was set up, it was not a democracy; the old, feudal Serb monarchy dominated it. In the 1930s, Albert Einstein organised a round robin of protest, which was signed by many Members of the House of Commons, denouncing the use of terror by the Serb monarchy against the Croat leadership. That fact is conveniently forgotten when we try to understand why, when the Germans marched in, so many Croats lined up with them. The world had ignored the systematic brutality of the Serb monarch.
We were lucky that Tito--a great statesman--managed to hold the whole package together. But from the moment of his death, it started to unravel. Tito died in 1980. In 1981, there were protests and demonstrations throughout Kosovo as Albanians demanded stronger autonomy and the upgrading of their regional status to equivalence with that of the other six component republics.
The Albanians were not the only ones making demands. In Serbia, the Serbian Academy of Sciences began to stir up nationalism with a notorious report, published on 24 September 1986, that talked about historic injustices to the Serb people. The nation was starting to fall apart.
What would any responsible leader do in that case? Would he try to pull people together? Would he try to build safeguards, or to recognise legitimate demands? Or would that leader do what Milosevic did: go to Kosovo to whip up a fury that could be ridden to power?
Many of my friends on the left view the former rulers of Yugoslavia as wonderful old communists. When one reads the internal debates of the Yugoslavian Communist party in the late 1980s, when Milosevic rose to power, one finds that the old communists warned, one after another, "Beware of what you are doing. Beware of what you are unleashing." There should have been more condemnation of Milosevic then and when he suspended the effective autonomy of Kosovo in 1989.
If we had moved decisively with air strikes when Milosevic first sent his troops into Slovenia--I, along with Mrs. Thatcher, was one of the first Members of Parliament to call for the use of air strikes to stop that armed intervention--we might not face the current disaster. We might not have seen the slaughter and the dismemberment of Bosnia.
What we are seeing is not western or Yankee imperialist attempts to establish control of the region. Let me tell the House why 41 American senators have voted against intervening: they see no interest, and no bounty, in it for America. Intervention is simply about human rights and, frankly, they don't give a damn about that. They are not incipient members of some new Marxist peace party; they are simply saying, "There's nothing in it for us, and who gives a damn if Milosevic is killing Albanians?"
Throughout the 1990s in my constituency, where there is a substantial Muslim community, I have seen the most horrifying stream of refugees. I saw people who had been tortured and driven from their homes because the west was so slow to act in Bosnia. I denounce the atrocities on both sides. The fact that the west was silent as Tudjman organised the driving out of Serbs from Krajina was an outrage. Frankly, he should be under indictment for his crime and for the liquidation of whole Serbian areas in Krajina.
However, that does not justify what Milosevic is doing now to the Albanians. What did Milosevic do when the Krajina refugees arrived in Belgrade? They were not allowed off the train. They were not allowed to seek comfort among their Serb neighbours. They were sent, against their will, to the Albanian areas of Kosovo to tip the balance of the population there. Even now, when Milosevic can have no doubt about the resolve of the west, what were the last images we saw? Serbian tanks systematically obliterating one Albanian village after another.
What about a breathing space? If we were to stop this action, would Milosevic stop the destruction of the Albanian areas in Kosovo? Of course not. He would recognise that breathing space for what it was--a sign of weakness. He would press on, seizing every day, week and month to carry on his ethnic cleansing.
Where my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield and I diverge is that we see different parallels. I see this action not as another Vietnam, but as a classic parallel with the rise of Hitler in Germany.Hitler rose by exploiting fear of the Jews; Milosevic has risen exploiting fear of Muslims. We heard Hitler demand, "All Germans within one state." That is exactly the cry we hear now from Milosevic--"Intervene in Slovenia, in Croatia, in Bosnia; seize the areas so that all Serbs come under one Serb nation." Europe cannot be
governed in that way. Nationalities are scattered across Europe, and there is no way to draw up ethnically pure communities.
Mr. Dalyell:
Curiously enough, I agree with much of what my hon. Friend is saying. Would he address one point, however? If this action is about saving villages, is not the only way in which to do that to send in ground troops? People are reluctant to send in ground troops, but I must ask--gently--whether bombing by itself will do anything other than strengthen Milosevic's hold on his own people. It is a terrible dilemma.
Mr. Livingstone:
I hope more than anything that the bombing will deter Milosevic. But we must not let him think that because some voices in the west are raised against the bombing, he need simply hold on long enough for us to lose our will. If the bombing fails, we must not give up. We must not step back and say, "Sorry, we can do nothing more." If the bombing fails, there will be a legitimate debate in the House of Commons and other Parliaments about the need to intervene with ground troops. Let Milosevic consider that the alternative. It is not a matter of whether we continue bombing or stop it; if the bombing does not persuade Milosevic to treat his own people as human beings, the west should not step back and ignore the situation.
If I had seen any sign over the past decade that all this was part of some imperial plan by America, I should oppose it. However, even with all the horrors of Bosnia, Clinton was eventually forced to move only with the greatest of reluctance after American television showed pictures of Bosnian men starving to death in camps. At every stage, Britain and America have been reluctant to act, and slow to act. There has been no grand imperial grab for power. Everyone would rather avoid the problem.
If I have one criticism of successive British Governments, it is that they have been slow to react and have allowed a monstrous tyrant to continue. Others have complained, saying, "Why intervene in Kosovo when horrors happen around the world?" I agreed with my hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr. Grant) who denounced the fact that the west stood by for so long while genocide happened in Rwanda.
We are no longer in a world divided along ideological lines. In those days, the superpowers often kept some reasonable order in their own areas. The end of the cold war has made a more dangerous and deadly world for many minorities who find themselves on the wrong side of an international border.
It is the duty of the nations that have the military power to protect individual communities from systematic genocide by evil regimes. Milosevic is not a democrat. Every election is rigged, and the media are controlled. I imagine that the vast majority of the Serb people would be happy to see the back of him. Where the west has the power and uses it wisely, I will support intervention. I would have supported immediate intervention in Rwanda.
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