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4.6 pm
Mr. Mike Hancock (Portsmouth, South): I am grateful for the opportunity to take part in the debate. I think that none of us--certainly not the Foreign Secretary when he spoke today or the Prime Minister in his statement earlier this week--would say that we have a death wish or hatred for the Serbian people. Nothing could be further from the truth. On both sides of the House and throughout the country, the reaction is the same now as it was for events in Iraq. As far as we were concerned, there was no fight with the Iraqi people, but we were against the Iraqi regime. That is also true of Serbia. As long as Milosevic leads a regime that is so intrinsically evil to the people whom he claims to represent, and he is prepared to punish them in such a severe and hideous way, the natural reaction of all decent people is to be repelled by that and to want to try do something about it.
Like many hon. Members who have spoken today, I have visited the area on several occasions. Before I went to Kosovo and Albania, I thought that I had seen the worst things that I would see in my life. I had seen children die through hunger in the deserts of Africa and had seen people locked up in the hideous asylums of Romania and other countries of eastern Europe. I had seen civil rights atrociously denied to people right across the world.
However, nothing had prepared me for what I saw on the borders of northern Albania and in Kosovo. My group travelled by helicopter and landed in a place where a
firefight had just finished. We saw people who had been shot and their heads hacked off and left as an example for other villagers. That is a horrendous sight. We saw children shot, then stabbed and mutilated. We saw women who had been raped, not once but several times, then shot or hanged as an example to others. Those events are horrendous to contemplate. Those were not rare occurrences; they were everyday events for the people of that region, as they had been for some considerable time.
As the right hon. Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Mr. Clark) said, it is right and proper to put aside the suggestion that the KLA are blameless. Far from it. I also witnessed the atrocities that they had committed. They had killed unarmed civilians, as an example to others; they had shot and then mutilated the bodies of Serbian soldiers who had surrendered. The suggestion was made, "In a civil war in a country like ours, nobody surrenders to anyone. The minute you stop shooting, you're dead." That cannot be right. The Prime Minister spoke for all those who believe that it is not possible to watch the scenes that we have seen on our television screens, or to read the graphic details in our newspapers as we have done, and then, as a nation and as a member of NATO, to stand by and let it continue.
There has rightly been criticism that these events were allowed to continue for so long, but no one who has said that the bombing is wrong has come up with a viable solution that stops the killing. Everyone who has spoken has been unable to suggest an alternative to bombing Milosevic, depriving him of some of the killing kit that he has at his disposal, and perhaps shocking the people of Serbia into realising that Milosevic has got it wrong.
Listening to the World Service today, I was staggered to hear interviews with people in Serbia who were surprised that bombing had occurred. Right up until 7 o'clock last night, some of them had believed that Milosevic would once again pull a magician's trick and somehow con NATO and the rest of us into calling off the bombing. Today, the Serbian people are in a state of shock, horrified that, for the first time, bombs and missiles have been targeted on them.
Hon. Members are right to say that what we have done is horrendous to contemplate. Anyone who saw the Prime Minister talking about it in the House this week could not have failed to see the strain and tension in his face. The right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) spoke of his own conflicts of conscience when he, as a member of the Cabinet, had to make similar decisions. Anyone who feels that the action is being taken to protect and defend NATO's macho image must be mad. Human beings have had to make those decisions in respect of other human beings who are dying.
It is right to repeat the statistics. Twenty-five per cent. of the population of the region of Kosovo have been forced to move from their homes, which have been destroyed. Thousands of people have been killed, and tens of thousands wounded or injured, either by direct action or by having to endure terrible trauma and forced movements across the region. European Union countries currently hold 1 million refugees from that region. Those people have been forced to move from their homes because of a regime led by a madman that is so evil that it believed that that was the right thing to do.
How on earth can we reason with people who genuinely believe that it is right and proper to massacre women and children, blow up their homes, or force them from the
region in which they live? How can we reason with people like that? How can hon. Members who say that we should have gone on talking believe that there is a genuine solution to be found at the negotiating table? Of course there is not. The Serbian people have the answer in their hands: they have to decide whether they want to be governed by a regime that disregards human life in such a cavalier manner.
It is despicable to suggest that we are acting for any other reasons than the right ones. The right hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr. Benn) is extremely selective in recounting history to support his argument, and he should have stayed in the Chamber throughout the debate and heard some of the rebuttals. He claims that it is better to talk than to drop bombs, but he did not make a single suggestion as to how that would prevent one more person from being killed. In his well crafted speech, the Foreign Secretary spelt out the method of negotiation that had been exhausted. Did he not say that, when Milosevic agreed to call a halt, it lasted all of six weeks? That simply gave him, his armed forces and the Serbian police an opportunity to regroup and return with an even more heavily mailed fist to inflict pain and suffering on the people.
No one can be sure that the bombing campaign will be sufficient to knock sense into the heads of the Serbian people. I greatly doubt whether it will ever be possible to knock sense into Milosevic's head. However, I hope that the Serbian people will realise that this is being done to bring peace to the country and to stop the murderous actions that have been carried out, supposedly in their name. I hope that they will see sense.
From the three occasions that I have visited the area, I know that it is not hard to find some who want a Greater Serbia, in which the people of Slovenia and Croatia are reunited with their Serbian brethren. Equally, one does not have to go far in the region of the legions of the KLA to meet those who believe that their only salvation is a Greater Albania.
Mr. John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings):
The hon. Gentleman is speaking with some passion, but I want to be clear as to his argument. He says that he is not absolutely sure that the action being taken will bring the Serbs to heel, yet with his next breath, he tells us that the aim of the mission is to bring peace to the country. To anyone with a sense of logic or common sense, that does not hold up.
Mr. Hancock:
Others who have spoken in the debate and who previously questioned the Prime Minister have suggested that we should go on talking. My point is that no one--not one of us, not the Prime Minister, not the President of the United States, and not the generals leading the campaign for NATO--can say that they believe that this action alone is a solution, but we hope and pray that it will be. Most reasonable people hope that we do not have bomb again, and that enough harm will have been done to ensure that people see sense; but none of us--even the hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr. Hayes)--can claim to be sure. I hope that we can achieve a solution.
Mr. Jeremy Corbyn (Islington, North):
The hon. Gentleman is making a clear case for continued
Mr. Hancock:
The hon. Gentleman has made the point that I put to the Secretary of State for Defence when he came before the Select Committee on Defence yesterday morning. I asked the right hon. Gentleman, "What do you do if, at the end of the day, you have to commit ground forces?" His reply was the same as the Prime Minister's: "It is not our view that we will have to face that." Nobody wants that, but we all have to keep at the back of our mind the possibility that we might be confronted with a nation that has been bombed into a unit of resistance and that can be overcome only by land forces being sent in to protect the people.
Sir Peter Tapsell:
So that is the policy is it?
Mr. Hancock:
No, I do not think it is. It is a possible end scenario, and certainly the most painful end scenario that could ever be contemplated. That is why we must be seen to be united today in what we want from the campaign in which NATO is exercised on behalf of the whole of the civilised world.
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