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Mr. Tyrie: It is true that that point of view is strongly held in Belgrade. It is also true, however, that the Serbs left Kosovo in an economic migration to a higher standard of living, largely in Belgrade. They did not leave as a result of any forced emigration caused by the Albanian community.
Mr. Leigh: A memorandum that has been widely distributed in Serbia talks of ethnic Serbians having been massacred, raped and forced out of their homes. It may be overblown; it probably is, and I am sure that my hon. Friend is right to say that the prime motivation may have been economic migration. However, the Serbians believe that they are gradually being eased out of their own homeland. We must recognise that point. If we fail to do so, we shall never make progress.
Kosovars--the ethnic Albanians, that is--are not being offered an independent Kosovo. They are being offered autonomy. That is not in itself some simple solution on which western politicians can all agree. Autonomy is highly controversial to the Serbian people.
I want to speak briefly about international law. It is obvious that there is no justification for this action under international law.
Mr. Menzies Campbell
indicated dissent.
Mr. Leigh:
I have heard what the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife (Mr. Campbell) has said, but there is no justification under international law for bombing a sovereign state because one is horrified by what is being done within that state's boundaries.
Mr. Campbell:
Is it the hon. Gentleman's opinion that no matter what the nature of the enormity being inflicted by a Government on their people may be, there will never be circumstances in which intervention would be justified?
Mr. Leigh:
I was talking about international law, but the right hon. and learned Gentleman returns with an argument that I must accept. Let me put it to one side, however, while I continue to talk about international law.
We are creating a new international law--one that proclaims the point of view advanced by the right hon. and learned Gentleman. If we accept that new international law, we must ensure that we are not accused of hypocrisy. We must enforce the new international law that there should be no hiding place for dictators or for Governments who oppress their people. We must enforce that new law fairly and equally throughout the world.
What has gone on in Turkey throughout this century? What happened to the Armenians? What happened to the Kurds? I submit that what happened in those cases is of far greater barbarity and horror than even the horrors inflicted on the Kosovar Albanians. The hypocrisy of our debate--what I find utterly sickening--is that people are dressing themselves up in moral outrage on behalf of the Kosovar Albanians, but they are not prepared to intervene to help the Kurds because Turkey is too powerful and too useful to the western alliance.
By all means, create a new international law, but be fair. Do not forget what is happening in Africa. Do not think that because these people are Europeans, we should be concerned about them, but not about the massacres in Africa. We know that this new international law will never happen. We do not have the will or the resources.
We are going wrong because there is a feeling that we are dealing with an appalling dictator, a Hitler figure, who will try to eject the Albanian population entirely or murder them. I make no apologies for the Serbian leadership, but I assure the House that the people in those villages have lived together for centuries. If we blunder in, we could make the situation much worse. I believe that we have, by our blundering, our lack of will and our in-out approach, made the situation in Bosnia far worse.
Sir Patrick Cormack:
Does my hon. Friend deny the reality of the massacres in Bosnia or Kosovo, or that Milosevic is responsible for them?
Mr. Leigh:
Of course not. I do not defend Milosevic in any way. I do not deny what is going on. I am saying that we must not assume that if we do nothing, the massacres will continue and the entire population that has existed there for centuries will be evicted. That is extraordinary reasoning.
The massacres and difficulties could be exacerbated by outside pressure. The Serbian army has 239 M84 tanks, 65 T72 tanks, 785 T55 tanks and 181 T34 tanks. The safest place for those tanks now is in the Kosovar villages. We could make the situation far worse by intervening in this way.
No one can say what will happen if bombing fails to change the Serbian leadership's mind. It is absurd for the Liberal party to suggest that we can turn Kosovo into a protectorate, and that the British Army, which is already 86 per cent. committed--committed to a greater extent than at any other stage of its peacetime history--could enforce a peace on the ground in a wooded, hilly area against one of the toughest fighting peoples in the world. The area is like Wales, not an empty desert. I cannot believe that the Liberal party, with all its fine traditions--
Mr. Menzies Campbell:
Oh, come on.
Mr. Leigh:
What are the Liberals trying to convince the House of? We all know that the British Army will never be committed to this area in any event. We all know that this is fundamentally an exercise in hypocrisy. What is so moral about being prepared to bomb from the air and use cruise missiles, inevitably killing some innocent civilians? How is it moral to bomb from afar, but not be prepared to send our people to enforce the peace? I do not believe that there is any morality in that.
It is true that we have intervened before. In 1914, we were prepared to go to war to help the Belgians; in 1939, to help the Poles; in 1990, to help the Kuwaitis; in 1982, to help the people of the Falklands. In all those cases, we were prepared to commit our ground troops. We had the moral strength, the feeling of outrage and the determination to commit our own people on the ground to enforce just solutions.
Even in Iraq--and I had grave doubts about bombing that country--there was a military plan in place. I hate the term "degrading capability"; I prefer to say that we are "at war". At least in Iraq we were trying to bomb chemical facilities and possible nuclear installations. What are we bombing in Yugoslavia? If Milosevic is determined to ethnically cleanse the Kosovar people, he does not need tanks or chemical weapons. He has 30,000 troops on the ground, but he would need only a few gendarmes. We cannot bomb just these people. The House of Commons must be prepared to send Britain to war and to endorse the action on the ground--but we cannot do it. Therefore, this action is the most grotesque hypocrisy.
I shall end as I started: with Russia. In an attempt to make ourselves feel better, we are putting at risk the world order and our friendship with Russia. The House of Commons should have had an opportunity to vote on this action before we sent in our aeroplanes.
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst):
I must make an appeal for shorter speeches if many more hon. Members are to be heard in the time remaining.
Mr. Frank Cook (Stockton, North):
If I must be brief, I shall start by reminding the House that I represent Westminster on NATO's parliamentary assembly. I am vice-president of that assembly and vice-chairman of its defence and security committee. I am a member of the joint monitoring group that oversees the work of the permanent joint council, which is a channel directly between NATO and Russia. In addition, I am the special rapporteur on the reform of the Russian armed services and special rapporteur on the reform of the Ukrainian armed forces.
I am very dissatisfied with this debate. We have heard one or two good speeches, but an awful lot of ignorance has been displayed. There has been a stream of invalid comparisons, sloppy logic and selective historical references. That angers me because we are discussing serious issues.
It is grotesquely inaccurate to say that these matters have not been debated. Ten months ago, I took part in a Rose-Roth seminar held at Lake Ohrid in Macedonia, which was attended by senior politicians and diplomats from every Balkan country. Someone said that Russia has not been involved in the discussions, but I must tell the House that Russia was very well represented at that meeting. I discussed these issues with Vladimir Ryzhkov, who was Russian deputy Prime Minister under Chernomyrdin; with Volotnikov, a very influential Communist; and with General Popkovitch and other people who carry real weight in Russia.
The dialogue has continued for months. The Kosovars who attended the seminar in Macedonia were split down the middle: one half wanted autonomy and the other half wanted independence. When we attended the Organisation
for Security and Co-operation in Europe parliamentary assembly 10 days later, one Kosovar on the rostrum was arguing with another on the floor of the hall. They yelled abuse at each other in much the same way as some hon. Members have done today.
One of the problems is that the Kosovars have not spoken with one voice. Milosevic had the voice, and he still does. There has been much talk, quite properly, about Serbian heroism in world war II and comparisons have been made with the Milosevic regime. Such comparisons are entirely invalid and inaccurate. Mention has been made of Germans and the Luftwaffe. That is entirely wrong because Germany is now a democratic nation--what is more, it is part of NATO.
That brings me to the essential point. We have talked today about the fact that the Prime Minister and the British Government have declared war. They have done nothing of the kind. They have engaged in a collective action in compliance with a decision that was taken collectively by NATO--a treaty organisation of which we have been a member for 50 years. We cannot turn around and walk away from our treaty obligations. After protracted negotiations with Milosevic and after his successive breaches of faith, the collective wisdom of NATO was that the only way to stop the slaughter was to take this action. I do not like that; however, although it is regrettable, it is necessary.
I remind the House of my comments the other day; the bombing did not start last night, but months ago. When the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh) tells the House of Serbian culture and of the Serbs' determination and commitment to go on until the end, I am well aware of that because I have seen Serbs kissing the bombs as they put them into the field mortars. They sent those bombs sailing on to some defenceless community across the valley, who had no weapons of that calibre to fire back.
We must be sensible and realistic. It is no good trying to force the dialogue that has been called for today. I get a bit sick of hon. Members wringing their hands and parading their consciences in the Chamber, while people are being shot in the back of the head. Those people are not combatants, but old women and young boys. Combat did not matter to the 20 people who were found slaughtered in a gully. They were not killed because they were engaging in combat; they were killed because they were of the wrong ethnic origin and the wrong religion.
We can make nice legal points about why we should or should not take this action, but, frankly, I do not want to take part in that debate. We cannot allow slaughter to go on in that state. It is utterly wrong. The approach adopted by NATO is to disarm the major weaponry of the Yugoslavian army. The tanks mentioned by the hon. Member for Gainsborough may well prove to be a problem to the KLA and it is true that NATO's air strikes may be providing cover for the KLA, but they are also providing cover for those who are not members of the KLA. The Serbian tanks could well be taken out by Apache Longbows in the fullness of time; I hope that does not happen, but it is a military reality that it could easily be done. Technologically, there is no comparison whatever between the NATO strike capability and that of
the Serbians. The Serbian communications networks will be in a mess now, and their logistic routes will not be as easy as they were.
I do not know what the reaction will be to the reports on the wires--which my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Mrs. Mahon) has told us about--that Mr. Milosevic has announced the cessation of his action in Kosovo. That is one bonus. We must hope that he goes a little further and signs the agreement that was on the table in Rambouillet, as he should have done originally.
NATO has allowed itself to be conned. The KLA was prepared to sign the Rambouillet agreement for autonomy only, even though its members wanted independence. I have no doubt that the KLA agreed to sign that agreement to put Milosevic in an embarrassing situation. I discussed those matters with General Klaus Naumann, who chairs the military committee. General Naumann and General Wesley Clark, the supreme allied commander, spent more than 20 hours face to face with Milosevic, trying to talk sense to him. Naumann came away from that meeting convinced that Milosevic needed armed intervention to protect himself from his own electorate in the event of his making concessions to the Kosovar demands. I do not know whether that is true, but it was Naumann's analysis and I have heard many other senior commentators express similar views. If that proves to be true, I shall be hugely relieved, and I am sure that the rest of the House will be as well. The fact that Milosevic has called a cessation of the action might indicate that there is some substance to that analysis. I pray to God that there is.
5.41 pm
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