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6.20 pm
Sir Raymond Whitney (Wycombe): There is a long and honourable tradition in the House that in times of conflict right hon. and hon. Members on both sides of the Chamber give unqualified and wholehearted support to our forces. I am glad that the Conservative party has offered that support since the beginning of the crisis. As a former Regular soldier, I have every reason to understand the importance of that support. However, that does not mean that the Opposition or hon. Members on both sides of the House should renounce their right and duty to examine carefully the performance of the Executive. Indeed, at times of war, the monitoring of the Government's performance is even more crucial than it usually is.
Over the past day or two we have had some extraordinary examples of the extent to which the Government are at sea--a matter to which I shall return. A balanced examination of the way in which the Government have handled the Kosovo crisis can conclude only that we are witnessing a fiasco on a scale that this country has not seen for generations. I think that we should have to go back to the Boer war to find a military situation where the enemy has been so thoroughly misunderstood, where planning and foresight have been so glaringly absent and where the strategic concept on which our campaign appears to be based is so greatly at variance with the great majority of military thinking and the experience of our armed forces.
Never can a collection of Ministers--in interviews on television or radio and in articles in the press--have seemed so completely at sea, so entirely unable to control events and so uncomprehending of what is going on. It may be offered as a plea in exculpation that the Government have been dragged into this situation by the United States. As a long-standing admirer of America and much of what that country stands for, I have to say that that is a valid complaint and a valid point to make. However, the US contribution to Europe's security has always been, and continues to be, tremendous, and crucial to Europe, and we Europeans must do more in future to deserve a continuation of American support. The Americans sometimes miscalculate, however; and when
we think they are on the wrong track, we have a duty, as their close friends and allies, to tell them so. Conservative Prime Ministers have done so in the past. The present Prime Minister clearly has failed to do so.
Perhaps both Governments are in the dock, therefore, but the performance of the US Government is a matter for the American Congress and the American people. It cannot be used in a plea of mitigation for the British Government.
The list of charges is lengthy, so I can offer only a selection. For a year the Government blustered with Milosevic hoping to browbeat him into acceptable behaviour. When that failed, they turned to aerial bombardment, apparently hoping that that would achieve his rapid submission. They have been surprised that the use of air power has not brought the success they were after. Yet, as we have heard so often this evening, the vast majority of military commentators could have told them, and did tell them, what would happen.
The use of air power alone hardly ever works. The Government have been surprised not only that Milosevic is still there but that he now enjoys more popular support than he did when the bombing started. They have been surprised that once the action began Serb atrocities against the Kosovars increased, so that since 24 March thousands more have been killed and hundreds of thousands have been turned into refugees. The figure offered today by the United National Development Programme is that 600,000 refugees have been created in recent weeks. The Government gratuitously told Milosevic that NATO would not use ground troops, thus giving him more reason to hope that he could secure a satisfactory settlement of the terrible situation that he had created. The Government told Milosevic that he would be tried as a war criminal, giving him a further incentive to hold out against the bombing and to refuse to negotiate. The list is much longer.
Even this Government, having reached this situation, must surely accept that we cannot merely continue with the bombing month after month after month. The Foreign Secretary has given us no idea of when the bombing might achieve any sort of success. There are now only two choices facing NATO Governments. They could call off the bombardment and patch up whatever accommodation they can manage with Milosevic, perhaps hoping that the Russians will come to see it as being somehow in their own interest to play a constructive role. Or they could recognise what they should have understood before they started to threaten the Serbs and before they started the bombing, which is that they will achieve their aims only by backing up the aerial bombardment with the use of land forces.
I believe that things have gone too far for the first option to be acceptable. Quite apart from the messy situation that it would leave in Kosovo and the neighbouring states, it would represent a massive and humiliating defeat for NATO. Such a defeat is something that we and all western nations simply could not afford, for many reasons which I think most Members will appreciate.
Of course, the ground force option has great difficulties, not least because it has been so emphatically ruled out by the Government until quite recently. However, I refuse to accept that the most successful military alliance ever created is unable to tackle the
Yugoslav army, particularly once the military infrastructure pounding takes its effect, bearing in mind what we have seen over the past three or four weeks.
From this Government-created fiasco we must learn important lessons for the future. We must never again be sleepwalked into this sort of mess by a Government who are bemused by spin doctoring and who understand so little of the military and strategic realities that modern Governments have to face. In this post-cold war world, are we and our western allies prepared to intervene in sovereign states for humanitarian reasons? I am inclined to think that the answer to that question will be--and perhaps should be--yes, if only because of what they refer to in the United States as the CNN factor. If we are to intervene, it must be on the basis of clear thinking and careful planning. Those factors have been totally absent from the Government's handling of the Kosovo affair.
Mrs. Alice Mahon (Halifax):
I share with colleagues an abhorrence of ethnic cleansing and condemn unreservedly any atrocities committed by either side. If evidence is available, the perpetrators should be prosecuted. I condemn also the war that is waged by NATO against the people of Yugoslavia, which is why this weekend I visited Yugoslavia to learn at first hand the people's views about how the bombing is affecting their lives and what they see of the future.
I visited Novi Sad on Saturday and stood with citizens of that multi-ethnic city on the one remaining bridge across the Danube. Twenty-six ethnic communities live peacefully in Vojvodina and they were all represented on the bridge. I and the journalists who accompanied me were allowed to mix freely with the people. We were under no restrictions as we talked to the people about the refugee crisis and the bombing. We heard many expressions of sympathy from the ordinary people on that bridge. They overwhelmingly blamed NATO for the escalation of the problem in Kosovo; that united them. [Interruption.] They referred to the Kosovo Liberation Army as people who had perpetrated serious acts, and compared the position with other situations in the world involving the Kurds and the IRA.
I am sorry that my hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr. Bradshaw) felt fit to laugh when the people about whom I was talking live under nightly bombardments. They have a right to express a view. Such cheap behaviour does not do anything to enhance the debate.
The people in Novi Sad know what is happening. They watch CNN and BBC television. They know what happened to the Zastrava--
Mr. Ben Bradshaw (Exeter)
rose--
Mrs. Mahon:
I will not give way.
The people in Novi Sad know what happened to the Zastrava car and tractor factory, where the workers staged a sit-in. They faxed the co-ordinates to NATO and Clinton, but NATO still went ahead and sent 25 cruise missiles to bomb that factory. If hon. Members visited the factory, as I did, they would think it a miracle that nobody died--160 were injured--and they could still go into the centre, where the sit-in was, to see the blood splattered over the makeshift beds and chairs.
When the sirens went, there was no chance to evacuate everyone and people saved themselves by getting under the main structure, carrying the injured with them. Somehow it held and lives were not lost. The bombing that night shattered the heating plant that serves a large residential area--it was completely destroyed--and a large area is without any heating whatever.
The workers whom I met and talked to quite freely were pretty angry. They wanted me to give a message to the House. They said that they had harmed nobody. Many of them had demonstrated against Milosevic, but they asked me to say, "We will fight for our country in every town, every village and every house and behind every tree. If the Americans use defoliants, as they did in Vietnam, we will fight from tunnels. We are not going to give up." That is the message from the Zastrava factory and from the bridge at Novi Sad, which is the only one standing. The bridges have been bombed. As any civil engineer would tell the House, when a bridge crosses a river it carries the water supply--in this case, to the main hospital. That has gone, and so have all the cables.
As has been said, bombing bridges harms civilians; in this case, it has. Tremendous damage has been done to the civilian population. An hour after we left, the heaviest bombing yet took place in Novi Sad. These bombs are hitting civilian targets.
Early on Sunday morning, I heard the sirens. A bombing attack was taking place on Pancevo, where petrol tanks and the chemical factory went up. Pancevo is about five or six miles outside Belgrade. I stood looking out my hotel bedroom window, wondering what to do and watching clouds of noxious fumes go up, as the plant took a direct hit.
On Sunday, I visited a small town called Chubria. I am sorry that the Foreign Secretary would not let me intervene earlier, because I have brought a message from a citizen of that town. It was bombed in the early hours of 8 April: one woman was killed, five were injured and 400 residential homes were either flattened or badly damaged. This is not propaganda; I witnessed it with my own eyes. In the town centre, a school of nursing, a department store and the sports hall--500 m from where the seven bombs fell--have been badly damaged.
I talked to a dentist and his wife who referred to themselves as "collateral damage". Their home was completely destroyed above their heads as they hid for shelter in the cellar. The wife was injured and they are deeply traumatised. The so-called military target was a long-time disused barracks 2 km from the residential area. That attack was on civilians, as were the attacks on the train, the factories and the refugee column. It is no good telling these people, as they run each night into their bomb shelters, that NATO is not attacking them. They know that it is. That town opposed Milosevic; it is now 100 per cent. behind him.
On Sunday evening, we visited Pancevo, where the oil refineries and the chemical plant were blazing out of control. Restrictions meant that we were not allowed to film and talk to the staff, but workers died there during the previous bombing raid, and I got the feeling--which can be translated into any language--that there was no way that they wanted to talk to us. I could taste and smell the fumes and I was glad to get out of there. Of course, there is nowhere for those people to go.
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