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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence (Mr. John Spellar): It must be true then.
Mr. Galloway: I found her reply persuasive, even if my hon. Friend prefers the Foreign Secretary's version. I thought that Mrs. Milosevic's letter had a certain dignity.
Mr. John Wilkinson (Ruislip-Northwood): This grim crisis has made us all realise that the Government's long honeymoon is finally over. We all imagined that destiny would at some time intervene but no one in their worst dreams could have envisaged a destiny as grim as the conflict which has beset Kosovo and threatens to engulf the region. How I wish that our deliberations were illuminated by people of the character and knowledge of Julian Amery and Billy McLean for Albania, Fitzroy Maclean for Yugoslavia, and Monty Woodhouse and Carol Mather for Greece. Unlike theirs, our generation is unused to war, and many have not comprehended the totally determinant effect that it can have on human affairs, nor have they prepared sufficiently for it.
At the beginning of the crisis way back in October, I asked the Foreign Secretary two questions. The first was whose side are we on. Mr. Milosevic has now answered that. Secondly, I asked whether the ultimate solution to the problem of Kosovo was not to be found in self-determination for its people. The Government resolutely turned their face against that option. It is in the tradition of the Foreign Office to do so, and to recognise existing boundaries, but self-determination is often the right solution. It was right when the Soviet Union broke up and its constituent republics became free again. It is what sustains our position in Northern Ireland and our sovereignty over the Falkland Islands. In short, it accords with our democratic tradition, and in Kosovo it accords with the ethnic reality on the ground.
The tragedy is that the pain and grief that we see on our television screens are the consequence of weakness. We must always remember that the consequence of weakness is usually suffering. Both militarily and diplomatically, we have been weak. Our bluff was finally called. The phoney war is over, though at home people might not believe it because the war which we see on our screens is of the sort that people play in amusement arcades. As those who have experience of war know, this is quite different, and painful in human blood and suffering.
This is not a phoney war. I use the word "war" advisedly although the Foreign Secretary does not like it. It is certainly a war for the people of Kosovo, Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia and for the aircrew of the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy, who have now joined the conflict. Day after day, night after night, often in appalling weather and difficult conditions, they go out to prosecute the combat, seeking out difficult targets in difficult circumstances. If it is not war, we are prejudicing the treatment of our aircrew if they have to bale out over what we know to be enemy territories because they would be regarded as common criminals and would not enjoy the safeguards of the Geneva convention. We should strip away the illusions.
Once our country is engaged upon war, there is only one acceptable outcome, and that is victory. We must see it through to the end whatever it may take. The consequences of failure are too dire for the people of Kosovo, who have suffered enough already; for the neighbouring nations and states; and for our alliance, because other dictators and aggressors will take it to heart that our alliance is not prepared to stand up for its rights and for the liberties of its citizens, and ultimately has not the strength and courage to win.
The air offensive is crucial at every stage of the conflict. First, it has to secure the air superiority without which nothing can be achieved on the ground. Secondly, it has to isolate the Kosovo battlefield and conduct a strategic effort to degrade the Serbian war machine and economy and take out its fuel supplies and transport, communications, command and control systems.
There is also a tactical air campaign to be won. This is perhaps even more difficult. It is mainly in Kosovo, against Serbian armour, transport, communications, troop concentrations and headquarters facilities. Such targets are difficult to locate and for air crews are extremely professionally challenging. The key will be the will to sustain those operations and maintain the offensive.
The United States, to its credit, is calling up its air reserves. I wish that we had more. The Opposition have argued for them for long enough. I wish that we had the strategic airlift capacity of the C-17s promised in the defence review but not yet ordered. They could have enabled us to take main battle tanks and heavy armour to the theatre in hours rather than weeks, but we have to fight with what we have got.
In my judgment, I perhaps differ from other hon. Members, but the best people to fight are the Kosovans themselves. It is their land that will be liberated. They know that, and they have the will. They want to see it through to regain possession of their homelands and get their families settled in peace. The history of Balkan conflict has always involved assisting people who, ethically speaking, may seem to us, in the cosiness of our
armchairs, not ideal; but the Kosovo Liberation Army is the only force available to do the job. It needs to be trained, supplied and given intelligence support and all the backing that we can provide. We have the expertise to do so, and we should use it to the full.
Mr. Roger Casale (Wimbledon):
I add my name to the list of Members on both sides of the House who support the military intervention in Kosovo. I say that without banging war drums, without any self-righteousness, and also without feeling any contradiction between that view and being a man of the left; however, I say it with a sense of great fear and terrible anxiety--the fear and anxiety that I felt on hearing news of murders in Vukovar, Srebrenica and Racak. I believe that it is right that we are directly involved in the terrible events that are happening in Kosovo.
I do not believe that we are engaged in an act of war against Serbia; nor do I believe that the bombing of military targets and installations in Serbian Kosovo can in itself be described as a humanitarian act. However, having the capacity to act in the face of such butchery, we are right to do so. We are right to do all that we can to stop the killing in Kosovo; we are right to take a stand.
Historical parallels are dangerous at the best of times, and no more so than in the context of the current conflict in the Balkans. However, for those who claim that the current intervention must be justified, despite the obvious fact of the killings, perhaps we can cast the moral dilemma in this way. We knew that Hitler was rounding up the Jews, placing them in camps and murdering them. We knew that, to do that, he was taking them to the camps by train. Would it not have been right to try to destroy by aerial bombardment the railway lines that led to those camps? Could a moral case be made today for not taking such action? I believe not only that it is right to act in such circumstances, but that we have a duty to act. Moreover, the people of Kosovo have the right to expect NATO to act in order to save and protect them, and those acting on behalf of NATO in the field are entitled to expect and receive the support of this House.
The questions that we must ask are not so much to do with why we are in Kosovo; I believe that we know why we are in Kosovo. Tonight, we must ask how far the Kosovan people can expect NATO to go in attempting to protect them. What are the limits that we, as a nation, should set in pursuit of our objectives? We know that those objectives now include the determination not only to stop the killing of Kosovar people, but to return the people of Kosovo to their homes.
A further fact becomes clearer every day: that without ground forces in addition to air strikes we cannot stop the killing. How are we to stop the killing when small groups
of Serb militia go from house to house murdering and mutilating people, armed not only with Kalashnikovs but with pistols and pocket knives, and hunt down refugees in the countryside? By means of aerial bombardment, how are we to stop the systematic rape of Kosovo women? Partitioning Kosovo is perhaps an objective of Milosevic but cannot become the aim of NATO. How are we to drive Milosevic's troops and militia from the territory without the intervention of troops on the ground? If we decide to send in troops, in what circumstances shall we do so and at what human cost?
We have not found answers to those questions in today's debate, but we must at least raise the issues that may be relevant to finding answers. First, if we do not take the next step, there is a real and present danger that the killing will simply go on and on. There were 100,000 lives lost in Croatia and 250,000 were lost in Bosnia. How many hundreds of thousands of lives must be lost in Kosovo before we decide that it is no longer possible for us, on moral, pragmatic or any other grounds, to hold back the troops?
Secondly, it is now clear that Milosevic's aim is to expel the Kosovan Albanian population--90 per cent. of the total population--from the territory of Kosovo. Not to send in ground troops will be to allow that to continue. My right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary is right to say that the relatively fortunate people who escape across the border into Albania or Macedonia do not blame their exile on NATO. Milosevic tells the refugees, "Go to NATO, they will help you," and we would do well to heed those words. However, protecting and caring for the displaced--almost the entire population of Kosovo--whether in the neighbouring countries or in our own countries, represents a massive challenge not only to our military strength but to the resourcefulness of our entire civic societies. If there are no troops, it means that we will have taken on the responsibility of caring for the Kosovan refugees of the diaspora--perhaps for many years to come.
Thirdly, the conflict in Kosovo is not only a conflict between different ethnic groups or a battle of wills between a murderous psychopath with a monopoly of power and the rest of our civilised world; in a fundamental way, the conflict in Kosovo is about ourselves, our values and the world that we have built up around us in Europe since the second world war. Milosevic's actions stand in direct contradiction to the values of freedom, equality and justice that we have built into our systems of domestic legislation and into the conduct of international relations in the modern world and which have so often inspired the left. On the threshold of the 20th century, can we allow one man on the borders of Europe to take the decision about who should live and who should die? We should not believe that we can fail in our attempt to stand up to Milosevic and break his monopoly of power and wake up to find ourselves in the same world as before.
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