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9.2 pm
Mr. Bowen Wells (Hertford and Stortford): I wish to concentrate on two of the war aims enunciated by the Foreign Secretary this afternoon. The first--as has been reiterated many times by the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister--is to return the refugees to their homes. I wish to examine the implications of that war aim. The second was not mentioned by the Foreign Secretary today, but has been mentioned briefly by the Prime Minister; to return stability to the whole region. That matter has not been dwelt on in this debate.
The hon. Members for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd) and for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) referred to the terrible plight of the refugees in neighbouring countries to Kosovo. The camps in Macedonia, for instance--which were put up so brilliantly and so quickly by the British Army--have serious problems. There is no adequate sanitation, schooling or health provision. They are no places for any refugee to stay for a long time.
We have been told this afternoon that the war will go on for much longer, so we must look at how we provide properly for those refugees and how we make certain that we have sufficient provision for them. I have been trying to find out the number of refugees with whom we will be dealing. My inquiries have met with varied results. I have been told that about 500,000 refugees are spread between Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro. Those are the main areas in which the current refugees are to be found.
Those people are crossing the borders in ever-increasing numbers, and the longer the war continues, the larger the numbers will be. The population of Kosovo is approximately 2 million, 90 per cent. of whom are Albanian Muslims, Kosovans or Illyrians--as they would call themselves in some of their more historical reminiscences about their origins. If all those people are to be "cleansed", horribly as it may be, we shall be dealing with a much larger refugee problem than I think the international community has even begun to contemplate.
Certainly, the amount of money that we have contributed is insufficient to deal with the problem. I understand from ministerial statements that we have contributed £20 million, £10 million of which will come from the emergency provisions of the Department for International Development and £10 million from a source that the Prime Minister did not name to us. I hope that that money will not come from the budget of the Department for International Development; if that is the case, the question of our attacking poverty will rise. I hope that the Secretary of State for Defence will tell us where the money will come from when he winds up the debate.
There has been talk of a further £7 million, making a total of £27 million. There are also our contributions to the UNHCR, the International Committee of the Red Cross and UNICEF, and to the European Union fund, so the total is actually much greater than the public imagine. Nevertheless, it is not enough to enable us to deal with
the refugee problem that we shall face over a long period. We shall have to establish whole villages, which are likely to comprise more than 1 million people and which will need to be provided with proper sanitation, proper housing and shelter, schools and numerous services for women and children who have been parted from their families. There will need to be services to deal with the trauma that people will have experienced, as well as food and medical supplies. Nothing like that level of provision has been contemplated by the country, by the House or, indeed, by the international community, but I think that we must plan for it.
The war aim is to return the refugees to their homes in Kosovo after, say, six or nine months, but what does that mean? Their homes have been incinerated: they have been destroyed. We in NATO are busily destroying the infrastructure that controlled those homes, on the basis that those are military targets that we are entitled to bomb: roads, bridges, fuel supplies, water supplies and sanitation. People are not going to return. Refugees who have been established, properly, in camps of which we can be proud are not going to return to conditions in which they have not the basic elements enabling them to live--including food: they will not have been able to plant crops or produce any kind of harvest for the next year. We must provide those people with food, housing, and all the infrastructure into the bargain.
Given our objectives and the opportunities that exist, a huge problem lies ahead of us. Meanwhile, we are destroying the Serbian infrastructure. There are already 600,000 refugees in Serbia who have come from Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, and who need help of the kind that is given to refugees. Our bombing is making many more people homeless, and giving them refugee status. If we are to pursue this war to its conclusion--which is demonstrated by a single objective--we must make provision for the Serb refugees and the homeless in Serbia who will be destitute, without jobs, food or shelter. We cannot ignore their problems. If we are to provide a stable regime for the rest of the region, we cannot allow the stationing in small countries of a number of refugees that would upset the ethnic balance in those countries.
Moreover, we cannot treat refugees better--give them better housing, better food, better shelter and better medical facilities--than the people who live in Macedonia, Montenegro and Albania. We have a massive problem with which to deal in those countries. We need to make provision for it now. We need to alert all the international agencies, particularly the UNHCR, to that great problem.
With the massive number of minorities and refugees in those countries, stability is not likely, particularly if we have to introduce troops to defend refugees whom we return to Kosovo. They will not return unless they feel that they will not be attacked again.
Ms Tess Kingham (Gloucester):
I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to what is an important debate.
There is no doubt that the plight of the Kosovar refugees has hit to the very heart of the British people, who have responded with characteristic generosity to the disturbing scenes of streams of Kosovars driven from their homes, fleeing with few provisions across the borders into camps in Macedonia and Albania. In my own city of Gloucester, the public responded swiftly, establishing collection points in the city centre for clothing, blankets and children's toys. Over the past few weeks, as a result of that, I have spoken to hundreds of people in my city. The overwhelming response to the NATO campaign has been, "It's about time. Milosevic has had enough time to negotiate over many years. It's about time the international community acted."
As someone who spent most of her working life before being elected working in international aid agencies, often communicating the aftermath of war, I find myself in the unusual position of agreeing with that view. I strongly believe that the suffering of the Kosovar Albanian families will cease in the long term only if Milosevic's war machine is stopped now and if the NATO campaign does not cease until his military capability has finally been completely crushed. If the international community had dealt with Milosevic and his systematic campaigns of ethnic cleansing in that way almost a decade ago, we would not be witnessing yet again mass atrocities almost on our borders.
I became active in party politics quite late on and primarily as a result of my experience working in the international aid sector. Personally, I grew increasingly frustrated with lobbying politicians for action. I thought that I should like to play a more direct part in trying to influence political decisions. Certain international events during my career crystallised my thinking--indeed, it changed it--on military intervention, in particular, the tragedies in Bosnia and Rwanda.
I remember clearly in 1994 the aid agencies and people on the ground warning politicians throughout the world that genocide was being planned in Rwanda. As in most cases of genocide, the Rwandan genocide was not spontaneous. It was not just an ethnic tribal conflict. The genocide was strategic, clinical and totally predictable.
I madly lobbied politicians to increase the UN presence in Rwanda and to get the UN to intervene to prevent the genocide, not just to stand by as a passive witness. It was a sad, frustrating and depressing experience. While politicians pontificated, the Rwandan massacres took place under their noses. Instead of intervening, the UN pulled out.
To our eternal shame, almost 1 million people were slaughtered under the noses of the inactive international community. We failed the Rwandan people and then the people of Bosnia too. The reports of death camps, mass executions and systematic massacres there in the early 1990s gradually exposed the situation. Then, too, there were cries that the reports might be exaggerated and should be a bit more evenhanded. After the event, when the mass graves were uncovered, it emerged that the truth was much worse than many of the reports.
I remember the frustration that many of us felt that the world had waited too long to act. In both those cases, arguments were advanced about national sovereignty and the rights of the nation state, but we had a responsibility as an international community and as signatories to the UN convention on genocide to prevent genocide wherever possible; we did not. In any case, the survivors of the Rwandan genocide did not care whose remit it was, or about the dot or comma of international law: they wanted action and they wanted their families saved from the massacres. For the sake of basic humanity, the genocide in Rwanda should have been stopped.
I feel the same sense of frustration now as a Member of Parliament, seeing the plans for genocide--I make no apology for using that word--unfold in Kosovo. I do not like war--I have seen its effects at first hand--but I am pleased and relieved that the Labour Government are not turning away from Kosovo and finding excuses not to act. We are acting now to prevent genocide and not to have the shame of standing by and prevaricating while hundreds of thousands of people are systematically ethnically cleansed. That is a brave decision and it is morally correct.
So far, either beforehand or this evening, I have not heard any convincing alternative to NATO's actions that would have protected the Kosovar Albanians. I have heard plenty of reasons--and felt a sense of deja vu--why NATO should not intervene, but no credible, practical alternatives from those opposing the NATO actions. Some hon. Members have argued that the UN should be the lead force in the intervention and that we need more negotiations with Milosevic. If we expected the UN to arrive on a white charger to save the Kosovar Albanians from genocide, we would have had a long wait. We all know that the UN would never have intervened in Kosovo because of the veto system in the Security Council.
Last year, I was part of a delegation from the Select Committee on International Development to the Secretary-General and the UN head of peacekeeping. I asked both of them what the ultimate sanctions applied to any party in a conflict who did not abide by UN resolutions would be. I was thinking not of Kosovo at the time, but of Angola and Western Sahara. It was made clear to me that any wait for UN intervention would be a very long one, that there was no political will around the world to intervene, and that the ultimate sanction the UN had was to pull out.
I remember commenting to colleagues on the delegation that that was a charter for any expansionist dictator to invade anywhere, commit atrocities, have a few UN resolutions slapped at him, sit tight for a few years and the UN would pull out. Sadly, the UN would not have prevented genocide in Kosovo.
The UN must be the foundation of international law and our hope for the future, but its capabilities to intervene must be built up. We must also address the ridiculous veto system in the Security Council. That is an enormous task and the people of Kosovo could not wait for it to be completed. I have also heard it argued that we should not intervene in Kosovo because we did not do so in Rwanda or Bosnia. Surely that is the point. We did not intervene, to our eternal shame. What are we supposed to say to people in Kosovo now? "We are sorry, but you will have to wait and let genocide happen. We let a million die in Rwanda and we did not intervene in Bosnia, so it would not be fair." I do not think so.
It is also argued that we should negotiate, but we did and for more than a year. This time Milosevic is following a characteristic pattern. We have seen it before--the clearing of villages, the burnings, the torture and the mass executions. If Milosevic accepts NATO's five-point plan, the bombings will stop. It is that simple and straightforward. We must be clear that he is enacting a strategically planned programme of ethnic cleansing. Whatever the historical perspectives, that is what he is doing--and we must remember that fact throughout this debate. More than 500,000 people have been displaced, villages have been burnt and destroyed, men taken away and shot, and women raped.
The question of rape in Kosovo clearly illustrates Milosevic's true intentions in that area and across the region. It is at the heart of his genocidal campaign. The reports of rape from women refugees are not unfamiliar to me. I had heard them from Bosnian women and read countless similar testimonies during the Bosnian war less than 10 years ago.
The rapes are not spontaneous acts of violence by an uncontrolled military. Yet again, Milosevic's forces are using rape as an act of genocide. When Serb forces rape a woman as part of an ethnic cleansing strategy, they intend to do, and succeed in doing, several things. They humiliate an Albanian. Often, they rape a woman in front of family members--fathers, brothers and sons. They destroy the fabric of the family.
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