| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Tam Dalyell (Linlithgow): Would the Foreign Secretary allow me?
Mr. Cook: I shall give way to my hon. Friend.
Mr. Dalyell: Presumably, the tanks are being destroyed by depleted uranium shells. The depleted uranium health hazards in Iraq are well known. What is the assessment, in the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office, of the long-term health effects on the population of using depleted uranium weapons?
Mr. Cook: No depleted uranium is in use with British forces--[Hon. Members: "NATO".] With respect, I am speaking in the British House of Commons of the British Parliament, and I am assuring the House that there is no depleted uranium in use with our forces. As for studies of health in Iraq, the Ministry of Defence has had a considerable look at what may have happened there, and we are confident that depleted uranium poses a very small risk to health. Regardless, however, none are being dropped by RAF airplanes.
Mr. Robathan: Will the Foreign Secretary give way?
Mr. Cook: No. If I may, I shall continue with my speech.
As I said, our air campaign has had a real impact in Kosovo. That impact is known throughout Serbia, not only in Kosovo. Yesterday, in Krusevac, 3,000 protesters stoned the town hall and booed local officials, demanding the return of reservists from Kosovo. They did so under the slogan, "We want sons, not coffins."
On Friday, I spoke by satellite telephone to Hashem Thaqi, the political spokesman for the KLA. He confirmed that the effect of our air campaign had been to keep the Serb forces divided, to prevent them from regrouping or concentrating their forces. They have to spend more and more of their time digging in and hiding, rather than carrying out offensive action.
Hashem Thaqi was unequivocal in his conclusion. He said:
Mr. Nicholas Soames (Mid-Sussex):
Does the Foreign Secretary accept that, while no one disputes that the air campaign is beginning to take a toll--and so it should after more than 50 days of bombing--troops on the ground will be required to secure Kosovo for the refugees to return? What would happen in the unlikely event of Mr. Milosevic buckling in the next few days? There are not enough troops on the ground to secure Kosovo because of the disastrous decision taken before the mission started that no troops would be used on the ground. What is the Foreign Secretary doing to secure the number of troops required for the operation?
Mr. Cook:
The decision was taken before the conflict began that we would require troops for the circumstances that the hon. Gentleman outlines. We need to put a NATO presence into Kosovo to secure the peace. That is why Britain has already deployed 4,000 troops in Macedonia as part of the 20,000 who are now in Macedonia and Albania. As I said at Question Time, we have provided another 2,300. We are by far in the lead in the NATO forces for Kosovo. I assume that the hon. Gentleman is not suggesting that we should do it all and that only British troops should go in. We shall require a contribution from other alliance members. We shall discuss that this week in Brussels when Javier Solana reports on his proposals for the enhanced KFOR.
I was referring to my conversation with Hashem Thaqi. I had that conversation with the leader of the Kosovo Albanians on the ground the day after the NATO attack on the command post at Korisa, in which Kosovo Albanians were killed. I deeply regret any loss of life among the Kosovo Albanians as a result of our campaign. The UK takes great care to minimise the risk of any attack resulting in civilian casualties, but, as I have told the House before, we cannot guarantee that there will not be any civilian casualties if NATO is to wage a campaign of the intensity and strength necessary to win.
I reject with contempt the crocodile tears with which Milosevic has sought to manipulate the death of the refugees at Korisa, particularly given the track record of his army in using civilians as human shields. International
monitors have documented separate reports from refugees of 80 occasions on which they or their neighbours have been used as human shields. At Klina, 500 men were forced to lie in front of Serb artillery as it attacked the Kosovo Liberation Army. At Orahovac, 700 men were forced to stand with their hands tied for two days in front of Serb tanks.
In village after village across Kosovo, Serb forces have massacred civilians at point-blank range. They may now have killed 20,000 to 30,000 men, women and children. None of those was killed by tragic accident. All of them were killed deliberately and callously.
The bald statistics cannot convey the terror of those who have been evicted at the point of a gun; or the anguish of those who have been separated from their husbands and children and are left with the fear, but not the certainty, that they are now dead; or the pain of the refugees hiding without food on the hillsides throughout Kosovo and then injured without surgery by the shelling of Milosevic's guns. The tales of individual victims speak more eloquently than the statistics.
Some of those individuals are now in Britain as a result of the air bridge that we have built between Britain and the camps in Macedonia. Leeds was one of the first towns to embrace refugees from the camps. I visited them on Friday, after the funeral of Derek Fatchett. When I left, one of the workers there reminded me that it was easy to be misled by the smiling faces and happy children I had seen--to understand their suffering I should also hear the sobs that continued through the night.
The endurance that many of them showed in escaping from Kosovo is a measure of the depths of the terror from which they fled. One woman now in Leeds fled from her home towards the end of a pregnancy. She walked for days through the mountains carrying one of her other children. She gave birth to her son on the road, then got up and moved on again until she reached safety.
Another young woman told me how she had left her husband fighting with the KLA and had fled on foot with her two young children. In one village in which they stopped on the way, all the young men were rounded up and taken by the police to an ammunition factory. Throughout the following night, the woman heard gunfire from the factory. She removed herself the next day, but she heard later that, on the next night, the Serbs came back and raped the young women there. It is difficult for us to grasp what must have been endured by those women who, on the first night, lost the men of their village, and, on the second night, were humiliated by their murderers.
I want every hon. Member to understand the evil that we are fighting, and the brutality to which we would abandon Kosovo if we were now to give up. Today, I am placing in the Library a chronology of over 100 atrocities of which we have reports from refugees and other sources within Kosovo. All those atrocities are crimes born of ethnic hatred and fostered by the daily propaganda of the regime in Belgrade.
In the middle of this century, we believed that we had finished with fascism. At the end of the century, we cannot tolerate the revival in Europe of the doctrine of ethnic superiority, or the practice of mass deportation of a whole people.
That is one reason that strengthens our resolve to press home our military campaign, but there are other reasons too. First, we must succeed because NATO guaranteed
the ceasefire of last October, and because NATO has committed itself to enforcing a ceasefire in Kosovo. The security of our country depends on the credibility of NATO, and that credibility depends on securing our objectives in Kosovo.
Secondly, we must succeed because our promises to the countries of the region can be fulfilled only if Milosevic is forced to reverse his policy of ethnic cleansing. There will be no turning point for the region, and no stability in the Balkans, if Milosevic gets away with his aggression in Kosovo.
Mr. Michael Howard (Folkestone and Hythe):
It is now two months since the Prime Minister first came to the House to tell us that military action was being taken by NATO in response to the atrocities committed by the Milosevic regime. For the whole of the period since then, the Opposition have supported the Government on the fundamental issues at stake. We have supported the original NATO objectives, and we have supported the decision to take military action to achieve those objectives. We continue to support the Government in those crucial respects, and we shall continue to support them. Those inside and outside the House who have suggested that we intend to withdraw that support are mistaken.
We support also, as we always have done, our dedicated service men and women, some of whom I was privileged to meet when, in the company of the Secretary of State for Defence, I visited Gioia del Colle, HMS Invincible and Albania. The work that they are carrying out on the ground, in the air and at sea is second to none, and we are entitled to be proud of them.
I condemn, of course--and without reservation--as we always have done, the Milosevic regime in Yugoslavia and the atrocities for which it is responsible. For my part, I am perfectly prepared to accept that those atrocities include the tragic killing of Mr. Agani. With each day that passes, those atrocities worsen. I welcome what the Foreign Secretary said about the decision to use British police officers to help assemble evidence of war crimes. I share the Foreign Secretary's disgust at the events that he has described.
All those things are important, and they need to be said. However, accounts of atrocities are no substitute for an explanation of the strategy. When all those important things have been said, the essential task of an Opposition in a parliamentary democracy remains: it remains our duty to scrutinise, to question and, where justified, to criticise. That responsibility is more, rather than less, important at a time of armed conflict. It is to the Prime Minister's credit that he recognised that when, last Wednesday in answer to my right hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater (Mr. King), he expressly dissociated himself from the criticisms that had been made earlier in the week
by his official spokesman. I trust that others, including those sitting beside and behind the Prime Minister on the Government Benches, will follow his example.
It is against that background that I wish to put questions to the Government today. Some of them are questions that I put to the Foreign Secretary last Monday. He did not answer them then, but I hope that he will answer them today. First, I have questions about NATO's objectives. I listened carefully to what the Foreign Secretary said about NATO's objectives today; I hope that he will do me the honour of listening carefully to what I have to say about them this afternoon.
"without the NATO bombing the situation in Kosovo would be even worse. If the bombing stops, we would simply be back at Square One."
That is the voice of someone who knows the realities of war at first hand.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |