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Mr. Douglas Hogg (Sleaford and North Hykeham): I am sorry to interrupt the right hon. Gentleman, but he seems to be concluding. When he made his statement two days ago, I asked about the political reconstruction of Kosovo. It is plain that NATO and the other allies will have to assist with the creation of representative bodies and political structures in Kosovo. It would be helpful if the right hon. Gentleman could give us a flavour of the intentions in that regard. Perhaps he intended to cover that ground in his speech, but there has not been much sign of it.
Mr. Cook: The basis on which we will reconstruct political institutions in Kosovo is set out in the Rambouillet peace accords, which, if I recall correctly, are in the Library. If they are not, I shall ensure that they are placed there for future reference. Those accords provide for an elected assembly of the Kosovar people and for an executive drawn from it.
As to the immediate future, I must say frankly to the House that the task of civil government in Kosovo will be in the hands of the United Nations, with the assistance
of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the European Union, the World Bank and the UNHCR. However, I hope that in a year or more one of the urgent priorities of that civil government, drawn from the interim international administration, will be to transfer its powers to elected representatives of the Kosovar Albanians and to ensure that we maintain the spirit of the Rambouillet peace accord, which provided for maximum decentralisation to the local regions of Kosovo so that communities would have maximum room to settle their own security matters and the future of their own public services. Much of that work has yet to be done, but the Rambouillet peace accords were the result of a lot of hard effort by the international community and they give us a good staging post.
I was about to turn to the neighbours of Serbia and Kosovo, without whom we could not have achieved what we have, and to each of whom we owe a debt. To Bulgaria and Romania, we owe a debt for their co-operation with the sanctions regime and their agreement to overflight by NATO. To Macedonia and Albania, we owe a debt for the extraordinary burden they shouldered from the dramatic tidal wave of refugees, and for willingly giving access to their territories for the deployment of advance NATO forces. To Montenegro, we owe a debt for the great courage President Djukanovic and his Government showed against intimidation by Belgrade, and the open home that they provided for refugees from Kosovo and dissidents from Serbia.
In the immediate future, we must repay our debt by helping those countries to regenerate their economies, which have been badly disrupted by the conflict. In the longer term we must accelerate their ties with the European Union and NATO to ensure that their freedom is underpinned by prosperity through trade with the wealthy markets of Europe, and their security by the guarantee of NATO. In the case of Montenegro, we have already prevented any further build-up of troops by Milosevic by insisting that all forces from Kosovo withdraw to Serbia and none to Montenegro.
We want the people of Serbia also to benefit one day from the strengthened relationship that we are forming with all their neighbours, but we cannot embrace Serbia in the modern Europe until Serbia itself embraces the values on which that modern Europe rests: a belief in the equality of all citizens, respect for the human rights of minority groups and the recognition that a country is strengthened, not weakened, by containing a diversity of ethnic cultures. Nor can Serbia hope to join the international community as long as it is led by a Head of Government who dare not set foot outside its borders in case he is arrested as an indicted war criminal.
Milosevic claimed that he was defending Serbia's heritage. It is hard to think of a more authentic voice of the true Serbian heritage than the Holy Synod of the Serbian Orthodox Church, yet on Tuesday it demanded that Milosevic resign. It declared that
There will be a time in the future, when the immediate pressure of urgent priorities has lifted, when the House can reflect on some of the wider consequences of the success in Kosovo. I put to the House four positive consequences of what we have achieved. The first is that NATO is healthier and more united. The alliance has come through a testing time, but despite all the gloomy predictions that its resolve would weaken or that its unity would crack, the alliance remained robust and resolute until we secured all our campaign objectives. That can give the House new confidence in the security that our membership of the alliance brings to our nation. We can also take satisfaction in the valuable role that Britain played throughout the crisis in promoting cohesion between the European and American pillars of the alliance.
Secondly, we have opened a new chapter in the relations between western Europe and the Balkan region. We now have the opportunity to close the chapters of Balkan history that are written in blood and to make the region's countries our partners in trade and our equals in freedom.
Thirdly, we have halted the backward-looking nationalism of Milosevic and comprehensively defeated the evil policy of ethnic cleansing. For 10 years, Milosevic has terrorised his region and brought violence to the peoples of the former Yugoslavia. If he had previously been faced with the same resolve and made to experience the same clear defeat without compromise, he might never have visited such brutality on Kosovo. As it is, he will now think long and hard before he attempts it again.
Mr. John Maples (Stratford-on-Avon):
I thank the Secretary of State for welcoming me to my new role. In foreign policy, there is a great deal of consensus between the Government and the Opposition, and I hope that it will continue. Even in areas of consensus, however, difficult issues have to be addressed and difficult questions must be asked. I shall ask some of those questions today. There are also areas of considerable disagreement between us; mainly, I suspect, concerning Europe and the future of the European defence identity and whether that should be developed within NATO. There will be very robust debates on those issues.
I pay tribute to my predecessor, my right hon. and learned Friend for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard), who by any standards has had a distinguished political career. He spent 12 years in the Government, eight years in the Cabinet and three years as Home Secretary. That is a series of posts for which almost any hon. Member would settle. It is interesting for Conservative Members to see so many of the reforms that my right hon. Friend introduced as Home Secretary, which were anathematised by the then Opposition, now being put into practice by his successor. There is irony in that.
I turn now to Kosovo. The Foreign Secretary is right to say that NATO and the Government have been very successful in the first phase, and they deserve our congratulations. As he said, there were many doubters, and indeed some said that the task would be impossible. However, it looks as though by Sunday night NATO will have succeeded in getting the military out of Kosovo. It has been an impressive performance. As the right hon. Gentleman said, the solidarity of the alliance has been enhanced by the experience. There are those who wavered, but the alliance came through unscathed.
As the Foreign Secretary said, Kosovo's neighbours have behaved very well. Two in particular have behaved magnificently. Albania and Macedonia have taken in an enormous number of refugees. Macedonia did so at considerable risk to the stability of its own fragile ethnic balance. The Secretary of State for Defence invited me to accompany him to Albania, and it was truly impressive how the people of that country opened their hearts and, literally, their homes to people whom they regarded as brothers. People in Albania said to us, "There is no limit to the number of refugees we can take. They are our brothers." Such practical humanitarian concern is very impressive.
Military lessons must be learned from the experience. We are seeing encouraging and rewarding television pictures of columns of Serb military vehicles leaving Kosovo for Serbia. However, those columns seen to contain an awful lot of tanks and armoured personnel carriers, which I understood we had destroyed. Much of the Serb armour in Kosovo seems to have survived the air attacks. Now is not the time, but at some stage we shall have to consider in more detail whether we knew that that was the case, or whether we truly believed that our figures for the destruction of tanks were correct.
As the Foreign Secretary said, British troops--first the Air Force and now the Army--have played a valuable role in Kosovo. It is good to see them at the forefront of operations, displaying their usual competence. Another of today's ironies is that the troops of whom we hear most are the Parachute Regiment, and soldiers from a former generation of that battalion are under investigation in the Saville inquiry in Northern Ireland. We should reflect on how much we owe to that regiment's courage and training and its commitment in Kosovo, and, in retrospect, how much we owe to those who were in Northern Ireland 20 years ago. It is within the Government's power to alter the inquiry's terms of reference to ensure that the lives of those troops and their families are not endangered.
Despite the success of phase 1 of the campaign, Kosovo is still, for various reasons, not safe for the refugees to return to, and nor is its future secure. Two factors contribute to that. The first is the presence of the Russians at Pristina airport, and the second is the future position of the KLA. The Prime Minister and the Secretary of State
have said on many occasions, and we entirely agree, that the ultimate test of success in the operation will be the return of all the refugees to all parts of Kosovo. Partition in any form is not an acceptable outcome.
There is clearly still a major Yugoslav army capability in Serbia and Montenegro. The buffer zone was reduced in the negotiations from 25 km to 5 km, but the withdrawal of the troops looks as though it is on schedule to end on Sunday night. Then NATO, the Governments and the international organisations can turn their attention to the future of Kosovo.
One aspect that has received less attention than the military aspects is the civil power that the UN Security Council resolution called for--UNMIK, as I suppose we will come to know and love it. That is being set up. As I understand it, one of the Deputy Secretary-Generals is in charge of it and is in Kosovo.
I hope that the process is moving fast. The military is performing tasks that should be handed over to a civilian authority as soon as possible. Such an authority will have some responsibility for the security of the population of Kosovo, which will be vital to a long-term settlement.
Paragraph 11 of the UN Security Council resolution calls for the deployment of an international police presence. When the Secretary of State for International Development winds up, perhaps she will tell us what progress is being made on the establishment of an international police presence. The KLA clearly wants to be the police in Kosovo, and no doubt many KLA members will have a role to play in that regard, but they cannot be allowed simply to turn themselves into the Kosovan police force.
Bosnia sets a reasonably good example of an international police force gradually incorporating more and more local people, but initially the police force in Kosovo will have to be under the control of the United Nations. We cannot allow the KLA to turn itself into the police force.
The Secretary of State spoke about the atrocities. That is what the campaign has been about. The Government's policy and NATO's has been to defeat that. I spoke at length on the telephone this morning to a journalist who is in Kosovo. She told me that in every village there is a mass grave, and that every garden seems to have a grave in it. We see the appalling scenes on television, as evidence of the mass slaughter is discovered. It is clear from the stories and the mass graveyards that that was worse than anything that I imagined, and we do not yet know the full scale of it.
The Secretary of State mentioned the discovery of a torture chamber at Pristina police station. It is good news that UK investigators are involved in helping the UN war crimes tribunal. We must make sure that as many as possible of the people responsible for those crimes are brought to justice, or a large part of the positive effect of NATO's operation in Kosovo will have been lost. If we cannot bring home to people like Milosevic the fact that they face the serious risk of prosecution for war crimes, they will not be as discouraged as we want them to be.
It is a sad fact that the atrocities continue as the Serbs withdraw. We see them leaving a scorched earth policy behind them. People are killed and their houses destroyed even as the Serb military forces are withdrawing.
As regards the Russians, whatever gloss we put on the matter--I understand why the Government and General Jackson have to say that it is not much of a problem, but it is--they continue to hold the airport, and their presence there will disrupt the establishment of the northern or the French zone.
We were collectively outwitted by the Russians. They cooked up a plan with the Serbs, and we should expect to see more of that. I do not think that Milosevic has run out of tricks. On Wednesday 9 June, late at night, the military agreement was signed. The plan, as I understand it and as was reported, was for NATO troops to enter Kosovo at 4 am on Friday. According to reports in The New York Times and elsewhere, those plans were postponed by 25 hours on Thursday night. The press briefing was postponed as well. As we all know, in the end the NATO troops went in at 5 am on Saturday.
There was some speculation in the press about whether that was at the request of the United States, to enable its troops to be in the forefront of the deployment, but that always seemed an unlikely explanation, because the United States already had 1,700 troops in Macedonia. I do not think that it was planned that they should be among the first troops to enter Kosovo, but they would have been there and gained whatever publicity was needed.
The truth came out when a NATO officer was reported as saying that the Serbs were having difficulty in withdrawing. They were suffering from a shortage of fuel and could not get out on schedule. It appears that that was a subterfuge cooked up by the Russians and the Serbs to give the Russians time to move.
One must ask why that was not foreseen by NATO. Russia always wanted a zone. Its amour propre had clearly been damaged during the process, despite its part in the peace negotiations. The wording of the UN Security Council resolution is slightly ambiguous in this regard. It authorises member states to establish the international security presence, whereas it empowers the Secretary of State--I mean the Secretary-General of the UN; the Secretary of State has many responsibilities, but not that one--to establish the civil authority. That creates an ambiguity and was presumably designed to get over the difficulty of Russian involvement, but it gives the Russians some basis for arguing that they are entitled to a presence.
Reports of the movement of Russian troops in Bosnia went out on Serb radio at 10.30 am on Friday. There must have been some evidence of it earlier. Two hundred troops and their vehicles cannot have been moved out of the American zone in Bosnia without anyone noticing. During the morning, Secretary of State Albright spoke to her counterpart, Ivanov. She has said in public--and the Vice-President of the United States has said the same thing--that she was assured by Mr. Ivanov that the Russians would not move into Kosovo until their role in KFOR had been settled.
NATO could presumably still have moved at that moment. There are some questions as to why it did not. The airport is important. Because we do not have control of the airport, the roads are heavily congested, which makes it difficult to resupply NATO forces and provide food for refugees. We are now planning air drops, which were not planned originally. Not only does NATO need the airport, but it would have been a good idea to deprive
the Russians of it. The fact that they hold it gives them a means of bringing in reinforcements, which they did not have before.
Could NATO have moved during that period? If it had done so and denied the Russians the airport, our position would be considerably easier than it is. The Russians did not move into the airport until 2 am on Saturday. NATO deployed at 5 am on Saturday, which of course was too late.
As I said, it seems to me that that was a plan cooked up by Milosevic and the Russians. The Russians behaved in extraordinarily bad faith. I know that the Secretary of State must be more diplomatic in dealing with the matter. It shows extraordinary bad faith on the part of the Russians that they should have played a part in brokering a peace deal; assured the US Secretary of State that they would not move; and then moved in the middle of the night in a way that they knew would create considerable difficulties for the peacekeeping operation in Kosovo.
We should expect more of that. The Russians have 1,700 troops with SFOR in Bosnia. There are reports of more troop movements around Bjielina. Apparently troops left their barracks in Lopare and Ugljevik on Saturday for the airport at Bjielina, and on Sunday Bosnia radio reported 150 Russian troops leaving Bosnia across the Bjielina bridge for the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. I assume that those troops are still in Serbia.
Russia made efforts last week to reinforce its position at Pristina airport from the air. Fortunately NATO moved quickly, and Russia was denied the overflying rights that it would have needed. That clearly was part of Russia's plan.
I know that yesterday and today negotiations have been going on between Secretary of State for Defence Cohen and his counterpart, Sergeyev. Progress was reported yesterday, but it has also been reported that Yeltsin has told Sergeyev that the Russians will not settle for anything less than a Russian zone. I hope that the issue will be resolved over the weekend at the G8 meeting or early next week at the European Union-United States meeting. I gather that President Clinton will be at both. It is important to resolve the matter as soon as possible.
Russia has wanted its own zone all along. According to press reports in The New York Times and elsewhere, it has been offered a zone of operation within the French sector. We must not create a Russian zone. The Secretary of State has said that he will not allow an east German solution to be implemented in Kosovo, or to be effected on the ground. A Russian zone of occupation, or a Russian zone in the KFOR sector, will become a Serb zone and will effectively mean the partition of Kosovo.
We need something along the lines of what is happening in Bosnia, where the Russians are deployed within the American sector, but do not have a particular zone to themselves; they are assisting in various areas. In that way, they can be valuably involved in the peacekeeping process, but without the risk of creating a zone within a zone, which may be as bad as a zone of their own.
"every sensible person has to realise that the numerous internal problems and the isolation of our country on the international scene cannot be solved or overcome with this kind of leadership".
It called for the Government to be replaced by
"new people, acceptable to the domestic public and the international community."
Milosevic fools nobody--except, possibly, himself--when he goes on state television to announce that he has just achieved victory. Increasingly, as the news seeps back
from Kosovo, his people will realise that the pain and damage that his confrontation with NATO brought upon them was for no useful purpose. After immense cost to his people and his economy, Milosevic has been compelled to accept a peace deal on worse terms than he could have got if he had settled through dialogue at Rambouillet.
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