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Mr. Nicholas Soames (Mid-Sussex): The inquiries that the Select Committee has undertaken into earlier conflicts have been extremely valuable. As the hon. Gentleman knows, they are taken seriously in the Ministry of Defence. Will he consider including in the early part of his inquiry the difficult--I mean no political ill will by saying it--and tortuous negotiations on the diplomatic and political front before the conflict began, which would normally concern the Foreign Affairs Committee? The Defence and Foreign Affairs Committees might consider doing that part of the inquiry jointly, thereby adding even more weight to their conclusions.
Dr. Godman: That is a good idea.
Mr. George: It might be a good idea, but I should like first to liaise with the Foreign Affairs Committee. I was a great reader of its report on Sandline International and Sierra Leone. I would prefer to liaise, as opposed to co-ordinating. Our remit is defence and security. It is important that we do not trespass too far into any other possible inquiries.
Mr. Wells: May I make a suggestion? The Select Committee on International Development report on Kosovo and the humanitarian crisis might be a starting point for the inquiry of the hon. Gentleman's Committee and that of the Foreign Affairs Committee.
Mr. George: I have read that report. Having been to Kukes--I do not think that the hon. Gentleman's Committee got as far as Kukes--we were able to form our own opinion. I have also read his speeches. Again, it would be far better if he pursued his own inquiry, rather than merging it--if he pursues it--with that of the Defence Committee.
Over the past 12 months or so, the Defence Committee has undertaken two substantial inquiries: one into the NATO summit and the future of NATO, the second into the strategic defence review. Both the inquiries will have to have a Kosovan dimension. We will be able to see the extent to which the SDR--although it has not yet fully unfolded--has been affected by events in Kosovo.
I digress slightly. Although I accept the Government's views on the Reserves, I was delighted to see that one of the heroes of the early days of the entry into Kosovo was a member of the German reserve. That German officer defused a major crisis between the Albanians and the Serbs. The gentleman, a major I believe, was a professor of oriental languages--oh, that our own Reserves had such an opportunity of proving their military competence. [Interruption.] I do not think that the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, East (Mr. Anderson), should mock the lack of language abilities. I heard him speaking Hungarian three months ago; it had to be translated into English. I am not attempting to be hostile.
The two inquiries that we have done could have the added dimension of Kosovo. It will not be a negative inquiry. Mistakes were made; of course they were. I am not yet aware of any war that has been fought perfectly, although Milosevic claims that his war was. He obtained the same victory as Custer at Little Big Horn and Napoleon at Waterloo. I can imagine Custer down to his last three men and saying, "We really whacked them this time, didn't we?"
Leaving aside the claims of Milosevic, most other wars have their mistakes, but we must learn from our mistakes. We must see what we did well; we did much that was good. Let us hope that we can avoid such crises in future.
Mr. Menzies Campbell (North-East Fife):
I, too, welcome the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Mr. Maples) to his first foreign affairs debate. He has moved smoothly from defence to foreign affairs. He will discover shortly that the only difference between them is that, thankfully, in foreign affairs, we do not place such reliance on impenetrable acronyms as appears to be necessary in defence.
Rightly, the hon. Gentleman paid generous tribute to his predecessor, who has enjoyed a distinguished parliamentary career. I, too, shall miss him, not least because he has been an ever-present example of the strength of the adversarial system in contemporary politics.
The debate is something of an interim report. I expect that we shall have more such debates from time to time. As others have said, much has been achieved, but much more remains to be done.
If one passage in the Foreign Secretary's speech attracted virtually unanimous support, it was his powerful account of the importance of dealing properly with those who have been guilty of war crimes. He will, of course, be aware that the extremely powerful and professional chief prosecutor, Louise Arbour, has, in recognition of her
considerable talents, been appointed to the supreme court of Canada, which means that, after September, the effective leadership that she has been able to give will no longer be available.
It is obviously essential to ensure that Louise Arbour is replaced by someone of equal merit and personal courage. The House may remember that, on one occasion, she went to Kosovo but was turned away at the border. The strength of the International War Crimes Tribunal clearly depends on the quality of the leadership available. I hope that the Government--the Foreign Secretary is nodding in recognition of my point--will ensure that a suitable successor is found.
These occasions, shortly after the end of a conflict, are sometimes seen as an opportunity to draw lessons from a successful military action. When a military action has been a failure, the lessons to be drawn are often much more obvious and provide a readily understood basis for the necessary remedies. When a military action has been successful, however, it is often too easy to draw invalid conclusions, not least if they are hasty and informed only by contemporary evidence.
In recent time, the most obvious illustration of that is the belief--almost ineradicably lodged in the mind of the public after the Gulf war--that so-called smart weapons are in all cases capable of pinpoint accuracy, and that so-called surgical strikes can be effected without risk to anyone or anything other than the designated targets. Those have, to some extent, become myths of our time.
We are at some risk of repeating that flawed approach in precipitate judgments to the effect that air power on its own succeeded in this case, and that it will provide a universally valid approach in future conflicts in which NATO countries, with proper regard for the sensibilities of their citizens, expose their forces to no more risk than bombing from, say, 15,000 ft. I believe that it is much too early to reach such conclusions from the military action that has just been terminated. Moreover, the evidence that is so far available would not justify that conclusion.
What apparently succeeded in this case was a combination of three elements: first, intensive air operations; secondly, strenuous diplomatic efforts, in which Russia's role was significant, even if its motives were not entirely laudable or even always understandable; and, thirdly, the credible threat of ground action, with the accompaniment of NATO's demonstrable willingness to impose its will by the use of its massive war-fighting capability. That raises, at least for consideration, the very substantial probability that, if air operations had begun at the right tempo and intensity, if diplomatic efforts had been sufficiently strenuous initially, and if the threat of ground action had been credible from the beginning, the Milosevic regime might have capitulated earlier.
Never before has such a large-scale military action been undertaken to prosecute a policy of attempting to prevent ethnic cleansing and to secure basic human rights. However, we should realise that the legacy of the action will be an expectation among those who are ethnically repressed around the world, or at least within NATO's range, that NATO will intervene in their plight. The expectation cannot be justified, and there are bound to be occasions of deep disappointment. The intervention that occurred in this case was made because of an almost unique assembly of factors that are unlikely to be repeated.
The first factor was the sustained intransigence of a dictatorial leader. The second was the proximity of that leader, and the evil that was sought to be prevented, to several newly joined and aspirant NATO countries. The third was the possibility of uncontrollable instability in the region. The final factor was ethnic repression on a scale unseen in Europe since the second world war, but the effects of which were daily seen on our news bulletins. The unique combination of those elements created a climate in which NATO action, if not inevitable, was virtually so.
If we ever doubted the legitimacy of our actions, NATO forces are daily finding a catalogue of horror that is indescribable. I do not know if others have felt this way, but I have certainly begun to feel that language is inadequate to convey the depths of the depravity to which the paramilitary and military units of the Milosevic regime have sunk. They have systematically terrorised and brutalised the defenceless people of Kosovo. This was no episode of savage war fighting between equals, but rather a cowardly, despicable and cynical abuse of defenceless men, women and children, with women and children deliberately targeted.
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