| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Dalyell: If the right hon. Gentleman is right, as I believe that he may well be, does he see the KLA meekly surrendering its arms?
Sir John Stanley: That question is at present unanswerable. However, my judgment is that, although the KLA may stop displaying arms in public, I should be immensely surprised if large numbers of arms were not secreted in various parts of Kosovo.
The second concession that should arouse great concern in the House is the wording of paragraph 8 of appendix B to chapter 7 of the Rambouillet accords. I shall read the key sentence because it is so crucial. There was a requirement that
I was profoundly depressed by the passage in the Foreign Secretary's speech in which he said that Milosevic dare not set foot outside Serbia's borders for fear of arrest. That implies that, as long as Milosevic maintains his position inside Serbia's borders, he is absolutely free from the possibility of arrest and of indictment for the war crimes for which he is due to be charged.
The Foreign Secretary also said that no effort would be spared to bring the war criminals to justice. I totally support that sentiment, but we cannot ignore the absence of the crucial last link in the chain--the link beyond the indictment to the arrest. I hope that the Secretary of State for International Development, when she winds up the debate, will say how it is proposed that the people indicted for war crimes in Kosovo will be arrested. Perhaps the Foreign Secretary will intervene to clarify that matter, because all the provisions in appendix B of the Rambouillet accords, which previously were the subject
of a clearly stated NATO position, have effectively been dropped as part of the loose incorporation of the accords into UN resolution 1244.
Mr. Robin Cook:
The right hon. Gentleman is building a very large house on stilts on the proposition that the Rambouillet accords have somehow been abandoned. They have not been abandoned. They are referred to specifically in the UN resolution as the instruction, not to Milosevic on this occasion, but to the civil administrator, who will operate under the direct instruction of the United Nations and report to the Secretary-General. We have a firmer, more hands-on international basis to implement Rambouillet in Kosovo than we had before.
The right hon. Gentleman's earlier point that independence for Kosovo had been ruled out is false. Neither Britain nor any of our allies favour independence for Kosovo. That was not an objective of the campaign. However, none of the options laid out at Rambouillet has been taken off the negotiating table by the Security Council resolution: indeed, paragraph 11(a) of the resolution specifies that what the international civil administration does in carrying out the Rambouillet accords will be "pending a final settlement". The option of that final settlement after the interim period is present in the Security Council resolution with every bit as much force as it was in the Rambouillet accords.
Sir John Stanley:
I am glad to hear what the Foreign Secretary has said. I can only rest my remarks on the text of the resolution.
Sir John Stanley:
The text speaks of taking the Rambouillet accords into account, which is a very tenuous matter. Although I do not want to delay the House by developing this into a long exchange, will the Foreign Secretary give the House a clear assurance that the provisions for NATO forces to enter any part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and to exercise their powers to detain individuals, as stated clearly in the Rambouillet accords, will be carried into effect at an early date?
Mr. Cook:
First, the oft-quoted passage on the right of NATO to travel through the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia is a standard element of all similar status-of-forces agreements, including the one signed by Milosevic--without much murmur--in relation to Bosnia. The identical language was included in the annexe to Rambouillet. I was at Rambouillet, and I can tell the House that the Serb side raised no objections to that usage at the time. Moreover, in the military-technical agreement it is made clear that there will have to be a status-of-forces agreement of that character.
On the question of arrest, the right hon. Gentleman should join the real world. There is no immediate prospect of our being able to enter Belgrade and arrest Milosevic in the face of the 200,000 VJ troops in Serbia. That has always been one of the facts of the matter. However, the right hon. Gentleman should not understate the Government's commitment to effecting the arrest of war criminals wherever possible, nor the effectiveness of
British troops in achieving that. That is why, only last week, we carried out the arrest of another war criminal in the British sector in Bosnia.
Sir John Stanley:
I think that the Foreign Secretary's response exposes the deficiency that I have highlighted. I am grateful to him for making it clear that there are no prospects, in the near term or possibly ever, of bringing the indicted war criminals to justice. I strongly support all the Foreign Secretary has done to promote international courts and the concept of international criminal justice. However, if that concept is to translate into reality, there can be no safe haven for indicted criminals.
The third part of my speech relates to events before the conflict broke out. Amid the euphoria of peace and the moving mass return home of the refugees, I realise that questions about what happened before the conflict may not seem appropriate. However, I make no apology for asking those questions. During the past 10 weeks, thousands of people have been brutally murdered and hundreds of thousands have lost all but their lives. Expenditure has run into billions of pounds, and billions more will doubtless be spent to repair the damage incurred. It is proper to ask, therefore, whether the horrendous humanitarian disaster in Kosovo might have been averted.
In his recent evidence to the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, the Foreign Secretary put interesting new information into the public domain, making it clear that the Government had had knowledge of an impending humanitarian disaster in Kosovo. On 14 April, at paragraph 109, the Foreign Secretary said that
Serious questions arise over the use of ground forces, particularly for the Americans. In the weeks or months before the air campaign, when Milosevic was presumably deciding whether he could get away with his infamous operation, even a modest deployment of the United States rapid reaction force--the marines--into the border areas of Kosovo could have had a profound impact on his calculations. No such deployment was made. In fairness to the Americans, I must point out that no European NATO country made an advance deployment of rapid reaction forces. A major deterrent opportunity was therefore missed.
That error was compounded by what was said in public about the use of ground forces. NATO countries, including our own, made it clear at the outset that no ground forces would be used for a forced entry into Kosovo. This matter is too important for party politics,
so I must point out that the same position was taken by my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Opposition Front Bench. We must ask whether a different position might have had a material impact on Milosevic. I believe that if he had known in January or February that all options, including forced entry, remained open--the position ultimately adopted by NATO 10 weeks later--Operation Horseshoe might not have been given the go-ahead.
The Secretary of State for International Development (Clare Short):
I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman appreciates that compromise is necessary if a 19-member alliance is to move. Was it good that NATO acted, even if some undesirable things had to be said about ground troops? Or would it have been better not to act at all?
"NATO personnel shall enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY including associated airspace and territorial waters."
That paragraph is profoundly important and should be retained. It should be taken together with what is said in paragraph 21, which states:
"In carrying out its authorities under this Chapter, NATO is authorised to detain individuals and, as quickly as possible, turn them over to appropriate officials."
The significance of those paragraphs is to be found in the context of what is being done to bring the war criminals to justice. As we know all too well from the bitter experience of what happened in Bosnia, where Karadzic and Mladic and the other leading war criminals are still free, the sending out of scene-of-the-crime investigators, the painstaking collection of evidence and the issuing of indictments against individuals for war crimes have no value whatever in the absence of arrangements for international powers of arrest in the locations where the war criminals are.
"it has been reported in the press (and I can confirm it is true) that there was a plan developed in Belgrade known as Operation Horseshoe which was for the cleansing of Kosovo of its Kosovo population."
In paragraph 111, he continued:
"The spring offensive was planned; we knew it was coming; we knew it would be accompanied by ethnic cleansing."
If we knew that the spring offensive would bring ethnic cleansing and barbarity unprecedented in post-war Europe, did the NATO countries do all that they reasonably could to deter Milosevic from giving Operation Horseshoe the go-ahead? I should like to explore the issue of deterrence using both ground forces and the air threat.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |