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ESTIMATES
Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 145 (Liaison Committee),
Ordered,
That this House agrees with the Report [24th June] of the Liaison Committee.--[Mr. Hill.]
Question agreed to.
That Mr. Ivor Caplin be discharged from the Select Committee on Broadcasting and Mr. Kelvin Hopkins be added to the Committee.--[Mr. Hill.]
29 Jun 1999 : Column 249
Thorney Bypass
10.25 pm
Mr. Malcolm Moss (North-East Cambridgeshire): It is my privilege, as the hon. Member for North-East Cambridgeshire, to present this petition on behalf of the residents of the village of Thorney in my constituency regarding their campaign to reinstate a bypass for their village. The bypass was in the previous Government's road programme but was removed from the programme by the incoming Labour Government.
- The petitioners, therefore, request the House of Commons to urge the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions to consider reinstating the A47 Thorney Bypass into the Government's road building programme with immediate effect.
And your Petitioners, as in duty bound, will ever pray.
Iraq
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.--[Mr. Hill.]
10.26 pm
Mr. George Galloway (Glasgow, Kelvin): I declare an interest, in that I am chairman of the Mariam appeal for cancer victims in Iraq, which has received support from the Governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
I begin by welcoming my hon. Friend the Minister of State to his new and important position in the Government--although I regret, as does the whole House, the circumstances that led to his appointment. The late Derek Fatchett and I had many spectacular clashes on this and related subjects, but I always respected him greatly, and he is sorely missed.
I shall start by telling the Minister what I am not going to talk about. The character of the Iraqi regime has been effectively carpet bombed on many occasions by hon. Members throughout the House. In the 15 minutes available to me, I do not intend to add to the many statements, speeches and interventions on the subject that I have made over the years. I hope that my hon. Friend will take them as read. However, I note that paragraph 14 of United Nations Security Council resolution 687 demands the establishment of a middle east free of weapons of mass destruction. I support that goal and call for the Iraqi regime to forswear such weapons, as I call on Israel--which sits atop an easily verifiable mountain of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons--to forswear them also.
The House has of late been much occupied with the concepts of genocide and of mass graves. I want to take the Minister on a brief tour of that wasteland, which will require him to exercise only a little imagination. Imagine a mass grave into which 6,000 small children are laid every single month. Imagine that those months stretched into years--nine years--and imagine a mass grave in which more than 2 million people, mainly children, or the elderly, or the poorest, or the most ill, are laid one upon the other.
Imagine how mass such a grave would be. Imagine what a mountain 2 million dead people would constitute. Imagine what an ocean of blood is represented by those 2 million lost souls. Such a mountain, such an ocean, such a mass grave is not a figment of anyone's imagination: it is the reality of life and death under sanctions in Iraq.
That reality is testified to by a plethora of United Nations agencies--by the World Health Organisation, by the World Food Programme, by UNICEF and UNESCO, by the President of Finland, Martti Ahtisaari, who performed such service for the Government recently, by Dennis Halliday, the former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, by other high officials of the UN, and by other credible sources, such as The Lancet, the Harvard medical team and the delegation of Church of England bishops, recently returned from Iraq, who called the sanctions "ethically untenable".
No one is saying, of course, that those 2 million people were specially targeted, or that they were singled out for extermination. No one is saying that those dead people ever committed any offence against anyone. They could
hardly have done so, as most of them were small children. It is much, much worse than that. The killing has been wholly indiscriminate, except in one respect. Those people are dead for one reason only. They are--rather, they were--Iraqis. They had the misfortune to be born in Iraq at this time. I do not need to tell a man of my hon. Friend's legal background the name for the mass killing of people for no other reason than their race or ethnic origin.
It is no longer asserted--it was once--that we are exaggerating. The Security Council, in its recent report, said that it was reporting
Can we also agree--for it is germane to the future as well as important to the history books--that what I have said in the House to more than one Minister, that the United Nations Special Commission inspectorate was riddled with spies, turned out to be true? After all, we have had the testimony of Scott Ritter, the deputy to Richard Butler, who headed UNSCOM. We have had the ground-breaking journalism of The New York Times and the Boston Globe. Most important of all, this week, we had an admission by Kofi Annan, no less, that UNSCOM inspectors were spying for the American intelligence agencies during their time in Iraq.
As the Minister knows, there is mounting international concern about the cancer epidemic in Iraq, and about the rapidly multiplying number of babies being born with deformities. My hon. Friend may have seen the recent cover story in Tribune, or he may have read Maggie O'Kane, whose reportage from Kosovo has been favourably commented on by the Government. In The Guardian,she quoted a doctor from one hospital, Dr. Zenad Mohammed, thus:
Mr. Tam Dalyell (Linlithgow):
Former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds and I saw exactly those conditions in December 1998. My hon. Friend does not exaggerate.
Mr. Galloway:
I do not have to imagine the horror. Like my hon. Friend, I have seen it with my own eyes, and I have heard the cries of parents.
Please do not tell me that food and medicines are not covered by the sanctions. The Minister and I both know that that is only partly true and that, in so far as it is true, it is misleading. If we subject a country to the tightest of mediaeval-style sieges, bankrupt its economy and freeze its international assets, how much food and medicine can it buy? If we define food and medicines so that vitamins and additives are not foods, so that insulin or intravenous fluid are not medicine and so that everything from syringes to diagnostic equipment is subject to endless delay and subversion by the sanctions committee in New York, what will the effect be on the health of the people?
What is the point of allowing diarrhoea, typhoid and cholera medicines while forbidding the equipment to repair the water and sanitation systems? The collapse of those systems led to the epidemic of water-borne disease in the first place. If the Minister says that members of the Iraqi regime are not hungry and that their children are not suffering, he will merely make my point. The sanctions are not harming the Iraqi regime, which is stronger than it was when sanctions began. The sanctions are laying waste the innocent Iraqi population.
What is the point of doubling, doubling and doubling again the upper limits of the oil-for-food quotas, when the Government know that Iraq can only dream of pumping that amount of oil, given the degradation of the oil extraction and distribution system, when we ban under sanctions the wherewithal to upgrade it and when oil prices, although firming, are still historically low?
Please do not tell me that there are stockpiles of undistributed medicines in Iraqi warehouses. Read the United Nations Security Council's own report on page 9 about the deterioration of warehousing; the lack of handling equipment; communication and transport difficulties; and the lack of tools. Read the World Health Organisation's study, which proves that Iraq's warehouses are operating at less than 20 per cent. of previous capacity.
Please do not tell me that the Iraqi health service is importing frivolous or unnecessary equipment as, sadly, some of our colleagues have been misled into doing--like the canard about the liposuction equipment, when it was falsely implied in this place that it was being imported for the prettification of the wives of members of the regime. That was a deliberate piece of disinformation. I have followed that equipment, which is used as such equipment is used here--in surgery on women suffering from breast cancer and undergoing mastectomies; in surgery on patients suffering from severe burns; and on patients who are having tumours removed and whose own lipid must be moved from one part of the body to another.
If the Minister wants to end the stalemate with Iraq, it really is time to turn down the rhetoric of demonisation which, as he found at the CAABU meeting, is doing our reputation among the Arab peoples no good at all.
I have some questions for the Minister. If he cannot answer them now, I hope that he will do so in writing in due course. My hon. Friend said at the CAABU meeting that "it is nonsense" to suggest that Britain would like to see the break-up of Iraq and that
After all, as will be seen increasingly in Yugoslavia, if one pursues policies that objectively contribute to the break-up of a sovereign territory, whatever one's
protestations, the country will still be broken up. What else is the solely United States-United Kingdom policy of daily bombardment of the so-called no-fly zones, which have no United Nations Security Council authority, if it is not a contribution to the break-up of Iraq and an attack on its territorial integrity?
Lest hon. Members are misled by the relative media blackout on those bombardments, it is worth pointing out that Britain and America have dropped more bombs on Iraq since Desert Fox than we did during that massive operation and that the targets have included shepherds and their sheep, schools, hospitals, oil installations and oil storage tanks, civilian houses and the civilian families living in them.
What else but a contribution to disintegration is the constant use of our territory by American officials and exiled Iraqi opposition groups to plan terrorist operations in the towns and cities of Iraq? I can give the Minister chapter and verse about those meetings--who attended them and what they were discussing.
Does my hon. Friend know that those meetings contravene our law, which was rushed through the House last summer, whereby section 5 of the Criminal Justice (Terrorism and Conspiracy) Act 1998, makes it an offence to conspire on British soil to cause explosions, murder and other terrorist acts outside the United Kingdom? I should know, for I single-handedly blocked that law when it was first introduced in the House during the tenure of the previous Administration.
The Minister has a tiger by the tail with those organisations. What else but the break-up of Iraq is sought by the armed Kurdish factions, when they are not murdering each other? What else but the break-up of Iraq is sought by the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution, the army of fanatical Shias who wish to set up a pro-Iranian fundamentalist theocracy, if necessary in the south of Iraq? Or does the Minister believe that Iraq can be governed at the centre by Kurdish parties or by radical Shi'ism? What do Iraq's Sunni neighbours--some of our oldest and closest friends--think about that idea? Have we learned nothing from our sponsorship of those other holy warriors, Mr. bin Laden and his Afghan mujaheddin?
Finally, I turn to the recently announced British initiative in the Security Council and express the hope that the Minister can persuade me otherwise than that that is just another twist in perfidious Albion's policy towards Iraq, which intends to find another means of prolonging the agony. I hope that the Minister is not offended when I say that I cannot understand why we cannot support the French initiative, launched by our sister party--a fraternal Government and European ally. That initiative already has the support of a majority of the five permanent members of the Security Council. Our initiative only has the support of the USA--perhaps predictably. Will the Minister tell us what is wrong with the French draft? He well knows that it has the capacity to break the stalemate, while our draft--as he knows equally well--does not have that capacity, and has been rejected out of hand.
My hon. Friend the Minister has answered a parliamentary question from my hon. Friend the Member for Leyton and Wanstead (Mr. Cohen). Let me contradict that answer. During the past 48 hours, Tariq Aziz said that
the French draft has real possibilities for the negotiation of a way out of that stalemate. That is contrary to the parliamentary answer that was released today. On the face of it, the British draft is worse than the existing governing resolution 687. Under resolution 687, the sanctions will be lifted in circumstances in which, in the British draft, they would only be suspended. Anyone who saw the US Government's treacherous betrayal of the recent Libyan deal, when they said that, notwithstanding the recent breakthrough, they would not lift their sanctions, will realise how that was regarded in the Arab world.
The draft imposes obligations on Iraq that were not even present in resolution 687, although it was, in effect, a draconian surrender treaty. Why? The burden of proof placed on Iraq in relation to weapons is more onerous than 687; in essence, it formalises what had, hitherto, been only the practice of requiring Iraq to prove a negative. Why? The British draft includes that hoary old myth--beloved of the "Missing in Action" Indo-China conspiracy theorists--the "Kuwaiti hostages". I have the internal discussion document in which the Government decided to change that formulation from prisoners of war because of the greater "emotional power" of the word hostages. However, whatever they are called, the Minister knows that Iraq says that it does not have them and that unknown soldiers die in every war. Again, the Minister is asking Iraq to prove a negative.
"in the context of increasing concern among security council members over the humanitarian situation in Iraq."
The Security Council added that
"the gravity of the humanitarian situation of the Iraqi people is indisputable and cannot be overstated."
In his recent and turbulent debut before the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding, the Minister said that the Government were
"looking for a way out of the stalemate"
on Iraq, and talked of the "grave humanitarian situation". I genuinely consider it progress that we can agree about the gravity of the situation.
"In August 1998, we had three babies born with no head, in September, we had six with no heads, in October, one with no head and four with big heads and four with deformed limbs or other types of deformities."
There has been a tenfold increase in the number of cancer cases in Iraq over the past nine years, at the same time as there has been a catastrophic decline in the capacity of the Iraqi health service to cope with it. The number of children born with the conditions hare lip or cleft palate has tripled. As a father, the Minister will be able to imagine the horror of that.
"Preserving the territorial integrity of Iraq is a fundamental part of our policy".
As President Clinton might say, "It all depends what you mean by 'is'".
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