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Mr. Ian Bruce (South Dorset): On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I apologise to the hon. Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell) for interrupting the flow of his speech, but I have a point of order that is relevant to the end of the Adjournment debate. On Wednesday, the House is to have a guillotine motion on the Welfare Reform and Pensions Bill and there is some suggestion that the Government are modifying the way in which they will deal with certain clauses relating to national insurance for those working through a limited company--it is known as IR35 in general parlance. I have been contacted by constituents and others asking what the Government's intentions are--
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael Lord): Order. That is not a point of order to be dealt with now, but a matter to be debated when those issues come before the House.
Mr. Ian Bruce: Further to that point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: I have dealt with the point of order. We should return to the Adjournment debate, which is on an important matter.
Mr. Peter Bottomley (Worthing, West): On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Without intending any discourtesy to the hon. Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell), may I ask on what occasion the
Government will be able to make available to the House the information that they will otherwise introduce on Wednesday in a guillotine motion?
Mr. Deputy Speaker: That is not a matter to be dealt with by me at this stage of this evening's business.
Mr. Peter Bottomley: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Is it the same point of order?
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Is it an entirely different point of order?
Mr. Bottomley: Yes. At the end of this debate, the House will have adjourned and there will be no opportunity available to the Government today; that leaves only tomorrow, Tuesday. Hon. Members and those outside the House will have only overnight to consider any proposals the Government make. It would be appropriate for Ministers who have heard these exchanges to consider the matter and return to the House.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: I have no doubt that Ministers on the Treasury Bench have heard the hon. Gentleman's remarks, but that is not a matter for me at this time.
Mr. Dalyell: We returned from Zastava to Belgrade the following day. It is incredible what technological weapons have done to a modern European capital such as Belgrade. We experienced great difficulty repairing parts of Manchester after the bomb damage there. It cost £60 million to repair the Bishopsgate building. Throughout the centre of Belgrade, huge, solid buildings of the Austro-Hungarian empire are reduced to unsafe rubble and twisted metal.
Is the Serb capital city to remain in that state? If so, we have some moral obligations; if not, who will start paying for it? Will there be an international effort, or will we leave Belgrade to deteriorate and thus become infinitely more expensive to repair and a greater technical problem than it otherwise would have been? Does my hon. Friend the Minister believe that we have such obligations? We must always bear in mind that the House was told time and again that we had no quarrel with the people of Serbia. On that basis, the House--apart from very few of us--assented to military action. Therefore, I am entitled to probe Government thinking.
Our first meeting in Belgrade was with Dr. Leposana Milicevic, the Minister of Health, who is a distinguished doctor. She told us that we should not imagine that the graphite bombs aimed at power stations simply knocked out the power for a short time; they created all sorts of other problems. Those for the health service were incredible. For example, Dr. Milicevic told us that 4,000 people were on kidney dialysis. What happens when not only the main but the auxiliary power supplies are knocked out?
All sorts of other medical problems were pointed out to us. For example, hospitals were hit. I do not doubt that that was unintentional, and I appreciate that much of the precision bombing was remarkably precise, but collateral
damage is inevitable. We must consider whether modern aerial warfare is justified in the long term when one has no quarrel with the people of the country being bombed. That was the basis on which the bombing commenced.
We visited the Red Cross in Belgrade, and its presentation made it clear that we must confront collateral damage and not only short-term, but long-term damage. My hon. Friend the Member for Halifax, the representative of Unison and I think that the problems in hospitals are likely to be acute for a long time, not only because of the damage done to medical cases, but because of the trauma effect. The bombing that took place night after night was traumatic for a whole generation.
How does the west intend to mend its fences with the Serb people? The answer might be, "They brought it all on themselves", but I do not think that the problem is as simple as that. There are two sides to the story. My hon. Friend the Minister may deal in some depth with the reports in the Sunday press yesterday that suggested that the numbers of those executed in Kosovo were markedly fewer than were claimed in my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary's statement to the House, which suggested that there had been mass genocide. I am not jumping to conclusions, but there will be a briefing on yesterday's reports in The Sunday Times. Will the Minister give us the Government's reaction to the briefing? Is The Sunday Times justified in saying thatthe number of people executed was markedly fewer than the Foreign Secretary asserted, or was my right hon. Friend justified in talking in terms of genocide?
We must also consider a Serb view of events, so I shall describe what was said to us and ask for a Government comment. The Serbs said that the Albanians, who live in very large families, made group decisions to send one or two family members to Germany. In Germany, they worked as Gastarbeiter where they earned--let us say--DM2,000 a month. They lived very frugally and the overwhelming proportion of that money was remitted to their Albanian families. Therefore, a family soon had sufficient deutschmarks to buy a house in a village in Kosovo. When the Serb owner of a house refused the first offer of market value, the Albanians said that they would offer double the market value. That was very tempting, because such an offer would enable a Serb family to buy a house in Belgrade, send a child to the university there and better themselves.
That process was repeated once or twice in the same village. As the Albanians came in, other houses could be bought quite easily at market price and the rest would be sold dead cheap because, by that time, the Serbs felt that they had to get out. Their children were bullied at school and they faced all kinds of social pressures. Therefore, the cradle of Serb civilisation--whether we like it or not, that is how the Serbs see it--systematically went over to what I was going to call Albanians. However, I had better be careful. In general, the Kosovo Albanians were not blamed, because people who had come from Albania--they had doubtless fled from the odious Enver Hoxha--took over that part of Kosovo. I mention that, because the question is not one of good and bad; it is one of varying shades of grey. Therefore, simply to say that the Serbs deserved all that they got is just not the reality.
Mr. David Winnick (Walsall, North):
My hon. Friend mentioned the report in The Sunday Times. I suggest that he looks at yesterday's edition of The Observer,
Mr. Dalyell:
I do not think that it is as simple as that. The people who made such complaints were as anti-Milosevic as one could find. They had demonstrated, day after day, in the streets of Belgrade. I wish that they had had rather more help from the west when doing so some years ago.
The problems of the Balkans are not in black and white. This debate is about the future. I am trying to pre-empt the argument that the Serbs deserved all that they got. That is not a fair way of looking at a very complex problem.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for International Development (Mr. George Foulkes):
I assure my hon. Friend that he does not need to pre-empt that argument because I do not intend to advance it.
Mr. Dalyell:
I am glad that we have got that out of the way, because certain people in the press have put around, "Hell mend the Serbs! As long as they keep Milosevic, we have no obligations." I think that we have some obligations, and it is the purpose of this Adjournment debate to try to elicit what they are.
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