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5.48 pm
Mrs. Alice Mahon (Halifax): I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell) for being so generous in sharing his debate with me. I endorse many of his comments, particularly those on the demonisation of the Serbs and the way in which they have been blamed--quite unfairly--for every ill in the Balkans.
On Thursday, in business questions, I raised the persecution of Serbs, and called for a debate. We had just read the latest story of a column of 150 Serbs who were leaving Kosovo when they were attacked, and their vehicles set alight, by ethnic Albanians. Hansard is incorrect: I said, and should like to put on record, that nearly 1,000 people had been killed or abducted since the KFOR occupation, but Hansard states 100.
As my hon. Friend said, I went with him and other colleagues to Serbia to see first hand the effects of the NATO bombings on the civilian population and to get some idea of the need for humanitarian aid and economic reconstruction. That was necessary because the plight of Serbia proper has been almost entirely ignored by the media. Western Governments have imposed sanctionsthat have been designed specifically to prevent the
reconstruction of civilian infrastructure, even though, as my hon. Friend said, we were constantly told that the war was not aimed at the ordinary Serbian people.
We were told that the sanctions were imposed for specific reasons. According to a House of Commons Library briefing that I received today, the British Government imposed sanctions unilaterally and participated in the multilateral imposition of sanctions under the auspices of the United Nations and the European Union. The reason behind the imposition of sanctions by the UN, the EU and the British Government has always been linked to a lack of democratic government and grave human rights abuses by the Government of Serbia. Further, the current basis for the EU sanctions, at least against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, is laid out in the most recent regulation, which was adopted by the Council on 4 October, amending the prohibition of the sale and supply of oil and oil products.
Mr. David Heath (Somerton and Frome):
The hon. Lady is reaching a point that I wanted to touch on. She knows that I do not entirely agree with her and the hon. Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell) about the conduct of the conflict, but the Balkan winter is as cold for Serbs as it is for Kosovan Albanians. What assessment was she able to make of the adequacy of fuel supplies to enable people to get through the winter with reasonable heating? Does the sanctions regime need to be amended further to enable that to happen?
Mrs. Mahon:
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. I shall talk about that later, but, clearly, oil sanctions are hitting hard. We have some graphic photographs of people having to buy petrol to get to Kragujevac and other places. There is none in state petrol stations. People have to buy it on the black market, on the street corner. It was interesting because almost everyone selling it was smoking a cigarette, as were the people buying it. I have photographs of that and it was horrifying. There are serious implications for heating, for hospitals and for everything else, as my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow said.
On the legal basis for sanctions, the EU cites as justification continued violations by the Yugoslav Government of UN resolutions and the pursuit of extreme and criminally irresponsible policies, including repression against its own citizens, which constitutes serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law.
Can we have some examples? What on earth does that mean? What precisely are the continued violations by the Yugoslav Government of the UN Security Council resolutions? Can the Minister give us examples because, at the moment, the people who are being persecuted, killed, having their homes burned and who are being made into refugees are the Serbs and other minorities in Kosovo. Nearly 100,000 have been ethnically cleansed from Kosovo since the NATO occupation.
The Minister will be aware of the demonstrations by Opposition parties in Yugoslavia, which want early elections. They are perfectly entitled to do that, but those demonstrations take place regularly and freely. I have not seen any of the over-the-top policing that I saw the other week when the Chinese President came to this country. Peaceful protesters were treated in a fairly rough manner by our police.
A friend of mine, a member of the Committee for Peace in the Balkans, went to Serbia after we went. She attended four demonstrations. She said:
We are told by the west that there are no political prisoners--certainly, Amnesty International is not badgering us about political prisoners in Yugoslavia. The opposition media operate with restrictions, but they are no greater--I have been looking the details up; I am a member of the North Atlantic Assembly--than some that we found when we visited Croatia in April 1998. At that time, we met the opposition media there, who complained about the state-run media and described what a bad time they were having. We recommended that Forum 21, the opposition media, be given more freedoms and should not be harassed, and that Croatia did something about the lack of press freedom there.
It is the hypocrisy of the west sometimes that needs to be exposed, and this is the place to expose it. On political prisoners, during a visit by the North Atlantic Assembly to Turkey in February 1998, we tried to see the members of Hadep, who were Members of the Turkish Parliament, who were sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment on charges of separatism and membership of a terrorist organisation. Immunity was lifted and they were sent to prison.
Those members include Lena Zana, the recipient of the Sakharov prize for human rights of the European Parliament and a well-known campaigner for the rights of the Kurds. The unconditional release of Mrs. Zana and her colleagues has been demanded by several interparliamentary organisations, including the Council of Europe and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, as well as the European Parliament. There is something seriously wrong when we live with that and carry on dialogue with the Turkish Government, despite all the human rights abuses that we have seen there, including the imprisonment of elected representatives, yet bring that out about the Yugoslav Government.
Sanctions do hurt ordinary people. There will be enormous suffering in Yugoslavia this winter. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has confirmed that Yugoslavia has the largest concentration of refugees in Europe. We visited some; we visited some of the Roma people. They include not just Serbs from Kosovo--Yugoslavia has hundreds and thousands of Serbs from the Krajina, Serbs from Bosnia, and also other minorities.
We visited Roma in the camp. I do not like going to refugee camps. I hate staring at people who are already living in absolute misery. It is a dreadful thing to do, but sometimes we have to make ourselves do it. Lots of people visited the refugee camps in Kosovo. I thank NATO. It was fairly well organised after the initial bad start, but people are not getting that sort of help in Serbia. Some groups do not naturally have a family in Serbia--not only Roma, but Turks, Bosniaks and Jews. Jews are being expelled. Can hon. Members believe that, in this day and age, Jewish families have had to leave Kosovo because it was not safe and because they were warned?
We visited those people. It is difficult to do. They are living in converted school rooms, barracks and factories. Entire families have been squeezed into single-room accommodation. Many were expelled from the Krajina and Bosnia; they have been there for years and their plight is difficult.
Mr. Winnick:
I have much admiration for my hon. Friend, but it saddens me that she has allowed herself, in many respects, to act as a spokesperson for the regime in Serbia. I would be glad to have her comments on the following point. Milosevic instigated wars that have led to the disintegration of Yugoslavia. He lost those wars, and the Serbian people, to a large extent, as well as others, are paying the penalty.
With regard to the position in Serbia, I draw her attention to the murder of a journalist during the conflict, a murder that was undoubtedly instigated by the Belgrade authorities. No effort has been made, understandably, to find the murderers. It would be useful if the Committee for Peace in the Balkans, of which she is the chair, denounced such crimes and put the blame for them, as well as for what has happened in the past eight or nine years, where it belongs--on a Milosevic clique.
Mrs. Mahon:
I am sorry that I gave way to my hon. Friend, as some of his remarks were unworthy of him. He knows perfectly well that any committee that I might belong to would condemn murder, and I am outraged that he thinks that the situation might be otherwise. I hope that, on reflection, he will decide to apologise for those remarks.
The press has ignored the plight of the hundreds of thousands of refugees in Serbia. Although all the refugees are not Serbs--there are many other minority groups among the refugees--Serbs comprise the vast majority of them, and the conditions in which they are living are very bad. Many of the refugees have no family support and, unfortunately, are receiving very little help from aid agencies.
Will the Minister tell the House what aid the Department for International Development is giving to the Yugoslav Government? The Yugoslav Government have to deal with the victims not only of the recent NATO war, but of the previous war--in which the Croats, with NATO's help, expelled hundreds and thousands of people from the Krajina. I have seen those refugees for myself; shamefully, the Red Cross seemed to be the only aid agency helping them. Red Cross workers told us that their soup kitchens are able to feed only a third of the worst-off refugees--100,000 of 300,000 people.
Another problem, which the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) mentioned, is power cuts. Although there were power cuts while we were there, the problem will become much worse as temperatures drop and the demand for power grows.
The power shortages caused directly by NATO's bombing are seriously affecting health care in Yugoslavia. As my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow said, heating for homes and hospitals has been curtailed. Schools will also have to close because of power shortages. As we all know, elderly people will suffer as temperatures drop as low as minus 20 deg C.
Even The Guardian, which has been almost as warlike on the subject as my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall, North, has now said that sanctions should be eased. It is interesting that it should now be coming round to that view. It stated:
About £52 million has gone to help refugees in Kosovo, with which I shall deal in a moment as I was fortunate enough to visit it in late September. Although that money is desperately needed in Kosovo, where the housing situation is awful--people must have decent accommodation to cope with the winter--it dwarfs the aid that has been provided to Serbia. It is disgraceful that, although everyone knows about Serbia's huge refugee problem, people who raise money for Kosovo say not a word about the Serbs. The west really will have to answer for the way it has demonised the Serbs, almost creating a hatred of them, so that we do not think of them as deserving.
"In spite of media reports to the contrary, we witnessed no beatings and no police brutality."
She said that she saw one or two fights in the crowds and the police stopped them, but she witnessed no beatings or police brutality. She took photographs. My hon. Friend the Member for Walsall, North (Mr. Winnick) can choose to believe that, or not. A very good friend of mine, whom I trust, saw it with her own eyes. When we were in Serbia, we witnessed no police brutality.
"The US, ignoring the lessons of Iraq, continues to insist that tough economic sanctions, including fuel oil, must be maintained. It believes this will spur the Serbian populace to mass revolt as winter exacerbates its misery."
The Guardian, like everyone else who thinks about the matter, concludes that the Serbian people will have to try to survive the winter and that all their energies will be spent in attaining that one goal. Nevertheless, we are very grateful for its support in calling for sanctions to be lifted.
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