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Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael J. Martin): Order.
7.36 pm
Mr. Bowen Wells (Hertford and Stortford): I shall take up shortly the remarks of the hon. Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell) about Kosovo, but first I want to copy him by congratulating the Government on two policies that were announced by the Foreign Secretary today. First, in the WTO Seattle round, the Government wish to adopt a comprehensive development trade round that will benefit the poorer countries in the world, and begin to attack the protectionism developed in the European Community and the United States against products and imports from developing countries. I believe that in that way we can make a great step forward to help those in abject poverty throughout the world.
Secondly, I congratulate the Government on their achievements on debt initiatives, which they took up at Cologne and succeeded in getting through the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings at Washington in September and October. I am delighted that the United States has enacted the necessary legislation to support the initiatives.
I lament the fact that I will not be able to herald, as I would have wished, the report of the Select Committee on International Development on women and development, which will be published on Thursday. I will have to leave hon. Members to read that excellent but alarming and devastating report. I can, however, herald the report that the Committee intends to deliver to the House on sanctions, probably in early December.
That brings me to a serious question. The United Nations has put in place comprehensive economic sanctions cementing Saddam Hussain into power. As he has to ration food, health provision and clothing to all his people, they are all entirely dependent on him and will not revolt against him.
We are doing exactly the same thing in Serbia, against which there are comprehensive economic sanctions. There are 800,000 refugees without proper housing. They face a devastating winter and will be entirely dependent on Milosevic and his Government to enable them to maintain life and limb, to keep themselves warm so as not to die of hypothermia, and to keep their livelihoods. The sanctions policy is a nightmare. It is completely the wrong to achieve our ends.
The situation in Serbia is extremely serious. I shall speak about the refugees who were made homeless as a result of our bombing of Kosovo, but first I shall respond to the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife (Mr. Campbell), who is not in his place. In a previous debate, the right hon. and learned Gentleman challenged me on the legality of the intervention of NATO forces in Kosovo.
Mark Littman QC has published a book for the Centre for Policy Studies in which he asks:
It is all very well for the Government or the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife to say that we should have a method of intervening on humanitarian
grounds, and to propose five points, as the right hon. and learned Gentleman did, but that is not yet international law.
What we did was to flout the law, and we did it deliberately, as Mr. Littman says. If we call on Israel, Palestine and Russia to obey resolutions passed by the United Nations, how can we refuse to abide by clause 2.4, which makes action of the kind that we took in Kosovo illegal?
Mr. Littman goes on to ask:
The war having taken place, we must look after those who have been displaced. The UNHCR reported to the International Development Committee. Mr. O'Sullivan, who is in charge of UNHCR throughout the Balkan area, including Serbia, appeared before us as a witness and told us that UNHCR will have repaired only 50,000 houses by the time winter sets in. The winter temperature in the Balkans often falls to 20o, low enough to cause hypothermia in old people and children, and in the middle-aged population.
Materials have been supplied to repair only one room in each of the 50,000 houses. As we heard today, more than 100,000 houses were totally destroyed. That means that people will be living in tents which, even if winterised, are thoroughly inadequate to see young children and old people through the winter.
That is what we have produced in Kosovo, and our response is entirely inadequate, as was predictable. The Guardian of 15 October stated that the cost of humanitarian aid will be £2.54 billion, and that of reconstructing Serbia and Kosovo about £20.5 billion. What did the World Bank and other donors agree only two days ago to give to that area? One billion pounds.
Before the bombing, Serbia already had 400,000 refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia in camps. There were Roma people among them, and the refugees were inadequately looked after, without food, shelter, medical supplies or the means of keeping themselves going during the winter. Serbia now has double that figure, most of them from Kosovo, and most having been ethnically cleansed by the Kosovars. That, too, was predictable.
Dr. Phyllis Starkey (Milton Keynes, South-West):
I start by wholeheartedly endorsing the comment of my hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Ross) that there will not be a sustainable settlement in the middle east peace process unless there is a proper recognition of the rights of the Palestinian refugees in international law and as laid down by United Nations Security Council resolutions.
The main topic about which I shall speak is Russia, and in particular the remarks in the Gracious Speech about improving the effectiveness of EU foreign and security policy, and our commitment to NATO as the foundation of Britain's defence and security.
Russia is clearly no longer the super-power that it was, but it remains an extremely important player in Europe and the world. It has huge potential resources, once it gets its economy sorted out, but it is also a huge threat, not because it may attack the west, as used to be the case, but because it has within its territory a vast number of decaying nuclear facilities, both civil nuclear power facilities and the enormous nuclear submarine fleet that is rotting in the Pacific ocean or the Baltic sea.
That problem not only poses a huge environmental threat to western Europe but--because security in the Russian Federation is not what it used to be--offers the possibility that some of those nuclear sources may go astray and fall into the hands of terrorists or criminals. Furthermore, the breakdown of order in the Russian Federation has led to a huge growth in organised crime, which is starting to be exported to the rest of Europe.
Grave threats are posed by the Russian Federation which are much more serious to Europe than to the United States, simply because of distance. The threat is next door to us.
The EU common strategy on Russia recognises the need for the European Union to take seriously the issues posed by the Russian Federation, and to try to co-ordinate our foreign and defence policy in relation to Russia. The common strategy is largely driven by the Nordic members of the EU and tends to focus on the northern dimension, not least because people in Finland are under immediate threat of pollution if there is an accident at a Russian nuclear power station like the one that occurred at Chernobyl. Also, Finland has a border with the Russian Federation and realises the instability that arises when there is a great economic disparity between the two sides of a border.
The events taking place in Chechnya demonstrate the importance of developing a southern dimension to the EU's common strategy on Russia. We should be concerned about the dynamic among the European Union, NATO and Russia. I am referring not just to the Russian Government but to the internal dynamics within Russia.
To many in Russia, NATO is a threat. It is natural that the Baltic states and others that were formerly part of the Warsaw pact should wish to join NATO. I understand the reason why they want to do that--the security that it gives them, and the symbol that NATO provides of their acceptance into the western world--but we should be aware of the way in which the enlargement of NATO is perceived from the Russian point of view.
Enlargement plays to an agenda that suggests that NATO is trying to encircle the Russian Federation. NATO is a body set up for the defence of Europe, but defence is necessary against an external threat, and the Russians believe that they are seen as that external threat. Therefore, they view NATO as potentially aggressive rather than defensive. They interpreted NATO action in Kosovo as setting a precedent for NATO to act aggressively.
Kosovo caused several conflicts; the most obvious philosophical one was human rights versus sovereignty. To the Russians, human rights were placed above sovereignty in Kosovo. For them, that has obvious parallels with Chechnya. One analysis views events in Chechnya as the Russian military's riposte to what it believed to be the wrong decision in Kosovo, and a reassertion that, for it, sovereignty is more important than human rights.
We in the west need to continue to state clearly the values for which we stand, and to tell the Russian Federation that its behaviour in Chechnya is neither sensible nor justifiable. Its actions do not constitute the most sensible way in which to overcome terrorism, and it is not acceptable for the Russian Federation to cause such enormous damage to civilians and the infrastructure of Chechnya in its blitzkrieg attempt to blast a few terrorists into oblivion.
However, it is important for Britain and Europe to return Russia to the notion that it is acting in partnership with the rest of Europe. That would help to deal with threats to world security that endanger Russia and the rest of Europe. It means recognising Russian sensitivities. The right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife (Mr. Campbell) said that the conflict in Chechnya was popular in Russia. That is true. It is ironic that Mr. Putin is taking such action in Chechnya because Russia is moving towards a form of democracy and he needs to play to voters' sensibilities. It is regrettable that most Russian voters do not have great respect for the human rights of the Chechens, and that they applaud their Government's actions in Chechnya. We must acknowledge that it will probably help to gain Mr. Putin a bigger vote in the presidential elections than he would otherwise have had.
In NATO, we need to take account of the balance of advantage. We gain security from the alliance and from enlarging it. We also gain from a real and effective partnership with Russia, not from the confrontation to which we seem to be returning.
We must be especially careful in the Caucasus. The recent announcements about oil pipelines from Baku to Ceyhan have been dictated by United States political objectives, not by economics. They are part of the Americans' aim to promote Turkey and to avoid at all costs a pipeline that goes through Iran. However, the proposal is likely to create in the Russians a fear of a United States-Turkey-Israel axis and has already led to Russia shipping weapons across the Caspian sea into Iran. Iran's isolation strengthens its theocratic elements, which we do not want to back, rather than its more progressive forces, which we support.
"Was the Campaign Lawful?"
The eminent QC concludes, as I warned Foreign Office Ministers at the time, that
"the Government, while correctly accepting that the Kosovo bombing could not be justified if it involved a grave breach of international law, wrongly assured the British public that it did not involve such a breach, while refusing the Yugoslav challenge to have the point tested before the International Court of Justice."
In other words, the intervention was and remains illegal.
"Was the Campaign Necessary?"
His conclusion is:
"It is possible that the Kosovo problem could have been settled by diplomacy and without the use of force. It is certain that NATO did not make every effort to do so: at a critical point in the discussions at Rambouillet, NATO abandoned diplomacy in favour of a package of non-negotiable demands contained in a document described by Dr. Kissinger as 'a terrible diplomatic document', as a 'provocation' and as an 'excuse to start bombing'. And it is likely that, if the terms which were agreed at the end of the campaign had been put forward at Rambouillet, then the ethnic cleansing and the war could have been averted."
Those are not my words, but the considered opinion of an eminent QC who has examined all the facts.
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