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3.16 pm
Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley): The hon. Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack), in his customary candid and robust way, has expressed many of the views that I hold. I have on many occasions argued for regime change. I believe that it was the right thing to do. I might have wished for a different approach to it, and I tried to argue many times in this House that it was possible to indict members of the regime in the same way that Milosevic was indicted while he was still head of state. It was unfortunate that despite INDICT—the organisation that I chair—taking evidence to the Governments of four countries, including this one, not one Government was prepared to act on the evidence that we had given them. That would have been my preferred option, as I am sure it would have been for many other Members of the House. I also thank the hon. Member for West Derbyshire (Mr. McLoughlin) for his kind words.
Clearly, when one has seen and been involved for such a long time in events in Iraq, one can describe them with some passion and conviction, and in the belief that something ought to have been done. I believed as far back as 1984 that something needed to be done. In 1987,
I was chair of an organisation called CARDRI—the Campaign against Repression and for Democratic Rights in Iraq—which was the only pressure group in this country that highlighted the excesses of Saddam Hussein's regime. The group wrote newsletters, published books and used every opportunity to try to make the world take notice of the atrocities that had taken place since the beginning of Saddam Hussein's regime. In 1987, I put out a newsletter on behalf of CARDRI that called for Saddam Hussein to be divested of his chemical and biological weapons.In 1988, Halabja took place. No one took any notice of what we had said in 1987. This country continued to sell arms to the Iraqi regime and to deal with members of the regime as though they were honourable people—of course they were not. In 1988, I also took a group of women from the House of Commons to visit some of the survivors of Halabja in a London hospital.
At the beginning of this year—the last time that I spoke to the House about my visits to Iraq—the Kurds took me to the area of the country between Chamchamal and the road to Kirkuk, which was the dividing area between Saddam's Iraq and the Kurdish part of Iraq. The Kurds pointed to rockets on the hillside. They believed that chemical and biological warheads were to be fired in their direction. They were so convinced of that that they asked me to ask our Prime Minister to provide them with protective suits. I made that point to the Prime Minister and in the Chamber on my return. The Kurds contacted me several times during the following weeks to ask when they would receive the protection. They were close to everything that was going on and had their own intelligence. They sincerely believed that chemical and biological warheads existed, although I do not know whether they did or not.
I did not make an argument about weapons of mass destruction. I argued that we needed to take action in Iraq for humanitarian reasons. When I spoke in March about the plastic shredder that was used to kill in one of Saddam's prisons, I never imagined that only a month ago in Baghdad—after the war—I would read in a chillingly meticulous record that one of the methods of execution in Saddam's prisons was mincing—that was the translation from the Arabic. I had finished a press conference at the British embassy in Baghdad when a person from Fox television asked me to take a dossier that the company had been given that was an account of methods of execution. I read some of the methods outlined in the 56 pages—they were horrific.
The Abu Ghraib prison is the largest in Iraq. Since the early 1980s, I have read about executions that took place there and methods used by the regime to deal with its opponents in the prison. I visited the prison in the company of the Americans. When we reached the gate, it was locked, and the people inside refused to open it until they had received instructions from a higher military commander. We stood around for some time talking to children who were playing around the prison. The prison could house up to 75,000 people. The total prison population of this country is about 75,000, so those people could be contained in that prison alone. The 15 and 16-year-old boys who were playing around the prison had been guards there. They told us that only one day before the Americans arrived at the prison, the
remaining prisoners had been killed. They had been stood in trenches up their waists and shot through the head.There are murals of Saddam Hussein on the corridors of the prison, which is gruesome beyond imagination. The murals show Saddam with a hawk on his shoulder, Saddam with a rocket launcher with a dove in its barrel and Saddam in a silk shirt with a cigar. His victims were taken from dark and overcrowded cells to the execution block that had ceiling hooks and levers that catapulted them to a grizzly death in the pits below. Some remained alive, so the guards broke their necks by standing on them. The United Nations could have continued passing resolutions for the next 50 years and sending inspectors and rapporteurs into Iraq, but in the end, despite my reservations, there was no realistic alternative to war.
When I was in Iraq, the people on the streets to whom I talked were irritated because the debate on weapons of mass destruction was raging here at the time. When I asked them what they thought about the weapons, they were amazed that anyone was talking about them at all. They said, "Don't they care about us? Don't they care about the mass graves? Don't they care about the torture?" I assured them that we did care about all those things but that people were nevertheless worried about weapons of mass destruction.
Mr. Dalyell: If that is the only side of the story, how does my hon. Friend explain the attacks on American troops in Baghdad, which happen day in, day out and are alas increasing? That is lamentable.
Ann Clwyd: It is lamentable; my hon. Friend is right. But he must know some of the reasons for that. An Iraqi friend in this country, who had a brother in the Iraqi army for 35 years to whom he had spoken recently on the telephone, was told that people are being offered $600 a head for shooting at American soldiers. Of course, my hon. Friend must know that there are also the remnants of the regime—the remnants of the Ba'ath party who have so much to lose because the regime has gone, and the fedayeen who fought for Saddam. There are also extremists. For all those reasons, there is still insecurity in the country.
For people to feel secure in Iraq now, it is imperative that they know that Saddam Hussein is either dead or arrested. They need to know that his two terrible sons are either dead or arrested. That is necessary because people feel insecure. When I spoke to people on the streets, they said, and this is no exaggeration, "Thanks to Bush and Blair." That was said to me many times. Sometimes I would ask a man a question and he would turn his head away. When I asked why he was doing that, I was told, "He thinks that the Ba'athists are still watching him, and if they come back into power, he will get into trouble." That is the level of concern that the people still feel.
I say to my hon. Friend: stand at the mass grave at al-Hillah, where between 10,000 and 15,000 people are buried, hands tied behind their backs, bullets through their brains. Look at the pitiful possessions on the ground that the forensic scientists are going through—a watch, a faded ID card, a comb, a bit of cloth. Watch an old woman in her black chador, with tattoos on her hands, looking through the plastic bags on top of the
unidentified bodies that have been placed back in the graves for something to help her to find her son. Stand at the mass grave near Kirkuk. Look at the skeletons now tenderly reburied in simple wooden coffins. Talk to Nasir al-Hussein, who was only 12 at the time of the 1991 mass arrests. He, his mother, uncle and cousins were piled on to buses, and then the executions started down a farm road in the middle of the country. People were thrown into a pit, machine-gunned and buried with a bulldozer. Nasir crawled out of the mass grave, leaving his dead relatives behind.The killing fields of al-Hillah and Kirkuk are unremarkable, but here are some of the hundreds of thousands of the perhaps 1.5 million dead or missing in Iraq. Saddam's victims were the Shi'as, the Kurds and the communists—the people of Iraq. Now the secrets of that evil and despotic regime are being revealed. How much more killing might there have been? My hon. Friends may carry on about weapons of mass destruction, but I think that the action that we took was the right one, and I will always defend it.
3.28 pm
Mr. John Maples (Stratford-on-Avon): I agree with what the hon. Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd) has said. She has a long and honourable record of reminding us what a dreadful regime that was, and if ever there was a case for regime change on humanitarian grounds, this was surely it. But of course that is not the basis on which the Government went to war.
Interestingly, the United States Government do not have the same problem, because they basically said what the hon. Lady said, "This is an extremely unpleasant individual, who is murdering millions of his own citizens and destabilising the region, and we are not going to put up with it any longer." If the Prime Minister had come here and said that, I would have supported that, but that is not what he said. What he did, at great length, was to construct a legal case for going to war. I do not know whether that is because he felt that that was necessary, or because he felt that it was necessary to carry the majority of Labour MPs with him, but he did it.
That surprises me to some extent because the House was very willing to go to war in Kosovo on the grounds of humanitarian intervention when 30 people had been killed in the so-called Racak massacre. That intervention was clearly illegal by any standards of international law. There was absolutely no justification for it. If there is a doctrine of humanitarian intervention, it would not have extended to that. It certainly would have extended to Iraq, but that is not the case that was made.
I rejoiced in the outcome. I believe that the policy that we and the United States are pursuing will result in great benefits in the region. Progress—albeit modest and slow—has started towards the rule of law and democracy. There have been more elections in the middle east in the past six months than for a very long time outside Israel. All that could, and I hope will, result in a much more stable region and cut off the finance and support for many terrorist movements. However, no one would deny that it is a high-risk policy. It may or may not result in that, but it is worth a try and I hope that it succeeds.
However, the issue is not whether we were right to go to war; the issue is the Government's credibility. So many question marks hang over the evidence presented
to Parliament that it has become an issue all of its own. The crucial question is, "Did the Government misuse or misrepresent intelligence information?" There are so many possible indicators that they did that those questions have to be answered. We have tried to get them answered and, to a large extent, failed. They cannot remain unanswered for much longer.The central allegation about the WMD dossier is that it was manipulated because the 45-minute claim did not justify inclusion. It was not just Andrew Gilligan who made that allegation. We set out in the report a series of newspaper articles that appeared around the same time. Many people within the machine were talking to journalists. Pauline Neville-Jones, a former chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, told us:
- "There was clearly turbulence inside the machine".
Those of us who heard Andrew Gilligan could not simply dismiss his evidence. His source was right about two things: first, that the 45-minute allegation was a late entry into the field and, secondly, that it was single sourced. He said that before anyone else and the Government have since confirmed it. He clearly had a source who knew quite a lot about what was going on. Because his evidence could not be dismissed, the Committee had difficulty in reaching a conclusion on the matter, although I must tell my hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack) that it was virtually unanimous on everything else in the report.
I shall highlight one or two things that cast doubt in our mind. We were a bit mystified about what was the first draft of the report. It was presented to us by Mr. Campbell and the Foreign Secretary that the first draft appeared around 9 or 10 September, which we then debated. However, the idea of the dossier had been around since March. The crucial question is what happened between March and 10 September, not what happened between 10 September and publication. What was the role of people at No. 10 during that time? I imagine it was not published in March because it was not interesting enough. The Foreign Secretary dismisses the 45-minute claim and the uranium, but they were the two things that grabbed the headlines. They got the press interested and gave some credibility to the dossier. One of those claims was so late that it did not even go through the Joint Intelligence Committee assessment procedure. The other came in very late in the day.
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