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Mr. Nigel Beard (Bexleyheath and Crayford) (Lab): I worked closely with the British Army for 12 years, and know it to be the best-trained, most skilled and most disciplined military force in the world. That character and capability have been displayed in Northern Ireland, Sierra Leone and Kosovo, and twice in Iraq. It is a humane, confident and professionally effective force of which, with good reason, Britain can be proud.
That reputation should be in no way diminished by the media's treatment of reports from Amnesty International and the International Committee of the Red Cross, as though they were an indictment of military personnel serving in Iraq. Those reports have been cynically used to imply some association of the British armed services with the very serious evidence of abuse and humiliation of detainees in Abu Ghraib prison. Let us say on every possible occasion, loud and clear, that there is absolutely no evidence of any systematic or widespread mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by British forces.
The 33 known cases of Iraqi civilian deaths, injuries or ill-treatment have been investigated by the Royal Military Police—because the Army itself identified them as needing investigation, not because they were
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responding to either the Amnesty or the Red Cross report. Of those investigations, 12 are continuing and 21 have been completed, with 15 findings of "no case to answer". In the other six cases, the findings are still being considered.
The Amnesty report published this week involves 37 cases of Iraqis killed in accidents witnessed by or involving UK forces. The Ministry of Defence is now trawling through its records to identify what was involved in those incidents. Such investigations, using established military procedure, do not reflect an organisation indifferent to the welfare of the civilian population or tolerant of soldiers who are careless in the use of their weapons.
I have yet to see a newspaper article attempt to set any such case against the backcloth of events that soldiers are experiencing. Colleagues have been killed; they may themselves being fired on at the next street corner. A mob may be jeering, and it may be difficult to see what is going on. There are undoubtedly hostile forces at large attempting to create disorder, destruction and despair. In that climate of uncertainty and fear, people will make mistakes. They may do things in the heat of the moment that in calmer times they regret. That is the nature of military operations. Incidents like these must be judged against that background, not against abstract standards of model behaviour. Those are the considerations that the Royal Military Police are best able to bring to the investigation.
Both the Red Cross and Amnesty, in the role reflected in their reports, contribute to sustaining the high reputation of our armed forces. They are independent and strive to be objective in what they report. That is more than can be said for much of the media reporting and comment on them. Too much of that has been an attempt to establish the guilt of British forces by association with what went on in Abu Ghraib prison. The most culpable example of that, which we have already spoken of this afternoon, was in the Daily Mirror, which promoted its indictment with those fake photographs and interviews with anonymous soldiers, which were no more than the regurgitation of stories that had already been investigated, or were recycled from newspaper stories earlier in the year. What valiant and fearless journalism.
Do those responsible for that ever stop to wonder how the parents at home feel when their sons and daughters are risking their lives but are, by implication, defamed as brutalised and undisciplined? Those are the same men and women who have brought drinking water and electricity supplies to new standards in Iraq, who have helped to establish schools and hospitals and to train civilian police, and who have brought in elected local councillors. Not only has press reporting been an unfair indictment of men and women who do great credit to Britain; the climate of crisis that it has created encourages and emboldens the extremists to greater violence and hostility.
Generating a climate of crisis also serves many of those who opposed intervention in Iraq from the beginning, or who otherwise see some political advantage to be gained from the present situation. It is that which leads to the phoney "shock horror" at the fact that the Prime Minister and Secretary of State for Defence became aware of the Red Cross report only recently. The flood of issues of all kinds relating to Iraq
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and many other topics does not require the Prime Minister or the Secretary of State to deal with everything personally. They must ensure that there are clear lines of accountability and responsibility for action to be taken, and those arrangements exist. The Red Cross report cases had been investigated, and the Amnesty cases either had been investigated or were about to be. Those who allege that the reports should have been immediately sent to the top should tell us what they would have expected the Prime Minister or the Secretary of State to do that was not already being done.
There is no more motive behind that line of argument than an attempt to create a public impression that the Government are not in control.
Mr. Jenkin: The question that I would have expected the Secretary of State for Defence or the Foreign Secretary immediately to ask the American Administration is, "How on earth are we going to handle this when it comes out?" That is the damage that has been done, and it is the fact that the American Administration seem to be coming from so far behind on this issue, as do we, that has sullied the reputation of the entire coalition administration and poisoned the Arab world against us even more.
Mr. Beard: So the actionable matter was an indictment of the United States—a power for which we have no responsibility whatever.
The whole episode, as that intervention suggests to a degree, is being exploited to gain political advantage. Let us just look at the troubled waters in which the cynical opportunists are fishing. We are within two months of sovereignty being passed to an Iraqi Government who, six months later, will hold elections for the whole of Iraq. The extremists do not want either of those things to happen. Iraqi sovereignty removes a grievance that they can exploit on the streets, and democracy forecloses any attempt to install an Islamic state. There are numerous sects and cults, including al-Qaeda, with an incentive to try to prevent that progress by creating disorder and fear. These are bound to be difficult days for our troops in Iraq and anxious times for all who want to see a decent, democratic state emerge after Saddam Hussein's 30 years of tyranny.
Those who are dealing with that situation deserve our support, not the distraction of the fabricated indignation and opportunist hoo-hah that we have witnessed from the press and from Opposition parties in this House, including frequently this afternoon.
It is not just that our troops deserve better than that; so do the people of Iraq. They want a settled future in a democratic state, with an economy generating jobs and opportunities. To those such as the Liberal party, who have gone on pretending that there is no exit strategy for our troops, I would reply that that aspiration alone defines the exit strategy. It is to create the conditions whereby that kind of society can grow in Iraq.
Both the British and the American forces have made huge strides to establish those foundations, through the civil works programmes, the establishment of local democracy, and the training of police and local officials. The vast majority of people in Britain have barely heard
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any of that positive news. They have been given a diet of death, disaster and scandal, with scarcely a word about the progress on reconstruction.
Now, that negative picture is being elaborated to create an impression that all is chaos, that things are moving backwards, that all efforts were foolish and in vain and that the best thing we could do would be to withdraw British and American forces. Even sensible reports from the Red Cross and Amnesty are being prayed in aid of that false "I told you so" assessment.
This is not a time when our troops in Iraq should be distracted by a partisan propaganda war at home. They need all their skills and personal qualities to deal with the difficult period ahead, up to and after the end of June. The Iraqi people want them to succeed for the sake of their future too. We want them to succeed. No one can gain if Britain or America appears to lose its nerve at home at this crucial time.
5.26 pm
Adam Price (East Carmarthen and Dinefwr) (PC): I shall concentrate on what the Secretary of State, in his characteristically opaque manner, has referred to as some of the "process issues" associated with the subject that we are discussing. The process has been deficient; certainly it has been an arduous task trying to extract information on this subject from the Government through parliamentary questions. If the Government had acted with greater candour and a greater sense of urgency, the collateral damage that we are suffering now because of the allegations against America would have been minimised with regard to the British forces. It is a great shame that they did not.
I have at present 10 parliamentary questions to which I have not had a reply, some of which date back to February. Indeed, to one question I had a holding reply on 28 November, and received the letter that was promised at the end of March, after constantly bombarding the Minister of State's office with telephone inquiries asking where it was. That is no way for us as parliamentarians to have to try to hold the Government to account on any issue, let alone one as important as this.
Even more worrying is the fact that some of the replies that we have received have not been complete, and some of them have not proved to be correct. I asked whether the Government were aware of any complaints made by the Iraqi interim governing council about alleged human rights violations by coalition forces, and the answer was that they were not. Yet the Iraqi Human Rights Minister, Abdel Basset Turki, made a public statement in November saying that he was very concerned about that very subject, and he had several meetings with Paul Bremer.
The reply to another of my questions was more worrying still. I asked about the number of fatalities that were under investigation, and on 19 January I was given a list of names. Yet we read in the Amnesty International report about the death of Ghanem Kadhem Kati, who was shot in the back outside his home on 1 January. Why was that name not included in the parliamentary reply? The Government say now that the investigation was ongoing at that time, and there was an interview with the Royal Military Police.
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I asked a further question following a press report about the alleged shooting of a demonstrator by British forces in Basra on 4 October.
"On 4 October, on the periphery of a demonstration, British soldiers killed an Iraqi gunman in self-defence. His automatic weapon and ammunition were recovered."—[Official Report, 6 January 2004; Vol. 416, c. 235W.]
We read in the Amnesty International report of the death of Hilal Finjan Salman on 4 October. [Interruption.] The Minister of State is smiling while I am recounting the death of an innocent man who was actually protecting a girls' school. He had been employed for 35 years as a guard for al-Maqal girls junior high school, and was licensed to carry a weapon to protect the school. He was required to wear a luminous orange jacket, but neither the British Army nor the Iraqi authorities had issued him with such a jacket. He was the "gunman" whom the Minister of State told me was shot, thereby dismissing the death of that innocent man. Hilal Finjan Salman's son has applied for compensation, but according to the Amnesty International report he has heard nothing from the British authorities.
There has been a lot of talk about apologies. Will the Minister of State apologise to the family of that man, who was wrongfully killed while doing his job protecting a girls' school in Basra? The Minister of State has dismissed what happened in an incorrect parliamentary answer to me.
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