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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 795-iii House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEE
FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE ANNUAL REPORT 2006-07
Tuesday 17 July 2007 LORD ASHDOWN SIR IVOR ROBERTS Evidence heard in Public Questions 176 - 255
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday 17 July 2007 Members present: Mike Gapes (Chairman) Mr. Fabian Hamilton Mr. John Horam Mr. Eric Illsley Andrew Mackinlay Sandra Osborne Mr. Ken Purchase ________________ Examination of Witness
Witness: Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon GCMG KBE, High Representative for and EU Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina (2002-06), gave evidence.
Q176 Chairman: Lord Ashdown, welcome. May we first thank you for coming along this afternoon to talk to us about our inquiry into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office annual report? We decided that it would be useful to have non-diplomatic commentary on the annual report, as well as commentary from current members of the FCO staff, so we are grateful that you found time to come along. Perhaps I could begin by asking you some questions relating to your experience in the Balkans. The FCO in its assessment of its own performance said that the situation in the Western Balkans at the moment is amber on the colour-coded scale. Do you concur with that assessment? Is it about right? Lord Ashdown: I should like to differentiate between the assessment of the Foreign Office's work in the Western Balkans and the assessment of the Western Balkans. I have a high regard for the work that the Foreign Office has done in the Western Balkans and particularly in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was a tremendous assistance to me. In so far as I was able to achieve some things in Bosnia-I made some mistakes too-it was in large measure because of the huge support provided by Her Majesty's Government through the Foreign Office. It was also because of Washington's support. But the Foreign Office staff were unstinting, generous and they did that most remarkable thing: they even backed me when they thought that I was wrong, which is a very good thing to do. I am very grateful to them. I think that the ambassador in Sarajevo, Matthew Rycroft, is an exceptional ambassador. He gained, even in my time there when he was relatively newly arrived, a huge and very widespread respect. I do not think that it is an exaggeration to say that he is probably, among all sides, one of the most respected, if not the most respected, ambassador in Bosnia. He carries a huge amount of weight there. I think that the Foreign Office's policy, by and large, in the Western Balkans has been effectively carried out. So, yes, I think that amber is a good judgment. Perhaps I might even be a bit more optimistic than that in terms of what I have seen. If there is a flaw and fault in the Western Balkans in international foreign policy, it lies in Brussels, not in London. The lack of co-ordination and sufficient muscularity for conditionality, putting the wrong people in the wrong jobs, the lack of an overall regional policy towards the Western Balkans and its penny-packet policies that apply to each country have left a situation where I fear the Western Balkans has gone backwards in the past 18 months. I am gloomy about that. I always used to say that Bosnia and Herzegovina was held in place by two electromagnetic forces: one was the push of the Bonn powers, which did diminish, had to diminish and should have continued to be diminished and the other was the magnetic pull of the Brussels institutions. The one thing that everyone is agreed on is that they want to get to the Brussels institutions, to NATO and the European Union. We have turned off the use of the Bonn powers under my successor completely. I do not say that that was necessarily a wrong judgment, but at the same time there has been a visible weakening of the magnetic pull of the European institutions. Above all, in the chancelleries of Europe there is, and this is well recognised in the Balkans, a lack of enthusiasm and perhaps even a growing feeling that we do not want the Western Balkans in. That has had a disastrous effect. I think that Bosnia has gone backwards, not because I have left. They may be coincidental events, but I do not think that they are more connected than that. If the Committee has not read the latest International Crisis Group report on Serbia, I commend it to you. It says that Serbia is moving increasingly to a position that is anti-European and pro-Moscow. Our policy of trying to appease some of the forces in Serbia has weakened our friends, like Boris Tadic, and strengthened our enemies, like Vojislav Seselj. Our failure to take a clear and distinctive position on Kosovo has left open territory for the radicals in Serbia to play upon and, indeed, for Moscow to use. Moscow's position is more understandable. I realise that you are coming on to that, Chairman. The Foreign Office has done well in the Western Balkans; Brussels has done badly in the Western Balkans, and I fear that the Western Balkans is going backwards. One final word, I do not say that the danger is that Western Balkans will return to conflict. That is not even likely or possible. The danger is that the Western Balkans will become an ungovernable black hole in the middle of Europe-let us recognise that it is now inside Europe, not beyond it-through which criminality and instability will be imported into the European Union. I am very pessimistic about the outcome of that. Q177 Chairman: We will get some questions on Bosnia and Herzegovina specifically in a minute, but two of us were in Kosovo last week with the Committee. I should be interested in your assessment of what is likely to happen on Kosovo. Do you expect a Security Council resolution, and if not, what do you think is the likely scenario if there is no Security Council resolution? Lord Ashdown: I cannot tell you whether I expect a Security Council resolution or not. I can tell you that we should have grasped this nettle long ago. In foreign policy, as in politics, if there is only one solution, we need to adopt that sooner rather than later. The truth is that Kosovo could never again be governed by Belgrade. That should have been evident to us in 1999; it is the one thing that cannot happen. By leaving that gap-that vacuum-which was the only place that people wanted an answer on, we have allowed the forces of destruction or destructiveness in Bosnia, rather than the forces of constructiveness, to have a gathering point. I understand that you will speak to Ivor Roberts in a minute. He will have a different view on this if you ask him about it, and he is extremely knowledgeable on these issues, but my view is the Ahtisaari plan is the best plan-the only plan that is likely to have effect. My view is that it has something in it for all sides. My view is that, inevitably in the end, we have to come to this and the sooner we do it, the better. How that happens is a difficult issue. My own judgment is that Belgrade no longer views Kosovo as part of its homeland; it regards it as an important monument, but not as part of its homeland. I think in the end Belgrade will accept that Kosovo will move towards some kind of independent status through whatever mechanism is possible. The unanswered question, of course, is: what will the reaction of Moscow be? I suppose that calculations about a UN Security Council resolution turn on that question. My judgment has always been that Moscow, with proper and legitimate concerns about the precedents that this may establish for Transnistria, for Abkhazia and so on-we should not be deflected by those concerns, but we should certainly understand them-is more likely to veto than to oppose, but I cannot be certain of that. The other thing I cannot be certain of is to what extent there are European nations-that is, nations within the EU-that would take a different view on this. Are we going to have European solidarity on this issue, never mind Security Council or P5 solidarity? I am not sure about that answer. Q178 Andrew Mackinlay: Looking again last week at the map, I realised how close or coterminous the Republika Srpska is with Serbia. It struck me that it would be very difficult to grant or tolerate independence, either granted, managed independence for Kosovo, or a UDI Kosovo. That would put enormous strains on the work you have done in Bosnia and Herzegovina as regards the Republika Srpska: people would want independence or to join Serbia, surely. Lord Ashdown: Mr. Mackinlay, I absolutely reject that. I have to say I completely and wholly reject it. These are two completely different cases. Bosnia is a country that goes back to the middle ages. It sent knights to the crusades. It is a country that has existed and is recognised by the United Nations today. Is it, then, the case that we should reward the Serbs for their murder and atrocities in governing Kosovo, where they lost both the moral and the practical right to govern their country, by giving them a piece of an established country? Absolutely not. I do not doubt that there are some people in the wildest fastnesses of eastern Republika Srpska, and perhaps some in the back offices of President Kostunica, who warm themselves on chilly nights by pretending that that is a possibility, but it is not a possibility. These two are completely unconnected. The fact of life is that, in so far as a precedent will be established by the independence of Kosovo, that precedent is already established. There are many cases in history in which a country, by its behaviour to some people under its government, loses the moral and practical right to govern that piece of its territory. We know of one-Ireland. Because of the way we governed Ireland for four centuries, we lost the moral and practical right to continue to govern Ireland. That did not mean to say that other pieces of country should be handed over. That is the fact. The fact is that the Serbs lost the moral right to govern Kosovo, where they are probably 5% or perhaps at the most 10% of the population, and then soaked it in blood. Should they be rewarded for that by giving them a piece of another country? That is the moral position. There is one thing that will return the Balkans to war, which is if you try to hand Republika Srpska back to Serbia. Then you will find the Muslims, and others probably too, in Bosnia. What will you do with Brcko, which sits in-between? What will you do with the Muslims who have returned to Srebrenica and those who are now a majority in Kozarac, where all the death camps were? Are you going to hand those people over too? It is simply not to be accepted. One of the faults of the international community is its failure to make that absolutely crystal clear. I do not seriously believe that there are people today in Serbia who believe that they are about to be able to be handed Republika Srpska as some kind of compensation for their monstrous crimes in Kosovo, let alone their monstrous crimes in Bosnia. I reject that completely, and the sooner the international community makes it clear the better. By the way, if you do that, where are you going to stop? Are you going to say that the Muslim majorities in the Sandzak part of Serbia, and in the north of Montenegro, should become- Q179 Andrew Mackinlay: With respect, I think that you have slightly misunderstood my question. I understand the moral case and, indeed, have some sympathy for it. The question was a genuine one: would there be a demand not from Serbia seeking it back but from people in Srpska itself, seeking- Lord Ashdown: There would be a demand, and of course there was a demand for it when I was there, but it is a demand that we should reject. I always said that it would be easier for me if the matter were made crystal clear by the international community. That demand will not melt away, and I do not say that there are not some people who are making it, but we should not give it house room. Q180 Andrew Mackinlay: That is noted, and I think that it is a good point. You also said in your introduction-I am paraphrasing-that you have some sympathy for the Russian position that, if you grant independence to Kosovo, what about the Russian minorities in Transnistria and other places? They say that they were part of the Helsinki final act. I understand the British Government saying, "Kosovo is an exception", but we surely cannot ignore Russia's legitimate case. Lord Ashdown: I do not think that we can ignore the fact that the Russians' concerns are legitimate, although I do not think they are on anything like the same parallel. On the idea that you cannot establish a precedent and redraw a border, what about Macedonia? We established a new country in Macedonia. The Greeks did not like it very much, but we drew some new borders in Macedonia. The truth is that history imposes certain imperatives. If the one thing that we know cannot happen is Kosovo being governed again by Belgrade, we have to face that reality. No one, except some in Belgrade, proposes that somehow or another Kosovo should be governed by Belgrade again. I have never heard anybody propose that seriously. The one thing that can never happen is Kosovo being ruled by Belgrade, which is what Belgrade desires. We need to accept that and move on from there to consider what other solution there is. There is only one solution: moving towards an independent position under a managed democracy under the international community. That is why the Ahtisaari report represents something relatively close to common sense. Q181 Andrew Mackinlay: If we cannot get a Security Council resolution, what happens then? Lord Ashdown: Then you are in a very difficult situation. I guess that the United States independently recognises the independence of Kosovo. I guess that other countries follow suit and that most of the major countries of the European Union do so, but I guess that some do not. Then there is a division in the EU. We need to recognise that, but it does not alter the fundamental fact that Kosovo cannot again be governed by Belgrade. Whatever policy you draw up, it has to take that into account, not pretend that it is somehow possible to reverse history. Q182 Sandra Osborne: Can I ask you a question as a previous incumbent of the Office of the High Representative? You referred to the Bonn powers, but you have also previously said that there should be a gradual passing over of the tasks of the Office of the High Representative to the Bosnian authorities. In that regard, do you think that the UK was right to support the extension of the office and powers of the High Representative beyond 2007, and do you think that it will be possible to close the office by June 2008? Lord Ashdown: No, I do not think that they were right, actually, and I said so to the British Government at the time, but I accept that that is the way that the international consensus was going. I suspect that the UK Government did not think that it was the best policy, either. The truth is that if you have these powers and do not use them, which was the position that I got myself into at the end, when I used them only once or twice, they become less and less possible to use. They are far more dangerous if one possesses them in theory but not in practice. My successor, Mr. Lajčák, who is now in the Office of the High Representative, has used them. Maybe we can resuscitate some utility from them, but I shall not hide from the Committee that my view was rather similar to the view of the ICT at the time-that the best thing to do was to dispense with the Bonn powers completely and rely on the magnetic pull of the EU, as the driver for reforming change in Bosnia. What I was not to know was that that magnetic pull itself would diminish. That was the great mistake. I was opposed-privately, of course-to the maintenance of the Bonn powers. I would have preferred to see it go to a European special representative, but that depended on whether Brussels was prepared to exercise the conditionality leverage available to it through the Stability and Association Agreement process, and Brussels has not seemed prepared to do that. With the benefit of hindsight, maintaining the Bonn powers might have been the right decision. Is it possible to close the OHR? Yes, and it is probably necessary. Q183 Mr. Hamilton: May I move on to constitutional reforms? During our inquiry into the Western Balkans, when you last gave evidence to the Committee, you told us that the constitution had to be reformed: "You have a state in which there are far too many layers of government." In our report, we agreed that the international community should not impose a new constitutional structure from outside but should nurture state structures that would make reform easier. As you know, new talks on constitutional reform were held in Washington in November 2005, the 10th anniversary of the Dayton agreement. It was agreed to increase the powers of the Prime Minister and add two ministries to central Government, but the talks came unstuck on the issue of creating a unified presidency. How optimistic are you that Bosnia and Herzegovina will be able to reach an agreement on constitutional reform and is the UK doing enough to support such reform? Lord Ashdown: I think that, in the end, it has to happen. Leaving aside the question of corruption, the failure of functionality in Bosnia is now the biggest threat to the state, bluntly. The state spends about 70% of its very poor citizens' taxes, in some cases, just on governance rather than on citizen services. One cannot build up loyalty to the state under those circumstances, so in the end it has to happen. I am pretty depressed about the fact that it has not even begun. The steps that you described-strengthening the Prime Minister and so on-were minimal first steps that all of us saw as part of a process that would enlarge, but even they have proved unachievable. I seem to have it in for Brussels today. I hate to add to that, but the fundamental mistake-we tried to point it out to Brussels-was that Brussels, for reasons that I do not understand but that I think were largely bureaucratic, decided not to make constitutional change a condition of the SAA. In so doing, it completely lost its leverage to drive forward the process. It was left to the United States' powers of persuasion-I remember being in Washington and hearing the distant but unmistakable sound of bones cracking when it was being negotiated. Brussels decided, for some reason that I honestly do not understand, that it was not prepared to say that, in order to join the European Union and be part of the SAA process, the state had to have a certain minimal level of functionality, meaning that constitutional change was part of the SAA. I have always regarded Europe as a union of values, but also as a union of systems. I do not understand why our one greatest leverage to drive forward the process of constitutional change that Bosnia needed so badly was abandoned by Brussels. If Brussels is prepared to make constitutional change a key requirement of the SAA and is prepared to be serious about it, we will give ourselves back the leverage to drive the process forward. I understand that Mr. Lajčák-in my view, absolutely correctly-has decided to put priority on police reform because it opens up routes to the SAA, but his next priority should be, and probably will be, constitutional reform. If Brussels throws its weight behind it, it can still be done. Q184 Mr. Hamilton: Are we in the UK doing enough? Lord Ashdown: I think that, unless the European Union is prepared to exercise that leverage, the British Government cannot. But I suspect we are doing as much as we can within less than optimal circumstances. Q185 Mr. Hamilton: May I move on, Lord Ashdown, to nationalism, which is involved here? The Foreign and Commonwealth Office's annual report notes, "In Bosnia, the elections in October 2006 saw an increase in national political rhetoric and less progress in key reforms than previously." The Government and their EU partners should foster civil society and increase the stake of the Bosnian people in the political process by encouraging the integration of Bosnian politicians into the European mainstream, but can the United Kingdom Government have any impact on the levels of nationalistic rhetoric in Bosnian politics, and do we actually have any place in trying to do so? Lord Ashdown: Nationalistic rhetoric always rises during election periods. You do not have to go to Bosnia to find that; you will find it in lots of other places too. But I think it is true to say that in the person of Milorad Dodik and his mirror image on the Bosnian side, Haris Silajdžić, you have two people who have raised the nationalist rhetoric in Bosnia. There is a sort of Newtonian law in the Balkans that action and reaction are equal and opposite. It is a bit like the Protestants and the Catholics in Belfast: if one does something and can get away with it, the other does it too. I think it was a mistake to allow Milorad Dodik to call for referendums that were clearly against the Dayton agreement. That would have fractured Bosnia and was extremely dangerous, but he was not suppressed and told that this was unacceptable in sufficiently powerful terms by the international community and-lo and behold!-the Muslim community on the other side responded to that. So, you had this equal and opposite reaction in terms of the heating up of nationalistic rhetoric. Is there much the British Government can do? I think we are doing quite a lot-Westminster Foundation for Democracy work, etc.-to build the civil society. I think we are doing quite a lot through our ambassador and through the British Council to try to encourage the process of reconciliation. But that can only take place within a structure and functionality of the state within which people can work. In the absence of that, there will be rather small weights on the other side of the balance, in comparison with the sense of dysfunctionality and maybe even dissolution that has occurred as a result of the rise of nationalist rhetoric in Bosnia. Q186 Mr. Purchase: May I explore a little further the question of nationalism within Bosnia? It is always difficult to see real democratic processes when nationalism is involved. But is that wholly nationalistic, or is it underpinned by an ethnic dimension and perhaps even religious intolerance? Lord Ashdown: The truth is that I do not know which of these two forces is the more powerful, Mr. Purchase. My own view is that religion has always been a vehicle for nationalism. If you look at religion in Northern Ireland, you find very strongly that that is the position. So I think what marches hand in hand with nationalism is religious intolerance and ethnic intolerance, and those are the by-products of it. So yes, they are very much connected. Q187 Mr. Purchase: Are we right to characterise it as nationalism, then? Lord Ashdown: Yes, I think you probably are right to characterise it in that way. Q188 Mr. Purchase: Are we in denial about something here-about a really nasty side of what went on? Lord Ashdown: There is a nasty side, but it is going to take time to get over that. The truth is that the nature of nationalist parties changes. If you look at the Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica in Croatia, it started off as a nationalist party, but became a European party. I think the process of politics alters. What starts off, straight after a liberation struggle or a nationalist war, is that people gather together in political parties that call themselves nationalist, but they are actually broad coalitions of people who are pursuing a certain aim. Then, after a while, they tend to disaggregate into their basic political structures of left, right and centre-or call it what you will. That process was happening. The HDZ-the Croatian nationalist party in Bosnia-is more fractured internally between the nationalists and the reformers. The same is true of the Stranka Demokratske Akcije-the Bosnian national party. The same was true of the Serbs. The truth is that Milorad Dodik, who defeated the SDA-the Serb nationalist party of Karadzic-was nominally a non-nationalist, but he won. You would therefore assume that the Serbs were less nationalist under Milorad Dodik than under the SDA, but that is not true. Seeing things through the prism of nationalism does not always give an accurate picture; other forces are at work as well, such as pro-Europeanism and the natural processes of politics. Q189 Chairman: Can I ask you about the criminal justice system and, as a related matter, The Hague tribunal and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia? When we were in Belgrade last week, my general impression was that many people there would very much like the four outstanding indictees to get to The Hague as soon as possible, and that that clearly included Karadzic and Mladic. Based on your knowledge of the region, do you think that that is likely? Lord Ashdown: One of those four is probably dead. No, I regret to say that I think Karadzic and Mladic are further away from The Hague than they have probably been in the past 10 years. I think that it was extremely unwise of NATO to relax its conditions on their arraignment. My view is that Mladic is perfectly deliverable by the Serb authorities; he is being protected by renegade elements of the Serb security forces. Karadzic, I guess, is probably being protected by the Serb Orthodox Church. We held the line on General Gotovina in Croatia. We said, "Until you deliver Gotovina, you cannot join the European process." The change by NATO was, to my mind, a very wrong move indeed. I cannot understand why, but bizarrely it was the Americans who changed position. They were my strongest supporters and they were holding a tough line, so I do not know what went on behind the scenes. Suddenly, NATO said, "It is not necessary to join partnership for peace, but you deliver these two." The European Union seems to have said broadly the same on the SAA. My judgment is that, absent some remarkable event, Karadzic and Mladic are now probably further away from going to The Hague than they have been for some time. Q190 Andrew Mackinlay: Carla del Ponte says that the court dealing with the former Yugoslavia is time-limited. Do you see a way in which the British Government could encourage others at least to have a system whereby that does not come to an end, but is put into hibernation, to address the situation that would arise if the people to whom we have been referring fall into custody? Lord Ashdown: You are rather supporting the view that I would take: if they are going to be arrested, it is a question of luck, or bad luck for them. Q191 Andrew Mackinlay: At present, there is a green light for everyone who might be harbouring them to snug in there. Lord Ashdown: That is my view. I cannot answer your question on whether the court at The Hague could be put in mothballs to wait for Mladic and Karadzic to arrive; my guess is that probably it could not. The process of stabilisation in the Balkans will not be finished until the two primary architects of that slaughter are brought to justice. For as long as they are not brought to justice, they cannot any longer prevent, although they can impede, the process of the reform of the Western Balkans, in which we have a very strong interest. It would be a moral and practical tragedy, therefore, if we gave up on those two, but I fear that that is the mood at the moment. That is a tough thing to say, but I fear that it is so. I think that we are getting tired of it, and that is very wrong. It is wrong in practical terms too. Q192 Chairman: The lower-level criminals have been tried in national courts. As I understand it, there were 50 prosecutions in the Bosnian Federation, but only two in 10 years in Republika Srpska. Do you think that there is anything more that the British Government and the international community could do to give more support for capacity building in Republika Srpska? Lord Ashdown: It is sometimes overlooked, but what has happened in Bosnia is something that I think is quite remarkable. It is something for which the Bosnians are unique in the Balkans. They have created for themselves the capacity to try their own war criminals, in their own courts, on their own territory. That is a remarkable thing, and they have done it effectively. There is a disparity in the approach on the Republika Srpska side and on the federation side. I think that that is a very regrettable disparity. You asked me what could be done. Hold firm to the principles of police reform. The fact is that until you have a decent, state-run police force, which operates equally across the whole territory and is outside political control, you will probably not be able to deliver those people to justice. Here, again, I regret that there is some weakening in the firmness and determination to carry the thing through. Q193 Chairman: Is police reform the big remaining issue? Lord Ashdown: Beyond constitutional reform, it is. What we did when I was there was to put in place all the necessary structures for a light-level state governing a strongly federal structure in Bosnia and Herzegovina. We put together a taxation system, a justice system, a customs system and an intelligence system, and we put the army under state control. There is one piece of unfinished business, which I thought that we had nailed down before I left: the creation of a single police force, governed and controlled at state level. Obviously it would not be a state police force; it would be decentralised, but controlled at state level from the Home Office, as it were, and budgeted from the state. That is the last block that has to be put in place to create the beginnings of a light-level functional state institution in Bosnia. That is the big piece of unfinished business, beyond constitutional change. Q194 Mr. Purchase: What assessment do you make of the stability and association process, which promotes stable democracies and open economies with a view eventually to opening up the way to accession? Is it proceeding in the right direction and at the right pace? Lord Ashdown: It is the absolutely crucial process. Imagine Bosnia as a badly bombed building when we arrived there. We had to reconstruct that building: the Bosnian state. The first thing that we did was surround it with the scaffolding of the Dayton peace agreement, which was-I hope that I am not mixing my metaphors-the process of getting the building into a habitable state. The next job is to make it a proper building that you and I would recognise-to create a functional state. The Dayton scaffolding was necessary to carry Bosnia through the first process: stabilisation. The second process is the construction of a functional, European-style state. The essential scaffolding for that is the SAA process. That process is right; it is arguably the world's most successful post-reconstruction mechanism. The European Union, using that mechanism, has been far more successful than the Americans have been, for instance, in constructing peace after conflict and reconstructing states from communism. The difficulty is not with the institution or the framework, but with the political will behind it. We are not prepared to use to best effect the conditionality that we have. I have no complaint about the structure, but I have a large complaint about the political will of member states. Let me except from that the extremely gifted, able and effective European Commissioner, Olli Rehn. Chris Patten is a pretty difficult act to follow, but Olli Rehn has done a superb job. The problem lies not with the Commission, but with the member states' political will to make it happen. Q195 Mr. Purchase: Name some names. Lord Ashdown: I am pretty disappointed by the messages that have come out of European chancelleries in the last couple of years. In particular, I had hoped that Germany would send signals about the integration of the Western Balkans that were slightly different from those that we were hearing from Paris and elsewhere. I exclude the British Government from that. This is not about the enlargement of Europe beyond its borders, so it is a sadness to me that, on the issue of the Western Balkans, which I regard as unfinished business within our borders, one hears such words as, "We are reaching the limits of our-" Q196 Chairman: Absorption capacity? Lord Ashdown: Yes, absorption capacity. Those are weasel words that are translated very simply in the Balkans as, "They don't want us in." That is a devastating thing. Q197 Mr. Purchase: Thank you for that. I wonder whether, in a similar vein, I can ask you about the process of forming a single military force in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Lord Ashdown: I think the great thing is that the country will not be going back to war. By and large it has been very good. I have lost touch over the past year, so I do not know how it has been progressing, but I was very pleased about the fact that it was done and how it was done. When I spoke to military officers, their commitment to increasing professionalism as a state army was very clear and far more encouraging than the views of their politicians, who were more resistant to the process. The Americans, incidentally, played a tremendous part in that; it would not have happened without them. So, I was rather optimistic when I left Bosnia. Maybe things have happened in the last year that I do not know about, but I was then, and even if it is in ignorance, I remain so now. Q198 Mr. Purchase: Could it be that the politicians had a slightly different feel? Lord Ashdown: Politicians nearly always do. Q199 Mr. Hamilton: Lord Ashdown, our Committee's report on the Western Balkans expressed concern, following your last evidence session, about the effective rule of law in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It recommended that the Government-our Government-should stress to their EU partners the importance of establishing effective rule of law throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, and that they should take a lead with them in strengthening the physical infrastructure and personnel to this end, including the training of judges and legal employees. What progress do you think has been made, since you last gave evidence to us, on the strengthening of the rule of law in Bosnia and Herzegovina? Lord Ashdown: Mr. Hamilton, I wish I could answer your question in the way that I know you want me to, but I have to say that having been away more than a year now, I am a little out of touch with what is happening in detail on the ground. I was a little depressed by some of the decisions taken by the state court in respect of major corruption charges, but, on the other hand, the state court judges include many international judges, and I am not sure that the decisions that they took were necessarily wrong, even if they were uncomfortable for those of us who were fighting very high level corruption in Bosnia. I come back to my answer to Mr. Gapes, the Chairman, which is that there will be smaller deficiencies that I do not know about, such as in the judicial system and the training of judges, but the big gap, which is a mile wide and must be filled, is the gap not in the judicial structure, but in the unreformed police force. It remains politically and ethnically controlled. It is fractured, it cannot pursue criminals effectively, it is not properly resourced because it wastes so much money, and, above all, it is under the control of its political masters. This is the big gap in the justice system in Bosnia, and it must be reformed. Q200 Mr. Hamilton: Has the UK invested sufficiently in Bosnia? Lord Ashdown: Again- Q201 Mr. Hamilton: I do not mean invested in trade, but invested money to ensure that the reforms that you state are essential are actually happening. Lord Ashdown: I was always after more money, and I suspect that any High Representative would be, but I have no complaints about the British Government on that score. They understood the importance of this, and they have supported the process very effectively. Chairman: Can we now move on to another wider area? John Horam. Q202 Mr. Horam: Can I ask you a couple of questions, which you may or may not feel able to answer, about the way that foreign policy is handled by the UK Government? As you may know, the Foreign Office, like any other Department, is subject to public service agreements. Sir Ivor Roberts, who we are seeing next, said in his valedictory statement that the outcomes of foreign policy are not like hospital waiting lists; you cannot measure the outcomes in quite the same way. Is that something that you agree with-in your experience? Lord Ashdown: I have not had a look at Sir Ivor's valedictory report recently, so I am not sure that I can comment very much on it. However, let me say this in relation to the question: our Foreign and Commonwealth Office was created at a time when we were living in an information-poor structure. We did not know what was going on elsewhere in the world, we did not have detailed knowledge, we needed ambassadors and embassies, and we needed to know what was happening. Ministries of Foreign Affairs now live in an information-rich world and, frankly, I think this has discombobulated all of them. They are not quite sure what their job is because, by and large, an ambassador-Sir Ivor Roberts is sitting behind me, so I had better be careful-can rather rarely provide you with an insight that is not available from other means, perhaps from the Head of State picking up the phone or sending an e-mail. I think that all Ministries of Foreign Affairs have found themselves rather confused as to what role they should be playing in the modern world, and that is true of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Mr. Chairman, forgive me if I go into just a little detail. If this sounds like a diversion, it will come back to the question. I have a view that economic structures shape political ones, not that political structures shape economic ones. We in politics imitate the structures of business and commerce. If you look at the Haldane committee structures in the industrial revolution, they replicated the structures that existed in the industrial revolution: vertical hierarchies, specialisation of tasks and stove-piped institutions. Those structures were about carrying out specific tasks in specific boxes and specific manners. Q203 Mr. Horam: So do you think that it is inevitable that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office will get overwhelmed by modern management-speak? Lord Ashdown: No, absolutely not. Look and see what business has done today. Modern commerce has stripped down the vertical hierarchies, has networked organisations and restructured them to serve their customer. That is what modern organisations have done and if you have not done that, you are not going to succeed. Meanwhile, all the British Departments of State remain in vertical stovepipes, replicating the systems of yesterday. So, what do we have to do? Are we going to reconstruct the whole of our politics and the whole of our state structures to mimic industry? I doubt it. But what we do have to do is to work cross-departmentally. In the business of foreign affairs and the area of post-conflict reconstruction, which I have been involved in and is becoming a very large part of foreign affairs, it is not what Foreign Offices do that matters, but what they do together with other Departments, for example, with the Ministry of Defence and the Home Office on police reform. What you do with other countries matters as well; this is essentially a multilateral organisation. And it is what you do with the multilateral organisations, the UN organisations, that matters. This is about joined-up government. How do we apply that? The Foreign and Commonwealth Office needs to become good at-and what it is very bad at, by the way-is project management. It is very good at reporting and sitting dizzily above the scene and providing elegant telegrams for home, but what it should be saying is, "Here are the improvements that are needed to resolve this problem: here is the Ministry of Defence contribution, here is the Treasury contribution and here is the Department for International Development's contribution of aid; here is what we can do by bringing some police reforms in." Then we can change the nature of a failing state. Our job in this process is not to pretend that we can do it all, but to project manage it. If someone asked me what the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has to do now, it would be to learn the art of project management. The Department for International Development, by the way, is rather a good project manager, but the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is extremely bad. If we are serious about joined-up government in international affairs-and we ought to be because it is the only way to get things done-we have to start thinking about growing new skills and a new psychology in what is the golden Department, equipped with more intellectual horsepower than any other and made up of extremely gifted people. Q204 Mr. Horam: The Treasury may disagree with that. Lord Ashdown: Well, it may or may not, but in my view the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is not doing the job it ought to be doing in the modern age. I do not apply that to our own Foreign Office only, but think it is true of all MFAs, which are equally somewhat puzzled by the world in which they suddenly, blinkingly find themselves. Q205 Mr. Horam: It is interesting what you say because the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has been given such a project. Its main public service agreement under the new arrangements will be run jointly with the Ministry of Defence and the Department for International Development and is called "conflict prevention worldwide". If that is a project that it is having to look to manage, what, in your view, should be the objectives of such a conflict-prevention public service agreement? Lord Ashdown: International co-ordination. That brings me to an issue that I am getting very worried about, which is Afghanistan. I think that we are losing in Afghanistan and I do not think that any of us have yet calculated the cost of a failure there. We are losing public support, which is the crucial thing we must have to win. Whitehall redounds today with the phrase "the comprehensive approach". Everybody in Whitehall is talking about the comprehensive approach, which is what you just talked about with the PSA. There is no point in having a comprehensive approach in Whitehall if there is not one in Kabul, and there is not. This thing is fractured and unco-ordinated. The cardinal principle for successful post-conflict reconstruction is to have the international community working to a unified strategy in a co-ordinated way and speaking with a united voice. That is more honoured in the breach than the observance in Afghanistan today. There are 50 international and national organisations involved in the eradication of the poppy. We have spent $400 million on that and the last two poppy harvests have been the record poppy harvests in Afghanistan. Karzai's people will tell you that he is fed up to the back teeth with bilateral advisers coming in with their bilateral enthusiasms. Sometimes they make offers and sometimes they give instructions, many of which are contradictory. There is a complete failure to take a comprehensive approach in Kabul. You can do anything that you like in Whitehall-in my view, the Foreign Office is going in the right direction-but it does not matter, because what matters is what happens on the ground. Q206 Mr. Horam: But how do we achieve things on the ground? Lord Ashdown: Tom Koenigs is the UN's special representative in Kabul. He is without the international will to pull the institutions together to create a co-ordinated structure, which is what we did in Bosnia. The Foreign Office helped me to get the international community to follow a co-ordinated plan and to speak with a single voice. The US should be saying to its allies that they are going to lose unless they get their act together. It should then drive the process of providing a co-ordinated plan and bang some heads together to ensure that the duplication of effort that is happening at present ceases. In Afghanistan today, we are putting one twenty-fifth the amount of troops and one fiftieth the amount of aid per head of population that we put into Bosnia and Kosovo-fewer resources than we have ever put into a successful peace and stabilisation mission. Does that mean that we will fail? Maybe not. But "maybe not" becomes a definite "yes" if on top of a complete poverty of resources you have a complete lack of co-ordination, which is where we are now. I think that we are now looking at the prospect of failure in Afghanistan, with all that that will mean for NATO, the security of this country and Pakistan, which could fall into a new, wide, regional war. At the heart of the problem lies a single fault: our failure to act in a unified way. The Foreign Office must bear the implications of that. Q207 Mr. Horam: Would you say that the new arrangements proposed under the new European treaty, which would involve joint foreign policy working and so forth, would help with the problems that you described? Lord Ashdown: It would undoubtedly help, because some of the issues ought to be dealt with on the European basis. That would enable co-ordination, but it would not be enough because we would also need proper co-ordination with the United States and with the multilateral institutions of the UN. Normally, you could rely on the military to understand the importance of unitary command, but not even that exists in Afghanistan. The United States' operation-Operation Enduring Freedom-is not under the control of the international security assistance force. In terms of civilian casualties, the US is acting in ways absolutely contrary to ISAF policy. By the way, its special forces are not even controlled from within the theatre-they are controlled from Washington. Those who have studied such things will recognise that it is an exact loving replica of what happened in Somalia, which ended up in "Black Hawk Down". I cannot believe that we are deliberately making those mistakes again. It is a serious situation, and we ought to start being serious about it. Chairman: This is your last question, I am afraid, Mr. Purchase. Q208 Mr. Purchase: I just want to take you back a little on the question of project management. Often, in a business or engineering project, which is to say when we are dealing with inanimate things, we can plot a time line, plan a critical path, and match resources to time to do whatever is required. The difference in international affairs is that the project that one wants to manage does not want to be managed-it has a different understanding, a different culture, and different requirements. I have been to Afghanistan. Like you, I often think to myself that there are parts of Afghan society that totally reject everything that is done by the west, and which fight against it. Those circumstances are not dissimilar to those in Northern Ireland, where I often got the feeling that people did not want to be managed, thank you. People had a different agenda. I have some sympathy with the idea of project management. I put it to you that we are not dealing with straightforward business planning, but with circumstances such that it may be beyond you-although you are very good-to put together managers who would bring about a result that you and I would want. Lord Ashdown: You may be right. You might therefore fail, having done everything right. What is certain is that you will fail more quickly, and sooner, if you do everything wrong. That is what we are doing at present. Maybe Iraq was undoable, who knows, even if we had done everything right, but we made that a certainty by doing it wrong. My second point is that if you go and speak to Karzai and his people, they will say, "For God's sake, give us an international partner we can speak to instead of this collection of bilaterals". Our chances of changing their view of what can and should be done are much greater if we can have a decent, partnership-based relationship with them. My third point to you, Mr. Purchase-you make a powerful point, and I am glad that you mentioned Northern Ireland, because it is relevant-is that there are some places in the world, I suspect, where we cannot reconstruct peace and where we actually might have to take the decision not to try. But there are some places in the world where you cannot afford to leave it to conflict. Northern Ireland was one. I was among the soldiers who marched into Belfast, my own home city, in 1960. If somebody had said to me there, "It is going to take 38 years," I would have baulked at that and so would most of the British public, but it did. I suspect, looking back on Northern Ireland, that even though we did not think that we were doing it at the time we were doing no more than containing the situation for 25 years until the ingredients for peace emerged. We could not afford to do anything other than that because the chaos in Northern Ireland was too dangerous to us in the British state. We spent whatever time, gold and blood was necessary simply to contain the situation. Maybe Afghanistan is so dangerous that we have to do that. Maybe what we have to do is simply to sit there and contain the situation until the ingredients for peace emerge. That is a pretty pessimistic outcome. I do not believe that my judgment is that that is the present situation, but there are times in the world when you take one of three decisions. One is to say, "Sorry, it can't be done, and we ain't going to do it because we'll make things worse." That is a tough decision, but we have to be prepared to do it. Sometimes we can say, "We can do this, and we can win, and therefore we should." There are also times where we say-and they are rare-"We can't do this, but we can't afford to let it go bad either, and therefore we will contain it." I do not happen to think that Afghanistan is in the middle category, but some countries may be some day. Q209 Mr. Purchase: I tell you this: there is just as much opium on the streets of Birmingham as there would be if we were not there. Lord Ashdown: I guess there is more, because they have just had two record harvests. However, that is much more to do with the fact that we have done this so badly than that it was undoable. Chairman: Paddy, I am sure that we could be here for another hour or two. You have touched on Iraq, and we have not got time. I think that everybody should read the Iraq Commission's report, without going into it now. Thank you for your answers, your depth of knowledge and your commitment. We wish you all the best in the future, whatever you are doing, and I am sure that we will see you again at some point. Lord Ashdown: Thanks very much indeed.
Examination of Witness
Witness: Sir Ivor Roberts KCMG, Diplomatic Service (1968-2006), former Ambassador in Belgrade, the Republic of Ireland, and Italy and San Marino, gave evidence.
Q210 Chairman: Sir Ivor, thank you for coming this afternoon. As you are aware, we are conducting an inquiry into the annual report of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and we thought that it would be useful to have a word from people not currently in the FCO system, as well as from those within it-both Ministers and officials. I shall begin with something quite important. You produced a valedictory telegram in which you were rather critical of FCO management, and we now understand that there are no more valedictory telegrams-my colleagues may wish to intervene at this point. In your valedictory telegram, you particularly criticised management-speak and how the FCO tried to use the language of the private sector. We put your comments to Sir Peter Ricketts when he came before this Committee, and he basically suggested that you were out of touch with the modern public service. What is your reaction? Sir Ivor Roberts: Well, he would say that, wouldn't he? I read Peter's comments. The only thing that I can say is that of course I am 60 and not 20, but I was struck by the fact that I had well over 100 comments by e-mail and in other forms to my valedictory dispatch, and the vast majority of them came from junior members of the Foreign Office who endorsed my comments without exception. Q211 Chairman: So you think that there is widespread support within the service for your criticisms? Sir Ivor Roberts: It is hard for me to judge. I say immediately that I am not the most representative person, because I have spent so much of the past 20 years abroad. I can operate and comment only from my perspective as an ambassador in three posts and a minister in another in the past 20 years. It is a peculiar position, but it allows me to engage closely with a wide range of people in the service. Q212 Mr. Purchase: Politicians have been obsessed for some time with the idea of management in the private sector being transferred almost wholly into the public sector. There is no question but that good management, of whatever level, is of considerable assistance to the effective and efficient operation of any project, but are you concerned that much of that management-speak, when translated into action, is inappropriate for public service, or do you think that much should be imported from business practice into diplomatic practice? Sir Ivor Roberts: You have put your finger on a crucial area. My view is that in some areas we undoubtedly need outside experience and business practice. Information technology is a clear example of where diplomats, however experienced and well versed, are simply not up to dealing with the problems, so I would welcome bringing in outside experience. When dealing with conflict prevention, I do not see the great value of management-speak and management practice. I have a slightly pessimistic view of diplomacy, which I mentioned en passant in my valedictory dispatch, as a slightly Sisyphean task. You constantly push your boulder up hill and most of the time watch a series of boulders going down in the other direction. I do not believe that Wall street language will help anyone to deal with the problem. That is why I am basically opposed to rigid, strategic priorities, objective setting and so on. That is not the way in which to deal with the problems that emerge from day to day. Today's events in Russia did not exactly come out of the clear blue sky, but they would certainly not have been a top priority three months ago. We need infinite flexibility and intellectual agility to deal with such problems. Q213 Mr. Purchase: I do think that your words, "flexibility and intellectual agility", are probably the key to good diplomatic practice. I have always thought of power as the ability to persuade someone to do something against their will, or to create a situation in which something happens contrary to nature. What other form of power is there? It is essentially an art, not a science. Sir Ivor Roberts: And it is mainly a failure, or at least it requires iteration. I dealt with Milosevic for four years, and spent most of the time trying to persuade him to do things he did not want to do, and he usually declined, but occasionally he did. The process is attrition, persuasion, persistence and patience. Q214 Mr. Purchase: Patience does not lend itself to targets. Sir Ivor Roberts: It does not lend itself well to targets at all. Andrew Mackinlay: Chairman, Sir Ivor was ambassador in Belgrade, so could we spend a couple of minutes at the end- Chairman: You could ask him now. Q215 Andrew Mackinlay: I am too excited about the valedictory telegram. I was able to obtain, for accuracy, one of the many copies that presumably exist. In it, Sir Ivor, you refer to Prism as the Via Dolorosa, and to the selling off of the family silver by some of the estates. You specifically criticise Collinson Grant reversing the Coopers and Lybrand report, and there is the wonderful quote given to Sir Peter Ricketts. You also referred to Rodric Braithwaite referring to the Foreign Office as a demoralised cipher. Would you touch on those comments and elaborate on them? Sir Ivor Roberts: Prism is one of those areas that are difficult for non-specialists like me to grapple with. What was so depressing was the hype when Prism was introduced that it would solve all our problems at the press of a button and that all management would be reduced to infinitely simpler forms. In fact, it involved recruiting more people to deal with it, and the whole process seemed to be entirely counter-intuitive. I cannot claim to be a great expert on Prism, but all I am saying is that it was a major disappointment in terms of what we expected from it, and what it brought to us in return. Q216 Andrew Mackinlay: They say that it now works, but the impression I got was that it was a case of "Thank God it's working, we can tell the Committee that its working," when it has required a disproportionate effort to get it into that category. Is that a fair assessment? Sir Ivor Roberts: Like many things, if you knew how difficult and awful it was going to be, would you have started down that path? I believe that the answer is certainly no, both in terms of cost and attrition. Q217 Andrew Mackinlay: Collinson Grant- Sir Ivor Roberts: Collinson Grant was a bad joke. I do not know who dreamt up that scheme, but in management terms Collinson Grant seemed to reverse most of the proposals for the organisation of the Foreign Office that had been introduced 15 years ago. I said it only jokingly, but someone might actually believe it: I said that you would think that these sets of management consultants were in collusion, and that one would say, "I'll tell you what. One year you propose that we double the number of human resources people, and then we'll come along five years later and say that they should halve the number. We'll each get a handsome fee for it, and the Foreign Office will be left in the same position as it was at the start." It seemed like that, it was so absurd. Q218 Andrew Mackinlay: In your paragraph 13, you refer to the Foreign Office not fighting for its budgets but say that other Departments-for instance, you mention DFID-threw high resources at the problem, with consultants and so on, and that the Foreign Office had failed to argue its corner for adequate resources. The Committee is mindful of the fact that in some parts of the globe there is no United Kingdom mission-one that I bore hon. Members stiff about is Kyrgyzstan, a not insignificant country-and I rather felt that you were saying that the Government were not alive to the investment and that they would save money if they invested more in the Foreign Office. Sir Ivor Roberts: You have three big budgets-the Ministry of Defence, DFID and the Foreign Office. The Foreign Office is about conflict prevention; DFID is largely about reconstruction; and the Ministry of Defence is about armed peacekeeping, intervention or whatever else it is called. The cheapest of those by far is conflict prevention, yet the Department of State that has the fewest resources of those three over the last seven or 10 years, or however long it is, is the Foreign Office, as far as I can tell from the perspective that I have occupied. That seems to me to be a governmental failure. It is not a failure of senior people in the Foreign Office; it is a failure, if you like, of Ministers in the Foreign Office and it is a collective failure of Government to say, "Hang on, what is it that we really want? Do we really want a war in Iraq, or do we want to solve this diplomatically? Do we want to get involved in Sierra Leone, the Congo or wherever; or, if we can get a diplomatic solution, it is worth investing extra resources to get there?" As it is, we often find, to our absolute horror, that we share a capital with DFID, and that DFID, because its budgets seem to be so much larger than ours, is able to outbid us in recruiting local staff. You may need a driver to help service the mission, but the running cost of such a driver is now 20% higher than you are prepared to pay because that is what DFID is paying. That seems to me a complete absurdity-a failure of what, in a particularly odious management phrase, is called joined-up government. Q219 Andrew Mackinlay: I have two more questions. The first is brief. You were ambassador to the Italian Republic, and to save money the Foreign Office decided effectively to abandon the United Kingdom mission to the Holy See. There was panic about that, a reverse, and then it was decided to locate that mission in the same campus as our embassy to the Italian Republic. I understand that your counsel that this was most inappropriate for a whole variety of constitutional reasons was ignored. Is that correct? Sir Ivor Roberts: Yes. Q220 Andrew Mackinlay: Will you elaborate? Sir Ivor Roberts: Sure. First, may I slightly correct you? No decision was taken to abolish the mission to the Holy See. The decision was taken to downgrade it and to lower its cost as much as possible. As you rightly said, part of the exercise involved co-location of the Holy See mission inside the residence of my mission to the Italian Republic. I wrote to the then head of the Foreign Office and I said, "This is your baby not mine, but let me say from the perspective of someone who knows Italy well, and is a Catholic and therefore understands the Catholic Church very well, that this is not going to wash. They are not going to put up with co-location of the embassy to the Holy See with the embassy to the Italian Republic because it crosses their fundamental red line-see the Lateran Treaty 1929." Above all, I said, "Do not give up the lease on the residence to the embassy to the Holy See, because you are getting it at less than half the commercial rent." I had no reply for five weeks and when I did get one it effectively said, "Don't you worry your little head about these things, we have it all under control. The Vatican is super cool about this and, by the way, we have given up the lease on the embassy to the Holy See." Okay-not my baby. About a month later a new ambassador to the Holy See arrived. On day one he was hauled in by the Vatican, figuratively cuffed around the head and asked, "What is all this nonsense about co-location? You know that that is not acceptable to us, go away and think again." We then had to go back to the landlord and say, "Oh dear, we have made a terrible mistake can we have our lease back?" He said, "Of course you can have your lease back, but instead of costing €9000 a month, it will now cost you €25,000 a month." Q221 Andrew Mackinlay: Thank you for that. It was very interesting. I shall now turn to Belgrade. The Chairman and I were in Serbia and Kosovo last week. What is your assessment of the fragility of the Serbian Government and democracy? If there was either "managed independence"-I think that that is the phrase of Ahtisaari-of Kosovo, or a UDI by Kosovo, which had subsequent recognition from the USA, what would the political collateral damage be in Belgrade, a place where I assume all of us would like to see the fragile democracy built up? Sir Ivor Roberts: I am very out of date now. I left Belgrade nine years ago. I left as ambassador at the end of 1997 and Robin Cook sent me back twice to see Milosevic as a personal envoy in 1998. That was the last time I was in Serbia, so I am very out of touch and it is one area where I fully accept that I am out of touch. However, I am concerned about Kosovo. When I left Serbia, I wrote another valedictory dispatch, which was not banned. Q222 Andrew Mackinlay: It is one I haven't seen. Sir Ivor Roberts: It is 10 years old now. One of its recommendations-not recommendations, but I said that I saw the only way forward over Kosovo was a partition. Now we are talking about a different form of partition in the Ahtisaari plan, which of course wishes to partition Kosovo out of Serbia. I think that that would be hugely destabilising to Serbia and the region. However, I have long taken the view that the borders drawn up in the Titoist period were administrative borders and should be treated as such, not as sacrosanct national borders. I spoke to a great man called Milovan Djilas, one of the architects of the borders of Yugoslavia, shortly before he died. I asked him what they were all about and he replied, "Look, this was going to be a communist state and the borders were of no importance to us whatsoever. We drew them up from an administrative point of view." The real fault with regard to the borders goes back much further to the British Government who chaired the London conference in 1912-13, when it set the borders of a new state called Albania after the Balkan wars. The idiocy at the time was to create a state of Albania which had more Albanians living immediately outside it than inside it. A more certain recipe for instability, confusion and chaos for the future could hardly be imagined. Chairman: We need to get back to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office annual report. Mr. Mackinlay has had his few moments of diversion. We will return to John Horam, please. Q223 Mr. Horam: I think that Britain is usually at the bottom of these things in the Middle East as well, drawing up the wrong boundaries and so forth. Sorry to go on to a slightly less interesting subject, but it is important in terms of what we are trying to do in the Foreign Office. I heard what was said about resources for conflict prevention as opposed to the activities of the MOD and DFID. Sir Peter Ricketts presented us with a practical problem when he came before the Committee. He said that he was in disagreement with the Treasury in three main areas: first, the Treasury was asking him to find efficiencies of 5% of administrative costs in the next round. We do not quite know what administration means in that context, because most people in the Foreign Office are doing administration. Secondly, it wants a 3% overall efficiency target achieved, and thirdly there are real problems with the security of embassies abroad. Given those problems, if you were Sir Peter Ricketts, what attitude would you take to those continual demands for more efficiency? Sir Ivor Roberts: One of the answers I gave in my valedictory statement was to quote Comrade Maxim Litvinov back to the Treasury. I do not know whether you have seen my quote- Q224 Mr. Horam: About the five-year plan? Sir Ivor Roberts: Yes. Litvinov was asked by Stalin to produce a five-year plan and said, "It isn't going to happen, Comrade. We can't predict what we're going to be doing in five years' time. Others dictate the agenda, not us." I think that Peter Ricketts is faced with an intolerable problem. Why on earth should the Foreign Office be penalised for the fact that, because of the success of the British economy, we end up paying a higher percentage of international subscriptions? Chairman: That comes out of the total budget. Q225 Mr. Horam: So there is less for other things? Sir Ivor Roberts: Yes. We would be better off if Britain were a failure. It is utterly ludicrous. As someone who has always loyally supported what the Foreign Office should be about, I strongly hope that a Committee such as yours will underline that the Treasury is behaving appallingly over this. It really is disgraceful that the Foreign Office should somehow be penalised for the fact that international subscriptions, over which it has no control at all, are going up, partly reflecting the success of the British economy. Q226 Mr. Horam: None the less, the fact is that every Department must be subject to some sort of Treasury control, must it not? Sir Ivor Roberts: Of course, and I would not suggest that the Foreign Office could simply spend. The point that I am trying to suggest, and made initially, is that I think investing in the Foreign Office is a way of reducing the cost of overseas activities. If you look at them in an holistic way-the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence and the Department for International Development-to cut back on the Foreign Office is a way of spending more money rather than less. I think that is the way the Treasury needs to be approached; it needs to be told that that is how it is. Let us suppose that Peter Ricketts said, "Actually, we are not going to make any attempt to improve the security of British embassies around the world, because we have not got the money to do it." What happens when a British ambassador or consulate in the Middle East is blown up? Is that Peter Ricketts's fault? If there is not the money, there is not the money. The Americans would never have that problem. Q227 Mr. Horam: Do you think that DFID should still be part of the Foreign Office? Sir Ivor Roberts: I think that we need to have a clear understanding of who runs foreign policy, and at the moment the lines are so blurred that it is very difficult to know. There can only be one British Government foreign policy, and whether it is run by a Department called DFID or a Department called the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is not the point. The point is that there can only be one British Government foreign policy, and in every capital there can only be one voice that holds sway. It can be the ambassador or someone else, but there can ultimately be only one person who is responsible. We cannot have-and this happens too often-two voices in the same capital. Q228 Mr. Purchase: It is very interesting to hear you say is it DFID, is it the MOD, or is it the Foreign Office? What about the role of No. 10? Does that not complicate matters somewhat in regard to what our foreign policy is? A secondee goes from the Foreign Office into No.10 and suddenly we have a different take on these things. Sir Ivor Roberts: Yes, it is a failure to use the system of Cabinet Government effectively. Of course, it is right that the Prime Minister should have an adviser on foreign affairs, but the Executive arm is the Foreign Office; not Mr. X or Sir Y. Q229 Mr. Purchase: But why should the Prime Minister have an adviser on foreign affairs when there is a Department called the Foreign Office? Sir Ivor Roberts: He needs someone to interpret the Foreign Office to him. It does not have to be a very senior person, but it needs to be someone who can explain what is going on and can put it into context. When I first joined the Foreign Office, the person in No.10 who dealt with foreign affairs was essentially a private secretary. His job was to arrange meetings for the Prime Minister with international visitors, to arrange the Prime Minister's international calls and to minute every meeting on international affairs. And that was roughly it. His job was not to be a policy voice; it was more to act as an Executive branch of the Foreign Office. Q230 Mr. Purchase: Sorry to pursue this, but the Foreign Secretary is also briefed by the Foreign Office; he does not have someone to interpret the brief for him or her. If the brief is available to the Foreign Secretary and to No.10, why is that not sufficient? Sir Ivor Roberts: It depends what the Prime Minister wants, ultimately. In other days, it was very much the case that the briefing and the advice that the Prime Minister got would have been directly from the Foreign Secretary who would say, "Prime Minister, you should know that this is what I am planning to do and so on." That is much more satisfactory, but it is not something that has evolved over the last five years; it is more like it has evolved over the last 20 years. Mr. Purchase: I understand and agree with that. Q231 Mr. Hamilton: Let me follow on from what Ken Purchase has said. Sir Ivor, you were very critical of the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair. In fact, I believe, that you are reported as saying that his foreign policy was based on self-righteous soundbites and expensive foreign travel, and that he refused to listen to expert advice. Is that what you said? Sir Ivor Roberts: No, I do not recognise those words at all. Q232 Mr. Hamilton: I apologise if I have misinterpreted you and I withdraw that. Leaving that aside, there has been a lot of criticism of Tony Blair's foreign policy. As Ken Purchase has said, foreign policy has effectively been run from No.10, which is contrary to what you have just said about foreign policy having only one base from the United Kingdom and that there should not be different foreign policy bases pushing out different foreign policies in the capitals throughout the world. You gave some good examples in relation to that. Since Gordon Brown became Prime Minister, he has changed direction a little bit and we have seen a few different interpretations and policy statements. He has also appointed Mark Malloch Brown, the former Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, as a Minister in the House of Lords. From what you have read and seen on television so far, do you think that we will see huge changes with Gordon Brown? Do you think that the appointment of David Miliband, which was quite unexpected in some quarters, marks a change and that foreign policy will once again be conducted from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office? Or are you suspicious that the same will continue with Simon McDonald, who is now one of Gordon Brown's advisers? I believe that he has another adviser as well, but Simon is from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and is a very well established ambassador. Do you think that that means that the same will continue and that we will have two centres of foreign policy? Sir Ivor Roberts: It is very early days. I do not know a lot of the current personnel. I know Simon; I met Mark Malloch Brown briefly on one occasion. I have met the man from the Treasury-Jon Cunliffe, who is also at No. 10 now-a couple of times. I do not really know the answer to that question. My gut feeling is that the new Prime Minister, at this stage at least, wants to push work and policy back toward the Foreign Office. That is certainly what the Foreign Office feels, I think-that it is a welcome development, that it will spend more time on foreign policy and that less foreign policy will be decided inside No. 10. As for the various conflicting voices that we have heard in the past few days about relations with the United States, I suspect that the Prime Minister's instinct will be to try to tread water during the next 18 months until an inevitable change of Administration in Washington, when things will get easier. Equally, he does not want a transatlantic row. Q233 Mr. Hamilton: Can I put you on the spot a little? You do not have to answer this question, but what do you think of the appointment of Mark Malloch Brown? You said that you do not know him very well, but he is somebody who-if I remember rightly-was once in the Foreign Office; he went to the United Nations, worked there for many years and is close to Kofi Annan. He is a complete outsider, if you like, but obviously he is British and understands the UN very well. What is your view of Gordon Brown's appointment of somebody like that to a ministerial position at the FCO? Sir Ivor Roberts: I personally welcome it. I want to see the United Nations much more central in British foreign policy making. If I were being critical-I did not recognise any of the language that you used at the beginning of your questioning, as I have certainly never used it-I would say that I have been very unhappy about aspects of British foreign policy where there has been a clear distance between our policy and what I regard as correct United Nations practice. The appointment of someone like Mark Malloch Brown seems to be a signal that the United Nations is going to matter more to Britain, and I welcome that. It might upset some people in Washington, to which I say, "Too bad." The United Nations is the centre of international legitimacy, and we must never forget that. Q234 Mr. Hamilton: Would you imagine that his appointment has upset anybody in the Foreign Office? Sir Ivor Roberts: No. When I joined the Foreign Office-it was a long time ago now, 39 years-we had four or five ambassadors from outside the diplomatic service. I have never had a problem with appointments of outstanding figures from outside the Foreign Office who bring a particular expertise. The American system, where appointment is based entirely on the quantity of money that one has brought to the election or re-election campaign, is absurd. That is the way that they do things.
Q235 Mr. Hamilton: Thank you, Sir Ivor. To take up your remark about treading water, do you agree that foreign policy content will not change much but that how it is presented will, and that public and international perception will therefore be of a more significant change than has occurred? Tony Blair's hug-them-close approach will no longer apply to how British policy is perceived-any differences will be expressed. In a way, that will be uncomfortable for the Bush Administration, but British policy is nevertheless likely, during the next 18 months at least, to be continuous in content, although expressed differently. Sir Ivor Roberts: I think that you are right. I think that there will be an element of that, but the real test comes when major events intervene-the famous "Events, dear boy, events"-that can destabilise or throw off course all sorts of carefully laid plans. Obviously, something that any Prime Minister has to cope with are the problems that are thrown at him unexpectedly. Iraq was one of the problems that we could see coming for months, or even years. However, there are other events-for instance, I remember in my earlier days in the Foreign Office a major crisis between Britain and America over the American invasion of Grenada. Nobody would have seen that one coming at all. When it did come, it led to tremendous tension and disagreement between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, two people who could hardly be separated at one stage. That was wholly unexpected. Given that 18 months is quite a long time, things will emerge that could well change the course of British foreign policy. Q236 Mr. Horam: Coming in on the point about "Events, dear boy, events" and so forth, in the light of what you have just said, what is the utility of the sort of strategy document that the Foreign Office has lately gone in for producing? For example, in March 2006 it produced a document listing 10 strategy objectives. Is that useful or not? Sir Ivor Roberts: Do you want an honest answer? Mr. Horam: Yes. Sir Ivor Roberts: Well, I'm afraid that I have never really believed in that exercise. If you look at the departmental report, as I have been doing, you find that strategy priority 3 is "Preventing and resolving conflict through a strong international neighbourhood," and that "Performance on this SP is assessed by PSA 3 (Conflict prevention) and PSA 5 (European security (performance indicators A & B))-please refer to pages 153 and 159." That sort of thing drives me absolutely mad. Then you look at the progress towards PSA targets, and everything is on course. All nine of them are on course, so nothing could be going better. Q237 Mr. Horam: Is that not true of all Departments? Sir Ivor Roberts: "PSA 2-to reduce the risk from international terrorism so that UK citizens can go about their business freely and with confidence." We are on course. Well, that is great, but I do not perceive as I go from airport to airport that we are in that situation. This is an exercise in pandering to the Treasury and the Cabinet Office in a way that- Q238 Mr. Purchase: You mentioned "bullshit" earlier. Sir Ivor Roberts: Those are words that I do recognise. Chairman: Those are unparliamentary expressions, but I am not Mr. Speaker, so I did not hear them. Q239 Mr. Horam: Nevertheless, playing devil's advocate, is there not a role for a clear statement of the UK Government's overall strategy on their outlook on the world? Sir Ivor Roberts: Yes. I certainly do not believe that you should reduce it simply to the level of a sort of Lord Salisbury floating lazily down the stream, putting out the occasional boat hook. However, the present obsession is with objectives and the measurement of objectives, and some things cannot be measured-diplomacy is not that sort of thing. As somebody said earlier, it is an art, not a science and cannot be measured in those ways. There is a famous Spanish proverb: "Traveller, roads are made by walking." There are no roads until they are made by walking, and that is how you have to approach diplomacy. You have to walk that path yourself, and put down markers as you go. There are no guidelines. Simply to see it all in terms of PSAs and SP2s and all the rest of it is to reduce diplomacy to a mathematical science, which it does not begin to approximate to. Q240 Mr. Horam: None the less, even when you are walking, you usually have an objective. You want to get to a certain town or something like that. Surely you should have some sort of idea. Sir Ivor Roberts: You need some general anchors, but they should be in very broad terms. Q241 Mr. Horam: Can you give an example? Sir Ivor Roberts: One of my objections to these strategy priorities-I think that it is strategy priority 9-is something about consular services. That does not seem to me to be a strategy priority. It is just a job description-it is what a consul does. That is what he is there for. He is to provide-I cannot remember the language- Chairman: "To provide high quality support to British nationals abroad, such assistance and protection as may be necessary in normal times and in crises." Sir Ivor Roberts: Exactly. That is a job description, not a priority or anything to do with strategy. Q242 Mr. Horam: Take another example: "Strategic priority for building an effective and globally competitive European Union in a secure neighbourhood." That sounds more strategic. Sir Ivor Roberts: It is. It is apple pie and motherhood stuff. It is so vague and bromide-like that I cannot believe that it is worth putting down on paper and developing measurements towards. Q243 Mr. Horam: So your strategy would only really evolve when you had clear choices to make, for example, where you support the American invasion of Iraq. Sir Ivor Roberts: I think you can lay down clear strategies that you want to protect British interests and respect for international law. It can obviously be done in very broad terms. What we did in Iraq did not respect international law; certainly that is the view of the former Secretary-General of the United Nations. It is a fundamental problem, something that I found quite shocking when the Foreign Office assembled all ambassadors throughout the world a month before the Iraq war. The Iraq war was not on the agenda; it was not there to be discussed at all. That is extraordinary. There were about 180 ambassadors and no opportunity to sit around discussing how we squared what was going to happen in Iraq with our commitment to international law. Q244 Mr. Purchase: Sir Peter Ricketts said that during his time in the job he would like to see dependency on consultants going down, which is right and proper. Give us your take on this: when a company or organisation looks for outside advice or assistance on a particular aspect of its work, part of the remit is for the company itself to learn from that process, so that, next time it is confronted with a similar problem or difficulty to overcome, it has the resources in-house, through observation, training, understanding, learning and insight. Is that working in the Foreign Office in your experience? Is the Foreign Office more able to take on repetitive work than it was when it first had access to a skilled consultant? Sir Ivor Roberts: Its first experiences of dealing with IT, for example, were a disaster. Something called FOLIOS-Foreign Office London information office system-collapsed. That exercise was undertaken well before this Committee was around. The company we brought in to do it went bankrupt because it could not fulfil the remit and its mandate and we had nothing to show for our investment. Even the hardware had to be thrown out; it was completely useless. We had absolutely nothing. We need to be very cautious about the consultants we bring in to ensure that they are of the highest quality. Q245 Mr. Purchase: I know that, and it was not quite the direction of my questions about getting good consultants. I want to know if you learn from them. Sir Ivor Roberts: I do not think we have learnt. I would guess that the FOLIOS experiment is about 20 years old, I cannot remember exactly. I do not think we have learnt. Prism is a classic example of how we have not learnt. We now spend, I think the figure is something like £34 million on consultants in the Foreign Office, of which the largest percentage is on IT. Obviously, we need outside help to do what we are trying to do but in my experience of the process we have not gained experience to handle it ourselves successfully. Q246 Chairman: One consequence of the budgetary crisis in the FCO is that it has decided no longer to make a financial contribution to the cost of defence attachés. We raised this with Sir Peter Ricketts, who was adamant that it was not a priority for FCO funds, and as a result the MOD is reviewing where it has defence attachés. I understand that it will be reducing them in a number of areas where they perform a useful function, not least in gathering information that is of use in the wider Government sense. What is your view on that decision? Sir Ivor Roberts: I regret it. My experience of defence attachés in the posts where I was ambassador was very favourable. I found them very useful, and in the Balkans invaluable. They could pick up intelligence information in areas where I, as a layman in military terms, would never have been able to, and they could go into areas where I, as an identified ambassador, could not go. They could dress down, disappear into the night and pick up information that it was not possible for me to pick up, so I found their role very important in several posts where I went. Again, it seems a pity that all this happens in the context of one Department trying to save money, as opposed to a holistic approach, asking, "Do we need military intelligence from our attachés?" We do, and the money should be found from somebody's budget. It does not matter whose: if one Department is under-funded, it should be compensated. Q247 Chairman: Another change that the FCO is introducing is to FCO Services, which has become an executive agency. Subsequently, there are likely to be some redundancies. Also, there has been a decision to get rid of the FCO's language centre. What do you think the impact of those changes will be on the service and on the morale of people working for the FCO? Sir Ivor Roberts: I can talk only about the language centre, because the last time I served in London was so long ago that there was no such thing as FCO Services. I have known the language centre all my career, and it has been a wonderful institution. I, again, regret its abolition, if that is what is happening to it. What concerns me particularly is that, going to outside consultants, they will not understand what the Foreign Office is all about, and what sort of specialised knowledge it needs. Some of the language centre people with whom I worked closely were outstandingly able, including those involved in the production of manuals on diplomatic language and the intricacies of diplomatic negotiation, which you would never find in a commercial company. We look to be losing that skill, particularly in areas where we need to make up ground such as in European languages. Traditionally, we have always been good at teaching hard languages such as Arabic, Russian, Mandarin, but our knowledge of European languages is woeful compared with any other European diplomats of whom I am aware, and I have served in a series of European posts over the past few years. Most European diplomats do not even get into their diplomatic services unless they speak two European languages fluently. Q248 Mr. Horam: Sir Ivor, you talked a few moments ago about the question of leadership, and about bringing together the 180 ambassadors throughout the world. Was that at a leadership conference? Sir Ivor Roberts: Yes, I referred to the first of them. Q249 Mr. Horam: Right, and you said that in fact, those leadership conferences did not discuss foreign policy. Is that not amazing? Sir Ivor Roberts: There is a kind of sub-branch of the leadership conference. Instead of having the 180 ambassadors, there are now twice-yearly gatherings of the senior leadership forum, which is sort of the top 20 ambassadors by seniority. At the last one I attended there was a series of events at which we were going to be talked at on various corporate governance issues. I feebly protested, saying, "Shouldn't we have something on the agenda covering Iraq, the middle east peace process, Iran and so on?" I was told, "Oh, well, I expect we'll find some time over lunch to have a chat about that." Q250 Mr. Horam: That was simply not allowed? Sir Ivor Roberts: That was not the purpose of the meeting, apparently. It seems to me that if you are bringing back the senior ambassadors in the world, at some expense, instead of you lecturing them about the latest wheeze that the management team have dreamed up, you should be saying, "These are experienced guys who know a lot about what is happening in the world. Why aren't we listening to them and getting their advice on the mess we are in in Iraq or the Middle East?" Q251 Mr. Horam: Listening to former ambassadors such as yourself, do you think that Sir Peter Ricketts has done the right thing in banning valedictory statements? Sir Ivor Roberts: No. I think it is depressing to think that people's advice will not be given a full airing so that people can reflect on what has been said by those who have lived a full and varied life and want to impart something to a wider audience as they leave. Q252 Mr. Horam: What do you think the consequences of the decision will be? Will more people publish their autobiographies, like Sir Christopher Meyer, and reflect more publicly than they have hitherto, when they have perhaps been satisfied with a private notice to their former employers about what they really thought? Sir Ivor Roberts: I do not know. Christopher Meyer's book is not full of wise stories about the Foreign Office. It seems to be more colour and froth than- Q253 Mr. Horam: There are nevertheless some quite interesting thoughts in it in the midst of all the rest. Sir Ivor Roberts: Yes. I am all for having a much wider debate about foreign policy, and ambassadors' valedictories form part of that process. Chairman: The final question, Mr. Mackinlay. We have two minutes. Q254 Andrew Mackinlay: I asked what the distribution of your valedictory was-just the numerical distribution, not the list-and they said they could not possibly tell me as it would cost too much. Could they have told me the number of people who were on the receiving end of your valedictory? Not unreasonably, you referred to some of the Governments with whom you have had dealings. One was the Italian Government. Could it not have been embarrassing if that had got out? I am putting Ricketts' case, if you like. It was a pretty wide distribution, from what you indicated earlier. Unusually, you have a valedictory interview with the Foreign Affairs Committee. It was distributed pretty widely and you were very candid in it. Was there not the potential for embarrassment diplomatically if it came out? In any event, could they have answered my question about how many people received your valedictory? Sir Ivor Roberts: I have seen the figure-I do not know whether it is correct-of 4,000. Q255 Andrew Mackinlay: Is that right? Sir Ivor Roberts: My valedictory dispatch was in two parts. The first was a valedictory to Italy and the second was a valedictory to the diplomatic service. It is right to ensure that comments made about a Government to whom you are accredited should be protected, but comments that are meant to give food for thought to Parliament, serving diplomats and the rest on a long career in foreign affairs might usefully be shared and discussed in forums such as this. I can see no technical reason why the two things cannot be divided. Andrew Mackinlay: Final question. Chairman: I am sorry, we have to conclude. We are about to lose our quorum, and we did say 6 o'clock. I am conscious, Sir Ivor, that you have covered a great quantity and quality of areas. We have got a lot of interesting information out of these two sessions this afternoon, and we are grateful to you. Thank you very much. Sir Ivor Roberts: It was a pleasure. Thank you.
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