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Let me be clear that—and this is a little bit analogous to the Ottawa process, which reinforced a slow-moving intergovernmental process on landmines—we look at the Oslo process as the vital ginger group that will bring pressure to bear on the CCW. That is why we are participating in it with, at the last count, 83 other states. As many noble Lords are aware, the Oslo negotiations are evolving. At the next Oslo process meeting in Vienna from 5 to 7 December textual elements for a new convention are likely to be discussed. A further conference in Wellington in February 2008
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I now turn to what has happened here in the UK. I acknowledge the praise this morning for the progress that has been made and for the action of the Secretary of State for Defence. I hardly dare use the word “dumb” again; it is a very unfortunate term because of what it suggests about the weapons still commissioned. Nevertheless, we are in the happy situation of being able sharply to reduce these weapons systems. It is largely a response to the important point made by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, about the new asymmetric character of warfare where warfare takes place in population centres and indiscriminate weapons of this kind not only cause an unacceptable loss of innocent civilian life but are such a counterproductive weapon in winning hearts and minds, as the noble Lord, Lord Addington, observed.
I draw the noble Lord’s attention to the remarkable and visionary document produced by General Petraeus, and particularly to the essay in it by Sarah Sewall, the director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights—I am not sure whether Ministers have to declare conflicts of interest, but I was on its board until becoming a Minister. The essay represents a revolution in military thinking and an understanding that these weapons are utterly at odds with the objectives of military action in these new asymmetric conflicts.
I caution the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, to remember, as I am sure that he does, that although at the moment fighting counterinsurgency operations seem to be the dominant likely conflicts of the future, it is nevertheless the case that there is still a possibility that our Armed Forces will find themselves committed to an operation against an enemy equipped with mass armour, for which certain categories of weapons that we would not want to use in close civilian situations may still be justified in those more old-fashioned battle circumstances.
I remind noble Lords that we expected the 2003 action in Iraq to be more of that old character than of the new.
Lord Ramsbotham: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, but I think that he would agree that the weapons that we actually deployed in Iraq, such as the M85, were not anti-armour but anti-personnel.
Lord Malloch-Brown: My Lords, I think that the noble Lord is correct. Although they were deployed in
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Let me reassure the noble Lord—he is aware of this—that despite the very bad press that the M85 had in Lebanon, where it was used by the Israeli armed forces and where it was suggested there has been a failure rate of 25 per cent to 30 per cent, in the case of the British arsenal, the M85 has been tested rigorously. Tests conducted in Norway in 2005 suggested a failure rate of 2.3 per cent. Although any failure rate is not acceptable, that at least puts those weapons in a very different category.
Lord Elton: My Lords, does the noble Lord accept that experts—I think that it was the Norwegians themselves—went to the field in Lebanon and found evidence that the failure rate was much higher than that?
Lord Malloch-Brown: My Lords, I was acknowledging a failure rate of 25 per cent to 30 per cent for the weapons used in Lebanon as a figure that has been used. Frankly, given the fraught nature of the aftermath of that conflict, it is very hard to get solid figures for the failure rate, but it was clearly unacceptably high and had a terrible consequence for civilian lives. I fully acknowledge that point but, again, I contrast those weapons with the UK M85, which has a self-destruct mechanism. We are committed to improving the reliability of these weapons.
The essential point is that, given what the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has observed about the current nature of the conflicts in which we are involved in Afghanistan and Iraq, there is no current use of those weapons. They remain in the arsenal, but are not used. The weapon of dispute is the Apache-fired CRV7, which the Ministry of Defence does not categorise as a cluster weapon—but I suspect that there may be a debate on definition there.
I assure your Lordships that Her Majesty's Government have moved this year in response to concern expressed in this Chamber and outside by civil society and all those involved in the Oslo process. We have moved sharply to contract our use of those weapons, to decommission whole categories of those weapons and to take the lead internationally in pressing for a conventional treaty to ensure that the use of cluster weapons, as an indiscriminate tool of warfare against people and one that no longer comports with the overwhelming nature of modern conflict, is reined right back to military purposes that have a military rationale.
Lord Elton: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, could he address my question about the constraints put on our diplomatic efforts in such
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Lord Malloch-Brown: My Lords, the noble Lord will have heard me say that I hoped that the observation of the noble Lord, Lord Jay, that the European Union had a common and proactive position on the matter in the negotiations, was indeed the case. It is other producers who are not members of the European Union who were the force of conservatism and resistance here. I can assure the noble Lord that building a common position is usually worth the effort, because it increases our firepower—to use what is perhaps a slightly unfortunate metaphor in this context.
I will look into the negotiations surrounding the emergence of that common position, because it is a useful diplomatic tool. It gives more power to our arm, if you like, but the noble Lord is quite correct: if it is at the expense of a forward position, we should try to ensure that next time Europe is more forward.
Lord Elton: My Lords, I am most grateful to your Lordships. I earlier thanked your Lordships for taking part, because it had escaped me that I would have the opportunity to do so formally at the end. I add my thanks to those who have not taken part but who have done us the favour of listening to the arguments, which I hope were persuasive. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.
Liberal Intervention
12.57 pm
Lord Soley rose to call attention to the case for liberal intervention; and to move for Papers.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, perhaps I ought to start this debate with a vote of thanks to my noble friend Lord Malloch-Brown on the Front Bench, because he seems to be working overtime these days. I am not quite sure how he fits in the many other things that he has to do.
This is an important debate. Some people said to me, “What do you mean by liberal intervention?”. One or two optimists on the Liberal Benches thought that I might be suggesting that they should intervene within the Government in some way. I was not suggesting that.
As my noble friend will know, this debate is of growing importance within the international community, and has been there for some considerable time. Liberal intervention in the affairs of other states has been with us for a long time, but in recent years, it has become profoundly important because, with the end of the Cold War and then with the September 11 attack on the United States, there is a recognition that, unpredicted by most of us, the collapse of so many states around the world after the ending of the
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It is also true—this is particularly important—that, increasingly, the nation state is seen to be no longer at the centre of events in quite the same way as it was. The old European ideology—it was essentially European in the first instance—was that you should never interfere or intervene in the affairs of another nation state and it has been the idea behind European thinking since at least the 16th century. That progressively fell apart as a viable proposition, and falls apart even more so now, particularly as people, organisations and others cross national boundaries as they never crossed them before. We all congratulated ourselves, particularly—and quite rightly, in my view—in Britain and the United States, on setting up the United Nations and many of the world organisations that have actually served us rather well for many years. However, the reality is that they now have very serious shortcomings when it comes to dealing with failing states, failed states, dictatorships and many of the other problems that pursue us around the world.
Intervention in the affairs of other states, particularly using hard power—I will come back to hard power and soft power in due course—is very often popular if it is seen to be successful, and unpopular when it is seen to be unsuccessful. It was popular and people thought that it was a very good idea when we intervened in Sierra Leone. There were at least two cheers from most people about the intervention in Kosovo. There were virtually no cheers in the case of Iraq. Those cheers died down when the post-conflict phase was done so appallingly badly that it put people like me, who believed very strongly in liberal intervention, into a defensive position, because although you cannot say that it will have failed in the long run, you can certainly say that the cost in human life and suffering was far higher than it should have been, or indeed need have been. However, that is another debate, and one that I have already addressed in this House on a number of occasions, so I do not wish to revisit it at this stage.
Let me say a little more about why this is not an entirely new debate. It helps to inform our discussions if we look at the history of this. For me, the purpose of the debate is to open—or, for some people, to re-open—the issue of when and how we intervene in the affairs of nation states. That will be the ongoing debate. This problem ran through the Prime Minister’s speech in a number of ways in Mansion House. It certainly featured in Tony Blair’s speech in Chicago, when he talked about how and when we intervene and acknowledged that the old idea that the nation state was totally supreme and could do what it liked with its own citizens no longer applied. It will be mentioned again today in Bruges in Belgium when the Foreign Secretary speaks on the role of the European Union in using both soft power and hard power, and on the question of intervention.
This issue will not go away. It will be complex, and will become more and more difficult. If I can have
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I mentioned the history of intervention. The reality is that probably the greatest, and first, intervention in the affairs of other nation states in modern times was by the British in the 19th century. The example that I often give—I will not dwell on it for too long, because again I have spoken on it before—is the abolition of the slave trade. Throughout the 18th century—certainly towards the end of it—Britain transported more slaves across the Atlantic than any other European power. Then came a remarkable period when, thanks to what was probably the first ever mass movement by people in a country, supported not least by slaves and slave revolts, we changed in about seven or eight years from being the country that transported more slaves across the Atlantic to the country that, 200 years ago this year, abolished the transatlantic slave trade. We then used all our diplomatic, military and economic power to force an end to the slave trade. It took 60 years; Brazil was the last country to give it up.
My point is that the Royal Navy was used consistently throughout that period to stop the slave trade. Virtually everything that it did was unlawful. Indeed, the Royal Navy and the British Government were taken to court, both in this country and elsewhere, and found guilty of breaches of international law. It was an illegal war. This House found against the Royal Navy when it towed a French ship back to port in Africa and forced it to release the slaves. It challenged the Royal Navy, and the court here decided that, however noble the purpose, one did not have the right to override the law. That is the dilemma that one faces when one deals with something that is clearly immoral and wrong but the law does not fit that.
After that, incidentally, the Royal Navy came up with an interesting concept that has interesting parallels with the concept of terrorism. It said, “Right, we are going to call slavery piracy, because everyone knows that that is wrong and that will enable us to intervene and deal with ships of other nations on the high seas”. Of course, it did not do so. The Royal Navy not only turned ships back but entered the harbours of other countries and burnt empty slave ships. That, again, was pretty strongly against the law, but it was a profoundly good thing. The Royal Navy tried to get other nations to support the Atlantic squadrons that we deployed to turn back the slave ships. Again, there are echoes here with the terrorism of today and the so-called war on terrorism, a phrase that I have never liked. Although many of the nations were prepared to support the squadrons in principle, quite a few of them would not do so because they worried about the ulterior motives of
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We must, of course, look at intervention from the other end of the telescope; an example is the intervention argument in relation to Islam from a Middle East point of view. Gladstone, who was one of the great statesmen of this country and of whom I am a great admirer, intervened in what he saw as the wicked Ottoman Empire. Indeed, it was pretty wicked by that time because it was corrupt, despotic and collapsing. His intervention is seen by many people in that area as an attempt by Britain to spread its influence and colonialism. The other end of the telescope tells us that it can be a way of taking over areas of land, which is why a number of the countries in that region and elsewhere regard the American and British practice of talking about intervention as colonialism in drag. I do not think that it is, incidentally. One argument is that one must remember that the Ottoman Empire, and indeed the Mughal Empire in India, were both empires themselves and were not always welcomed in the areas that they had taken over. The argument is more complex.
There is another point to make about the morality of the issue. I have taken the view for many years that it is morally impossible to argue that one should not remove despotic or psychopathic killers from the control of nation states. One can argue, however, that it is difficult to do so without making the situation worse. In some cases, it simply cannot be done, and one even has to co-operate with them, which brings up some of our dilemmas about the whole question of intervention. I recall very clearly—this is when my views became much more formed on this, and again is a message to people that intervention is not just a western concept—when Vietnam intervened, absolutely rightly in my view, to remove Pol Pot from power in Cambodia. I cheered that, but there were people, in this country, in the United States and elsewhere, who said that it was wrong and should not be allowed because it invaded the rights of the nation state. It was of course done without the approval of the United Nations. I cheered again when Tanzania intervened in Uganda to remove Idi Amin, again without the consent of the United Nations. I cheered again when India removed the Government of what was then East Pakistan. That was not just a regime change; it created the new state of Bangladesh. It was right to do so, and it is one reason why the Indians have a rather different perspective of this from the Chinese, who are much more worried about the concept of liberal intervention.
We must also beware of the argument used by many of my colleagues, which I never liked although I understood why it was used, that it was all right because you could keep people in their boxes. That was the argument that we used about Saddam Hussein, particularly after the first Gulf War. We said, “Well, it's all right. He's no longer quite the danger that he was because we've got him in his box”. But we forget that in that box with him were 25 million people. It is a curious concept and where, again, we get into all sorts of double standards. If we had, towards the end of the Second World War,
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In fact, although keeping them in their box is one of the most dubious arguments, you have to do that when you have no alternative. There are contradictions. One of the most obvious ones is that we supported Joe Stalin, who was little better than Adolf Hitler, because we saw Hitler as the greater danger. There are plenty of examples, too, of the way in which we now support states that we have severe doubts about, but we do so because of other reasons. This debate should be about how and when you intervene.
That brings me to the discussion we need to have about the nature of the intervention—about soft and hard power—and the nature of the state you intervene on. Places such as Indonesia or Pakistan are countries that are struggling to find a democratic rule-of-law structure, but staggering between collapsing into dictatorship or achieving greater stability. I saw an interesting image the other day in a number of photographs. Police were bundling women into a police van in Pakistan. Standing on top of the police van and filming everything were two television cameramen. You could not show a clearer case of a country that is torn. Cameramen would not be standing on top of a police van filming in Burma, North Korea or Zimbabwe. In a way, that is the difference between a chaotic, unstable state and one that is truly ruthless and brutal, where no display of opposition is allowed at all. That is an important distinction.
That clearly shows the problem that the United Nations has to struggle with in relation to nations such as Somalia or the Democratic Republic of Congo. There was a massive loss of life in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, bigger than almost any other in the post-war period, but it is such a vast country and is so chaotic. You are looking not at a dictatorship, but a series of chaotic scenes where your ability to control the situation is very limited. The issues of how and when you intervene are important.
This is an area where we should be discussing rather more the issues of hard and soft power. Both are forms of intervention: noble Lords should not have any illusions about that. If you talk about using soft power, you are intervening in the affairs of other states. We should be very clear about that. I believe that it is right to do so—because I believe in liberal intervention—by using both soft power and hard power, but the difficulty is when we decide to use one and not the other. The European Union is very proud of its intervention with soft power and is generally quite good on that, but it has an awful blind spot—some of this will be said by the Foreign Secretary in Belgium in his speech today—about the question of when, how and if you use the hard power that would be available to you if you set up the right organisations.
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I watched in despair the attitude of the European Union when Yugoslavia collapsed. Noble Lords will remember the great arguments at the time, such as, “We’ll persuade them to stop and in any event we can use the United Nations”. The United Nations was brought in, particularly in Bosnia, in the early stages. People may have forgotten that an awful lot of United Nations troops from countries around the world had their blue hats left on them but their weapons taken away, and then were tied to stakes in open, exposed positions to make sure that the world got the message that further intervention was not acceptable. In fact, intervention did happen, due in no small part to Tony Blair's efforts to get Bill Clinton and the United States involved. But that sort of thing is a classic example of how soft power cannot deliver at the end of the day: you need some degree of hard power to end a particularly horrific regime.
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