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5.3 pm
Mr. Menzies Campbell (North-East Fife): We have had a few sombre moments in the past 12 months and I suspect that we shall have a few more, but today is certainly one of the most sombre, for we now stand at the crossroads between success and failure. If we had a moral obligation to intervene in Kosovo, we now have an even more compelling responsibility to bring that intervention to a satisfactory military and political conclusion. Anything short of autonomy for Kosovo, the unfettered return of the dispossessed and the unequivocal recognition of their right to live in peace will be a failure.
If that failure arises out of an unwillingness to subject ourselves and, more particularly, our forces to some of the risks that we have imposed on the Kosovar Albanians, we shall have no right to claim any moral credit. NATO's air campaign is being conducted at heights which are safe for air crew and aircraft, but which put the people whom we want to help into the front line. Whether they are there by accident or by the sinister fiat of a regime that is using them as human shields, the risks are equivalent and the results as horrifying. NATO's intervention was soundly based on the acceptance of moral responsibility. However,
that soundness of principle may be readily undermined if it is not matched by equal moral integrity in implementing a burden that we took up freely.
Mr. Bowen Wells (Hertford and Stortford):
Will the right hon. and learned Gentleman clarify for the benefit of the House whether he is advancing the war aims to a greater degree than are the Government? He referred in his opening remarks to "securing the autonomy" of Kosovo. Is that the Liberal Democrats' objective?
Mr. Campbell:
The autonomy of Kosovo was the principal political proposal of Rambouillet and of Paris, and I have always understood it to lie at the very heart of the international community's efforts to seek a political settlement. I also understand that it lies at the heart of the G8 settlement, to which reference has already been made during the debate. In that respect--although I differ from the Government in other areas to which I shall come later--my position and that of my party is exactly the same as the position of those on the Treasury Bench.
When you embark on a course of action based on ethical values, Mr. Deputy Speaker, you have a duty to reflect those values in the diligence with which you pursue that course of action. If one wills a moral end, one must show moral commitment in providing the means of achieving it. I believe that NATO is on the cusp. I disagree with the Treasury Bench in this respect: it is clear beyond doubt that an air campaign of the kind being prosecuted will not on its own achieve NATO's five principles for settlement. Those who always opposed the air campaign will argue that it should now cease. However, let us consider for a moment some of their alternative solutions.
Economic sanctions, Security Council resolutions and Russian diplomatic initiatives have been tried against the Milosevic regime without the compulsion of military action and with a consistent and depressing lack of success. What evidence is there to suggest that, if military operations were to cease unilaterally, those measures, either singly or in combination, would achieve now what they have so signally failed to achieve in the past? Why do we think that the displaced citizens of Kosovo set no store by those solutions and are willing instead to suffer the loss of life and limb, the cynical brutality of paramilitary thugs and the violation of their wives and daughters--sometimes before their very eyes?
Why do the Kosovar refugees say, even after devastating civilian casualties among their number, that NATO should not cease its military operation? They say that not out of some sense of masochistic guilt, but because they know their enemy. They know of what he is capable and what price he will exact if he is not checked. Those of us with any recollection of the Bosnian conflict should know our enemy as well. Srebrenica should not have faded from our memories. We should be haunted every day by the ruthless extermination of 7,000 men while United Nations forces with an ambiguous mandate and inadequate resources stood by, appalled but powerless. When, as it will, the searchlight of scrutiny falls upon Kosovo, I suspect that we shall see the results of a brutality that is far beyond anything that the disjointed accounts of traumatised refugees have been able to describe.
In our last Kosovo debate, the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody)--I gave her advance notice that I might refer to the comments that she
made then--expressed entirely justified reticence about urging the sending of other people's sons, and increasingly their daughters, to war. She was correct: it is too easy for us, at risk of only political embarrassment, to ask others to risk their lives for our political judgment. However, while paying due regard to the hon. Lady's reservations, we must acknowledge that ours are professional forces: there are now no pressed men or women. That does not entitle us to be profligate with their lives, but it means that, when considering whether to send them into action, we are dealing with those who have accepted voluntarily the risks of service.
Mrs. Gwyneth Dunwoody (Crewe and Nantwich):
I am grateful to the right hon. and learned Gentleman for his courtesy in telling me that he intended to refer to my speech. He has set out what he says are alternatives, but I find some of them frightening. If he is saying that we should now commit a professional army--a British Army--to Kosovo, I will ask him several questions. Is he convinced that this is what the British people want? Are they prepared to accept the considerable casualties and the damage that the action would do to them? Above all, is he convinced that it would produce any result? To send a British Army into hostile territory without proper preparation, certainly without proper back-up and with extremely muddled control by a number of nations at the top, would be to murder many British men and women. I would find it wholly unacceptable if the House of Commons supported that.
Mr. Campbell:
The hon. Lady raises three points. My response to the first is yes. On the third point, I think that it would be right to send in British troops, subject to proper preparation. I shall deal with the second point during my speech because it is right that those who, like me, urge this course of action, accept the consequences. It is right also that those who write editorials in newspapers urging that course of action should understand what would be its consequences.
Dr. Norman A. Godman (Greenock and Inverclyde):
Will the right hon. and learned Gentleman give way?
Mr. Campbell:
No, I want to make progress.
It is imperative that military pressure on Milosevicbe maintained. Without such a continuing sanction, diplomatic efforts are likely to flounder in deception and ambiguity. We had a ceasefire less than 12 months ago, but no sooner had Richard Holbrooke got back to Washington than the Milosevic regime began breaching the spirit and every letter of that ceasefire.
If our continuing military effort is to be effective, it must include the mobilisation of sufficient ground troops, properly configured and able to impose NATO's will, to effect a forced entry into Kosovo and to operate in a hostile environment. The very act of assembling a force of such credibility which could make a forced entry would be disconcerting for the Milosevic regime.
Dr. Julian Lewis (New Forest, East):
Will the right hon. and learned Gentleman give way?
Mr. Campbell:
No, I shall make progress.
If NATO does not have the will to assemble such a force and, if necessary, to use it, I fear for the future of NATO itself. What do we make--more importantly, what does the Milosevic regime make--of a NATO that sends Apache helicopters, which are the most sophisticated attack helicopters in the world, to the region, but then is unwilling to use them for fear of the impact on domestic public opinion in the United States if they or their crews are lost other than in training?
There is too much of a belief that modern warfare can be sanitised and that we can fight war rapidly and win without casualties. Our experience in the Gulf misled us about what modern warfare consists of, and what its consequences may be. Those who argue so blithely in the editorial columns of national newspapers for ground forces able to make forcible entry into Kosovo should understand that there would be a price to pay, which would test the Government's resolve much more than even the substantial embarrassment and political damage occasioned by the bombing of refugees or foreign embassies. Every life should be worth the same, but when the bodies are those of our countrymen and women, there is no doubt that they make even greater demands on our resolve.
Mr. Julian Brazier (Canterbury):
Yes, there would be a price to pay for forced entry. If I understood the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody), she was asking what would be the continuing price year after year, for how many years those forces would remain and what would be the ultimate outcome. It was, after all, a great Labour Prime Minister who decided in 1948 to withdraw from Palestine because, after three years of our troops being shot at from both sides, we realised that we could no longer sustain 100,000 men there.
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