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Mr. Peter Bradley (The Wrekin): My hon. and learned Friend has spent a long time convincing us that he is a highly paid lawyer, and I am sure that he is good at his game, but will he spend the rest of his time telling us what he would do to protect the Kosovars from genocide?
Mr. Marshall-Andrews: In debates such as this, I dislike personal invective. I have not indulged in it and I hope that other hon. Members will not do so. What would I do? I would take not 1,000 refugees a week but 10,000 refugees a week. I would welcome them to this country as the victims of a civil war, with all the inherent generosity for which this country is justly famed.
Sir John Stanley (Tonbridge and Malling): I shall address the bulk of my remarks, as most right hon. and hon. Members have so far done, to where we go from the situation in which we find ourselves. However, it is right to cast our minds back and ask whether we should have got into this situation. That question can be answered only when the conflict is over, and it will require a full and lengthy examination of the entire foreign policy and diplomatic process for at least a year before the start of the conflict in March this year.
Admittedly, with the benefit of hindsight, it can now be seen with stark clarity that the foreign policy that was pursued over the 12 months to this March rested on one enormous gamble: that it was possible to replay the Dayton formula that had produced peace in Bosnia to resolve the situation in Kosovo. The idea was that it would be possible for the western powers, from outside, to devise their own solution to the problems of the Balkans and force the Serbs to accept it under the threat of bombing.
That idea took little account of the profound difference between Bosnia and Kosovo in the minds of Milosevic and of the nationalist Serbs. There was always a hugely greater likelihood of failure in applying the formula to Kosovo and there was never any doubt that those most exposed by that failure would be the 2 million Kosovo Albanians. They have been the real victims of the failure so far. Deeply serious questions need to be asked about why more account was not taken of their vulnerability and the risks that they faced.
Why was not more done to try to deter Milosevic from applying a Hitlerian final solution to the Kosovo problem? Why was he given a partial green light by declaring in advance that there would be no use of ground forces? Those are serious questions that require an answer.
The central issue is what we should do from here. I find this moment extremely sobering and distressing, and I am sure that that feeling is shared by hon. Members of all parties. At the start of the conflict, three objectives--humanitarian, diplomatic and military--were set. The verdict today must be that we are miles and miles from achieving success in any of them.
The Prime Minister clearly stated the humanitarian objective at the very outset. He said that the action was
The diplomatic objective was that the start of bombing would make Milosevic climb down and accept the terms from which he had run away at Rambouillet. There again, two months on, we have total failure. We are nowhere near achieving the diplomatic objective with which we started. We hope that that will change, but that is the position today.
On the military objective, the Foreign Secretary has once again reeled off the list of destruction of Serbian armour in Kosovo, but the real test is what is coming out of the mouths of the refugees crossing the Macedonian and Albanian borders day after day. They report daily that the ethnic cleansing is continuing, with murder and rape and any number of people being taken away, perhaps to be sent to slave labour or rape camps, suffering every type of defilement and possibly mass murder: we shall find out only when we eventually get into Kosovo. Unhappily, the military action has not stopped the ethnic cleansing.
The House has widely divergent views on where we should go from here. My view is that, militarily, thereis now an absolutely overwhelming case for the deployment--I stress deployment--of ground forces. Deployment is different from commitment. A commitment to use ground forces could be taken only at the time and on the basis of the military advice.
We are in a time-critical position, not only because of the weather factor, which is certainly important, but because of what is going on inside Kosovo. Apparently, there are still 600,000 ethnic Albanians inside Kosovo. What is their fate? Almost certainly, many more people are being murdered or driven out of their homes. The longer we delay, the more people are likely to end up as corpses in Kosovo.
The case for deployment now is not merely to try to give ourselves a military option as soon as a suitable force can be assembled, if we decide that that is the ultimate need, but to reinforce our diplomatic efforts. If Milosevic knows that troops are gathering on the borders of Kosovo, he will know that we are serious and that he risks a ground force invasion by the NATO countries. Surely that will add to the diplomatic pressure on him.
We must ask ourselves what more we can do to maximise the pressure on Milosevic to persuade him that he will be better off settling now than waiting for an uncertain future. What is the future of Kosovo itself? The right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife (Mr. Campbell) referred to the Rambouillet process leaving Kosovo autonomous. I think that he blurred the issue somewhat: under the Rambouillet process Kosovo was to enjoy a degree of autonomy, but within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
Surely we should now make it clear to Milosevic that, if NATO is forced ultimately to use ground troops, there can be no question of Kosovo remaining within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. He will lose it and it will become independent. Surely we would all agree that if we went to the financial and human cost of a ground forces invasion of Kosovo, it would be unthinkable for Kosovo to remain part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
Mr. Tony Worthington (Clydebank and Milngavie):
I do not want to follow the line taken the right hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Sir J. Stanley), although I agree with virtually every word that he said. The great value of these debates is that we can point out where we fear that errors may be made and hope that, by so doing, we can prevent those errors from occurring and causing the loss of lives.
Having visited Macedonia and Albania, I am extremely concerned that neither the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees nor NATO is doing the planning or taking the action necessary to house refugees over the winter, which, in the Balkans, starts in mid-October. I understand why the Government and NATO should not want to appear to plan for refugees still to be there in the medium term. It may be argued that that would encourage Milosevic, but I think that it would show our determination to see this through. It would be extremely foolish not to plan for there to be substantial numbers in Macedonia and Albania over the coming years. That would bring us in line with the realism that we should have learned from the history of refugee camps throughout the world.
The primary reason for urgency is that it would be intolerable to have hundreds of thousands of people housed in tents in a Balkan winter. There would be deaths, and appalling cruelty. The blame would fall on the international community--on us, not on Milosevic. The deaths, the carnage and the suffering would have occurred under our care, and people would have forgotten why the refugees had arrived at the camps.
If the refugees are to return, whether in winter or earlier, there must be diplomatic agreement, but there is little sign of that. Agreement must include an international force to escort people into the wasteland. I do not believe that we could make life tolerable for people in Kosovo in the full knowledge that Milosevic has sought to make their villages uninhabitable. I welcome discussions between the development ministries of the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Germany and Italy to plan a return to Kosovo, but the idea that it will happen by October requires a huge leap of faith.
According to the Department for International Development, nearly 750,000 Kosovar Albanians have been expelled to neighbouring states, but another 700,000 have been displaced internally. Surely a successful outcome is likely to leave us fully stretched in meeting the medical and housing needs of people whose conditions are likely to be appalling after their treatment by Milosevic. Considerable humanitarian activity will be needed and considerable preliminary work will have to be done to prepare for returning refugees.
An enormous amount has been done by ordinary families in Albania and Macedonia who will need more rather than less support in the coming months--putting up 20 people in a small flat can be tolerated for only so long. Extra support is needed. Albanian families in both Albania and Macedonia have been unbelievably receptive.
The main challenge will come in the camps, which house hundreds of thousands of people. They were built in a huge hurry. We often failed to stay ahead of Milosevic's purges. Survival came about only through miraculous work by NATO to erect canvas townships. The Cegrami camp, for example, was built by German NATO, and its population went from 2,000 to 30,000 in a week. The camps are for the short term. They are often in the wrong places, being placed where people crossed the border rather than where they can be adequately catered for.They were a remarkable effort by NATO and by non-governmental organisations, but will NATO be able to construct winter dwellings, or will troops be needed for the central task of freeing Kosovo of Milosevic?
Unfortunately, winter means beginning all over again on housing the biggest refugee movement in Europe since the second world war. It may be possible in a few limited cases to harden the tents sufficiently to provide more protection. However, the camps are often three to five times more crowded than they should be. They are totally inadequate. They were erected in a great hurry, often in the wrong place, and some are running out of space for latrines.
"to avert . . . a humanitarian disaster".--[Official Report, 23 March 1999; Vol. 328, c. 161.]
There has been no averting, and the humanitarian disaster has been catastrophic--way beyond anything that anyone expected would happen two months ago. On the humanitarian question, we have produced a total failure.
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