House of Commons Hansard Debates for 18 May 1999 (pt 26)

Mr. Hogg: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Campbell-Savours: I am very sorry, but I do not have the time.

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I should include as targets motor vehicle spare parts depots and major computer data recording departments. Both record data about individuals. I should include Yugoslavia's national identity registration system, which holds data that are now being used by the authorities in the process of the ethnic cleansing. It provides a permissible target according to the convention article to which I referred.

I should add as targets the inland revenue and national insurance departments; the military pensions departments; and the national police records departments. Let it be absolutely clear that I am not asking for the bombing of civilians; I am arguing for the bombing of data centres. If warning is given that the centres will be targeted, we shall not be responsible for any civilian losses. I am arguing for attacks not on civilians, just on the depots where data are held.

What would the collateral advantage be? By attacking the centres of data collection, we would undermine the relationship between the Serbian citizen and the state. The war must be partly about undermining morale. If we interfere with the relationship between the individual and the state in a country that is under pressure, it is inevitable--

Mr. Dalyell: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I make no complaint about what my hon. Friend the Member for Workington (Mr. Campbell-Savours) has said, but it should be pointed out that, of the three Members of Parliament whom he was obviously referring to, two were in the Royal Air Force and I was in the Army as a national service man.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: That is not a point of order for the Chair and it is taking time out of the debate.

8.11 pm

Mr. Crispin Blunt (Reigate): I do not think that the hon. Member for Workington (Mr. Campbell-Savours) was in the Chamber to hear the excellent speech by my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis). I commend to him my hon. Friend's analysis of Professor Sir Michael Howard's thoughts on the nature of a limited war and the linkage between such a war and the limited objectives and strategy that support it. The hon. Gentleman proposes going far beyond the objectives of a limited war. I also caution him about advocating the destruction of data centres in Yugoslavia, because the data that are being taken off the refugees as they leave Kosovo will be needed to ensure that they have some claim on their proper citizenship of Kosovo when the situation is restored.

The hon. Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell) mentioned depleted uranium. I assure him that it is highly unlikely to have been used in Serbia and Kosovo so far, because it is used with kinetic energy rounds, which cannot be used from a height of 15,000 ft. They are used by tanks engaging other tanks or by close support aircraft near the ground.

This is a profoundly depressing occasion. Events outside the House in the past few days have shown that the only credible military strategy seems a very remote possibility. The German Chancellor has described the deployment of ground troops without an agreement as unthinkable. The American ambassador to NATO has said

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that American forces would be deployed only if there were an agreement with Serbia. The French have been briefing that the British position is dangerous. The Italians, the Greeks and other NATO members also have well known reservations.

I particularly agree with the remarks of my right hon. and learned Friend the shadow Foreign Secretary about this being a war of spin doctors. HMS Invincible has been deployed in the Adriatic to no apparent military purpose. There are better aircraft with better runways in Italy and in Corsica that are better able to carry out NATO's role. There is no benefit in having one of our aircraft carriers steaming up and down the Adriatic. The Americans have indulged in the same tendency by deploying Apaches. No one has yet been prepared to send Apaches forward with no ground support. We wait to see whether they will send such highly expensive military equipment forward on to the Kosovo battlefield without the support of other forces.

I was also depressed by the speech of the hon. Member for Walsall, South (Mr. George), the Chairman of the Defence Committee. For the majority of his speech, he seemed to have suspended the critical analysis that has marked his 20 years on the Defence Committee. Only right at the end of his speech, when he talked in coded terms about identifying the endgame and using all necessary means to achieve it, did he speak with the authority that has marked his analysis of defence affairs over the past two decades.

The right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife (Mr. Campbell) told us that the air campaign would not succeed and that he and his party were prepared for the use of ground troops. He failed to point out that most military analysts arrived at that conclusion before the bombing began.

Mr. David Heath: So did we.

Mr. Blunt: Then why have the Liberal Democrats not pointed out that glaring, shocking, disgraceful lacuna in the Government's strategy? Instead, the right hon. and learned Gentleman indulged in a foolish attack on Her Majesty's Opposition. He tried to ascribe my views on the Chief of the Defence Staff to the Opposition Front Bench. I am just a Back-Bench member of the Defence Committee. I believe that my judgment has proved correct. Our strategy has failed, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Sir J. Stanley) pointed out graphically.

In unprecedented newspaper articles, the Chief of the Defence Staff defended the Government's strategy as the best option available, repeating the immortal words

"to govern is to choose".

Permanent under-secretaries do not write newspaper articles in support of their Ministers' policies. Ministers write articles to defend Government policy. The Chief of the Defence Staff made a foolish, unfortunate decision to write those articles, probably prompted by pressure from the No. 10 press office.

In the early stages of the conflict, the politicians hid behind the military. The Secretary of State for Defence did so in the Chamber. Pretty quickly, the military started to distance itself from its political leaders. On day 2 of the campaign, General Wesley Clark made it clear that it was impossible for the use of air power alone to prevent the humanitarian catastrophe and the eviction of Kosovar

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people from their homes by the Serbian military forces. General Naumann made the same point when he retired as chairman of the military committee. Now General Colin Powell is making clear the dissatisfaction of the American military establishment with the conduct of the war, as has General Shelton, the American Chief of Staff, in front of the Senate committee.

The central failure of the Chief of the Defence Staff was his inability to persuade the Prime Minister that the military strategy had precious little chance of success and was a disgraceful gamble that should not have been made. The central failure of the United Kingdom was in not persuading President Clinton of that glaring truth, which we are now all too familiar with.

Two months later, as the ground option evaporates, we urgently need an exit. It is too late for the Prime Minister to wake up to the military truths. Force should never have been used except in the pursuit of clear and achievable objectives. It is a modern military maxim to get inside the enemy's decision-making cycle. Without ground troops, it is no good the Foreign Secretary and the Defence Secretary coming to the House to tell us that they have destroyed a brigade worth of artillery or tanks. The destruction of that equipment is not related to the decision on when to abandon Kosovo. That decision will be taken by President Milosevic and our strategy will not force him to take it.

We do not have an objective that we know that we will achieve. We are committed to a strategy of endless bombing and Serbia is committed to a strategy of the endless absorption of punishment. What a policy to pursue against a country with a myth of heroic sacrifice at the core of its national identity. We are stuck with a strategy as creditable as that pursued at Passchendaele, but this time it is not the generals leading a reluctant Prime Minister, but the reverse.

It is clear that our allies want a way out. That is likely to lead to a deal in which the edges are blurred--blurred on the future status of Kosovo; blurred on whether the Kosovars will be able to return to their homes in safety; blurred on the future of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Do we expect the Kosovo Liberation Army to disarm if it is to be returned to the sovereignty of Yugoslavia?

We have fundamentally misread the nature of the conflict.

The Kosovars have resorted to what is, in effect, a war of liberation, following the failure of decades of democratic aspirations towards their route of self- determination. I do not agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Romsey (Mr. Colvin), who seems to believe that Kosovo is irrevocably a part of Serbia. Kosovo was invaded by Serbia in 1912, and was established as part of Serbia at an international conference in 1913. However, there has not been a majority of Serbs in Kosovo in the modern era--not for hundreds of years. Yugoslavia's status was established by the treaty of Versailles in 1919. The status of Kosovo within Serbia and Yugoslavia was the product of probably a few minutes' consideration at the end of the second world war by the Communist party of Yugoslavia.