HC Deb 19 December 1966 vol 738 cc1005-8
The Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (Mr. George Brown)

With your permission, Mr. Speaker, and that of the House, I wish to make a statement on South Arabia, and in particular on the Bowen Report.

The House will recall that towards the end of October I appointed Mr. Roderic Bowen, Q.C., a distinguished former Member and Deputy Speaker of this House, to go to Aden as my personal representative to examine the procedures for the arrest, interrogation and detention of persons suspected of terrorist activities there. Mr. Bowen was in Aden from 27th October to 8th November and submitted his Report to me on 14th November. I have arranged for the Report to be published in full as a White Paper and for copies to be placed today in the Library of the House.

Hon. Members will see that I have included in the White Paper an Introduction describing the sombre background of the security situation in Aden. It was against this background that I decided I should reassure myself directly that the necessary special procedures in Aden were being carried out in the best way and that those responsible for them would be protected as well as is possible from uninformed or malicious criticism. I have also added a note on the action already taken to carry out Mr. Bowen's recommendations.

As I have already told the House, Mr. Bowen has submitted a most valuable Report and I take this occasion to thank him publicly for having carried out his task so expeditiously and so thoroughly. I am happy to say that, after receiving the High Commissioner's comments on Mr. Bowen's recommendations, I have been able to accept them almost in their entirety and the High Commissioner is now putting them into effect.

Among Mr. Bowen's recommendations are a number for dealing with complaints by detainees in the future, and these recommendations have generally been accepted. Mr. Bowen did not investigate specific allegations of cruelty to prisoners, but he has criticised the handling by the Aden Administration of some such allegations in the past. I must emphasise here that his criticism relates to a short period in the past and centres on the activities of three interrogators at that time employed in the Interrogation Centre and the control exercised over their activities. Investigations into these allegations will now be pursued to a conclusion. While these investigations take place, I think it right that nothing should be said publicly to prejudice the position of any persons who may be implicated, before they have had an opportunity of giving their own account of what took place to the appropriate authorities.

We must remember that in Aden today, as Mr. Bowen says in his Report, the life and limb of the population as a whole are in constant danger from the indiscriminate throwing of hand-grenades and other activities. I was therefore glad to see that Mr. Bowen gained the general impression that the military personnel and the police, upon whom falls the main strain of protecting the population and dealing with the terrorists, were discharging their onerous duties with great restraint. I well understand the difficulties to which they are subjected in doing this and I should like to take this opportunity of expressing my admiration for the way in which all those concerned in the preservation of order in Aden, both civil and military, are carrying out their duties.

Sir Alec Douglas-Home

The House will be grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for the White Paper. Obviously it would be a mistake to prejudge its findings, but we will study it with care. At present I am content to join with him in underlining the great strain under which our Service men serve in Aden. While discipline must obviously be enforced, this must be understood.

Mr. Rose

Is my right hon. Friend aware that the publication of this Report will be widely welcomed and that it is a vindication of the genuine concern expressed by the organisation Amnesty International? Would he not agree that the way to avoid this sort of allegation being made in future is to allow prisoners access to lawyers, to inform their relatives where they have been detained and, if possible, to substitute for the military police civil police seconded from this country.

Mr. Brown

I do not accept that this is endorsement of the somewhat wild allegations made in the name of Amnesty International which I deeply regret. Indeed, the Rastgeldi Report, which reached my hands only after much preliminary publicity this weekend, does not bear out what was said.

On the other matters which my hon. Friend raises, may I suggest that he reads the Report and sees whether we have met what he has in mind.

Mr. Archer

Without wishing to raise further issues at this stage, may I ask my right hon. Friend whether he is aware that the Report of Amnesty International made only allegations as to what transpired at two specific centres—at Fort Morbut and al-Mansura? If further evidence has become available since Mr. Bowen reported, is my right hon. Friend open to receive it?

Mr. Brown

Yes, but I think that before we start trying to raise new problems my hon. Friend had better look at what the Report deals with. Almost the first thing which worried me when I came into this job was whether our procedures were right. If the procedures are right, one can avoid the excesses. If we have put the procedures right, I think that my hon. Friend will agree that we have done what is required.

Mr. Eldon Griffiths

Since the Amnesty charges were used by Moscow radio and Cairo radio and were held unfairly against British troops as a whole, will the Foreign Secretary take this opportunity of acquitting the British soldiers, sailors and airmen in Aden at this moment of any intention to perpetrate cruelties? Will he also say that against the background of spasmodic murder and terror, our troops there have behaved with forbearance and restraint?

Mr. Brown

I thought that was exactly what I said. I wanted to publish the Report in full in any event, but one of the arguments very much in favour of doing so was that it narrowed the area of justifiable criticism to such a very small one and, by so doing, of itself acquitted the vast area of our military, police and civilians in those very difficult conditions. I hope also that the fact that we are willing to publish such a Report in full, even where it includes criticism of ourselves, will commend itself to those whom the hon. Member has mentioned.

Mr. Thorpe

Is the Foreign Secretary aware that the House will be extremely grateful to Mr. Bowen for his Report and, in particular, for his recommendation in regard to future procedure to be adopted?

I should like to ask two questions. First, are the three interrogators against whom allegations are to be investigated either suspended or, alternatively, no longer in the employment of the interrogation centre? Secondly, since the Foreign Secretary has said that Mr. Bowen was precluded from investigating the specific allegations of torture, is it not important that this country should deal with the allegations made by Amnesty and say that they are either true or false, but quite clearly go into them and have them investigated, which, on the Foreign Secretary's own statement, he accepts was outside Mr. Bowen's terms of reference?

Mr. Brown

I did not quite say that. Pretty well all, if not all, of the allegations by Amnesty have been investigated in the past. The Red Cross representative has made something like five visits to the centres in the quite recent past, and one should not conclude or deduce from Mr. Bowen's Report that it thereby increases anybody's suspicions that the exaggerated accounts before Mr. Rastgeldi's Report was published were true. Quite the contrary. It limits the area over which there might be reasonable ground for doubt.

The question of establishing whether, over that area and in relation to those interrogators, there should be a further examination is clearly one that must be answered affirmatively, and this is now going on.

We must, of course, be fair to the men concerned. They have been identified, if not named. The Ministry of Defence is, therefore, making the appropriate inquiries to see whether there is a prima facie case for court-martial or disciplinary proceedings against these men. Those inquiries are going on at this moment. One of the three men is out of the Army. The other two are still in the Services but are out of that Command. All three are available and the investigations will go on.

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