§ Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn. —[Mr. Dowd.]
2.32 pm§ Mr. George Galloway (Glasgow, Kelvin)First, I extend my warm congratulations to my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary on his important initiative, during his recent tour of middle eastern capitals, which attempted to restart the ailing middle east peace process. I noticed in this morning's press that my right hon. Friend is to be denied the pleasure of yet another dinner as a result of his principled and courageous efforts to achieve peace with honour, peace with justice, and peace for land in the middle east.
The well-publicised rudeness of Netanyahu, and that of his settler supporters and his police, tried but failed to divert world attention from the importance of illegally occupied Jerusalem. The Foreign Secretary was right to visit the illegal settlement in occupied Jerusalem. He was also right to say publicly that Jerusalem was a Palestinian capital as well. It is occupied in exactly the way that Kuwait was occupied by Iraq—by armed force. It is held in defiance of repeated decisions by the United Nations Security Council.
Similar rudeness by Netanyahu's cheerleaders here in Britain will equally fail, and will merely draw further attention to their hero's arrogant refusal to implement international law and solemn and binding treaties signed by his predecessors.
I also congratulate my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister in anticipation of his visit to the Palestine National Authority. There are great expectations of him and his visit in the territory. Like the Foreign Secretary's efforts, the prospect of the visit has done much to lift the air of despair and depression in the Arab world and has buttressed the standing of this country in an area that is of great interest to us.
We maintain a huge balance of trade surplus with the Arab world. Our annual trade with Saudi Arabia alone is worth £3.8 billion—more than the total in trade with the whole of Latin America. Our surplus with the United Arab Emirates alone is £1 billion per year. We must never forget that, in pursuing a more balanced policy in the middle east, we are not only doing what is right, but serving our national interest, which is, after all, a legitimate part of any Government's foreign policy.
The middle east is historically important to us—nobody knows the area better than we do. We were guiding statecraft in Arabia when the cowboys were still wiping out the indigenous population of America and when the idea of obliterating the name Palestine from the maps of the world would have seemed incredible. The other day, Netanyahu had the nerve to say that the Europeans had no place in the middle east peace process because they did not understand the area. The House will recall that Sykes and Picot were not Americans.
The truth is that the reason why Netanyahu does not want us in the peace process is not that we do not understand the area, but that we understand it only too well. We understand the canyon of despair in the middle east that was created by the failure of Netanyahu to implement the Oslo agreements and by the failure of the United Nations and the world to force him to do so. 873 That is what the Government have been told by our friends in the area—people who are our good customers and loyal allies, and who have taken considerable risks for peace.
I am talking about friends such as Qatar's admirable Foreign Minister Sheikh Hammed, who has expressed his fears about the rise of fanaticism in the area in the wake of that failure. The Crown Prince of Jordan last night spelt out on television the high price that our friends the Jordanians are paying and may yet pay for the paralysis in the peace process and the continuing crisis in the Gulf. The Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, warned us of the shock waves of extremism that lurk in the Arab world, which will be unleashed unless something is done.
I had the opportunity of following the progress of my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary while I was in three Arab countries—Syria, Jordan and Iraq—to which I travelled at the expense of, and in my capacity as, secretary of the Emergency Committee on Iraq. I can therefore tell the House that the British Government's stance—advocated in the name of the European Union, the largest collection of democracies in the world—was warmly received in both the chanceries and streets of the Arab world.
My right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary should not be deterred by the predictable chorus of pro-Netanyahu propaganda that is recycled—to their discredit—by some Opposition Members and some newspapers, who irresponsibly adopt the Israeli line on these events not because they support Netanyahu, but because they are out to damage the Foreign Secretary and the Government.
As I said, I recently returned from that other flashpoint in the area—Iraq. Again, I thank my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary for the generosity of spirit with which he received my entreaties on behalf of the suffering children of that country. My right hon. Friend has always said that Britain has no quarrel with the ordinary people of Iraq, and I have always said that we should go out of our way to prove that—this, he has done.
There are encouraging signs of peace breaking out in Iraq. Mr. Richard Butler, the far from easily pleased head of the United Nations Special Commission spoke earlier this week of
a remarkable new atmosphere of co-operationemerging between the United Nations inspectorate, its diplomatic escorts and the Iraqi Government. The first presidential site was successfully visited by a huge UNSCOM team yesterday.When I met Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz last week, I stressed to him the importance of the swift and comprehensive implementation of the agreement brokered with great skill by the United Nations Secretary-General. I stressed the importance of avoiding at all costs any mistakes or misunderstandings in the implementation of those accords. The Deputy Prime Minister was clear that Iraq would implement the Secretary-General's agreement, both in spirit and to the letter.
Judging by what Mr. Butler has said, progress has started well. At this rate, the sites about which so much has been said will all have been inspected soon. Of course, there are rather fewer of them than we were told at the 874 height of the recent crisis—eight rather than 48—and they are rather smaller than we were told or, indeed, shown on specially prepared maps here in the Chamber. Alas, the quality of our intelligence from Iraq has been poor, perhaps deliberately so.
In any case, let us be positive. That means that the job will be completed all the sooner. We must hope so, because time is running out for the long-suffering people of Iraq, a nation of 22 millions, with which we have had a long and close association and with which, not so long ago, we conducted huge volumes of business—I am talking about respectable business and not the obscenities of the arms trade—whose people we educated in our universities in huge numbers and whose tourists used to come here in greater numbers than from any other Arab country.
Time is running out because even a people with the fortitude of the Iraqis cannot suffer the depredations of sanctions indefinitely. Pre-famine conditions exist in Iraq, as the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation has stated. UNICEF, the United Nation's Childrens Fund, says that 31 per cent. of Iraqi children under five are suffering from chronic malnutrition—almost one in three. On average, every child in Iraq suffers around 15 bouts of diarrhoea a year with a one in 50 chance of dying from what is an easily cured condition.
The Government may say that food and medicine are not covered by sanctions, but that is misleading to the point of being untrue. First, the current levels of the oil-for-food deal, which are double what they were, allow Iraq to sell just £2 billion worth of oil every six months, with strict UN supervision of how the money is spent. Of that sum, more than one third is deducted immediately for reparations payments to Kuwait and to cover the cost of the vast UN apparatus in Kuwait and Iraq. That leaves less than £3 billion per year for all food, medicines and other supplies for a country with a population nearly half the size of Britain's—30 cents per person per day.
To obtain a comparison, let us look at our expenditure on our health service alone of £44 billion per year. We see that the figure falls grotesquely short of Iraq's needs before even taking into account the aggregate effect of seven and a half long years of sanctions. It is true that the Government are proposing a further doubling of the amount, but it is equally true that Iraq cannot pump the amount of oil needed to realise that new sum without substantial rehabilitation of its capacity. Even if the figure is doubled to 60 cents per day, it will be a drop in the ocean.
Iraq is a sea of water-borne diseases. The sewerage systems have collapsed and the water purification systems too. Sometimes, solid waste comes through the taps. Many parts of Iraq have had no electricity since the war and all parts still suffer power black-outs, even hospitals, sometimes during operations. Cholera, typhoid and enteric diseases are on the march in that once-modern land. In 1990, there were 485 cases of Kwashiorkor, the starvation affliction introduced to the word's public in Biafra 30 years ago. Last year in Iraq, there were 28,475 cases. I beg my hon. Friend not to treat those figures as though they were controversial. They are not mine—I have deliberately chosen figures produced by the United Nations agencies.
I walked through that misery in Iraq last week, and hard-bitten journalists from the American, French, German and British media wept with me at what we found 875 in two children's hospitals, which were filthy because cleaning materials are banned under sanctions. Cleaners do not turn up to work because their salaries are only $2 a month, and doctors sweep floors as well as treating patients and comforting their families for only $3 a month. There are no sheets on beds, because they are banned under sanctions, and other bedclothes are washed in diesel, because detergents are banned under sanctions.
Hospital equipment has virtually all broken down, and spare parts are banned under sanctions. There is almost no intravenous fluid: it, too, is banned under sanctions, as are insulin; vitamins; until recently, syringes; doctors' pencils; and even plastic bags that hold blood or collect waste matter from open wounds. Anaesthetic is virtually unobtainable, as are radiotherapy treatment and X-rays, which are banned under sanctions.
Drugs are either unaffordable or undependable, and arrive in the wrong combinations at the wrong times. Much worse, a cancer epidemic afflicting many children who were not born at the time of the conflict between this country and Iraq appears to have broken out. In 1989, there were 2,185 cases of leukaemia, and 385 deaths. In 1996, there were 9,785 new cases of cancer, and 3,320 deaths. The figures for 1997 suggest that the trend is accelerating.
The incomparable Robert Fisk, writing in The Independent, and other noble British journalists who are investigating this disaster, point to the enormous bombardment of southern Iraq in 1991 with 927,000 uranium-tipped aircraft bullets and 30,000 armour-piercing shells which were tipped with depleted uranium for greater penetrative power. Those weapons were tested in Scotland, and 20 tonnes of them still lie festering in the Solway firth, but 300 tonnes of uranium dust has been left in the sands of the Gulf—in the water and in the food chain, and in the chests and blood of the children of Iraq.
Our own service men were ignored by the previous Government when they complained of Gulf war syndrome. Fisk argues that the syndrome and the suffering of the Iraqis, who were on the receiving end of the ordnance, may be linked. Like the children of parents poisoned by agent orange, the American chemical weapon used in attacks on the peoples of Vietnam, Iraqi children are victims of a conflict that they did not choose and could not affect.
Having visited the cancers on Iraq's children, we would be putting them in double jeopardy if we maintained a blockade that effectively starved Iraq's children of the remedies. I cannot prove that those weapons cause the cancers, but there is a case to answer, and the question mark hanging over it is so large that it demands a response.
We have an armada of soldiers and sailors armed with cruise missiles standing to in the Arabian gulf. Hon. Members would do much to inform the people of Iraq of the values of western civilisation if we sent an army of cancer experts armed with radiotherapy equipment, diagnostic tools and suitcases of chemotherapy drugs to help the beleaguered Iraqi health service to combat this malignancy.
This policy must end sooner or later—we are not fighting the hundred years war—and it no longer commands the support in the Arab world, among our European partners or in the Security Council that it did. It would be better to bring the policy to an end in a 876 calculated and negotiated way. If that is not done, it will begin to collapse in ways which we cannot accurately foretell and which may lead to even more terrifying instability in the region, to the detriment of people with whom we have no quarrel, of friendly Governments in the neighbouring middle eastern countries and, ultimately, of our own national interests.
§ The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Mr. Derek Fatchett)May I first thank my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Kelvin (Mr. Galloway) for his remarks and his congratulations to our right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary? I agree with my hon. Friend that those congratulations were well earned.
I shall first address the need for urgent progress in the middle east peace process. My hon. Friend is right to say that a deep sense of frustration and despair is felt in all the Arab countries, which has been built up by the lack of progress in the peace process. We are keen to see progress because we believe that it is in the interests of everyone, including Israel, the Palestinians and the rest of the region.
One of the reasons why my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary made the speech that he did a few weeks ago, which achieved such widespread support and acclamation, was that he wanted to ensure a distinct and clear European Union voice in the process. He also wished to set out our ambitions and aspirations for the middle east peace process.
My hon. Friend will have watched recent developments. We have set out the important steps that we believe need to be taken by the parties. We have always stressed that the parties are under an obligation to fulfil their commitments under previous agreements. It does not make any difference in international law if those agreements are signed by a previous Government: the simple fact is that they are signed on behalf of states, not by individual Governments, and the commitments do not fall into abeyance once the Government changes. It is crucial that all the parties carry out the commitments that they have undertaken in previous agreements.
As my hon. Friend said, we have been even-handed. We have reminded the Palestinians of their obligations. We have talked about the need for the Palestinians to deliver on security and, as part of our presidency of the European Union, we have made clear our commitment to the Palestinians to help with that issue.
I am pleased to tell the House that there is now a strong view in the United States and among our European Union colleagues that the Palestinians are making every possible effort to deliver on their security obligations. We wish them well, because security is a crucial part of the process of developing and maintaining confidence.
We have also said that no other action should be taken by either party that diverts attention from or undermines the existing process. For that reason, as my hon. Friend knows, we have been strong in our criticism of settlements, because they contradict international law and are in contravention of the spirit of the peace process. The settlements make it difficult, if not impossible, to restore the confidence that is crucial to making progress. That is why my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary made a strong statement about settlements on his recent visit to the middle east. We will continue to make such statements, because they are important. Israel should not 877 be able to pre-empt the final status negotiations by continued settlement development. That position is not unique to the United Kingdom: it is held by the European Union and has been affirmed on many occasions by the United States.
The Foreign Secretary, in his speech recently, also said that there was a need for other action that would enable the peace process to move forward. He itemised four areas that are especially important. First, progress needs to be made on further redeployments. I hope that it is clearly understood that the term is "redeployments" in the plural. Commitments exist that make it clear that the next redeployment will not be the last in the process before final status negotiations. We have argued that there must be meaningful and significant movement on further redeployments. The figures have been discussed and are out in the open in rumour form, but it is important that more progress is made.
The other areas in which progress can be made are economic measures to win confidence, the development of the industrial estate in Gaza and the opening of the airport there, and the provision of the southern safe passage route. All those measures will restore confidence. It is a remarkable testimony to the patience of the Palestinian people that, since the Oslo peace accords, their living standards have fallen, on average, by nearly 40 per cent. That must make it difficult for the average Palestinian to have any confidence in the peace process, but they still appear to be strongly committed to it. It is important that those interim economic measures are taken to build confidence and, above all, to maintain and improve living standards.
My hon. Friend was in Palestine at the same time as I was, just over two years ago, for the Palestine National Authority elections. He knows that that was a day of great hope, not only for the Palestinians but for those of us who had the opportunity of talking to ordinary Israelis. They, too, hoped that two neighbouring democracies were being born in the middle east that could work together and build confidence, one in the other. We must ensure that hope is put back into the peace process so that the ordinary people of the region can see a future. We must replace frustration with hope.
My hon. Friend has a clear commitment from the Government, as part of our European Union presidency and beyond, that we will give a high priority in our diplomatic efforts to ensuring progress in the middle east peace process.
The Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary are in regular close consultation with our European Union partners and with the United States to discuss ways in which we can advance the process. There is good collaboration between Europe and the United States. We hope that before too long—the quicker, the better—the United States will table its own proposals. They will be watershed proposals that open the prospect of making the progress that we all seek. Europe will have played a significant part in delivering them to the table and creating confidence in the process.
I welcome my hon. Friend's opening comments on those issues. He has from me the assurance that we will continue to be active in the middle east peace process.
878 My hon. Friend talked about several issues relating to Iraq. I congratulate him on the points that he made to the Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz. It is crucial that the agreement made by Kofi Annan is adhered to; there must be compliance. We are pleased that, so far, there has been co-operation and that the inspections are going ahead. We have always argued that there had to be unrestricted access. So far, we have to report that progress has been reassuring, and we wish that to continue.
When my hon. Friend was speaking, I was reminded of an important point. If Iraq can now co-operate so fully with the inspection regime, why did it not co-operate earlier? That shows that responsibility for the continuation of sanctions rests with the Iraqi regime and no one else. We have always said that compliance with the United Nations Security Council resolutions would lead to the lifting of sanctions. I am sure that my hon. Friend recognises that non-compliance over the years—the refusal to go along with the inspection team—has created the problems that may now exist in the form that he described. The fact is that such co-operation could have been given by the Iraqi regime a long time ago, and many of the issues could have been resolved. If that had been the case, Iraq would have been free of its weapons of mass destruction.
When my hon. Friend visited other capitals in the region, he would have been told time and again that those countries share our objective of ensuring that Iraq is clear of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. They want Iraq to be clear of its weapons of mass destruction.
My hon. Friend was very kind in his comments on the Government's concern for the ordinary people of Iraq. He is right that we have no argument with the ordinary people of Iraq. The Government have been proud to take action in two important areas. First, we led in the Security Council to ensure that there was a new humanitarian Security Council resolution. We were responsible for taking the initiative to double the amount of oil that could be sold by Iraq to meet a range of requirements. We are proud to have taken that position, and it is further evidence that the United Kingdom has no argument with the ordinary people of Iraq. We are trying to deliver to the ordinary people of Iraq.
We have taken a further initiative in calling for a conference—to take place next month, we hope—to look at the humanitarian issues and the ways of providing further assistance to the ordinary people of Iraq. We have got together with our European Union partners, and the conference will involve other countries. We hope that we can be imaginative in dealing with some of the issues of immediate importance to the people of Iraq.
My hon. Friend wrote to my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary about the case of Marian Hamza, although he did not mention that case today. My right hon. Friend has replied, and will do all he can to ensure that appropriate humanitarian assistance is made available. I am sure that my right hon. Friend will keep in touch with us on those issues.
My hon. Friend referred to the use of depleted uranium and his fears in that respect. Given the shortness of time available and the importance of the issue, I promise to write to him to do justice to his remarks. It would be wrong at this stage to try to push those aside with a sleight of parliamentary hand. My hon. Friend deserves a fuller 879 reply, and it may be useful to the House if, with his agreement, I make my reply available through the House of Commons Library.
I conclude by thanking my hon. Friend for raising the issues. The middle east is important to the UK. As he rightly said, we have experience and expertise in the region. We are determined to be fair and active players, and we understand the importance of the issues, and the concerns and priorities of all people. If we can deliver 880 political solutions to what have been intractable problems, it will be a real contribution by this Government and the United Kingdom. We will work towards those with our best endeavours. As always, we cannot promise satisfaction—
The motion having been made after half-past Two o'clock, and the debate having continued for half an hour, MR. DEPUTY SPEAKER adjourned the House without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.
Adjourned at two minutes past Three o'clock.