HC Deb 25 March 1999 vol 328 cc621-8

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Kevin Hughes.]

7.2 pm

Mrs. Angela Browning (Tiverton and Honiton)

On 9 December 1998, in response to a private notice question from the hon. Member for Hereford (Mr. Keetch)—who is in his place tonight—the House heard a confirmation of the previous day's sad reports about the murder of four hostages in Chechnya. Three of the hostages were British nationals and one was a New Zealander. One hostage, Mr. Rudi Petschi, was my constituent and his family live in my constituency.

Since then, I have tabled several written questions to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and I have met the Minister to discuss the matter. I thank the Minister for agreeing to that meeting. However, several issues continue to concern me. Many questions remain unanswered, and we hope to hear more at the inquest about what happened to Mr. Petschi and his colleagues, who worked for Granger Telecom.

I welcome this opportunity tonight to express to the Minister my on-going concern about not just events in Chechnya but the way in which cases such as this are dealt with, and how Members of Parliament can respond to them. There seems to be a grey area in terms of what action we can expect of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office when British nationals are taken hostage—and, in this case, subsequently murdered—in places such as Chechnya.

We recognise that it is unsafe even for the Foreign Office to maintain an official presence in some parts of the world—and Chechnya is one such place. Therefore, my remarks are made against that backdrop: it is not an easy situation. None the less, when incidents such as this occur, relatives naturally turn to their Members of Parliament. I believe that we should have a clearer idea of what we can or cannot expect the British Government to do in securing the safe return of hostages and in handling information about hostages taken in hostile parts of the world. There seems to have been an increase in hostage taking; unfortunately, it is becoming a regular event in various parts of the world. One hesitates to say so, but it seems that many political organisations or regimes now see hostage taking as a way of making a political point. All hon. Members are concerned about the frequency of hostage taking, which sometimes occurs much closer to home than Chechnya.

Last week, at my meeting with the Minister at the Foreign Office, I told him of a request made by Mr. Petschi's widow. The Minister has placed in the Library the advice given to the employing company, Granger Telecom, and we have had a chance to study that. The Foreign Office has a duty to make it clear that Chechnya is a dangerous place and its advice is that people—whether from a company, a charity or any other organisation—should not go there for whatever reason. I am satisfied that the Foreign Office made that information available to Granger Telecom. Although there may be a duty of care on the employing companies, Mrs. Petschi is concerned about their employees. She asks that the Foreign Office should ensure that, from now on, its advice is not merely given to companies in the form of a written brief; the Foreign Office should also state in writing that that document should be made available to every employee or associated person who will go to a part of the world to which the Foreign Office has advised people not to travel. She is anxious that individuals should be made fully aware of the dangers. That is a simple request for a widow to make.

Notwithstanding such advice, we realise that people make a judgment; some of them are prepared to take a risk. We might then debate whether the protection afforded them by the employing company or the charity adequately met the danger or the threat in that country. However, I feel that there is a duty for the Foreign Office and I am glad to record Mrs. Petschi's request to the Minister.

Before the Granger Telecom employees were taken hostage, the Foreign Office had had the experience of dealing with the case of Camilla Carr and John James, who were taken hostage while they were working for a charity. I accept that the Foreign Office's experience of hostage taking has been influenced by that case. Fortunately, although the hostages were held for a long time, they came out alive. The subject of my repeated questions to the Minister—I have now had an opportunity to discuss the matter with him—is the information that comes out in such cases. In the case of the hostages in Chechnya, most of the information coming into the public domain—whether people knew where the hostages were or what was going to happen—came out through Russia on the interfax. How does the Foreign Office treat such information?

In the case of Camilla Carr and John James, the Foreign Office received much information and, with the benefit of hindsight, one can say that it was mainly rumours. I accept that that poses a dilemma for the Minister. Should the Foreign Office react to every bulletin or piece of paper that is received? In his discussions with me, the Minister has made a case—not an unreasonable one—that one cannot expect the Foreign Office to respond in detail and immediately to every piece of information. However, I maintain that, in the case of the Granger hostages, information that was seen as yet another rumour was instrumental in triggering the death of the four hostages.

Mr. Paul Keetch (Hereford)

I congratulate the hon. Lady on obtaining tonight's debate. She will know that, as well as being the constituency Member of Parliament for Peter Kennedy, who was murdered in Chechnya, I was by some strange fate also the constituency Member of Parliament for Camilla Carr and John James, and so I have that experience of hostage taking as well. That taught me that there is so much rumour going about that we as Members of Parliament also have a responsibility to sift through that information. Although I accept that the Foreign Office needs to keep the channel of communication open, we, too, bear a responsibility in that respect.

Mrs. Browning

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. It was after sifting through that information—albeit retrospectively—that, in December, I raised, during the private notice question on the Wednesday when we knew that the hostages had been murdered, the particular case of the interfax that had come out of Moscow on the previous Sunday.

When I visited the Foreign Office last week, the Minister kindly gave me a bundle of internal messages and telecommunications that he had received, and I am grateful to him for sharing those documents with me. I studied them carefully. The Minister appears to have concluded that the death of the hostages was a result of two warring factions—two armed gangs, one holding the hostages, the other attempting to release them—attempting to resolve the situation and that the Chechen security forces played no part; and the interfax that came out of Moscow from the head of Chechen security, warning that a rescue attempt was to be made, was not relevant to the subsequent murder of the hostages within the next day or so.

I have studied the information carefully and I am not of the view that there was no connection between the fax that came out of Moscow and the subsequent murder of the hostages. Some of information in that fax might have been inaccurate, in that the head of Chechen security indicated that the Russians were going to make an attempt to rescue the hostages and that the hostages were being held over the border in Russian territory. However, on 13 December—the Sunday following the death of the hostages—The Sunday Times published a detailed article on the subject. It states: It looked like a Soviet military convoy, but the men dashing along the highway early last Monday morning in a line of Jeep-like Russian uasiki"— I assume that those are tanks— were 150 Chechen anti-terrorist commandos on a rescue mission. Their destination lay to the south, across the snow-covered plain, under the shadow of the Caucasus mountains. From Grozny, the Chechen capital, it took them only 40 minutes to reach the pastel-painted houses on the outskirts of Urus Martan, the most prosperous town in the war-shattered republic. Dodging potholes, they slowed down. In subsequent correspondence with me, the Minister says that he thinks it quite likely that that hostage rescue attempt that went so terribly wrong took place in Urns Martan. I have double-checked with representatives of The Sunday Times, who have assured me that the genesis of that report the following Sunday leads them to believe that it is accurate. It appears unlikely that, if the whole affair had been merely two gangs led by warlords fighting it out in secret, there would have been a military convoy en route on the Monday morning, bearing in mind that it was on the Tuesday that we heard reports of the heads of the hostages being found, and on the Wednesday that the Minister came to the Dispatch Box to tell us that the Government had no prior knowledge of a rescue attempt.

I want the Minister to take my remarks in the spirit in which they are offered, because this is not a witch hunt or an attempt to put him on the spot. The interfax that came out of Moscow was received by the BBC listening service at Caversham near Reading on the Sunday morning and conveyed to the Foreign Office. The Minister's written answers to me confirm that it was read by Foreign Office officials at 9 am the following Monday. It was also received by the Moscow embassy, but not read until the Monday morning. I am not for one minute saying that, if that interfax had been read on the Sunday, the four men would be alive today; that would be quite wrong of me. However, if every piece of information is treated as a rumour, when a hostage taking occurs, there is no reassurance for Members of Parliament, or for people whose relatives have been taken hostage, that the key piece of information, if and when it comes, will be treated in such a way that, at some point, it might be pertinent to some form of intervention that will save lives.

I shall not go so far as to suggest to the Minister, on the Floor of the House, that intervention by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on Sunday morning, perhaps by notifying Granger Telecom—the third party that was on the ground in Chechnya—could have reinforced the clear message that the Foreign Office had already given. The Minister had made it clear that the Foreign Office would never have encouraged a rescue attempt on the terms on which that attempt took place because it would have jeopardised British lives.

I reassure the Minister that I do not expect the Government to be involved in any negotiations about ransoms. He made the Government's policy clear to me and my colleagues in a meeting that took place before the hostages were murdered. The opinion in the House is that the Government should not negotiate ransoms for hostages, hard as that may be on their relatives.

It is clear, however, that in hostage situations in hostile territories such as Chechnya, the Government have to rely on a third party. In this case, the third party was the employing company, Granger Telecom, which had taken the initiative and responsibility for liaising, through Chechen Telecom, with the Chechen security force. Granger Telecom would have been the Foreign Office's official contact if it had wanted to validate any of the rumours.

It is therefore important for the future that the Foreign Office put in place a better system to identify information and judge whether it requires a reaction. Clearly, when the Minister came to the Dispatch Box on the Wednesday, he was not aware that the Foreign Office, or the Moscow embassy, had received notification of the interfax two days earlier, and I find it hard to believe that he could have known about that. I think that the papers were being dealt with routinely because they were viewed as rumours and it is difficult to decide when action should be taken.

The Minister wrote to me concerning the handling of such information. He stated: You asked about dealing with media dispatches in Moscow and London on a Sunday. In London, we have a resident duty officer system for emergencies: this officer works and sleeps in the FCO main building over the weekend. FCO Consular Division (which liaises with hostage families) and Counter-Terrorism Policy Department each also have a weekend duty officer, on call at home. FCO News Department also has a weekend duty officer system. This officer is on call, and may be at home or in the FCO, depending on the time of day and media pressure. Unlike the BBC Monitoring Services, the FCO does not have the resources to monitor, as a matter of routine, all the product of all the world's media over a weekend. In Moscow there is also a weekend duty officer system, plus a rapid call-out system for urgent telegraphic messages. I do not expect there to be an army of people monitoring all the information on the internet from around the world but, if the Foreign Office is to play any role in hostage cases, it is surely incumbent on it to put in place a routine or system that at least triggers interest, whether the information arrives on a Sunday or a Wednesday. I find it unacceptable that those messages were not dealt with until the following day and, by Monday lunchtime, the FCO had felt that it was appropriate to send the messages to Granger Telecom. That is almost 30 hours after the information came into the public domain.

The Minister will know that Mrs. Petschi, the widow of one of the hostages, was notified of that information on the Sunday because her friends picked it up on the internet. If the general public can pick up such important information on the internet, I beg the Minister to put in place in the FCO a system that can separate the wheat from the chaff. However difficult that task may be, we should at least have a system. I ask him also to assure us that the information will be investigated with a view to how the situation should be handled, because, in future situations, it may be important that information is dealt with quickly.

We await the coroner's inquest, and I know that the Minister hopes to take evidence personally, here or abroad, from key people involved in the Chechen Government and security force, so that he can establish more facts. There is no doubt that I will want to return to the House with this matter when there is more information.

The purpose of this debate is to tell the Minister that, although I appreciate his co-operation—I do not say this vindictively—the systems in the FCO need to be considered. Alternatively, the Foreign Office may have to say that, in areas as hostile as Chechnya, where the Government clearly cannot guarantee to act on behalf of British nationals, it is unrealistic for Members of Parliament and the general public to ask it to play an active role. Perhaps the Foreign Office should come to the conclusion that, in such dangerous places, it will be as helpful as it can following a kidnapping but will play a passive role.

Once something like this event happens, Members of Parliament and relatives of those taken hostage expect that they will have the full force of the Government behind them, but, with the best will in the world, it might be unrealistic to demand that. If that is so, it would be better, for future reference, if the FCO published guidelines on what it can and cannot reasonably be expected to.

7.21 pm
The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Mr. Tony Lloyd)

I thank the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Mrs. Browning) for giving me the opportunity to respond in a debate on this important subject. Issues concerning the horrendous deaths of Rudi Petschi, Stanley Shaw, Darren Hickey and Peter Kennedy have been before the House before, and are rightly so again. I also thank the hon. Lady for the manner in which she has raised this subject, and conducted my meetings and discussions with her.

I know that the whole House will join her and me in expressing deep sympathy for the families of the four men, as well as admiration for the way in which, with considerable dignity and courage, they have coped. I say that particularly about Mrs. Petschi's very constructive approach to a number of issues.

In my statement to the House on 9 December, I gave an assurance that every effort was being made to get to the truth. Despite our best efforts, which continue, we have not yet been able to obtain a report from the Chechen authorities on their investigation into the crimes. It remains right that we should not send British officials to Chechnya, given the evident dangers there. We have invited representatives of the Chechen authorities to meet us in London or Baku to give a thorough account of what happened, and of what they are doing to bring the criminals to justice. I have received information today that the Metropolitan police will meet Security Minister Atgeriev in Baku on 27 March, when they will pursue these matters. Hopefully, they will be able to give us a much clearer view of what happened.

I return to the events that led up to the hostage taking. It is clear that Chechnya has been highly unstable and, of course, impoverished since the war with the Russian Federation ended in 1996. It is now even more unstable and dangerous. It might be helpful to the House if I outlined our best provisional assessment of what happened.

As we know, the four men were in Grozny working on a contract to install telecommunications equipment for Chechen Telecom. Chechen Telecom was directly responsible for the men's security. On Sunday 4 October, as soon as news of the kidnap reached Moscow and London—this is an important point—Foreign and Commonwealth Office officials called the head office of Granger Telecom in Weybridge to discuss the crisis. The hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton should know that the Foreign Office works in exactly the way she wants it to do. When information is relevant and seen to be relevant, action is taken—on Sundays, as on any other day of the week.

The Chechen authorities, especially Chechen Telecom, assumed full responsibility for resolving the case. The hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton is absolutely right to say that the Foreign Office cannot undertake to do everything in these circumstances, especially in a hostile environment such as Chechnya. We relied on the Chechen authorities and, indeed, the ability of Granger Telecom to take the matter forward.

I met Granger management two days after the hostage taking. After that, a pattern of regular contact with the families and with the men's employers was rapidly established. In Russia, we used contacts that we had built up with the Russian and Chechen authorities during the 15 months of the kidnap of Jon James and Camilla Carr to urge the early and safe release of the four men.

The Russians confirmed what we already knew: that they did not exert control in Chechnya. They had no means of securing the safe release of the men. Prior to that, Valentin Vlasov, President Yeltsin's special envoy, was kidnapped in Chechnya. He was released, but not rescued by the Russian authorities, on 12 November last year. More recently, General Gennady Shpigun, the representative in Chechnya of the Russian Interior Minister, was kidnapped at Grozny airport and is still in captivity.

We accept that the Russians do not have the ability to rescue hostages. However, we made it clear to the Russians that the security of the four men was our prime concern, and we urged them not to take any action that might jeopardise their security.

In late October, FCO officials in London met the Deputy Prime Minister of Chechnya, Mr. Atgeriev, who is the Minister responsible for security. We stressed to him that the safety of the four men was the British Government's overriding concern, and that the Chechen authorities should do nothing that would jeopardise the lives of the hostages. We were given assurances to that effect.

Since that time, Mr. Atgeriev has been in contact with the Foreign Office, specifically on 10 December, two days after the remains were found. He recalled that when he met FCO officials in October, they had emphasised to him the supreme importance of safeguarding the hostages' lives. There was no ambiguity about our Government's attitude in the minds of Chechen officials. Mr. Atgeriev expressed sorrow that the Chechen authorities had not managed to do as we had asked. There was no ambiguity on their part.

It may be helpful if I outline briefly the principles that govern the Government's response to hostage cases overseas. This is relevant to some of the hon. Lady's points. We treat the safety and well-being of hostages as our prime concern. We acknowledge the responsibility of the host Government for resolving satisfactorily a kidnap case on their territory.

Our writ does not run everywhere. We certainly did not claim to have a writ that ran into Chechnya. There are severe limits on what the Foreign Office can undertake to do. That is a realistic statement of fact, which the hon. Lady recognises and has expressed to me. I repeat to the House that it is important that people do not believe that the Government have universal power or capacity in such extremely difficult situations, especially in the terrain and circumstances that make hostage taking possible.

I should reaffirm that the long-standing policy of successive British Governments, as the hon. Lady noted, is to oppose concessions to hostage takers. The Government will not pay, or sanction, or facilitate the payment of ransoms. That is a continuation of the policy of all British Governments, which the House accepts and endorses. That was made clear to and accepted by the men's families and employers at an early stage.

In early December—we do not yet know when—Chechens—we are not in a position to say whether those were the security forces—opposed to the kidnappers captured one of their number and may have sought to use him as a lever to secure the release of the four men. We are fairly certain that an armed confrontation with the kidnappers followed, and that those who attacked the criminals came off worst. The kidnappers then murdered the four hostages, probably as a brutal act of defiance and a warning to their attackers not to try that again. It was an act of terror that we condemn, but it could not have been connected to the interfax report.

I have answered a number of written questions, to which the hon. Lady referred. I hope that I have made it clear to her that the media report was not relevant to the fate of the hostages. I say that partly because our position was crystal clear to the Chechen authorities. They knew that we deplored any attempt to put our citizens and a New Zealand citizen at risk by premature or risky rescue attempts. That was unambiguous.

I have sought to explain why the media report was, like many public—

Mrs. Browning

rose—

Mr. Lloyd

The hon. Lady will forgive me for not giving way, but I have only two minutes left and I want to make this point for the record. We had no foreknowledge of the sequence of events that led to the deaths of the hostages, and the media report in question does not constitute such a warning. The report was one of a series and it does not constitute a missed opportunity to warn the Chechen authorities of the dangers of an ill-judged rescue attempt. They were aware of our concern about those dangers.

The hon. Lady may be right that the report, which referred to Russian security forces, was perhaps designed to mislead, but it could have misled only because the Russians were not capable of undertaking the kind of rescue attempt to which the report referred.

The hon. Lady made a point about travel advice. The travel advice has been clear and unambiguous. It states: We strongly advise against travel to the Chechen Republic because of the unstable security situation. Kidnapping for financial gain is common. Westerners are particularly vulnerable. Those who travel to Chechnya despite this advice are taking severe risks, and must accept"— this is important; it is central to her point— that the ability of the FCO and the British Embassy in Moscow to render assistance is severely limited. She wanted me to make that point and it had already been made in the travel advice. I hope that she accepts that we did not oversell what we could do and understands that, by not overselling, we were trying to convey a real sense of danger to those who wanted to travel.

I am looking carefully at the point that Mrs. Petschi wanted to be raised, about what can be done to remind employers and travel agents—those with responsibilities—that they have absolute duty to those in their care. It is complicated, and I cannot give the hon. Lady an easy answer, but my—

The motion having been made after Seven 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 twenty-eight minutes to Eight o'clock.