HL Deb 15 March 1956 vol 196 cc483-94

Debate resumed.

4.47 p.m.

THE MINISTER OF STATE FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS (THE MARQUESS OF READING)

My Lords, being the first Government speaker on this Motion, I should like to say, even though in his absence, that it is not every day that the House is able to welcome a former Prime Minister. Nor has it always been the case in the past that the new arrival has gratified the House by taking part in—or, indeed, in this case by initiating—a debate after only so brief a delay. My Lords, if it would not be presumptuous to congratulate the noble Earl on his maiden speech I should desire very genuinely and warmly to do so. Although a novice, he seemed to have a striking volume of general knowledge and particular experience in the field that we are discussing. I might perhaps even more suitably and respectfully felicitate the Opposition on being reinforced by so powerful a piece of artillery for their counter-battery work, and the House itself upon acquiring so eminent and so welcome a recruit.

The noble Earl's Motion has a certain duality. If I may slightly vary the noble Lord Rea's simile, I would say that it is rather like a pair of field glasses, one glass of which is directed upon Cyprus and the other upon the Middle East. The division does exist between the spheres of the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office, and I myself propose to confine what I have to say to the House, in as narrow a compass as possible, to the Middle East glass, leaving the Cyprus glass to my noble friend Lord Munster at a slightly later stage, and only adding that my noble Leader intends to wind up, what I may call bifocally, on both heads of the Motion at the end of the debate.

So far as the Foreign Office interest goes, this debate is not taking place at the most advantageous of moments. We had a debate on the Middle East in this House not long ago and there have subsequently been various discussions on the subject in another place, but more particularly because my right honourable and learned friend the Foreign Secretary returned only this afternoon, while this debate has been in progress, from his extensive and arduous pilgrimage, which has taken him to, amongst other countries, all the signatories of the Baghdad Pact. I have, consequently, not had the opportunity—which I should admittedly have liked—to consult him and to obtain from him his impressions of his various visits. But I can at least tell the House from the messages he has sent home that in all these countries he found the Governments concerned in a robust mood, and firm and faithful in their adherence to the Baghdad Pact.

The noble Earl, moving his Motion, made reference to the need for raising the standard of life of the peoples of the Middle East, and I only say this much in passing. We have in all our dealings with the Baghdad Pact countries paid particular attention to the economic aspect of the arrangements which we are considering in that regard. I am going to speak a little more at length about the Baghdad Pact, but before doing so I would point to one small matter. If I understood the noble Earl aright, he made a slight slip. He indicated that Greece was in some way a member of the Baghdad Pact. That is not the position, of course, and I am sure that that was not the impression which the noble Earl wished to give. At the same time, I think it was the impression which the House derived from what he said, and I may perhaps be allowed to remove it.

There are critics of the Baghdad Pact, both in this country and abroad—people who are apt to contend that the creation and continuation of this Pact is in some way a provocation and is, indeed, mainly responsible for the worsening of the situation in the Middle East which has come from the acquisition by Egypt and possibly by other countries through Egypt of arms of Czechoslovak origin. That is not in the least the view of Her Majesty's Government. It does not seem to us that it is in the least probable. The Soviet Government must undoubtedly be behind the actions of the Czechoslovak Government in this move. It is against all their normal habits to undertake a new move from one day to another without long deliberation, and only after such deliberation they bring it into operation when the moment seems more favourable. In our view, this arms deal was conceived far earlier as part of the usual Communist technique to exploit and intensify the existing difficulties in the area. The Communist purpose was not merely to fish in troubled waters, but first to trouble the waters and then to fish in them. I recall that when my right honourable friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer, at the time when he was Foreign Secretary, raised this question of the arms deal with Mr. Molotov, both in New York and subsequently at the second Geneva meeting, in each case he was told that this was purely a commercial transaction—though I am bound to say that that allegation was not accepted with complete conviction by Her Majesty's Government. But this arms deal changed the situation for the worse in the Middle East, and, in our view, the Baghdad Pact came into being just in time to limit and to localise the scope and the effect of this Communist incursion into the Middle East.

I confess I always find it a little difficult to understand the grounds for opposing, as a matter of principle, these various pacts which now exist in different parts of the world, such as the Baghdad Pact and the South East Asia Treaty Organisation. It is surely a fair comment upon the line of criticism with which I have been dealing that if the grouping together of countries in, for instance, the Baghdad Pact constitutes an incitement to the Communists, the same must be true of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the South East Asia Treaty Organisation, for the character and purpose of them all are exactly the same. If we admit that these objections can be levied against all these arrangements, then surely we are accepting and endorsing the whole Communist thesis that N.A.T.O., for example, is designed for aggressive objects. One cannot help thinking that it must be a somewhat agreeable experience for the Russians to observe their case being thus guilelessly made on their behalf.

They must also, I think, be somewhat comforted by the attitude of those who urge that they roust be brought into any discussions on the Middle East. The Baghdad Pact owes its origin solely to genuine fears of Soviet policy and to the determination of the member countries to make better defensive provision for their own safety by collective than they could ever have made by separate action. Had there been no such incentive to them thus to coalesce, there would have been no Pact and no need for a Pact. Now it is suggested that the door which this Pact was spontaneously designed to close should be flung lightheartedly open and that those whom it was formed to keep out should be invited to step in.

If that is the view, why not offer them membership of the Baghdad Pact? And if that, why not membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation? I do not remember that those who are now very vocal in urging that Russia should be asked to step into the Middle East were at the time very loudly in favour of agreeing to the Russian proposal that she should join the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Your Lordships may remember that that was one of the Russian moves some time ago. I do not think it was very seriously considered by any Party in this country. Yet now the suggestion is that, in spite of the existence of the Baghdad Pact, she should be invited to step into the theatre of the Middle East. There is no logical distinction between the two positions, each one of which could, in my submission, result only in the collapse of the whole defensive structure of the free world. I am inclined to think that there is already quite enough Communist activity in the region of the Middle East without going out of one's way to increase it. If is does not create, it is at least prompt to exploit any incident which is unfavourable to the West. Certainly, we have had our anxieties lately in the Middle East, and those anxieties have been acute. General Glubb, since his return, has made plain his own attitude to what happened with a degree of generosity, wisdom and restraint that is perhaps the most effective commentary upon the circumstances of his dismissal after so many years of zealous and selfless service.

The position in Jordan as a whole, however, seems to be clearing gradually. I am not going to venture into the realms of prophecy, but I think that so far one can go. Your Lordships will remember that the King of Jordan did not accept an invitation to the Cairo talks which recently took place between General Nasser, the King of Saudi Arabia and President Kuwatly of Syria, talks which resulted at least in an extremely lengthy and resonant communiqué. Yesterday, as your Lordships will have seen, there was also a meeting between the King of Iraq and the King of Jordan, who are not only bound by geographical but also by dynastic ties. I would add only this: the noble Lord, Lord Hore-Belisha, called attention to the position in Jordan and the necessity of looking at the situation afresh; and a remark on the same lines was made by the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, in moving his Motion. The position is that in Jordan, at the moment, Her Majesty's Ambassador is engaged in talks with the Jordan Government on the existing situation, and the House will understand if I go no further than to say that those talks are being carried on.

Our preoccupation with events in that part of the world, of course, is due only to the obvious fact that any sudden upheaval might at any moment disturb what is admittedly the precariously poised situation between Israel and the Arab States. The whole situation in that area of the Middle East is not made easier by the vicious and persistent broadcasts of stations such as "The Voice of the Arab". I do not intend to-day, with the number of speakers there are on the list, to go over the ground that I attempted to cover in our last debate on the Middle East on the more restricted field of relations between Israel and the Arab States. I propose only to say this. If there has been no actual outbreak of hostilities during the past six years or more since the State of Israel came into being, in my view, that condition, if not of peace, at least of "non-war," has been attributable in the main to the existence of the Tripartite Declaration. That Declaration is still of full force and effect. I can only repeat to-day the conviction I expressed in the earlier debate that the only solution which can give real and lasting relief from the present prolonged tension and animosity lies in a settlement between those directly concerned, with any assistance they may require from other countries, of difficulties which hitherto, unfortunately, the passing of time has only served to perpetuate.

Sometimes it has been urged that since we have a Treaty with Jordan, under which we are bound to go to the aid of Jordan should she be attacked, we should conclude a similar Treaty with Israel. Our 1948 Treaty with Jordan, which is the existing one, was in replacement of a former Treaty made in 1946, as the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, will remember, which, in its terms, gave form and substance and definition to our relations with Jordan. Therefore, our treaty relations with Jordan stem from a situation which existed at a moment before the State of Israel ever came into being at all. The conditions which have existed in the area since the Armistice Agreement have been covered and protected by the Tripartite Declaration. The Tripartite Declaration is a phrase which is not altogether to be overlooked, because, as distinct from a Treaty, this is a Declaration which involves not us alone, but the United Kingdom plus the United States and plus France, and it therefore is a treble assurance—

LORD HENDERSON

My Lords, may I intervene? I am interested in the last remark of the noble Marquess. I recall the Prime Minister in another place saying in the last debate, with reference to the Tripartite Declaration, that the representatives of the three Governments were meeting to consider the nature of the action to be taken to give effect to the Tripartite Declaration. In view of the fact that the noble Marquess has again rejected the idea of a bilateral Treaty with Israel, is he in a position to say what is the nature of the action that is to be taken, because that is the deterrent value of the Tripartite Declaration?

THE MARQUESS OF READING

I quite follow the noble Lord's point. What was said was perfectly accurate. That aspect is being discussed, but I am not yet in position to say exactly what the outcome of it may be.

Towards the latter part of his speech, the noble Lord, Lord Hore-Belisha, asked a question, I think not wholly rhetorical, about what separate interest this country was claiming in the Middle East. I think that question arose out of what he had been saying about Cyprus. So far as I know, we are claiming no separate interest in the Middle East. We are accepting perhaps a separate responsibility in Cyprus, because it happens that Cyprus is a British possession, and therefore the responsibility for Cyprus rests upon this country. But when the noble Lord asks what we feel about oil and whether we should sell it to Russia and so on—

LORD HORE-BELISHA

My Lords, may I interrupt the noble Marquess? My point was: why do we not discharge the responsibility on behalf of N.A.T.O., instead of as a purely British responsibility?

THE MARQUESS OF READING

I think we have a duty to discharge our own responsibility, though certainly with our eye upon N.A.TO. Indeed, it is the interests of N.A.T.O., as well as our own strategic interests, that have led us to attach the importance that we do to the geographical position of Cyprus and to its use as a base.

LORD HORE-BELISHA

My Lords, forgive me. I think the point has some substance, and I am sure that the noble Marquess does not want to gloss over it. Is there, then, nothing in the claim of Mr. Eisenhower and of other foreign Powers, Members of N.A.T.O. that their interests are affected by what is happening in Cyprus, that they wish to be consulted and would make a composite policy? I think it necessary to call attention to this matter because it occupies a great deal of space in every newspaper, and I think it is worthy of consideration for the sake of good relationships.

THE MARQUESS OF READING

Consultation is one thing; giving information is one thing; but discharge of responsibility is another thing. At the present time, as things stand, as I have said, it is our responsibility to discharge our task in Cyprus of establishing and preserving order and, at the same time, carrying on the base which has been installed there. Certainly throughout the Middle East, in all our dealings with the problem of that country, we have not only sought but have received a considerable volume of co-operation from other countries. Indeed, in an earlier passage of my speech I went in some detail into the position of such an Agreement as the Baghdad Pact, where, after all, we are working in close relation with other Asian countries. We quite realise that in many parts of the world to-day we cannot be responsible for security except by a combined effort of all those concerned. I suppose that one of the first and basic principles of foreign policy—I have said this before to your Lordships—is that in all these matters we have to match our resources with our responsibilities and not let one outweigh the other. That we have sought to do in our Middle East policy, as well as in our policy in other parts of the world.

There are many other matters with which I could deal in this particular field, but the weight of the debate so far has, I think, been on the Cyprus issue, and will perhaps continue to be. At the same time, I thought it right, in view of the double nature of the Motion of the noble Earl, that there should be, on behalf of the Government, at least a speech which should confine itself to the problems of the Middle East. With what I have already been able to say I shall content myself, and I can only hope that, to some degree, I may have contented the Home as well.

5.13 p.m.

THE EARL OF LISTOWEL

My Lords, this debate, as the noble Marquess, Lord Reading, has pointed out, has been mainly concerned with Cyprus, in spite of his own valuable foreign policy contribution; and Cyprus is a subject on which I have had a Motion on the Order Paper for several months. I should like to express my gratitude to the noble Marquess, the Leader of the House for his courtesy in giving us this early opportunity of discussing this subject. We on this side of the House have never wished to hamper negotiations, which everyone hoped would succeed, by a premature debate here. We therefore readily agreed, at the request of the Government, to postpone my Motion until there was either a settlement or a breakdown in the negotiations. A breakdown has now unfortunately occurred, and the noble Marquess has been good enough to rearrange the Business of the House so that we can discuss the subject without any unnecessary delay. I propose to confine my own remarks to Cyprus, and I am pleased to observe that the noble Earl, Lord Munster, who is a former Colonial Office Minister, will soon be in a position to reply to me.

The reason for my special interest in Cyprus is that I was a Minister at the Colonial Office at the time of the 1948 constitutional offer, when my noble friend Lord Winster was Governor of the island, and working so hard for its acceptance. Since then I have been a close and sympathetic observer of events in the island. There are two things that strike one particularly forcibly about the present tragic situation. One is that we cannot hope to find the right way out unless all the relevant facts are examined without Party or national prejudice, with a mental willingness to see and understand the British, the Greek, the Turkish and the Cypriot viewpoints. This is not altogether easy at a time when Party and national sentiments have already been deeply stirred. The other thing that strikes me particularly forcibly is that responsibility for what has happened in Cyprus is widely distributed in time and space: it ranges from our failure to bribe Greece, by the offer of Cyprus, to come into the First World War in 1915, to the strategic requirements of the present cold war and the tension between Israel and the Arab States in the Middle East. If we on this side of the House deal with the special responsibility of Her Majesty's Government, it does not mean that we have forgotten these other relevant factors; it means simply that we are trying to do our job as Her Majesty's Opposition.

We recognise, of course, that those primarily concerned with, and responsible for, the present situation are the British Government and British policy and the Greek-speaking Cypriot population. In my view, there have been mistakes on both sides—mistakes which ought to be frankly admitted—and the future of the island will depend on the rectification of those mistakes by both sides. The two most grievous mistakes of the Cypriots were, I believe, first, to refuse the liberal constitution in 1948, which would eventually have given them a Parliamentary weapon in the struggle for Enosis; and secondly, to start the present campaign of terrorism and violence, which would have been quite unnecessary if they had had a constitutional method of pressing their national claim. Terrorism has brought death to Britons and Cypriots; it has brought untold misery to their families and financial ruin to many people on the island. The longer it continues, the harder it will become to find the common ground necessary for agreement.

I should now like to pass to the mistakes which, in my view, Her Majesty's Government have committed and which have led up to the present situation. I shall then go on to say something about the changes of policy that are now required, and I hope to allude to the interesting suggestions of the most reverend Primate the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury for putting an end to terrorism and coercion and achieving an agreed settlement. The policy of Her Majesty's Government towards Cyprus since 1954 has, I believe, been weak and vacillating —and I think that this was implied by something that was said by the most reverend Primate. This weakness has encouraged the belief that the British Government will surrender to force what they will not give to persuasion. Their inconsistency has obscured the limit beyond which concessions cannot go. Step by step, in response to pressure from Cyprus, the Government have retreated to the position which they should have occupied at the start.

In July, 1954, a shadow of self-government, a Legislature without an elected majority—a much less liberal offer than that made in 1948—was held out to Cyprus. Thirteen months later, in August, 1955, the Foreign Secretary announced that this shadow had been given substance, and that Cyprus would have a Legislative Assembly, with an elected majority and powers of internal self-government. The unfortunate feature in this sequence of events was that shooting had started in Cyprus in the spring months of 1955. Self-government had thus been conceded, but not self-determination. In that regard the Cypriots were no better off after the Tripartite Conference in the autumn of 1955 than they had been before it; indeed, the failure of the Conference—to which, of course, Greece, Turkey and ourselves were parties—to reach any agreement merely worsened the situation in the Eastern Mediterranean. I should be surprised if Ministers looking back did not admit, privately at any rate, that the Tripartite Conference was a blunder and should never have been convened. International conferences should presuppose from the start a reasonable chance of agreement. With that general principle I am quite sure all those who have been concerned with foreign relations will agree.

The public exposure of the differences over Cyprus between Greece and Turkey started the terrible anti-Greek riots in Istanbul and Ismailia, and the refusal of self-determination preceded violence on the island. In November of last year the Governor had to declare a state of emergency. Then, quite suddenly, in the following month of December, only three months after a categorical statement by the Foreign Secretary that exceptions must be made to the principle of self-determination of Cyprus, the same Minister informed the Members of another place that self-determination for Cyprus was no longer not in the foreseeable future and should come (and here I quote his words) at some time and on certain conditions. The time and the place were not specified, but everyone realised that a right for which the majority of Cypriots had been striving for the last hundred years had been at last granted. If only these basic demands, self-government and self-determination, had been offered in 1954, instead of being conceded to mounting violence in the next eighteen months, Cyprus might have been today as peaceful an island and as useful and efficient a base as Malta is in the Mediterranean.

It is thus against a background of agreement on essentials that in January and February of this year the talks between the Governor and the Archbishop proceeded. This, at any rate, was the view expressed by the Secretary of State at the beginning of the present month. I should like to quote his words. He said: The big issues, the principle of self-determination and the question of self-government, are in a sense out of the way. The talks therefore broke down on matters of much less importance—matters essentially negotiable—and what I think the Government have to do to justify their policy in breaking off their talks; and what I do not think they have done hitherto by their explanations in another place, is to give a single valid reason for calling off the negotiations at this stage.

Everyone is aware of the three issues —my noble friend Lord Attlee has dealt with them at length, and I will not repeat them—on which the two sides failed to agree. Too many people think that both parties could have made concessions without losing anything essential. Your Lordships will have noticed that that view was expressed in The Times yesterday by their correspondent in Cyprus. This report is a matter of such interest that I should like to read a few lines from it. He says: … your Correspondent has come to the conclusion that the talks with Archbishop Makarios should not have broken down, at least when they did. This is not the view merely of one or two minor and possibly disgruntled or prejudiced philhellenic officials; apart from the Greek Cypriots or the Greek representatives here, who are naturally unanimous, and for the most part genuinely so, that the deportation of Archbishop Makarios was a blunder, there are evidently many others who think that agreement might, and should if possible, have been reached.

EARL FORTESCUE

My Lords, I think it would be convenient if we were now to adjourn during pleasure for the Royal Commission.

House adjourned during pleasure.

House resumed.