§ Motion made, and Question proposed, That the sitting be now adjourned.—[Joan Ryan.]
2.30 pm§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Mr. Bill Rammell)I welcome the opportunity to debate the United Nations and Britain's position within it. Before starting, it is appropriate to express on behalf of all hon. Members our deep shock at the horrifying attack on the United Nations in Baghdad in August and the appalling and tragic death of Sergio Vieira de Mello and his staff. I last met Mr. Vieira de Mello in Geneva at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in March, and it would be difficult to find a more dedicated, charismatic and effective leader within the United Nations structure. It was also tragic that his political affairs officer, Fiona Watson, a former Officer of the House, was killed, with 20 other people. On behalf of all hon. Members, I pay tribute to those people. I welcome Kofi Annan's determination that the UN should continue to make its contribution to cohesion and world peace despite those tragic events, and I am sure that hon. Members will join me in that.
This debate is the start of what the Government hope will be an annual process of reflecting on the United Kingdom's position within the United Nations and the overall structure and direction of the UN. It is timely that this debate is taking place in advance of the opening of the 58th session of the United Nations General Assembly, which my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary, my hon. Friend the Minister of State, Department for International Development and I will attend later this month. Given that timing, today I want to outline the Government's views on the way forward for the United Nations.
It is also timely that in the middle of the UK's month at the helm of the Security Council, when we are leading important Council business on conflicts in Africa. discussion of the middle east peace process and, of course, Iraq, we shall be putting forward an initiative on managing the transition from conflict to the rule of law. I shall speak about that later.
The debate also provides an important opportunity to take stock of the enormous breadth and depth of the UK's relationship with the United Nations. The Command Paper, "The UK in the UN", which we published last week, sets out the current situation effectively, and I urge all hon. Members to read it, as it sets out some of our ideas for reform of the UN, or which I shall elaborate in greater detail as the debate proceeds.
Anyone who doubts the continuing relevance of the United Nations need only look at the range of work outlined in the Command Paper. Discussion of military 140WH intervention and sanctions in the Security Council may grab the headlines, but the UN's ongoing work, funds and programmes are at the heart of global efforts to improve the lives of 2 billion people throughout the world who live in abject poverty on less than $1 a day. The Command Paper makes it clear that the UK is active across the full range of the UN's work as a major contributor of people, ideas and funding.
Earlier this week I met Mr. Fawzi, the outgoing head of the information centre in London, who paid a departing call on me. He was at pains to stress his belief that the United Kingdom is almost unparalleled in its political and financial commitment to the UN. I was grateful to hear that directly from someone who has spent his life working with the UN.
One myth that the Command Paper lays to rest is the idea that disagreements with the UN and the Security Council over Iraq sounded the death knell for the UN, or for our interest in working through it. Even in the Security Council, where the disagreements were felt most strongly, the reality belies the media's image of permanent splits. The Council was united in its original analysis of the problems in Iraq in a succession of resolutions over more than a decade setting out obligations for Iraq, and in its determination, in Security Council resolution 1441, that Iraq was not in compliance with those. I think there can be no doubt about that whatever.
Despite the subsequent disagreements, since resolution 1441 the Council has united again around four further resolutions dealing with Iraq. It is also worth making it clear that in the same period it has adopted 60 resolutions on other subjects before the Council—all but two unanimously. Whatever took place over Iraq, the breadth and scale and importance of the work of the UN continues apace.
It is clear that the breadth of work outlined in the Command Paper highlights the UN's importance as the only truly global democratic institution, with 191 member states meeting on an equal basis in the General Assembly. It is certainly the case that to engage in global business, one has to engage through the United Nations. The success of the UN, therefore, is critical to many of the UK's international policy objectives. The Command Paper describes our contribution to the development of policy at the heart of the key areas of UN activity—international peace and security, human rights, development, health, crime and justice—which reflect many of our national interests. To promote those interests effectively, the UK and its Government have to help the UN to succeed.
The Command Paper sets out how we hope to achieve this in relation to each of the main bodies of the United Nations. I would like to draw out some of the overarching objectives for the UN to help it deliver the results that matter for the UK, and I hope that we can all do that during the debate. We want a Security Council that effectively deals with all threats to international peace and security, including new threats such as terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, which will undoubtedly require us to develop new approaches. We also want a revitalised General Assembly that helps provide strategic direction for international efforts to manage globalisation. We want the implementation of the proposals for the reform of the UN secretariat set out by Kofi Annan last year, 141WH and we certainly want better co-ordination of the wider UN system of fund programmes and specialised agencies.
One example in which I believe that the UK's contribution and vision have helped achieve a greater UN impact is in the reform of UN peacekeeping operations. Our involvement in peacekeeping goes back as far as 1964 in Cyprus, and since then the UK has participated in 18 further UN missions. I believe that the outstanding record of our armed forces is demonstrated in their support and commitment to restoring peace, security and stability in the Balkans and Cambodia.
In Sierra Leone, I believe that our contribution—this is now universally acknowledged—was critical to what subsequently has rightly been seen as a major UN success. In Afghanistan, the UK was the first nation to lead the international security assistance force, which has made a significant contribution. The situation there is much better than before, and I hope and believe that that will continue.
We have also worked in the Security Council to ensure that peacekeeping operations have robust realistic mandates, which focus on situations in which they can make a genuine contribution to restoring and maintaining peace. We have also worked through the General Assembly to build consensus on reformed and effective operations. Indeed, the UK has been at the forefront of the secretariat's efforts to implement the Brahimi report on peace operations, which was established in August 2000.
We have worked closely with the Department of Peace-Keeping Operations on developing a programme of assistance under the UN strategy of the global conflict prevention pool. We have encouraged the development of links between peacekeeping operations and the many other UN bodies involved in post-conflict work to ensure an effective, integrated international effort on the ground.
On 22 September, the United Nations General Assembly will begin its 58th session. The agenda is wide-ranging, and we shall contribute, as a country and a Government, to all aspects of that. We have a number of particular priorities. First, we hope that the international community can address the threat of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. We want to build on the European Union's Thessaloniki declaration on counter-proliferation to get a commitment from the wider international community in the pursuit of this vital agenda through the UN.
We want to encourage the international debate on counter-terrorism and ensure that there is continued commitment to the process of peer review and partnership through the Counter-Terrorism Committee of the Security Council, which has been one of the most significant success stories for the UN over recent years.
We also want further national and EU support for peacekeeping, including capacity building in the UN system and among non-EU troop contributors. In addition, we will work for a new focus on international policing, which is a necessary supplement and ingredient of any post-conflict situation. We believe that one of the key tasks for the UN is to reduce the likelihood and frequency of conflict around the world, and as a result 142WH we are very supportive of efforts to build UN capacity in conflict prevention. In that regard, we are working to strengthen African institutions to improve their role in maintaining African peace and security.
§ Tony Baldry (Banbury)If we really are committed to conflict prevention in west Africa, we must ensure that the special court in Sierra Leone has the resources necessary to complete its work. Is the Minister aware that the special court will soon be issuing redundancy notices to staff because it does not think that it has the financial wherewithal to continue? Perhaps he will give some thought to that in his summing up.
§ Mr. RammellWe have contributed significantly to the special court in Sierra Leone. The model that has been pursued in Sierra Leone is far more cost-effective than other mechanisms of post-conflict restorative justice that have been established throughout the world. We have encouraged other nations to contribute to the court and will continue to do that. I will return to the issue in my summing up, when I may be able to give further details.
This year's session of the General Assembly will finally agree the organisation's budget for the next two years. We want the budget to focus on UN priority activity to ensure that the organisation is as efficient and effective as possible. That is one of the recurring themes when considering general reform within the UN. The Government and I are passionate supporters of the UN, but if we are really to believe in it, it must ensure that its resources and programmes are targeted at the issues, problems and concerns that are relevant and are priorities for the whole international community. We will return to that.
The opening week of the General Assembly comes during the month in which the UK holds the rotating presidency of the Security Council. As a neutral chair, our main responsibility will be to conduct the daily business as efficiently as possible, building consensus around the many important issues on the agenda. Those include the situation in the middle east and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a mandate for a new peacekeeping operation in Liberia, and renewing those in Sierra Leone and on the Ethiopian-Eritrean border.
In addition—this will be a significant development—we will initiate a debate on post-conflict transition to justice and the rule of law. The UN's broad experience in bringing many countries out of conflict means that there is much expertise on individual aspects of that agenda. Restoring the rule of law is both backward looking, in the sense of dealing with the injustice of the past, and forward looking, in the sense of establishing or reforming the institutions and democratic structures that guarantee the rule of law in the future. Critically, the UN has experience of all those elements. Its experience ranges from international criminal tribunals to training in policing and justice. We are arranging discussions between the Security Council and experts to 143WH consider how the international community can learn from previous experience and more effectively achieve the transition to the rule of law.
Overall reform of the UN—its methods of working and its institutions—is one of the most timely and critical issues that we will face. Like any organisation that wishes to remain relevant in the modern world, the UN continually updates its priorities and its working methods. That is why the Government are committed to pushing forward the process of reform, which has been led with such vigour by the Secretary-General of the UN, Kofi Annan. Part of our agenda for reform is of long-standing and part is based on new thinking—inspired, bluntly, by what has taken place during recent months—and the discussions that I initiated and led in the Foreign Office, which involved the Foreign Secretary and other Ministers and a range of politicians, academics and practitioners. I believe that some Members here today attended a seminar on UN reform held at the Foreign Office on 19 June.
Institutional reform can play an important part. The Government have been a long-standing supporter of enlarging the permanent and non-permanent categories of Security Council membership. The original Council formation was enlarged in 1965 to reflect the growth in UN membership in the post-colonial era, but the world has moved on and changed significantly since 1965, with the enormous expansion in UN membership and the end of the cold war. In particular, the economic power of Japan and Germany and their enormous contribution to the UN should be recognised with permanent seats on the Security Council. India and Brazil, which are emerging powers, should be given seats reflecting their regional weight and increasing global reach. Significantly, Africa must be given a permanent seat to ensure that countries can build up experience and weight in the Council that will give that continent, which takes up so much of the Security Council's time, a more effective voice.
However, the Security Council is only part of the picture. If we wholly and exclusively focus on its makeup, we will miss the essential importance of the debate. To maintain its position at the centre of the international system, the Council must address the full range of the challenges that face us. The need for it to deal with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is pressing. As a first step, it would be appropriate for it to acknowledge the threat and perhaps commission further work on how the UN could tackle the menace.
The Council must be as imaginative in that area as possible, and certainly as imaginative as it was in responding to the terrorist threats and attacks that happened exactly two years ago today. Following those horrendous attacks, the establishment of the Counter-Terrorism Committee within the framework of the Council was an unprecedented innovation, showing how the Council can succeed in setting the international agenda. The CTC was chaired very ably and successfully for its first 18 months by Sir Jeremy Greenstock, who is now en route to Iraq to work with Paul Bremer in leading the international effort there. The CTC set up a system of peer review that has shown significant progress in making universal the existing international instruments against terror. The chairmanship has now been taken on with equal vigour by Spain.
144WH It is perhaps time to consider whether the CTC should be placed on a more permanent footing, with control of its own resources and expert staff, as recently recommended by the Foreign Affairs Committee. I would be interested to hear Members' comments and views on that issue.
Similarly, we should return to the question of when the Council and the international community should have the right to intervene in massive abuses of human rights, whether those inflicted by Governments on their own peoples or those that Governments are powerless to prevent. The debate that was rightly sparked by the horrors of Rwanda and Kosovo has largely fallen silent. The UK was at the forefront of earlier action on the matter, starting with the Prime Minister's speech in Chicago in 1999, and subsequently pursued through draft guidelines that we floated in the Security Council.
This is a very important issue, and I know from brief conversations that I had with two hon. Members who intend to contribute today that it is of real interest and concern to them. If we want the UN to be the credible and effective body that it needs to be in the modern world, we must face up to the questions of where, how and why it is justified to intervene on humanitarian grounds. I say that as a passionate believer in and supporter of the UN.
Clearly, we also want to invigorate the General Assembly, which is too often weighed down by its attachment to outdated procedures and to the continual recycling of well-worn arguments, as the same resolutions come up year after year. The Assembly is also too often deadlocked by the bloc politics that have somehow outlived the cold war, which ensures an atmosphere of continual confrontation and, bluntly, lowest-common-denominator solutions. Too much Assembly business is repetitive and sterile, with the same issues coming up year after year, thereby choking the agenda and blocking off other discussion. Little time is allowed for the General Assembly to debate the many issues of substance that genuinely face the world today.
There are practical procedures that we can put in place to deal with the problem and to streamline the agenda. We could, for example, reduce the frequency and length of the time for which committees meet, ensure that the Assembly debates certain low-priority issues only once every two or three years, rather than annually as at present, and combine related resolutions. We should consider, very strongly in my view, introducing sunset clauses for programmes, so that we do not keep programmes running year after year even when the issue has moved on and the real problem is not as significant and enduring as it was. We also have to strengthen the oversight role of the General Committee, the General Assembly's agenda-setting body.
In the context of General Assembly reform, I am pleased to welcome the election of Julian Hunte, the Foreign Minister of St. Lucia, as the president for this year's session of the General Assembly. As well as that being a long-overdue chance for a Caribbean country to take on that important post, we are pleased to note his reforming agenda, and we intend to work closely with him to ensure that he can push forward that agenda and develop his plans to increase the relevance of the Assembly's work.
145WH We have also taken the opportunity to set out in the Command Paper our intention to take action to try to break down the stultifying bloc politics of the Assembly. We want to seek ways of building alliances across regional and political groupings. We also want to place that on the agenda of the European Union, the G8 and other forums to ensure that we are all considering it as constructively as we can. In particular, we want to focus on those countries whose lack of resources leaves them especially reliant on the group system because they feel that they have nowhere else to go.
We want the UN to reach out more effectively to non-governmental organisations, whose role in society has increased immeasurably and dramatically since the UN was established. That has been a very healthy and positive development, but the UN needs to develop, evolve and catch up with it to ensure that it is engaging with everyone, not just national Governments.
On secretariat reform, the UN has recognised, under Kofi Annan's stewardship, that a successful organisation needs an effective administration to deliver its priorities. The Secretary-General has drawn on his experience at the heart of the administration to shape the reform agenda that he initially launched back in 1997. Much has been done, which we welcome, but there is still room for improvement.
In September 2002, the Secretary-General launched the latest round of his programme of reforms with a report entitled "Strengthening the UN: An Agenda for Further Change". The United Kingdom has fully supported that agenda. The latest reform agenda includes many items: priority setting, management of human resources, financial management, working practices and ensuring that there are appropriate staffing levels. All that is crucial to providing an efficient administration that can deliver priority activities and go on to achieve the objectives set for the UN by the international community.
The UK Government take a lead role in pushing for reform of the UN bureaucracy. Reprioritising activity in line with the millennium declaration, coupled with time limits on programme mandates— also known as sunset clauses—will be key. There is real concern that the UN is in danger of spreading itself too thinly because it has failed to discontinue activity that is either redundant or no longer serves its original purpose. People who say that they support the UN—thus implying or suggesting that we should not challenge, question or scrutinise how it works—are not genuinely its friends. If it is to evolve and be successful and effective, it needs to take on those challenges.
On the UN budget, an organisation with such a wide range of responsibilities and interests undoubtedly needs adequate funding to carry out those functions. The UK, rightly and justifiably. is a major financial contributor to the UN. In 2002, the UK paid more that £600 million, through our assessed and voluntary contributions, to support the many activities described in the Command Paper on the UN that we have recently published. That is a considerable sum, but it represents excellent value for money when set against the benefits that the UN delivers. For example, we each pay only about £1.90 for the UK's share of the cost of 146WH peacekeeping operations. Everyone would acknowledge that that is value for money, given the benefit that it can bring.
As a major contributor, we are also interested in proper management of UN budgets. Our permanent mission to the UN at New York represents the UK in negotiations on expenditure for the UN regular budget, peacekeeping operations and international tribunals at the fifth committee of the General Assembly, where all aspects of the programme and activity are carefully scrutinised to promote budgetary rigour and maximum effectiveness in supporting the UN's overall objectives.
The UK has certainly lobbied for linkage between budget and reform, using the budget as a tool to push for acceptance of the Secretary-General's reform agenda. It is important to stress that our aim is not to cut budgets but to ensure that the organisation delivers value for money. Nobody is suggesting that there should be a cut in contributions, but if we can introduce greater efficiency and focus, we can ensure that there is even more money to spend on other programmes within the UN structure.
Finally, I turn to development. The UN is undoubtedly integral to the international development architecture. Major players such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are part of the UN family and work with the United Nations Development Programme and other UN development organisations to make poor people's lives better. Since 1997, when the UN Secretary-General set in train a series of reforms to the UN development effort, much has happened to improve co-ordination across the UN family, with support for that process from the Department for International Development.
Those reforms were carried forward in the Secretary-General's 2002 reform agenda, with action points addressing the need to strengthen the effectiveness of the UN's presence in developing countries and to clarify roles and responsibilities in technical co-operation. In parallel with those efforts, individual UN bodies in the sphere of development have launched ambitious programmes aimed at improving the Assembly's focus.
I have tried to run through current Government thinking on reforming the UN, its institutions and its methods of working. I hope that we can have a constructive debate this afternoon, and it is timely that we are debating the issues in the UK. We are not the only people undertaking that process. The Secretary-General has made it clear that he wants to propose and develop a reform agenda. The Latin American countries are undertaking a similar review, and many other members of the UN are going through similar processes. The reform of the UN has been long discussed, but I genuinely believe that the timing and circumstances for the debate are the most propitious for some time. I therefore urge Members to get involved.
I have not given an exhaustive list of the options for UN reform. As I have said, we have listened to many views in drawing up the work programme, and I hope to hear more views during the debate. It is essential that the UK's engagement with the UN and its reform go wider than just involving the Government. We want to engage civil society and the private sector, and we want to encourage well-informed debate in Parliament.
147WH This debate is the start of what we see as an annual process. At this time each year, in the run-up to the UN General Assembly meeting, the Government will propose an annual Commons debate on the UK's position within the UN, which may help the UN and us. The process is important, and I look forward to hearing what Members have to say and hope that we can have a constructive debate.
2.58 pm
§ Mr. Alan Duncan (Rutland and Melton)Hon. Members will agree that this is one of the most timely debates that we have seen in this Chamber. It comes when the UN's role in Iraq, and indeed the whole future direction of the UN, is on all our minds. I place on record my own and my party's condolences and appreciation for all those who have lost their lives serving the UN, particularly those dedicated and hard-working people who were killed and injured in the recent bombing of the UN building in Baghdad.
I recall debating this subject in May last year. On that occasion, I said that in an ever more globalised world, discussions and understanding between nations are more important than ever. The opportunities for misunderstanding and conflict may be greater, but so too are the opportunities to resolve such problems without violence. The UN remains an important forum—probably the most important forum—for the resolution of disputes between nations and peoples, as well as being an agent for social and economic progress.
What cannot be escaped, however, is the fact that since that debate, much has changed. Iraq merely threw into stark relief what had been lingering for some time. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Mr. Ancram) said in a lecture earlier in the summer, international institutions, including the United Nations, the EU and NATO, have all sustained damage during the Iraq conflict. He pointed this out:
For many, the United Nations is still widely perceived as the ultimate organisation of international cooperation … but the stark truth is that, in the run-up to the Iraq conflict, the UN Security Council was rendered impotent, and in February when France made it explicitly clear that it would veto any 'second' resolution … it became effectively gridlocked".The questions that remain are whether recent events have undermined the Security Council's effectiveness or simply its reputation in Washington DC, and what can be done to help the United Nations adapt to recent and not so recent changes.We have to look deeper to understand that. The vital backdrop is the end of the cold war and the geopolitical changes that flowed from it. The UN was established in the era immediately after the second world war, and it came of age during the cold war. That was a time when the two superpowers and their two attendant blocs counterbalanced each other. Neither one side nor the other could dominate the world, and neither of them had a free hand to act as they wished. It was an era of balance and, in many ways, of compromise.
Today, the Communist eastern bloc is gone and the USA remains as a world power—indeed, the world power. It possesses unrivalled military, economic and technological power, and as things stand there is no rival power or power bloc that can match it. That presents a changed geopolitical environment from the one in which
148WH the United Nations emerged, because the US has the power to act as it wishes. It can act unilaterally if it determines that that is in line with its national security strategy document. The USA can act alone if it perceives a risk to itself. That ability to act unilaterally, combined with its clear view of a threat that necessitates removal, has coloured many views and subsequent actions of the US Administration.
With Iraq, the US believed that the UN had already made clear its view that Iraq was acting illegally, and the US therefore believed that it was incumbent on the UN to enforce previous resolutions—it would have otherwise failed in its duty and thereby made itself redundant. Others, such as France and Germany, took the view that if the Security Council simply agreed with the US proposals, that would be tantamount to making itself redundant, as it: would be abrogating its right to disagree with a proposed course of action.
To many, it appeared that the US was saying, "We hope you back us, but if you don't we'll act unilaterally anyway." That appeared to mark the death of multilateral consensual conduct of international relations in favour of a more conviction-based model where the hyperpower called all the shots. If this were a truly a unilateral world, the UN would not have a discernible role in great power politics. It is not, however, a truly unilateral world, and ironically, events in Iraq have begun to show that quite brutally. To be effective, power must be matched with wider acceptance.
The reality is complex, and in the world today there are probably even more reasons why we need the UN than there were before. That is something that the United States Administration are also beginning to realise. Let us not forget that President Bush and Secretary Powell made their presentations on Iraq to the UN and sought, and succeeded in obtaining, a UN Security Council resolution—1441—before finally acting.
I do not intend to revisit yesterday's debate, save to say that since the end of the conflict the importance of the UN in the reconstruction of Iraq has become daily more clear. America recognises that it needs the assistance of the international community through the UN for the reconstruction of Iraq. I, like most others, welcomed President Bush's statement earlier this year, following talks with the Prime Minister, in which he made clear the importance that he attached to the UN's involvement in post-Saddam Iraq.
We have long supported UN involvement in the reconstruction. Although we regret the Government's apparently inadequate preparations for post-Saddam Iraq, which have placed a great burden on our troops who are obliged to do jobs that would be more properly done by aid organisations and contractors, we hope that every effort will be made to secure greater UN involvement. I hope that no country will seek to block or undermine those measures, as we can all see that that would only hurt the Iraqis.
We should not fall into the trap of pretending that until recently the UN Security Council was a perfect body in which the political interests of individual nations were separated from their behaviour. The cold war was filled with political use of the veto on both sides—for example, on motions regarding Israel. The UN has always reflected political power.
149WH The UN charter aspires to save people from the scourge of war, establish conditions under which justice, human rights and respect for international obligations can be maintained,
promote social progress and better standards of life",and practise tolerance. Those objectives are as valid and worthy today as when the charter was drawn up. We must try to modernise the UN where necessary and translate the objectives into workable projects. That highlights the concept of what the new UN, if I may call it that, has to do. To be effective, it must blend power and consensus. That is the challenge that it must address during the reforms that it faces. Given America's status and power, the corollary is that no one should expect the UN to be able to tell the US what to do, if Washington is not so minded. Equally, no one should expect the US to be able to tell the UN what to do and have it fall into line on every occasion.I am encouraged that the debate to reform the UN to adapt it to those new realities is going strong. It is a debate to which my right hon. Friend the Member for Devizes constructively contributed in his recent lecture, addressing issues such as the need to expand the UN Security Council, areas in which the UN has a positive role to play and the question of peacekeeping or peace making. I do not have time to rehearse all his erudite arguments today, but I will touch on a couple of them.
Similarly, I welcome the Minister's contribution today, and a speech that he made in June, but I do not believe that all the proposals that he has outlined would necessarily help. Some threaten to create more, not less, bureaucracy, and although increases in the size of the Security Council are proposed, there are no suggestions for tackling problems that might arise if, for example, India became a permanent member but Pakistan did not. None the less, those are important contributions to what should be a mature and open debate.
Kofi Annan's proposals, which were recently published and are soon to be formally discussed, are also important. Mr. Annan has ruled out a run-of-the-mill review and has thereby made an important commitment to improve the inner workings of the UN. I welcome the decision by President Bush, President Chirac and Chancellor Schrőder to accept Mr. Annan's invitation to attend the UN General Assembly meeting to debate UN reform priorities. I am sorry that—unless the Minister has something to announce today—our Prime Minister will not be there.
We cannot deny that the debate is real and urgent. One key question is whether the UN should be engaged in peace making as well as peacekeeping. The UN has been successful in peacekeeping operations such as those in Namibia, El Salvador, Cambodia, Mozambique and Cyprus. On a bigger and more recent level, it has been in Afghanistan where, although there is still much to be done, there is much of which the UN can be very proud.
As I said last year, humanitarian aid, health programmes and the building of effective education systems are all vital if we are to tackle the long-term causes of poverty and conflict. Dealing with humanitarian crises when they occur, helping refugees and feeding a starving population are important aspects 150WH of the UN's work. There is also, however, a longer-term commitment to improving social conditions and tackling root causes, and in those areas the UN continues to be the key international player.
United Nations subsidiary bodies also have a long and distinguished record. The World Health Organisation successfully co-ordinated the international response to SARS and has been combating various lethal diseases in developing and developed countries for decades. The International Atomic Energy Agency has been doing vital work in monitoring atomic materials, most recently in Iran. The World Food Programme is successfully relieving starvation and famine in afflicted areas. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees continues to relieve the suffering of people made homeless and stateless by conflict and natural disasters. The UN has been taking an active, indeed a leading role in the fight against AIDS. That is a superficial skim across the surface of some of the UN's activities that are perhaps not as much in the public eye as the activities of the Security Council, but they are every bit as important.
There is room for reform in those areas as well: for example, in the procedures of organisations such as the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. I hope that a firmer line could be taken with countries such as Burma and Zimbabwe, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Devizes has repeatedly called on the Government to internationalise the situation in Zimbabwe through the UN. I would be interested to know why the Government do not make better use of the UN in that way, and why they appear to be frightened of bringing the tragedies of Zimbabwe to the attention of the international community. It could only be constructive if they were to do so, and I do not understand what they are afraid of.
I have focused on the broader questions concerning the UN's future, rather than on the specific achievements and reform proposals that many hon. Members will no doubt address thoroughly and eloquently this afternoon. I want to leave time for others to consider this important subject, but the UN deserves a practical alliance of realism and idealism. That is the only way in which it can effectively adapt to the new geopolitical environment and continue to serve the interests of its members. I hope and believe that that balance can be struck. It must be struck. because the UN is far from past its sell-by date; it is in need of change, but has much good work still to do.
3.11 pm
§ Mr. Clive Soley (Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush)Before I contribute to this important debate, I hope, Mr. Pike, that you will allow me to say a few words about Westminster Hall, because it is the first time that I have spoken here. That might seem odd because, as you will remember, we served together on the Modernisation Committee in which I introduced a paper suggesting that we have another debating chamber, which I clumsily called the Second Chamber or the Primary Chamber. The Clerks, with all their wisdom and historical knowledge, suggested a better name: Westminster Hall.
The aim was to alter the timetabling of the House of Commons, so that debates such as this were not conducted in the middle of the night or on Friday 151WH evenings. I have watched this Chamber evolve into an important part of the House of Commons—although I have not taken part in its debates. When I wrote that short paper, I hoped that the media would be interested in the Chamber's proceedings. I regret that they have chosen largely to ignore it. That is a great shame because so much is introduced here that the British people should hear about. I want to put that on record.
I identify myself with the comments made by the Opposition spokesman and the Minister on the Baghdad bombing. One of my near neighbours in Oxford, who was in the same office as the representative, had his legs blown off and suffered other appalling injuries. We must remember that, as well as the deaths that occurred, many in that dreadful experience, such as Gill Loescher, suffered awful injuries from which they will never fully recover. That is a reminder of how those who work for the UN place their lives and liberties at risk for the benefit of the citizens of the world.
I welcome the debate because, as the Minister will know, I have been concerned for a considerable time about the need to reform the UN. When people talk about reforming it, they normally mean reforming the Security Council to make it more representative of the modern world. I accept that that is important. It is long overdue that countries such as India and Brazil—two future superpowers, by any standard—are represented on the Security Council. That is an issue on which people agree that reform is necessary
However, I do not want to focus my comments on that issue today. I want to make a relatively short contribution on what I see as the most important aspect of reform in the United Nations: the procedure for dealing with totalitarian and failed states. It is a difficult issue, because every nation is a member of the United Nations, and one person's definition of a tyrannical regime is another person's definition of life, liberty and heaven on earth.
The world now has an opportunity that it has not had before. All the great powers have either got democracy and the rule of law or are trying to get it. Both China and Russia fall into the latter group. They are feeling their way towards the rule of law and democratic processes but are clear that they want to get there. That means that there is a growing recognition around the world that it is impossible to have a modern state that is based on a tyrannical regime or for a modern state to make full use of technology without many different freedoms, including that of information. Freedom requires both the rule of law and a degree of democracy.
I am conscious of how the United Nations was set up in 1945. We must remember that it was established in the context of the second great war of the 20th century and the failure of the League of Nations. There was a great desire to create a structure that would make it difficult for countries to invade and go to war with each other again. Although there have been a few examples of failure, overall it has been remarkably successful, particularly in its work to make it more difficult for nation states to invade each other. However, one problem at the heart of the 1945 settlement was that it put the nation state at the centre of everything. It did not pay the attention, which we now have to give, to failed and failing states. Our big challenge for the 21st century is to do that.
152WH In the several recent debates on Iraq, I became increasingly struck by the similarity between the argument on the primacy of the nation state and the one that we used to have in Britain and other western countries about the primacy of the man—and I mean the man—in his own home. We have always been ready to intervene against nations if they cross their borders, so Iraq's invasion of Kuwait immediately produced an outcry, but we turn a blind eye to what happens within the nation state.
An analogy that I have used before concerns our past domestic law. If a man beat his wife up in the street, he would be arrested, but if he did it in his own home we would take no notice. Indeed, I remember as a child walking by on the other side of the road from one house, with my mother saying, "It must be dreadful to live there. I wonder why she doesn't leave." We regarded it as unacceptable to intervene because a man's home was his castle, and we take a similar view with failed and failing states.
As the Minister and I have discussed on several occasions, and as I raised with the Prime Minister after the last G7 summit, when it was also discussed, it is difficult to get the lines right about how or when to intervene, particularly as there are different definitions of democracy, the rule of law and freedom. However, the vast majority of us, and a growing number of states and leaders around the world, know the difference between a tyrannical regime and one that is trying to succeed and needs help.
People sometimes say to me, "You intervened in Iraq. Who's next? Why not intervene in all these other countries?" The answer is simply that different judgments must be made for different situations. Let me spend a few minutes considering that point. I took the view that it was right, to intervene in Iraq. In fact, if anything, we should have intervened much earlier. The problem for the UN was that it had signed a ceasefire with Iraq, but that was never fully put into effect. Saddam Hussein did not honour the conditions laid down in the ceasefire, so a spate of 17 resolutions followed, as we well know, again calling on Saddam Hussein to accept the requirements that the UN had imposed on him. We ended up passing all the resolutions and signing a ceasefire when we knew that the state involved would not follow any of them. We had the additional problem that Iraq was located in a very unstable region.
That leads me to other examples. People ask, "Why not intervene in Iran, Syria, Zimbabwe, Burma or North Korea?" I say that the arguments are different. One can argue that there is the prospect of Zimbabwe and Burma returning to a degree of normality and freedom if we get the assistance and, indeed, the pressure right. There is a considerable effort in the world to do that. There is also some hope of achieving that in Iran and Syria. Indeed, I argue that there are quite exciting prospects for the reform movements in those countries to win. It does not follow that they will win, but there is a chance.
The issue of North Korea is much more difficult. If there were a country that needed regime change, it would be North Korea, but there is a difference between North Korea and Iraq. Unlike Iraq, North Korea is located in an area of stability. It is surrounded by states—most notably, Japan, South Korea and China; there is also Russia—with an interest in maintaining 153WH stability. That indicates how we should ask the UN to restructure itself. If there is a regional interest in restoring stability—there certainly is with North Korea, Zimbabwe and Burma—the UN needs two things: the ability to work with the other regional powers in a way that secures change and stability, and structures that enable it both to put pressure on I he countries involved and to offer the carrot of help towards reform.
In reality, however, if a regime is so awful that it destabilises the surrounding region, the UN needs the ability to intervene. On Rwanda, we failed, and failed miserably. Everyone in the world should recognise that. When people say to me, "You can't intervene in nation states," I say that if I had lived there, I would have wanted someone to help me.
Many Iraqis live in my constituency, and many of them opposed the war, but on one matter they were all clear—they wanted rid of Saddam Hussein. One man in my constituency lost half his family to Saddam Hussein and then three other family members to a British bomb. Not surprisingly, he feels very ambivalent about the whole thing, but the one thing on which he is not ambivalent is the pleasure at seeing the end of Saddam Hussein. That man in my constituency is critical of many of the other things that we have said and done, but he supports that.
We should never underestimate the importance of recognising the right of individuals to have the rest of the world take sufficient interest in their concerns and problems and intervene as and when that is necessary. That does not mean that the world should invade Burma, Zimbabwe or wherever. It means that we should develop different structures, within and outside regions, to put pressure on countries to reform. It also means that we should face up to the difficult problem of regime change because, as we all know, the UN cannot legally just go in and call for regime change. However, that is what the UN wanted with regard to Iraq, and Kosovo and Serbia. We intervened in Kosovo without the approval of the UN—it could not agree on Kosovo either, but it accepted that intervention, as did most of the world, because it knew that it was necessary. However, the assumptions behind the articles of the UN are that it cannot require regime change, such as was needed also in Rwanda. We therefore have to face up to that difficult choice.
I shall conclude my remarks by saying to the Minister that we need the UN to draw up much more flexible ways of intervening. By "intervening" I mean everything from putting pressure on, to offering support and help, to discussing with other nations in the region what we can do to change the situation in countries such as Zimbabwe, Burma, Iraq and Iran.
We all know what the problems are. We know that there is a current tendency to want to move in the right direction, but we have to change the UN from what it was in 1945—an organisation designed to protect individual nations from outside intervention—to one that expects its members to live up to certain minimum standards. That does not mean that we should invade China if it still commits human rights abuses, but it means that we should have much tougher codes on human rights, and ways of drawing attention to nations that are failing to deliver on that—we all fail to deliver 154WH sometimes. Above all, a series of steps should be taken before we take the ultimate step of intervening in a nation state that has totally failed, is destabilising its region, brutalising its population and, as in the case of Saddam Hussein, is run by a psychopathic killer who has managed to take over that state.
We cannot sit back and pretend that such problems concern only the people of a particular country, and that they can do something about them. They might have been able to do something when a dictator took over, but once that has happened the opportunity for removing him disappears. That is particularly true of leaders who have brutal regimes, such as Saddam Hussein, which suppress all dissent and do so very effectively. I do not believe that the world is willing to sit back and watch such things take place any longer—the television coverage of Kosovo, where people saw what was happening, demonstrated that.
In a sense, the problem is that people did not see what was happening in Iraq. They did not see the awful tortures that took place there, examples of which were given by my hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd). Television did not show children being tortured in front of their families to make them talk, or people being put into plastic shredders. Therefore some people—whether over the road in Parliament square or elsewhere—still say that people are dying in Iraq now. That is true, but the numbers dying are dramatically fewer than those dying under Saddam Hussein's regime. Moreover, there is not the appalling and nightmarish torture that took place in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. That message needs to be put across, and the UN is the organisation to transmit it. During this century, the power of public opinion and the ability of the UN to examine those complex situations will give us a better chance to reduce the power of those psychopathic killers, and to remove them from power in the states in which they cause so much misery.
3.29 pm
§ Mr. Michael Moore (Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale)It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush (Mr. Soley). I echo his comments about the Westminster Hall venue. Those of us who are on the beat in this Chamber slightly more regularly than he is endorse what he says about this being a place where we have the opportunity for measured debates, of which this afternoon's is a good example.
In the introduction to the Command Paper that is the starting point for the debate, the Foreign Secretary says:
Never has the UN been more needed.I say, "Hear, hear," to that. As we meet on the second anniversary of what is universally known as 9/11—the terrible atrocities in New York, Washington and elsewhere in the United States—we are in reflective mood. We have had 12 months of intense and—we must not duck this—divisive activity that has left the participants in the debate wounded, figuratively and sometimes literally. It is welcome that we have a chance this afternoon to reflect on that, and I particularly welcome the Minister's statement that this is intended to be an annual event.If the United Nations did not exist, we would have to invent it. It replaced the League of Nations, which proved itself sadly ineffective in preventing conflict in 155WH the world or managing the different competing powers of the nation states. There have been times, especially in the past year, when people felt we were in danger of needing to invent a third international body. I do not take that pessimistic view, but we need to recognise the innate value of the United Nations and understand why it is important that it exists. In a fractured world, it is vital for making and keeping the peace. It is essential to have proper forums in which we can talk, rather than going to war. Increasingly, we need to assist the world's poorest out of the famine and disease that often underpin wars and conflicts.
Earlier this week at a press conference, the United Nations Secretary-General made a distinction between hard and soft threats. We have focused on the hard threats of international terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and so on, but we must give equal attention to the soft threats of famine and disease, especially HIV/AIDS.
On balance, the United Nations is undoubtedly a force for good overall, although it is not without problems and shortcomings. In common with other hon. Members who have spoken in the debate, I believe it is important that we acknowledge the fact that the United Nations is in the front line. The tragic attack on the United Nations building in Baghdad in August killed 22 people and, as the hon. Member for Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush said, injured many, who will live with their difficulties for a long time, if not for the rest of their lives. The event led us to reflect on the ideas that underpin the United Nations: was it a target simply because it is an easy target in such circumstances, or was that symbolic of a wider challenge to its legitimacy?
As we debate these issues, it is important to recognise the strong role that Britain plays in the debates, and in maintaining the United Nations. Britain more than lives up to its position as a founding member of the United Nations and a current member of the Security Council. My colleagues and I profoundly disagreed with United Kingdom Government approaches on key issues such as Iraq; nevertheless, we recognise that under successive Labour and Conservative Governments. Britain has played a leading role in the United Nations.
That is highlighted in three key areas. First, our diplomatic contribution is first-class. Mention has already been made of Sir Jeremy Greenstock, who is now the special representative in Iraq. I had the privilege of meeting him in New York a few years ago, and I was impressed by him and his colleagues, and the operation that they oversaw. I join all other hon. Members in wishing him well in his difficult role in Iraq. More recently I met the new ambassador, Sir Emyr Jones Parry, in his previous incarnation as ambassador to NATO. He has a hard act to follow in Sir Jeremy Greenstock, but I am sure that he will be well up to the task.
Apart from our diplomatic contributions at the UN, Britain's financial contribution should not go unnoticed. The Command Paper highlights that in great detail. It is a staggering amount of money. I hope that the people in the Treasury who attend to these things appreciate just how important that contribution is. and do not regard it as a soft target. Without those contributions Britain's clout in the UN would not be nearly so significant.
156WH A third area that I shall briefly highlight, echoing the Minister, is the significant military contribution that our forces make around the world in the many different problem areas that have been mentioned. So many other areas could be listed too. In each of them people recognise Britain's role, and for that reason we continue to have a greater influence than we might otherwise have as a middle-ranking country.
Current events are never far from our attention. The bomb in Iraq brought us all up short. This weekend there is a gathering of Foreign Secretaries and senior UN officials in Geneva to attempt to broker a proper resolution for the ongoing administration and governance of Iraq. As the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton (Mr. Duncan) said, yesterday's debate covered most of the main issues and I do not seek to rehearse them again. I hope that it is taken on board that the legitimacy of the post-war situation in Iraq will depend on the embedding and involvement of the UN in its many different guises in the governance of that country. UN authorisation and accountability for the operations there are essential. If the wider world is to believe that something more than a military conflict has taken place, UN endorsement will be very important.
The middle east is never far from our thoughts. The latest suicide bombings and the Israeli retaliation are a depressing return to a familiar cycle. The UN is part of the Quartet, still hopefully sticking to the road map, which is being torn apart with each passing day. It is not clear whether it is sensible to retain any optimism about the road map, but without it, and if the UN and other key powers do not play their key role, there can be even less hope in the middle east.
There are huge areas of important work that the UN does beyond seeking to make peace or keep it once conflict is over. Often those burst into the headlines. I am sure that other hon. Members will focus on some of the development issues that are before the world at present, not least at the World Trade Organisation meeting at Cancun in Mexico. We must not lose sight of the fact that the momentum that developed and the real sense of optimism when the millennium development goals were endorsed just a few short years ago are beginning to be lost. If we do not think that that is right we should pause to reflect on the words of Kofi Annan at his press briefing earlier this week in New York. He said that he was not sure that the consensus and vision were still intact to deliver on the millennium development goals. I hope that the Minister will reflect on that when he winds up.
Even the greatest supporters of the United Nations—I count myself among them—recognise that, for all its achievements, it needs reform. The contributions that we have heard this afternoon have focused on that in large part. The Secretary-General led the charge when he spoke publicly not long ago. Reflecting on the uncertainties of the past year, he said:
We all agree that there are new threats, or rather that old challenges have resurfaced in new and more virulent forms. What we do not seem to agree on is what exactly they are, or how to respond, or even whether the response should be a collective one. We seem no longer to agree on what the main threats are, or on how to deal with them.He recognised that without even that basic agreement there is something wrong with the United Nations.157WH As the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton said, the Secretary-General encouraged Heads of State to attend the General Assembly later this month. I understand that the Prime Minister will not attend—I am not sure whether that is because it coincides with the Labour party conference or an important national or international event. I hope that the Minister can assure us that even if the Prime Minister does not attend, Britain will still be represented at a senior level at those talks. We are at a key point in the UN's development, and the Prime Minister, whatever our disagreements with him, has championed the international order, so surely he should be there and take part in those discussions.
We could focus on many areas that need reform, and some have been mentioned this afternoon. I agree with the Minister that innovations such as the Counter-Terrorism Committee are welcome. We support his notion that such a committee should become a permanent feature of the United Nations infrastructure. That committee illustrates the UN's ability to innovate. We regularly hear that it is a morass of bureaucracy and inflexible, but a new need was identified, a solution was found, and we should seek to make it permanent.
Kofi Annan has highlighted the need for Security Council reform, saying
if we can reform the Council and make it more democratic and representative, it will gain also in greater legitimacy. I think most Member States want to see that happen.I cannot imagine anyone opposing that sentiment.I agree with the broad thrust of the suggestion that there should be new permanent members of the Security Council. Japan and Germany have been mentioned as key members and, crucially, there should be members from other continents which, almost scandalously, do not have permanent representation on the Security Council.
Perhaps the Minister would also deal with an issue about which the Secretary-General was clearly troubled. If countries are to be eligible for permanent member status they must have no outstanding resolutions against them at the Security Council. A point that was specifically made to the Secretary-General was the situation in India and Kashmir. None of us wants to challenge the right of India, Brazil or any other country to be part of the Security Council, but perhaps the Minister would specify some criteria that he envisages as the basis for membership.
Another area that needs reform is the way in which Security Council resolutions are developed. That must be done mostly privately in the backwaters of the UN headquarters in New York, Geneva or whatever venue is most appropriate. However, too much of the political debate that is important in this country and elsewhere is influenced by leaks, counter-leaks and lack of information on what is actually at stake. The example that I would highlight is Zimbabwe. There has been a great deal of pressure from us, from the Conservatives and, frankly, from the whole House, on the Government to seek a United Nations resolution. Understandably, Ministers have said that they do not want to introduce a draft resolution for fear that it will be rebuffed—I am sure that the Minister will repeat that today. I think that 158WH that solution only suits Zimbabwe. We must find a new mechanism for discussing draft resolutions, and understand who is blocking them and why. Only in that way can we seek to focus the power of the United Nations on the members who are blocking serious efforts to resolve real problems.
Zimbabwe takes us neatly to one other area that I would like to touch on, which was the focus of the contribution by the hon. Member for Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush—the doctrines of intervention that we might encourage and develop. I do not want to repeat the arguments of March, or those of the many weeks and months preceding that debate. We had a thoughtful contribution about why what we did was right then. Many of the arguments will appeal to all of us on different levels. Was it right or not? The legality of it will entertain international lawyers and academics for years to come. Understandably, the UK debate, which was passionate and vigorous, was a microcosm of a much wider debate.
I would agree with the Minister's comment that we failed in Rwanda, and part of the reason why we failed is that we did not have at our disposal the tools that would legitimise and allow such interventions to take place. That has to be seen alongside the question whether there is the political will to deliver the troops required. We also live in a world where the United States has set out its new doctrine of pre-emption, which many would say is fundamentally at odds with the United Nations charter and with international law as we have known it.
We all accept that United Nations resolutions are not the sole repository of international legitimacy, but equally, we accept that they are important sources of that legitimacy. We need a new mechanism that will allow us to work out how we deal with crimes against humanity, genocide and all the humanitarian issues that are troubling us in this modern world. As the hon. Member for Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush said, so much of what we now have to cope with internationally is happening within member states' borders rather than across them. The UN needs to recognise that, and we need to be part of it.
Some of the reforms will be beyond the scope of one meeting of the General Assembly or a meeting of Heads of State, important as those are. I hope that the Minister will look for new ways to develop the momentum for reform. We might need a constitutional convention of UN members to consider that, aside from the regular meetings of the General Assembly. The system is broke, and it needs fixing—but it is well worth fixing.
As I draw my remarks to a close, I would like to comment in a parenthesis on the very sad death of Anna Lindh, the Swedish Foreign Minister, who was stabbed as she was out doing her shopping yesterday, and died overnight. There is a palpable sense of shock around the House and the whole Palace of Westminster today, and the international media are reflecting that. The Foreign Secretary and Secretary-General Kofi Annan have remarked on her commitment to the United Nations and her internationalism, and it is a tragic loss that she is no longer with us.
The debate has been important, and it will continue to be so. There are important contributions to come. I hope that in future this will not just be a Thursday afternoon debate in Westminster Hall, but something 159WH that can attract more attention in the House and in the country as a whole. Talking is the easy bit; we must hope that the Government will build on this debate, and build the momentum for change. Even critics such as the United States, which has sought to bypass the UN at key moments, now recognise more clearly its innate strength and purpose. As the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton said, it is not past its sell-by date but is a force for good, and we should all be focused on making it better and more effective.
3.49 pm
§ Valerie Davey (Bristol, West)I welcome the fact that the Government have initiated this debate and that they propose to have it each year. Even more than that, I welcome the enthusiasm in the Minister's opening statement not just for the more showy parts of the United Nations—the active, or even, dare I say, the more glamorous side: war. He gave his commitment to reform, which is part of the detailed diplomatic side—the necessary work of Ministers and civil servants. That work is behind the scenes, time consuming and undramatic, but his enthusiasm for it gave me some hope.
However, on this second anniversary of the attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon in the USA, it is appropriate that we have time to reflect on the role of the UN. I want to comment, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush (Mr. Soley), on the future and, in particular, on the role that he underlined, to which I shall come in a moment.
The events following 11 September 2001—the invasion of Afghanistan, the further terrorist attacks and the war in Iraq and its aftermath—have raised more and more questions about the importance and value of the UN. We had a useful debate yesterday on the UN in Iraq, and I do not want to cover that ground again, except to pay tribute, as other Members have done, to those UN staff who lost their lives on 19 August, particularly the leader of that group, Sergio Vieira de Mello. His record of service and his achievement underline the crucial role that the UN has played in the resolution of conflict through his work in post-conflict reconstruction in Lebanon, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor and, finally, Iraq. We have heard today of the death of Anna Lindh, and we recognise that both were people of international calibre; they were a loss not just to their family and friends or to their own nation. The contribution that both have made internationally will be sadly missed.
My concern—the future role of the UN—stems from the trauma of Rwanda. The jolt to my thinking happened when the UN pulled out of Rwanda, and we saw the violence and the genocide that followed. Since then, as other hon. Members have said, there have been tragedies in countries in need of support that the United Nations, with its present remit, has been unable to give—for example, in Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe.
I was especially keen to speak today following an interview that I heard last Sunday on Radio Bristol. It was with the visiting Bishop, the Rt. Rev. Ben Ojwang, who is the Bishop of Kitgum in northern Uganda. He spoke passionately of the situation facing his diocese and the people of northern Uganda as a result of the
160WH atrocities committed by the Lord's Resistance Army, including the abduction and brutalising of 20,000 children. That is happening in a country that we are all acclaiming as having met the HIPC—heavily indebted poor countries—regulations. It is one of the countries that is doing better and that we highlight as developing, and I am sure that my hon. Friend the Minister would suggest that it is one of those moving forward to democracy. Yet communities in the north of Uganda have been suffering terribly for 17 years.
As the bishop said, while the Ugandan army has gone into the Congo, it has failed to resolve the situation within its own borders. We all know that that depends in part on the situation in Sudan and involves the cross-flow of people, but it is tragic. The bishop argued for mediation to resolve the 17-year conflict and asked our Government to take part. Just as the interviewer was about to cut him off, he suddenly came up with a lovely illustration. He said that the only illustration he could give was the anguish and pain of childbirth from which there must come peace and that he was looking to Britain to be the midwife of peace in northern Uganda. It suddenly struck me that we should use that illustration for the United Nations: out of areas of tragedy, pain and conflict, we must bring forward hope and peace. I thanked the bishop in my mind and thought what a graphic and poignant illustration it was. I want hon. Members to keep Uganda in mind as we think about a new role for the UN that involves humanitarian intervention in a sovereign state.
As the Minister indicated, we do not have to start from scratch. I have not read the speech that the Prime Minister made in Chicago in 1999, but I will look for a copy. My new thinking on the issue was prompted by an article in the Financial Times in September 2000, written jointly by my right hon. Friend the Member for Livingston (Mr. Cook) and the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife (Mr. Campbell). The article was entitled "Revised Role in Humanitarian Tragedies". I ask all hon. Members to read that article again. It strongly expressed the need for the UN to play a role when
a government has shown that it is unwilling or unable to cope with a humanitarian catastrophe".It stated:We believe that the international community has a duty to intervene".The authors called for a clear framework for intervention to cope with such problems and proposed six principles, which are worth revisiting, as they are the kind of principles that we argued for in the House on 18 March. First, there should be more concentration on conflict prevention. Secondly, armed force should be used only as a last resort. Thirdly, responsibility in the first place should lie with the state where the violations are taking place. Fourthly, the international community has a duty to intervene when Governments are unwilling or unable to cope with a humanitarian catastrophe. Fifthly, any use of force should be proportionate to the humanitarian purposes to be achieved and in accordance with international law. Finally, the use of force should be collective and taken with the authority of the Security Council, except in exceptional circumstances.The authors went on to indicate that such things would not happen without further reform of the UN's structures. As many hon. Members will recall, they 161WH advocated allowing another five members to join the Security Council and suggested Germany, Japan and one each from Africa, Asia and Latin America. They asked for four more new, non-permanent members. They also raised the important idea of an annual resolutions review by the Secretary-General to ensure that resolutions were not ignored and to determine which obligations were outstanding. The article certainly impressed me. I have kept it and refer to it.
Internationally, things have been on the move. As I did in a speech in the House, I want to draw attention to the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty and its report, "The Responsibility to Protect", which was commissioned by the Canadian Government. The commission's year-long review reached with some important conclusions. The challenge of whether we can intervene was dealt with in the initial address by Kofi Annan:
Surely no legal principle—not even sovereignty—can ever shield crimes against humanity… Armed intervention must always remain the option of last resort, but in the face of mass murder, it is an option that cannot be relinquished."The report went on to indicate that there were times when intervention was called for in the wake of completely unacceptable human rights abuses. It has one key aim: to facilitate the process of building a new global consensus on intervention for human protection. Its central theme is that sovereign states have a responsibility to protect their own citizens from avoidable catastrophe, mass murder, rape and starvation, but that, if they are unwilling or unable to do so, responsibility must be borne by the broader community of states. Those ideas are therefore permeating the debate, internationally and nationally.Despite all the immediate demands on his time, the Prime Minister has also recently readdressed the issue. At the progressive governance summit in London in July, he insisted that we could not walk by on the other side if people in failed states were being brutally downtrodden. That echoes the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush.
The draft communiqué for the conference stated:
Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to avert it, the principle of nonintervention yields to the international responsibility to protect."In fact, the final communiqué did not contain those words—it appears that they were too radical for some international partners. However, the final version said that the report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, which was launched by the Canadian Government in 2000, was "a valuable contribution". The gathering in London referred to that report, and our Prime Minister again tried to ensure that we do not pass by on the other side.I admit that I have not seen the Command Paper—I must have come badly prepared for this debate—but I have pulled out the global conflict prevention pool document, for which I offer tribute to the Government. I am glad to say that, as is the Government's wont, the document is from three Departments: the Department for International Development, the Foreign and 162WH Commonwealth Office and the Ministry of Defence. All have put forward ideas for conflict prevention that are very much along the lines that have been alluded to this afternoon.
My one criticism—perhaps it is not strong because there is a parallel document—is that the United Nations is referred to on the very last page, rather than at the front, so the recognition that the Government are making a contribution with the UN, not just working in isolation, is somewhat lacking.
I quibble with one word in a sentence in the final paragraph—hon. Members will guess which word. The documents states that the UN was launched in 1948 and has, in the decades since,
helped to defuse tensions and encourage negotiated solutions in conflicts around the world. Its unique legitimacy and authority and its global mandate mean the United Nations has a key role to play in conflict prevention.It does not have "a key role" but the key role. We must continue to recognise that we have a valuable part to play. I was glad to hear the Secretary-General praise Britain for its contribution to the UN. In all that we say, our language must indicate that Britain is a member of the UN and that that is where our allegiance and effort will go.Lest it should be thought that my idealism has left behind any realism, I remind hon. Members that today is also the 30th anniversary of the overthrow of the Allende Government in Chile. That coup was supported by the UN through the CIA—a different sort of intervention in a sovereign state. That difficult situation in Chile is not of the sort that hon. Friends and I advocate, and there are different ways of interpreting intervention in a sovereign state. Such things are incredibly complex and not an easy option for the UN. Those of us who want to see humanitarian intervention—prevention, rather than always bringing about the cure—will have to work very carefully behind the scenes. A lot of careful diplomacy must take place.
Allende was not the only person killed, so I want to conclude with a reminder of the death of Victor Jara. He was a remarkable man—a poet and a theatre director. He was a man who supported the arts. Under arrest and held in a stadium, he was still composing in those short days before his death and the last couplet of an unfinished poem reads:
How hard it is to singwhen I must sing of horror.Horror which I am living,horror which I am dying.To see myself among so muchand so many moments of infinityin which silence and screamsare the end of my song.What I see I have never seen,what I have felt and what I feelwill give birth to the moment…There the poem ends. The phrase, "Will give birth" echoes the bishop's words, and I will end on that theme.Birth does not come about without agony, without pain. It will cost all of us a great deal to work towards intervention and an understanding of the level of humanitarian degradation that we, as the UN, should 163WH not be prepared to accept. I urge the Minister, with all his commitment and enthusiasm, to continue that work. Perhaps midwife is not the ideal metaphor or idea, but it has a strong potency, so I leave it with him and urge him to continue the good work that he has started.
4.8 pm
§ Tony Baldry (Banbury)The hon. Member for Bristol, West (Valerie Davey) has made a very sensible and sober speech. On Uganda, the International Development Committee has had several meetings with Members of the Ugandan Parliament, who have lobbied and briefed us on the sad situation in northern Uganda. The Lord's Resistance Army has committed a number of atrocities over the years—not least kidnapping children, tearing them from their families and turning them into child soldiers. That is a war crime. The message that we have been given is that the Lord's Resistance Army recognises that it has nowhere to go. Through mediation, it wants to find a solution with Kampala and President Museveni. There is a nuance here for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. There is a danger that we may be too keen on reform, which would allow us to have some success stories in Africa. We are perhaps too generous to President Museveni. We do not apply as much pressure on him as we might do on other countries. If there is to be progress in northern Uganda, it will be achieved by getting people around the table to try to find a solution to disarm the LRA.
The hon. Members for Bristol, West and for Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush (Mr. Soley) made some interesting points about intervention. This is my only thought about that: against the background of recent events, many countries in the world would see discussion of reforming the UN charter to make it easier to intervene as perhaps making it easier for the coalition to intervene when we want to do so.
May I give a domestic example of the sensitivity surrounding the matter? Next year, Parliament is due to host the annual Inter-Parliamentary Union conference. It is a significant event in our Parliament's life and that of the IPU. I have just returned from an IPU meeting in Cancun, which was held prior to the World Trade Organisation conference. I was surprised and distressed to hear that the Zimbabwean Government have made it clear that they want to attend the IPU conference next year. The Speaker of the Zimbabwean Parliament, who is a member of ZANU-PF, will lead their delegation. Unsurprisingly, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has made it clear that, in accordance with the EU sanctions in relation to Zimbabwe, if he applies for permission to travel to the UK, it will not be granted.
Everyone in the House is concerned about the situation in Zimbabwe. When the International Development Committee recently visited southern Africa, we concluded that Mugabe's actions in Zimbabwe had turned a difficult situation for southern Africa into a humanitarian disaster. A significant number of other African Parliaments have asked the secretary-general of the IPU to attend a special meeting in Geneva, where they will request that the venue for next year's conference be moved from London to somewhere else because they say that who attends IPU conferences should be a matter for them, and not for the UK Government. In other words, they are showing 164WH "solidarity" with Zimbabwe rather than facing up to the problems that President Mugabe and his Government are perpetrating against their own people.
That is disappointing. Those of us who are firm believers in the New Partnership for Africa's Development and in peer pressure in Africa find it particularly disappointing, but it is a fact of life. I sympathise with and support many of the approaches described by the hon. Member for Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush, but we must recognise that, against the background of recent events, there is hypersensitivity about what UN intervention currently means.
We all know why the Government chose to hold a debate on the UN today. Government business managers and the Prime Minister know that the vast majority of Labour party supporters and—I suspect more importantly—of people in the country instinctively support the UN. As time goes on, it becomes increasingly important for the Prime Minister to justify why two members of the UN went to war against a third without clear and explicit UN approval. The coalition finds itself in a bind. There is a desperate need for more troops in Iraq to enhance security, facilitate reconstruction and enable rotation of existing troops, who have been serving in extremely difficult conditions for a long time. However, without explicit UN endorsement, nations such as India and Brazil have made it clear that they are not willing to commit troops to Iraq. On the other hand, the United States has made it clear that it will not support any UN resolution that gives greater or further authority to the UN in Iraq.
It is surprising that the UN has not played a vital role so far in Iraq given the Prime Minister's commitment:
We are of course agreed, as we say in our joint statement, that there will be a vital role for the United Nations in the reconstruction of Iraq".I do not dispute that the UN has played a humanitarian role in Iraq, and we have heard today about the tragic consequences of that for many brave individuals who work for it. However, by no stretch of the imagination can that role be described as vital. That is surprising because the "we" in the quotation refers to the Prime Minister and President Bush. They made that statement not once, but twice—first at their summit meeting in the Azores and secondly when they were together at Hillsborough castle in Northern Ireland. It was also made at a joint press conference between the Prime Minister and the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in mid-April 2002.Serious questions are being posed over the US Administration's ability to do everything themselves. The International Herald Tribune reports that the Pentagon believes that the military occupation of Iraq is currently costing $4 billion every month and that the figure will rise dramatically to $20 billion next year. The New York Times on Tuesday observed that President Bush's $87 billion request for post-war costs is heavily weighted to maintain military operations, with some $65.5 billion going to the armed forces. It also notes that the $87 billion price tag makes the package the most expensive post-war military and civilian effort since the Marshall plan to rebuild Europe after the second world war. The figure must also be combined with the $79 billion that was earlier approved by Congress during the war.
165WH To put the matter into context, what has been spent already in Iraq is, in today's dollars, 25 times the amount to American taxpayers of what was spent in the 1991 Gulf war to expel Iraq from Kuwait. The New York Times observed yesterday that there had been a substantial earlier miscalculation. The Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told a Congress appropriations committee in March:
We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon".Alan Larson, the Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 4 June:Iraq will rightly shoulder much of the responsibility".Their views rested on two assumptions: that the Pentagon would be able to reduce its presence quickly and that Iraq was reasonably well developed. Both were wrong and, as a consequence, President Bush has now had to ask Congress for $87 billion.That is a substantial amount, especially in comparison with the amounts that are spent on development aid in continents such as Africa, but the need to spend the huge sums unquestionably explains President Bush's overtures to the UN Security Council. According to the New York Times, it amounts to
one of the most significant changes in strategy since the end of major combat in Iraq".Moreover, the paper said thatfuller UN involvement would not only reduce the cost in American lives and dollars—it would also improve the chances of success".How are we going to get British troops home from Iraq? There was a time when the Labour party believed unquestionably in the United Nations. After its 1964 election victory, Harold Wilson appointed Hugh Foot, later Lord Caradon, to become the UK's ambassador to the UN, with an executive seat on Cabinet Committees. So much importance was attributed by the Wilson Government to the UN that Hugh Foot was a hybrid between an ambassador and a Minister.
The Government have abandoned their support for the UN. What we hear and have heard today is the mantra that the UN needs reforming, yet it is always unclear what that reform involves. A lot is said about reforming the Security Council and increasing its size, but for a long time there has been no dispute that it needs to expand to include countries such as Japan, India and Brazil.
Does reform of the UN mean altering its charter? Last week the UN Secretary-General gave an interview to the Financial Times, in which he said that
we need to look at the way the international peace and security architecture is structured and functioning … We have to be able to adapt our institutions",and that shouldnot exclude reform of the Security Council.Kofi Annan tends to be cautious in his assessments, but I suspect that his normal optimism has been shaken by the debilitating Security Council rows over the Iraq war. I understand that he has written to 191 world leaders asking them to attend the UN General Assembly meeting later this month to debate its priorities. I 166WH understand that the US President, George Bush, the French President, Jacques Chirac, and the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schrőder, are among 90 leaders who have agreed to attend. So far the UN has said that the UK Prime Minister will not be there. In his winding-up speech, will the Minister tell us whether the Prime Minister will attend that special session of the UN General Assembly, along with other Heads of Government?The fundamental question is whether we believe that it is in the world's best interests to try to achieve results and solve problems together. If so, we should surely do all that we can to reinforce and support the UN. In recent years, the International Development Committee has been concerned with many issues, including the HIV/AIDS crisis and climate change and its impact on poorer countries. We concluded that there would be a greater change in the next 100 years than there was in the last 300,000. We also considered food shortages in the horn of Africa and southern Africa, where each year more people depend on food aid. None of those challenges to the world will be resolved by individual countries, however powerful they are. Going it alone is not an option.
The Minister should ask his private office to put in his weekend box the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, which has an extremely good article by Madeleine Albright—the US Secretary of State from 1997 to 2001—entitled, "Bridges, Bombs, or Bluster?" She quotes a senior US statesman who said, immediately after 11 September, that
this most recent surprise attackshoulderase the concept in some quarters that the United States can somehow go it alone in the fight against terrorism, or in anything else, for that matter."That was a quote from George H. W. Bush, the United States' 41st president.In contrast, President Bush—the 43rd president—offered his own perspective shortly before going to war with Iraq.
At some point, we may be the only ones left. That's okay with me. We are America.As Madeleine Albright observes in her article:The best rebuttal Washington had to qualms about regime change was that military force was the only way (in the absence of effective UN inspections) to enforce the council's resolutions and thereby strengthen both the UN's credibility and international law. Unfortunately, the Bush administration made its eagerness to pull the plug on chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix and his team transparent and billed its preemptive war doctrine as a replacement for international law. As a consequence, much of the world saw the invasion not as a way to put muscle into accepted rules, but rather as the inauguration of a new set of rules, written and applied solely by the United States.That follows up my concern about changing and strengthening the rules on intervention. The actions of the coalition have led many countries to believe that it will be intervention not on the UN's terms but increasingly on those of the coalition and the most powerful nations in the world.During the week before the war, the International Development Committee happened to be in New York and Washington and we met senior Members of Congress, the president of the World Bank, the UK 167WH ambassador to the UN and many other permanent representatives at the UN in Washington and New York. On the return flight to London, the Select Committee unanimously wrote to the Prime Minister and much of the content of our letter still stands. The Committee told him that it had become clear from the meetings that
the fracture of the international community over Iraq is the most serious since the end of the Cold War. Unless immediate steps are taken to heal these rifts, the poison of mistrust and antagonism will run deep to the detriment of the world…Some are criticising the United Nations for failure in the period leading up to war. But it was the nations of the Security Council that failed to find consensus over a second resolution. It is wrong to blame the professional agencies of the United Nations which must play the key peace-building role now.Of course no one pretends that there was a halcyon golden age of UN co-operation to which we should return. My first memory of an international political crisis was the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which was resolved with the help of the UN—despite President Kennedy's doubts about the UN—because it was a convenient forum for both Russia and the United States to resolve the crisis and save face. However, when the Russian tanks rolled into Prague in August 1968, the UN could do nothing to defend the people of Czechoslovakia.
Since the collapse of the Berlin wall and the break-up of the Soviet Union, the UN has been at the forefront of assisting in nation building, encouraging democracy and promoting conflict resolution. In truth, the UN can only be as good and as effective as the manpower and resources committed to it and its agencies by its member states.
By and large, if the UN has been given the authority and the resources, it has done a good job; if it has been denied authority or adequate resources, it has understandably failed to perform or to perform as well as it might. One simple example of this is the UN special court in Sierra Leone. I spoke this week to one of the chief prosecutors on the special court who said that it is "really Alice in Wonderland" that Nigeria, which is on the management committee of the special court, has given asylum to indicted President Charles Taylor of Liberia. Surely Nigeria's granting of asylum to Taylor cannot be consistent with its international obligations.
Instead, however, of the special court being strengthened, the opposite appears to be happening. One needs only to consider its financing. This week, the special court had to explain to a delegation of Canadian parliamentarians that, in two months, the court would have to start to issue redundancy notices as it would be wrong to do otherwise in the absence of further funding. The Minister has justifiably praised the work of the special court, because it has worked far faster than the special courts in Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia. Not surprisingly, our Canadian parliamentary colleagues found that situation crazy when contrasted with the speed, efficiency, diligence and professionalism with which they saw the special court discharging its work.
I do not challenge the assertion that the UK Government have been generous in their funding of the special court but I hope that our approaches to other countries will bear fruit in ensuring that its work can be carried out. If the international community cannot succeed in simply indicting and bringing to trial those 168WH responsible for the worst war crimes in west Africa, what hope is there of the international community prevailing elsewhere?
It is further notable that Kofi Annan's comments to the Financial Times described the response of the international community to conflicts in parts of Africa as
hesitant and tardy … We continue to lack the political will, as well as a vision of our responsibility in the face of massive violations of human rights and humanitarian catastrophes occasioned by conflict".However, the real issue is not the need to reform the United Nations but how the United Nations functions in a world with only one superpower, which clearly believes that there are actions that must be taken to protect its citizens and homeland and that the role of the UN is superfluous to those needs or at worst a serious impediment and at best an organisation simply to coordinate humanitarian and other assistance. That is the crux of the international community addressing criticisms from within the UN of the international community.I have been struck on recent visits to Washington in discussions with colleagues, Members of the Congress and the Senate and Americans generally by the extent to which, since September 11, they perceive the United States as being an island under attack by terrorists—those, known and unknown, who wish to hurt the United States and her citizens. Perhaps understandably, they are simply resolved to do whatever they consider is necessary to protect America. If there are others who are willing to go along with them in doing what they feel to be necessary, well and good; if not, they will do it on their own. The difficulty with that approach, as Iraq shows, is that it has clear limitations. Even a nation as powerful as the United States on its own—its defence spending next year will be greater than that of the rest of the world combined—cannot prevail in Iraq even with the support of key allies such as the United Kingdom.
I hope that the Prime Minister and the United Kingdom Government will use such influence as they have to seek to persuade President Bush that, whatever the United States' understandable desire to go it alone, we need to act together as an international community if we are effectively to contain rogue states such as North Korea. We need to enhance, not undermine, the status of the United Nations.
Furthermore, we should not allow history to be rewritten. The United States' frustration with the United Nations over Iraq was because the United States believed that there would not be a second resolution, and that France would veto a crucial motion on attacking Iraq. It is clear, and it is to the Prime Minister's credit, that he did everything possible to try to get a second resolution, which he would not have done unless he felt that necessary. If anyone doubts that, it is worth their reading Peter Stothard's book "Thirty Days". It was intended to be 30 days in the life of the Prime Minister when he became 50, but it coincided with the lead-up to the war in Iraq and its outbreak. What caused the Prime Minister to abandon his support for a second resolution was that he knew that the United States would go to war against Iraq regardless of whether the second resolution was passed.
France made it clear that it would not support the attack on Iraq because it did not believe that there was sufficient evidence of weapons of mass destruction to 169WH justify it. Given what we know now, was France so wrong in that assessment? In truth, if they knew then what they know now, how many Members of Parliament, on both sides of the House, would have withheld their support from the Prime Minister in the crucial vote on 18 March on going to war with Iraq?
The issue is not the need to reform the United Nations but the need to recognise that the international community working together is better than some countries working on their own. Still the most effective means that we have to give a purpose, assent and reality to the international community is the United Nations. Evidently, by returning to the United Nations for help in Iraq, President Bush has eaten his words about the UN's irrelevance. His actions are a clear reminder of the UN's indispensability, even to the one country that sees itself as indispensable, but that will not necessarily make the institution any more effective. To regain its status, the UN will have to show itself ready to tackle, multilaterally, an Iraqi crisis on which the USA and the UK have made a start. Therein lies a serious problem, because it would be unfortunate if the upshot of the current Security Council negotiations for a new resolution on Iraq were simply to slap a UN label on a US-led military force.
Doubtless, longer-term issues remain, to which the UN Secretary-General alluded to this week. I suspect that the publication on Monday of the UN's report on progress towards its 2000 millennium declaration goals will give the Secretary-General the opportunity to raise many of those issues, one of which is the UN's view of the balance of threats facing humanity. The UN has been unfairly criticised for its usefulness in the fight against weapons proliferation and terrorism, but the Secretary-General was right to remind us that, for most countries, the real scourges are the old ones—famine, poverty and disease—and that specialised agencies of the UN combat those daily. Therefore, if there is to be reform of the UN, that will be pointless unless it is matched by the commitment of every member of the international community to those UN agencies and to the UN as a whole. If that were to start to happen, the USA, the UK and others would find that the UN's edicts would then carry much wider legitimacy and credibility.
4.36 pm
§ Mr. RammellWe have had a very productive and constructive debate. Even though I have an hour left, I shall briefly—
§ Mr. Alan DuncanBriefly!
§ Mr. RammellI assure the hon. Gentleman that I will be brief in my response to some of the points that have been made.
When I opened the debate, the hon. Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry) asked me what we were doing about the special court for Sierra Leone, and I promised that I would return to that issue in my summing up. As he is aware, the court relies on voluntary contributions. I am sure that he is also aware that the UK has already committed £6.6 million to the overall budget of around £40 million for the three-year lifespan of the court. That 170WH is a contribution of 16.5 per cent. which, in anyone's scale of contributions, is significant. The hon. Gentleman knows that funding is a source of concern: the court currently faces a shortfall of about £14 million. We have undertaken an active lobbying campaign. involving the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and other Ministers, in support of the UN Secretary-General's call earlier this year for additional funding. We will continue with that campaign. We have made our contribution, and it is important for others to make theirs.
The hon. Member for Rutland and Melton (Mr. Duncan), leading for the Opposition, began with an interesting contribution. He singled out the fact that in considering the situation of the UN, we must recognise that the world has changed significantly since the end of the cold war, and that there is now one pre-eminent economic and military global superpower: the USA. In the debates that are taking place at present, people must face up to the fact that we cannot wish that away. It is part of the circumstances in which we operate, and we therefore need to think through how to ensure that the US can and will work with the international community and the UN. Similarly, it is incumbent on the USA to think through how it and its actions are sometimes perceived throughout the world. The Prime Minister said that when he went to Congress a few weeks ago. That is at the heart of the debate; sometimes we have a caricature of a debate that does not face up to the reality and the difficulty of the situation.
The hon. Gentleman then discussed what he described as the inadequacies of the preparations for the post-conflict situation in Iraq, and the implication that there is chaos on the ground. I do not underestimate the ongoing and significant difficulties on the ground in Iraq, but it is pertinent to state that there are also significant improvements. All 240 hospitals in Iraq are now functioning. By the end of June, most of the schools were open. Yes, electricity and oil supplies have been targeted by terrorists, but in response an estimated 10,000 Iraqis are being trained and armed to guard Iraq's electrical and oil facilities as well as its bridges and dams. Iraqis are also helping coalition troops to secure the 19,000 km of power lines and 7,000 km of pipelines in Iraq.
§ Mr. DuncanI agree that that is good news and represents a step forward. Will the Minister undertake to publish, for the benefit of the House, a list of the contractors that are active on the ground, supplementing the work of troops and bringing to Iraq the necessary civilian reconstruction that we all want?
§ Mr. RammellMy right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary referred to that in the debate that took place earlier this week. We have certainly not sought contracts for British firms for their own sake, but British firms have a strong track record on post-conflict reconstruction. We have done all that we can to facilitate that situation, and we will continue to do so.
The key point that I am making is that there are significant difficulties on the ground in Iraq, but in the debate that this country is having, particularly through the media, there is almost a wilful refusal to acknowledge that some progress is being made. If people talk to Iraqis in Iraq, or Iraqis in this country 171WH who have family in Iraq, they will see that Iraqis acknowledge that there are difficulties, but also willingly attest that there has been significant progress and the situation is immeasurably better than life under Saddam Hussein.
The hon. Gentleman went on to talk about Zimbabwe, about which he and I have had exchanges in the past. The argument—it was picked up by the hon. Member for Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale (Mr. Moore), who leads for the Liberal Democrats—was that we should take this issue to the Security Council. I remind hon. Members that when the European Union proposed a resolution at the Human Rights Commission in Geneva in March to criticise Zimbabwe's appalling human rights record, a no-action resolution was proposed by the other African states, and a significant number of members of the Security Council voted in support of that motion. If we cannot even get those members of the Security Council to support a resolution on Zimbabwe's human rights record at the Human Rights Commission, how on earth, at the moment, will we get them to support a more important resolution at the Security Council?
§ Mr. DuncanShame.
§ Mr. RammellThe hon. Gentleman talks about shame, but we need to act purposefully and in full recognition of what will be the results of our actions. Were we to propose a resolution in the full knowledge that it would be defeated at the Security Council, that would do nothing for people in Zimbabwe who need international support. That is why we are working purposefully and carefully. In particular, we are talking to the African states that we want to take the lead on this issue. We do criticise the Zimbabwean Government. Anyone who thinks that we do not should look at what some of the state-sponsored newspapers in Zimbabwe say about the UK Government and what we are doing. However, if it is just the UK Government who lead on these issues, that could, in some circumstances, be counter-productive. The comments from the Opposition Front Bench are not widely endorsed.
We then had a significant contribution from my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush (Mr. Soley). He talked persuasively about the potential limits to the primacy of nation states and advanced a strong argument that there should, in some circumstances, be limits to the right to self-determination if that self-determination entails massive and sustained abuse of human rights or destabilisation of a whole region. He is right. The key debate that we need to have is about when, how and in what circumstances. My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, West (Valerie Davey) also referred to that. That is the pertinent debate in which we need to engage. My hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush said that that would inevitably mean different solutions in different places. That is the reality that we have to face. It will, as he argued, mean more flexible ways of intervening.
We then had a contribution from the hon. Member for Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale. He said, and I think that we would all agree, that the UN is a force for good in the world. He also talked about the fact that the UN is on the front line, particularly bearing in mind the 172WH appalling attack on the UN in June. In the current debates on what is happening in Iraq, some people absolve themselves from thinking through the challenges that we face by saying, "Oh, isn't it dreadful that just the British and the Americans are leading this?" But that was an attack on the international community, in case anyone is in any doubt. Whether it was carried out by the remnants of Saddam's regime or other international terrorist organisations, they were directly taking on the international community through the body of the United Nations. That should be recognised.
I welcome the comments that the hon. Gentleman made about the key role that the UK and its Government play. That should be a source of pride to all of us, and to the people of this country. He praised the diplomatic contribution that the UK makes to the UN and the wider international community. I used to think that that was one of those issues on which the Brits always congratulate themselves without there being much substance to it. However, since I have been a Foreign Office Minister, when I go around the world I am struck by the fact that, totally unprompted, many Ministers, civil servants and journalists from other countries automatically volunteer the view that the UK makes a significant contribution through its diplomatic effort.
The hon. Gentleman went on to talk about the new suggested draft resolution at the Security Council and the need to embed the role of the United Nations. We certainly subscribe to the UN's vital role and have always envisaged that over time, it will progressively increase. However, there is a need for clarity. Sometimes the semantics of the debate are lost in the position taking. Certainly the proposed draft resolution envisages an enhanced role for the UN, but that will not entail the UN running Iraq, specifically because Kofi Annan has said that he does not want the UN to run Iraq, and does not believe that it can. It has never run a country that size. No one is arguing for the blue-helmet solution. Sometimes in this debate we lose sight of what is really needed and what is really possible.
The hon. Gentleman then talked about our representation at the General Assembly. The Prime Minister's commitment to international issues and to the UN is unprecedented. He will not be attending the current General Assembly, but in the light of that he has urged that there should be senior representation. I assume that by that—although I am going to the General Assembly—he meant representation slightly more senior. I can assure the hon. Gentleman that my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary will be attending for a significant period.
The hon. Gentleman asked an important question about our views on the expansion of the permanent membership of the Security Council, and what our view would be if outstanding resolutions against some of the suggested nations were in existence. Let me be clear: we believe that all Security Council members should uphold their obligations under the UN charter, and we make that clear to all who have ambitions to be Security Council members, whether permanent or nonpermanent.
The hon. Gentleman also referred to the importance of the millennium development goals. We welcome the annual publication of the report on those goals. This year's report came out recently, and was especially 173WH thoughtful, covering a wide range of areas. The millennium development goals are an excellent example of the UN providing significant leadership and setting targets to improve people's lives. As I said in my opening contribution, 1 billion people currently live in abject poverty. There is a legitimate question—I think that this is what the hon. Gentleman was referring to—about whether the millennium development goals will be met by the target date of 2015. We are strongly committed to helping to achieve those goals, and more effective coordination in the UN system will also help. We will get a better idea in 2005 when the UN system carries out the first formal review of the progress towards those goals, but we are strongly pushing for them in the interim.
The hon. Gentleman referred to the criteria for intervention and discussed whether the constitutional convention in the European Union might perhaps be a model. I am not sure about that.
§ Mr. MooreThe Minister is generously answering my points, and those of other colleagues, in detail that we would all commend—but may I clarify something? I was not in any way using the European Union constitutional convention as a model, but suggesting the idea of a constitutional convention that would allow the states to consider these serious issues.
§ Mr. RammellI take that point fully, and I clearly understand what the hon. Gentleman is saying.
The hon. Gentleman also expressed his shock at the tragic killing of Anna Lindh and paid tribute to her. I did not mention that in my earlier contribution. As I am someone who has a Swedish wife and has met Anna Lindh several times, what happened yesterday and today shocked me to the core. It has affected many of us. For a country as liberal, open and prosperous as Sweden to be affected in that way is enormously shocking. I know that that view will be widely shared across the House.
My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, West spoke movingly about the situation in Uganda and drew out some of the wider lessons from Africa, where some of the most appalling atrocities and impacts on human rights have occurred. She argued strongly, and rightly, for the UN to be able to become involved in humanitarian intervention. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush, she effectively and cogently underlined the need for us to establish the principles on which such intervention should take place. She also mentioned something that reminded me that I had not made this clear in my opening remarks—that as well as calling for an expanded permanent membership of the Security Council we are in favour of an expanded nonpermanent membership. That point needs to be made clear.
Finally, I turn to the comments of the hon. Member for Banbury. In calling for a debate about the criteria under which humanitarian intervention can take place, 174WH I should make it clear that that view predates the whole Iraq situation. My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, West referred to the article drafted by the former Foreign Secretary and the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife (Mr. Campbell). I cannot recall its date.
§ Valerie DaveyIt was 2000.
§ Mr. RammellYes, 2000. That issue has been around for a significant time. In that context, the cynicism of the remarks of the hon. Member for Banbury was out of keeping with the tone of the rest of this debate. He stated that the UN's role in Iraq was negligible, but if he reads the special envoy's report, which went to the Security Council on behalf of the Secretary-General, he will see that it discussed the UN's role in very positive terms. I would absolutely refute his statement that we have abandoned our support for the United Nations. I have to say that I take it a little hard that a member of a party that in the run-up to the conflict urged us to go along with the Americans come what may, ignoring the constraints of the United Nations if need be, should now be lecturing us on our support for the UN.
§ Mr. DuncanThe Minister really must correct that. The accuracy of our position is clear. We said that we thought that the legal justification probably already existed, but we argued strongly in favour of the desirability of a second resolution. I think that the Minister should put that clearly on the record.
§ Mr. RammellI recall absolutely what I heard in those debates. I also recall that in a recent debate on the UN an eminent senior Conservative Back Bencher said that he was ashamed of the tactics and stance of those on his party's Front Bench, and of how they were currently handling that issue.
§ Mr. DuncanHe was against the war altogether.
§ Mr. RammellNo. I am sorry, but I was referring not to a Conservative Member who was against the war, but to one who strongly supported it. The only difficulty is that I cannot recall his constituency, so I cannot refer to him—[HON. MEMBERS: "Staffordshire"] It is in Staffordshire—absolutely. I think that that point needs to be made for the record. Our advocacy of the criteria for intervention is not about giving carte blanche to the coalition, but if we can create a consensus on when, how, in what circumstances and according to what criteria intervention is justified, that can only be a cause for good.
In general, we have had a significant and constructive debate this afternoon. I hope that we can go forward and ensure that such a debate takes place annually, which can only help to inform the House and the wider country of the importance of the United Nations and our role in that organisation.
§ Question put and agreed to.
§ Adjourned accordingly at five minutes to Five o'clock.