Kosovo

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 7:39 pm on 19 April 1999.

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Photo of George Galloway George Galloway Labour, Glasgow Kelvin 7:39, 19 April 1999

As a former chairman of the Britain-Albania Society and as one of the two people responsible for persuading the former National Heritage Secretary, Mr. David Mellor, to return Albania's stolen gold, I am second to no one in the House in my love for, and concern for the fate of, the Albanians. Neither am I a pacifist. Indeed, I would be ready to go five rounds with practically any hon. Member. There are a few with whom I would quite like to go five rounds. I hope that my views of the campaign will not be attributed to an animus against the Albanians or to spineless pacifism. As a former member of the Army Cadet Force Royal Artillery Battery 2, I could not credibly be accused of that.

On Saturday afternoon, a bomb went off in the centre of a European capital city, creating havoc and chaos. It brought traffic to a standstill. Hundreds if not thousands of people ran from the scene in terror. Sharp pieces of steel penetrated the bodies and the eyes of innocent civilian bystanders. It was, of course, not in Novi Sad or in Belgrade but in Brixton. It traumatised practically all London and scandalised the readers of Sunday morning newspapers.

That was the effect of one crude home-made bomb in Brixton. The same evening, NATO flew 500 sorties against targets in Yugoslavia. I, along with few others in the House, have had the experience of being under aerial bombardment. With the distinguished war correspondent, Desmond Hammill, I lay with my face pressed to the earth in Eritrea, being bombed from on high by Russian aircraft of the Ethiopian air force.

The terror that I experienced was indescribable. Slices of razor sharp steel and fragmentation —they were fragmentation bombs of exactly the kind that we are dropping in Yugoslavia —tore alive the people who were around me, and I literally ate the earth to try to make myself a smaller target. Others were not as lucky as me, and Desmond Hammill was able to take some award-winning pictures of some of the casualties.

The purposes for which the Ethiopian air force was dropping those bombs were different from NATO's purposes: the Ethiopians were aiming for civilians, and we are not. I have no complaints about the conduct of our Defence Ministers and certainly none about the conduct of British forces in the action. From everything that I have heard, they have behaved with precision and professionalism. My case is that the massive failure is in foreign, not defence policy.

Neither the Eritreans nor the people of Brixton would remotely consider capitulating to the demands of those doing the bombing. The Eritreans did not and the people of Brixton will not. It does not matter how often we escalate the demands. Some hon. Members may have missed the point, but the war aims were deliberately escalated this afternoon, and the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, de facto and de jure, is now being demanded.

Anyone who thinks that the Serbian Government or, still less, the Serbian people and armed forces will voluntarily succumb to such dismemberment knows nothing about history or about the region. Even if, after a bloody invasion and wading through casualties on both sides, Kosovo is severed from Yugoslavia by force, that will be only the beginning of the problem. We will have engendered a depth of bitterness and hatred among a fighting people—the Serbs—that will haunt us for many years.

Everyone has seen the terrible suffering of the Albanian refugees being driven from their homes—yes, by ethnic cleansing enforced by paramilitary thugs and by police and soldiers and, yes, by fear of bombardment—but we have not heard much today about the civil war as a reason for refugees being on the move.

I have heard several odd references to the KLA this afternoon. Is the House aware that last year the KLA was on the US State Department's list of terrorist organisations? It was accused by the US Government of being bankrolled by the proceeds of the heroin trade and loans from characters such as Osama bin Laden. That was said in the Washington Post.

When did the KLA cease to be a terrorist organisation and become a partner for which we were ready to go to war? The reality is that the Serbs are not involved in some irrational, maniacal persecution of Albanians. Charles Krauthammer, again in the Washington Post, said: The reason for the killing in Kosovo is not mindless ethnic hatred but quite rational power politics. There is a guerrilla army of Kosovar Albanians who want independence and are willing to kill to achieve it. And there is a Serb army that wants to keep Kosovo in Yugoslavia and preserve the sovereignty of the state. And it is willing to kill for that.

That was the Government's perspective until a few short months ago. I believe that our failure has been to get carried away in the flood of rhetoric. This wickedness in Kosovo is appalling, but it is not the holocaust. Milosevic is a brute, but he is not Hitler. This is an appalling problem, but it is not the second world war. As the now much maligned correspondent, John Simpson, said in his admirable memoirs, which I read only last weekend, if we persist in treating conflicts as though they were Armageddon, we run the risk of getting in over our heads. That is what we have begun to do, especially with the escalation of our war aims this afternoon.

Let me say to my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary that it serves no one's interest to become so carried away that one resorts to hoax and to first world war-style propaganda. We warned him of that in relation to his boy prisoner story in Iraq, which turned out to be a canard. Addressing megaphone insults at the Government of Yugoslavia, with whom we will eventually have to deal, and insulting the family of the President—wrongly, as it turns out, if one reads the letter from Mrs. Milosevic to the Foreign Secretary published in the newspaper—