Europe after Maastricht : interim report : report, together with the Proceedings of Committee, Minutes of Evidence, and Appendices : first report [of the] Foreign Affairs Committee.

  • Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Foreign Affairs Committee.
Date:
1992
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: Europe after Maastricht : interim report : report, together with the Proceedings of Committee, Minutes of Evidence, and Appendices : first report [of the] Foreign Affairs Committee. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    31/96 (page 15)
    [Mr Wareing Contd] should say that last year I visited under different auspices. (Mr Hurd) 1 am sure that there is not going to be a militarily composed solution in Bosnia, or Kosovo if it comes to that, or anywhere else. I am certain of that. If that is so, leaving aside the humanitarian problem which is huge, then we have to keep up the pressures and the talks designed to produce political settlement a way in which these different problems, and there are about half a dozen in Yugoslavia, can be peacefully settled. That is what the Owen/Vance, EC/UN framework is about. Of course, that does involve listening to and trying to help those, particularly in Serbia and Montenegro, who are arguing for what we would regard as a saner policy. I have had several discus- sions with Mr Panic and Mr Owen. What we should not do, in my view, is relax the existing pressures on Serbia and Montenegro, the pressures of sanctions which are clearly having some effect, before we are clear that the saner policies are pre- vailing. We are not clear of that. What is actually happening now in Bosnia, at the instance of the Bosnian Serbs, is plain contrary to what was undertaken in London by Mr Panic. I am not accusing him of deceit because I do not think that is the right accusation; but what is clear is that he does not control all those who are responsible for continuing the fighting. Chairman: I want to keep the discussion today on the UN involvement, because these other aspects are absolutely crucial but ones I do not think we can spend time on today. You said, Foreign Secretary, that we are bound to be drawn again and again into these sorts of situations where there is a demand for troops under the auspices of the UN to go on being involved in humanitarian work. Dr Boutros-Ghali in the Agenda for Peace is suggesting a wider agenda which is not merely peacekeeping and humanitarian work but peace- making. Could we just ask you about that. Mr Lester 57. Foreign Secretary, could I say before that, when you talked about the United Nations having more responsibility and people not funding it, surely the same thing applies to your own budget in terms of the same numbers and disasters which we were asked to co-operate and assist with, the troops that we are now putting into Bosnia at a cost of £90-100m coming out of your budget. One of the things that has been suggested in the Agenda for Peace is that that sort of operation should come out of the defence budget in any national government, which is far more considerable by a factor of about five or ten as far as our own bud- get is concerned. Should those things not go together in the sense of the increased requirement and where the funding comes from? (Mr Hurd) Well, you can argue this, Mr Lester. I think these kind of activities are a function of our international relations. It is very hard to fore- see them in advance on a three-year cycle, which we have for the public expenditure reviews, and, therefore, if whenever something of any size comes up, of course there have to be discussions with the Treasury, whoever carries the load of this budget, so I do not think this question of budget attribu- tion is of huge substantial importance. The basic question which will confront governments from time to time is whether Britain is going to take the risk of involving itself in a particular UN opera- tion or not and the question of finance is of course an important part of that, but I do not think the decision will revolve really on what comes out of the Defence or the Foreign Office budgets. We are very good at this. We have, as Sir John knows, highly professional task forces with a lot of experi- ence in this kind of thing. We are going to be sought after again and again and again and of course we cannot do everything, nor can we leave people indefinitely in places because we have other responsibilities, but this pressure is, I think, already mounting and I think it is going to be quite severe and I think it does require a great deal of thought on our part, but also on the part of the whole international community, as the Secretary- General’s Agenda for Peace paper proves. 58. The reason for my question about budgets was to try and find out why we seem less enthusi- astic about the Secretary-General’s proposals for UN peace enforcement units to be deployed fol- lowing a ceasefire in any conflict. I am assuming we are willing to collaborate with other countries in planning crisis management and intelligence for peacekeeping and a joint training of troops avail- able for peacekeeping duties as proposed at the UN General Assembly by President Bush, but one detects the thinking and the movement of interna- tional opinion from peacekeeping to peace-enforce- ment which is something we are moving towards in both Somalia and indeed in Bosnia and I just thought perhaps it was because of the inordinate costs of these operations, as seen from the costs of Cambodia, the participation in that operation, that makes us less than willing to take a lead in what must be the way in which the UN proceeds. (Mr Hurd) Of course cost comes into it, and I am not denying that. What I was questioning was whether the budget attribution of the departments is the key. Clearly of course cost comes into it. What the Secretary-General was insisting on in Bosnia is that those who contribute should actu- ally pay and it should not fall on the UN budget as a whole. We are talking, we have begun discus- sions with the Secretary-General’s military experts at a high professional military level to establish what UN needs are under the heading of Agenda for Peace and how we can best respond to them. We think that this is the stage for some rather detailed discussion on these comments before we start uttering about them so that is in hand. I would not accept that we are laggard in this. If you include the troops we have decided to send to Bosnia, we will be the third largest troop contribu- tor, and that is worldwide. France and Canada come ahead of us. So we cannot be described as