Responsibility to Protect

Earl Attlee Excerpts

Thursday 16th July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, for introducing this subject today and I do not think that I have heard anything I disagree with. I strongly believe in the responsibility to protect. In fact, I also think that it is a duty. I have seen what happens when we fail in that duty. I ran an NGO—British Direct Aid—in Rwanda for most of 1995. Our mission was to maintain all UNHCR vehicles and plant operating there. Quite often an educated Rwandan would come up to me and challenge me with the words, “You are swanning around in your white Land Rover, but where were you when we really needed you?”. In other words, why did the international community not intervene militarily to stop the genocide? Of course, I had no answer to that. One day I was invited to donate my Land Rover to the freelance section of the Rwandan army. My greatest worry was what I would say to the ODA and the noble Baroness, Lady Chalker, to explain how I had lost the Land Rover. Fortunately, I got it back. I pay tribute to my noble friend, who continues to do sterling work in Africa.

In the winter of 1997-98 I served with the British Army in Bosnia as part of SFOR. Nothing gave me and my comrades more confidence that we were doing the right thing than seeing local people putting a roof back on their house. They were doing this because SFOR and NATO, with their overwhelming military superiority, were able to provide the stability and security which are a prerequisite for reconstruction and other desirable post-conflict activities.

Many noble Lords have touched on how the UN and the Security Council decide whether to intervene or not. This is not my area of expertise but, like many noble Lords, I think that we need to find some way in which the international community can sanction an intervention without being vetoed by one or two states which still seem to be comfortable with tolerating crimes against humanity—a point just raised by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay.

I would like to look at the question of whether UK forces are militarily willing and able to intervene as part of a solution and a component of deterring a failure to protect one’s own people. However, first, I want to make it clear that I strongly support ring-fencing the international aid budget. If noble Lords imagine looking at the cake of government expenditure, it will make no difference at all whether the very small slice that is international aid is there. The fact is that the first 25% of government expenditure goes on welfare, followed by pensions, health, education, interest payments and then defence. I have no idea why the defence community gets so excited about ring-fencing international development, as we all know perfectly well that hard power on its own has little utility.

The first point to understand is that members of our Armed Forces are indeed very willing to engage in peacekeeping and peace support operations. I have never detected any reluctance on the part of soldiers deploying to Afghanistan, but there is clearly a significant risk of being seriously injured in combat in that type of operation. In operations of the type that we are talking about, you have to be extremely unlucky not to come back intact. In our operations in the Balkans, the vast majority of serious injuries arose from road traffic accidents.

The next question is whether our Armed Forces will be able to engage in these operations. First, we need to be certain that they are capable of successfully engaging in high-intensity operations, because we need to deter interstate conflict. It does not necessarily go away, and just when you think that it has gone away for ever is when it arises. These high-intensity operations are extremely difficult to undertake and it is essential that training and exercises focus on them. I have a particular concern that we do not undertake exercises involving whole brigades being manoeuvred around the area of operations. This is principally because we do not have the training areas and the resources to do it.

There is a school of thought that says that we should not get involved if our own direct national interests are not engaged. I am not convinced about that. If we want to remain a P5 member, we have to pull our weight. In addition, it is far easier to play the honest broker in a situation if one has little direct interest. Of course, we are very far from being the only country that engages in peace support operations—indeed, numerically we are quite small—but there are very few countries that can deploy at brigade strength out of area. So we ought to get in first and then out fast, having, one hopes, established a UN mandated force. A very good example of this was Rwanda in 1994. When I arrived in January 1995, most of the British forces had already left and there were only one or two staff officers in headquarters.

The good news is that if one has trained for high intensity, peace support operations are relatively easy to conduct, although mistakes are still easily made. One obvious difference is that on a peace support operation one does not normally try to conceal oneself or reduce one’s signature—quite the opposite, in fact; you want to be seen. The bad news is this. Until recently, the British Army had been heavily engaged in operations all the time since Dayton in 1995. However, we are now drastically reducing the size of the Regular Army under Army 2020. In future, if we deployed just one brigade of 3,000 to 5,000 troops, I am sure that the staff would make it very clear to the centre of Government that there would be severe difficulties in doing another conventional land operation anywhere else at the same time. In addition, such a deployment would impact on training for high-intensity operations where we are already weak. Furthermore, there are real dangers in deploying our forces at too small a scale of effort after considering the military estimate.

So in future years, when your Lordships see the Government of the day declining to intervene militarily in circumstances where there is surely a moral imperative to do so, it may well be that there is simply not the capacity to undertake the operation without compromising our own security.