Bosnia and Herzegovina: Stability and Peace

Debate between Alicia Kearns and Bernard Jenkin

Thursday 2nd December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I very much welcome the points made by the hon. Member for Rochdale (Tony Lloyd), and I wholeheartedly agree with them, except for one: I think it is NATO’s job not to interfere in the internal affairs of a state but, if invited to secure the security of that state—and we feel we can do that—to make an offer to it to save it from conflagration. I will come back to that. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton (Alicia Kearns) on securing this debate, on the very knowledgeable way in which she introduced the topic and on the passionate way that she spoke. I have wonderful words in my prepared speech, Madam Deputy Speaker, but in the interests of brevity, I shall cast aside my beautiful turns of phrase and say what I think needs to be said.

I think there are only three Members here this afternoon who sat through the 1992 to 1997 Parliament. We heard Paddy Ashdown every week at Prime Minister’s Question Time—it was twice a week then—asking questions on what we were going to do about the Balkans crisis. I have to say, I am one of the guilty ones who sat on the Government Benches and thought that he had become obsessed with something that we could not do anything about or should not get involved with. But he was right. It was only when the bread queues in Sarajevo were being shelled by the Serbians that we began to realise that something terrible was happening in our own continent.

I happened to make a visit, I think with the armed forces parliamentary scheme, to NATO, and I heard the then Supreme Allied Commander of NATO describe this as the biggest security failure in the European continent since the second world war. We began to wake up to the fact that something terrible was happening. What had gone wrong? My hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton said that we are repeating the same mistakes as we did in the early 1990s. Oh yes we are.

First, there is complacency. Secondly, there are different voices. We talk about the European Union, but the European Union has different voices. Different countries have different approaches. I am afraid that the German Government are pretty ambivalent at the moment about whether the Bosnian state should be secured permanently. The French have always had a stronger relationship with the Serbs than with any other part of the Balkans. The United States now, as it did then, feel that this was a post-cold war European security problem that it should not get involved with. And then there was some precipitate action by an external actor, Germany—the recognition of Croatia, I think in 1990—that triggered the whole Balkan crisis. It took years before it was understood what we had to do—we tried an air campaign, which did not succeed, and we had to put troops on the ground to stop the fighting—but at least when we got in there and did it, we got an agreement.

We got the agreement with tacit Russian co-operation—Russia did not prevent it. This time, Russia is a player in the conflict. It is stoking the ethnic tensions and encouraging the separatists and the break-up of the state, because I imagine Putin regards it as in his national interest to see 1.8 million Bosnian refugees flooding into Europe when western Europe is already facing a refugee crisis. He would love that, and the Chinese are helping, too.

What are we going to do? Are we just going to carry on pussyfooting around? The solution is for EUFOR, which is a small European Union force, to be reinforced very substantially, now. I differ from the hon. Member for Rochdale on this point: I think that if the Bosnian Government requested that, NATO would have to respond. However, that would require persuading the United States’ Mr President Biden, who has become far more isolationist and unhelpful to NATO. I have no brief for Trump, but at least Trump managed to get us all to spend more money; Biden looks completely disinterested from foreign wars. He has to become interested. Just as Clinton started from that position—

[Alicia Kearns]

I apologise for interrupting my hon. Friend, who is making a very good point. I just want to briefly make a point about wars. What we are saying, and what Biden does not appear to have an appetite for, is that we are trying to create a forever peace, not a war or a conflict. It takes guts, commitment and determination; I thank all hon. Members who have spoken so far and have shown that. That is a slight divergence from my hon. Friend’s point, but it is important that this is about forever peace, not war.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

My hon. Friend is quite right. I was going to go on to the point that it was Madeleine Albright, bless her, who persuaded President Clinton that the Americans had to be involved. President Clinton nicknamed it Madeleine’s war, but this time it has to be Secretary of State Blinken’s peace. My hon. Friend is completely right.

The point is that we can pre-empt war if we get in there with sufficient deterrent force to deter those who are arming the separatists and encouraging their withdrawal from the Bosnian state institutions. The October mandate that Dodik issued that Republika Srpska elements should cease to operate as part of the Bosnian armed forces is an act of revolution, and it must be stopped. It is contrary to international agreements and it is contrary to the UN resolutions. The UN resolutions are still in force under which we can act—and we should act.

What if Russia objects? That is the question that I want to deal with.