Reconciliation: Role of British Foreign, Defence and International Development Policy

Lord Campbell of Pittenweem Excerpts

Friday 14th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Campbell of Pittenweem (LD)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Jay, who today was once again authoritative and perceptive. Those are qualities which necessarily apply to the most reverend Primate who opened the debate. I was interested to understand that he had addressed the United Nations Security Council on some of the issues we have been discussing. Perhaps on a more private occasion he might be willing to give us a personal report on just how well he thought his remarks were received, because I can think of some current members of the Security Council who might find some of the things he said a little uncomfortable.

Let me begin by saying how much I associate myself with the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, about the fact that soft power and hard power are mutually reinforcing. That is set out in a report produced by your Lordships’ House in 2014, Persuasion and Power in the Modern World. That rather lines me up with the noble Lord and against the analysis provided by the noble Baroness who is no longer in her place.

I want to suggest, perhaps not on the same theme as the noble Lord, Lord Jay, some considerations with regard to the exercise of hard power. It might be thought that if soft power is successful, as it sometimes is initially, there will be no need for hard power—but if reconciliation were to break down, it may well need hard power in order to create an environment for a return to reconciliation. It is also the case that if reconciliation is proving impossible, hard power may be needed to create an environment for the discussion of reconciliation. One possible consequence is that the introduction of hard power may essentially have the effect of freezing events, so that what began as a ceasefire may well turn into a de facto long-term settlement. I have in mind the position in Cyprus, of which the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, has much more experience than I have and probably than almost all noble Lords in the House.

It is also worth reminding ourselves that hard power is not necessarily provided by coercion; the threat of coercion may be of considerable impact in considering the extent to which hard power makes a contribution. Even after successful reconciliation, parties who had previously been in disagreement may take some comfort from the regulating presence of hard power: for example, the continuing presence of a military mission of one kind or another.

In all these scenarios it seems to me that there are a number of principles that have to be applied, and I shall give some examples to suggest where that has not been the case. The hard power that is to be deployed must both be proportionate and have integrity. Reference has already been made in this debate to United Nations peacekeeping. The hard fact is that when it comes to peacekeeping missions, the United Nations has to take who or what it can get. The behaviour of some peacekeeping missions—I think particularly of the mission in which soldiers from Ukraine were involved—proved to be, to put it mildly, nothing less than catastrophic, involving abuse and worse. It is also the case that often when a request is made and an invitation given to offer troops for United Nations peacekeeping missions, impoverished countries apply, not necessarily those with a high degree of military acumen or ability. Often, those countries use the United Nations deployment to help to meet the cost of their military, sometimes to ensure that they obtain equipment which they would not otherwise possess and sometimes to pay their soldiers whom they would otherwise be unable to pay.

Of course, whenever a peacekeeping mission is commenced, the United Nations is entitled to expect that any countries which join will stay the course. Most of us may be aware of the rather dramatic events portrayed in the film “Black Hawk Down”. It portrays an event in Somalia which, not surprisingly, obtained a huge amount of publicity in the United States, and afterwards the United States mission was withdrawn, with what were inevitably damaging consequences. That argues very strongly for the fact that, if you are going to deploy your forces in circumstances where there is real risk, you need to be satisfied that you have public opinion firmly and courageously behind you.

Reference has also been made to Rwanda and, in a slightly different context, to the contribution of Kofi Annan, but it is generally recognised that his decision that the small United Nations force should be withdrawn may have contributed to subsequent events. I join the noble Lord, Lord Jay, in saying that I think it was a failure of what we rather broadly call the international community not to take steps to intervene in Rwanda, difficult though that might have been.

It is also said in this context that we have to pay due regard to the responsibility to protect. It began as the right of humanitarian intervention, as noble Lords will remember, contained in the speech made by Prime Minister Blair in Chicago. It is said—and I myself have enunciated this principle here, rather as the noble Lord, Lord Jay, did—that intervention should always be the last resort. However, I have to tell him, and remind myself, that the very distinguished civil servant the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Defence, Sir Michael Quinlan, took a rather different view, which was that often early military intervention may have a very beneficial effect by, as it were, squeezing off something that may develop to a much greater extent, whereupon military intervention becomes more difficult.

I think too of the credibility of intervention. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is not all that long ago in our recollection, it was only the deployment of NATO, with the United States of America in the forefront, that eventually created the circumstances for what we might call reconciliation, although current events hardly suggest that the position is by any means fixed. It was only because of good-quality, highly motivated and well-equipped intervention that there was a benevolent outcome.

As for Sierra Leone, it is interesting that the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Richards, who subsequently became Chief of the Defence Staff, was a brigadier at that time, and it is generally accepted, not least by himself, that he took his orders in perhaps a rather more elastic way than the Ministry of Defence had originally conceived. However, if he had not exercised that degree of individual judgment, events in that part of the world would have been very much less favourable than they turned out.

These are not necessarily all joined-up illustrations, but I think they allow me to reach the conclusion that hard power cannot be an end in itself. There is no more dangerous proposition in the discussion of foreign affairs than the sentence, “Something must be done”. There must always be clear political goals, both tactical and strategic—and, once it has been decided to exercise hard power, there must always be the political will to carry the hard power through to the achievement of those goals. Without these principles, hard power might become an obstacle to reconciliation.