Ukraine

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Tuesday 18th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Goodhart makes his points persuasively and briefly, and I do not disagree with much of what he said. However, at the same time, no one can condone the manner in which recent events have been conducted by the Government of Russia.

Nevertheless, I would like to set my remarks in a personal context, if your Lordships will forgive me. I sit here on this Bench every day and look up at the Barons of Magna Carta—we will be celebrating them next year—and I think of how long it took from 1215 for us in this country to have a fully-fledged democracy. I also look up at the armorial bearings on one of those windows, on which the words, “Be mindful”, stand out. We need to be mindful of the history of the post-war world.

When I was first elected to the other place in 1970, the Soviet Union was a tyranny that dominated the whole of eastern Europe. I well remember my noble friend Lord Janner of Braunstone—I deliberately call him my noble friend—coming to me and persuading me to take on the chairmanship of the campaign for the release of Soviet Jewry. We worked hard, sometimes unavailingly, for those people who did at least have a door marked “Exit” if they could be given a visa to get out. I remember an instance when my noble friend and I tried to send a prayer book to a young man who was celebrating his bar mitzvah. We had it signed by Mr Wilson—as he then was—Prime Minister Heath, and some 300 Members of the House of Commons. It came back; not only was it not admitted, not only did the young man then know nothing about it, but my noble friend Lord Janner and I, and the other members of the committee, including my noble friend Lord Dykes, were not allowed to have visas to go to the Soviet Union. We were emphatically personae non gratae.

I had the great privilege, 20 years later, of taking part in an Epiphany communion service conducted by Father Ted Hesburgh, who had been the chairman of President Kennedy’s Civil Rights Commission, in the hotel in the Kremlin which had always previously been given over to visiting Soviet-bloc country delegations —Prime Ministers of East Germany and so on. During that visit, Mr Gorbachev’s chef de cabinet received from us a Bible that was symbolic of a million that he had agreed to accept to be distributed around the Soviet Union.

I relate those two separate anecdotes to show the progress that was made while it was still the Soviet Union after the coming to power of Mr Gorbachev—the man with whom Mrs Thatcher famously said she could do business, and did. There is no democratic infrastructure or democratic history of what we now call Russia. The Soviet Union was of course dismembered within a couple of years of our giving those Bibles. A superpower ceased to be and the Russian Federation was created. The Baltic states, Poland and Hungary—it was the situation in Hungary in 1956 that brought me into politics—all became independent nations and Czechoslovakia then split into two.

That was extraordinary progress and it had one effect in Russia. People who had been part of a superpower no longer felt themselves to be part of a great nation. We have to recognise that, for all his recent behaviour, Mr Putin gave back to the people of Russia a degree of self-respect. That is something that we should not set aside. I am not here to act as an apologist for Mr Putin or to justify the way in which recent events have been conducted, but I would say to your Lordships that we in the West, for all our tradition of developing democracy, have not always got it right. We have done things internationally, even in recent years, which have been questioned, and we should bear that in mind. We also have to bear in mind that a peaceful and prosperous Russia is essential to a peaceful and stable Europe. We must also remember that in recent history—I go back no more than a couple of hundred years—the concept of the sphere of influence has been recognised in international diplomacy. One has only to think of the famous Monroe doctrine of 1823.

It is against that sort of background that we should be careful. I am not saying that we should not apply certain sanctions but I am saying that, frankly, we have got off on the wrong foot here. We could have seen this coming—as a lot of us did—and a message should have been conveyed that it was crucial that the sovereign independence of Ukraine should be recognised, but it should also be acknowledged that Russia had its own legitimate interests in that part of the world.

The noble Lord, Lord Soley, in a very perceptive, persuasive and interesting speech, referred to the tragedy of Russian history. You have only to go to Moscow and see the monuments to where the German tanks were stopped to realise what the Russians went through. Yes, of course, they inflicted terrible things on others afterwards, for which they were rightly condemned, and we all rejoiced when the ghastly Berlin Wall came down and when the nations that I mentioned became free. I said a moment ago that it was Hungary in 1956 that brought me into politics, and it was. I shall never forget the issue of Picture Post which had on its cover the words “Cry Hungary!”. It was full of terrible photographs of what the phosphorus shells fired into Budapest by the Russians had done. We all remember what happened to Imre Nagy, the brave man who tried to stand up, just as we remember—and I had the privilege of meeting him—Alexander Dubcek, who 12 years later in Czechoslovakia tried to stand up.

Much progress has been made since then. We have, for all its imperfections, a free Europe. Many of the countries that were subjected to Soviet domination and tyranny are now members of the European Union—which is why I rejoice at the Union and will fight and fight to keep it—and most are members of NATO. I understand why there is a certain degree of concern and diffidence about seeing Ukraine become a member of the European Union and of NATO. Although I would like to see it allied to both, we have to recognise that it is not just a simple matter. Most of all, we have to recognise that we have a duty not to escalate the situation. We have a great responsibility resting on us for what we say in this Chamber today. I would hate to think that anything said here today encouraged a mindless bellicosity that could be only inimical to true freedom, peace and stability afterwards.

Yes, there has to be mutual recognition. I hope that there can be a pause, that the elections on 25 May can be properly supervised, and that the Government elected—it is only an interim Government at the moment—in Ukraine will be fully recognised. I hope also that there will be a role for Ban Ki-moon. We pay lip service—very often, it is only lip service—to the United Nations but if ever there was a case for the Secretary-General of the United Nations to seek to call together those who are at odds, this is it.

We must be under no delusions. The Baltic states are members of NATO. An attack on one member of NATO is an attack on all members of NATO. History does not repeat itself but it teaches us lessons and we should be mindful of what happened 100 years ago when people did not want to go to war. For corroboration of that, one should read Professor Margaret MacMillan’s recently published brilliant book, The War that Ended Peace. Although it sounds unthinkable, it is not utterly impossible that we could drift into a situation where the brinkmanship that took us almost to war in 1962 over Cuba could place us in a very parlous position.

I beg my noble friends on the Front Bench and, through them, the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary to do everything possible to establish a constructive dialogue and to recognise that the world cannot be a safe and secure place if there is continuing animosity and even cold hostility, as there was during the Cold War, between Russia and the nations of the West. To connive, however unwittingly, in the creation of that sort of situation in a world that is going to be increasingly dominated by the great power blocs of China and India as the 21st century progresses would be a disservice to our own continent and nation, and to the civilisation of which I hope we are all proud to be members.

There should be firmness but also caution and calmness. Let us remember that Mr Putin, for all his faults—we all have plenty of those—is not the devil incarnate. We must not strive to try to make him appear an isolated figure who becomes the devil incarnate.