Lord Soley
Main Page: Lord Soley (Labour - Life peer)
Lord Soley
My Lords, I join others in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for putting his important debate on North Korea before the House today. One reason why I wanted to speak is because we know that North Korea is an area where extreme actions are being taken by a dictator which are dangerous to world peace, dangerous to the people of Korea and, above all, extremely brutal to the people of that sad country. Therefore, it is right that we speak about it today; the noble Lord has a good record in doing precisely that.
I want to intervene relatively briefly because for many years I regarded North Korea as just about the worst of the failed regimes on the planet. By all accounts it is brutal in the extreme and is certainly dangerous. If you look at the effort it is putting into producing nuclear weapons and the rockets to carry them, and bear in mind that it has also been suspected over the years—with good evidence—of producing other weapons of mass destruction, and indeed testing some of them on its own people, you recognise just how extreme this regime is and how dangerous it is to the peace of the world.
In this context, China’s role is profoundly important, as has been said. It is incredibly frustrating that it does not use the pressure it undoubtedly has to bring about change in North Korea. I have great respect for what China has achieved in recent years. It is clearly determined to develop the rule of law and to develop its economy in a much more free and open way. However, it is still a bit ambivalent about democracy. One of its senior politicians asked me, “What advice do you give us, Mr Soley, to develop democracy in the country?”. I thought that we had enough problems here with a population of 60 million and wondered how you defined democracy with a population of more than 1 billion. However, China could do a lot worse than to look to its neighbour, India.
At the time of the cyclone in Burma, which led to the deaths of many people, I put it to the Chinese ambassador at a meeting in this House that China, along with India and Thailand, could, if it so wished, have told the Burmese regime that the aid ships that were sitting outside the cyclone area must be allowed in—that they would have been allowed in if those three countries had insisted on it. A similar incident occurred as regards China and North Korea. Only a few years ago, by all accounts at least a million people, perhaps more, starved to death in a famine. China did not let them cross the border and did very little, if anything, to help. When I put these dilemmas to the Chinese ambassador, she replied, “The problem is, you haven’t had the experience of colonialism”. That was the excuse given for non-intervention. There is something bizarre about all this, because it was the Europeans who defined a treaty of non-intervention several hundred years ago under the treaty of Westphalia. That has been abandoned more and more rapidly ever since, particularly since the British intervention to end the transatlantic slave trade, about which I have talked in this House on other occasions. Certainly since the formation of the United Nations, intervention has been seen as right and proper in certain situations.
China and some other countries are still very reluctant to think of imposing any form of intervention or pressure on a regime to make it change. However, China must be deeply troubled by what is happening in North Korea. Even if it is not concerned about human rights—both previous speakers have mentioned that—the sheer instability of the regime and the danger it poses to others, as shown by the sinking of the South Korean naval ship and the firing of missiles into the Sea of Japan, must make China worried about the nature of that regime. Its approach still appears to be that of, “We can’t do anything, we won’t do anything and it runs against our principles, too”.
One of the ways that the United Nations offered us great hope after the Second World War—a hope which has sadly not materialised, but which we must never lose sight of—was in its recognition that nation states and their Governments had a duty to treat their citizens well and not to ride roughshod over their rights. That led increasingly—particularly after the end of the Cold War—to intervention programmes, most of which were very successful. We regard the intervention programmes in Sierra Leone, Papua New Guinea and Kosovo as successful. The intervention in Iraq was possibly successful, but was carried out in a way which, post-conflict, led to far too much misery and loss of human life fully to justify that type of intervention. It was right, but badly carried out.
Could you do the same in North Korea? There is no doubt that if China chose to intervene and change the regime there, I for one would stand up to say, “I am pleased”—just as I remember welcoming Vietnam’s intervention in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the intervention by Tanzania into Uganda to remove Idi Amin, and the Indian Government’s decision to move into the then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. I welcomed all those interventions. Although I am not a great fan of the Chinese form of government, almost anything would be better than what is happening in North Korea.
What can we do? Some suggestions have already been made, but by far the most important is to persuade the Chinese that following the treaty of Westphalia in Asia, 300 years after it was written, is not necessarily the best definition of a good and humanitarian foreign policy. It is certainly not one for which you can make the excuse of having had a colonial experience in order to justify it. We all know that what is happening in North Korea is abhorrent in the extreme and intensely dangerous. We have to be very clear in telling that over and again to the Chinese Government. At the end of the day, only they can change this situation.
If it comes to a war between North Korea and South Korea—which, for what my judgment is worth, will not happen; there is too much to lose by them, and China would indicate that it would be an unacceptable step—the consequences would be horrendous. That is the only other way that change could happen. In fact, change in North Korea needs to come from China. The United Nations must keep asserting the importance of national Governments behaving in a civilised manner towards their own citizens. We must never lose sight of human rights and the importance of democracy and the rule of law in order to preserve stability, peace and tranquillity between and within nations.
For all those reasons I am glad to support the noble Lord, Lord Alton, in his debate.