'War in the Balkans' symposium, 29 May 1999

Speech Notes of Graham Kelly MP.

As I sit in Parliament Debating Chamber and look up I can see the walls, plaques of each military war New Zealand troops have been involved in for the past 100 years, starting with the Boer War in South Africa.

It is quite chilling as one observes our propensity as a nation to leap into almost any conflict going.

In saying this, I do not underplay the enormous contribution and the ultimate sacrifice that thousands of New Zealanders have made fighting in the two World Wars, but in the main, it has been other people's wars.

When the New Zealand Government decided to send troops to Bosnia about five years ago as peace keepers, the New Zealand Parliament debated the issue, although there was no vote taken at the end of that debate. A feature of the debate was that there was little or no distinction made between peace keeping and peace making.

My view was that we were sending troops who would inevitably end up defending themselves, or being required to take some offensive action in response to actions initiated against them. This would have been peace making.

The parliamentary debate was essentially about peace keeping, and there was a reluctance to examine the difference.

The debate largely focused on defending the Government's decision, and/or supporting the decisions made by other countries who had already indicated their support.

Why raise this in the context of this symposium?

Because it seems to me that once again (as those plaques on the Debating Chamber wall show), our politicians got instantly sucked into this issue with little or no widespread debate - in or out of the Debating Chamber.

That is why this symposium is important, as many have been in the past, to widen the debate amongst the public.

Like the recent bombing of Iraq, the bombing of Yugoslavia by Nato occurred and continues without United Nations sanction.

This raises for me the larger question for New Zealand and the international community of the quite deliberate sidelining of the United Nations.

Since the balance of terror ended with the collapse of the Soviet and the end to the Cold War, the Americans have taken on the role of international policemen.

In some cases the United States of America's involvement may be appropriate, but there are pressures on their politicians from military interests, the arms industry, trade groups and others, that, coupled with a lack of alternative international pressure to modify their behaviour, is increasingly leading them into theatres of conflict that the UN in the past would not have undertaken, or taken in a different form.

Nato in this latest case has now replaced the UN as the body to decide how we handle conflicts.

Regardless of the outcome, there will be profound implications for the future of the United Nations, international security, and relations with Russia and China. The NATO bombing has undermined the fragile structure of international law.

France tried calling on the United Nations Security Council for a resolution to authorise the deployment of NATO peace-keepers. The US flatly refused and insisted on its stand that NATO should be able to act independently of the United Nations.

What this is leading to, is that the UN, the World Court and other agencies are becoming irrelevant because of the arbitrary actions of the super powers acting outside the internationally agreed world bodies.

What is urgently needed from the New Zealand Government is to display leadership internationally and start the process of debating the future role of the UN amongst the international community.

The UN is all we've got.

Do we like or accept the alternatives?

Small nations like ours must demand this debate occur if we want the UN to be effective and play a prominent role in and between the nations of the world.

I agree with Helen Clark who said recently that the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia is a "complete disaster".

We all know that the bombing is a violation of Article 2 of the UN Charter that prohibits force against a sovereign state where it has not committed aggression on other states. However, what was, or is, the alternative?

There were and are other countries, particularly Russia, that could have and should be used to put pressures on President Slobodan Milosevic to grant autonomy to Kosovo.

It is in the West's interest that Russia should play a useful role in international affairs.

Why then was this not and apparently is not, being encouraged more by the West?

Russia is being marginalised by the expansion of NATO, but its links with a number of rogue states (like Yugoslavia) should be used more (and encouraged to be used) to exert diplomatic pressure on them to behave.

Milosevic would find it difficult to alienate his traditional and most powerful ally and Russia could ill afford to refuse the West's challenge.

Instead, the United States and Nato by-passed the inconvenient balance of power in the Security Council and instead sought to marginalise Moscow. This avenue of action must again be explored with Russia.

Even the recent Evening Post editorial, after supporting the present NATO policy, had its own reservations and confessed:

'Admittedly the Nato offensive is a high-risk strategy There is a danger that bombing, by itself, will not achieve the desired goals and that the commitment of ground troops will be required to bring an end to Yugoslavia's repression of the Kosovars. That in turn entails a risk that Nato will become bogged down in a costly and messy war of attrition."

No one could defend Milosovic's treatment of the Kosovo population. It has been barbaric. His own population, only two years ago were in the streets demonstrating against him. The bombing now finds these same people linking hands on bridges waiting to be hit.

But is the bombing campaign going to work? It didn't in Vietnam - even though the mentality was, "We had to destroy a village to save it'.

It didn't in Iraq.

Last year when Britain and the US bombed Iraq, innocent people were killed and when the bombing stopped, Iraq President Saddam Hussein emerged unharmed from his bunker. The same will happen in Yugoslavia.

The bombing campaign is placing incredible strains on Nato, and European countries are split over the campaign.

By the time the bombing is finished, there will be little left to liberate. As Harold Pinter said, "This was the crazed logic of escalation."

The immediate necessity now is to halt the bombing and seek a settlement enabling those who fled Kosovo to return, with international assistance and the resources to rebuild.

It must be under a United Nations mandate that an international force moves in to protect the unarmed civilians.

Arming the KLO or allowing Nato troops to conduct a ground war against Yugoslavia will only prolong the agony.

Nato needs the UN to help and the UN needs Eastern Europe and Russia to help, not only dig itself out of this mess, but to assist the UN as the only legitimate body to co-ordinate and act for all of the countries of the world.

Return to "'War in the Balkans' symposium"

Action Alerts	PMA's newsletter	What's on where	Peace links	Help PMA grow	How PMA can help you	Petition Forms	Site Map