---

Armed Forces Personnel

The debate about armed forces personnel is about real people. Like most other hon. Members, the real people that I knew in the armed forces were my relations, although I did not know my grandfather, who sadly died at the age of only 32 as a direct result of being poisoned with mustard gas in the Somme. I had two uncles, one of whom was a prisoner of war in Burma and made to work on the Burma railroad and another who, ironically, left the coal mines in 1928 because he hated working in them. He joined the Army and was taken prisoner at Dunkirk, fighting the rearguard action there. He ended up working in a Polish coal mine for four years. My father joined the RAF, but he was sent home after three days because, he was told, ““You’ll do more important work back home digging coal, Geordie, than flying aeroplanes.”” I do not have any personal or professional experience in the forces, but in a debate about armed forces personnel, I have relevant recent experience of the impact that our forces are having on the lives of ordinary people facing massive, extraordinary problems in Iraq. We have not just sent our forces to Iraq to fight a battle for us and then leave. Would that we had done that—it might have been a different story. Our armed forces personnel in Iraq have a very difficult job, as the local people recognise. In March, I was fortunate enough to lead a delegation of Labour movement people to Iraq. Most of us had been against the war, and I still believe that the debate on weapons of mass destruction was not a fair one. However, the people whom we met said that they did not want to talk about WMD, because they were worried about GRT—getting rid of a tyrant. The Iraqis saw our Government and armed forces as forces for good, and we must listen to them. It is easy for us to be critical and to point the finger, but our armed forces went into Iraq to get rid of a tyrant who had spent the best part of 20 years trying to wipe out an entire race of people—the Kurds. In Sulaimaniya, we saw examples of the torture that had been inflicted. In a matter-of-fact building about the size of a supermarket, on the main street in the middle of town, people had been hung in chains and subjected to electric shocks. They had suffered almost every horror that one could imagine. Thanks to the action taken by the British Government and their coalition partners in 1991 to establish the no-fly zone, and thanks also to the work that still goes on, the people in the Kurdistan area of Iraq have been able to build a fledgling democracy. They have a Parliament with 111 Members, and the fact that 29 of them are women puts our institution to shame. Without our intervention, that would not have happened: instead, 200,000 more people would have been killed, many thousands more would have been buried alive, tortured and persecuted, and many more villages would have been wiped off the face of the earth. That is what was happening, yet many in the world community were turning a blind eye. I still have concerns about how we went to war, but people in the area believe that we did the right thing on their behalf. We must listen to what they say, and we should continue to do the right thing, which means that we should remain there. The people of Kurdistan are very keen to develop links with the UK. They see us as their liberators and—