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European Commission

Perhaps. The answer to my hon. Friend's question is no: the frontiers are set. Many Albanians living in the Presevo valley in Serbia proper could also make that claim. It is better to stick with the current frontiers rather than start trying to redraw them, which is not a Serb demand, by the way; the Serb demand is still that Kosovo is an eternal part of Serbia and that the Kosovans just jolly well have to live with that. On the contrary, we have to lend maximum support to allow Kosovo to be Kosovo. Britain has done that. Some 42 nations have now recognised Kosovo, and that is the agreed position of the European Union. However, I say with regret that key European partners are refusing to recognise Kosovo. Spain, for example, does not recognise Kosovo, for reasons that are astonishing. As someone who has always supported Spanish freedoms and democracy, I have to say that for Spain to side with the Serbs is the same as if I were to side with the ETA thugs in the Basque country against the broader interests of the Spanish people. Bulgaria, a Slav country, has recognised Kosovo and I congratulate it for doing so. However, Romania, which is not a Slav country has, for whatever reasons, refused so to do. Greece does not recognise Kosovo. That is a contradiction in terms of Greeks' national interests. Greece needs a peaceful western Balkans corridor soon—I should like it to be composed of EU member states—through which Greek commercial interests, including tourism, can pass, allowing visitors to go peacefully up to the north of Europe instead of having to go through all the border checks. There is huge Greek investment in both Macedonia and Kosovo. Greek business men are there, helpfully making money and growing the two economies. Yet Athens cannot, for its own reasons, find its way to a peaceful relationship with Macedonia over the name issue or even give Kosovo diplomatic recognition, as we have and as France, Germany, the Nordic countries and the United States have. I ask my hon. Friend the Minister to get the Foreign Office to see what it can do to counter the Spanish diplomatic campaign in Latin America against recognition for Kosovo. Through the Commonwealth and with our French friends—through La Francophonie, as it is called—and through other networks of states, working in particular with the majority Muslim countries, I ask him to see what can be done to show Belgrade and, behind Belgrade, a deeply revanchiste Russia, that Kosovo is getting recognition. I am impressed by the level of economic activity in Kosovo. In the three or four years since I last visited, when I was a Minister, it really has been transformed from a war-torn country into one with a great deal of economic activity. Much of the money in the country is what we call ““black money””, or illegal money, but as the Swiss say, money has no smell. With new buildings being built, along with new restaurants, hotels and gas stations, and with cars on the road—there are traffic jams galore in Pristina—and motorways being built, I see a future of economic activity and buzz. Thank goodness, the 2nd Battalion the Rifles is currently in Kosovo, but only for a short time to cover the arrival of the EU legislative team, which is mentioned on page 6 of the report. The Ministry of Defence suffers from immense overstretch and from the deep irritation, shared by many hon. Members, at the fact that although there are 18,000 troops in Kosovo, few of them are as capable of imposing peace as the British Army and one or two other European contingents. I ask the MOD to see whether there are training possibilities in Kosovo for the soldiers we have stationed in Germany, and some way of having more British soldiers on the ground. Believe me, armoured vehicles going around with the Union Jack fluttering at the back do more to send out signals of confidence, law and order and a rule-based society than almost anything else. We need to de-UNMIK Kosovo—the United Nations Mission in Kosovo—which is mandated by the UN and does its best. However, after the initial year or two with top people visiting, it does not have the finest flowers of the available global civil service. I am sure that they do not leave security material on the local public transport, but they are not necessarily of the highest quality. Frankly, a state cannot be run by the United Nations. A nation can only run itself by creating its own state. Macedonia, which is next door to Kosovo, has never gone over the edge into full-scale violence, as the ex-Yugoslav states to its northern frontier did in the 1990s. In 2001, we came close, but strong intervention by Lord Robertson, who was the Secretary-General of NATO, Lord Patten, who was the EU Commissioner for foreign affairs, and Javier Solana, who was the European Council's representative on foreign matters, really made a difference. Through the Lake Ohrid agreement, they stabilised the situation and avoided what could otherwise have been a quite difficult confrontation between Macedonians and Albanians, and between Macedonians and Macedonians of a more Slavic origin. Unfortunately, the failure of the EU and NATO to allow Macedonia to pursue full Euro-Atlantic integration has led to the return of some of the old political thinking in Macedonia. I do not blame Her Majesty's Government for that in any way. We have two excellent ambassadors in Andrew Key, who is in Skopje, and Andy Sparks, who is in Pristina. I also know how concerned the Minister is about the issue and how concerned previous Europe Ministers have been about it in the past few years. However, the plain fact is that Macedonia was led to believe that it could join NATO, when key NATO stakeholders did not have enough authority to overturn Greek objections. I will not enter into the debate about Macedonia's name—it is rather like the argument in ““Gulliver's Travels”” about whether one should crack an egg at the big end or the small end. I accept that the issue is of passionate importance to our Greek friends, but it should not prevent Macedonia from exercising its right to pursue EU and NATO integration. I therefore ask the Minister to see what solutions can be found. We should leave the issue of the name to one side, and I will not, as I said, enter into a debate about its merits or demerits. We should not allow the question whether a rose is a rose by any other name, or Macedonia is Macedonia by any other name, to block Macedonia's path to greater EU integration. The same is true for Serbia. I love the Serb people. On every visit to Belgrade, I feel that I am in one of the greatest cities of the world, with an educated, cultivated, post-industrial—almost post-national—class of people who are multilingual and hugely talented. None the less, they seem to want to live firmly in the past. We make a mistake in thinking that if we are kind to the Serbs, they will be kind to themselves. In that respect, I regret that there was a change of policy at the European Council on the issue of Ratko Mladic, the man primarily responsible for the butchery of 8,000 European Muslims in cold blood in 1995. The condition that was always set—that he should go to The Hague if Serbia is to unlock the door barring it from setting out on the path to future EU membership—seems to have been watered down. Ratko Mladic is known to the Serb authorities and he was part of the Serb army and militia network. He was seen around Belgrade a few years ago, so he is not hiding in the hills, unlike his comrade in shame, Karadzic, who is in Republic Srpska. We should have made Mladic's removal to The Hague an unqualified condition, just as we made the rendering of Ante Gotovina to The Hague a condition for starting Croatia's application for EU membership. The Serbs do not respect the EU when it gets weaker bit by bit, drops conditionality and thinks that it will be rewarded for being nice. Not until we politically confront and defeat the so-called radicals—they are actually ugly, Falangist nationalists, who are not radical in any progressive or decent sense of the word—will there be much hope for Serbia and its brave President, Boris Tadic. Those are just some views on the western Balkans, which derive from my complete belief that, having offered to integrate the western Balkans into Europe and Euro-Atlantic structures, we have taken our eye off the ball. For honourable and decent reasons, the eyes of the Minister and the Foreign Secretary have to be on many other balls and many other parts of the world. Currently, they are probably on the level of rainfall in Ireland and on what effect that might have on a certain decision that is being taken in the emerald isle today. However, Europe and Her Majesty's Government have not put the same high-level pressure on the western Balkans that they did during the recent great crises. Bit by bit, the Balkans, instead of Europeanising, are gently suggesting that they might balkanise Europe. We need a serious push to move all the western Balkan nations—I have not gone into depth about Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro or Croatia—into the same position that Slovenia now finds itself in. I turn now to the section of this excellent document entitled ““Europe as a World Partner”” and to the issue of the Maghreb—the countries of Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria. There is a debate about the extent to which Libya should be considered a fully Maghrebian country, but for the sake of my remarks, I will refer just to Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Those three countries are indispensable future partners for Europe, and I therefore very much welcome the initiative by President Sarkozy. When he announced what the French would do during their presidency of the EU, he said that they would create what he called a union for the Mediterranean. That raised certain eyebrows and met with opposition from parts of the EU that felt that the proposals were about the French seeking to put themselves in the driving seat in relation to their corner of Europe—the western Mediterranean. It was thought that that would somehow undo the so-called Barcelona process and the Euromed work launched in 1995. Be that as it may, new energy and a new initiative were needed to get Mediterranean and European economic and diplomatic relationships going again. Of course, the supreme prize is peace in the middle east, but rather than trying to climb the Mount Everest of middle east peace without oxygen, it might be better to attempt the rather lower mountains of the Maghreb countries. I hope that the Government will support President Sarkozy, and I am sure that they will be represented at the conference that he proposes to call. I also hope that we will somewhat upgrade our economic, political and diplomatic relations with the countries in the area. The three Maghreb countries are all tricky. Algeria is an enormous potential source of energy—particularly gas—for the EU, but since the early 1990s it has faced a non-stop assault by ideological Islamists, which is aimed at destabilising the state. In that respect, it remains a mark of shame that Britain—its legal system, the Home Office, Liberty and all the other libertarian organisations—protected a man called Rachid Ramda, who was the financier behind the Algerian Islamist onslaught on the Paris Metro, which killed several innocent people in 1995. That was a forerunner of what happened in Madrid and in our own London tube bombings in July 2005. It took 10 years for this terrorist thug to be sent back to face his accusers in Paris and he is now, correctly, serving a life sentence because the evidence—with or without 42 days' discussion with him—was incontrovertible. That is what the Algerian state has faced. It is a nationalist state run by the military, so it is not my cup of tea in human rights terms. However, we should encourage it to take the same path as other parts of the world, such as Taiwan and Korea, as well as some of the Latin American and south-east Asian states, which started off in an authoritarian way but evolved over time. Morocco has functioning political parties. It has a young king, who is trying to maintain order without wanting to lose the control and authority that all kings have before they understand the benefits of a parliamentary system. He works closely with the Jewish community in the country, just as the President of Tunisia does with the Jewish community there. Morocco's king is seeking a different relationship with Europe. Sadly, there are not enough British contacts down there. We see the Maghreb countries as being a bit of a French backyard. The Spanish and the French have significant disagreements about Western Sahara and the Sahel. There is not, for example, any trade between Morocco and Algeria, which is as absurd as having no trade between Germany and France. We should be taking the argument for what we have achieved in Europe in the past 40 years and saying that it would be a way forward, although we must be careful not to patronise. Of course we should make demands for freedom of expression and human rights, but it is a huge pleasure to walk around in Tunis, for example, and see Tunisian women not being obliged by a patriarchal religious order to wear strange costumes covering them, and to be normal women who hold down Government, ministerial and professional jobs. President Sarkozy's initiative faces difficulties such as whether Muslim Government leaders will be prepared to sit down in the same room with the Prime Minister of Israel, and the question of Turkey.