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Foreign Affairs and Defence

I thank my hon. Friend for his support of the Iranian Government's decision. I want to speak briefly about Africa, although not about Zimbabwe, on which the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey) spoke passionately, but about the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Chad and Somalia, in the context of the European Union missions that have been deployed there in recent months and European security and defence policy generally. I want then to talk about the situation between Georgia and Russia. I intervened on the Foreign Secretary earlier, because I am concerned about what appears to be a lack of deployment of support for the United Nations force in the Congo. There are plenty of precedents for European Union deployments in the Congo. Some years ago there was the Artemis mission and two years ago there was a fairly successful EUFOR mission to Kinshasa, which I visited. The question of who is answerable to whom was answered in that deployment. During my visit, I was involved in a meeting about security matters in Kinshasa in which the EU force commander, the force commander of MONUC—the United Nations mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—the EU special representative and the United Nations special representative all participated. My concern, which I raised with the Foreign Secretary, is that in the past two years the European Union has agreed to deploy eight battlegroups, but we have never deployed any of them. Two are on call now—one is a British battlegroup and the other is a German-led battlegroup—and they amount to some 3,000 troops on call, deployable at 15 days' notice. The Foreign Secretary was in the eastern Congo on 1 and 2 November with the French Foreign Minister, Mr. Kouchner, who holds the presidency of the European Union. If the decision had been taken to provide that short-term assistance to the MONUC forces, those troops could have been deployed in 15 days and the situation would have been alleviated. They can be deployed only on a short-term basis, and the requirement is only a short-term requirement. If we are to have these battlegroups, and if they are to be on call, surely they should be available for short-term, dire humanitarian situations, such as that in the Congo, where some form of peace enforcement is required. If they are not to be used in such situations, what are they to be used for? They are beginning to become simply a paper commitment rather than a real commitment to any form of peacekeeping, and I would like to see that point seriously addressed. We can deploy under the EU flag. We have a very successful mission in Chad at the present time, which is protecting refugees from the Darfur conflict. It is there under a UN mandate, and will hand over to an African Union force under UN command in March next year. Interestingly—or perhaps ironically, given the Irish referendum debate—it is led by an Irish commander. General Patrick Nash is the operational commander of the mission, and one of the companies deployed in that force is a company of Irish soldiers. That demonstrates that, under the European security and defence policy, what is described in Ireland as the triple lock really works. Such a force would deploy only with the UN mandate, and with the approval of the Irish Government and the Irish Parliament. That fits in with the kind of peace enforcement or peacekeeping role that the ESDP was designed for, and with the intergovernmental nature of the ESDP. It does not, as was suggested during the Irish referendum debate, involve a European army. It is an intergovernmental force or, if you like, a coalition of the willing. There is a similar arrangement at the moment off the coast of Somalia, where the EU naval force is deployed. The United Kingdom is the framework nation for that force, and the mission is commanded from Northwood in London. My real concern is about duplication, however. What appear to be three international naval forces are now deployed off the coast of Somalia to combat piracy. We have the original CTF-150 force, which has engaged with the pirates; we have the NATO force, which has been there for some time; and we now have an EU force. That arrangement involves ships that are from basically the same nations but which are operating under different command structures. We still do not have enough ships, but I am not sure that duplication into three different commands will solve the problem of piracy in the long run. We really need some joined-up government. I should like to reflect on the Georgia-Russia situation, which has already been mentioned. In the past month or so, I have visited Tblisi and Moscow, where I had discussions about the situation. In the wake of what happened at the beginning of August, the actions of President Sarkozy in the name of the European Union were commendable. He achieved some success, but I seriously question whether any other nation holding the EU presidency would have had the same success. I believe that President Medvedev and Mr. Putin were prepared to meet President Sarkozy because he was the President of France, which is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. I am not sure—I say this with all due deference to the smaller member states of the European Union—that other presidencies would have had the same success. I am thus very concerned about lulling ourselves into a false sense of security, thinking that we can use the EU in such an initiative. If we had been premature, as the Georgians would have liked us to have been, in advancing Georgia's NATO membership—I support it in the long term—and if an article 5 response under the NATO treaty had been made, I am concerned that we would have been looking at a far worse situation. The conflict has real implications for NATO, EU and Russian relations. It is a frozen conflict that has moved on slightly, but it dates back to the fall of the Soviet Union. We have to remember that the two provinces, as we have described then, within Georgia—Abkhazia and South Ossetia—were never totally integrated provinces of the state of Georgia. In fact, they were placed in the territory of Georgia by one Joseph Stalin, who just happened to be a Georgian, when he was the chairman of the Soviet Union. They always existed as autonomous units within the territory of Georgia, so there is a danger of looking at the issue too simplistically. Of course we support the territorial integrity of Georgia, but we cannot look at it simplistically in the sense that these areas must be returned as integral parts of Georgia. We need to view the situation as far more complex than that. That is one reason why I believe we will see this revert to a frozen conflict, but with the chess pieces in slightly different places. We were all dismayed by the fact that two members of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe and two Council of Europe member states had gone to war in the dispute. It challenges all of us to get the situation back to a more sensible position in which we can engage with the people in South Ossetia and Abkhazia at the same time as engaging with the Russian authorities. We should engage in negotiations on an enhanced partnership agreement with Russia, while making it clear that it is unacceptable for Russia to seek to extend its sphere of influence to independent countries beyond its borders that have the sovereign right to determine their own future. Together with Russia, the United States and our NATO and OSCE partners, we should prepare the ground for discussions on a renewed security framework in Europe, building on our previous achievements. We need to step up our efforts to seek solutions to all the remaining frozen conflicts in Europe, taking advantage, I hope, of the EU's enhanced credibility as a foreign policy actor and as a valuable counterpart to Russia with regard to issues of security and stability. The EU should further strengthen its relations with Georgia by providing full assistance with repairing the material and economic damage caused by the war and helping it to implement the reforms needed for its consolidation as a modern state based on democracy, the rule of law, good governance and a free market economy. Finally, we must demand that Russia honour its agreement with the EU, ensuring that the EU monitoring mission that is deployed to Georgia is able to perform its tasks within the administrative borders not only of Georgia itself but of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. That is absolutely essential. I think that those borders must be opened up to that monitoring mission, as well as to the OSCE monitoring mission. I hope that the Minister who responds to the debate this evening will give us the assurance that we are not going to let up on the pressure we put on Russia to honour the obligations it entered into in the two agreements it made with President Sarkozy back in August.