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Sri Lanka

It is a pleasure and a privilege to follow the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh), who spoke with an integrity, passion and eloquence that will have been admired by Members on both sides of the House. Like the right hon. Member for Gordon (Malcolm Bruce), I was a member of the five-person delegation to Sri Lanka that was led by the right hon. Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Des Browne). I was pleased to be part of that, and did it on the basis that I had no previous Sri Lankan footprint. To my knowledge, I do not have a significant number of Tamils in my Buckingham constituency. What I do have is a passionate interest in international affairs, human rights and the need to avoid, or minimise, conflict. I want, very briefly, to say something abut the Sri Lankan Government, about the camps that we visited, and about the future for the country as a whole. Let me be clear, like the right hon. Member for Gordon: the Government of Sri Lanka are still fundamentally in denial. They were given to ostentatious and bellicose denunciations of all and sundry who had dared to criticise them. They were extraordinarily rude, and inappropriately so, about the Foreign Secretary. They took umbrage at our raising critical evidence against them. For example, when I mentioned, during a meeting with the President, the UN's satellite photography, which appeared to repudiate the notion that they had stuck to their 12 February commitment not to deploy heavy weaponry, the President's response was both to complain bitterly about UN spying and to rant at me about adopting a neo-colonialist posture. The House will not be surprised to learn that I was not intimidated by the rant, or indeed impressed by it, but rant it nevertheless was, and it will not do. We are entitled to hold that Government to account. We underlined the imperative of a ceasefire. We said that heavy weaponry must not be used. We said, "You cannot secure a military victory, and if you think you are behaving properly in the face of a considerable body of evidence to the contrary, glasnost must apply. Open up; let people witness what is taking place; allow the international aid agencies, and in particular the media, to inspect the territory and judge for themselves whether you are behaving properly." Let me next say something about the camps. We visited two zones of a camp called Menik Farm, which had been established only about a week earlier. Tents were more or less universally provided and everyone was housed, albeit in extremely spartan conditions. There was anecdotal evidence of a reasonable number of latrines and some evidence of a decent water supply, but much more needed to be done about sanitation. I was horrified to be told by students receiving tuition in business studies and by their tutor—this was at four o'clock in the afternoon—that they had not had a single thing to eat in the course of the day. That is lamentable and unsatisfactory, and must be changed without delay. What the right hon. Member for Gordon said was true. When we asked individuals in the camps, independently of each other and in the absence of any military personnel—whom we had told, in language that would not be acceptable in Parliament, that they needed to absent themselves from the scene—why they had not escaped from the conflict zone earlier, those people, to a man and a woman, volunteered that they had been prevented from doing so by the LTTE on pain of being shot dead, and that they knew of others who had been. The position needs to be put on the record: the LTTE is a pretty poisonous force. But we were not there to stand up for the LTTE. We were there to have discussions, to observe the situation for ourselves and to challenge the Government of Sri Lanka, and we make no apology for doing that. The third point that I wish to make concerns the future. The Government of Sri Lanka are still obsessed with complaining about people waving banners and flags in Parliament square. We explained to them the principle and practice of the operational independence of the police. I remember saying to Foreign Minister Bogollagama that the idea that just because people demonstrate or wave a flag—even of a proscribed organisation—it would be justified for the police to wade in and round them up, or fire tear gas or water cannon at them, is for the birds, as that is simply not reasonable or proportionate. There has to be a constitutional blueprint for a sustainable future for all the people of Sri Lanka. The idea that there can be a military victory—that the LTTE can be wiped out and that the problem can be physically removed and that will be the end of the matter—is nonsense on stilts, and the Government of Sri Lanka need to be clear about that. I went there, as others did, trying to be relatively impartial by taking note of the evidence but not seeking to take sides. However, I say to those who have much more experience on this subject than I do that since we came back the situation has got worse: the killing has continued, civilians have suffered, and there have been indiscriminate attacks. Unless the Government of Sri Lanka very quickly and in short order recognise the scale of international anger and change their behaviour, it will be inevitable that the multilateral institutions on which we depend for civilisation will assert themselves to take the strongest possible action against the regime. It is in the regime's hands to behave properly or to face the consequences.