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ON THE RECORD
JOHN MAPLES INTERVIEW
RECORDED FROM TRANSMISSION: BBC ONE DATE: 28.3.99
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HUMPHRYS: Terry Dignan reporting there.
John Maples,
is your leadership one hundred per cent behind this strategy?
JOHN MAPLES: Well we've given the government our
support for the air strikes which they say have the objective of stopping the suffering
in Kosovo and bringing Milosevic back, making him sign the agreement that was almost
reached in Paris. And, yes, we do support that but we've also made it clear that
we would oppose the starting of a ground war, in other words Nato troops fighting
their way into Kosovo. I think that that would be getting into something deeper and
deeper, which it would be very difficult to get out of.
HUMPHRYS: William Hague has said what's needed
is a clear sense of direction and a clear goal. Does that imply that you believe
that they do not exist at the moment.
MAPLES: Well in the debate on Kosovo in the
House of Commons last Thursday we asked the government some questions about these
matters - what would they do if the bombing didn't work and what was the long-term
plan for the Balkans. Now, I've said at the time I didn't expect immediate answers
to those but that we assumed that the government had answers to them and I think,
I assume they do, I think they're entitled to the benefit of the doubt about this.
But I do think we need to have a longer term plan for the solution of this problem
and it's not at all clear what that is.
HUMPHRYS: What do you think it ought to be?
MAPLES: Well I don't - it's very difficult
to know. I mean General Rose was just saying maybe one of Nato's options is to arm
the KLA, which then essentially the west would be supporting the independence of
Kosovo not just its autonomy and of course giving rise to demands almost certainly
for a greater Albanian state which would probably de-stabilise Macedonia and of course
one of the purposes of this exercise is to stop the de-stabilisation of Macedonia.
This is a very very complicated problem and I don't pretend to know the solution
but I just hope that the government has got a longer term plan than simply punishing
Milosevic for his intransigence.
HUMPHRYS: Surely the problem is that by bombing
the Serbs we are saying to the Kosovos we support your independence, in effect.
MAPLES: What we've said is that we support
their autonomy and what the agreement that was negotiated in France calls for is
their autonomy and does not call for their independence, but I think arming them
and actively taking their side in this civil war, would as you say, be effectively
calling for their independence and that begs a whole lot of extra questions which
I think are quite difficult to deal with.
HUMPHRYS: And the biggest question at the
moment is whether bombing alone can do what it is that they are setting out, they
have now set out to do.
MAPLES: Yes I think this is question that
everybody is asking themselves. The government in the debate said that their advice
from their military advisors was that it could and that with modern very smart weapons
I think one has to accept that targeting can be much more accurate. If this works
it raises the possibility of resolving other international issues without using ground
troops but being able to use military force. There's considerable doubt over whether
this can happen but again I think the government, if it believes it can achieve its
objective about this, is entitled to the benefit of the doubt and we will see in
due course whether it was correct or not.
HUMPHRYS: But there's more than considerable
doubt isn't there, when you even have people like General Rose himself saying it
simply cannot be done, you can attack a tank perhaps but you cannot attack a bloke
carrying a mortar - how do you get at him. You can't stop a man with a Molotov cocktail
or a petrol bomb throwing it into a house and that way you effectively cleanse as
well as any other way.
MAPLES: You're obviously right and I raised
that question with George Robertson in the debate last Thursday, pointing out that
you don't need air defences and sophisticated military equipment, all you need is
soldiers and trucks with automatic rifles and they can do an absolutely enormous
amount of damage. I think the government's strategy, although you would really have
to ask them in detail how their thinking has developed is that they can make the
price of it so high for Milosevic that he will just desist from the atrocities in
Kosovo, so far unfortunately that doesn't seem to be what's happening.
HUMPHRYS: Well quite the opposite seems to
be happening and that's the worry isn't it.
MAPLES: Yes, I think one of the problems
here was that as soon as Nato took the decision to bomb it had to remove the two
thousand monitors, peace monitors who were in there monitoring the peace agreement
which was reached before Christmas and they were having some success, not an enormous
amount, massacres were certainly taking place while they were there. But at least
there were two thousand people monitoring what the Serbs were doing. There's now
unfortunately nobody and I think that Nato has to bring this to a conclusion fairly
quickly if it is to avert the human catastrophe in Kosovo that is the purpose of
this whole exercise to avoid.
HUMPHRYS: But the whole thing is that Nato
says there already is a human catastrophe as we speak and the problem is, isn't it,
that we are now apparently saying to the Kosovans, that we will help you, up to a
point, and we've shown that because we are bombing the Serbs for you as it were,
but we won't send in the ground troops to finish off the job. In other words, we
might even be betraying our promise to them, might we not and you in the Conservative
Party are going along with that by saying we will not even contemplate the possibility
of ground troops, if I understand you correctly.
MAPLES: Well the government has said that
too. The government has made it very clear, the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary
and the Defence Secretary have made it clear that they will not send in ground troops..
HUMPHRYS: Do you think they are right?
MAPLES: ....and we agree with that. Well
I think if you start sending in ground troops then we are getting Nato involved,
firstly you would need an awful lot more than the twenty-eight thousand people who
are planned as the Nato peace keeping force, they aren't all in Macedonia yet, only
about half of them are there and estimates from military experts range from an army
of a hundred to two hundred thousand people to fight their way into Kosovo and take
it. The question then arises of when would they ever get out, would this actually
stabilise the area or would it add to the instability and would they end up fighting
a civil war between two parties and probably at the end of the day making themselves
pretty unpopular with both. I think those are the reasons that we and the government
share for not wanting to see the involvement of ground troops.
HUMPHRYS: All of which raises the question
of whether we should have started this in the first place.
MAPLES: Well the government as I say said
that their advice was that with an air campaign they could achieve the objectives
which they have set and we've just discussed what those were. We felt that they
are entitled to the benefit of the doubt. We don't have access to the intelligence
and military advice that they have but if they can achieve those objectives with
air power alone, well good luck to them. I really seriously hope it succeeds. But
there are, as we've just been discussing, some very difficult second order questions
that arise if that is not the answer.
HUMPHRYS: John Maples, many thanks.
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