=================================================================================== .................................................................................... ON THE RECORD JOHN MAPLES INTERVIEW RECORDED FROM TRANSMISSION: BBC ONE DATE: 28.3.99
.................................................................................... 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. ....oooOOOooo.... 3 FoLdEd