EDITED TRANSCRIPT OF AN INTERVIEW GIVEN BY THE FOREIGN SECRETARY, MR ROBIN COOK, FOR BBC RADIO 4, LONDON, MONDAY, 21 DECEMBER 1998
INTERVIEWER:
What is the diplomatic initiative that you hope to take after operation Desert Fox?
FOREIGN SECRETARY:
Today, I will spending most of the day on the phone to foreign ministers around the world, in Europe, in the Arab World and also those countries that are also members of the Security Council. What we will be seeking to do is build the broadest possible consensus in the international community against Saddam and making sure that he is as isolated as possible both in that international community and also among his own people.
INTERVIEWER:
You talk about the Arab World; is a consensus going to be easier or more difficult after what has just happened? There seems a fair degree of criticism based on the idea that it will actually be more difficult?
FOREIGN SECRETARY:
No, I don't think there are many governments in the Arab World who would take that view; on the contrary, the majority of governments in the Arab World understand perfectly well that Saddam is trying to achieve that capacity for weapons of terror and that military machine to use against them. The response of the Arab World over the past few days has been very muted. I think that we can indeed build a consensus for the isolation of Iraq which would embrace most of the Arab World as well.
INTERVIEWER:
You talk about the isolation of Iraq, Foreign Secretary. One of the obligations on the West is also to relieve the unquestioned humanitarian suffering of the people. It is all very well to say a lot of this has been brought on them by Saddam, an undeniable fact, but don't you accept that that is something that we should be doing, and yet you are talking about tightening sanctions?
FOREIGN SECRETARY:
Absolutely. I have myself repeatedly stressed that is an important priority of our policy and Britain has taken the lead in this area; it was we who doubled the oil-for-food programme and it was we who earlier this year called a conference in London to examine how we could try and get aid through directly. We are going to make that one of the priorities of the diplomatic initiative.
INTERVIEWER:
Tightening sanctions will not affect, as you see it, food for the people?
FOREIGN SECRETARY:
No, absolutely not. There are no sanctions on food, there never have been sanctions on food.
INTERVIEWER:
But the consequences?
FOREIGN SECRETARY:
Saddam Hussein does have the capacity, authorised by the United Nations, to sell 10 billion dollars dollars a year of oil for all the food and medicines that he could need and he has never come anywhere near it. One of the issues that we will have to look at is whether there are ways in which we try and meet directly the humanitarian needs of his people. That is not going to be easy because Saddam does everything possible to obstruct and prevent it. It is very difficult to operate in Iraq without Saddam's agreement given the brutality and savagery with which he represses any opposition or anything he does not like, but we must make that effort. By the way, I should add that the harvest in Iraq this past year has actually increased but what Saddam is doing is exporting the food rather than feeding his own people.
INTERVIEWER:
There is another element about this and that is the opposition inside and outside Iraq. Observers say that it is a pipe dream to imagine that there is a group of people, even if they were funded - and we heard the umbrella group here in London saying 'Give us the money, give us the weapons and we will do the job!' This isn't going to happen, is it?
FOREIGN SECRETARY:
We have no plans to provide money in the way that they were requesting. We are in dialogue with the Iraqi opposition groups in the West and my colleague, Derek Fatchett, had them into the Foreign Office last month and did stress the need that they show more unity and make sure that they focused their activities on Saddam and not against each other. We will continue to have that dialogue. One way we are actually better able to be of positive value is because one of the consequences of the military action is that we have deliberately destroyed Saddam's capacity to jam the BBC World Service and other international broadcasts. So we can actually try now to get the truth to the people of Iraq.
INTERVIEWER:
There are people with military backgrounds on the international stage who are expressing real doubt about the whole nature of this episode and saying it is all very well to say we have got these objectives and we have degraded some of his military machine, but did you really know what this diplomatic phase afterwards, was going to be when President Clinton and Mr Blair pulled the trigger?
FOREIGN SECRETARY:
Yes. We have had the diplomatic strategy ready for some time. You can't start a diplomatic campaign in the middle of the military campaign but we have spelled out for the last three days exactly what we are going to do - build that consensus for isolation, make sure that we maintain the monitoring of Saddam's military capacity - and we have a very clear, credible threat to deter him from trying it again because he knows we are not bluffing, and also to look at ways in which we don't actually make sanctions tight in the sense of increasing sanctions, but that they are better enforced whilst tackling the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people. Those are the elements of the diplomatic package and that is what I will be discussing with foreign ministers around the world today.
INTERVIEWER:
But if you are talking about consensus, look at the French for example.
FOREIGN SECRETARY:
If you go round Europe, I think you will find that there is an awful lot more support for the perspective we have taken within Europe than for the perspective being outlined by the French government. What I do welcome about the statement yesterday by President Chirac is that it clearly does say that we must work together to find a common approach to Iraq. We are willing to do that and certainly one of the people I will be having dialogue with today I hope will
be my French opposite number whom I spoke to at the very start of the military action and who made it plain he did not want any disagreement on the part of the French government on the military action to interfere with how we worked together at the end of it.
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