I asked for this debate for three main reasons. When the tribunal was established, I was firmly of the view that it would not heal wounds or bring people together. On the contrary, I thought that it would drive communities in the former Yugoslavia further apart, that it would be conducted on a low threshold of evidence and that it would pit neighbour against neighbour.

I have travelled extensively in the former Yugoslavia, before the various wars and since. I took a great interest in the truth and reconciliation commission established in South Africa. My second reason for securing the debate is that it seems to me that after something as vile and vicious as apartheid, or as vicious as a civil war, such a commission is more likely to succeed than a criminal tribunal.

My third reason for asking for the debate is that it is time to draw a line under the tribunal at The Hague and allow individual countries to arrest, charge and punish their citizens if they believe that they have committed crimes against the community. I notice that the occupying coalition in Iraq, led by the United States, has decided to allow the Iraqi people to try Saddam Hussein and his former Government; there are to be no charges against the warlords and no tribunals in Afghanistan. Yugoslavia seems to be singled out for this kind of treatment, and one must ask why. The United States was one of the main countries to set up the tribunal, and it gives the tribunal money, yet it refuses to sign up to the International Criminal Court. So a lot of double standards hang around the issue.

I have followed the tribunal at The Hague very closely. It is my belief that it delivers a biased system of justice and that the decisions taken by the chief prosecutor are largely based on the nationality of the accused, rather than on what evidence there is against them. In short, the tribunal has turned out as I said it would: it is a victors' court, set up mainly to punish one nationality—the Serbs.

A few years ago, I visited the tribunal with Mark Littman QC, a Serbian colleague who opposed, as I did, the illegal bombing of Yugoslavia. I am pleased to say that we were granted an interview with Carla del Ponte, the chief prosecutor. We were able to raise some of our concerns about how the indictments had been issued and why there was such emphasis on the Serbs. After all, there had been a civil war in Yugoslavia. When I went to The Hague, I had just returned from Croatia, where I had been looking at the plight of Serb returnees. We were shown mass graves there. In Operation Storm, there had been a lot of fighting; the Croatian army had driven out about 200,000 Serbs, and that was the first mass ethnic cleansing of the various wars. I was very up to date on what had gone on there, and I raised the issue of the mass graves with the prosecutor. We took photographs that matched up with the people who were missing. Carla del Ponte was not interested and said that she was short of resources.

I also raised the issue of Nasser Oric. With another organisation—not the NATO Parliamentary Assembly—I went to the siege of Sarajevo and visited not only the Muslim areas but some of the predominantly Serb villages. All the evidence there was about Oric and his raiding band, and how they had killed lots of people. He was, by any standards, a war criminal and there were videotapes and lots of evidence. Members of this House who went to the same area also know that. The chief prosecutor said that she had no plans to indict him and would not discuss the issue. However, she admitted that the whereabouts of that man were known. Only now, in the face of overwhelming protests and as a result of people putting evidence forward, has he been arrested. He has now been sent for trial at The Hague, but until then he had led rather a pleasant life. I think that there were double standards operating in that case.

In the same year I visited Banja Luka with the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. I was chair of the sub-committee at that time. We talked to many people and, in particular, to a policeman who worked for the chief prosecutor at The Hague. Interestingly, the policeman came from Preston, in the north of England, not very far from where I live. When he was questioned closely he told us that he had instructions to go after Serb war criminals only. Moreover, on the wall of the office of the prosecutor at The Hague—she is supposed to be impartial and to look for war criminals from every ethnic group in the former Yugoslavia—there was a big cartoon showing Serb criminals wanted for war crimes. Those war criminals probably do need to end up in The Hague, or being tried in their own country, but it seemed to us that the prosecutor showed an overwhelming bias.

We asked about the crimes of one or two of the Kosovo Albanians—Hashim Thaci, Agim Ceku and Ramush Haradinaj, who is now the Prime Minister of Kosovo—but no indictments have been published for them. Everyone agrees that those people took part in some very unpleasant practices during the bombing of Yugoslavia; newspaper articles are written about it, and no one bothers to deny it.

The Croatian general, Gotovina, has recently made it known that he has no intention of surrendering himself to the tribunal at The Hague, although he is willing to appear in Zagreb and be questioned by the tribunal. It is clear that there are laws for some participants in the civil war and not for others. Let us imagine the outcry if Belgrade had hung on for so long to a war criminal or an indicted person who was living openly in Belgrade or one of the other cities. Let us imagine what would have been said in a case similar to that of the general.

The more closely one examines the decisions taken by the chief prosecutor and the conduct of the hearings at the tribunal, the more it becomes clear that the tribunal is not a triumph for law and justice. It is a court founded by the west, funded largely by the west, and staffed at very senior levels by the west.

Many senior professors of law and others take the same view as me; I shall quote only one of them because I have so much material from people who share my view. Robert M. Hayden, from the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, in the United States, commented, in relation to the tribunals, on the

"failure of the ICTY Prosecutor to indict NATO leaders for the use of cluster bombs. This prosecutorial standard was set in July 1995, when Milan Martic, president of the self-proclaimed Serb Republic in Croatia, was indicted for violations of the laws and customs of war on the grounds that he had ordered the May 1995 missile attack on Zagreb."

He continues:

"According to the indictment, what made the bombardment a war crime was that the missiles had been fitted with cluster warheads. Seven civilians were killed and many more wounded, and damage was done to a home for the aged and to a children's hospital.

Why, then, have there been no indictments of NATO's May 7 attack on the city of Nis, where cluster bombs fell on the market, killing fifteen people, and hitting also the city's main hospital? It is not acceptable to say that NATO was only aiming at military targets and missed; after all, Martic maintained that he was aiming at military targets in Zagreb . . . While the Prosecutor says that Martic targeted cities intentionally, this is also true of NATO generals, especially the American ones, who were even complaining that French politicians did not permit them to attack more sites in Yugoslav cities."

I stood on the last bridge over the Danube—the railway bridge—at Novi Sad the night before it was bombed by NATO. That was a civilian target, because the bridges bring water supplies and other things across to the other half of the city. There was no doubt that that was deliberately targeted by NATO—it took out all the bridges. I visited the Crvena Zastava car and tractor factory and spoke to the workers just a few days after they had been bombed. That civilian target was hit by 21 cruise missiles. Many people were injured and I have photographs in which there is blood on the floor from the sit-in. The workers did not want to be bombed and they sent their stated position to every country in NATO. I do not know how they survived—people were only injured and not dead—because it was such a complete mess after the bombardment. From my hotel bedroom window I watched NATO bomb the oil refinery at Pancevo. I visited people who were grieving for colleagues who died. There are no charges against NATO for any of these offences. NATO took action that did not have the approval of the United Nations.

In late 1999 the tribunal prosecutor said that she was investigating NATO's conduct during the Kosovo war, including the question of the use of cluster bombs, but within days she produced a preliminary document that to my knowledge has never been published—and I have been trying to get hold of it. There was a press release, of which Robert M. Hayden said:

"The prosecutor had said that if the report indicated that NATO broke the Geneva conventions she would indict those responsible; however, four days later she issued a press release stating that NATO is 'not under investigation by the Office of the Prosecutor . . . There is no formal inquiry into the actions of NATO during the conflict.'"

It was never going to happen. Carla del Ponte, like her predecessor the Canadian, Louise Arbour, is a creature of NATO. Just listen to what Jamie Shea, the official press officer, said in answer to a question about NATO's liability for war crimes before the court at The Hague:

"NATO is the friend of the Tribunal. NATO countries are those that have provided the finances to set up the Tribunal, we are among the majority financiers."

The ICTY was set up to try to convict Serbs. Serbs resisted the western Governments who had taken sides.