The Scottish Government

THE JAMES SMART MEMORIAL LECTURE 2006

BY

THE RT HON LORD ROBERTSON OF PORT ELLEN

KT GCMG hon FRSE PC

(Secretary of State for Defence 1997-99, Secretary General of NATO 1999-2003)

28 SEPTEMBER 2006

LONDON

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"KEEPING LAW AND ORDER INTERNATIONALLY"

It is not just because I was born in a police station, nor because I am the grandson, son, brother, father and uncle of police officers, nor because I was once a Governor of the Scottish Police College at Tullialan that I feel privileged, and at home, paying tribute to the first Chief Constable of the City of Glasgow Police. These might be good enough reasons on their own but they are not the only reasons.

I am honoured much more by being able to mark the remarkable legacy Chief Constable Smart and the other founders of the Scottish Police service left for us today. The pioneers of a strong, unarmed, robust, respected, locally-rooted agency of law enforcement created something special which we can value even today.

So to keep alive the memory of one of its most distinguished founding fathers is a worthy idea and I feel humble in joining the illustrious lecturers who have graced the series.

But maybe it was growing up, albeit rebelliously, in an environment of daily law enforcement which still left its mark on the son who did not follow in the family footsteps. I may have occasionally challenged the conventional order and wisdom in my youth but I grew up with a healthy respect for it and ended up making the laws that are now enforced by the police.

But as I have come to specialise in things international my passion for honest law enforcement and order and stability has grown immeasurably. I believe that it is the basic right of a human being to live under the rule of law. Deny that or corrupt it and no one is safe. Even prosperity and poverty are secondary to that fundamental right.

It is difficult, and sometimes dangerous, to divide up the world and its problems and direct accusations against any one group, faction, or religion. We live in a very complex, multilayered and unpredictable world but I believe that it does divide in one particular way.

Put simply, there is an ordered part of the world albeit with imperfections and there is a disordered part. The task for our generation is to grow that ordered part until it completely eclipses and replaces the disorder which is the reality for so many of our fellow world citizens.

It is to that task and how it might be tackled I want to address myself tonight but before I do let me make two preliminary points.

First, whatever the challenges and threats we face today, and some are formidable, we do not face an existential threat to our way of life. There is no Soviet Union, no Nazi Germany, and no world movement which could invade and destroy the way we live. Even the Jihadists in their wildest and most fevered dreams do not dare aspire to that.

We are therefore among the first generations in this country to be able to say that and even as the gloomy pictures on our nightly TV screens depress us we should very much keep that in mind.

Second, we should also keep in mind that we do have in our hands and heads the knowledge, and the institutions and the means, to deal with the grave problems we do face.

Think back just sixteen or seventeen years. Seemingly wise and informed experts said that the Soviet Union could not disintegrate without violence. They were wrong.

They said that there would be violent bloodshed as South Africa moved from Apartheid to majority rule. They were wrong again.

They said that Eastern Europe would go through an orgy of Ceausescu-type bloodletting as it escaped the communist jackboot, but with that one grisly exception, they were wrong here too. They said that Northern Ireland would never escape sectarian, tribal warfare and they were to be wrong again.

And in the Balkans it was widely proclaimed by the same doomsayers that Bosnia, after its hideous, near-medieval killing and torturing would never be a modern united state. Wrong again.

Bosnia is not only a functioning state but the street crime in Sarajevo is now lower than in Zurich, and the team lobbying to lever Bosnia into the EU has a Bosniac chairman and a Serb chief negotiator. And to top all of that, Bosnia and Herzegovina came third in the Eurovision song contest this year - supported by practically all the other Balkan states.

That's a pretty remarkable catalogue of success, and its not complete because I have not mentioned Libya's rehabilitation, Egypt and Saudi Arabia's small steps to democracy, the peace between Pakistan and India in Kashmir and the end to the horrors in Northern Uganda. So let's throw all that into the balance if we sink into depression about the daily news from Baghdad and Helmand Province in Afghanistan.

But it's not even the whole story. In an exhaustive study by the University of British Columbia published just recently they have

shown that this supposedly crazy world has solved peacefully more conflicts in the last fifteen years than it did in the previous two centuries.

Some of the post war institutions may be fraying at the edges, and we seem to wait for ever to see reform at the United Nations, but these very institutions - the European Union, the OSCE, the Council of Europe, NATO, the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank and more - have given the modern world a means of solving problems and conflict which previously required long wars to achieve resolution. We underestimate, and undervalue and now under-resource these remarkable tools of stability and safety which a weary but determined world created in the wake of the Second World War.

Their record of success should be a matter of pride and congratulation, but maybe like so much more the beneficiaries of their success take them for granted.

So today we face a tumbleweed of trouble but we should not be in wrist cutting mode. If we think about it we know only too well what needs to be done. What is required is political will, visionary leadership, the right institutions with the right resources. With that combination nothing should be beyond us.

But neither dare we be complacent or self-comforting. If we do not address the problems which face us today, and they are very different from the ones our fathers and mothers faced, then that tumbleweed of trouble will assuredly overwhelm us.

In James Smart's day and indeed in my father's the problems of Glasgow were home grown. They were a lot less pretty than nostalgia suggests but they were by and large local in origin and in solution.

Not so for today's law enforcement agencies.

The context of law enforcement has moved across the world. Jihadist extremism and political terrorism are not new but 9/11 took it from the use of violence to seek a political end to nihilist violence and grand scale killing for its own sake.

And there is the narcotics industry now, on some estimates, outgunning the petroleum industry in cash generation. Organised crime feeds healthily on the drug trade as well as in the trafficking of people, guns, tobacco and alcohol and has the power and cash to buy police, judges and even countries.

And all of it snaking across continents and on to our own doorsteps.

As burglary and housebreaking ( what a wonderful word we invented for Scotland) diminish because globalisation has made the value of traditional booty too cheap to be worth taking, so our courts are now filling with the human debris of the Afghan poppy fields.

And then along came a very new and potent weapon, the suicide bomber. The Jihadist warrior indoctrinated with the hate and the poison of perverted theology is a new threat to our ordered world and this deadly weapon has no easy countermeasure.

Last year on the 7th of July London was hit by its first suicide bomb attack. In the ten days around that atrocity suicide bombers caused huge casualties in Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt. There was a truck bomb in Baghdad and there was a suicide attack in one other city. The combined carnage was huge, the devastation enormous and the world was rocked by the shockwaves. Even in these last few weeks we still feel them.

How many people caused the ordered world to recoil in horror? How many divisions of Al Qaeda's finest were required to capture such global attention?

Eleven men is the answer.

Just eleven human beings willing to die with their victims and in addition to the death and permanent injury they inflicted, their evil act commanded a worldwide audience. Mission accomplished.

And looming over it all is the horrific prospect of the suicidal Islamofacists moving on to dirty radiological bombs and to chemical and biological weapons.

There are I believe profound consequences in these global criminal trends both for the agencies of law enforcement and for democratic society as a whole.

The fact that the origin of so much lawlessness comes from outside the country means that there has to be a more comprehensive, multinational approach to dealing with the roots of the criminality. Domestic law enforcement on its own will be insufficient and inadequate in the face of snowballing waves of remotely generated trouble.

If western populations are to get the protection they increasingly demand then we will have to be prepared to go to where the trouble starts rather than using sticking plaster here at home.

All this means rethinking fundamentally the old order. It means confronting European electorates with the costs involved in making sure that the threats stay away from our shores and are addressed where they originate.

The cost is big, and rising and it is partly paid in the blood of our troops manning the front line. They are the thin line between that ordered world and the disordered world which challenges us. Our troops are brave, professional, committed.

Their cause is noble and I was deeply privileged to have had the chance to lead them as Defence Secretary of this country.

It also means confronting, and resolving, the longstanding norms concerning the sovereignty of national borders.

Just as we are agonising about the mass killings in Darfur in Sudan and there is global frustration at the resistance of the Sudanese government to a UN force to address it, a debate reopens about the wider responsibility of the international community to our fellow human beings versus the concept of national sovereignty.

I can with vivid recollection remember that morning of 24 March 1999 when in the bunker deep below the Ministry of Defence we embarked on the air campaign against the sovereign state of Yugoslavia without the cover of a UN Security Council Resolution. Our country and the other eighteen nations in NATO had decided that the violent ethnic cleansing of Kosovo by Slobodan Milosevic was unacceptable both in moral terms and crucially in terms of the spill over impact his actions were having in neighbouring countries.

The Foreign and Defence Ministers of France, Germany and this country had all cut their teeth in student rebellion in the 60's, all protesters against the Vietnam war, but yet we knew instinctively what had to be done. Military action against a sovereign nation state without a UNSCR was unprecedented and left us very exposed but we simply could not stand back and let the butcher of Srebrenica prevail.

The need and the necessity therefore were there and NATO planes went bombing Milosevic's military that March day. Our objectives were very simple, and have ensured me a place in the Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations.

'Serbs out, NATO in, refugees home'

All these objectives were met, there were no allied fatalities and, not long after, Milosevic was out of office and in prison where he died on trial for his war crimes.

The action is now seen as wholly justified, its success making its own case. But it was controversial at the time, there was no guarantee that a forensic bombing campaign would create enough leverage, and the appetite for a land invasion or even the planning for it was hard to generate.

In the end Milosevic, his Generals and his few international allies thought we were going to do what we actually could not do - and duly folded their tents. Kosovo's next chapter is being written even as we speak but it does not include genocide killing.

I raise this personal memory to show that resolution, conviction, political will and the right and appropriate military intervention can answer the endless question; what can we do? How do we restore law and order when the state has failed? We may have to answer that question again and again, and not just in Darfur, if the forces of disorder are not to get the upper hand.

So, having presented this portfolio of threats and challenges to our own order and rule of law, you would be right to ask for my prescription. Who is going to be the global policeman?

First of all let us recognise that distant trouble spots are now on our doorsteps. Either we go to them and sort them or they and their troubles will come to us.

If we were to retreat from the tough challenges in Iraq or in Afghanistan, or between Israelis and Palestinians the ensuing chaos will not stop in these regions.

Bringing the troops home before order is achieved will simply bring the terrorists, Jihadists and extremists with them. And the police forces of this country will then be on the new front line.

Second, let us extinguish the notion once and for all that it was the invasion of Iraq which started this spiral of violence. 9/11 itself happened before Iraq. And before that came the murderous attacks on the US Embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania, the attack on the US warship Cole, the outrages in Istanbul, Casablanca and Jordan - all of them claimed with obscene pride by Osama Bin Laden.

Eventually Sadaam would have fallen, but before he did - through his subsidies to suicide bombers in Israel and his support for other terrorist networks, the damage to his previously attacked and permanently spooked neighbours would have been grave. And when he fell does anyone who saw what happened in Yugoslavia when Tito went doubt for a moment that the tensions we see in Iraq today would not have erupted in roughly the same way?

Whether or not you supported the invasion in 2003, we are where we are and it is our own lives, and our own safety which is at risk in the streets of Baghdad - just as much as those of the Iraqis and our brave troops.

Second, we need multinational institutions with resources and political investment proportionate to the scale of the challenges facing us.

Interpol is an organisation with almost legendary status. It calls to mind real police-to-police cooperation and coordination. Its mission, gathering intelligence and coordinating the fight against the tsunami of global criminality, seems self-evident.

The reality is very different and Interpol is a small, under-resourced body with hardly any of the obvious powers to collect and coordinate which the public has a right to expect. Nations guard their policing almost as tightly as they guard the sovereignty of their football teams. It has to change.

The United Nations would have to be invented if it did not exist, but it is its reinvention as a 'fit-for-use' modernised organisation which seems the impossible dream. Its structures, procedures, powers and budgets simply do not fit the new, very different world we inhabit. And yet it is our hope for the future, it is the international forum and the personification of global co-responsibility and it does, in spite of its imperfections, have a remarkable track record of success in so many fields.

But must be better if it is to be relevant to our future.

The European Union, newly agreed as 27 nations, has had a huge effect on our continent. The Union, build deliberately, and incrementally, after the war has made conflict between historic foes impossible. Its economic role has created a single market with enormous strength and the magnet of membership and the disciplines required to join have consolidated and reinforced the democratic transition of the Central and European ex-Communist countries. Without that driving force peaceful transformation would have taken at least a couple of generations.

The EU has also played a major part in dealing with the threat of terrorism and organised crime. The common arrest warrant, which led to the return of one of the second wave alleged London bombers, could only have happened through the pan-European action of the EU. Similarly the post 9/11 action plan gave a cutting edge to the collective EU response on the financial, economic, immigration, diplomatic and communications side of the war on terrorism.

But while the EU is an economic sprinter it is a crawler when it comes to the hard military power needed in extremis in the modern world.

Without the hardware like large heavy planes, precision weapons and most importantly, trained, mobile, survivable troops, then the dependence on the US will continue. And if the US says it will not play, or when the growing frustration at European lukewarmedness about the dangers so close to us, leads to a very dangerous withdrawal to the homeland, then mighty Europe is in deep trouble.

And then there is NATO - the post-war second half of the walnut to European integration, the security half. The ultimate in pooling sovereignty; proud nations agreeing that if one was attacked then it was to be seen as an attack on all - with all the armed forces of the NATO countries coming under an American General and the political guidance of a European politician. Those who bleat about a little more majority voting in the EU might pause to reflect on that great principle which has endured since 1949.

I often said that NATO did not seek to be the world's policeman, and my successor has kept up that refrain. But having been reared in that police dynasty and knowing that policing is about preparedness, prevention, conciliation, and deterrence as much as it is in law enforcement, I have had doubts about what I have said.

This was reinforced by an article in a recent edition of the International Herald Tribune (17 May 2006) by a Finn, Risto Penttila the Director of the Finnish Business and Policy Forum. Finland is not a member of NATO.

He took my sound bite saying it 'sends a clear signal'. 'Yet', he said

'It does not stand up to closer scrutiny. NATO provides law and order to the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It patrols sea-lanes in the Mediterranean. It provides assistance to victims of hurricanes and earthquakes. It escorts children to school in Afghanistan. It educates officers in post-socialist states in the virtues of democracy. It provides logistic support for the African Union. It incarcerates war criminals. It fights terrorism. These are not war-fighting operations. They cannot even be classified as hard-core crisis management'

Now Mr Penttila's list is actually far from complete in what NATO does, not least in the involvement of Russia in its affairs with remarkable cooperation, including from very recently joining in the sea-lanes patrolling in the Mediterranean. So he makes a good point when he concludes 'The only show in town is NATO'.

That is a fact - albeit a sad and miserable one for we Europeans and for those who would want to place their faith in the UN. But NATO has modernised, has acquired modern internal structures has sharpened its decision making and its flexibility to act and has developed policies and capabilities relevant to the new, unpredictable age we live in. The fact is that no other organisation has yet done so. It is a backhanded compliment to say NATO is the only show in town, but at least there is a show, and it can show up.

But institutions are not enough. They need momentum, attention, resources and a commitment to make them work in the collective interest. Can that be galvanised? Is that not the exam question for all political leaders who care about future security in our ordered part of the world?

In the last two weeks two things struck me.

Last Saturday, in a second-hand bookshop in my hometown of Dunblane I bought a slim volume published in 1946, the year of my birth. Its title was 'Speeches in Secret Session' by Winston S. Churchill and it included some verbatim speeches and Churchill's notes from non-ranscribed speeches so delicate that the House of Commons sat in secret.

To read these remarkable contributions was to marvel at his mastery of words and the passion of his rhetoric. But to read for example his speech after the fall of Singapore in 1942 was to see just how desperate things were, how much the odds were against us and how weak each blow left us. He was candid about the threat, as he had been for so long. He was frank about the nature of the reverses. But he was brilliantly tenacious and inspirationally defiant in the extreme about the necessity to fight on against this monstrous enemy. The secrecy of the sessions was respected; why give comfort to the enemy?

In contrast last night, as I completed this lecture, I watched BBC Newsnight feature a leaked paper from an anonymous senior officer (strange how they are always senior when the news is bad) in the MoD's think-tank, the Defence Academy. This one think piece was explored in all its pessimistic detail with emphasis on every fault and failure and spotlighting with relish this one officer's most pessimistic forecasts. Call me a cynic if you must but if the BBC or any other news outlet came on a SECRET MoD briefing paper forecasting victory and the triumph of the elected governments of Afghanistan and Iraq over a bunch of murderous, sadistic, fascistic terrorists, would it get the same coverage?

Mr Chairman,

I have come a long way from Port Ellen Police Station where I was born sixty years ago. But what my father, and my grandfather before him, sought to do in a small island community - producing a sense of safety and security for everyone - still remains my main motivation in life.

Its just that today producing that safety and security is harder to do, and we may need to go further to do it.

But make no mistake, do it we must.

ENDS