The modern world has a very bad record on genocide; Europe has a particularly disgraceful one. There were the horrors of 19th and 20th-century history, from the Belgian Congo down to the Hitler-Stalin era. Even in the past 30 years there have been major genocidal crimes, including Cambodia and Rwanda. The governments of the West did little to stop them. The United States and Britain failed, but so did the major European and the major Communist powers. Britain has a particularly shameful responsibility for supporting the Nigerian genocide against the Ibos.

In Iraq, genocide has continued, particularly against two ethnic groups, the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs, for more than 20 years. It is still continuing. If Saddam Hussein survives, he can be expected to redouble the killing, as happened after 1991. The anti-war activists need to reflect on the murderous consequences of their policies.

Three speeches in last Wednesday’s fascinating parliamentary debates need to be studied. One was Lord Goodhart’s, which discussed the issue in respect of international law. The other two were Ann Clwyd’s in the House of Commons, which can be found in columns 319-321 of the Hansard for February 26, and Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne’s in the House of Lords, Hansard columns 284-288.

Ann Clwyd spoke from her experience of the genocide against the Kurds, Lady Nicholson from her similar experience of the genocide against the Marsh Arabs. Anyone who wants to have a serious understanding of the issues has a duty to read these speeches. Ann Clwyd’s speech had a great impact on the House of Commons and on the press; House of Lords speeches attract less attention, but Lady Nicholson’s was no less important. Their case was unanswerable and unanswered.

First of all one needs to consider what international law says about intervention to stop genocide. Lady Nicholson asserted that “the duty on state parties to the genocide convention is to stop the genocide and to punish those engaged in this ethnic mass murder. If the Security Council cannot be persuaded to act, an operation should be mounted by any signatory to the convention to secure the perpetrators and bring them to trial ... Has genocide been committed against the Marsh Arabs? Yes; then action is imperative.”

Lady Nicholson sits as a Liberal Democrat and she was therefore speaking against the pacifist line of her party. Lord Goodhart, who is a highly respected international lawyer, stayed with his party’s anti-war line. That adds weight to his legal opinion in support of the right to intervene. He summed up the state of the law in this way: “Let us look first at humanitarian intervention. This is a new principle which has risen outside the charter. It was most clearly recognised in Kosovo. It is widely, but not universally, accepted by international lawyers. In cases such as genocide by rulers against their own people, as in Rwanda and Cambodia, it is hard to deny that such a principle exists.”

This does represent a change. The traditional post-1945 view was that sovereign governments were free to abuse their own people, to torture or kill them, and that no other country could intervene. Kosovo, the trial of Milosevic, the conventions on torture and on genocide, and the House of Lords judgment on General Pinochet, have created a much wider right in international law to intervene for humanitarian reasons.

Lord Goodhart went on to argue that Saddam Hussein, though “a murderous tyrant” who has killed “thousands of his opponents”, has not gone quite far enough to qualify under this doctrine. “The closest Saddam Hussein has come to this is in his treatment of the Marsh Arabs, whose culture he had destroyed and many of whose people he has killed. But it would be unrealistic to treat even that as a justification for war.” Lord Goodhart spoke before Lady Nicholson; had he been speaking after her, he could hardly have made the case that Saddam Hussein’s genocide was only a little one.

The important point is that, as a lawyer, Lord Goodhart confirms that a right to intervene on humanitarian grounds is now internationally recognised. It would be hard to argue that Saddam Hussein is a less serious case than Milosevic.

Ann Clwyd’s speech destroyed the argument that Saddam Hussein belongs only to the junior league of genocidal tyrants. She pointed out that, before 1991, the victims already included “Arabs as well as Kurds. They include Assyrians, Turkomans and the Shias in the south”. She referred to the evidence of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, as well as the “documents from the torture centre” captured by the Kurds. On her latest visit she had opened, on Kurdish territory, the first genocide museum in Iraq.

She gave the evidence of a young Iraqi who had spoken to her within the past few days. He had been held in the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. “He said that almost every day people were executed at that prison — not one person, but hundreds. When there was an attack on Uday Hussein’s life some time ago, 2,000 prisoners were executed on the same day.”

Ann Clwyd also recently visited a UN camp in the Kurdish area where there were hundreds of current victims of ethnic cleansing, which “goes on all the time”. Even so, Lord Goodhart may be right in thinking that the Marsh Arabs have been massacred on an even greater scale. Lady Nicholson observed that: “The massacre of the North Kurds is well known in the West and internationally accepted as genocide. But I claim that in contrast the Iraq regime’s long planned and near finalised extinction of the indigenous inhabitants of the Lower Mesopotamian marshlands of Iraq has gone virtually unnoticed.”

She asserts that: “Four million people have fled Iraq.” Surely, four million is a large enough number to qualify for humanitarian intervention?

These two speeches were made by independent women who have been visiting Iraq since the 1970s; they probably have more genuine knowledge than any other members of either House. Both are political rebels. Ann Clwyd is seen as a leftwinger in the Labour Party. Baroness Nicholson left the Conservatives — her father had been a distinguished Tory MP — to join the Lib Dems. Both were going against the tide of their own groups, Ann Clwyd against the Labour Left, Lady Nicholson against the Lib Dems. They represent the true voices of conscience.

The Prime Minister, despite the justice of his policy, has contributed to the confusion of his party and the country. He should have put more weight on the issue of genocide from the beginning, indeed from his first coming to office. He should always have paid more attention to the House of Commons. If he had done so, these arguments might not be emerging so late in the debate.

It is mere common sense that no one would wish to see nuclear, chemical or biological weapons in the hands of a genocidal dictator. It is good news that the House of Commons is asserting its independence, but a pity that so large a number of Labour members are on the wrong side, because they did not know what Ann Clwyd and Lady Nicholson could have told them.

The result has been a distortion of public opinion in Britain. Well-meaning people see the issue as one of war or no war. In fact, it is an issue of war or Saddam Hussein, with the continuation of genocide, ethnic cleansing and torture, and the threat of secret but lethal weapons.

In international law, the most important point came from Lord Goodhart, even though he spoke on the wrong side. International law was doubtful at the time of Kosovo, and some of the facts were doubtful too. But sovereignty now no longer gives a national government the right, without intervention, to commit genocide against its own people. That is the logical response to the careers of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the other genocidal leaders of the past century. Change of regime in Iraq is not an optional add-on to the enforcement of UN resolutions on disarmament. It is a duty owed by the international community to the Iraqi people.

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