From Saga Magazine, September 1999

See also other media reports on this interview with Lord Carrington

BBC - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/431279.stm
Guardian - http://www.guardian.co.uk/Kosovo/Story/0,2763,203180,00.html


 

Photographs Snowdon
Written By Douglas Keay

Former Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington tells Douglas Keay why it was wrong to interfere in a civil war

 

Lord Carrington came in from the garden – his brown shoes caked with dried mud – and settled into a comfy old armchair. A man- servant appeared with coffee and biscuits. A grandfather clock in the large flag-stoned hall next door chimed the hour. “Now, what do you want to know?” enquired the sixth Baron Carrington of Bulcot Lodge with that twinkle in the eye that in its time has helped to disarm more than one belligerent foreign negotiator.

It is difficult to know where to start when interviewing someone who served under six prime ministers, shared a house at school (Eton) with Humphrey Lyttelton, commanded a squadron of tanks in the war, was Defence Secretary in Ted Heath’s government, achieved a schoolboy ambition to become Foreign Secretary – only to resign dramatically three years later over the Falklands conflict – was Secretary General of Nato in the 1980s, and who chaired a constitutional conference at the time when Yugoslavia was beginning to break up into separate warring factions. Carrington Picture 2“I spent about 18 months trying to sort that one out, and in the end the European Union made catastrophically stupid decisions – like recognising Croatia and Slovenia, and then asking Bosnia whether it wanted independence when I told them it would lead to civil war. 

“Finally I decided there was nothing more I could do and Cy Vance and David Owen took over, and much the same thing happened to them. The United Nations came in with a force that was not allowed to use its weapons except in self-defence, which alienated everyone. The whole business in the Balkans has been mismanaged from the start. It was obvious it was going to blow up.” 

Lord Carrington is one of those increasingly rare people who, while being deadly serious, can also sense the ridiculous. He has a chuckly sense of humour. (This is the man who, when he and Margaret Thatcher were entertaining a VIP from overseas, had been known to scribble a note and slip it in front of the Prime Minister: “The poor chap’s come 600 miles, do let him say something,” it read.) 

Today he recalled three golden rules that a friend, now a field marshal, had been given many years ago by an instructor at the Military Staff College in Camberley: “Never march on Moscow, never get involved in the Balkans, and never trust your luggage to the Royal Air Force.” 

But, to be totally serious for a moment, did Lord Carrington believe that Nato’s action in Kosovo in the past few months had been mistaken? 

“Yes,” 

“Why?’ 

“Well, to start with, it was impossible for Milosevic to accept the Rambouillet agreement because what it asked him to do was allow Nato to use Serbia as a part of the Nato organisation. Sovereignty would have been lost over it. He couldn’t accept that. 

“I think what Nato did by bombing Serbia actually precipitated the exodus of the Kosovo Albanians into Macedonia and Montenegro. I think the bombing did cause the ethnic cleansing. 

“I’m not sticking up for the Serbs because I think they behaved badly and extremely stupidly by removing the autonomy of Kosovo, given them by Tito, in the first place. But I think what we did made things very much worse and what we are now faced with is a sort of ethnic cleansing in reverse. The Serbs are now being cleared out. I think it’s a great mistake to intervene in a civil war.” 

Lord Carrington has no liking for President Milosevic but, again, he thinks it was wrong to brand him officially as a war criminal. “I don’t think he is any more a war criminal than President Tudjman of Croatia who ethnically cleansed 200,000 Serbs out of Kyrenia. Nobody kicked up a fuss about that. I think we are a little bit selective about our condemnation of ethnic cleansing, in Africa as well as in Europe.” 

It was clear that Lord Carrington’s views on Kosovo differed somewhat from those of Tony Blair’s Government and of William Hague’s Opposition Conservative Party, which has broadly supported the Government’s Balkans policy. But Lord Carrington has never been afraid of speaking his mind. (Among the many jobs he does nowadays – “for increasingly less pay” – is sit on the board of the Daily Telegraph. “And I don’t always go along with what it says!”) 

The obvious next question was what would he, former Defence Secretary, former Foreign Secretary, former Secretary General of Nato, have advocated in place of the policy adopted by the American and Western European governments? 

“I would have increased the number of UN observers in Kosovo and gone on negotiating with Milosevic. Removing the UN observers, as happened, gave a signal to the Serbs that they were going to be bombed. And, being a ruthless people, they took advantage of that and got rid of Albanians. If negotiations continued to fail and the Serbs continued to behave badly, you would then have had to declare war on them with ground troops as well as with bombardment.” 

But some have already argued that that could have led us to the brink of a third world war. “Of course it wouldn’t! Mark you, I think we ought to have tried harder to take the Russians with us, however difficult. If you were a Russian and had seen yourself as a superpower 10 years ago, astride the world with America, and then overnight you lose the superpower status and you get ignored by everybody and you are in a terrible mess economically, you become extremely resentful. I think we ought to have tried to clasp the Russians to our bosom much more than we did.” 

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When Lord Carrington was Secretary General of Nato in the mid 1980s it was the Soviet Union that was the potential enemy and Nato was designed to preserve the integrity of the Atlantic area. Now that particular threat has disappeared… “and the question George Robertson, (the newly appointed Secretary General), has to ask himself, and persuade other member countries to answer, is What is Nato now for

“If the idea is that it is going to be used for humanitarian purposes – which, I gather, is what was suggested in Washington recently – then are you going to do it under the auspices of the United Nations? And how selective are you going to be? When do you intervene and when do you not? These are some of the questions that George Robertson – who, incidentally, I believe is an admirable choice for the job – will be faced with.” 

Lord Carrington regrets that the political side of Nato, as originally mooted in the Treaty, never really materialised – “partly because France didn’t like the United States’ domination.” He thinks the position has now changed. “Nato is the only forum in which Western Europe and America have any contact at all. I think it would be very much better if we tried to expand the political side of Nato, to make the organisation into a sort of North Atlantic Group.” 

But might this not conflict with the idea of the European Union? 

“I don’t think so. In the EU you’ve got some neutral countries, such as Sweden and Austria, and in addition I don’t think any western European government is prepared to spend the money to make an effective defence force. You’ve got to have America in there. I genuinely believe that Nato kept the peace of the world in the Cold War and I think it would be rather silly to throw away a good insurance policy without having thought rather carefully about the future. After all, the only thing one ever learns about foreign affairs is that the unexpected always happens.” 

It happened, certainly, when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands on April 2 1982 and caught Britain hopping on one foot. As a direct result three days later Lord Carrington resigned as Foreign Secretary, to the dismay and regret of some but not all. There was an outcry in Parliament. Eighteen years later, Lord Carrington has no regrets at his decision. 

“I took the view that it was the right thing to do. We were going to war, to a very difficult war a long way away, and there were obviously going to be recriminations about whose fault it was, about who was responsible and so on… I thought it was better to put a stop to the recriminations by resigning. Margaret Thatcher said she didn’t think it was necessary. I said I thought it was. There was not much discussion. I think she realised I’d made up my mind, and that was that.” 

In his memoirs, (Reflect on Things Past), published six years later, he wrote: “The anger of the British people and Parliament at the Argentine invasion of the Falklands was a righteous anger, and it was my duty and fate to assuage it; the rest was done by brave sailors, soldiers and airmen, too many of whom laid down not office but their lives.” 

Lord Carrington pooh-poohs any suggestion that his resignation was a matter of honour and that honour has largely gone out of the window in today’s political climate. “I don’t think one can say that resigning has gone out of fashion. It’s all a question of circumstances, and how a minister feels, and what the Prime Minister thinks. Anyway, let’s get off the resigning thing can we? It’s frightfully boring, don’t you think?” Carrington Picture 3

Lord Carrington is among a dying breed. An aristocrat who fought in World War Two who entered politics largely “because it is fun”. It is unlikely that anyone with an inherited title will ever hold high government office again. 

His family traces back to the 17th century. Descended from a draper in Nottingham, the inheritance is founded on banking. The family home was at Wycombe Abbey which is now a girls’ boarding school. 

Today Lord (Peter) and Lady (Iona) Carrington live in a magnificent manor house in a Buckinghamshire village which they have been renovating and improving since 1945, with a garden of 10 acres which has increased in size each year. “I do the designing, my wife is the plantswoman – she doesn’t really talk English, she talks Latin!” They employ three gardeners. I look up. “I haven’t got a Rolls Royce, or a racehorse, or a yacht. I just have a garden, which I love,” he explains. 

The Carringtons have six grand children and three great- grandchildren, aged six, four and two, whom he adores. 

“The four-year-old is so funny. At church the other Sunday he watched a parishioner go up to the lectern to read the Lesson and when he saw the huge bible he looked at his mother and exclaimed: “He’s not going to read all of it, is he?” 

Lord Carrington was 80 last June. He has survived cancer of the kidney and suffers from pancreatitis. But he remains sprightly. “I read somewhere the other day that some people my age, otherwise healthy, can’t get out of a chair without pushing up with their hands.” 

As if to emphasise the point, he positively leapt to his feet. “It’s all a question of what’s in the mind, isn’t it? My recipe is to ignore the advancing years.” 

We went out into the garden – surely one of the most beautiful in England – and Lord Carrington bent down to pick from a patch of Alpine strawberries. As he straightened up he chuckled and looked slightly shamefaced. “Perhaps the ground does get a bit further away each year,” he conceded.Carrington Picture 4

 

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