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[Mr. Denis Healcy]
Foreign Affairs
22 MARCH 1984
debate, will deal in more detail with the problems of southern Africa and Latin America. I should like to make points on some secondary issues at the outset.
In regard to Hong Kong, I am glad that the Foreign Secretary gave the House some insight into the Government's conduct of negotiations. After a bad start with the Prime Minister's visit to Peking and Hong Kong, the Government are handling the negotiations sensibly, and the Labour Opposition have no intention of making a difficult task more difficult by exploiting obvious opportunities for party purposes. I hope that in return the Foreign Secretary will give the House a further report on developments after his return from his visits to China and Hong Kong in April, because it is most important that he should be able to carry the House with him, granted, of course, the limitations on his freedom to disclose all details of negotiations at any time.
Turning to some of the problems in central America -an area that the Foreign Secretary did not mention in any way in a speech of 40 minutes--I wrote to the Foreign Secretary some weeks ago to deplore his decision. to send observers to the Presidential elections in El Salvador this weekend. We divided the House two years ago on a similar decision to send observers to the elections in 1982. The division we asked the House for on that occasion proved fully justified in the event, because the observers sent by the then Foreign Secretary were unable to make an independent assessment. Their conclusion that the elections were fair has made Her Majesty's Government the laughing stock of Latin America.
It is no good the hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr. Whitney) shaking his head, because the best evidence for the truth of what I say is Mr. Armando Rodriguez, a Right- wing lawyer, who is the head of the central elections council that is organising the elections on this occasion. The hon. Gentleman has obviously read the report of his remarks. According to The Times, he said:
"This time the deads won't vote. In the elections two years ago dead people not only voted once, but sometimes twice.. Often there were three times the number of votes in a ballot box than there were people in a town".
Mr. Rodriguez estimated that more than 25 per cent. of the 1.5 million votes cast in 1982 were fraudulent. Those were the elections that the official observers of Her Majesty's Government found to be fair.
Unfortunately, this weekend's elections in El Salvador are unlikely to produce any better guide to the opinions of the people. A poll by El Salvador's Catholic university the other day showed that under 4 per cent. of those qualified to vote would vote out of commitment to any party' or candidate; the rest would vote solely out of fear. The Foreign Secretary must know that there is general agreement on both sides of the Atlantic-in Washington no less than in Europe-that these elections are likely to put into the Presidential palace either a psychopathetic killer, to quote the words of an earlier American Ambassador in El Salvador, or a man who will be either ejected or enslaved by the armed forces. It would have been far better if Her Majesty's Government had not sought to contaminate the reputation of Britain by appearing to sanctify this macabre charade.
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seek revenge by stepping up his attempt to bring down the Government of Nicaragua on the very eve of its elections. The dispatch of the Green Berets to Honduras and the mining of Nicaraguan ports represent a dangerous escalation of this conflict, and one that the Government should publicly deplore. It is the financing of terrorism c a far larger scale than the Soviet Union or Libya have e attempted in the West.
President Reagan's policy in central America, as in the Lebanon, is based on a total misunderstanding of the realities of the region. Only a few days ago President Reagan made a speech-I quote the Washington Post service in the International Herald Tribune-in which he said:
"Like a roving wolf, Castro's Cuba looks to its peace-loving neighbours with hungry eyes and sharp teeth... What we are witnessing to the south is a power play by Cuba and the Soviet Union, pure and simple."
How reminiscent that is of his view that all the problems in the Lebanon were caused by a conspiracy between Syria and the Soviet Union to subvert a natural democracy.
Even if the Foreign Secretary's vision of these areas has been somewhat weakened in recent years by the withdrawal of British missions from two of the key countries-a withdrawal which I welcome and which I see has been somewhat modified in recent days by the dispatch of chargés d'affaires to El Salvador and Nicaragua - he must know that what is going on in central America is essentially a historic revolution against centuries of poverty, dictatorship and colonial oppression. That is the unanimous view of all the other countries in the region, not least the Government of Mexico, who could not by any stretch of the imagination be regarded as a Marxist dictatorship.
America's friends in Europe have a duty to join the growing number of Senators and Congressmen in Washington, and a growing number of ordinary. Americans throughout the United States-according to the polls, now a majority who are seeking at the eleventh hour to drag the United States back from a catastrophe in central America which could be even more far-reaching in its effects than its recent catastrophe in the near east. It is vital, in the interests of the Alliance, that the foreign Secretary should abandon his doormat diplomacy in central America.
Further south, Her Majesty's Government have a more direct responsibility. I was glad to hear the right hon. and learned Gentleman again today pay tribute to President Alfosin, who has shown courage and skill in using his political majority to establish civilian control over the military and to try to end the foreign quarrels through which the military tried to distract the Argentine people from the consequences of the domestic dictatorship.
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The Argentine Government have, I understand, already come close to ending their dispute with Chile dispute which has lasted for far longer than their dispute with Britain over the Falklands- and they are now seeking to restore normal relations with the United Kingdom, relations which were disrupted by a military attack on the Falkland Islands which President Alfonsin had the great courage to oppose when he was in opposition before the general elections in Argentina. I understand -the Foreign Secretary was rather inexplicit about this that President Alfonsin is prepared to exchange diplomatic representatives with Britain and to begin talks 22 March '84
The real danger in central America is that if President Reagan's policy collapses in El Salvador, as more and more people in Washington are beginning to fear, he may
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