LONDON, Sept 26: Foreign Secretary David Miliband told delegates at an annual labour conference on Tuesday that Britain must continue to support democracy in Pakistan.
He said Britain must reach out to ‘moderate Muslims’, support democracy in Pakistan and Afghanistan, bring Turkey into the European Union and press for a Palestinian state to stop Al Qaeda from using their plight as an excuse for violence.
He recalled that in his meeting with educated young Muslims in Pakistan last July, he found them to be convinced that Britain and the West wanted to dominate them rather than empower them.
The Times on Wednesday said that the foreign secretary referred repeatedly to learning lessons from British diplomacy over the past ten years. He conceded that errors had been made in Iraq and referring to Mr Blair’s military interventions in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and Iraq, Mr Miliband told the conference: “While we have won the wars, it’s been harder to win the peace.
“The lesson is that while there are military victories, there never is a military ‘solution’. There is only military action that creates the space for economic and political life. The war in Iraq was divisive in our party and our country. It was a huge decision and the passion on all sides was sincere and understandable. But whatever the rights and wrongs, and there have been both, we have to focus on the future.”
He added: “We need to work with all the neighbours of Iraq to reconcile Sunnis and Shias, to prevent that conflict first fragmenting Iraq and then spreading like a contagion across the Middle East.”
The underlying lesson, he said, was that good intentions were not enough to ensure a peaceful solution.
Mr Miliband used his speech to appeal for restraint from Burma’s military leaders in the face of mounting protests, telling the conference: “The situation there is tense. The world wants to see restraint from the authorities.”
He said: “Wasn’t it brilliant to see Aung San Suu Kyi alive and well outside her house last week? It will be a hundred times better when she takes her rightful place as the elected leader of a free and democratic Burma.”
The foreign secretary appealed to those Labour MPs, unions and activists who were pressing for a referendum of the European Union’s reform treaty not to risk creating party disunity and ruled out putting the treaty to a vote of the people. “Europe needs to look out, not in, to the problems beyond its borders that define insecurity within our borders,” he said.
Mr Miliband admitted that Britain’s relationships with both Europe and the United States were less popular after Labour’s ten years in office. He defended both but did not mention President Bush by name, saying that both were “permanent commitments, beyond individual personalities”.
He said: “Some want distance from America. Others want distance from Europe. The Tories want divorce from both. But those are the wrong lessons. We share core values with America. It has more power for good than any nation in the world.”
He called for bodies such as the United Nations to redefine global rules so that countries such as Burma and Zimbabwe felt that it was better to play by the rules than to ignore them.
Britain would support permanent seats on the United Nations’ Security Council for Brazil, India, Japan and South Africa, but there was no question of Britain surrendering its own permanent seat in exchange for an EU one, he told the Newsnight programme on BBC2.
