ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: So the Algerian hostage crisis is over but at a heavy human cost. The Prime Minister, as you’ve heard, says that the world needs to come together to tackle the threat of terrorism in North Africa and I’ll be speaking about that and other issues to the Foreign Secretary, William Hague. Well let’s say a very good morning to the Foreign Secretary, William Hague and first of all, Foreign Secretary, if you would, just the latest on the British nationals that have been caught up in all this.

WILLIAM HAGUE: Well the latest and very tragic news is that there are three British nationals who have died, who have certainly died, in this terrible ordeal and there are three that we believe to have died, three additional and another further one, a UK resident who is not a British national, so seven in total. There were 22 who are now back in the UK, that represents the total number of British nationals who were involved in this and many of those 22 have been through terrible experiences but during the night we got them all back on a plane chartered by the Foreign Office, others on planes chartered by BP and so they are all back being reunited with their loved ones but of course our thoughts are with them, with their families. Of the ones I was talking about earlier, we are giving them all the support we possibly can and we should all have them in our thoughts this morning.

DM: I’m going to talk more in a moment about Britain’s involvement there and the offer of military and other logistical help which the Algerians didn’t need but you have been far from inactive when it comes to what I suppose is the humanitarian effort in getting these people out of there and sorting out what’s been happening.

WH: Well we’ve learnt a lot about crises. We had some difficulties a couple of years ago with the evacuation of people from Libya and Egypt, we’ve set up a new crisis centre in the Foreign Office which brings together all the agencies in the British government so we’ve got a hundred people working in that the last few days, more than a hundred on the ground in Algeria and we were the first country to get our Ambassador down there to the vicinity yesterday and to get consular staff on the ground in Amenas so I think the Foreign Office has responded very well and I’m always looking for ways of improving that because sadly we will have these or comparable incidents from time to time.

DM: We’ll talk more about that in a moment or two and I know it is a confused situation there still on the ground and a lot to be learned about what precisely happened there but of those who have sadly perished, not just the British nations of course, we’ve had horrible stories from some of the survivors already, some of the eye witnesses, of executions.

WH: Yes, absolutely. It’s too early to verify those things for sure, however there are a lot of stories emerging and I’m sure many of them will turn out to be true or approximately true. So these are cold blooded murderers and we must remember that. There is no political excuse that justifies behaving in this way, these are people peacefully going about their business and they have been attacked, held hostage and murdered by people who should not be supported anywhere in the world. So whatever arguments we have about, you know, did Algeria react in the right way, the media have been discussing all these things, we’ve got to remember that above all and that we should show our sympathy and our solidarity with the people and government of Algeria who have suffered the attack there.

DM: Indeed, but talking about that Algerian reaction, the media and you of course have discussed, we heard it from the Prime Minister in his statement on Friday to the House of Commons, you were not consulted about the initial assault. Is that now your only beef with the Algerians, that you really thought they should have told you about it before it all took place? Do you now feel, as President Hollande has said, of France, saying this was the most suitable or most appropriate response because there could be no negotiations. Do you agree with President Hollande now?

WH: Well from everything we know, yes. Clearly the Algerians had to make very difficult decisions that we know from decisions about hostage rescues, and we’ve had to make those sometimes, those decisions, over the last couple of years, how very, very difficult they are because you have to weigh, is there an imminent threat to the life of the hostages, could negotiations succeed, if you are going to do a military operation what is the best time to do it? Now the Algerians believe, their Foreign Minister told me yesterday afternoon on the telephone, that the plan of the terrorists was to blow up the entire installation thereby killing all or most of the hostages in any case and so yes, what they have done has been driven by the belief that negotiation couldn’t succeed and that the lives of the hostages were in great and imminent danger in any case.

DM: But you see that breaking news at the bottom of our screen there, Foreign Secretary, well that’s your line that 22 British nationals have survived and have been repatriated and there’s also another line just appearing on one of the news wires that 25 bodies have now been discovered inside the gas plant, coming from the Reuters news agency. There has been heavy – that awful phrase – collateral damage here.

WH: Yes, absolutely and it’s been difficult to get access, for the Algerians to get access, because booby traps were left behind, this is what we were hearing yesterday. So it’s taken some time for this to be safe for them to move around in but sadly they are now finding the bodies and of course the important process for us now is of the identification and repatriation of victims. In our Foreign Office work we will be very much concentrating on that in the next few days.

DM: Okay and it begs so many wider questions about how we prevent things like this happening again and the threat from Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda affiliates in a vast region, right across North Africa and beyond. We have had some of our viewers send in questions on Twitter and I want to put this to you, given that the Algerians have said of the terrorists they have been able to identify, of 32 terrorists only three of them were Algerians, that means 29 came from elsewhere. This was a question put by Paul Cotterall with that in mind, ‘Do you, Mr Hague, accept the view set up by Kofi Annan, that the Mali conflict is an unintended consequence of intervention in Libya’ and I’ll apply that to Algeria in that some of the people involved in this could well, and probably were, involved in the Libyan campaign where we armed, trained and supported them and now you’re calling them terrorists and murderers.

WH: Well we don’t know yet who was involved in it, it could be people from many different countries so we can’t rule …

DM: Given the proximity to the Libyan border?

WH: We can’t rule out that possibility of course but this problem has been gathering in the Sahel or the Magreb, however we term it, for some years. We have been increasing our focus on this from before the Libyan crisis so there is no single intervention or crisis in one particular country that then produces these events though the whole mixture of economic problems, of political problems within different countries that have contributed to discontent in that area and on the Libyan crisis, I don’t believe it was our intervention in the Libyan crisis that produced problems that have arisen from it. Fighting was going on in Libya, fighting had arisen in Libya and if we hadn’t intervened more people would have been killed, that fighting would probably have gone on longer and so if there are unhelpful spin offs from that I think those could even have been worse had we not intervened.

DM: Unhelpful spin offs, I mean the same is happening in Syria now. We hear from Aleppo, parts of the population there are getting annoyed by activities of elements of the Free Syrian Army and they’re moving towards Al Qaeda affiliates there. Now those people, many of them are not Syrians, we know that, they’re foreign fighters and they travel the world and they get involved and they attack Western interests. They’re in Syria, you’re supporting them, you’re saying they are freedom fighters but if they turn up in Mali or Algeria you’d call them terrorists.

WH: Well no, we don’t call them freedom fighters, we’re clear that …

DM: But you call them the opposition to Assad.

WH: Yes but we call the … the National Coalition does not represent those points of view, no. The National Coalition I think are sincere in wanting a democratic Syria, the opposition that we recognise as the representatives of the Syrian people, clearly we want them to have a free and democratic Syria in the future. We don’t want extremists like that to succeed and that’s why we want to bring the Syrian crisis to an end as soon as possible. The longer each of these situations goes on, then the more foreign fighters are able to take advantage of it, extremists to gain a foothold in the population and so on. So I think what we did, in reference to your original question from your viewer about Libya, I think what we did in Libya helped to bring things to an end faster and to reduce the growth of extremism.

DM: But the point being the unintended consequences because I remember you yourself saying to me two years ago, just under two years ago when Libya started, when the problems there started, saying there would not be a linear process there that would lead to a liberal democracy as we recognised in the West, that it will be messy. Is that’s what’s happening now, we’re seeing those consequences now in Algeria and Mali and other places?

WH: Absolutely. People across the Arab world have demonstrated or fought for freedom, for dignity, for economic opportunity and we should respect and support that, that is a positive thing in their countries but the process of change in those countries, of course it throws up many crises and an extreme one in Syria now, a dramatic one we saw in Libya and it often leads to periods in which the security arrangements of those countries have either broken down or are being reconstituted and an important part of stopping that movement of foreign fighters, that you’re quite rightly talking about, is co-operation between countries, it’s a lot of the work we do.

DM: But it’s this point isn’t it, that I want to go back to, that in Libya we fought alongside them, we trained them, we armed them, they were part of the process of getting rid of Gaddafi. There we were helping them and if they cross the border into Algeria and do things like this, you want to kill them.

WH: Nowhere, in no country do we support Al Qaeda affiliated extremists and so you are making quite a jump here from saying that anybody we might have supported in Libya is somebody who carries out a terror attack in Algeria.

DM: I’m not saying that but that it’s pretty likely that one or two or more of the people involved in this had experience of fighting in Libya.

WH: Are there extremists who gain a foothold in all of these conflicts? Yes and therefore the answer is for us to do everything we can, in a different way in each conflict, to try to bring it to an end as soon as possible and to achieve wherever possible a political resolution of it because there is no military only solution to all of this and that is why now we have to work with all the countries in that region to try to improve their political stability and their economic prospects as well as working with them closely on counter intelligence to deal with the sorts of people who have launched this attack, who no amount of political and economic work will change.

DM: Okay, I want to focus on Mali, clear and present danger there, the French involved already militarily and a little bit of British support there. I’ve got another question from one of our viewers, Okabu Ekuweyama, apologies to you if I’m mispronounced your name, asking you the Foreign Secretary, William Hague, if conflict spreads from Mali or even I suppose gets worse in Mali, will Britain become more engaged and even offer boots on the ground to the French and the West African forces that get involved?

WH: Well the primary way we want to deal with this is through working with the other countries of that region. It has to be predominantly their forces, their political work that is involved here so that they own the solution. It is never ideal to send forces from another continent to deal with the problems. The French had to do what they did ten days ago because this was an emergency and the Malian government appealed for help.

DM: But that’s forces from another continent.

WH: Yes, that’s what I’m saying, it’s never the ideal but they had to do what they did. Now in Somalia we’re making a lot of progress and this is something we’ve been leading in the last year since the London Conference on Somalia. We’ve made a lot of progress but it’s African forces …

DM: But the question is about Mali, the conflict is going on there now, the north is still in the hands of the rebels, if the French get bogged down and ask for more military assistance from the UK will we provide it?

WH: We provide the military assistance of transport planes now, we don’t know how these situations will develop and what assistance we’ll be asked to provide. We are not planning to send ground combat forces to …

DM: But if asked you wouldn’t rule it out, further assistance?

WH: I can’t be clearer than we have no plans to send … If the question is about boots on the ground, that phrase, clearly we don’t have any plans to. The British forces are very stretched apart from anything else but of course, when the French ask for help, they ask for transport assistance, we’ll try to accommodate such requests.

DM: Okay, I just want to move on, we are running out of time, Foreign Secretary, you mentioned earlier on another programme this morning that we are going to be hearing from the Prime Minister this week about the European issue, he is going to finally deliver that much awaited speech. Do you know precisely when and where?

WH: We’ll announce that tomorrow, exactly when and where but yes, it will be this week. I think everybody understands that it was postponed because of what we’ve been talking about and that is a speech about improving the relationship between Britain and the EU, about having an outward looking EU in the world and about democracy in this country, about people having their say but you will have to wait for the details of that of course.

DM: Okay, we have got some more interesting questions from our viewers, a very direct one – I like this – from P. Williams, ‘Do you agree that repatriation of powers from the EU is possible?’ That’s what the Prime Minister, that’s what …Is it an open door, do you believe?

WH: Well I wouldn’t say it is an open door but it is sometimes ajar, you can get your foot in it and push. For instance …

DM: So there’s quite a tussle then?

WH: Well for instance this government, we have got Britain out of being liable for bail outs in the eurozone, the last government had committed Britain to that and we have got ourselves completely out of that, it is agreed that the British tax payer doesn’t have to put fresh money into bailing out the eurozone. We’ve changed the rules about that. Now that’s an example of power that really had left this country that we’ve got back to this country, it can be done.

DM: Okay and we are going to get the offer of some form of referendum, effectively an in/out one?

WH: You will have to wait for the speech obviously, I can’t describe the whole speech in advance, that’s the point of having the speech. The Prime Minister and I have already spoken about the need for fresh consent in this, democratic consent in the future when we know how the eurozone crisis had developed and affected Europe, when we’ve tried in the future to improve the British relationship with Europe, there’ll be a need for fresh consent and we have said that a referendum is the clearest and cleanest way of doing that but to get the full context of that and the full argument you will have to wait for the speech itself.

DM: Of course but this is a point that has already been made, doesn’t the uncertainty start on Wednesday or whenever the speech is made? In particular, I know you do a lot of work in particular of course promoting British businesses around the world and the UK as a place to come and invest to foreign businesses, don’t they now think there’s a question mark about Britain’s EU membership and will hold back on those investment plans?

WH: Well again it’s important to see the speech. Whenever there’s a political debate, if there’s a political debate raging in this country about the European Union you can argue that creates uncertainty in any case but actually I think businesses are being very positive, European headquarters are located much more in this country than in other countries, we get more foreign direct investment than other countries. I think we will see that continue.

DM: But the uncertainty, as a politician you live and die by the ballot box and if you offer people a vote you don’t know what the outcome is going to be.

WH: That is true but it’s true that we live in a democracy, we do believe in our democracy, we believe that people have to have their say and that is the most important thing of all.

DM: Okay, thank you very much for sparing the time, I know you are incredibly busy, Foreign Secretary William Hague there.