Hansard

Yugoslavia

Volume 329: debated on Tuesday 13 April 1999

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Mr. Llew Smith

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence what assessment he has made of the proportion of the arms and military equipment held by Yugoslavia which was acquired from (a) the United Kingdom and (b) other NATO member states. [80241]

Mr. George Robertson

The Government are committed to both the EU arms embargo on Croatia and Bosnia and the UN embargo on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. We interpret these embargoes to include any items included on the Military List.The Government's Annual Report on Strategic Export Controls, which was published on 25 March 1999,

Official Report, columns 343–50, lists by country of destination the numbers of export licences issued in each equipment category and gives details of the military equipment for which licences were granted between 2 May and 31 December 1997. It also sets out the value of defence exports to each country between 1 January and 31 December 1997.

My Department does not routinely record details of arms transfers by other NATO members.

Mr. Llew Smith

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence what assessment he has made of the origin of the hits received by the Government website section devoted to Yugoslavia (a) before and (b) since it was translated into Serbo-Croat; and what plans he has to translate it into Albanian. [80239]

Mr. George Robertson

We are not able to determine the precise level of usage of specific parts of the Ministry of Defence website, and cannot therefore give access figures for the joint MOD/FCO section on Kosovo. We can, however, identify the origin of accesses to the MOD website as a whole. Information in Serbian was first added to the section on Kosovo on 29 March. The daily figures for accesses, for the days immediately before and after that date, are as follows:

DateDaily accesses
28 March 199986,523
30 March 1999149,503
Accesses from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia are currently running at about 1,000 per day, with a total of 17,129 having been recorded between 20 March and 8 April. About 400 accesses per day were recorded prior to the inclusion of Serbian-language information on 29 March, with about 50 per day recorded in the period 1–20 March.A total of 1,820,204 accesses were recorded in March 1999, of which the most frequently accessing countries (both before and after the inclusion of Serbian-language information) were: the UK (approx. 24 per cent.); the US (approx. 22 per cent.); Canada (2.5 per cent.); Switzerland (1.8 per cent.); Germany (1.7 per cent.); Australia (1.3 per cent.); France (1 per cent.). These proportions are fairly consistent from month to month, although the exact number of accesses can vary considerably.The translated pages are stored on an FCO web server and are measured using a different metric (page impressions rather than hits). They have received 3,300 page impressions in the last seven days. This translates, very approximately, to some 23,000 hits.There are no plans at present to translate any pages into Albanian.