MANY families of servicemen in East Lancashire will be asking today: "What are we doing in Macedonia anyway?" here Foreign Secretary and Blackburn MP Jack Straw gives an exclusive statement to the Lancashire Evening Telegraph answering that question.

"NO words of mine can assuage the grief of Sapper Collins' parents, family, colleagues and friends, but our thoughts and prayers go out to all of them.

Tony Blair phoned Boris Trajkovski, President of Macedonia, to ensure that the authorities there do all in their power to bring Sapper Collins' murderers to justice and to ensure that such acts of mindless hooliganism do not occur again. And this will be high on the agenda for my own discussions with the government of Macedonia when I visit Skopje, the capital, today.

But the question his untimely and unnecessary death has raised is one which British Ministers have to consider carefully whenever our troops are actively to be deployed, even where their role is a most benign one.

Our soldiers know that, however careful may be the planning and the execution of such deployments, there is, sadly, no such thing as a mission without dangers, particularly when they are placed in territory which has seen armed conflict. So why do the Balkans matter to us? Why don't we simply wash our hands of them, "leave them to it?"

The first answer is that the Balkans are in Europe's and in Britain's backyard. Neither we nor they can avoid our collective history. As long ago as the First World War, though the killing fields were in Northern France, the immediate cause of the conflict was a political murder in Bosnia.

And today we know that serious instability within the Balkans can, unless checked, have serious knock on effects for Europe, for Russia, for Turkey and the whole of this part of the world.

Nor is there any escape from this for the UK, even though we are on the western extremity of the continent.

To take one example, our asylum problem would be half what it is if the breakdown of civil order had not occurred in the Balkans over the last decade.

Not only have we and other EU Member states had to receive thousands of refugees from the Balkans themselves, but the lawlessness in many parts of the region has made the Balkans the major conduit into Western Europe for asylum seekers from many parts of Asia as well.

Along with this trafficking in human beings, has been trafficking in heroin and other smuggling, which directly affects crime and the quality of life here in the UK.

The second answer is that recent history teaches us that if we do not act early enough, we end up having to do far more later, in much more difficult circumstances.

In the early 90s Europe hovered and wavered as 'ethnic cleansing' led to the genocide of thousands of Bosnia nationals.

In Kosovo, our Prime Minister was determined that NATO action should be firm and prompt - and it was. Serbia's ethnic cleansing there was brought to an early halt; a democratic government is now in power and stability is gradually returning.

These operations in Kosovo would not have been so effective but for the readiness of Macedonia - a small nation of two million people - temporarily to accommodate hundreds of thousands of refugees in its northern borders whilst peace was restored.

Now Macedonia needs help to cement a political solution between its majority Slav population and minority Albanian populations.

The Macedonian government represents all communities and we support its efforts to bridge the ethnic divide.

Javier Solana, the EU's foreign policy chief, and Lord Robertson, the NATO Secretary-General, have given this their full attention in recent months.

Their efforts have helped broker the agreement which now provides the chance for Macedonia to escape from conflict.

Our troops are there to back up and consolidate the ceasefire and the political settlement by collecting arms, voluntarily surrendered by the ethnic Albanian militias.

After the operation to collect weapons is complete, NATO and the international community will work together with the Macedonian government to ensure that democracy and stability take firm root.

I reject the defeatist counsels of those who say that we should leave the communities to fight out their differences among themselves.

They said we could not stop Milosevic from removing the ethnic Albanian population from Kosovo. But we did. Our intervention in the spring of 1999 was the key event which turned the tide of ethnic cleansing and finally made clear that the politics of violence and hatred have no place in modern Europe.

It helped the people of Serbia to realise that Milosevic himself had no place in modern Serbia.

If only we had intervened more decisively in Bosnia, we might have spared the people of the region five years of their conflict. If only we had done in the Balkans in 1991 what we are doing in Macedonia in 2001, we might have saved ten years of bloodshed.

If action by NATO can make the difference between peace and conflict in Macedonia, then it is worth making the effort to make that difference. Let there be no doubt: Operation Essential Harvest is vital to Britain's strategic interests."