Middle East

Baroness Berridge Excerpts

Friday 16th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of the advisory council for the charity that supports the work of Canon Andrew White, the vicar of Baghdad. I have visited Israel with both Conservative Friends of Israel and the Conservative Middle East Council to try, as a good lawyer, to see things from both perspectives, and I was in Egypt last September. I could not help but think in Egypt of the error in the lines of the hymn “Jerusalem”, when it asks:

“And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon England’s mountains green”?

Frankly, they did not—but they did touch base in Egypt.

I wish to speak to three common mistakes when looking at the region, and three risks facing Egypt in particular, namely religious cleansing, the constitution and emigration. As outlined by the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, the first common mistake is to attempt to treat this region as one block when all countries differ economically, politically and socially. The problems can be very different. As Canon White has said, what is going on in Israel has nothing to do with Iraq.

Another common mistake is to look at the region through a lens of only western interests and anxieties—namely trade, investment and security. This led the UK Government among others to become uneasy bedfellows with regimes with worrying track records on human rights and respect for the rule of law. Such mistakes may be coming home to roost as police are currently poring over the documents about the alleged M16 involvement with the Gaddafi regime. In light of past experience, I wonder what Her Majesty’s Government’s baseline is for involvement with still potentially dubious but now democratic regimes. It is easy to remove rulers, but not so easy to remove the corrupt system behind them, and elections may not yet serve to be a thorough cleanser.

The third common mistake is to fail to see a vital part of DNA of the region—religion. This is a different and perhaps difficult perspective for western Europeans to fully understand, as over recent decades we have seen the trend of secularism while the rest of the globe has got seriously more religious. China is now the second largest producer of Bibles in the world and Brazil is now second only to America for the number of Christian missionaries that it exports. Some 96 per cent of Egyptians say that religion is an important part of their lives; not to understand that is like trying to understand America without knowing about the free-market economics. I dare say that our recent news stories on militant secularism—and whether my freedom to stand in this Chamber wearing a cross around my neck should also be enjoyed by employees of our national airline—must seem like an anathema to many in the Middle East. On a serious note, if any of the worrying scenarios that I go on to outline materialise for minority religious communities, will not UK diplomats and politicians be weakened if cheap retorts can be given by foreign politicians to get our own house in order first?

The establishment of the FCO’s religious freedom panel is a most encouraging step by the Government, but still too often when religion is talked of in regard to the region it is with only partial understanding. One such example arose just before the Deputy Prime Minister’s trip to Egypt last year, when he wrote an article in the Independent about the rise of “sectarian violence” in Egypt. Really, Deputy Prime Minister, was it sectarian violence, in which religious communities attack each other? Have the minority Baha’i, Sufi Muslim and Coptic communities really taken leave of their senses and decided to start launching attacks on the majority Sunni population in Egypt? There is, I believe, a need to show British Copts and Baha’is a more sophisticated understanding of the situation than this.

The suffering communities in the region—whether the minority Baha’i in Iran, the majority Shia in Bahrain, the Christians in Egypt or the Jews in the region as a whole—predominantly identify as religious communities. A great fear in parts of the region is religious cleansing, which is what lies behind the most depressing reports on the BBC this week—that the minority Christian community in Syria is supporting the Assad regime, as it fears this religious cleansing over the plight of their fellow Syrians. Worryingly, there are reports that religious cleansing is beginning to happen in Alexandria to the Copts. Walking the streets there last year as a woman without a covered head, one could have cut the tension in that city with a knife.

Will my noble friend please outline how Her Majesty’s Government are making it clear that not only will religious cleansing not be tolerated but that international justice will apply to the perpetrators? Moreover, what is the Government’s view on whether UK taxpayers’ money through IMF loans, EU funding and UK aid will continue if the soon-to-be-written Egyptian constitution fails to protect minority and women’s rights and breaches Article 18 of the UN Declaration on Human Rights? This article, which is often not given its correct status as a fundamental human right, states:

“Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change”,

your “religion or belief”.

However, if the constitution of Egypt does not also promote equal participation in every level of Egyptian society, there could be another damaging consequence for Egypt. I asked a young Copt who gave me a lift what his ambition in life was. He said that it was, “to leave. There is no future for me here, I am a Copt”. Egypt could lose much of its human capital and needs to retain its educated young people, particularly the 1 million to 2 million Copts who under the Mubarak regime could find no place in government, civil service or the military, and so thrived as entrepreneurs and doctors. A huge proportion of Egypt's wealth is held by the Coptic community.

Too many lives have been lost to gain the freedoms that we take for granted, but when a country is not politically stable, as in Iraq and Egypt, religion can be used as a justification to remove the other, whether by creating the conditions for mass emigration or worse. Western European Governments need to understand thoroughly the religious as well as the economic and political dynamic of the region, and to learn the truth of the words of Archbishop William Temple, I think, who said:

“When religion goes wrong, it goes very wrong”.