Foreign Affairs

Baroness Mobarik Excerpts

Tuesday 5th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Mobarik (Con)]

The Middle East is a part of the world that the UK understands, and, in turn, the UK is held in affection there. It is with concern, therefore, that I hear from long-standing friends there that those feelings are changing. We are seen as either bystanders or complicit in the current conflict in Gaza. My noble friend the Foreign Secretary, however, deserves appreciation for his leadership in expressing that the state of Palestine be recognised, and calling for accountability for crimes committed by both sides in Gaza. The change of tone from the United States is an indication of his influence.

The dream of the Palestinian people is the same as for all people: freedom; security; food and shelter; and some degree of hope for a better future through education and employment. I condemn the Hamas terrorist atrocities of 7 October in the strongest possible terms, but the indiscriminate killing of so many innocent Palestinian civilians is causing such outrage, anger and sorrow across the region and throughout the world that Britain’s ongoing support for Israel’s war in Gaza is damaging our equally important relationships with other allies in the region. It is as if the Palestinian people have been dehumanised to such a degree that some people in this place, and in the other place, do not even recognise the enormity of the injustice being committed against the Palestinian people, so many of whom are children, bombed and starved for crimes they did not commit. International humanitarian law does not permit collective punishment, but that is what is happening in Gaza. It is wrong, and it must stop.

We proclaim the rights of the child, but when it comes to the rights of Palestinian children, our lack of action during these past five months makes a mockery of that declaration. How many potential artists and scientists have been simply eliminated? So much talent is, literally, being killed. If we wish to generate a better future, this is not the way to do it. Our credibility, our legitimacy and our role as a country central to the contemporary global world order are because of our adherence to and support for the rule of domestic and international law, and justice and fairness. The British people are fair and expect their representatives in Parliament to be fair and just on their behalf. Even if we were simply to consider our own interests in much of the Middle East, we have to show ourselves as fair brokers. It is vital that we make every effort towards ending this ghastly situation, and I know my noble friend the Foreign Secretary is working tirelessly to do this.

The United Kingdom has a legal, moral and historical obligation to make every endeavour to help both sides make peace a reality, but the process for a lasting peace cannot be ambiguous; there are no partial solutions. Our support for international efforts towards, on both sides, a full, immediate and permanent ceasefire—not just for the six weeks stipulated by the United States—is essential, as is the safe delivery of aid without obstruction. Can the Foreign Secretary say why medical equipment, such as ventilators and anaesthesia machines, is being refused entry by Israel?

Also needed is the immediate exchange of Israeli hostages and non-Hamas Palestinian detainees, and the forcible displacement of people to stop. There are now 1.5 million in refugee camps in Rafah. We need the reconstruction of Gaza to start and, ultimately, those displaced to be able to go back to where they once lived. Furthermore, the illegal occupation by Israel of the West Bank in east Jerusalem must end. Hundreds have been killed there since January last year.

As for Gaza, in 2010, the House of Commons Hansard shows that my noble friend, then the Prime Minister, said that

“we are not going to sort out the problem of the middle east peace process while there is, effectively, a giant open prison in Gaza”.—[Official Report, Commons, 28/6/10; col. 583.]

Yet Israel has recently stated it wants to remain in overall security control of Gaza and select the Palestinian technocrats that it chooses to run it. Can the Foreign Secretary say whether he believes that that would be in any way acceptable or have legitimacy in the eyes of Palestinians? Most would argue that having two independent separate states is the only solution. It is a right of the people of Israel to have peace and security, as, too, it is for the people of Palestine, in two separate independent states that recognise each other’s right to exist.

Pakistan: Flood Relief

Baroness Mobarik Excerpts

Wednesday 7th September 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, I assure the noble Baroness that the points she raises are very valid. It is not just about a cross-government approach to climate change, but a global approach. That is why I am fully supporting, engaging with and will continue to engage with the current COP President, Alok Sharma. Prior to this catastrophe, in my role as Minister with responsibility for north Africa, I spoke directly to Egypt, which will hold the COP presidency, to ensure that the commitments mentioned earlier to meeting the challenges of climate change are kept. The United Kingdom very much stands at the forefront of that. We allocated £11.6 billion of climate finance funding. That support is not just pledged but delivered in a way that focuses on the specific issues. Looking at the lay of the land in Pakistan, important long-term investments need to be made in respect of adaptation and mitigation.

[Baroness Mobarik (Con)]

My Lords, rich countries promised to help finance lower income countries to deal with the impacts of climate change because of a recognition of their responsibility for historic carbon emissions. However, the target of £100 billion of climate finance by 2020 has never been reached. Does my noble friend agree that Pakistan should have its debt repayments suspended with immediate effect to ensure that much-needed resources are not sent out of the country at this time, as the human and economic costs the country faces are truly astronomical? Finance delivered in the past has been in the form of loans, not grants. Can we exert any pressure on the international community to do away with this debt?

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, I know that the IFIs, including the IMF, are working with Pakistan on its current situation. My noble friend will know from her own insights that Pakistan has just agreed a programme with the IMF that was important, as I am sure she agrees, to ensure the economic stability of Pakistan for the medium term. This catastrophe was not foreseen but it could certainly have been mitigated, and that is why my noble friend talks about emissions and contributions.

It is important to look at the here and now. What can be put in place? What support can be offered to Pakistan? As we have seen in previous crises, including when we were gripped by the Covid pandemic, the decision was taken internationally to freeze debt interest repayment. I am sure that all the authorities concerned—the IFIs and the international organisations—are looking at the different proposals. The United Kingdom will also make sure its voice is heard.

Bosnia-Herzegovina

Baroness Mobarik Excerpts

Thursday 16th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Mobarik (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth for securing this debate at a critical time for Bosnia-Herzegovina. In six months’ time, we may see another descent into war.

If noble Lords will permit, I will first recount a memory which haunts me to this day, and which I believe is important to this debate. I travelled to Bosnia in November 1996, after the Dayton peace agreement, having spent much time during the conflict years raising money for humanitarian aid and, after the horror of Srebrenica, calling for UN intervention as part of a group founded by some of us in Glasgow known as the “Save the Bosnian People Campaign”.

Still with no direct flights to Bosnia, I travelled to Zagreb in Croatia to meet members of the team of Edinburgh Direct Aid, a charity we had used to deliver aid to Bosnia. I declare an interest as patron of EDA. From Zagreb, we travelled by road to the town of Ključ in north-western Bosnia-Herzegovina. Devastation paved the way. Every one of the 34 mosques in the Una-Sana Canton had been dynamited to rubble. No house was left intact—they were covered with bullet holes and without windows or door frames—not even the one where we stayed in the village of Biljani. Some plastic sheeting from UNHCR was all that acted as a barrier from the bitter cold.

The next day, we received a call from the mayor’s office, as he knew that foreigners were present in the town. He asked if we could meet him; it was important, as he needed us to see something. He had something to tell the world—for us to be witnesses to the truth. The chairman of Edinburgh Direct Aid, Dr Denis Rutovitz, and I, along with Feho Botonjić, who had spent six months in the Manjača concentration camp, reached the appointed place, the outskirts of a forest in a mountainous region some 14 kilometres from Ključ. Then accompanied by the mayor, Amir Avdić, we walked into the heart of the forest with its towering trees.

We came upon a strange scene. There was a wooden table where four or five exhausted young men, not more than 17 or 18 years old, were sitting eating their meal. Beside them lay bundles wrapped in black plastic sheeting laid out in a row. A few hundred yards across from them were people around a gaping hole and down below, as we approached, we saw that there were more young men digging many metres below to extract what was there and haul up, by ropes, one by one, the evidence of the brutality that had visited that forest several years before. The bodies of 188 people, some of whom had been beaten and killed outside the local primary school in Biljani, and others taken alive and loaded onto buses in July 1992, and whose whereabouts had been unknown, were there in that dark abyss.

The townsmen who had gone hunting in the forest after the war had noticed that the natural crater, 20 metres deep, that had been there was now filled in and covered over with earth. It rang alarm bells, so they started digging, only to discover those 188 people who had seemingly vanished. The strange, unfamiliar, bitter-sweet scent that shrouded the forest now made sense—it was of human remains long since decayed. It pervaded the forest, and my consciousness, long after we left. The bodies were transferred to the school hall for identification by those who had missing family members. Among them, the oldest was an 85-year-old man; the youngest were a four month-old baby and a young girl in her teens. “The sweetest, prettiest, kindest girl”, lamented Ramis and Raifa, our hosts: “How is it possible?”

It is too often possible, as history tells us, for perfectly normal people to descend into such barbarism. If the language of division is used as a weapon to bring out the worst in people and to deliberately incite hatred, it is all too possible. We face that scenario once again in the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina. If our humanity means anything to us, we must act to prevent another inhumane situation—another genocide in the heart of Europe.

In 1992, the world watched and waited and ignored the deteriorating political situation, the reports of mass killings, until eventually the scale of the genocide in Srebrenica awoke us to a truth we could no longer ignore. Alongside the physical devastation lay a devastated economy. The factories I visited in Sarajevo lay mostly empty, with owners struggling to revive their businesses. All the export markets, for leather shoes, timber and textiles to Germany, Italy and elsewhere, had been lost during the years of conflict. I ask whether we could have done more to ensure the economic success of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Some 25 years on, many of the villages lie empty. Opportunities are few. Half a million of the brightest and best have left in the last decade, and in recent years the institutions of government, which should have been strengthened in order to build on a fragile peace, have instead, in the last 10 years, been eroded by the political leadership of the Bosnian Serb region, Republika Srpska, with the President, Milorad Dodik, questioning the legitimacy of the Bosnian institutions—the Bosnian army, security services, tax system and judiciary. Last Saturday, on 11 December, the Bosnian Serb entity of the assembly voted for a set of provisions which would see the regional government opt out of these national institutions, in clear contravention of the Dayton peace agreement—this despite the threat of sanctions by the US and Europe. It is clear that this confidence is partly because Dodik has the backing of Russia, as he has more or less made clear.

The Opposition leader in Republika Srpska, Mirko Šarović, has said that secession would be

“a direct threat to peace, which would lead Republika Srpska into the spiral of war.”

We cannot allow that to happen. If we care nothing for what happens to Bosnia, let us ask ourselves: can we afford another refugee crisis? At this moment, we have a small window of opportunity. The proposals that have been voted through require new laws and changes to the constitution within a six-month period. We can no longer ignore what is happening and time is of the essence. We support it and were deeply involved in the Dayton peace agreement. We must uphold it, and the constitutional integrity of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Dayton peace agreement was by no means perfect, but nevertheless has provided peace.

When you look at the geography you realise that there is no clean separation of the territory, as Dodik proposes. In parts of the country, villages are entangled along ethnic lines. Let us for a moment remember that in Bosnia in the early 1990s, the people were completely integrated. They spoke the same language, went to school together and worked side by side in the same factories and offices. They socialised with each other. The only thing that was different between them was their names. When I spoke to the citizens of Ključ and of Sarajevo they said, “We were targeted simply because of our Muslim names”.

When Dodik and others refuse to define Srebrenica as a genocide it means they have no regrets for what happened. The theory that the mass murders across Bosnia and genocide in Srebrenica the 1990s is a lie is espoused by a small percentage of people, not just in the Bosnian Republika Srpska, Serbia and Croatia but right across Europe. I heard such views in recent years from individuals I served alongside as a Member of the European Parliament. It is why organisations such as Remembering Srebrenica—I declare an interest as a patron—must be supported. Educating future generations about that miserable episode of European history is vital to a more caring, tolerant and peaceful society.

I am heartened to know that our Government are taking the current situation in Bosnia very seriously, having recently appointed to the role of special envoy to the Balkans Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach, whom I had the pleasure of meeting in 2006. There can be no one more qualified. This step is to be commended, but would my noble friend the Minister agree that this issue means that we leave every option on the table? Do we follow up on our interventions or do we walk away? Britain, as one of the signatories of the Dayton agreement and a participant in the NATO peacekeeping forces, has a clear duty to intervene and to persuade all its allies to intervene. We owe it to those 59 British soldiers who lost their lives and the many more who were injured in the 1990s war in Bosnia, to people such as Christine Witcutt, who was killed by a Serb bullet while delivering humanitarian aid to Bosnia on behalf of Edinburgh Direct Aid, and to our future generations, for whom we would wish a peaceful and prosperous Europe.

Commonwealth Heads of Government

Baroness Mobarik Excerpts

Thursday 27th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, I would say that it was not a delusion. We have already seen practical initiatives, including SheTrades, which has supported 3,300 women entrepreneurs. It is good that we see consistency across the piece between the two Commonwealth countries.

[Baroness Mobarik (Con)]

My Lords, one of our commitments was to lead and strengthen the structures of the Commonwealth to become a powerful economic bloc. Much of our focus since CHOGM 2018 has been on negotiating a free trade agreement with India, but there are other sizeable economies in south Asia. Will my noble friend tell me what efforts are being made to engage fully with Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka in relation to trade?

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend is quite right that the issue of prosperity was a declared priority. We are working with associations within the Commonwealth, including that led by my noble friend Lord Marland on pursuing trade and business across the Commonwealth. There is a recognition of intra-Commonwealth trade and investment and an ambition has been set for $2 trillion-worth of trade. On south Asia, I can talk with some degree of insight as the Minister for South Asia. My noble friend is correct to point to India, but I can assure her that we are working in very practical terms with Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. We are very focused on the trade element, including setting up teams across Whitehall, which include not only FCDO Ministers, but DIT Ministers as well.