Syria and the Middle East

Lord Bishop of Truro Excerpts

Monday 1st July 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Truro]

My Lords, I, too, am very grateful to the noble Baroness for introducing this important debate. I thank her for her wide-ranging and helpful speech. The Foreign Secretary was right when he recently described the situation in Syria as the worst crisis affecting the world today. It is a truly wicked conflict. This wickedness is illustrated both by the scale of the human tragedy and by the complexity that has thwarted efforts to resolve it.

I am also grateful for the noble Baroness’s mention of the Prime Minister’s G8 announcement of a £178 million emergency package, which is very welcome. However, we should not deceive ourselves into thinking that it will suffice. As other speakers have mentioned, the crisis has so far driven more than 1.5 million Syrian refugees into neighbouring countries, and thousands more pour across Syrian borders every day. Sadly, as the noble Lord, Lord Wood, mentioned, around 50% of these refugees are children. This is a truly desperate situation, and I hope that the Minister will be able to say something more about the efforts to tackle the growing phenomenon in Lebanon, as we have just been hearing, where innocent and traumatised children are sold into prostitution through temporary marriages.

With every passing month, the conflict generates 200,000 new refugees that impact on Syria’s fragile neighbours. If current trends persist, we can expect that over 3 million Syrians will have left their home country by the end of the year. This situation threatens to become a Sword of Damocles hanging over the host countries and host communities, which lack the capacity to absorb increases of up to 10% of their local populations.

Will the noble Baroness assure the House that the Government will continue to respond generously to this humanitarian disaster, which threatens to unsettle the delicate confessional and political balance of neighbouring states, not least Lebanon itself? I am sure the noble Baroness would agree that, even if obstacles have yet to be overcome in resolving this conflict, the international community should not shirk its responsibility in containing it. What steps are the Government taking to ensure that donors’ pledges are fulfilled without delay and that additional funds are provided to meet short-term and longer-term needs? I would like also to mention here the indigenous Syrian Arab Christians, who are especially vulnerable when outsiders from elsewhere in the region, who know or care little about the honoured place that Christians have held in the nation from earliest times, seem to be influencing events so greatly. All of us who are Christian leaders are extremely concerned about the two abducted archbishops from Aleppo, Boulos Yazigi and Mor Yohanna Ibrahim. We are all in solidarity with the faithful Christian communities of Syria.

The wickedness of this humanitarian catastrophe is matched only by the paucity of our political efforts to resolve the conflict. The absence of any real political progress on Syria at Lough Erne last month is a truly regrettable blight on an otherwise successful G8 summit. The Government have to date wisely resisted the temptation of military intervention, but it remains a real concern to members of this Bench that the Government hold to the assumption that only by correcting the asymmetry of military power can President Assad be cajoled into serious negotiations with the opposition. Is this right? Will arming the opposition—or it might be better to say “oppositions”, in the plural—make the situation for the Syrian people better, or will it merely lead to more bloodshed and accelerate spillover to the wider region?

I accept that there might be a time when it is necessary for the international community to police any peace settlement, but we are clearly a very long way from that point and, as it stands, the ongoing debate about the arming of Syrian rebels serves merely to distract attention from finding a diplomatic solution to the crisis. Surely now is the time to intensify our diplomatic efforts. Diplomatically, the West appears locked into a political mindset that assumes that a solution needs to be agreed by external powers and then imposed from outside without any consultation. Is this the right strategy? Even if the capacity and coherence of the Syrian opposition can be developed sufficiently ahead of Geneva 2, are the Government being fanciful in thinking that a group of Syrian exiles can be parachuted in as the opposition transition government implant to assume command of the army and security forces in Syria?

The Government need to move beyond the narrative that this is a liberational struggle against a nasty and brutish regime. This might have held true in the conflict’s early months, but it has long since mutated. It is high time that the conflict was analysed in its own terms rather than by reference to the transformations going on in other parts of the Middle East and north Africa. Will the Minister accept that the political position taken in the embryonic stages of this conflict—namely, that Assad must go—has now become an obstacle to resolving the conflict? Will she accept that Assad’s fate must be a question for the transition process and not a precondition, and that Iran, as has been said, must play a role in the diplomatic process?

This is a truly wicked conflict but, when all we see is good or evil, light or dark, we are in danger of overlooking the shades of grey that give this conflict its multilayered complexity. Unless we recognise this complexity, any intervention, military or political, is going to be bluntly ineffective and at risk of compounding the situation. That would be a tragedy, not least for the people of Syria and the surrounding region.