ISIL: Iraq and Syria

Lord Bishop of Truro Excerpts

Thursday 16th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Anelay of St Johns]

My Lords, I am grateful for the support of my noble friend Lord Kirkwood about the timing of the visit and the impetus that it will, I hope, give to further development. No one is complacent. We know the seriousness of this and that there is a long haul ahead.

I am very grateful to my noble friend for reminding me not just about the ambassadors and British citizens in our posts overseas, but the staff. There are local staff, and there is a particular strain on them. We have given support to Iraq from the very beginning to obtain an inclusive government. A crucial part of that support has been our encouragement to find someone who can provide a nexus of support between Shia, Kurd and Sunni. We believe that al-Abadi is able to do that, and we are giving him every support.

[The Lord Bishop of Truro]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness for her Statement and associate the Lords spiritual with her thanks and tributes to those she mentioned in it. The conflicts in Syria and Iraq are, sadly, part of a wider cycle of sickening violence in which individuals and groups are increasingly targeted for their religious affiliation. I do not know whether the Minister has had a chance to read the article by my most reverend friend the Archbishop of Canterbury in the journal Prospect today. In line with that article, I wonder what steps the Government are taking to ensure that human rights considerations, including freedom of religion and belief, are given greater urgency in their relations with the Government of Iraq, the Friends of Syria Group and any required dealings with the Assad regime.

[Baroness Anelay of St Johns]

My Lords, I am grateful to the right reverend Prelate. I referred to that very briefly at the end of Questions yesterday; it was too brief, I know, but time was running out. We recognise that life in Syria for Christians and other minorities continues to be deeply distressing. That extends to Iraq as well, where whole communities have had to flee. We have serious concerns about rising sectarian tensions. As for Syria, we believe that President Assad’s actions include a deliberate attempt to stir up such tensions in his efforts to hang on to power. The right reverend Prelate asks a timely question.

We think that the only way to secure the position of Syria’s minority communities is to find a political solution to the crisis. Part of that must involve respect for each religious group. I mentioned the other day that one of the priorities for the Foreign Office is freedom of religion or belief. I am involved in working to deliver some practical examples of how that may be achieved. The task of achieving that freedom of religion and belief in societies which are at peace but divided by religion is difficult enough. It is multiplied perhaps a hundredfold or more when we have the situation in Syria and Iraq. However, I am aware that when Foreign Office Ministers visit a region, they do the best they can in the time available to meet Christian communities to discuss their concerns and learn from them. I know that my honourable friend Mr Ellwood visited Iraq at the end of August and raised the persecution of Christians with the then Foreign Minister and other senior officials, but I assure the right reverend Prelate that that will not be the last time that we do that.

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.