Kashmir

Lord Desai Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking my noble friend Lord Ahmed for bringing this topic to your Lordships’ House. To the substantial question of what Her Majesty’s Government can do, I think that the answer is not much. As far as possible, Her Majesty’s Government should keep out of this. I remember what happened to my right honourable friend David Miliband when he went to Delhi and made a statement on Kashmir. I had to spend several evenings defending him and telling people, “No, he’s really a good man”.

This is a bilateral issue. Since the Simla Agreement of 1972, as several noble Lords have pointed out, the UN no longer has any locus standi in the matter. This was a mutual agreement between the two countries. Neither the UN military observers nor the UN Security Council as of now has any locus standi in the matter.

I was in Pakistan 15 years ago and spent a whole month in Islamabad. I was very struck that the second question I was asked in every social gathering—after how I was and so on—was, “Why do you not give up Kashmir?” My answer was that I had a British passport, so Kashmir was not mine to give up. They said, “Forget about that. You really have Kashmir and you ought to give it up”. I suddenly realised that India has Kashmir by virtue of the agreement with the old king, Maharaja Hari Singh. Pakistan’s sense of nationhood depends on having Kashmir as part of Pakistan. There is a great asymmetry in feeling about Kashmir in those two countries. India has the bulk of the valley of Kashmir and Pakistan has only a sliver and wants all of it. Flying on Pakistan International Airlines in those days, I saw a map of Pakistan that included all Kashmir in Pakistan.

I can see that there is a very strong feeling in Pakistan that, somehow, something happened and Kashmir should have come to it. The state of Jammu and Kashmir has three components: one is the valley of Kashmir, which is majority-Muslim; then there is the Jammu, which is predominantly Hindu: and then there is Ladakh, a huge area which is mainly Buddhist if anything. When we talk about Kashmir, it is one of the three components of Jammu and Kashmir that we mean. You could not really hold a plebiscite even if it was possible, except on the condition that the votes of the three regions were counted separately and you had different choices, because, ultimately, Pakistan cares only about the valley—which is the most beautiful part as well.

Forgetting about the plebiscite, what we have to do is to maintain the status quo. In both areas—I do not think that there is a paradise of human rights in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir or even in Pakistan itself—we have to have civil society people monitor violations of human rights, complain about them, point them out and try to make the Governments involved behave better. In that respect, civil society in the UK can perform a function, but that function cannot be performed by the Government, who would be well advised to stay out.

I have always championed, and written about, an independent Kashmir which would be like Switzerland with a condominium guaranteed by all the major powers plus India and Pakistan. When I put forward this idea in Pakistan, I was violently opposed by people saying, “No, an independent Kashmir will not do. Kashmir is part of Pakistan”. I think that in India also there is considerable opposition.

This is one of those endless disputes, like that between Israel and Palestine, which goes on and there is nothing much that the UN can do about it. We have to make sure that the people involved in that tragedy are assured as peaceful and lawful an existence as possible and hope that India, which is a kind of older brother in this dispute and already has a democratic structure in Jammu and Kashmir, will improve governance in Kashmir. It should try to make sure that violations of human rights which take place are addressed and that the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, about which there is a lot of debate in India—not only with respect to Jammu and Kashmir but also with respect to the north-east—is removed in its application from the area of Jammu and Kashmir.

Perhaps something like that can by urged by civil society groups in the UK, because it is already being urged by civil society groups in India. I do not say that that will happen, but we have to keep up the pressure. It is very important on humanitarian grounds that we keep up the pressure and try to improve as much as we can the lives of the people of Kashmir on both sides.

Libya

Lord Desai Excerpts

Monday 19th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

That is unquestionably so. This is the issue that we are now discussing. Libya was and remains a country with many different tribal groups, not all of which necessarily live in tight geographical locations. They are often rather mixed up. Many different forces are at work in Libya, but overall, as a democracy, it is our advice to other democracies that their future will be best assured by pursuing the democratic method.

I should add that the recent survey of what has happened in Libya leaves us with figures that show that 97 per cent of Libyans think that the revolution was absolutely right; 66 per cent support a semi-centralised Government, with ministries spread across Libya; and 79 per cent expect their lives to better a year from now. These are pretty decisive figures, which indicate that if we push for more democracy we are all on the right lines.

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, do the Government have any plans to help Libya to conduct a good election by pointing to the Commonwealth experience in these matters?

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

The Commonwealth experience is available, and I know that there are leaders in the Commonwealth who are quite ready to provide any advice, support and help that they can. The Commonwealth’s role in monitoring and administering elections is particularly valuable where new constitutions are in the making, as in Libya. Commonwealth leaders have certainly indicated that they stand ready to help in any possible way.

Building Stability Overseas Strategy

Lord Desai Excerpts

Thursday 6th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, we are grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, for introducing the debate. I compliment her on her speech, and say all this because I will be quite critical of the document we are discussing. I find it intellectually inadequate and do not think that it can be a basis on which to frame any sort of policy. I shall go into some detail about why I think that.

It is economically deterministic and takes a rather naive view that in any conflict there are bound to be economic causes, and only economic causes. In proposing a solution, it has the defect of all the UN documents that I have had to read over the years of being far too idealistic in the requirements that it imposes on what kind of a perfect solution there has to be. Everything has to be democratic, transparent, accountable, gender-friendly, environmentally sustainable and what-not. I once headed something called the Centre for the Study of Global Governance at the London School of Economics and, on one of the first discussion papers we published, a brilliant Canadian scholar pointed out that people sitting in New York ask their UNDP branches out in Kenya and so on to add new things that they have suddenly thought of that we must have in conflict resolution. We do not have to do it but people out there have to satisfy so many constraints. At the end of it, whatever we do will be inadequate.

I start by saying why I think that the document is analytically defective. Then I will say something about the solution. First, the document is analytically defective because the notion of a fragile state is not an adequate notion. Most things that are called fragile states are not states. They are not even nations. Because of various things, either colonial developments, or something else, they have been designated as states by some constitutional accident but then have followed a long struggle to find out whose nation it is. Consider Afghanistan, where we have had trouble for 40 years. It was a kingdom once upon a time, and as kingdoms go it was stable. In a kingdom you can command the loyalty of different tribes who may not agree with each other. Then there was the communist revolution and other things later on, and we are still trying to establish a nation state there. A nation state is very different from a kingdom. In a nation state, numbers count and different tribes have to quarrel to take command of resources. The notion that everything is a state is inadequate for analysis of fragility.

I even say, at the opposite end, that we should consider Sri Lanka. Virtually everything that people want—gender friendliness, good health, education, a fantastic welfare state, high literacy, high ranking of human development—was reported over the years. What happened? Almost horrendous genocide takes place there in a 25 year-old civil war. The notion of a fragile state does not help us to analyse Sri Lanka or Zimbabwe. Until the late 1990s Zimbabwe was thought to be an ideal combination of social development and economic growth. I was part of the UNICEF project. In an article somebody listed Zimbabwe as one of the 10 most successful countries combining social development and economic growth. Why did Zimbabwe fall apart? This document will not help us to explain that. We have to be much more critical.

What are we being asked to intervene in? We may be asked to intervene in situations not because states are fragile. None of the states in the Arab spring revolutions was at all fragile—not Egypt, Tunisia, Libya—but all were subjected to considerable change and had to respond to it. I urge Ministers to look again and to have a more robust doctrine on why we have to have early warning and on what we can do. We were able to do nothing about Sri Lanka despite it being a member of the Commonwealth. We were not able to expel it, like Zimbabwe, or even Pakistan. It not only continues to be a member but will host the CHOGM in 2013. We need a slightly better concept of not just fragile states, but rogue states and maybe states that are perfectly well functioning but which because of that can be perfectly efficient at oppressing their people. Iraq, for example, under Saddam Hussein, was not a frail state at all—not even a fragile state. It was a very powerful state but it was oppressive to its own people.

The doctrine of liberal interventionism, of which I think I am the last friend, says that if you live in a global village and see a neighbour beating his wife you will intervene. You do not regard it as his affair. If a country—especially a non-western country, if I may say so—has a dictator who is eliminating some part of the population through genocide and so on, we do not say, “No. Their values are different, so we cannot intervene”. I think that it is quite right to intervene. It was right to intervene in Iraq. I have no problem with that. Iraq today is a democracy. Not only that, I believe—although I cannot prove it—that some of the inspiration for the Arab spring must have come from the fact that Iraq was seen as a functioning democracy. It is such a stable functioning democracy that after the elections it did not have a Government for six months but still nothing happened that could upset the political balance.

That is an achievement and that kind of liberal interventionism was successful in Bosnia and Kosovo and very effective in Sierra Leone. We have to learn positive lessons from that. We cannot just rely on the doctrine of fragility. Maybe we should have “fragile states”; we should have “rogue states”; we should have states that are perfectly all right but suddenly undergo a conversion—in all these different situations we may be required to intervene and what kind of intervention we make will be important.

Time is running out so let me say a few things on the ideal solution. It is very important, especially in fragile states, states that are breaking down, or even states in which we are intervening, that we prioritise what kind of intervention is needed. Before all the democracy and accountability and transparency—all those good things of life—are achieved, we have to restore law and order. The restoration of law and order and the security of property and people is absolutely the top priority. In doing that you may not achieve all the good bits that you want to achieve. Very often, especially after a civil war, it would be very difficult for even the domestic security forces, let alone somebody from outside, to really be able to give proper, perfect equal justice to people who were previously the masters and committing the genocide—just think of how it was in Rwanda. First should be some sort of security of property and life on an equal basis, and later one can go on to look at institution-building and things like that.

How many years did we stand by and wring our hands over Darfur and all the time the crisis was happening? Was Sudan a fragile state? Was Sudan a state at all? Now coming out is what we knew all the time: that Sudan had very deep divisions, north and south, on the basis of religion. At that time we were not able to operate on the idea that perhaps Sudan should not be a single country. My own private view is that the Democratic Republic of Congo should not be a single country and is not viable as a single country, but that is for another day.

As far as Her Majesty’s Government are concerned, if you are going to set up an early warning system, please have a much more robust analytical model on the variety of different situations in which we will have to intervene and not just this notion of a fragile state and that it is fragile because it is economically weak. That will not do; that is not a proposition which would pass any examination. Therefore, we should be deeper in our analysis and economise on the objectives we pursue when we intervene—and once we intervene, get out fast.

Middle East and North Africa

Lord Desai Excerpts

Friday 11th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, some years ago, when my right honourable friend Tony Blair, the then Prime Minister, was visiting Palestine and Israel, someone pointed out that he may not have realised it was the anniversary of the Sykes-Picot agreement. He probably does not know what the Sykes-Picot agreement is, but everyone in Palestine knows its date and what happened.

I start with that because I think that we are still suffering from the unwinding of the Ottoman Empire. The Sykes-Picot agreement was an agreement among the allies to divide up the remnants of the Ottoman Empire. They created Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon and invented dynasties that went on to rule these countries.

Many noble Lords have said that we cannot impose democracy. I actually disagree. The British Commonwealth is a splendid example of imposed democracy. I come from India. Democracy was imposed on India, and India took to it. Many Commonwealth countries did the same because the people in charge then insisted that whenever the colonies became independent, they became democracies. They could easily have chosen to make India full of maharajas, kings and sultans but they chose not to.

The point is not that democracy cannot be imposed, but that we no longer have the power to impose it because no one will listen to us. When we had that power in the Middle East, we imposed various kings like the Hashemites who, later on, were thrown away. Some of the problems of the Middle East are of longstanding origin. We have tolerated practically a century of instability in the region, or false stability under dictators and seething unrest among the masses.

American interest in the Middle East is only twofold: it wants to guarantee Israel’s security and it wants cheap oil. Perhaps we are slightly distanced from that and, along with the European Union, we might be able to think slightly out of the box and propose other routes to stability in the region. Of course what is happening in Egypt is very exciting, as is what happened in Tunisia, and the transitions are going to be long—in Egypt it may even be bloody—but I am confident in asserting that eventually democracy will come to Egypt.

I also agree with many noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, that we do not have to be afraid of the Muslim Brotherhood. Let the people of Egypt choose whom they want to elect. It is not up to us to lay down a criterion that some will be good Egyptians and the rest bad Egyptians. I remember how in India, as recently as the early 1990s, there was a fear of the BJP, a Hindu nationalist party, coming to power. Good progressive liberal friends of mine practically stopped talking to me because I was not as fiercely opposed to the BJP being elected as they were. I said, “It’s up to the Indian people to elect or not elect whichever party they want; as long as the party competes, let the people decide”. The BJP came to power, it was perfectly ordinary and it went out of power. The power of the democratic process is much stronger than the ideology of any particular political party, and we should not fear the Muslim Brotherhood.

It is also quite clear that the whole resurgence of Islamism in the Middle East over the past 20 to 25 years and the defeat of the secular, rather than democratic, solutions like the Ba’ath Socialist Party are very much because of the defeat of the Arab armies in three successive wars against Israel. After 1973 there was a crisis of conscience among the Arabs, who asked, “Why do we keep on losing?”. One answer, although I do not think it was the correct one, was that they were no longer as “pure” as they used to be. They had to purify themselves as good Muslims in order to be able to win the next battle. The Islamism that has erupted in the Middle East in various forms—Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood and so on, although the brotherhood predates all this—is very much a consequence of the unsolved Israel-Palestine problem.

Many noble Lords have remarked on that problem. Perhaps I may something that has not been said so far. I think that the two-state solution is dead. What Al-Jazeera has revealed in its various leaked documents is that the last moderate Palestinian negotiating party has been destroyed. Hamas is still a popular democratically elected alternative but no one wants to talk it. There has long been a very settled opinion—or, rather, a strong opinion—on the left of the political spectrum that only a single-state solution is viable, that you cannot have an exclusive Israeli or Palestinian state. The land is limited, there are far too many claims, and a secular, multifaith, multi-ethnic state is the only viable solution. That will not happen; I know it will not. The only way to guarantee the security of Israel and the alleviation of poverty for Palestinian Arabs would be a single state with guaranteed minority rights, sharing the same land so that each can pursue their own prosperity.

We have just such an experience at home. Northern Ireland was for decades run in a democratic context by a single dominant community; the minority community was badly treated and took to arms. We lived through that, and the lesson we learnt there was that a single dominant religious majority does not actually guarantee security for the majority community and certainly does not relieve the minority community of deprivation. It is up to us to say, if anyone on either side would listen, that there is not enough land for two competing claims to be successful. The claims go back thousands of years and there is no way of deciding the historical priority of either community. Nor can we guarantee that the smaller state would be viable if a two-state solution were created, unless the entire international community was willing to foot the bill for about a century. So we might as well think of completely different alternatives. A single multifaith, multi-ethnic state in the Holy Land is the one viable solution.

Iraq has not been mentioned so far. We ought to realise that, as messy and bloody as the whole Iraq adventure was, it is now a democracy. It has had two or three elections, and the latest Government formation under Nouri al-Maliki took six months of negotiations. Everybody patiently negotiated. There was no instability. It was almost like a European democracy, where post-election negotiations for Government formation take a long time but everybody knows the rules of the game.

The fact that Iraq is the largest Arab democracy today is probably one reason why people in Tunisia and Egypt said, “Well, it is possible”. If it can be done without all the bloodshed we had to go through in Iraq, all the better for all of us. If I could impose democracy on everybody, I would, but I hope that everybody realises that that is no better a form of democracy than western liberal reform. One can encourage diversity in this market but the superior product is well known.

Iraq: Camp Ashraf

Lord Desai Excerpts

Monday 25th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

The noble Lord is right: all such methods and activities, where they take place, should be deeply deplored. These are not the kind of things that we expect to see in the modern Iraq, which is trying to take its place in the world and the comity of nations as a responsible power. We should never cease to put pressure on Iraq to maintain the highest possible standards and we should not cease to deplore anything of the kind that the noble Lord has described.

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, am I right in thinking that, if these people were in the UK, we would not send them to Iraq, knowing full well that they would be tortured?

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

That is a hypothesis with which I would have to agree if that were so but, unfortunately, it is not. We are dealing with a much more complex situation, with Iraq seeking to get a new Government and to be a sovereign power. There is also the historical baggage to which I have referred and the malign influence of Iran throughout the Middle East, which we must never cease to safeguard against and watch carefully.

Foreign Policy

Lord Desai Excerpts

Thursday 1st July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, we are all very grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, for initiating this debate. I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Maples, as I may not be in my place when he gives his maiden speech. However, I shall read it tomorrow with great interest.

Given the short time that I have at my disposal, I shall have to be quick and somewhat brutal. The first hazard is, as the noble and learned Lord mentioned, the changing economic balance between what I shall call the OECD countries and Asia. Although we talk about it, I do not think we quite believe that it is about to happen. Next year the so-called emerging economies will have a larger share of world GDP than OECD countries. Given the current difficulties of the eurozone and the indebtedness that most OECD countries face, I predict that in terms of economic growth the European Union will be a stagnant pool for the next 10 years. It will also have the problem of sorting out the consequence of the Lisbon treaty, or whatever else it is called nowadays. The governance problems will be severe. I also expect that the Anglo-Saxon economies, mainly the US and the UK, will struggle to achieve a moderate growth rate of between 2 to 2.5 per cent. I would rather be cautious on that side than exaggerate our opportunities.

One of the major things we will have to do is to change our mentality about where power is now going. There is still an arrogance—if I may call it that—in our approach to Asian countries and a sense that somehow they must listen to us because we know best. The whole attitude to China’s foreign exchange rate policy—its renminbi policy—shows the utter futility of going on like this because China knows what it is doing. It will act in its own interest. We certainly would not appreciate it if the Chinese came to our doorstep and told us to join the euro or something like that. We have genuinely to learn that power has shifted. We will have to be prepared to be much more humble in the years to come because that is the major given of foreign policy for the next decade or decade and a half.

However, great opportunities are available to us. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, mentioned—this ought to be mentioned—people talk a lot about soft power. One of the things that allows us to punch above our weight is our Armed Forces. We have been willing to risk them in conflicts around the world in a responsible way. However, if you look at other NATO countries and other European Union countries, you will note that we have been willing to go out and fight all these battles. Even if these battles have been somewhat vague in their purpose, such as in Afghanistan, Sierra Leone or Kosovo, we have been true to ourselves, and I pay tribute to the Armed Forces for the vital part they play in our foreign policy. They are our strength.

Given those two points, our ability to deploy our forces in such situations for such good causes should impress Asia that we are in Afghanistan not just for our home-security interests but because India has as much interest as we have in our being there. We are able to use this ability in another way. I am sure that the noble Lord who will reply from the government Benches will recognise that we have the Commonwealth—it is a cause close to his heart. Although it used to be a cliché, given the changing balance of power, Commonwealth countries are located in the emerging areas of strength in the world economy. The Commonwealth has presence in Asia, South America and Africa. It is our connection with the Commonwealth which will allow us to have a greater and more crucial role than any comparable country.

Finally, although I appreciate that the Foreign Office likes our ambassadors and high commissioners everywhere to be professionals, we are missing a trick by not using our country’s large multiethnic strength. We have many people with good connections abroad and we should use them more as our ambassadors and high commissioners. The Americans do it all the time. We somehow miss a trick and I urge the new Government perhaps to think about it.