Security in the UK

Debate between Lord Desai and Lord King of Bridgwater

Monday 10th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord because we entered this House together some 26 years ago. I shall touch in my speech on some of the things he has said. I should start by saying that I have absolutely no practical knowledge of anything that anyone can think of, but I am a social scientist. In the wake of 7/7 I wrote a book about terrorism called Rethinking Islamism and I shall draw upon it in my contribution.

The central question that we have to ask, because it is one that goes on reverberating, is this. What is it that makes people who are born and bred in Britain become jihadists? The definition of extremism is where someone does not agree with fundamental British values. We have to remember two things. The first is that the way we see our history is not the way the world sees our history. The world has a different perspective on British history from us. I have had the good fortune to come from a former colony and to have settled here for many years, so I know both sides of the reading of history.

How many of us know that two years from now will be the centenary of Jallianwala Bagh? I would bet that very few people here know what Jallianwala Bagh is, but it means a lot in India. Unarmed people were fired on with machine guns by soldiers led by a British Army officer. That does not matter to us, but you could easily turn—I am deliberately using a non-Muslim example here—a Hindu boy, born and bred in this country, into a sort of terrorist by telling him, “The time has come to wreak revenge for this enmity of 100 years ago”. That is exactly what is going on in Islamism.

In his speech the noble Lord, Lord King, contrasted the Irish question with current terrorism. He said that in the Irish question we knew the nationalists and the unionists, and that religion was never the issue: it was about politics and history. The Reverend Doctor Ian Paisley was a scholar who wrote many books about theology. We did not worry about any of his books; we worried about the fact that he was a politician. Difficult though it is, we need to forget that it is a religious problem.

The problem is that the way Muslims see the history of the last 100 years is very different from the way we read it. The other day in our Chamber we debated the Balfour Declaration. Be prepared for a huge terrorist attack on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, because it is not thought to be as good a thing by most of the Muslim population as it is by most of us. We have to face these things.

One hundred years ago the Ottoman Empire was breaking up and we had the Sykes-Picot agreement, which divided up the Ottoman Empire even before it was defeated. Places such as Syria and Iraq and various countries were created. Later on they were assigned after the war to either Britain or France. We have forgotten that history, but they remember it. They have not been reconciled with what happened to the Ottoman Empire at the hands of the British and the French. I have read a lot about this.

As the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, pointed out, Islamism and terrorism are not new. A lot of Islamism was a war within Islamic countries, one faction against another, but then it became globalised and turned against us. After the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, America subsidised the Taliban, which later became al-Qaeda. They defeated the Soviets in Afghanistan by making them religious fanatics and telling them, “This is your jihad. Throw out the Soviets from Afghanistan”. That al-Qaeda may now have become ISIS.

ISIS may have disappeared, but it will become something else because the central complaint and grievance of the Muslim population of the Middle East has not been solved—I do not think it can be. The fact that one of the longest-lasting empires disappeared—an empire that lasted 700 years and which took its origin directly from the Prophet—means that the caliphate disappeared. That is why when ISIS was set up the dream was to have a caliphate again. Of course, now the caliphate is gone. It is very hard for us to understand why this caliphate is so important, but it would be like having the Catholic Church without the Pope. In that situation, there would be Catholics who would want to have a Pope back. That is why there is a big desire in the Muslim world to have a caliphate back.

This is a complex story through which many boys and girls are being converted. Yes, they are old stories; maybe they are wrongly read and maybe they are a wrong reading of history, but read what Osama bin Laden wrote. If you do not want to read his original, read my account of what he wrote in my book. Systematically, the idea is that this is a war that has been going on since the Crusades. The last phase was in the early 20th century, when the Ottoman Empire was broken up, and this is where we are now.

The borders of Syria and Iraq are all completely imagined. These lines were drawn on a map in the Foreign Office and later implemented. These injustices of history we of course cannot now correct, but I urge that whoever is working on Prevent should know something about this history. We need to know our history as other people see us, because if we do not see it that way we will never understand why they go against us. They do so because they no longer believe our pretensions that we were just, liberal and kind, and that we helped them come out of savagery or whatever it is. It is not even about Wahhabism, because that is a war of Muslims against other Muslims. It is the idea that there was this ugly battle at the end of which the Muslims lost decisively when the Ottoman Empire disappeared, and they want to resume the battle.

We have to treat this terrorism as a more or less long-run fact; it will not go away. We have not even begun to understand where these things come from. They are certainly are not going to go away. We should be able to educate ourselves a bit better and understand what drives the other side. If we understand that, we will be able to be more self-critical and not just assume that such attacks are unjustified. That is not the way that other people read this history.

In the past few months, at least since Donald Trump was elected, people have been worried about the future of the liberal order and about its collapse and so on, but those who have praised the liberal order have been very uncritical as to why it is so good. It does not seem so good to the rest of the world. It may seem very good to the north Atlantic region, but the rest of the world does not think that it is great. We have to be more self-critical; at least, we have be more self-educated, so as to understand what drives our children, born and bred here, to accept this other version of history.

That is all I can say; I do not really think that much more than that will be useful. A knowledge of the history of the past 100 years, especially that of Islamism—

[Lord King of Bridgwater]

In analysing the history of the events we are facing at the moment, the noble Lord seems to pay no attention to the involvement of the Sunni-Shia conflict. Following the invasion of Iraq and the deposition of Saddam Hussein, the Shia took their opportunity to settle a lot of old scores. There seems to be considerable evidence that the origins of ISIS were the remains of Saddam’s Sunni army. That showed when they managed to acquire a lot of the Iraqi army’s American-gifted equipment, and had the skill to operate it extremely efficiently. ISIS started not in an attack against the United Kingdom or the United States, but in a determination to take over Iraq and as much of Syria as it could and to establish a Sunni supremacy. Is that not an analysis of the history which is well worth remembering?

[Lord Desai]

I thank the noble Lord for that. I had not even come to the 21st century, but I quite agree. It is true is that there are battles within Islam, between Sunni and Shia, that have been going on for quite a while, and that is part of the Qatar-Saudi Arabia battle right now. The noble Lord is also quite right about the way ISIS was set up. However, the story starts much before ISIS. It starts with the Muslim Brotherhood and afterwards with what happened to clean out the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, as the noble Lord no doubt knows, where jihadists were created and financed by us to remove the Soviets—they were given lots of drugs, arms and so on. Through that came Osama bin Laden. These attacks have been going on since the early 1990s—let us remember the first frustrated attack on the World Trade Center, then on the USS “Cole” and then on the American embassy in Kenya. They were even before we got to 9/11. I agree with the Sunni-Shia commentary, but we need to make ourselves aware of this complex history. At least, those fighting radicalisation should be aware of the broad perspective that the young, radicalised man or woman has when they want to go off and throw a bomb at us.