Syria and the Use of Chemical Weapons

Lord Hunt of Chesterton Excerpts

Thursday 29th August 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the trenchant remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart. The framework of this debate about government action has been the 1920s international convention about chemical warfare and the practice of intervention by foreign countries for humanitarian purposes, but in the 1920s there were no satellites or internet. One of the important changes is the role of communication, to which I shall return.

Chemical warfare was one of the heinous methods deployed by Saddam Hussain. There was plenty of evidence for it in his attack on the Kurds, but it was not so clear, as the noble Lord, Lord Reid, reminded us, whether he was planning to use those weapons in 2003. There was, however, enough suspicion that the allies intervened. I voted to support the Government. Scientists were particularly doubtful at that time about the estimates of the range over which his weapons could endanger other countries and about how rapidly they could be deployed. No United Kingdom or United States scientific report was produced before, during or after that conflict. The Chilcot report may have some evidence of that sort.

In the case of Syria, as the excellent Joint Intelligence Committee report stated, toxic chemicals were discharged last week with a devastating impact on thousands of people. The timings and location of some of the releases have been reported and intelligence has identified which weapons were used, but we must now have much more open scientific data, which should be produced by several countries. Unlike in previous conflicts, this information is now available in near real time. For example, complex chemicals can now be detected though satellite measurements in the urban areas where this conflict is taking place, and the gases that enable these chemicals to be dispersed can also be computed so that it is possible to make predictions.

This work is going on in the United Kingdom and European laboratories of space and environment companies, and if more of this information were made available, particularly in collaboration with Iran, Russia and China, which all have these instruments and can make these measurements, it might be possible through the much wider distribution of information for us to understand what is going on and particularly for people to see what is going on. As we now know, people are much less suspicious of data in real time. Any report, such as the report of the United Nations inspectorate, excellent as it is, may take several weeks to be produced and people then wonder what has happened in the report.

My first point is that it would be very important to enable people on both sides in Syria and in the Middle East to have more information about what is happening. I believe it will make more likely collaboration with other countries with which we want to negotiate, which has been a theme of this afternoon. Ultimately, this may be the most powerful way to put political pressure on parties, and this will surely support other organisations in their humanitarian efforts.

I should like to make a final remark. Perhaps the government chief scientist, the chief scientists at the MoD and other organisations, and people with military and political experience might consider in some detail how we could distribute more information on the internet and broadcast generally—in all countries and produced in collaboration with countries—whereby it might be possible to have confidence in what is happening. At the moment, there is little confidence because the information comes from different countries. We might enable wide populations across the Middle East and other areas in conflict to track and communicate the illegal use of weapons.