Queen’s Speech

Lord Hylton Excerpts

Tuesday 7th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hylton (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak about Turkey and Syria, starting from 2013, when three left-wing Kurdish women were assassinated in a Paris apartment. No one has been charged with that crime, but everything points to Turkish state responsibility. Early in 2015, the Dolmabahçe agreement could have ended 30 years of Kurdish insurgency in Turkey but instead the President tore it up, thus provoking the failed coup d’état of 2016. Turkey, however, deserves credit for hosting more Syrian refugees than any other country. By contrast, it provided arms and medical treatment for the most extreme Islamist factions.

In 2014 and 2015, the Turkish army stood by looking on while ISIS destroyed the frontier town of Kobane, which was saved only by American air support. Since then, Turkey has seized three slices of Syria: first, around Jarabulus, then Afrin province, and last year a 50-mile strip along the frontier of Jazira—all this with no UN approval or consultation with NATO, using as paid allies Islamist fighters, who have killed civilians and raped and extorted, as we can see from the death of one woman MP in Syria and the killing of Rezan Sido and four friends, as reported by Agence France-Presse on 6 December. It is no wonder that 200,000 people were displaced and some 4,000 killed in an attack that saw white phosphorus used on civilians.

I must ask why HMG did not call for a compulsory and verified ceasefire in both Jazira and Idlib. What is their response to Turkey’s new claim to an undue share of Mediterranean gas and oil at the expense of Greece and Cyprus in particular? With this claim goes the recruiting of yet more Islamists to fight in Libya. How have our Government replied to the damning report of 20 December by the UN Assistant Secretary-General, Ursula Mueller?

After eight years of war in Syria and chaos in Yemen, Sudan, South Sudan and Libya, our Government have lost much of the influence that they once had. Dialogue is essential, as was pointed out by the noble Marquess, Lord Lothian, in the Gulf region, both across it and within it. It should start unofficially and continue formally. Have the Government budgeted for dialogue in the region? Will they also reconsider their approach to British jihadis, especially to their widows and orphans, and rethink their failure to have any representation at all in Damascus?

I have raised these issues previously, but they have been rejected, I am sorry to say. I will keep coming back to them. If one surveys the ruins of British and American policies in so much of the Middle East, it seems clear that second thoughts and new ideas are urgently needed, if only because of the unusual demography and deep discontent that exists there.