Reconciliation: Role of British Foreign, Defence and International Development Policy

Lord Jay of Ewelme Excerpts

Friday 14th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jay of Ewelme (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Fall, with whose speech I agree and with whose father, whom she mentioned, I worked for many years. It is a great pleasure, too, to take part in this debate, which gives us an opportunity to consider some of the more difficult issues that face Governments and our societies. I want to focus mainly on conflict, in particular the need to think carefully about the prospect of peace and reconciliation after conflict before entering into it in the first place.

I do not want to get into the long-standing debate about what constitutes a just war, which goes back at least until ancient Egypt and later exercised the minds of some of Christianity’s greatest theologians. However, I agree that war can in certain circumstances be justified. The UN’s endorsement in 2005 of the principle of the responsibility to protect recognised this. Military intervention, as a last resort, can be the only way to prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. But saying that is the easy bit; the hard bit for Ministers, the military and civil servants, as I know only too well, is how to be as satisfied as one can before intervening—one can never be certain—that the planned intervention is likely to make things better, not worse, and that the prospects for peace and reconciliation after conflict will be advanced and not put back.

If we look at recent conflicts in which this country has been involved, I think we will conclude that this was the case in Sierra Leone, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, and just in Kosovo. With hindsight, the case for intervention in Rwanda looks strong. Well-planned military intervention could have prevented genocide and the international community was wrong not to intervene in Rwanda. The intervention in Iraq was by common consent a mistake. The atrocities committed by Saddam Hussein were appalling and should not be airbrushed out of history, as now sometimes seems to happen, but there was no hard-headed analysis of whether getting rid of him was going to make things better or of whether reconciliation within a divided community was likely to succeed.

Then there is Syria. I argued in this House against intervention in Syria in 2013, despite the use of chemical weapons by Assad, because I could not see how intervention would help resolve the conflict or advance the cause of reconciliation that would, and indeed will, be necessary after the conflict. None of this is easy, but the conclusion I reach is that before any military intervention there needs to be a hard-headed analysis about whether the chance that there will be genuine reconciliation afterwards will be enhanced. That requires, among other things, real Whitehall togetherness and a readiness to listen to others, not least the faith communities. The creation of the National Security Council—it has been mentioned a number of times in this debate—with representatives of all Whitehall departments, including DfID, is a positive development, but it needs to listen to those outside the Government, as the most reverend Primate said. Perhaps the Minister can confirm when summing up this debate that that is the case and that the National Security Council listens to those outside government as well as to those within it, and that there is—if I may quote the most reverend Primate—what management consultants might call a supervariable crunchy bucket at work here.

My final point is closer to home. It is of course possible to conduct a foreign policy purely on the grounds of perceived self-interest without any moral imperative behind it—at the moment, look at Russia in Syria or China’s detention of Canadian citizens—but if, as I think we should, we seek to incorporate moral values into our foreign and security policy, we need to follow, and be seen to follow, those values at home. That is especially challenging just now, but we need to remember that our authority and our influence abroad would be weakened by, for example, reports of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and lack of tolerance and generosity. The role of the faith communities will be crucial in showing that we are at least striving for real tolerance in our own society, which is why I welcome this debate.