Yemen: Giving Peace a Chance (International Relations Committee Report)

Lord Luce Excerpts

Monday 1st April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Luce (CB)]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Amos, who speaks with enormous authority and experience on this issue, having served with such distinction at the United Nations and in tackling humanitarian issues. I too warmly welcome the report of the Select Committee and the excellent introduction from the noble Lord, Lord Howell. It is certainly refreshing to be talking about an issue outside the European Union, looking more outwards, which is what this country needs to do again. I hope that in due course we will follow this Select Committee report with other ones about our role in the rest of the world—the sooner, the better.

Four and a half months ago I put down a Question for Short Debate. We have since had the Stockholm agreement, as the noble Baroness, Lady Amos, referred to it; the efforts of the Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, in his tour of the Gulf countries, and I commend the efforts of Her Majesty’s Government; and the valiant efforts of Mr Griffiths and others. But we have to recognise the condition of Yemen before we decide how to move forward. It is a failed state. I have described it before as a kind of Dante’s Inferno for the people who live there. At the moment it does not have the makings of a nation state. I have to confess that I have watched this for over 60 years, since I first went out as a young student in the late 1950s when my father was governor of Aden. At that time there was the imam ruling north Yemen, and the British with the colony and the eastern and western protectorates of Aden.

Since then, after the unhappy departure of the British—it was a very unhappy situation indeed after we left—there has been civil conflict of major proportions between north and south. The unification of north and south under President Saleh was absolutely disastrous and has led to warring factions of one kind or another from the separatist tribal south to Aden, Hadramawt, Ta’izz, the Houthis and so on. It is a fragmented country with desperate humanitarian challenges.

The report and the noble Lord, Lord Howell, referred very fully to the Stockholm agreement. I agree with the recommendations in the report of the Select Committee, although I ask for more than just a review of export licensing. We are facing an extremely serious challenge there, and where export licensing may conflict with humanitarian law we should take action and suspend those licences.

There is no military solution whatever to the problem in Yemen, as the noble Baroness, Lady Amos, said, but I commend the role of the British Government. This is the kind of role we should be playing in different parts of the world. Our humanitarian contribution of over £500 million in four years has been outstanding, but I want to say a word about the role of diplomacy by the United Kingdom. Of course, the precondition for any progress at all is the fulfilment of the various first stages from Stockholm, and thereafter a ceasefire. But the people of Yemen want hope, and they need to link that with the prospects in the longer term—so even though the immediate situation is very grave, we need to think too about the longer-term strategy. We have to start by recognising the gravity of the fragmentation and considering how the various groups in that country will find a way of living with each other and what form of governance will emerge. I recently met a man called Mr al-Zoubaidi, the president of the Southern Transitional Council, which is strongly supported by the UAE. He said he is looking forward to an inclusive political process because the south has been marginalised for so long. The groups have to find a way of living and working together—obviously with the help and encouragement of outside powers.

The point I stress is this. The role of regional nations is critical; Europe is there to back up, but the front row of the scrum is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Our job is to back that up where we can, and to engage with Kuwait and Oman so that there is a very strong international effort behind finding a long-term way forward. To my mind, a key is the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran. It is vital that the international community does whatever it can to press those two nations to find a way of living together. The rivalry is doing an immense amount to undermine stability in the Middle East, and certainly in Yemen.

Then there is the question of the longer-term role of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the UAE in their coalition. It looks as though Saudi Arabia’s interests are to see stability in the north of Yemen, whereas the UAE is already showing more than an interest in the south. The question is: how much are we and the international community engaging with those two nations on the kind of role they can play that would help to stabilise that region and not colonise it?

The last point I want to raise is the lessons of the wider region. The strategic importance of the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb is obvious to the international community, but both sides of the seas are very unstable. In the Horn, you have Eritrea and Somalia and the work of al-Shabaab; by contrast, you have Yemen on the other side. It is worth reminding ourselves that we, along with other naval forces, have played a positive role through the naval task force in trying to reduce piracy in those seas, and that has been successful. We have also played an important role in helping to build up Somaliland as a more stable part of Somalia. There could be lessons to be learned here. For example, in the port of Aden, there could be areas in which we could work to help build up greater stability.

I hope the Minister will reassure me that the Government are thinking seriously about longer-term strategy as well as the immediate.