Middle East: Jihadism

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 19th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, for securing this debate, and congratulate him on introducing it with such eloquence. Rightly, he referred to the war on Iraq. I shall not talk about that at length, but I will begin by saying that, although Mr Blair led us into the war, the Conservative Party had already agreed to support it. Therefore, it was not merely the Government or the Labour Party; the two major parties agreed on that. It is also rather pathetic and saddening to see ex-Ministers falling over each other, trying to tell us that they regret that mistake. That is depressing for two obvious reasons.

First, if they were capable of making that kind of mistake, because of which hundreds of thousands of people were killed, can they ever be trusted to make sensible judgments in political life? In classical Athens, there was a tradition that if a politician misguided his people or was guilty of an egregious mistake of that kind, he would be sent into exile, because he was unfit to be a fellow citizen. We should find some way of dealing with people who are capable of making that kind of mistake. Secondly, if they could make that kind of mistake, why did they do so? It is no use telling us that Mr Blair lied—he said the same thing to all of us, and some of us were simply not taken in. We opposed the war in Iraq at the time, and some of us felt so strongly that we almost resigned our party Whip. All that suggests that nobody misled innocent people. Those leaders were prepared to believe certain things and were simply willing accomplices to what was going on.

Having got the question of Iraq off my chest, I turn to the question we are debating today. Since the early 1980s, it has been a practice for Muslims to go to foreign theatres of war to support those sides with which they sympathise. That started with Afghanistan when the Soviets were involved there, then spread to Iraq a few years later and has now spread to Syria, and at every stage the numbers have increased. In Afghanistan, the number of foreign Muslims who fought there was around 3,000 to 4,000. In Syria today, the number is estimated to be about 11,000, and although some are leaving, others are coming in. Those who leave do not outnumber those who come in, so the number remains pretty much the same. It is estimated that, of the 11,000 foreign Muslims who are fighting in Syria, about 400 are Britons.

That is not the end of the story. With the turmoil in Egypt, I expect that something worse will happen. The army has declared war—not a virtual war, but a real one—on the Muslim Brotherhood. That simply will not work. The Muslim Brotherhood has global appeal among Muslims and, being highly ideologically motivated, it will not be crushed or put aside as easily as others might. Therefore, as far as I can gaze into my crystal ball, in two or three years’ time, we will see a situation in Egypt that will be no different from what we now see in Syria and Iraq. That will pose some very acute problems, because Egypt is one of the largest countries in the Middle East and faces some very acute problems.

Those who fight abroad get good training; they are angry because they have gone through the suffering of fighting in a war and they build up global networks. When they return home, therefore, they pose a danger—although not necessarily. It is a mistake to think that, when those who have fought in Syria come back, they will necessarily engage in terrorist activities. If I think of students with whom I have had some dealings, sometimes the opposite happens. Having fought in a war in Syria, Iraq or elsewhere, they have seen enough suffering and do not want to be involved any more, or their family put pressure on them not to. Nevertheless, generally, when people who have fought in wars abroad come home, they have a slight tendency to be part of a certain network and to engage in terrorist activities in the domestic sphere. The two recent cases bear this out. The 29 year-old Mehdi Nemmouche, who shot and killed three people at a Jewish museum in Belgium, had been in Syria for more than a year. In our country, Mashudur Choudhury, who was convicted of terror offences in Syria, had of course been there.

MI5 informs us that about half of its casework involves preventing Syria-related terrorist activities. About 200 Britons have returned from Syria and we are told that dozens of them are suspected and have been arrested. Even if all these conflicts—including the one that I foresee in Egypt—were to end tomorrow, the world in which we live would not be stable. Historical memories of the wars that were initiated by the West, historical memories of the shady business deals in which we engaged in Iraq and elsewhere and memories of the humiliation we inflicted on a lot of people, not only in Abu Ghraib but in lots of other places, will linger, and rightly so. How can one expect people to forget what they have seen and what they have heard? As long as these memories last, we cannot afford to assume our world is entirely safe simply because that world over there is safe. It is not safe now; it was not safe for 40 years, as the noble Lord, Lord Desai, said. During those 40 years we did lots of things we should not have done.

That is the situation and the question is what our response should be. In the minute and a half I have at my disposal, I want to prescribe my remedy. New wars, limited or unlimited, will not help. The kind of thing that Mr Blair has been trying to press upon our attention will only exacerbate the situation. We should provide help when that is asked for—that is right—but at the same time we should remember that we should not get caught up in domestic rivalry and domestic conflict. If the Government make a complete mess of the situation and alienate people and there is a civil war, as in Syria, and they ask us to help against ISIS, we need to be careful that we are not being manipulated.

Secondly, we must keep a keen eye on the terrorist activities in Britain but should not presume that everybody who has been to Syria, Iraq or elsewhere is necessarily a potential terrorist. That can lead to heavy-handed activities and could alienate the Muslims.

Thirdly, we should do nothing to demonise the entire Muslim community or to alienate it in a variety of ways, as we have tended to do, as in the case of schools in Birmingham. Ofsted produced one report and two or three months later there was a completely opposite kind of report. There is also the constant mistake of equating conservative views with extremism. This is only done in relation to Muslim schools. What about other faith schools where similar things might be going on? Those of us with some experience would know that it does. To single out a particular community and its schools can create an estranged, deeply alienated, deeply bitter community, and that is to store up trouble for the future.

Finally, unless the problems in the Middle East are brought under control—not solved; they will not be solved—we will not be able to find much peace there or here. If they are going to be dissolved, that cannot be done bilaterally by the Americans linking up with the Iranians in order to counter the Iraqis. That game has been going on for the past 40 years and it has not taken us anywhere. We should be thinking in terms of some kind of regional conference where all the parties involved are represented, where we can work out some kind of mechanism for conflict resolution and where we can lay down certain principles which no side would violate, whatever its grievances. Then we can think of an Arab peacekeeping force or an Arab reconciliation commission of the kind we have seen in other parts of the world. In other words, we need to decentralise the way these things function, try to organise a regional conference within a global context and aim for a long-term strategy based on good sense and wisdom, which I am afraid has been so rare in the past few years.