Middle East

Lord Soley Excerpts

Friday 16th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley]

I wish to address my brief comments to trends in the region and how we can be a positive influence on them. In doing so, I declare an interest as a director of the Good Governance Foundation. The dangers in the region are clear and we all know them. There is the unresolved and tragic Israeli/Palestinian question. There is the danger of an unpredictable regime in Iran. There is the growing conflict between and within Sunni and Shia groups, and as the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, indicated, the extremes of religion can be very dangerous. Indeed, I would argue that political ideologies have been replaced by religious ideologies, and not just in the Middle East. Those extremes are just as dangerous, if not more so. Then of course there is the question of the unpredictable outcomes of revolutions to which the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, drew our attention. It is easy to slip into the mode of saying that what has been happening in the Middle East will have a positive outcome. In fact, it is far more unpredictable than that, but I hope that the trends are going in the right direction.

What we can forget when addressing all the dangers that I have just listed and which have already been alluded to by other speakers in the debate is that there is also a positive side in the Middle East. For the first time in many years, I have been hearing a much greater emphasis being put on the questions of democracy, the rule of law, freedom and on progress generally. That debate is taking place. It is a struggle between the old and the new, of course, and there is no guarantee that the new will win, but it is important. If someone had told me five years ago that I would manage to get established at the King Saud university in Abu Dhabi a postgraduate school of law looking at human rights and international law, with Palestinian students from Palestine attending, I would have said, “It will not happen”, but it has. When talking to other academic bodies and governments about this, I recognise that there is a thirst for such developments. Some of that is driven by the fear of what will happen if they do not move forward, but whether it is driven by fear or desire matters less than the fact that it is happening at all.

We have to be quite clever in how we structure our aid packages. Just before Christmas, when talking to two very senior Egyptian generals holding influential positions, I emphasised the difficulty that I saw, and wondered if they too saw, in separating the armed forces from the state. That is because at the moment the armed forces in Egypt are like a parallel state. How you manage to help a country separate the two is hard to know, but I think our packages of aid need to address it.

I put great emphasis on the rule of law primarily because I believe it is easier for a number of these countries to focus on getting that right in order to step towards democracy. Some will say, “We do not want to go down that road”, but most countries are saying that they want the rule of law. The problem is how do they get it and how can we help them. As I have indicated, at times that requires packages of aid. I am also impressed by the increased level of discussion about, if not always a strong commitment to, human rights and women’s rights. The discussion has not moved as fast as I or indeed most people would like, but it is moving. All these are fairly positive signs, and we should not underestimate the importance of some of the other developments. I felt some years ago that Al Jazeera television was the best news in the Middle East for many years. It indicates the development of a free media.

I have a remarkable respect for Tunisia and I am full of admiration for the way the country is handling itself. During a discussion about free media not long ago, the ambassador said to me that what they wanted was help in establishing a BBC in Tunisia, and he did not mean our BBC, but Tunisia’s own form of BBC. The fact that such things are being talked about and people are seeking assistance is immensely hopeful and we should give these issues our strongest support. That is because another aspect that is changing in the Middle East is not just the uptake of new technology, but the recognition that no longer can you just gag your people. People do have a voice and they will use it.

Obviously, our policy, as the Government know only too well, is to focus on individual countries and sadly, at the moment, it will be Syria—led by an ex-constituent of mine. When I was an MP, he lived in my area, but I plead not-guilty to any responsibility for his activities. It is deeply sad, of course, but I repeat that the Ba’ath Party in Syria, and in Iraq in the past under Saddam Hussein, ran particularly efficient dictatorships—not least because they had their roots in the ideology given to them in the 1930s by the Nazi Party from Germany, which helped to set them up. We sometimes forget that there is a difference between incompetent and inefficient dictatorships and efficient and competent ones, but the latter are the most dangerous. The first ones are dangerous but can be dealt with, while the second ones cannot be.

I want to finish on a wider point, which people might think is not directly relevant to the Middle East, but it is. Here I declare an interest again as the chairman of the Arab-Jewish Forum, a body I set up when some Arabs came to see me in my former constituency and asked for some structure which could enable Arabs and Jews to talk to each other. I set it up; I hoped I could walk away from it, but because I am neither an Arab nor a Jew they asked me to continue chairing it. The idea was to have an annual conference in Britain where we could bring together the two diasporas—the Arab diaspora and the Jewish diaspora. We underestimate at times the enormous importance of the Jewish and Arab diasporas, particularly in Western countries and, more particularly, in the United Kingdom. In London they are immensely powerful. My aim has always been to have a two-day annual conference, similar to what happened in relation to Northern Ireland. I have spoken on and was involved in Northern Ireland, though I never organised those things, but I hope we can do that. At the moment, the Arab and Jewish diasporas tend to get behind their own country in the Middle East and shout for them, rather than actually recognising that they could have a wider point. At some stage, perhaps I ought to talk to the Government about some assistance for that, because it is difficult to fund such an organisation without some external help.