Syria and the Middle East

Lord Wright of Richmond Excerpts

Monday 1st July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wright of Richmond]

My Lords, in the light of many of the interventions made in the House today, including the very powerful arguments of the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, I hope that the Minister can assure us that the Government will now urgently reconsider whether it is right, sensible, necessary, safe or effective to supply lethal arms to the Syrian opposition. I have seen, as presumably the Government have also, conclusive evidence that arms supplied to the Free Syrian Army by Saudi Arabia have ended up in the hands of Jabhat al-Nusra, closely allied as it is with al-Qaeda. It is evidence that must call into question the noble Baroness’s claim, in answer to the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, last week, that the Government have been,

“incredibly cautious about ensuring that”—

any—

“equipment … does not get into the hands of extremists”.—[Official Report, 27/06/13; col. 858.]

The Minister has told us again today that no decision has been made to send weapons to the Syrian opposition. However, a recent meeting in Doha, at which HMG were represented, is reported to have agreed to provide urgently,

“all necessary material and equipment”,

to the Syrian rebels. The Minister has argued that one purpose of arming the rebels would be to put pressure on President Assad to come to the negotiating table. However, President Assad has told his Russian allies that he is ready to negotiate. We may not believe him but he has said that. As far as I know, no single element of the Syrian opposition has agreed to negotiate.

It is an oversimplification to describe this conflict, as I have often, as a Sunni-Shia or Arab-Iranian war. In fact, it started as an uprising, mainly by the majority Sunni population, against a brutal regime dominated by the minority Alawite sect, of which Bashar al-Assad is a member, and exacerbated—this is not often mentioned—by widespread deprivation in Syria caused by five years of drought. It has now become a regional conflict between Sunni and Shia forces, backed on the one side by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and on the other by Iran, Russia and Hezbollah. The escalation of this proxy war, increasingly involving non-Syrian fighters on both sides, is a threat to the whole region and beyond. It is not a conflict in which Britain has a direct stake. What we do have is an interest in working energetically—as the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, has argued—for peace in an unstable area.

HMG are not alone in having consistently underestimated the extent to which President Assad and his Government can survive this externally fuelled onslaught. The military strength that Bashar al-Assad inherited from his father has also been underestimated. Of perhaps equal importance, so has the degree of support which the regime still enjoys from Syrian minorities and, indeed, from a significant proportion of the Sunni business community. The Prime Minister has claimed that we are trying to help form a transitional Government in Damascus which will respect the rights of Christians and other minorities in Syria. Perhaps I may remind the House of a book by William Dalrymple called From the Holy Mountain, in which he concluded that Christians in Syria in the late 1990s enjoyed greater freedom of worship and absence of discrimination than any other Christian community in the Middle East. We should not underestimate the very real fear of Christians in Syria, now much diminished in number but which until recently included a large number of Syrian exiles from Iraq, of any likely successor Government in Damascus. The same fear must be shared by the Druze and other minorities, including the very small Jewish and Yazidi communities. I am reminded of the couplet by Hilaire Belloc:

“always keep a-hold of Nurse

For fear of finding something worse”.

There has been regular, and sometimes strident, criticism of the Russians’ support for President Assad and his Government, both in the Security Council and over their supply of weapons for the Syrian armed forces. However, we should remember that the Russians are scared, as they should be, of the impact which a fundamentalist Sunni Government in Damascus would have on Russia’s own Muslim communities in Chechnya and elsewhere in central Asia, and indeed on the large Russian and Orthodox community in Syria. As the Russian Foreign Minister put it in an interview on 20 June:

“We need to [preserve Syria’s] territorial integrity, sovereignty, multi-ethnicity and multi-religious nature”.

We should also bear in mind the long strategic relationship which Russia has had with President Bashar al-Assad and his father. In the latter case, as I remember well, the Soviet Union had long had a treaty of friendship, dating back to the 1970s.

I would argue that the time has come urgently to reconsider our support for, and recognition of, a deeply divided and dysfunctional Syrian opposition, closely allied with Islamic terrorist movements. I believe that we should now try, with our European and American partners, to resume contact with what I have previously described in this House—I do not expect my noble friend and former colleague Lord Hannay to agree—as the legitimate Government in Damascus.

At its meeting on 22 June, the Friends of Syria Core Group, in which the Foreign Secretary took part, said that it,

“supported reaching a political solution … and affirmed their prior commitments … in favour of negotiations”.

I hope that the Minister can assure us that the Government still support the efforts of Ambassador Brahimi and will concentrate now on encouraging and supporting attempts by the Russians and the Americans to convene an international conference at which some end can be negotiated to this tragic and appalling conflict.

Whatever its effectiveness on the political track, we must also hope that a conference can help to raise desperately needed assistance for the refugees on a much more sustained and monitored basis. I would be interested to hear the Minister’s assessment of the current prospects for such a conference. I hope that we can also use our diplomacy to persuade our friends in the Gulf to think likewise, since it is they who will be more influential than any of us in dictating what happens in Syria in the coming months.