Iraq: Coalition Against ISIL

Alistair Burt Excerpts

Friday 26th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I will give way to my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt) and to my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron), and then I will make some progress.

[Alistair Burt (North East Bedfordshire) (Con)]

I am sure that we are all grateful for the recall of Parliament and the opportunity to debate this matter. My right hon. Friend has mentioned Syria, and he has mentioned that the Kurdish peshmerga and the Iraqi army are on the ground fighting ISIL. Also fighting ISIL on the ground is the Free Syrian Army. Given that last week the United States Congress voted to support the Free Syrian Army overtly with weapons, and given that the Free Syrian Army is conducting a ground war, which we are not prepared to do, will my right hon. Friend say whether we are looking again at the possibility of giving military hardware to the Free Syrian Army? It has the people, but it does not have the weaponry to take on Assad or ISIL. It has been attempting to do so for the past year, and it needs our help.

[The Prime Minister]

As my right hon. Friend knows, we have supported the Syrian National Coalition and the Free Syrian Army with advice, training, mentoring and non-lethal equipment, and I am not proposing a change to that today.

Let me address directly the issue of ISIL in Syria. I am very clear that ISIL needs to be destroyed in Syria as well as in Iraq. We support the action that the United States and five Arab states have taken in Syria, and I believe that there is a strong case for us to do more in Syria, but I did not want to bring a motion to the House today on which there was not consensus. I think it is better if our country can proceed on the basis of consensus. In this House, as I am sure we will hear in the debate today, there are many concerns about doing more in Syria, and I understand that. I do not believe that there is a legal barrier, because I think that the legal advice is clear that were we or others to act, there is a legal basis, but it is true to say that the Syrian situation is more complicated than the Iraqi situation. It is more complicated because of the presence of the brutal dictator Assad. It is more complicated because of the state of the civil war. We should be clear that we have a clear strategy for dealing with Syria, backing the official opposition, building it up as a counterpoint to Assad and working for a transition. As I have said, in the end, what Syria needs is what Iraq needs: a Government who can represent all of their people.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alistair Burt (North East Bedfordshire) (Con)]

As we get through the debate, we start to say a number of similar things. Before I say the three things that I wanted to say, two things are pertinent. First, most of us approach this debate with a sense of humility bearing in mind the history of Iraq and what has happened there. Secondly, as recent speeches have shown, there are layers of complexity; we should approach simplistic answers with even greater trepidation.

I want to make three brief points. First, in support of the motion I should say that the particular nature of so-called ISIL has become clear in recent months. We have to be careful about the names we use. The Islamic world is deeply upset at the identification of this terrorist, criminal group with the words “Islamic State”—they are neither Islamic nor a state. In some parts of the region, they have started to be called “Daesh”, a derogatory term. We must be sensitive to the issue—the group are not Islamic and not a state.

The particular nature of the group has become clear. Their wickedness is demonstrated in the fact that they want to occupy not just territory, but minds, and they want to seize not just land, but people. The barbarity of the executions is matched by the barbarity of how they seduce and corrupt the people they bring from different parts of the world to follow their lies. We now know the nature of the group, and that is why the motion is set as it is.

In support of the Government’s motion, I should say that had we been discussing something different today, the tone would have been rather different. Although I absolutely agree with others that we are going to revisit the issue, having the motion as it is, allowing us to proceed step by step, might be wise.

This is a long struggle. To an extent, I am reassured by the fact that a coalition of 60 is now dealing with the issue, but I remind the House that for the past three years there has been a coalition of more than 100 states and different entities called the Friends of Syria. That has achieved none of its objectives; Syria has rather dropped off the map recently, until now.

[Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)]

I thank my right hon. Friend personally for all the work he did in the region while he was Minister. The situation is very difficult, but we have to target ISIL, who are bringing the middle east back to the dark ages. There are no two ways about it. Their brutality, as my right hon. Friend has been saying, is second to none. The idea that we should do nothing would be absolutely wrong. I entirely support the motion.

[Alistair Burt]

I entirely agree. ISIL’s barbarity is what has brought us here today, as well as the recognition that something longer-term is needed beyond force.

That brings me to my second point. In the past few weeks, I have travelled to both Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates. None of us should underestimate the importance of those Islamic states’ having joined against this terrorist criminal group. That is a big thing. As the hon. Member for Bradford West (George Galloway) observed, none of it is simple. The fact that some, in the past, supported what became this terrorist group because they felt that they were standing up against Sunni oppression was a very big thing, and the fact that states and theological leaders are now denouncing it marks a profound shift in opinion. It is a big thing to be able to attack those who are attacking one’s enemies. That shift has been profoundly important, and none of us here should minimise it.

Relationships in the area are complex. Not all Islamist groups are enemy groups. Some leaders in some states go easy on some groups, but are now beginning to make a clear distinction, recognising that groups which label themselves in a particular way, professing to stand up for Sunnis who are being oppressed, are not always what they seem. That is a profound change, which—as my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham (Mr Holloway) said earlier—enables this alliance to be led not by the west, but by the thought leaders of the middle east. It marks a turning point in the way in which this matter should be handled in the future.

[Jack Dromey]

The right hon. Gentleman is making a typically thoughtful speech. It would be unthinkable to stand back and repeat the mistakes of history—the slaughters of Srebrenica and Rwanda, for instance, through barbarism—but the right hon. Gentleman is right to point out that it would also be unthinkable to fail to learn the lessons of history. Evil thrives on a sense of grievance.

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that, on the one hand, it is of the highest importance for us to work with and support progressive elements in the Muslim community nationally and internationally and resist the demonisation of the Muslim community, and that, on the other hand, a regional political settlement must include a two-state solution?

[Alistair Burt]

I shall not respond to the hon. Gentleman’s second point. There is an issue relating to the settling of wider grievances, and that is one of the layers of the complexity to which I referred earlier. However, his first point was absolutely right. The unequivocal response of the Islamic community in the United Kingdom to what we have seen in recent months has also been one of the most profound developments. As the hon. Gentleman said, there should be no demonisation of the Muslim community in the United Kingdom, because its response has been very dramatic and very strong, and must be used to bring to the young people who have been corrupted by this false ideology a sense that their Muslim faith should take them in a different direction.

The last point that I want to make concerns Syria. I entirely agree with colleagues who have raised it as the issue that might have been discussed today. We know that it is there, because there are no borders between Iraq and Syria, and indeed there are no borders when it comes to dealing with the issue, which will be dealt with in Syria sooner or later. However, there are some misunderstandings about how the situation in Syria has arisen, and about the relationship between President Assad and the extremists.

President Assad’s fight is with his people who rose up against him, who are represented by those who supported the protesters, and who have been recognised by more than 100 states, the Syrian National Coalition and the Free Syrian Army. The enemies of those people are not just Assad, but the terrorist criminal forces that have come in. Assad has been in league with those forces, because his greatest fear is his people, not the extremists. Had we taken action against Assad last year, that action would have demonstrated that the rest of the world was prepared to stand up against him, and—as he realised—would have provided an opportunity to bring him to negotiations.

Assad will not negotiate for the peace of Syria until he is forced to do so, which is why we should seek to support those who have been fighting the terrorists and criminals on the ground. That means the peshmerga and the Iraqi army—although the vulnerabilities of the Iraqi army are well known, and they cannot be relied on for some time to come—but it also means the Free Syrian army, which exists and is not a fiction. It has fought both Assad and the terrorists for the past year in Aleppo, and it should be supported. We now know that we cannot do the ground work, which must be taken on by people in the region, so we should support those who are doing it. The United States has moved from covert to overt support, and we should be trying to do the same.

If there is to be an overall settlement, underlying grievances will need to be tackled, but the key to such a settlement is an end to intolerance in the region, notably religious intolerance between sects and against the Christian community. Intolerance runs through the region as if though a stick of rock, and the damage that it does is now being seen in the intolerance of the terrorist and the criminal.

EU Council, Security and Middle East

Alistair Burt Excerpts

Monday 1st September 2014 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

What we must do is convince everyone that it is worth while getting round the table to find a negotiated solution to the fundamental underlying issue of the need for a Palestinian state. To do that, we must persuade the Israelis to make it a greater priority and to understand that that would be the true route to security. We also need to persuade the Palestinians and those who have supported Hamas that terrorist attacks and rocket attacks on Israel will not bring Palestinian statehood closer.

[Alistair Burt (North East Bedfordshire) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to protect the United Kingdom against the threat that it faces, but the most immediate threat in the region is faced by those states around ISIS which find their borders being dissolved and which first bear the brunt of the need to protect innocent civilians. We can help, and there are those who are bearing a burden even now. Has my right hon. Friend received a specific request for arms from the Kurdish Peshmerga, either directly or through the EU? If he has, how are we responding? If he has not yet received that request, how will the Government respond?

[The Prime Minister]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for his question. So far we have received requests from the Kurds to facilitate the transfer and transport of arms and ammunition from Jordan and Albania to the Kurdish regional authorities. We have done that, and it is absolutely right that we have. I am not aware of a specific request directly from the Kurdish regional authorities for arms and military support, but as I have said before, we would look very favourably on such a request. They are our allies and friends, and we believe that they are helping to put the pressure on ISIL and to defend communities. We very much want them to be part of a future Iraq rather than anything else. With those provisos, we take a very positive view.

Ukraine (Flight MH17) and Gaza

Alistair Burt Excerpts

Monday 21st July 2014 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I do not think that we should in any way seek to justify or explain away rocket attacks by Hamas on Israel. [Interruption.] That is, I am afraid, rather what it sounded like. We must be absolutely clear about the fact that we condemn those rocket attacks, and must make it clear that if they stopped there would be a ceasefire, and we could then make progress.

[Alistair Burt (North East Bedfordshire) (Con)]

Yesterday I was in contact with the director of the International Commission on Missing Persons, the excellent international body supported by the United Kingdom Government which has done such fine work in the Balkans and Iraq to identify the victims of violence. It has been asked by the Ukrainians to go and help to identify victims of the Ukrainian air crash. Will my right hon. Friend impress on the authorities that have custody of the bodies that it is a matter not just of dignity, but of identification? You cannot repatriate until you identify. Will he give every support to the ICMP in terms of the representations that must be made to enable it to do its vital work on behalf of the families who so desperately want to have their loved ones back?

[The Prime Minister]

I will certainly look very closely at what my right hon. Friend has suggested. As he knows, we have police victim identification teams that are going out to Ukraine, and they will be able to help. The work that they and other international experts do is absolutely vital.

Tributes to Nelson Mandela

Alistair Burt Excerpts

Monday 9th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Alistair Burt (North East Bedfordshire) (Con)]

It is a real privilege to follow the right hon. Member for Neath (Mr Hain), who speaks with an authenticity that few others could have in these circumstances. It must be the case that the vindication of history sits comfortably on his shoulders and on those of all in the Anti-Apartheid Movement. He is entitled to his day today, and he has spoken very well of the things that matter so much to him and to so many of us.

I remember as a small boy writing to Basil D’Oliveira when he was excluded from the test team, and I remember cheering when a test series was cancelled. My parents were convinced I had become a communist. They are now, like one or two others of my colleagues, merely uncertain.

In 2000, Nelson Mandela visited Bedford to pay tribute to Archbishop Trevor Huddleston in the town of Archbishop Huddleston’s birth—Archbishop Huddleston, who gave so much to the Anti-Apartheid Movement. It is said that a photograph taken that day was used as the model for the statue in Parliament square. Mr Mandela’s host on that day was the mayor of Bedford, Councillor Carole Ellis. Sadly, Councillor Ellis is seriously ill at present, but I know that she is so proud of her own and of Bedford’s part in Mr Mandela’s story.

Between 1986 and 1990, the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), I and Peter Pike, the former Member for Burnley, made three visits to South Africa at the invitation of the followers of Christ working for a peaceful resolution of the situation there. On our return from our first visit, on 17 June, we made joint speeches in a debate here in the House of Commons, referring to each other as our hon. Friends—a point duly noted by Hansard. We had gone together—safety in numbers—at a time when the ANC was still banned, the political situation was deteriorating, violence was abroad, and the isolation of South Africa was impacting on the flow of anything but very polarised information. We were able to report back to our respective party leaders on what we found. I had half an hour with an anxious, worried and very uncertain Margaret Thatcher. We reported back on the tragic success of apartheid in separating one person from another, on the urgency of the need for change to avoid a looming catastrophe, and on how the United Kingdom’s public position also needed to change. But we also, apparently rather unusually, reported some hope. I said in the House:

“There is a large group of people in South Africa whom many have ignored. They are those of all races who are working patiently for simple fellowship and reconciliation in pure human terms by meeting each other and sharing their lives and experiences. It was largely with those people that we spent our time, and through their friends across the political spectrum that we had contact with their politics.

Some of those with whom we stayed were white opponents of apartheid and had been so for decades, but all were people who realised that the abolition of the legislative structure of apartheid is almost secondary to the struggle to change hearts and minds. They should not be ignored, for if any group epitomises hope in South Africa, it is that group.”—[Official Report, 17 June 1986; Vol. 99, c. 960.]

We met on our visits, even in 1986, South African Government figures who worried about the impact of the release of Nelson Mandela but who knew that his death in prison would be a tragedy beyond comprehension. Like many others, we knew that only a miracle could save South Africa from violent confrontation, but unlike others, perhaps, we saw some of the groundwork being patiently prepared. South Africa was a land in which Jesus Christ was the person around whom so many could meet together, especially if they were those who were allowed to meet in no other circumstances. That task became easier after the Dutch Reformed Church publicly recanted its misplaced biblical support for apartheid.

South Africa’s people were readying themselves for a different future but uncertain if the miracle of leadership would be there. In the end, of course, the miracle was Nelson Mandela, with a passion for reconciliation and forgiveness that astonished the world. It was built on a base that had been prayed for and actively worked for in South Africa for years before his release. Nelson Mandela was the pivotal figure around whom all this work became based and whose attitudes overcame the fear and negativity from people who knew intellectually what needed to be done but simply could not see how it could happen. It is impossible to predict what would have happened without such leadership.

I regret that I did so little for the struggle here in the United Kingdom, but my friend Peter Pike, with 26 years in the Anti-Apartheid Movement before he even set foot in South Africa, deserves to have his voice heard today. I asked him over the weekend what he would say if he were here, and he told me of his memories of the visits. He reminded me that one MP had believed God created reptiles, birds, animals, black people, brown people and white people and that they should all keep their places as species—and he thumped his Bible to prove it. He undermined his argument, however, by declaring that he had proof that Mrs Thatcher was “a Marxist infiltrator”.

Peter reminded us of how, on our next visit, he had asked why the security was building up as we approached the security gate at Johannesburg airport. I said it might be because of the large “Free Nelson Mandela” badge he was wearing on his lapel. He asked one of the security guards, “Is it illegal for me to wear the badge?” He was told very briskly, “It is not illegal, but it is extremely inadvisable.”

Peter wanted to say this in particular:

“I believe one thing so typical of Nelson Mandela was when he addressed the large meeting in Nelspruit. At the end he had young white youths asking him what would their future be in a black South Africa. He put his arms around their shoulders and said he was not removing the domination of South Africa by the white minority to allow it to be dominated by another race. The new South Africa would be for all South Africans and that they were the South Africans of the future. He ended by saying it was a pity that they had wasted 27 years and could not have talked like this before.”

I wanted Peter Pike’s words—the voice of a true, authentic anti-apartheid supporter—to be heard in this House today.

In conclusion, world leaders have on their plate a series of conflicts, which I know only too well from the past three and a half years. A better tribute to Nelson Mandela than all the fine words we are going to hear at the funeral would be for the leaders involved in just one of those conflicts to echo reconciliation and forgiveness, the magnanimity of power and the true service of their people and to lead their people in humility and peace rather than grandeur and war.

EU Council

Alistair Burt Excerpts

Monday 28th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Hon. Members]

Hear, hear!

[Alistair Burt (North East Bedfordshire) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Speaker, and I thank colleagues very much.

I welcome what the Prime Minister had to say on migration and avoiding the tragedies in the Mediterranean, but will he reaffirm the long-term nature of support to Arab countries in transition? There is a sense that just two years after the events of 2011, countries should be settling down and sorted out, but the impact on politics, economics and security has been significant. If we are to avoid the tragedy of deaths in the Mediterranean, and greater migration, an assurance from the United Kingdom and the EU that there will be long-term support for transition would be helpful.

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend did a huge amount in the Foreign Office to ensure proper relationships between the EU and those north African countries, and that we put in resources to try to help stabilise them. Clearly there is much more work to be done, and we must keep on with that initiative because the best way to stop those migratory flows is to help heal those countries at source.