Arab Spring

Baroness Falkner of Margravine Excerpts

Tuesday 29th October 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, want to thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Wakefield for securing this debate. There are some points that are worth making about the Arab spring in general. The uprisings were not motivated by religious sentiment or indeed through any kind of ideology per se. The report of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the other place on the British Foreign Office’s responses to the Arab spring showed clearly that what the protests did was to unite discontented citizens from across the political spectrum and the economic, class and religious divides, simply in opposition to the long-standing authoritarian regimes that existed in those countries. Irrespective of the subsequent popularity of Islamist parties, as we saw, Islamism was not what those overthrows of government were about.

There was chronic economic underperformance across the region. The United Nations Development Committee reports of 2001, 2002 and, I think, 2004 showed that demographic expansion in the late 1970s has resulted in 60% of the population now being under 25 years of age. High unemployment, rising food prices and a widening inequality with endemic corruption, particularly among the elites of the countries, meant that it was inevitable that any kind of trigger could well result in mass uprisings. It was also predictable that the only organised groups that would have any credibility in protesting against the regimes were those who had made personal sacrifices in the past. They were the Islamists, whether the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or the Shia minority in Bahrain and so on. These were people who had credibility because they had worked in towns and villages with the people who had had none of the privileges of the elites that were rising up over the period. As we know, they were elected with great popular support.

With the exception of Turkey with its secularist constitution, there is no tradition in these countries of choosing between different ideologies. The choices are mainly between clan, communal and religious loyalties. Illiteracy among these populations is sometimes as high as 50%. Figures recently released for Egypt indicate that in the rural areas, illiteracy is running as high as 60% or 70%. Half the electorate, notably women, are either excluded or told who to vote for. The only unifying factor across a country as diverse as Egypt or Syria is Islam or variants of it, according to your communal ties.

Religious minorities, just like the population as a whole, tend to opt en bloc for the system that best protects them. While they supported the Arab spring initially, they have witnessed the impact of political Islam on their own survival in these countries. I emphasise that I am talking about political Islam, with its emphasis on “us versus them”, rather than the religion I know, which is about pluralism and respect for other minorities, particularly the Abrahamic faiths.

However, political Islam in government—pace Egypt under President Morsi—finds that it has to overturn the status quo ante: it has to overturn women’s rights and reform the structures of state; it has to challenge liberals and secularists, as it has done over the past 16 months, in order to implement Islamist constitutional processes and norms; and it sees minorities as easy to scapegoat as “the other”. So minority rights and secular space are attacked while only fellow religionists are supported.

Recently I came across an article on Egypt by Yasmine El Rashidi in the New York Review of Books, called “Egypt: The Misunderstood Agony”. It sets the record of more than a year of Islamist government thus:

“The groups that have used religion as their shield and succeeded to attracting the public with their distorted view of religion, came to power and stayed there for a year. It was one of the worst years that Egypt ever went through”.

Being familiar with the excesses of the Brotherhood, I used the opportunity when I was in Egypt in August to raise the plight of Coptic Christians and Shias with the leader of the parliamentary faction of the Muslim Brotherhood, Essam al-Erian. Alas, his response was typical of Brotherhood propaganda. “No,” he said, “no Christians, no minorities, nobody has been ill treated. It is just a western media conspiracy”.

In conclusion, our support for democratic government cannot trump our promotion of core values in human rights. It is for this Government to walk the fine line between supporting democracy and popular will but at the same time reminding the Governments of these countries what their obligations are in universal terms.