Syria and the Middle East

Baroness Morris of Bolton Excerpts

Monday 1st July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Bolton]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Afshar, and I, too, thank my noble friend Lady Warsi for giving us this opportunity to debate this important and timely issue. There have been some exceptional and powerful speeches, which will merit rereading, I suspect, for some time to come.

It is now two and a half years since the tragic death of a street vendor in Tunisia, Mohamed Bouazizi, which triggered the astonishing train of events across the Arab world. These past 31 months have witnessed uprisings, the overthrow of regimes, the death of dictators and the election of new Governments; quickly followed by disillusion with those Governments as they failed to meet the expectations of their citizens. These months have also witnessed the deaths of tens of thousands of men, women and children in Syria. What started in Syria as a political uprising in March 2011, as many noble Lords have said, is now increasingly religious. As the conflict enters its third year, Syria’s tragedy is that sectarian divisions and religious hatred are fuelling the conflict, pitting Syrian against Syrian.

We can be certain when we say that Bashar al-Assad is a brutal dictator but we must also acknowledge, and condemn, the barbarous acts of cruelty perpetrated by some of the rebel groups; the kidnap of Christians, the wanton killing of Shia and the gruesome and public murder last month of 15 year-old Mohammad Qataa in Aleppo by Islamic jihadists. These factors should inform our judgment when we consider arming the rebels, some of whom are only one or two steps away from al-Qaeda. Syria, like whole swathes of the Middle East, is awash with weapons, as my noble friends Lord Ashdown and Lord Alderdice have explained. If we add to these weapons, we can have no guarantee that they would not be exchanged, stolen or fall into the hands of extremists. I fear the belief that the weapons would somehow stay in the hands of secular, pro-western forces, or that they can be tracked, simply would not hold true in the fog of war, with the utter unpredictability and fast changing dynamism of events on the ground.

Having said all that, I completely understand and am in no way critical of those who call for the arming of the rebels, and my noble friend Lord Risby is persuasive in his argument. The natural reaction of anyone observing such appalling bloodshed, with the death toll approaching 100,000, is to want to do something. However, I question that arming the rebels is the something that we should do.

We cannot just sit on our hands and do nothing. Our actions should be guided by what we can do—energetically, as my noble friend Lord Alderdice said—and not what we would like to be able to do. We can and must continue to intervene with humanitarian assistance. UNICEF reports that 1.6 million refugees have now fled Syria to neighbouring countries; as we have already heard, half of these terrified, displaced refugees are children.

I need to declare a number of interests: I am a former trustee of UNICEF UK; I chair the Conservative Middle East Council; I am president of Medical Aid for Palestinians; and I am the Prime Minister’s trade envoy to Jordan and the Palestinian Territories.

Last year, on a visit to the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, I met and spent some time with families who had fled Syria. They were Turkmen, but had ended up in the Palestinian camp of Ain el-Hilweh. Their new homes comprised a tin roof and walls made from the cardboard packaging that protects washing machines and fridges. These walls might have afforded some protection in September 2012 but as I witnessed one of the coldest winters in the Levant on my television screen, I often wondered how those kind, hospitable but bewildered families were surviving.

Across the border, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, with its customary generosity, has once again opened its heart and country to the dispossessed victims of man’s struggle against man. In a recent interview with the al-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper, His Majesty King Abdullah II said:

“How can we close the border in the face of a woman carrying an infant and fleeing under shelling?”.

But he went on to say that he fears Jordan finding herself in a difficult situation and not being able to provide relief for her Syrian bothers and sisters seeking a safe haven.

The international community must not for one minute underestimate the situation the neighbours of Syria find themselves in. I am proud that Britain has already spent £348 million on providing critical assistance to Syria’s refugees, making this the UK’s largest ever response to a humanitarian disaster. But there is much more to do. As the intensity of the crisis increases, 53% of all the Syrian refugees in Jordan have entered since the beginning of 2013. As of 15 June, there were 545,694 Syrian refugees in Jordan. That is 9% of the total population of Jordan. Translated into UK terms, it is as if a refugee population equivalent to the number of people living in Scotland had arrived in our country and become our responsibility. That would be massively destabilising to us—just imagine, as the noble Lord, Lord Judd, invited us to do, the impact on the Jordanian economy and public services, not to mention the scarce resource of water. We must do all that we can to support Jordan and all the other countries that have so generously and selflessly opened their borders to the dispossessed, and we must strive with all our diplomatic strength for sanity to prevail.

Before I finish, I wish to turn to another conflicted area where sanity also needs to prevail: Palestine. While the world, rightly, concentrates on the savagery of events in Syria, we must never forget, nor diminish our efforts to find a solution to the occupation and the oppression of the Palestinian people. The time is rapidly running out for a viable two-state solution, and with it Palestinian hope for the normality of life that we all take for granted and which is a vital component of the stability of Israel. There is much good work going on to build up civil society and encourage trade but all efforts now should be on a political solution and I am very pleased that Secretary of State John Kerry is seized of this. I hope that the British Government are employing some of the “quiet diplomacy” of which the noble Baroness, Lady Afshar, spoke.

Palestine and Syria both need the determined will of the international community. As in all conflicts, there cannot—and will not—be any outright victor, only a just solution that isolates the most extreme and works to ensure that everyone feels they have a stake in the future.