North Africa and the Near and Middle East

Denis MacShane Excerpts

Monday 28th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Richard Burden (Birmingham, Northfield) (Lab)]

I do not know how to follow the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski), who is a west midlands colleague of mine.

I welcome this debate and in particular the way in which the Foreign Secretary opened it. Even though I have some differences with the Government on their non-vote on Palestinian recognition, as was clear from the last statement on the middle east, I have been impressed by the willingness of the Minister and the Foreign Secretary to engage on that issue and to provide regular briefings. I am sure that that is welcomed by hon. Members on both sides of the House.

There was a very interesting speech by the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind), which I will comment on in a minute. I am not sure that I entirely followed his analysis on Iran, but he made some telling points on a number of other areas. My right hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd) made some important points that we should all heed on Bahrain and Syria.

I would like to say a few words on Syria. All of us, particularly those with a keen interest in the middle east, have been appalled by the level of repression and violence by the Assad regime. As the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington said, the Syrian people have showed incredible bravery and fortitude in standing up to that in the most appalling of circumstances. He was right—this has been said in the messages that I have been getting as well—that one of the most important things that we can do is to show the Syrian people that they are not an afterthought, but that we are with them. It is important that we help to keep their morale up. He was absolutely right that that is one of the important points about the Arab League initiative. I hope that the sanctions bite and are effective, but my right hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley is correct that we need to think beyond those sanctions as well. The statement that they have made is that the situation is a concern not simply to the outside world but to the Arab world itself, and that the Arab world will not stand for what is going on in Syria.

In Egypt, as we have heard, the polls are open for a general election, which I am sure we all welcome. However, we have to bear it in mind that there are parties that are boycotting the election because of the context in which it is taking place, and that people are still in Tahrir square voicing disquiet about how those elections could turn out. If the Muslim Brotherhood wins or gets the largest single number of votes, as seems likely, it will be really important that it carries through what it has said about recognising that democracy in Egypt has to be for all shades of opinion, secular as well as Islamist. That will need to be reflected in the future constitutional settlement.

[Mr Denis MacShane (Rotherham) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend comment on the case of the 26-year-old Egyptian blogger Maikel Nabil, who is now in his third month of a hunger strike? He was one of the first bloggers and the first Egyptians to say that the army and bits of the Muslim Brotherhood may be coming together. It is the army that is sending thousands of Egyptians to prison, with military courts and 93% conviction rates. That young man may die and be sacrificed as a martyr to the fact that the Egyptian army will not accept the will of the Egyptian people.

[Richard Burden]

My right hon. Friend draws attention to a very brave individual, who is one of many in Tahrir square and beyond. Everyone recognised when the Mubarak regime fell that there were close ties between that regime and the military. Nevertheless, the military were also seen as a national force who were not moving against the people. That is one of the tragedies about what has been happening in Egypt. The fact that things have not moved as people in Tahrir square and beyond wanted them to is a source of profound regret, and that is what is being said in Tahrir square today. I hope that not only the Muslim Brotherhood but, as he says, the military themselves take that on board in the context of the elections. The military in Egypt can be a force for national unity, but they have to change their approach from the one they have adopted in recent weeks and months.

The Muslim Brotherhood is clearly an influential force in Egypt, and in other parts of the Arab world in north Africa and the middle east. Political Islam is a potent force there, and again, the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington made an important point about that. If Members look for political symmetry between my views and those of the Muslim Brotherhood, they will have great difficulty in finding any points of contact. However, he was right to suggest that success for groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood are a disaster for groups such as al-Qaeda and the Salafist tradition of political Islam. We must bear that in mind, and it is why the Government are correct to look to open up engagement with political Islamist forces, whether in north Africa or elsewhere.

We recognise that such engagement is necessary in north Africa, for instance in Egypt and Tunisia, and perhaps—who knows?—in creating a dialogue in Jordan. As chair of the all-party group on Jordan, I welcome the visit of King Abdullah to the House the other week, which showed that there is a chance for greater engagement as Jordan continues its reform programme. That sends a clear message that involvement by the UK in the formation of political parties in Jordan is to be welcomed as it moves towards reform. I hope that the Minister will say something about what more we can do on that. However, if we see that engagement with political Islam is important in all those places, we cannot suddenly put the shutters up as a matter of principle if the country involved is Palestine, because the bit of the Muslim brotherhood involved is called Hamas rather than the Muslim Brotherhood.

At the moment, there is a chance of a different way forward in relation to Israel and Palestine. Talks have been taking place in Cairo between Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah and Khaled Mashal of Hamas about a possible reconciliation between those two parties. Anybody who knows about Palestine knows that both Hamas and Fatah, and both political Islam and secular organisations, are part of the reality of Palestinian politics. If we are to get to the stage of a two-state solution and enduring peace between Israel and the Palestinians, as I am sure the whole House wants, the peace deal has to reach out to both those traditions. It has to include political Islam as well as secular forces.

In the same way, we could not say that the only people we wanted to talk to in Israel were those who would generally be regarded as being in the peace camp. We have to recognise that the reality of Israeli politics also includes people such as Mr Lieberman, whose views are hardly the most progressive in the world—some would say that they are racist. It includes groups such as Yisrael Beiteinu and Likud. If we accept that in relation to engagement with Israel, we have to do so in relation to Palestine as well.

That gives a choice in relation to the reconciliation talks. There have been fairly clear signals coming out of those talks, as there have been from Hamas not for months but for years, about its involvement or acquiescence in a peace settlement. We would be totally foolish to ignore those signals. Yet somehow, the international community has got itself into a position of trying to put preconditions on the involvement of Hamas in talks. That was why I asked the Foreign Secretary a question about the matter earlier. In practice, those preconditions seem to have been designed not to encourage Hamas to come into peace talks but to find ways of keeping it out. Hurdles have been erected so that we can work out whether Hamas has jumped high enough, rather than our understanding what it means and responding when it offers truces and unilaterally declares hudnas. The term “hudna” has huge importance in Islam.

If we want to see peace between Israel and Palestine, a more subtle approach is important, and we cannot have that unless we are prepared to discuss matters and have dialogue. I think most diplomats would understand that dialogue and discussion do not necessarily mean the same as negotiations—negotiations can come later—but are an important start to the process by which negotiations can happen.