General matters

Denis MacShane Excerpts

Tuesday 20th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Denis MacShane (Rotherham) (Lab)]

What a pleasure it is to follow a speech from a Member on the Government Benches that I would have been honoured and delighted to have made myself.

I want to talk a little about the history of the Arab countries, because exactly one year ago a humble vegetable seller, Mohammed Bouazizi, set himself on fire in the small town of Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia, protesting at his humiliation by the state. That act set off what we now call the Arab spring, a process of revolutionary change that today remains as unclear as the revolutions of 1789 or 1917 remained unclear 12 months after the storming of the Bastille or the Winter palace.

Sadly, we are seeing how history repeats itself, not, as Marx wrote, first as tragedy and then as farce, but as tragedy followed by tragedy. Revolutions devour their children and nowhere is that more true than in the Arab and Maghreb world. Gaddafi is gone but Libya is full of violence. The Syrian people get warm words from the west but nothing more as they are killed daily. The King of Bahrain came for tea at Downing street and the next thing we saw was a helpless woman being dragged away in front of cameras back in Bahrain as if the ruling elites there were sending a message to our Prime Minister that they did not care a fig about human rights.

In Tunis today, the Manouba university’s faculty of letters, with 8,000 students, is occupied by Islamist ideologues insisting that girls wear the niqab and veil their faces if they want to be students. We are learning, perhaps too late, that Islamism is not a friendly ideology but remains a political construct aimed at destroying human freedoms.

We have had to watch Egyptian soldiers faced with a peaceful protest pull a woman from the crowd and drag her painfully along the ground, exposing her breasts, before a brutal soldier stamps his booted foot on her chest. What is our Government’s response? Yesterday, the Foreign Secretary issued the blandest of bland statements:

“The unrest of recent days shows the scale of the challenges which Egypt’s political system must address including the need to build full respect for human rights.”

That was all the Foreign Secretary could say. “Unrest” is putting it uber-mildly, as 13 people have been shot dead by the Egyptian army, acting on orders, and hundreds have been wounded since Friday prayers last week. A military dictatorship is revealing itself in Egypt, aided by Islamists with that ideology’s extremely limited concept of freedom and democracy.

We do not know the name of the young woman who has been in many newspapers, but we do know the name of the 26-year-old Egyptian blogger Maikel Nabil. He is now on the 118th day of a hunger strike that might well claim his life as he is taking only water at the moment. Nabil began earlier this year by blogging that

“the Egyptian army and the people are of one hand”,

meaning that the two were working together for democracy. He changed his mind and later wrote that the army and the people were

“no longer of one hand”

when he saw the army repressing protesters. For publishing that incontrovertible journalistic truth, he was charged with “insulting the Egyptian military” and a military tribunal convicted him last April in a fake legal process. Last week in a retrial, amid the renewed brutality in Tahrir square, his conviction was upheld.

The tribunal’s decision has been condemned by Reporters Without Borders and by the US State Department. I want to take advantage of this pre-Christmas debate to ask for our Foreign Secretary to add his own—and, I believe, Parliament’s—voice in calling for the immediate release of Maikel Nabil, who might well die soon, just as Mohammed Bouazizi died on 4 January this year when he sacrificed his life to call attention to the lack of freedom in Tunisia. Mr Nabil is taking only water now. His sacrifice is also in protest at the fact that Egypt’s ruling military council has put on trial 12,000 people in the post-Mubarak era, more civilians than were tried during all of Mubarak’s rule.

Throughout history military tribunals dealing with civilians who irritate the generals work on the basis of presumption not of innocence but of guilt. There is no right to cross-examine witnesses or evidence, and no consideration of the evidence is permitted. There is no right of appeal. Nabil and the 12,000 Egyptians now in prison had no right to their own lawyer. This is Soviet-style justice, or perhaps could seem even worse if one considers justice in the Nazi era.

I hope British lawyers will be able to go to Cairo to help Mr Nabil and other prisoners of conscience. I ask our Foreign Secretary to call in the Egyptian ambassador and demand Nabil’s immediate release and British generals who have hosted their Egyptian fellow army officers should place some calls to Cairo and say that the Egyptian military will be covered in shame if Maikel Nabil dies at their hands.

The Arab spring is at a crossroads. Britain should speak loud and clear for justice and democracy.

--- Later in debate ---

[Eric Joyce (Falkirk) (Lab)]

I want to speak briefly about two things: first, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and, secondly, Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority—a subject into which I will segue with surprisingly little effort; as you will discover, Mr Deputy Speaker, there is a significant link between the two.

Today, the incumbent President, Joseph Kabila, was invested in office again after an election that was preposterous. It was condemned strongly by the United States and France—and by Belgium; one might not normally think that terribly important, but in the case of the Congo, the Belgians’ position is quite important. Europe looks to Belgium to give a moral lead in some historical respect. The Carter Center observed the elections and said that they were not valid. The Open Society Institute did the same. In general, the position of most Governments, including the UK Government, is that the elections were a farce.

Nevertheless, Joseph Kabila turns out to be still in power. It is one of those odd situations where it is hard to break off diplomatic relations with a country because it has flawed elections. Many countries do not have elections at all, but the Congo is one of those worrying cases where things are going backwards. It had pretty well organised, well run elections funded by the international community back in 2006. This time, early in the year, President Kabila changed the rules to take out the second round of elections because he did not think he would win in the second round. He thought he would win easily in the first round. As the campaigning moved on, it looked as though he might lose in the first round, so it looks awfully like some manipulation took place, although nobody could see it. The manipulation occurs in the places where the ballot boxes are tipped out—sometimes just tipped out all over the floor and sometimes actually counted.

Some remarkable results emerged. In Katanga, where President Kabila clearly has a fantastic campaigning machine, he managed to get 99.8% of the vote—remarkable. His getting the vote out and his ID work must have been truly magnificent—99.8% of the vote. Only more remarkable than that is the fact that the turnout in Katanga, his own stronghold, was 100.14%—astonishing success in the Congo. Perhaps we should be watching how those politicians campaign and what the campaigning methods are. On the other hand, perhaps not.

[Mr MacShane]

Was it AV?

[Eric Joyce]

There are direct elections in the Congo, of course, for the president. The parliamentary elections, which took place at the same time, will be counted shortly and the results will come out in January. We should probably have no more confidence in those. That is a great shame. I urge the UK Government to take a very strong position. As time goes by it is hard to deal with such a Government. We give considerable international development aid. We cannot reduce that; it goes directly through NGOs, but I hope the Government will take a strong position in the coming weeks and months.

I shall now segue into IPSA. The President of the Congo has a cunning ruse. It is not that cunning, actually. He simply takes national assets, sells them to a mate for a pittance and then his mate sells them on for a few hundred million dollars profit. He has done it many times now. I have stuck it on my website for all who may be interested to see it. He has done it to the tune of $5 billion or $6 billion in the past two years. One such deal involved a company listed in the UK, a company called Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation, better known as ENRC.

The deal is well known and has been extensively written about. I urge all Members to google it. It is an absolute shocker of a deal. It is quite clear that it was a very ropey and dodgy deal. One of the primary defenders of the deal is a man called Ken Olisa, who was a member of the board of ENRC. He said at the time, “I wouldn’t have joined the board if I thought there was anything ropey, if anything crooked was going on.” That was just before he was famously sacked by the ENRC oligarchs who run it. He then changed his tune and is famously quoted as saying that the company is more soviet than City. This is a company that essentially enables the President of the Congo to rip off the people of the Congo.

IPSA has five board members—very experienced individuals who draw on their own experience. There is an accountant/academic, a former judge, a former quangocrat, and even a former Member of Parliament, so a pretty good bunch, except that the business man on IPSA is none other than Ken Olisa. I find that absolutely staggering. When I spoke about the subject last time, I was not even aware of it. Someone tweeted, “Perhaps Joyce ought to look at Ken Olisa’s other job before he slags off Ken Olisa again.” It is absolutely astonishing that that man should be on the board of IPSA, carrying out a function that we all agree is very important. I hope he may have the chance to reflect on whether his position on the board is appropriate.