North Africa and the Near and Middle East

Lord Spellar Excerpts

Monday 28th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hague]

They have been invited, as I have just been reminded by the Minister for Africa, my hon. Friend the Member for North West Norfolk (Mr Bellingham), and their engagement will be very important.

We have committed £128 million in famine relief for Somalia since July, and nearly £4 million this year to support the African Union Mission in Somalia. The United Kingdom already makes a huge contribution to efforts to improve matters there.

[Mr John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

The Foreign Secretary spoke of putting guards on merchant vessels. That was announced at the end of October. Will he tell us what has happened since then, particularly in regard to the establishment of the procedures and protocols and the various rules?

[Mr Hague]

The rules will follow briskly, but of course these things take time to organise. The fact that there has been an announcement does not mean that there will instantly be a guard on every ship; it means that the procedures are in the process of being changed. I have no reason to think that people are dragging their feet, but I will check and write to the right hon. Gentleman, because we will certainly not let them drag their feet.

Successive British Governments have grappled with the problems emanating from Somalia, but we believe that now is the time to seek intensified international action, which I hope the House will welcome.

Regrettably, the situation in Sudan is also deteriorating. I was present when South Sudan became independent in July, when effective international diplomacy helped to ensure a largely peaceful separation from its northern neighbour. Recent events, including the bombing of South Sudan by the Sudanese air force on November 10, have jeopardised the prospect of Sudan and South Sudan co-existing peacefully in a stable region. We urge both sides to exercise restraint and refrain from military activity in each other’s territory, including through support to proxy forces. We are deeply concerned by the lack of humanitarian access in the conflict areas of southern Kordofan and Blue Nile state, and I urge the Government of Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement to address this and to negotiate for a lasting peace settlement. The two countries must resolve remaining legacy issues from the comprehensive peace agreement, particularly on oil revenue, citizenship, border demarcation and the status of the disputed region of Abyei.

The House does not often debate the Sahel, but it is a region of growing importance to the UK. I visited Mauritania in October, becoming the first British Minister ever to do so, as a signal that Britain will seek closer engagement with it and the wider region. The Sahel is deeply affected by poverty, insecurity, weak governance and a lack of education and employment opportunities. The revolution in Libya has also had an impact, risking an influx of weaponry from Libya as well as potential new recruits for al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, in the form of former mercenaries.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

It has certainly been a wide-ranging and interesting debate. We had the Foreign Secretary and the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) competing as to who had visited the most distant locations, and the hon. Gentleman also expressed his concern that the Conservative party was dominated by Guardian-reading, Radio 4-listening liberal lefties, which I am sure was a revelation to the Foreign Secretary. My right hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Mr Alexander) welcomed the debate, which is timely and a welcome opportunity to discuss the momentous events taking place throughout the region.

I do not want to appear churlish, but briefly I shall express a slight concern, because in Afghanistan we in the UK have a direct influence on events and a vital interest, with several thousand of our service personnel there, and this weekend the Bonn conference on the future of Afghanistan will take place, with more than 1,000 delegates attending. That would have been a significant moment even before the events of last weekend, so we should also recognise the considerable parliamentary concern about how the substantial gains made by the women of that country can be preserved.

In a speech last week, the Foreign Secretary pointed out:

“In 2002 only 9% of Afghans had access to health facilities in their local area, today this proportion has risen to 85%. One in three of the six million children in school in Afghanistan is a girl. Just last year 50,000 new teachers were trained, over 30% of them women,”

and:

“Sixty nine female MPs were elected in 2010.”

That is why last week more than 100 Members of this House attended a photoshoot to show their support for the gains made by Afghan women, so I am slightly surprised that the Government did not this week schedule a debate in which they could have outlined their aspirations for the conference, but at the very least I hope that we will have more information in Foreign Office questions tomorrow and a report back next week.

The other inevitable problem with a debate of this breadth is the difficulty of focusing clearly on particular areas and of developing clear themes. During the Foreign Secretary’s speech I was not clear whether there was an overarching strategic approach. The issue of national strategy has concerned the Public Administration Committee, and I would have hoped to have seen more of the strategic thread, but perhaps that will emerge in the Minister’s response. So I shall inevitably have to deal with matters country by country, and I apologise for those that I do not cover in the time available, but the Minister needs a reasonable amount of time to cover the wide range of issues that have been addressed.

I shall begin with Somalia. There are massive governance issues that clearly have a huge effect on the local population, impacting on the safety of neighbouring countries such as Kenya in particular, and on world shipping, with continuing depredations from piracy, to which I shall return. The Minister will know only too well that I have been raising this with his Department for over a year. My persistent complaint has been that the Government have the right intentions but are slow in taking action and encouraging a collective international response. I welcome the statement that has been put out today indicating that discussions will be taking place at the European Council, but those discussions have to be translated into action.

At the end of last month, the Prime Minister made a welcome announcement about the placing of private armed guards aboard vessels. Straight away, I wrote to the Home Secretary, who had been designated as the lead Minister on this, to pose a number of entirely proper questions. I asked what would be the procedures for command and control; what would be the rules of engagement; whether there would be arrangements with ship owners to recruit only reputable firms and individuals; whether there would be a register and, if so, who would maintain it; what sanction there would be against companies that were not in compliance; whether this would apply only off the Somali coast and into the Indian ocean or elsewhere; and what discussions there had been with other countries in the relevant region, where guards would embark and disembark. Those are absolutely core parts of a policy for dealing with piracy by the use of guards. There was no sound from the Home Office until today, when it faxed my office to say that it had transferred the matter to the Department for Transport. That does not show the sort of urgency that is needed, and unfortunately it has been only too typical of responses in this area, where the general direction has often been right but the implementation has been sorely lacking.

October is when the piracy season starts in Somalia, because the monsoons go down and piracy therefore becomes easier. As was rightly pointed out in the debate, that is absolutely crucial, because it means that if the warlords and pirate organisers are the main source of funding for governance in Somalia, its governance will be enormously destabilised.

[Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab/Co-op)]

Another reason for urgency is that, unfortunately, despite the efforts by the international community, and by the British Government in particular, there is every indication and every reason to fear that there may well a recurrence of the famine next year. We therefore need action on an international level as soon as possible.

[Mr Spellar]

I fully agree with my hon. Friend. That is why we particularly welcome the support for the beleaguered population of Somalia, especially food aid, and the substantial involvement of the Department for International Development, working directly and through non-governmental organisations. We also welcome the initiative of the conference on 21 February that was announced by the Secretary of State.

As with the involvement of the Arab League in the middle east, I hope that we will ensure that there is significant involvement in Somalia on the part of the neighbouring African countries and, indeed, the wider African continent. The hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) properly referred to the considerable role that the forces of the African Union are playing there. Equally, the role of the naval patrols should be not only to stop the pirates coming off the coast of Somalia but to stop the illegal fishing and dumping of toxic waste that has created some of the preconditions for piracy in that unfortunate area.

We fully accept that we cannot intervene everywhere within the scope of the debate—that part of the discussion is where I might differ slightly from the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart)—but we have to decide where, in particular, we are going to put our weight. Like all countries, we have limited resources. Even the United States has to make a decision about where it is going to put its main focus. I was therefore slightly surprised that the Foreign Secretary’s statement earlier this month had only about four lines on Tunisia—the country where the Arab spring started. Indeed, the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) referred to it as the first country of the revolution. Tunisia is therefore symbolic, but it also, in many ways, fits the criteria for a country that can succeed. It has a sizeable educated population and a long secular tradition in many parts of the community, and it gave women access to the political system well in advance of other countries in the region. It had an election which, as my right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State indicated, had about a 90% turnout for the Constituent Assembly, and that Assembly has already met. That is the ideal country on which to focus our efforts, partly for development and partly to build capacity in the political parties.

As I said on 16 May, there is a danger that some parties are well organised because of the underground structure that they have had in opposition to previous regimes and that other parties, which represent a wide body of opinion, are less well structured. It is important that those parties are given capacity, not by banning other parties, but by ensuring that there is a level playing field between the various tendencies. That applies across the region, but Tunisia might well commend itself as significant in that respect.

In the time available to me before I give the Minister time to reply, I will make a couple of points. There has been a lot of discussion about Iran, particularly with regard to its nuclear capacity. There was an exchange between the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington and the hon. Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) about Russia’s attitude on this matter. I think that it is true that Russia would be concerned about proliferation. However, there is a danger that it is complacent about proliferation, particularly because of its involvement in the civil nuclear programme. It might believe that it has that under control, which may or may not be true. The situation inside Iran is uncertain. There are reports tonight of another explosion at the Isfahan facility, with no indication as to the cause. There is a degree of complacency.

Finally, with regard to Libya, I take the point of the hon. Member for South Thanet (Laura Sandys) about the difficulties in transitional periods. That will be true in all of these countries, not least in Libya. I hope that the Minister will give us an update on the concerns that we have expressed before about where the surface-to-air missiles have gone. We know that there are a considerable number and that they are being looked for. This is a matter of considerable concern.

In conclusion, this is an historic period. Much progress has been made, but it will not all happen at the same speed and it will not go uninterrupted in a single direction. There will be difficulties in transition. It is clear from the debate that there is a common sentiment on both sides of the House that not only do we welcome progress, but we want to work to ensure that it is achieved. We look forward to the Minister answering many of the points that have been made in the debate and saying how he will achieve progress in real time.