Middle East: Water

Lord Alderdice Excerpts

Thursday 27th October 2011 Lords Chamber

Asked By

[Lord Alderdice]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the Strategic Foresight Group’s report The Blue Peace on transforming water from a source of conflict into a basis for co-operation in the Middle East.

[Lord Alderdice]

My Lords, first, I declare my interests as in the Register of Lords’ Interests. I am president of ARTIS (Europe) Ltd, which is a research and risk analysis company that takes some interest in the affairs of the Middle East and further afield. I have a number of non-remunerative interests in the Gulf policy forum, International Dialogue Initiative, World Federation of Scientists, Conflicts Forum, and Oxford Research Group. Of course, as I think noble Lords are aware, my real interests in this issue, this area and this subject go back a good deal further than any of my involvements in the organisations that I have mentioned and come from my experience in my part of the world, where I became aware that groups of people can be set against each other not because anybody wants conflict or its terrible results, but because they find themselves trapped in it.

I am particularly honoured not only that a number of noble Lords who share those interests are participating in this debate but, in particular, that the noble Lord, Lord Williams of Baglan, has chosen this debate for his maiden speech. He is an extremely distinguished diplomat, but I was privileged to come to know him through his involvement as UN special representative and then UK special representative in the Middle East. In conversations with him, I have found him thoughtful, enlightening, instructive, supportive and encouraging. It is a great delight to me to see him on the red Benches of your Lordships' House because I have no doubt that he will bring a very distinctive style and an extraordinary and distinguished experience to the corpus of knowledge and understanding in your Lordships' House.

Even before meeting the noble Lord, Lord Williams, I found myself very much involved in trying to find ways in which it was possible to encourage or facilitate people in the Middle East, not just in Israel and Palestine, although that is an important part of the area, but in other places, to see if any of the experiences that we had in the United Kingdom and more broadly might be helpful to them in finding a way out of the problem. Initially, I found myself doing what I had found extremely difficult to do at home, which was to engage with people who I not only disagreed with deeply but who were prepared to use or to threaten to use violence. I found that although it was possible for me to do that, many others simply found it beyond what was possible for them to consider, at least at that juncture, although my experience is that eventually it is necessary in most cases, but not all, to engage with those who cause the violence if you want to bring the violence to an end.

I then began to look at what had been necessary to create the context where we could address the issues between the British and Irish Governments and within the Province of Northern Ireland. The truth was that we probably would never have been able to do it if there had not been a wider framework in which that was possible: in particular, the European Union, and the good relations of both our countries with the United States. Some noble Lords will remember that some years ago I introduced a debate in your Lordships' House on the development of an inclusive, semi-permanent conference on the Middle East, the creation of a table where people from different countries with very different prospects could meet and engage with each other, as we have done in the European Union. Despite all the current financial and economic difficulties, we must not forget that we have now had two and more generations of peace in western Europe. I sometimes think we forget about that when we get so involved in the economic questions. Fundamentally, the European Union is an instrument of peace and conflict resolution much more than it is a matter of economics, which is the instrument, not the purpose.

I found that even as we tried to press this question there seemed to be a lack of urgency, so I went back to my colleagues in the Strategic Foresight Group, which is based in Mumbai, who had helped to put together that report on the inclusive semi-permanent conference for the Middle East and encouraged them, along with some other friends from the Middle East and the United States, to produce a report on the cost of the conflict, which is many trillions of dollars over a number of years. I rather hoped that when people saw the enormous cost, not just to people in the region, but to all of us, perhaps it might encourage them to address these questions. But while we think that economics is the dominant factor, I am afraid that the truth is that there are some things that are even more important for us as human beings, and we sometimes engage in activities that are to our massive economic detriment because there are other values that drive us.

I went back to my colleagues in the Strategic Foresight Group to think about whether there were things that we were missing or that we did not understand and were necessary. As we looked back at the European Union, whose development has been of such importance, as I have said, we were struck by the way in which, after the Second World War, the matters chosen for co-operation—coal and steel—were the very materials used to create the weapons of war and were based in the very areas that had been matters of dispute. We began to ask whether there are similar commodities in that region that could be or could become the cause of conflict, but which, if handled in a different way, could become the mechanism for co-operation, because they are shared requirements and shared needs. In the Middle East, the issues are not coal and steel, but water, energy and the environment. These things transcend borders in any case, but in a region like the Middle East many borders were simply straight lines drawn on a map with little cognisance given to social questions of tribe or community, to geographical and economic geographical questions, or to rivers and mountains and other kinds of naturally bounded communities. Things like water, energy and the environment transcend all our borders, especially in the Middle East.

Through colleagues in the World Federation of Scientists and a number of other such specialist groups, we began to look at water in particular. We thought that, if it is possible for people to understand that we need to engage with these issues as human communities and that we can learn a great deal from each other, perhaps with that engagement on human, social, economic and scientific projects, separate from the apparently almost insoluble political questions, we can build relationships between the countries that will enable us to address these other questions, as has been the case in our own part of Europe.

Our friends in the Strategic Foresight Group put together a report, which some noble Lords will have read while others will have read a précis of it. But noble Lords will clearly see that a thorough, thoughtful and deep piece of work has been done on many of the technical and scientific questions that must be addressed. But that, in a way, is simply to show that these are serious issues which need exploration. In practice, when we have gone to these countries and Governments, and have been able to bring many of them together in conferences in Turkey, Switzerland and elsewhere, it has been clear that there are opportunities to co-operate.

Noble Lords will not be surprised to know that we very quickly ran into the problem that most countries in the region simply would not sit down with the Israeli Government. We tried various ways to facilitate that but we came to the conclusion that for the present that is not possible, which is a dreadful pity. The Israeli Government and the Israeli scientific community have been remarkable in the developments of technology that they have been able to make in their region. Their capacity for recycling water, for example, and for using it is way ahead of any other country in the world. There are so many things that they could give—and in terms of the availability of water, a country like Turkey has so much to give. But it simply proved to be impossible to get them together at this stage.

Therefore, we tried to bring together those countries in the north—Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan—and to bring Israelis together with Palestinians and, indeed, with Jordanians. There has been some progress and there is an interest in moving forward on these issues. Of course, it is true that with the advent of the Arab spring, profound uncertainty has been thrown over all of this. In particular, it is impossible to do any work with Syria and the Syrian Government at the moment. One might well say, “Surely, that just throws the whole thing to the side”. I do not believe that for two reasons. First, the proposition that we tried to create institutions that enabled governments to co-operate on issues like water is not something for this week, next month or even the next year or two. We did not develop the European Union over a year or two but over many decades. This approach requires decades of overcoming hurdles and working together. The second thing is that if we do not have positive outcomes and directions for the Arab spring, then what may have started as an exciting prospect for the region could turn out to be much more disappointing and difficult.

I am grateful to the House for the opportunity to raise this question and I hope that the Minister may at least be able to indicate Her Majesty’s Government’s preparedness to address this issue. We are not looking for money from the Department for International Development but for diplomatic encouragement through the Foreign Office to our diplomats in the region.