Middle East and North Africa

Lord Avebury Excerpts

Thursday 30th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Avebury (LD)]

My Lords, the misnamed “Arab spring” has not yielded the arrival of democratic government, the rule of law and human rights anywhere in the region. In Palestine, as we know, creeping occupation of the West Bank makes a two-state solution increasingly implausible. In Iraq, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, one sees the legacy of the misguided 2003 invasion by Anglo-US forces. Now the state has lost one-third of its territory to the Daesh. In Egypt, the brief period of Muslim Brotherhood rule was marked by political ineptitude and repression, leading back to domination by a military strongman. The removal of Gaddafi produced anarchy, and now disputed sovereignty between the east and west of the country. Syria was already suffering a devastating civil war when the Daesh erupted onto the scene.

The actual revolutions in the region have led to far worse conditions for ordinary people; peaceful transitions, which may take far longer, are the right way forward. In Tunisia, mentioned earlier, the moderate Islamist Ennahda party of Rached Ghannouchi, who lived here in exile for 20 years, lost the election this week to secularists in a peaceful transition. The same could still happen in Algeria and Morocco, where the leaderships talk about reform, although the pace is leaden.

The Gulf states have followed a completely different path. All are ruled by hereditary autocracies, and only in Bahrain has there been an opposition with mass popular support. The response of the ruling family has been to impose long prison sentences on the most effective political and human rights activists, to violently suppress peaceful demonstrations, to deprive people of their citizenship without due process, to recruit a large number of foreign Sunni security personnel and grant them nationality in a medium-term plan to outnumber the native Shia population, and to invite in troops from Saudi Arabia and the UAE in an unsuccessful attempt to cow the people into submission.

Our Government say that they raise human rights violations with the Bahrain authorities, but they do it sotto voce, going along with the fake reforms initiated by the rulers. This is a country where the Prime Minister, who is the King’s uncle, has been in office for more than 40 years, and the King appoints all the Ministers. The judges, too, are appointed by the Government; so the rule of law is absent. There is a rigged Parliament.

Saudi Arabia played a key role in the creation of the Daesh, as Patrick Cockburn demonstrates in his book The Jihadis Return. It tried to stop its citizens from travelling to Syria only in February when it realised that the supreme target of the jihadists was Saudi Arabia itself. If the Daesh could usurp the title, “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques”, its claim to be the successor of the caliphate would be enormously enhanced.

We need to point out that in funding mosques abroad, particularly in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia is promoting an ideology that carries within it the seeds of terrorism. As the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, pointed out, Qatar and Kuwait are joining in the funding of terrorist operations. The Daesh can probably be eradicated so that it no longer has a territorial base, but the organisation and its ideology can and does metastasise; it already has footholds elsewhere in the region and well beyond, particularly in south Asia. It even has tentacles in the UK, as we see from the 500 young people who are said to have abandoned their families here to join the brutal and inhuman heretics in Syria.

The US has woken up to the importance of saving Kobane, recognising. as the New York Times wrote, that the fall of the city would show the fragility of the American plan, and put the Daesh in a position to cross the border and directly threaten a NATO ally. It would also facilitate the flow of terrorists into Europe and, of course, the UK in particular. As a result of the US policy reversal, arms and humanitarian supplies have been airdropped, as I suggested in our debate on October 14.

The first contingent of Peshmergas from Iraq arrived yesterday with artillery and mortars to reinforce Kobane. Ankara is said to have demanded that for any extension of this programme the coalition should also attack Assad. However, because the Syrian armed forces are the only large-scale provider of boots on the ground against the Daesh we need a reappraisal of the attempts to change the regime in Damascus, as the noble Lord, Lord Wright, advised. This is not my party’s policy but simply acceptance of the principle that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.

I hope that at the end of this debate we shall hear not only of plans to join the US in supplying humanitarian goods and arms to the heroic defenders of Kobane, but that we have in train a strategy to combat the much wider threat from a false doctrine of murder and religious cleansing that the Daesh espouses. At the same time, we must demonstrate to the Arab people that we are sympathetic to their needs.

I congratulate Sir Alan Duncan MP on his appointment as special envoy to Yemen, an FCO “country of concern” and the poorest state in the Middle East. Yemen is probably not going to meet any of the millennium development goals; it has a weak economy, poor social services, high population growth and internal conflicts that have displaced hundreds of thousands of people. In spite of these challenging conditions, in 2012, with the help of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation—to which the UK is also a major contributor—Yemen introduced vaccination for rotavirus, which causes extreme diarrhoea and accounts for 11% of under-fives’ deaths there. The All-Party Parliamentary Group for Child Health and Vaccine Preventable Diseases, of which I am co-chair, suggests that DfID should now assess how the vaccination system in Yemen should be integrated with the WASH agenda—programmes on clean water, sanitation and hygiene—and with the eradication of infant malnutrition as part of its post-2015 development master plan.