Middle East and North Africa

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 30th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Risby, for initiating this most welcome debate. I also declare a long interest in Turkey, stretching back politically over 30 years, so I will start my speech with a word about that country.

There are many misconceptions. First, there seems to be a misconception that the problems between the Kurds and the Turks are of recent origin; they go back at least to Ataturk. Indeed, the present Government in Turkey have initiated discussions with the Kurdish population that have gone some way to solving at least some of the outstanding problems. We must remember that the PKK is still listed as a terrorist organisation by the US, the European Union and NATO as well as by Turkey itself. That therefore adds considerable problems to how Turkey deals with a number of the problems on its border, particularly the problem of Kobane.

Let us be clear: the Turkish Government have spent some $4 billion on aid for refugees in this conflict. They have allowed 200,000 citizens of the Kobane region to come into Turkey to live. Carol Batchelor, the representative of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Turkey, was recently quoted as saying that, when it came to saving lives,

“the UN could not catch up with Turkey”.

They have, in other words, done extremely well with the cards that they have got.

Saving Kobane is part of a much bigger and widespread problem. The present Prime Minister, who was Foreign Minister, and the present President, who was Prime Minister, have both addressed this in great detail. One of the problems that Turkey has is that it seems to have made an enemy of absolutely everybody. It has crucially made an enemy of President Assad. I think that we have to start being realistic about Syria. President Assad presided over a regime that was—shall we say—suboptimal, to be kindest about it. None the less, the country was a damn sight more stable then than it is today. People were not being killed in the streets. It is going to survive because it has the support of Russia and Iran; in the present mix-up in that area of the world, President Assad, I predict, is going to come through in the end. It is in our interests to look at that area and see what we can do to try to help Turkey to get back on good terms with the regime in Syria.

I now turn to another subject in the region, and that is human rights. I know that the Minister has recently received a letter from the TUC—I know because it sent me a copy of it—about the human rights situation in Iran, particularly the rights of trade unionists and workers in Iran. I would be interested to hear from the Minister how the Government propose to respond to that letter, because it seems to me that we have a different view of human rights: it really depends on who is violating them, does it not?

If you look at the British papers, you will see quite rightly the absolute outrage over recent beheadings. We all share that outrage, but somehow the newspapers avoided mentioning—maybe they mentioned it on days I did not read them—that more than 100 people have been beheaded in Saudi Arabia within the past 12 months. I am told by the Foreign Office that it makes quiet representations to Saudi Arabia about this, but those are not doing much good, are they? The Saudis are not taking much notice of these representations. We need to look a little more clearly at having a consistent view on human rights and the way we put our human rights case forward.

In short, we cannot rest back on applying a Treaty of Westphalia system to the rest of the world—that is, the system where you say, “Well, countries can do what they like within their borders. If we recognise them as a legitimate Government, they can go round beheading people and do what they like. We won’t intervene”. We cannot do that any more. We do not do it in the European Union. Given the amount of attention that we pay, quite rightly, to human rights in Turkey, it is ironic how little attention we pay to the same subject in many states not that far to the south.

In closing, I suggest that the situation may change in a way we did not really anticipate. The energy scenario, which has of course driven our relations with that part of the world for the past 100 years, is rapidly changing. Many people have not noticed that the United States is no longer a net importer of energy. Many people have not noticed—or, if they have noticed, they have not tied it together—that new technology and the rising price of energy makes it easier to recover energy. The discovery of new energy fields such as the one off Cyprus, the advent of fracking and the developments in physics—I declare an interest as a governor of the pension fund of CERN, which is the major physics laboratory in the world—will probably put the energy crisis behind us in the next 20 to 30 years. That might sound rather astonishing at a time when we are concentrating on it. Of course, this is not a debate on energy, but from all I have heard and seen the energy scenario is changing faster than we realise. As it changes, the need and dependency on the near and Middle East will change significantly to a point where, maybe, we can have some consistency in our approach on human and civil rights, so that we can look forward to a time when we might be able to stand a little taller because we adopt the same principles in dealing with all countries in that region.