Middle East and North Africa

Lord Desai Excerpts

Friday 11th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, some years ago, when my right honourable friend Tony Blair, the then Prime Minister, was visiting Palestine and Israel, someone pointed out that he may not have realised it was the anniversary of the Sykes-Picot agreement. He probably does not know what the Sykes-Picot agreement is, but everyone in Palestine knows its date and what happened.

I start with that because I think that we are still suffering from the unwinding of the Ottoman Empire. The Sykes-Picot agreement was an agreement among the allies to divide up the remnants of the Ottoman Empire. They created Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon and invented dynasties that went on to rule these countries.

Many noble Lords have said that we cannot impose democracy. I actually disagree. The British Commonwealth is a splendid example of imposed democracy. I come from India. Democracy was imposed on India, and India took to it. Many Commonwealth countries did the same because the people in charge then insisted that whenever the colonies became independent, they became democracies. They could easily have chosen to make India full of maharajas, kings and sultans but they chose not to.

The point is not that democracy cannot be imposed, but that we no longer have the power to impose it because no one will listen to us. When we had that power in the Middle East, we imposed various kings like the Hashemites who, later on, were thrown away. Some of the problems of the Middle East are of longstanding origin. We have tolerated practically a century of instability in the region, or false stability under dictators and seething unrest among the masses.

American interest in the Middle East is only twofold: it wants to guarantee Israel’s security and it wants cheap oil. Perhaps we are slightly distanced from that and, along with the European Union, we might be able to think slightly out of the box and propose other routes to stability in the region. Of course what is happening in Egypt is very exciting, as is what happened in Tunisia, and the transitions are going to be long—in Egypt it may even be bloody—but I am confident in asserting that eventually democracy will come to Egypt.

I also agree with many noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, that we do not have to be afraid of the Muslim Brotherhood. Let the people of Egypt choose whom they want to elect. It is not up to us to lay down a criterion that some will be good Egyptians and the rest bad Egyptians. I remember how in India, as recently as the early 1990s, there was a fear of the BJP, a Hindu nationalist party, coming to power. Good progressive liberal friends of mine practically stopped talking to me because I was not as fiercely opposed to the BJP being elected as they were. I said, “It’s up to the Indian people to elect or not elect whichever party they want; as long as the party competes, let the people decide”. The BJP came to power, it was perfectly ordinary and it went out of power. The power of the democratic process is much stronger than the ideology of any particular political party, and we should not fear the Muslim Brotherhood.

It is also quite clear that the whole resurgence of Islamism in the Middle East over the past 20 to 25 years and the defeat of the secular, rather than democratic, solutions like the Ba’ath Socialist Party are very much because of the defeat of the Arab armies in three successive wars against Israel. After 1973 there was a crisis of conscience among the Arabs, who asked, “Why do we keep on losing?”. One answer, although I do not think it was the correct one, was that they were no longer as “pure” as they used to be. They had to purify themselves as good Muslims in order to be able to win the next battle. The Islamism that has erupted in the Middle East in various forms—Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood and so on, although the brotherhood predates all this—is very much a consequence of the unsolved Israel-Palestine problem.

Many noble Lords have remarked on that problem. Perhaps I may something that has not been said so far. I think that the two-state solution is dead. What Al-Jazeera has revealed in its various leaked documents is that the last moderate Palestinian negotiating party has been destroyed. Hamas is still a popular democratically elected alternative but no one wants to talk it. There has long been a very settled opinion—or, rather, a strong opinion—on the left of the political spectrum that only a single-state solution is viable, that you cannot have an exclusive Israeli or Palestinian state. The land is limited, there are far too many claims, and a secular, multifaith, multi-ethnic state is the only viable solution. That will not happen; I know it will not. The only way to guarantee the security of Israel and the alleviation of poverty for Palestinian Arabs would be a single state with guaranteed minority rights, sharing the same land so that each can pursue their own prosperity.

We have just such an experience at home. Northern Ireland was for decades run in a democratic context by a single dominant community; the minority community was badly treated and took to arms. We lived through that, and the lesson we learnt there was that a single dominant religious majority does not actually guarantee security for the majority community and certainly does not relieve the minority community of deprivation. It is up to us to say, if anyone on either side would listen, that there is not enough land for two competing claims to be successful. The claims go back thousands of years and there is no way of deciding the historical priority of either community. Nor can we guarantee that the smaller state would be viable if a two-state solution were created, unless the entire international community was willing to foot the bill for about a century. So we might as well think of completely different alternatives. A single multifaith, multi-ethnic state in the Holy Land is the one viable solution.

Iraq has not been mentioned so far. We ought to realise that, as messy and bloody as the whole Iraq adventure was, it is now a democracy. It has had two or three elections, and the latest Government formation under Nouri al-Maliki took six months of negotiations. Everybody patiently negotiated. There was no instability. It was almost like a European democracy, where post-election negotiations for Government formation take a long time but everybody knows the rules of the game.

The fact that Iraq is the largest Arab democracy today is probably one reason why people in Tunisia and Egypt said, “Well, it is possible”. If it can be done without all the bloodshed we had to go through in Iraq, all the better for all of us. If I could impose democracy on everybody, I would, but I hope that everybody realises that that is no better a form of democracy than western liberal reform. One can encourage diversity in this market but the superior product is well known.