Middle East and North Africa

Lord Desai Excerpts

Thursday 30th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Cope of Berkeley. Of all 35 speakers, I am the only one who is not a child of Abraham, which at least relieves me of a lot of responsibility for the situation in the Middle East. I see the Middle Eastern situation as an unsolved problem caused by the First World War. Lots of problems were posed by the First World War and solving them has occupied much of the 20th century. For example, I do not think that the problem of Germany was solved until 1991, when it became a united democratic country and part of the liberal democratic order. The repercussions of the Bolshevik revolution took until 1991 to sort out; eastern Europe was finally freed at that time. The noble Lord, Lord Cope, referred to the Middle East and the problem of the Ottoman Empire.

As a principal ally in the First World War, we knew that the Ottoman Empire would lose the war and decline, and that we would demolish it. As part of that, there was the Sykes-Picot treaty, which I have mentioned before in this House, and the Balfour Declaration. The Sykes-Picot treaty drew arbitrary boundaries and all that ISIS has shown is how arbitrary those boundaries are as to where nations can be formed.

My own view is a very pessimistic one. I do not think there will ever be a two-state solution. I do not think the two-state solution was ever the best thing to do. I remember in Labour Party discussions back in the 1970s, we thought a single multi-faith state was the only solution to the Palestine-Israel problem and that is not going to happen. The single multi-faith state is not going to happen; the two-state solution is not going to happen; there is going to be occupation; there will be things built on occupied territory; and there will be a continual war. It is somewhat like Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films, in which two sides fight and fight until they have both destroyed each other— and that is when peace prevails. Maybe I am being too pessimistic but, realistically, after all these years, I do not see why it should be solved.

I am much more concerned, however, about what is happening in the rest of the Middle East. I have spoken on this before. I believe that this is one of the most tragic situations for the Muslim world that we have witnessed in recent years. I think it was the noble Baronesses, Lady Falkner and Lady Nicholson, who mentioned the genocide of the Yazidis. That is indeed a very serious problem. But Muslims are killing Muslims in the highest numbers possible. Sunnis are killing Sunnis, Sunnis are killing Shias and the other way around. It has not just been going on for four years. This Middle East war has been going on for 40 years, more or less since 1973, after the last Arab-Israeli war, which was lost by the Arabs. As the noble Lord, Lord Sacks, said in his brilliant speech, at that stage the Muslims lost their faith in a secular democratic alternative. They decided that they had to abandon secularism, abandon all those stories of socialism and so on, and go back to religion.

The religion they have gone back to has been heavily subsidised by Saudi Arabia, and is a particularly extreme form of Islam: Wahhabism. Then you have Islamism, which has done more to destroy Muslim majority states than it has done harm to us. We are all worried about terrorism coming to our shores, but what Islamists have done to Algeria and other countries, in both the Maghreb and the Middle East, is very serious. From Pakistan to Algeria, Islamism is the enemy of Muslim-majority states.

There is nothing much we can do but we have to be aware that, because we have gone in—we have been in and out—this war will not be over any time soon. There is no quick solution to the ISIL or ISIS problem. We will have to, if not destroy it, at least de-fang it. We cannot kill an ideology but it will become less harmful than before.

I will say two more things, which I have said before but are worth repeating. The first is we have never had a large international conference on all the problems of the Middle East. Versailles was not a great success but at least everybody got into it. I have said this before. Again and again from the government Benches, I have been told to forget it, but I will say it once more. The problems of Kurdistan, Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran and even Israel and Palestine are interconnected. They have a common history. We cannot solve one without solving the others. It is at least worth trying, even while the war is going on. We owe ourselves and the Muslim population of the world, something better than what is going on right now.

Lastly, a lot of people have remarked that many of our young people have gone to Syria or Iraq to fight for ISIL. I think we should not call them extremists and we should not threaten them with immediate arrest and prosecution if they come back. These are our children. Some of our other children take to alcohol, take to drugs and join gangs, and we see the effects of that. When we see that, we feel we ought to do something positive to get them out of their addiction and out of their problems. Now some young people—men and women—have taken to believing in extremism. It happens. It is very attractive to believe that you have a higher cause than your daily living in a rich consumer-oriented society. So they have gone there. However, it is up to us to understand why they have gone there and tell them that when they come back we will try to rehabilitate them and help them re-establish their lives, and not immediately threaten them with prosecution. If they are fed up with ISIL, they will want to come back. We ought to welcome them.

Middle East: Jihadism

Lord Desai Excerpts

Thursday 19th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, for getting time to introduce this subject. I am going to take a very different stance from him. I spoke in the two debates that we had on Syria on 1 July and 29 August last year. I think that we are witnessing one of the biggest tragedies for Muslims in the world. Let us forget about the idea that we are responsible for everything bad in the whole world, and we should forget about asking, “What are we going to do about solving the problem now?”. This tragedy has been going on for about 40 years, if not since the Sykes-Picot affair of 1917.

Modernity has been a challenge to Islam. There have been different responses to it, especially since the three defeats that the secular and socialist Arab Governments faced against Israel in 1948, 1967 and 1973. There has been a revival of fundamentalism, a return to religion, and within that we have noticed the rise of Islamism, which is more of an enemy of Muslim majority states than of anyone else. The Islamists’ whole programme has been to undermine civilian Governments of Muslim majority nations, whether they be democratic or authoritarian. This latest phase of the tragedy has been going on since the Syrian civil war started. I remember saying in the two previous debates that this was bound to spill over into Iraq. It is a Sunni/Shia war, and Sunni/Shia wars are not something that any western nation, with whatever intention, can solve.

My concern is not what we did or did not do. My concern is whether the world can somehow devise a way of saving the civilian population who are currently suffering a lot of misery. There are refugees in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan because of the Syrian war. The latest phase of the war in Iraq is causing a lot of misery. Obviously we are reluctant to intervene as western nations. No one has a desire to maintain the international order, as we did. That will has gone. We did not intervene in Syria, and we are not going to intervene in Iraq. We are not going to send armies. We might not even bomb the place.

However, we have a duty to protect to human lives. The question is what are we doing on that. I do not think we can go around saying, “The good guys are Iran and the Iraqi Shias, and the bad guys are the jihadists who are the Sunnis”. That is the wrong way of looking at the problem. The problem is a human tragedy and it has to be prevented to the extent that we can through humanitarian efforts, peacemaking efforts and rehabilitation efforts.

One presumes that the United Nations should be somewhere in the centre of the action. Until now, in the public discussions that we have seen, the United Nations has not been mentioned. The United Nations Security Council failed to do anything in the Syrian case because there was a conflict of interest among the permanent members. It is very much the responsibility of our Government and any other Governments who have force in the United Nations to start a big proposal to do something about humanitarian aid and the protection of the civil population because this war is not going to stop any time soon. To the extent that we can reduce harm or people’s misery, we should do so. What are the Government doing about that?

Right now, this problem may look like it is in Syria and Iraq, but it has reached as far as Pakistan. In Pakistan, the battle going on between the Taliban in the north-west and the democratically elected Government has just entered a new phase. At the same time there is a tremendous Shia/Sunni conflict going on in Pakistan. It happened in Karachi not all that ago, and it goes on. Whether these jihadists are a danger to us is a separate question. The question right now is about what can we do as members of the international community to reduce suffering, solve the refugee problem, alleviate the situation and along the way, if we can, propose a solution to the political problem.

I shall repeat what I said once before. The noble Baroness has rejected the suggestion twice, so I am expecting a third rejection, but the world needs a general conference on all the Middle Eastern countries’ problems: the problems of Iran and Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Kurdistan, the Shia/Sunni conflict and the Israel/Palestine problem. All those problems are interconnected—we have not taken that seriously. We have taken them piecemeal. That may or may not happen. I feel the more urgent task is to devise a strategy for relieving suffering. If we can do that, we will have done our best.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Desai Excerpts

Tuesday 10th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great honour to follow the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon. In the short time that I have, I want to do two things. The first is to try out a somewhat novel idea, and maybe it will be one for the Government to take away and work on, and the second is to talk a little more about the manufacturing strategy that has been discussed.

We have now had four years of austerity. By and large, the deflationary move has been successful inasmuch as the economy has now revived. However, there is a particular anomaly which I want to point out and which has not attracted much attention. Our debt is about £1,300 billion, give or take £100 billion here or there. The surprising thing is that the policy of quantitative easing followed by the Bank of England means that the Bank owes £385 billion of that debt. Therefore, we are in the peculiar situation of the Government paying interest to the Bank of England, which the Bank of England returns to the Government with thanks.

Nobody has said this yet, although my noble friend Lord Myners mentioned it in the debate on the Budget, but the Government could take that £385 billion of debt owed by the Bank of England and cancel it. However, there is a snag: against the £385 billion of assets, the Bank of England has created a liability—that is, it has printed money. Therefore, I think that the best thing for the Government to do would be to sell the Bank of England £385 billion-worth of zero-interest bonds so that the books could be balanced and the Government could say what interest should be paid on the £385 billion. This is a very simple, effective device which nobody has thought about but I offer it to the Government out of the goodness of my heart.

By and large, monetary policy has not worked. At best, you could say that it has prevented things getting worse, but only active fiscal policy can do things which monetary policy cannot do, and a device such as that would release funds for fiscal policy to do more than it has been able to do so far. In a sense, it would give the Government a clever escape hatch through which they could save £30 billion or whatever, depending on how much interest they pay on the debt. That is something that I hope somebody will think about.

It may be said, “You can’t do that because you’ll have to print money against this debt”, but the money has been printed and is out there. With QE, the Bank of England bought £385 billion-worth of debt from the market. One alternative would be for it to sell it back and withdraw the money, but we do not need that. Inflation is very low. The central banks are competing with each other to raise the rate of inflation up to 2%. I thought that I would never live to see it, having lived through the great monetarist days when the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, was cracking the whip with his policy. So we already have a situation where the money is out there. We want the money to go out and stimulate the economy. The Government are paying too much interest— about a quarter of it to the Bank of England, which makes no sense—but if they think slightly outside the box, they could improve the prospects for the economy.

I shall now get a little more down to earth. When I came to your Lordships’ House roughly 23 years ago, on 18 June 1991, my maiden speech was on manufacturing and why there was no future in manufacturing at all. We ought to stop getting obsessed about manufacturing because it diverts attention from the economy. In his brilliant maiden speech, the noble Lord, Lord Bamford, pointed out that manufacturing is very valuable. Of course it is very valuable—there is no doubt about that—but it does not need to be expanded. Over the past 23 years since I made that speech, manufacturing has shrunk and the economy has become more prosperous.

The point is that in manufacturing we have concentrated on genuinely high-value-added jobs in high tech, which is the only place where we can survive in international competitive business. The UK economy cannot survive in labour-intensive manufacturing. You cannot create millions of jobs in UK manufacturing—there are people in China, Indonesia and Malaysia who will beat us at that—so we have to concentrate our manufacturing on high-value-added, high-tech products. It is a very competitive business which requires as a minimum, as noble Lords have said, a lot of research on the triple helix and so on. A good higher education sector is also required. Along with that, we have to be quite ruthless about eliminating non-competitive business and not subsidising it.

If we are to have a prosperous economy, we need a small highly valuable manufacturing sector whose contribution to national income in percentage terms is way above its contribution to employment in percentage terms—that is, we have to have the most productive people going into manufacturing. That is why this song and dance about apprenticeships surprises me. In around the 1880s, there were government reports that we were falling behind Germany. It was asked why the Germans were ahead of us. It was said that they had apprenticeships and we did not. Some 130 years later, we are still talking about apprenticeships. Nobody needs 2 million apprentices—certainly not in manufacturing.

Talking about apprentices produces a false concreteness —it looks as though people are doing something useful and highly skilled. We need a lot of people in healthcare, for example. Our real labour needs are going to be in what we might call the soft industries: healthcare, education and the arts. The arts are a very valuable and profitable part of the economy and one in which we have a comparative advantage. Therefore, when thinking about apprenticeships or the economy, we should not think too much about expanding manufacturing. Economic prosperity depends on doing what we do best, and very often that is not the concrete but the abstract. Britain is very good at abstract things—one has only to think of Shakespeare. We can sell good, expertly made products abroad. Let us stick to that and not get into metal bashing.

India: 1984 Operation in Sri Harmandir Sahib

Lord Desai Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warsi]

I am sure that these matters will be looked at. My noble friend will be aware that this Government are hugely committed to the issue of transparency, which is why we brought in the 20-year rule, bringing the period down from 30 years. It is important that documentation—subject of course to national intelligence issues and national security interests— is put into the public domain. The documentation that was destroyed was part of a 25-year review. As my noble friend says, it was fortuitous that elements of that documentation were present in other departments. I am sure that lessons will be learnt from this incident.

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness was quite correct in saying that Operation Blue Star was the responsibility of the Indian Government. However, there have been reports in the press that the advice given by the military adviser to the Government in India was to not undertake Operation Blue Star but to wait out the people who were in the temple and settle the issue much less violently than was the case. Has any evidence been unearthed to confirm that? If so, would it not be to the advantage of all concerned to make it public?

[Baroness Warsi]

The noble Lord may have heard in my Statement that the advice given was that entering the temple should be seen as a last resort and that a negotiated settlement was the right and the first way to proceed in these matters. In any event, it is clear what advice was given by the British officer and it is also clear that that advice was not followed. That is also an important element of the Cabinet Secretary’s report.

Iran and Syria

Lord Desai Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warsi]

I can give my noble friend confidence by saying that the chargé whom we have appointed is someone who has served in Tehran before; in fact he was the deputy ambassador there. Indeed, when I spoke to him this morning, he was brushing up on his Farsi. He knows the country well, is incredibly well equipped and is the right man for the job. Of course, it is an important role and we hope that he will visit the country before the end of the month.

The Russians have been working closely with my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary, in relation to Syria and Iran as part of the E3+3. They have indeed taken a leading role in relation to the destruction of chemical weapons. It is a strong relationship; it is a relationship which we know we need to continue to work on because their role is crucial to achieving a settlement.

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, in the Statement read out by the noble Baroness it was clear that there are three conflicts: the negotiations with Iran, the Syrian conflict and the Israel-Palestine negotiations. Is there scope for expanding the Geneva process to be much more inclusive and to take these various things together because they are interconnected? The Minister mentioned, for example, that the Syrian National Coalition has recognised the Kurdish Syrian party and I am sure that the Turkish Kurdish party and the Iraqi Kurds are also trying to get together. We might be at a crucial juncture in the Middle East and it might be helpful to have a much more general Geneva conference, expanded to include all these problems together.

[Baroness Warsi]

The noble Lord makes an important point but I think that he will probably accept that although each of these situations has overlapping issues, they are uniquely complex in their own ways. To try to bring the various issues together might make it too difficult to resolve any of them.

Syria and the Middle East

Lord Desai Excerpts

Monday 1st July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, we are having a very rich debate. My noble friend Lord Wood started by mentioning the collapse of the Ottoman empire. We were then treated to very good historical accounts by the noble Lords, Lord Howell and Lord Ashdown, while the noble Lord, Lord Bates, gave us a flavour of what he has been reading. I could have spared him the trouble had he read my book, Rethinking Islamism, where I do it in 100 pages.

Let me put it this way. I see the Syrian civil war as just one chapter in a 40 year-old crisis of Islamic society in the Middle East. It started in 1973 after the third defeat of the Arab armies by Israel and of course the quadrupling of the price of oil. The secular socialist alternative in all the countries of the Middle East lost its prestige and a lot of people in the region turned to religion as the answer to their problems. If we follow that trail—we could go back to the Sykes-Picot affair, but let me stick to past 40 years—in country after country, and between countries, there has been a revival of religion, a hardening of Sunni and Shia identities, and among the Sunnis the revival of Wahhabism and Salafism, which has been encouraged partly because the Saudis got lots of money from the rise in oil prices.

The Iran-Iraq war lasted for eight years. It was one of the biggest wars in the Middle East, but none of us intervened. We may have supplied arms, but we did not intervene. Saddam proceeded to destroy as much as he could all the Shias’ means of livelihood in Iraq. I supported the Iraq intervention, not because of weapons of mass destruction but because I considered Saddam to be a danger to his own people. We have to think further along those lines. We now have a much more explicit chapter in the Shia-Sunni conflict in the Middle East and it is not going to stop. Whether we intervene, whether we have a Geneva II or a Geneva VI, the conflict will break out in another location, because this is a deep crisis in the Muslim society of the Middle East that has not yet been resolved as it has to confront modernity and its own weak position in the Middle East and to reconcile religion and civic life. We have here something that we ought to take a much broader view of.

If we do not intervene now, we will intervene later. I assume that it is going to go on and I do not think that we have the choice of not intervening. Sooner or later we shall intervene because this war is not going to come to an end any time soon. If we consider this to be a long-running Shia-Sunni conflict, we have to ask what the dangers are. In this case, and for the first time in 40 years, there is a serious danger of this war becoming much more general across the Middle East than any previous war has done, such as that between Iran and Iraq.

Noble Lords have already mentioned that Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan have been affected. Very soon, Israel will be affected. Given the strategic weapons that the Russians are giving the Syrians, it will not be much longer before there is a general war in the Middle East. It has nothing to do with whether we intervene or not; the dynamic of the war is such that there will end up being a general war across the Middle East. Whether we do or do not give any weapons, we will end up with Sunni terrorist groups or Shia terrorist groups. It is true to say that we are watching a general conflagration in the Middle East, and unless we understand its full dimensions we will be too preoccupied with our own particular, narrow and local role in this conflict to see the more general picture.

We ought to be thinking about this in the following terms. Would an intervention on our part now bring about all the unintended consequences that the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, told us about? There are always unintended consequences following any action, so that is nothing new. Obviously we will do some things wrong, we will get into a mess and it will take a long time, but eventually some good may come out of it. There is one good thing that we would like to come out of any intervention, whether an armed intervention or a diplomatic one: a lessening of the probability of this crisis continuing for another 40 years. It would have to be a general confluence of all the Middle Eastern countries, not just Syria. The Israel-Palestine question would have to be a part of it. Unless we take a view on the very comprehensive nature of what is going on here, we will not be effective in our intervention. Obviously if there is an armed intervention, it would be better if we had friends to come along with us, but it is more important that we get along with them and take a comprehensive view of where we can intervene so that the next chapter is not even bloodier than this one already is.

Let me make a couple of points that are perhaps more controversial. The two subsequent big questions are going to be Iran and the problem of Israel-Palestine. I have not actually understood why Iran cannot have nuclear weapons. If India, Pakistan and Israel can have them, why cannot the Iranians? Pakistan is a very unstable democracy; or rather, not even a democracy at all. The more countries that have acquired nuclear weapons since 1945, the less the probability that anyone will use them. Indeed, nuclear weapons are among the few weapons that have not been used since their invention, unlike gunpowder. We ought to take a much broader view of what we object to in the Iranian plan for nuclear weapons. Obviously there is the fear that if Iran has nuclear weapons, the existence of Israel will be threatened. Therefore, any general and comprehensive dialogue on the Middle East has to include Iran’s ability to have nuclear weapons while at the same time guaranteeing that the Israeli nation will survive and is not threatened by anyone in the Middle East.

That leads to the Israel-Palestine problem, which a number of noble Lords have talked about. I do not believe that the two-state solution has any future, but I am old enough, and I have been a member of the Labour Party for 40 years, to recall that a long time ago the party had a one-state solution: a single, secular, multifaith state in which Muslim Arabs, Jews and Christians could live together. That will not happen and we will never be at peace.

Pakistan: Religious Violence

Lord Desai Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd May 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, we are very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, for bringing this topic to our attention. He described the problem, and I do not need to add very much. I shall concentrate on the why of this problem and on what we can do about it as an interested party.

A persistent problem since the foundation of Pakistan is its duality. Although Muhammad Jinnah supported a Muslim nation in pre-independence India, he was not an Islamist or a very religious person. He wanted a western, liberal regime for the large Muslim population in the subcontinent. As it happened, the majority of Muslims lived in Hindu-majority areas, and Muslims in Muslim-majority areas were a minority of Muslims. Pakistan was established, but soon after its establishment, Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan died, so there has been an identity problem. Is Pakistan a western, liberal-type democratic regime or a state founded upon the Islamic faith that should put forward Islamic policies? Along the way, especially after the departure of East Pakistan—Bangladesh—a persistent problem has been the tendency to emphasise Islamic anger, most particularly by military dictators who have no democratic legitimacy. Zia-ul-Haq played the Islamic card and was encouraged to do so because at that time the Americans were interested in getting the Russians out of Afghanistan, so they aided Zia-ul-Haq in his programmes.

To some extent, some of the emphasis on orthodoxy and Islamism has been engendered by international forces, but there is a problem that even in establishing an Islamic nation, sectarian violence within Islam is the most serious problem of Pakistan. As the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, has already pointed out, it is a Sunni/Shia, Sunni/Ahmadi battle. There is also a battle against Christians. There has been violence against the non-Muslim minority in Pakistan, which was 10% at the time of independence, but has now dwindled to about 2% or 2.5%.

How do we understand and tackle this religious violence? As the noble Lord pointed out, you have to see Pakistan not as a part of south Asia but as the eastern limit of western Asia. The tensions in Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Iran between Sunnis and Shias—Iraq is the battleground of Sunnis and Shias—are now happening in Pakistan. One thing we ought to be able to do is to contribute to a real understanding of why it has happened. In UK universities, government, NGOs and embassies, we have expertise; we ought to understand why the problem persists. How much of this problem is religious and how much economic and social? Are there economic and social roots to this battle between Shias and Sunnis? In India, for instance, some of the so-called communal riots have economic and social roots. They may be jockeying for land, jobs or economic resources.

Our first task should be to deepen our understanding so that we can help Pakistani society and the Pakistani Government to understand and tackle this problem. Obviously, we cannot say anything to a sovereign country about how it should conduct its affairs.

I think that going to the UN Security Council, as the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, suggested, would be a drastic step and I do not know whether the Security Council would actually decide anything, given the Cold War differences that persist. As an interested power with a large diaspora from Pakistan, we really ought to try to help Pakistan to reach an understanding and do whatever we can to ameliorate the situation.

The most interesting thing that has happened in Pakistan is the establishment of a new Government. For the first time in its history, Pakistan has had a proper constitutional transition from one democratically elected Government to another. Pakistan may be turning over a new leaf. Our task is to be there to help Pakistan improve matters at home as far as possible.

Kashmir

Lord Desai Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking my noble friend Lord Ahmed for bringing this topic to your Lordships’ House. To the substantial question of what Her Majesty’s Government can do, I think that the answer is not much. As far as possible, Her Majesty’s Government should keep out of this. I remember what happened to my right honourable friend David Miliband when he went to Delhi and made a statement on Kashmir. I had to spend several evenings defending him and telling people, “No, he’s really a good man”.

This is a bilateral issue. Since the Simla Agreement of 1972, as several noble Lords have pointed out, the UN no longer has any locus standi in the matter. This was a mutual agreement between the two countries. Neither the UN military observers nor the UN Security Council as of now has any locus standi in the matter.

I was in Pakistan 15 years ago and spent a whole month in Islamabad. I was very struck that the second question I was asked in every social gathering—after how I was and so on—was, “Why do you not give up Kashmir?” My answer was that I had a British passport, so Kashmir was not mine to give up. They said, “Forget about that. You really have Kashmir and you ought to give it up”. I suddenly realised that India has Kashmir by virtue of the agreement with the old king, Maharaja Hari Singh. Pakistan’s sense of nationhood depends on having Kashmir as part of Pakistan. There is a great asymmetry in feeling about Kashmir in those two countries. India has the bulk of the valley of Kashmir and Pakistan has only a sliver and wants all of it. Flying on Pakistan International Airlines in those days, I saw a map of Pakistan that included all Kashmir in Pakistan.

I can see that there is a very strong feeling in Pakistan that, somehow, something happened and Kashmir should have come to it. The state of Jammu and Kashmir has three components: one is the valley of Kashmir, which is majority-Muslim; then there is the Jammu, which is predominantly Hindu: and then there is Ladakh, a huge area which is mainly Buddhist if anything. When we talk about Kashmir, it is one of the three components of Jammu and Kashmir that we mean. You could not really hold a plebiscite even if it was possible, except on the condition that the votes of the three regions were counted separately and you had different choices, because, ultimately, Pakistan cares only about the valley—which is the most beautiful part as well.

Forgetting about the plebiscite, what we have to do is to maintain the status quo. In both areas—I do not think that there is a paradise of human rights in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir or even in Pakistan itself—we have to have civil society people monitor violations of human rights, complain about them, point them out and try to make the Governments involved behave better. In that respect, civil society in the UK can perform a function, but that function cannot be performed by the Government, who would be well advised to stay out.

I have always championed, and written about, an independent Kashmir which would be like Switzerland with a condominium guaranteed by all the major powers plus India and Pakistan. When I put forward this idea in Pakistan, I was violently opposed by people saying, “No, an independent Kashmir will not do. Kashmir is part of Pakistan”. I think that in India also there is considerable opposition.

This is one of those endless disputes, like that between Israel and Palestine, which goes on and there is nothing much that the UN can do about it. We have to make sure that the people involved in that tragedy are assured as peaceful and lawful an existence as possible and hope that India, which is a kind of older brother in this dispute and already has a democratic structure in Jammu and Kashmir, will improve governance in Kashmir. It should try to make sure that violations of human rights which take place are addressed and that the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, about which there is a lot of debate in India—not only with respect to Jammu and Kashmir but also with respect to the north-east—is removed in its application from the area of Jammu and Kashmir.

Perhaps something like that can by urged by civil society groups in the UK, because it is already being urged by civil society groups in India. I do not say that that will happen, but we have to keep up the pressure. It is very important on humanitarian grounds that we keep up the pressure and try to improve as much as we can the lives of the people of Kashmir on both sides.

Libya

Lord Desai Excerpts

Monday 19th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

That is unquestionably so. This is the issue that we are now discussing. Libya was and remains a country with many different tribal groups, not all of which necessarily live in tight geographical locations. They are often rather mixed up. Many different forces are at work in Libya, but overall, as a democracy, it is our advice to other democracies that their future will be best assured by pursuing the democratic method.

I should add that the recent survey of what has happened in Libya leaves us with figures that show that 97 per cent of Libyans think that the revolution was absolutely right; 66 per cent support a semi-centralised Government, with ministries spread across Libya; and 79 per cent expect their lives to better a year from now. These are pretty decisive figures, which indicate that if we push for more democracy we are all on the right lines.

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, do the Government have any plans to help Libya to conduct a good election by pointing to the Commonwealth experience in these matters?

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

The Commonwealth experience is available, and I know that there are leaders in the Commonwealth who are quite ready to provide any advice, support and help that they can. The Commonwealth’s role in monitoring and administering elections is particularly valuable where new constitutions are in the making, as in Libya. Commonwealth leaders have certainly indicated that they stand ready to help in any possible way.

Building Stability Overseas Strategy

Lord Desai Excerpts

Thursday 6th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, we are grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, for introducing the debate. I compliment her on her speech, and say all this because I will be quite critical of the document we are discussing. I find it intellectually inadequate and do not think that it can be a basis on which to frame any sort of policy. I shall go into some detail about why I think that.

It is economically deterministic and takes a rather naive view that in any conflict there are bound to be economic causes, and only economic causes. In proposing a solution, it has the defect of all the UN documents that I have had to read over the years of being far too idealistic in the requirements that it imposes on what kind of a perfect solution there has to be. Everything has to be democratic, transparent, accountable, gender-friendly, environmentally sustainable and what-not. I once headed something called the Centre for the Study of Global Governance at the London School of Economics and, on one of the first discussion papers we published, a brilliant Canadian scholar pointed out that people sitting in New York ask their UNDP branches out in Kenya and so on to add new things that they have suddenly thought of that we must have in conflict resolution. We do not have to do it but people out there have to satisfy so many constraints. At the end of it, whatever we do will be inadequate.

I start by saying why I think that the document is analytically defective. Then I will say something about the solution. First, the document is analytically defective because the notion of a fragile state is not an adequate notion. Most things that are called fragile states are not states. They are not even nations. Because of various things, either colonial developments, or something else, they have been designated as states by some constitutional accident but then have followed a long struggle to find out whose nation it is. Consider Afghanistan, where we have had trouble for 40 years. It was a kingdom once upon a time, and as kingdoms go it was stable. In a kingdom you can command the loyalty of different tribes who may not agree with each other. Then there was the communist revolution and other things later on, and we are still trying to establish a nation state there. A nation state is very different from a kingdom. In a nation state, numbers count and different tribes have to quarrel to take command of resources. The notion that everything is a state is inadequate for analysis of fragility.

I even say, at the opposite end, that we should consider Sri Lanka. Virtually everything that people want—gender friendliness, good health, education, a fantastic welfare state, high literacy, high ranking of human development—was reported over the years. What happened? Almost horrendous genocide takes place there in a 25 year-old civil war. The notion of a fragile state does not help us to analyse Sri Lanka or Zimbabwe. Until the late 1990s Zimbabwe was thought to be an ideal combination of social development and economic growth. I was part of the UNICEF project. In an article somebody listed Zimbabwe as one of the 10 most successful countries combining social development and economic growth. Why did Zimbabwe fall apart? This document will not help us to explain that. We have to be much more critical.

What are we being asked to intervene in? We may be asked to intervene in situations not because states are fragile. None of the states in the Arab spring revolutions was at all fragile—not Egypt, Tunisia, Libya—but all were subjected to considerable change and had to respond to it. I urge Ministers to look again and to have a more robust doctrine on why we have to have early warning and on what we can do. We were able to do nothing about Sri Lanka despite it being a member of the Commonwealth. We were not able to expel it, like Zimbabwe, or even Pakistan. It not only continues to be a member but will host the CHOGM in 2013. We need a slightly better concept of not just fragile states, but rogue states and maybe states that are perfectly well functioning but which because of that can be perfectly efficient at oppressing their people. Iraq, for example, under Saddam Hussein, was not a frail state at all—not even a fragile state. It was a very powerful state but it was oppressive to its own people.

The doctrine of liberal interventionism, of which I think I am the last friend, says that if you live in a global village and see a neighbour beating his wife you will intervene. You do not regard it as his affair. If a country—especially a non-western country, if I may say so—has a dictator who is eliminating some part of the population through genocide and so on, we do not say, “No. Their values are different, so we cannot intervene”. I think that it is quite right to intervene. It was right to intervene in Iraq. I have no problem with that. Iraq today is a democracy. Not only that, I believe—although I cannot prove it—that some of the inspiration for the Arab spring must have come from the fact that Iraq was seen as a functioning democracy. It is such a stable functioning democracy that after the elections it did not have a Government for six months but still nothing happened that could upset the political balance.

That is an achievement and that kind of liberal interventionism was successful in Bosnia and Kosovo and very effective in Sierra Leone. We have to learn positive lessons from that. We cannot just rely on the doctrine of fragility. Maybe we should have “fragile states”; we should have “rogue states”; we should have states that are perfectly all right but suddenly undergo a conversion—in all these different situations we may be required to intervene and what kind of intervention we make will be important.

Time is running out so let me say a few things on the ideal solution. It is very important, especially in fragile states, states that are breaking down, or even states in which we are intervening, that we prioritise what kind of intervention is needed. Before all the democracy and accountability and transparency—all those good things of life—are achieved, we have to restore law and order. The restoration of law and order and the security of property and people is absolutely the top priority. In doing that you may not achieve all the good bits that you want to achieve. Very often, especially after a civil war, it would be very difficult for even the domestic security forces, let alone somebody from outside, to really be able to give proper, perfect equal justice to people who were previously the masters and committing the genocide—just think of how it was in Rwanda. First should be some sort of security of property and life on an equal basis, and later one can go on to look at institution-building and things like that.

How many years did we stand by and wring our hands over Darfur and all the time the crisis was happening? Was Sudan a fragile state? Was Sudan a state at all? Now coming out is what we knew all the time: that Sudan had very deep divisions, north and south, on the basis of religion. At that time we were not able to operate on the idea that perhaps Sudan should not be a single country. My own private view is that the Democratic Republic of Congo should not be a single country and is not viable as a single country, but that is for another day.

As far as Her Majesty’s Government are concerned, if you are going to set up an early warning system, please have a much more robust analytical model on the variety of different situations in which we will have to intervene and not just this notion of a fragile state and that it is fragile because it is economically weak. That will not do; that is not a proposition which would pass any examination. Therefore, we should be deeper in our analysis and economise on the objectives we pursue when we intervene—and once we intervene, get out fast.