Reconciliation: Role of British Foreign, Defence and International Development Policy

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Friday 14th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, we should all be extremely grateful to the most reverend Primate—as I certainly am—for having chosen, as the theme for the annual debate on which he leads, a topic which looks outwards to the rest of the world and not inwards, as the national obsession with Brexit tempts us to do. He has done so at a time when the rules-based international order, to whose construction this country has devoted so much time, effort and resolve, is under fundamental challenge, not least from our closest ally, the United States. It is a time when wars between states are less frequent than wars within states, which are typically those that most urgently require reconciliation when they are over if they are not to recur. One has only to look at the successive killing orgies between the Hutu and Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi for an example. It is a time too when tensions between those professing different religions, or even in some cases between different branches of the same religions, are on the rise in a manner not seen since Europe was convulsed by them in the 17th century and lost a considerable proportion of its population.

What can we in Britain hope to do in the face of those threats? First, we can work to strengthen the efforts of the United Nations to prevent conflict, to resolve conflicts and build peace where some peace has been achieved, and to promote human rights. An example of what the United Nations can do was yesterday’s events in Stockholm, when the appalling civil war in Yemen was brought to a very temporary halt by an agreement on exchange of prisoners and by the opening of the port of Hodeidah. Do not let us throw our hats in the air—this is the beginning of a very long road that will require a great deal of reconciliation as well as a great deal of statesmanship by all concerned, but it shows what the UN is capable of when it gets the support of its principal members.

Of those members, Britain, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, has a duty to strengthen the UN. As a medium-ranking power with global interests, we have a major interest in doing so. Therefore, we should provide more resources to the UN’s role in conflict prevention. I believe that we should contribute more troops to UN peacekeeping missions, and we should make a reality of the responsibility to protect, not so much in terms of military intervention, which must always remain a last resort, but in using every diplomatic and economic tool in the international toolbox to prevent wars breaking out and to prevent gross breaches of international humanitarianism—war, massacres and genocide—which have often occurred.

Secondly, we need to put to the best possible use our commitment to devoting 0.7% of our gross national income to aid and development, and defend that commitment against those—there are plenty of them—who wish to reverse it. I applaud the Government’s decision to devote a substantial proportion of that commitment to fragile and failing states, where very often there can be no effective development until there is security and reconciliation. That commitment, too, ensures that we play a leading role in the effort to implement, by 2030, the UN’s sustainable development goals, which constitute the essential underpinning of reconciliation in fractured societies.

Thirdly, we need a bit of humility when approaching reconciliation. It cannot successfully be imposed from the outside; nor can it be successfully imposed from the top down. The most reverend Primate made that point very effectively. It has to come from the citizens of the countries concerned if it is to be durable. It requires that we do far more to nurture the growth of non-governmental organisations and other institutions of civil society in countries at risk. It requires too the nurturing in those countries of the rule of law, which is every bit as important as democracy. It requires us to strengthen the application of our own laws to ensure that we are in no way complicit in genocide, war crimes, bribery, money laundering or the payment of ransoms—whether openly criminal acts are involved or it is merely aid to oppressive Governments.

What can and should we do against the emergence of religious fundamentalism around the world? It is by no means confined to Muslim countries. There are plenty of Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and Jewish fundamentalists who do not believe in the value of tolerance for other religions. The Church of which the most reverend Primate is leader does believe in those values, and that is admirable. It helps to promote reconciliation.

What can be done? Most importantly, we must avoid lumping any advocate of religions other than our own together into a single category, as if to be judged by the crimes committed by the small minority in their ranks. We must realise that there are many hundreds of millions of devout Muslims who bitterly condemn the crimes committed in the name of their religion by IS, al-Qaeda and Boko Haram. The manifestations of Islamophobia in this country—and, alas, occasionally even in this House—will only serve to strengthen the fringe movements to which I referred.

In this new epoch, in which—Brexit or no Brexit—this country will need to navigate and to shape its international policies, we will need more co-operation and joint effort with other countries. That is why I found the call to re-invent separate national identities in the speech by the US Secretary of State in Brussels last week, which fortunately did not get a lot of press coverage, completely aberrant. We Europeans tried that prescription in the first half of the 20th century and it was not a huge success. Let us not go there again but rather follow the precepts of reconciliation, support for a rules-based international order and tolerance, which are at the heart of the most reverend Primate’s own teaching and advocacy.