Conflicts and Violence: Religion

Lord Patten Excerpts

Thursday 10th December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, if only we had the capacity in this country to do all the things that my noble friend Lady Berridge wishes to see done in the Central African Republic. If we had the capacity, the capability and the money we could do an awful lot, but we have not got it there or in much of the rest of the world where we all wish to see her words spun into action on the ground. That should not stop us saying exactly what she has said. She has shown formidable leadership in the whole of her speech.

It is good that she has mentioned Popes. Popes sometimes put themselves in the line of fire. Pope John Paul II led a very open papacy and was out and about for his pains. In fact, he received pains; he was shot in May 1981 by a Turkish citizen, for reasons that are still unclear. Of course, Pope Francis has been exceptionally brave and shown considerable leadership worldwide in what he has done in the Central African Republic. In the past, Popes have often been pretty martial themselves: they have got on horseback and led papal armies up and down the peninsula of Italy, chopping off the heads of other Roman Catholics on the other side of the argument.

That is what is so interesting and so challenging about the words in my noble friend’s Question: “religiously identified conflicts”. It is sometimes very difficult to identify exactly which strand of religion or which manifestation is causing the conflict. If we look at what is going on in the Near East and the Middle East now with ISIL or Daesh—or whatever the politically correct term this week is for those bodies and what they are doing to each other—they have killed far more followers of Islam than they have killed Christians or anybody else. The one thing that unites the Sunnis with the Shias, whom they despise, is their joint dislike of the Alawites, the Ismailis and others on the outer reaches of Islam. In that way they are no different from medieval Christianity in the west of the Mediterranean going across to medieval Christianity in the east of the Mediterranean during the sacking of Constantinople. There are considerable difficulties, however sophisticated the analyses are, of exactly which brand of religion is going to attack which other brand of religion, because they are very often so busy attacking each other.

We see this today in Syria. I will not go over all the excellent speeches that have been made in recent weeks, but there are minority communities in Syria which deserve our protection: the Alawites, the Druze, and various brands of Catholicism, whether western or eastern. If Daesh or ISIL takes over that part of Syria, there will be genocide among those peoples. If, on the other hand, President Assad is still there, whether we like it or not they are protected. We are in a very difficult position and I do not apologise to my noble friend for asking this most difficult of questions. We are now deeply involved in the fate of the Druze, the Alawites and the Catholics because our Typhoons and our Tornados are now going in and bombing in Syria at the same time as we say we no longer wish to see President Assad in power. So I wish to ask the Minister this afternoon: what strategy do we have to protect those minority groups, whichever way this plays out?

The last point that I wish to make is that just as you begin to try to solve a problem in one place, as may happen in the Central African Republic if we do what the noble Baroness, Lady Kinnock of Holyhead, has just said, then something else pops up. Take a Commonwealth country like the Maldives where we have an extremely radicalised Wahhabi Government. More than a couple of hundred young militants have recently left the Maldives, of all places, to fight in Syria at exactly the same time as on the edges of the Maldives we have alcohol-full rather than alcohol-free international hotels staffed by immigrant labour which may in the not-too-distant future be the centre of unwelcome attention from people in other parts of the Maldives. I do not know what advice is given by Her Majesty’s Government on the safety of Christians wishing, for example, to worship in the Maldives. I suspect it is pretty constrained, to put it mildly, in a society where to be a citizen of the Maldives now, you have to adhere to and recognise Islam. You cannot be a Christian if you want to be a citizen of the Maldives. It is full-on Wahhabism there. Recently marine archaeologists found the head of a Buddha which was promptly broken up. So we can see where the next well-scary—as we say in my part of Somerset—threats may be coming around the globe.