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

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

Friday 14th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the most reverend Primate for tabling this thought-provoking debate and I congratulate him on his wide and wise introduction. I also thank Chris Smith for his excellent Library briefing. The most reverend Primate has said that reconciliation is the greatest need in our world today, including as a general aim of our domestic policy. I could not agree more, along with his reference to the deep wounds in society which have been opened up by the Brexit debate, sadly manifest even on the Floor of this House. My noble friend Lady Saltoun of Abernethy, now sadly retired from the House, told me that the Scottish independence referendum had opened up many deep wounds that would not be healed for a very long time. I fear that it will be the same for Brexit. That is a very good reason for not holding referendums but, rather, to rely on representative parliamentary democracy. Others have said that they now better understand what life must have been like during the Civil War. Looking round the world, as other noble Lords have done, I am struck by how many of the accepted norms of a civilised society, such as observance of the rule of law, are being wilfully defied.

Of reconciliation, the most reverend Primate has also said,

“You can’t impose it on people, but you can encourage, enable and take away obstacles to it”.


His words remind me of 1992 when, as Adjutant-General, I was responsible for arranging the celebrations marking the battle of El Alamein, the event chosen by the Army to signify 50 years since the end of World War II. I hoped to include services both in Westminster Abbey and the main Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery at Alamein. When I asked the then Dean, Michael Mayne, for permission to hold a service in the abbey, he stipulated that the theme must be reconciliation and that a German must take part. I told him that we already planned to meet his second condition, the lessons being read by the sons of the two opposing commanders, my noble friend Lord Montgomery and Manfred Rommel, then Mayor of Stuttgart. His first condition would be reflected in the order of service but served as a reminder of the importance of reconciliation between former enemies as soon as possible after the end of conflict in the interests of peace between future generations.

With the leave of the House, I will continue to illustrate my support for the most reverend Primate’s Motion through personal experience, including “magnanimity”, which I have always thought went hand in hand with reconciliation. Having served there, I will not attempt to add anything to what was said about reconciliation in Northern Ireland by the noble Lord, Lord Trimble. My first experience of the need for the FCO, the MoD and DfID to work together came soon after the end of the Cold War, when the Army sent contingents to the UN, NATO and OSCE operations in the former Yugoslavia. Since then, I have had occasion to contrast the close co-operation that existed between the MoD and what was then the Overseas Development Agency under the noble Baroness, Lady Chalker. Based on the identification by her staff on the ground of a vital humanitarian requirement, she asked me to send Bailey bridges to Mostar, which we did. However, when I went to visit our troops in Afghanistan, I found not only that DfID staff lived in special huts but that they did not clear their projects with the military or our ambassador in Kabul. They went direct to DfID in London, in sharp contrast to the way the Americans operated, giving their military commanders sums of money that they could spend on projects, enabling them to respond immediately to locally identified needs.

While writing a report on how the management of future UK contributions to UN peacekeeping operations should be improved, I had the privilege of meeting and subsequently working with one of the most remarkable and magnanimous people I have ever come across: Kofi Annan, then Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping and, later, UN Secretary-General. He explained to me what he saw as the interaction between the three stages of peacekeeping: conflict prevention, peacekeeping operations and post-conflict reconstruction—namely, that a peacekeeping operation somewhere might prevent conflict somewhere else, as might post-conflict reconstruction.

For two years after leaving the Army, I was closely involved in post-conflict reconstruction, working for a security firm that was heavily into demining, without which there could be no development. Rather than doing the work ourselves, we trained people in several countries to plan and manage demining operations in connection with wider reconstruction plans. For example, in Mozambique, after we had demined the main railway line from Maputo to Malawi, the Mozambique Government said that they wanted to revive the sugar industry. To do this, we trained former freedom fighters to demine the plantations and repair their infrastructure, and then to work in them. That seems an excellent example of practical reconciliation and disarmament, because those who had carried arms against the state were now being employed by it.

My final witness is Kemal Atatürk. For many years, I have lectured on the battlefield of Gallipoli, during which I always take people to an obelisk just south of Anzac Beach. On it are the following words, uttered in 1934 by Atatürk, then President of Turkey; as Colonel Kemal, he influenced the campaign more than once. The words seem not only the epitome of magnanimity, but they sum up why reconciliation should be at the heart of all aspects of government policy:

“Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives ... You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us, where they lie, side by side here in this country of ours ... You, the mothers who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well”.