Syria

Lord Soley Excerpts

Monday 20th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warsi]

This is the biggest humanitarian appeal ever. Half the country’s population has been displaced, and we are constantly playing catch-up. The UN relief effort is, despite the 71%, still critically underfunded; it is constantly kept at the table, and we continue to assess it. The longer this goes on, the larger the humanitarian need. Without being able to give specifics about what that humanitarian need will be, we should be even more encouraged to bring this matter to a political settlement so that refugees and displaced people can return to their homes.

[Lord Soley]

Can I take the Minister back to her penultimate answer about the religious aspect? I agree with her about Bosnia; the failure to intervene radicalised and organised people. What I struggle with, and I am certain the Government do too, is the religious divide and how it is moving. The Sunni-Shia divide is getting wider and was never as it is now. Driven, as it must be to some extent, by divisions between Iran and Saudi Arabia, I wonder what thought has been given to the Sunni-Shia divide. If that becomes, as it may well do, a much wider issue playing out on the streets of Baghdad and elsewhere, we have got a much wider and more complex problem. The Minister has painted a picture which is already complex, but underlying it is a religious divide issue which is feeding some of the battles.

[Baroness Warsi]

This is something with which the Foreign Office is acutely engaged. The concern, not only in relation to Syria but in the wider region, is that intra-community tension is becoming more apparent and support for that intra-community tension compounds that problem. It is a phenomenon of more recent years. On a personal level, my background makes me half Sunni and half Shia. As I was growing up, it was never considered to be that unusual as so many families came from that mixed background. Recent political events have brought certain differences into stark light. We see that not just in what happened in Iraq but in the wider region and also now coming to the fore in places like Pakistan. It is something that we are aware of and about which we are doing a huge amount of work, both on the ground and in strategic thinking at the Foreign Office.