Syria and the Middle East

Lord Soley Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interest, which is recorded in the register, as director of the Good Governance Foundation, which operates in the region. I thank the Minister, not just for initiating the debate but for the way in which she has handled this incredibly difficult issue over the past few years. I should also put it on record that the Library note on the timeline of events in Syria is particularly useful to this debate. I want to focus my comments because this is such a wide issue that I would not wish to range right over it.

I first want to focus the Minister’s attention on Libya. I have had some talks with representatives of the Libyan Government, and it has been clear to me that it is almost impossible for them to achieve stable government without dealing with the problems of divisions within the security services—the police and the army. As the Minister will know, there is a series of armed groups who claim or try to be the police force or the army for the country. Perhaps our Government have done so but we ought at least to explore the option, possibly with NATO and the European Union, of putting some of our experienced military officers in there to try to help disarm and merge the various groups, and try to create at least one major police force or armed unit. Unless we do that, I cannot see how a stable state is going to emerge. The European Union, ourselves and NATO have some experience in that we know about how to negotiate between competing groups, get them to give up arms and introduce other stabilising forces. I conclude my comments on Libya by saying that unless we do something along those lines, it is hard to see how that country can progress to a more stable state.

I turn now to Syria. It is not with any great pleasure that I remind the Minister of my comment in the summer last year—she was good enough to acknowledge that it might come true—that the talks about Syria would almost certainly fail. I thought that they would fail, not on the humanitarian side—I recognise what the Government are doing on that and it is very good—but, as perhaps the debate has already indicated, we are not paying enough attention to the role of Russia.

People talk about the arms going to the various opposition groups in Syria, but the Iranian and Russian arms going to the government side—to the military, in fact—are profoundly important. The reason they are particularly important is that Russia is a sophisticated power with satellites, so it is not only arms being provided: there is good reason to believe that it is also providing intelligence to the Assad regime and military about the whereabouts of the various forces. Of course, Assad has an air force and it is no surprise that the barrel bombs—even though they might go astray at times and hit targets either deliberately or not deliberately—are targeting those areas about which it has information likely to have come from the Russians. I have yet to hear from the Government, either in this House or in the House of Commons, about how much we are engaged with the Russians in trying to get them to pull back some of their support for the regime.

I do not suggest that the Russians will necessarily want to see Assad stay in power, but I think they have a very real interest in ensuring that the military stays in power in Syria. That is why the Russians work closely with it. The Russians have a military base in the area and they want that base. Russians have arms contracts with the Syrians and they have always made it very clear that they will continue to supply according to those contracts. There is no dishonesty about it from the Russians’ point of view; it is just that they believe—and they are not entirely wrong on this—that if they do not back the Assad side, then it will be a failed state. The problem with the Russian position is that we are either facing a military state or a failed state, and neither of those is a particularly attractive option.

We therefore need to know a little more about the Government’s engagement with the Russians on their policy towards Syria. My own view still is that, although there is no clear winner on the ground in the military sense, the military controlled by Assad—or it may be other way around, with the military controlling Assad—is winning more ground than various opposition groups. That is really why I said a year or so ago that I believed that the talks would not succeed: because as long as the regime in Syria thinks that it can gain ground through military advances, it is not in its interest to engage in talks. That is why I found myself in agreement today with the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, about a plan B. I do not have any suggestions about what that plan B should be, but I understand—the noble Lord, Lord Wright, mentioned this—that if it is true that the Russians are determined to keep the military in control of Syria, rather than the various other opposition groups, then, frankly, that is what we might have to live with in times to come. If so, we had better have a policy about that; it is very hard to see what we could do otherwise.

The Russians are big players in this. Russia and Iran have a very real interest, and I do not doubt that they would deliver on ensuring that weapons of mass destruction are not used by the Syrian armed forces. It is in Iran’s interest, not least because it was on the receiving end of weapons of mass destruction from Saddam Hussein. From the Russian point of view, it is because its world image is so awful, but I do not think it is true to say that the Russians do not have an interest in making sure that the military stays as the primary force in Syria. That points to a military dictatorship of some type, except in the very unlikely event that one of the other groups comes forward as a winner.

A number of people in recent months have made the comparison with Spain in the 1930s. Obviously, the differences are far greater than the similarities; but the one similarity we should all be aware of is the problem for the western nations: they look at the opposition and see this diverse group which is unable to deliver a proper government while at the same time seeing a military Government who are unacceptable in everything that they have done and look like doing.

The world goes through various phases of supporting or being against intervention. You can go back much further than the post-war years to find policies on intervention, but we all believed in intervention when we found that we could work in certain areas. We tried Somalia and burnt our fingers there—or, rather, the United States did—so we promptly refused to intervene in Rwanda and 1 million people died. We intervened in Iraq but the post-conflict situation was dealt with so poorly that it went badly wrong again. However, who is really arguing that non-intervention in Syria is good for humanity? Of course it is not, but that non-intervention is a failure of the United Nations.

At the end of the day, it is possible to intervene in these states but you can do so only if all the major world powers are in agreement. That is our problem—we do not have that agreement. We should remember that it was only about two or three years ago that there were discussions in this House and the House of Commons about the new concept of a responsibility to protect, drawn up through reform of the United Nations. At the moment that has gone, and I am afraid that it will stay gone until we get agreement among the great powers. That is particularly difficult while Russia, most notably, but also China are opposed to intervention, unless of course it is close to their own borders in the case of Georgia and—one hopes not, but possibly—Ukraine. At some stage we need to reopen the argument in the United Nations about a responsibility to protect and what we do when we are faced, as we are in Syria, with the alternatives of a military Government who have been behaving appallingly by any standards and a series of groups, all of which would equal a failed state if they came to power.

I ask the Minister to respond particularly on the point about Libya. Otherwise, I thank her for what she has been doing in this field. Her knowledge of the religious conflicts in this area is very helpful.