Middle East: Water

Lord Williams of Baglan Excerpts

Thursday 27th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Williams of Baglan]

My Lords, I begin by thanking your Lordships for the warm welcome that I have received from all sides of this House. Noble Lords may recall that I was introduced on 18 October last year, but took a leave of absence from the House to continue my assignment as UN under-secretary- general for the Middle East for 12 months. I take this opportunity, therefore, to apologise to your Lordships for the delay in my maiden speech.

There are many Welsh men and women in this House, and two bear the name of the town in which I was brought up—Aberavon, or Port Talbot, in English. Indeed, as a child, I remember my noble and learned friend Lord Morris and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, fighting the general election of 1959 for a seat in the other place.

I have spent nearly my whole career in international affairs. It has often taken me overseas for extended periods, to Indonesia, Bosnia, Cambodia and Lebanon. I have worked as an academic, as well as for Amnesty International, the BBC World Service, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the United Nations.

In my UN career I had the privilege—not always a pleasure—of addressing the Security Council on several occasions, usually on the Middle East. I find it somewhat daunting now to address your Lordships’ House in this important debate initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice. He has shown a strong interest in the Middle East over many years, and I commend his attention to an area that remains critical to world peace. I also thank him for his very kind remarks about our previous meetings and my experience in the region.

I have spent the last six years working almost exclusively on the Middle East, the past three based in the region. In particular, I was entrusted by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and then by his successor, Ban Ki-Moon, to secure the cessation of hostilities established by Security Council Resolution 1701 following the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon. That resolution has worked remarkably well in securing stability, and there have been no major incidents between the two countries over the past five years. The people of Lebanon have been spared the many Israeli incursions that marked the quarter of a century between 1982 and 2006. For their part, the people of Israel, as former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert remarked to me, have been spared the many Hezbollah rocket attacks and raids that marked the years before 2006.

However, it has not been possible to move forward to a formal ceasefire, let alone a peace treaty. To some extent, the intransigence of both parties is at fault. In particular, there are Israel’s daily violations of Lebanese airspace and continued occupation of a Lebanese village. On the Lebanese side, there is the presence of perhaps the world’s most strongly armed non-state actor, Hezbollah, an organisation with a formidable constituency among Lebanon’s Shia community. On the one hand, Hezbollah presents itself as a party that contests Lebanon’s democratic elections and, on the other, it maintains a powerful militia outside the authority of the Lebanese state.

The failure to secure a Lebanese-Israeli peace, despite the fact that the two countries were until recently the only democracies in the Middle East, has been maintained by other factors. One has been the role of President Assad’s Syria casting its dark shadow over Lebanon and facilitating Hezbollah’s rearmament by an Iranian leadership that denies the very right of Israel to exist. Finally, the absence of progress in the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians inevitably freezes the prospects of peace between Lebanon and Israel and between Israel and Syria.

The immediate prospects for peace appear bleak. Frustration among the Palestinian leaders has led to their bid for statehood at the UN. That frustration has been intensified by the Palestinian sense that the efforts of President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to ensure security in the West Bank have not been met by an adequate response from the Israeli Government. In recent years, I have seldom met an Israeli general or security chief who has not attested to the genuine endeavours of the Palestinian leadership in this regard. Israel has offered talks, but with the continuation of extensive settlement activity in the West Bank and east Jerusalem and with far-reaching security demands regarding the Jordan Valley.

It is striking and ironic that the impasse over the Middle East peace process, the most serious since the Oslo agreements of 1993, has coincided with the unprecedented wave of political revival in the Arab world epitomised in the last week alone by the elections in Tunisia on Sunday and the demise of Muammar Gaddafi. Israel has not been alone in failing to comprehend the strategic significance of the Arab spring. The era of one-man rule and of authoritarianism is drawing to a close in the Arab world as it did earlier in eastern Europe and other regions of the world. We must brace ourselves for further political tumult in the region, some of which may not be to our liking.

In the Middle East, differences between states are too often seen through the prism of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The issue of water raised by the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, is one such. Palestinians believe strongly and with some justification that their water resources have been taken advantage of by settlers in the West Bank. One often hears that argument, with less justification, in Lebanon and other Arab countries. It often fails to recognise the fact that while Israel goes to great lengths to preserve its water supplies, Lebanon’s infrastructure, for example, is woefully inadequate in this regard.

In recent years, new sources of tension have arisen, aside from the issue of water that the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, has drawn to our attention. I think particularly of the development of maritime resources and, above all, gas. Israel is well advanced now in the exploitation of natural gas in the offshore blocks that abut its coast. Cyprus and Lebanon are taking the necessary steps in this regard and Turkey has recently signalled its intent to embark on exploitation of maritime resources in the eastern Mediterranean. I hope that these resources can be seen as a source of opportunity and work for all the countries and peoples of the region but, in a region where maritime borders and boundaries are barely defined, I am concerned about the potential that exists now for further sources of conflict between its countries.

In closing, I wish to record my indebtedness to my sponsors, my noble friend Lord Dubs, and my former UN colleague and noble friend Lord Malloch-Brown. I also register my gratitude to the staff of this House, without whose advice a new Member would not find his way around.