Middle East

Tom Tugendhat Excerpts

Monday 30th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Andy Slaughter]

I will not.

I want Britain to engage in a concerted diplomatic effort to wean Russia and Iran away from their support for Assad, and Turkey and Saudi Arabia away from giving comfort, if not actual support, to Islamist extremism. I want a peace process that allows non-extremist opposition to talk to the acceptable parts of the Syrian Arab Army and Kurdish forces, and a concerted attempt, as my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) has just said, to cut off the funds to, and other international support for, Daesh. That is a very difficult, perhaps impossible, agenda, but to engage in bombing missions on the basis of, “Something must be done”, or even on the basis of solidarity, and without clear objectives, does not show sound judgment.

There are other arguments for and against intervention, including that our contribution would be small, especially given the lack of military targets without the risk of civilian casualties; that we should support allies, whether they be the Iraqi or French Governments; and that we remain at risk from Daesh attacks on the UK, whether we take further military action against them or not. However, the three points I have mentioned are my red lines. They are also, I am pleased to say, reflected by a ratio of 100:1 in the letters and emails I have received from my constituents in the past few days and weeks. I will, of course, review my decision in the light of changing events, but given the UK’s poor record of intervention in the middle east over the past decade, I think that further military incursion should be approved only if a high burden of proof can be established.

Having dealt with that matter, may I turn, albeit necessarily briefly, to two other issues in the middle east? The first is the current situation in Israel-Palestine. I am sorry that a few moments ago we listened to a speech that gave a very one-sided view of that situation, which is at its most serious for many years. The issues are not new—we are familiar with them, including the growth of Israeli settlements, which now account for almost 600,000 people in the occupied territories; settler violence; a shoot-to-kill policy and increased use of live fire; increased use of home demolitions; child detention and administrative detention; pass laws, checkpoints and barriers; and restrictions of access to the Noble Sanctuary and other holy places. None of those things is new, but the intensification of their use by the occupying power is much more significant, and that is going on partly because of the extremism of the Israeli Government and partly because tragic events elsewhere in the middle east, including in Syria, give cover for it.

[Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Andy Slaughter]

I am sorry, but I will not, because of the time.

There are often distractions. Because the European Union has suddenly decided belatedly to impose labelling restrictions, Netanyahu said this morning that he was not going to talk to the EU. It is important that we do not import settlement goods, but, in the great scheme of the occupations, those are details. I can only quote from a recent article in The Guardian by Marwan Barghouti, who is a prisoner in Israel who wrote that

“the last day of occupation will be the first day of peace.”

That is what we should keep our eyes on—the fact that this is a country that has been occupied for many decades, and justice will never be achieved in Palestine until Israeli forces withdraw.

Finally, the Gulf is another issue that needs a whole debate in itself. The Government’s policy on it is just wrong. We support Saudi Arabia, where many barbaric things occur within the regime, and, indeed, Bahrain, where we are building a naval base, and the United Arab Emirates, all of which have appalling human rights records. Such matters cannot be airbrushed and they ought to be reviewed. Nowhere is that clearer than in what is currently happening in Yemen.

I believe that the Foreign Secretary is on the record as saying that the UK will support the Saudi-led coalition

“in every practical way short of engaging in combat.”

As Amnesty International has reported, that has meant a British-made Cruise missile being used in the coalition’s destruction of a ceramics factory, a civilian object, on 23 September in an apparent violation of international humanitarian law. The head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Peter Maurer, has said:

“Yemen after five months looks like Syria after five years.”

Yemen’s is a forgotten war. It is a war in which the Saudi-led forces are creating havoc and committing humanitarian outrages daily. That is not to defend the Houthi and other forces, who are equally guilty of atrocities, but it is wrong that—for strategic, tactical or other reasons—the British Government are giving their unqualified support to what the coalition is doing. It is wrong that they are supporting a regime, such as the Bahraini regime in the Gulf, which oppresses the majority of its population and carries out torture and human rights abuses. While the Government are prepared to condemn such abuses in other countries, it appears they are not prepared to do so in the case of Gulf countries for historical or, indeed, diplomatic reasons, but I believe they should do so.

[Heather Wheeler (South Derbyshire) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee) on securing this important and timely debate. I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

I want to take this debate in a slightly different direction. Our role in the middle east must be to support countries that provide full rights to Christians and protect the rights of all minorities. We must challenge those who seek to persecute minorities for their religious beliefs and practices.

A century ago, Christians made up 20% of the population of the middle east, but this figure has dramatically fallen to 4%. Christians face prison sentences and executions for practising their religion in many countries across the middle east, where hatred of Christians is ignored or encouraged. Daesh is carrying out a campaign of persecution against minorities in the middle east. At least 5,000 Yazidis have been murdered in Iraq since August 2014, with the advance of Daesh forces who have declared Yazidis to be devil worshippers.

The rise of Daesh has intensified the persecution of Christians in the middle east. Countless Syrian and Iraqi Christians have been murdered with methods including crucifixions and beheadings. Daesh has evicted thousands of Chaldean and Assyrian Christians from their homes in Mosul, and in other areas they have demanded that Christians either convert or pay a tax for non-Muslims. They have destroyed countless churches and Christian shrines, and have carried out ethno-religious cleansing of Christian minorities.

Any Muslim who converts to Christianity is considered to have performed apostasy—the conscious abandonment of Islam. In certain parts of the middle east, this is a crime punishable by death. Christians live in a threatening atmosphere in many countries in the middle east, including Iran, where there were hopes that the treatment of minorities would improve under President Rouhani. Christians in Iran continue to be arbitrarily arrested and they face abuse in police custody.

Elsewhere in the middle east, Coptic churches have been burnt in Egypt in recent years. Hundreds of Christian Coptic girls have been kidnapped and forcibly converted to Islam, as well as being victims of rape and forced marriage to Muslim men. There are no churches left in Afghanistan. In 2012, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia proclaimed that

“it is necessary to destroy all the churches of the region”.

[Tom Tugendhat]

I very much welcome my hon. Friend’s comments on the state of Christianity in the region. It is, after all, the crucible of Christianity, and where Jesus Christ himself emerged from the Aramaic communities of Syria, which have tragically been destroyed. There is, however, one glimmer of light—the United Arab Emirates, whose sheikhs have recently been building Christian churches. Is she planning to come on to that point?

[Heather Wheeler]

My hon. Friend has made the point superbly well already.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nadhim Zahawi (Stratford-on-Avon) (Con)]

I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee) for bringing this important debate to the Chamber. I also commend the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood). I have just returned from a trip to Iraq and Turkey as part of my work on the Foreign Affairs Committee and the teams in both places told me how engaged he was. I believe that he will be making his fourth visit to Iraq very soon. I want to put it on the record that our ambassadors in those places are doing a tremendous job. I hope to describe in detail some of the solutions in Iraq and Syria. I, too, highlight to the House my declarations in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

Britain has been deeply involved in the middle east for centuries. The region has occupied our diplomatic and cultural attention for decades. Those close links are the reason I stand here today. Britain was the haven of choice for my family when we fled Saddam in the 1970s.

Today, ISIL captures the news headlines, our nightmares and our imaginations, but it is just a symptom—a potentially fatal symptom—of a deep rift at the heart of the Muslim world. The rift has several parts at different layers and they all matter. For decades, a stricter, puritanical interpretation of Sunni Islam has proliferated across the region. Traditional and more enlightened forms have been rejected, leading to more aggression and intolerance. It has led to the spread of extremism when that interpretation has mixed with other social problems, such as unemployment, corruption and poverty, which are all too common in these countries.

The regional powers of Saudi Arabia and Iran are at a stand-off and undermine each other at every turn, their relationship poisoned by suspicion and fear. They risk tearing apart their neighbours by proxy. Syria and Iraq are vulnerable to that because of their origins as Ottoman provinces fitted together into new kingdoms by the victorious empires of the first world war.

[Tom Tugendhat]

Does my hon. Friend recognise that this is not the first time in the history of the middle east that countries have fought the genuine curse of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s interpretation of Islam, and that when the Ismaili dynasty of Egypt launched one of its great attacks on the Nejd province of Saudi Arabia in the 1800s, it was very much part of that evolution?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. He is a great scholar and I look forward to his contribution to this debate and, I hope, to the debate on Wednesday.

In Iraq, a Sunni king who was installed to allow the British to dominate was replaced by a Sunni dictator. In Syria, a Shi’a ruling class was created to enable the French to rule. In both instances, it resulted in bitter divisions, as political oppression added to sectarian divide. That settlement, which was maintained only by fear and force, has completely collapsed in the wars.

As we have watched Syria torn apart by the civil war and Iraq stuck in political deadlock and threatened by ISIL’s invasion, it has become clear to us that a new settlement is needed. The one that the US began in 2003 is completely gone. The Iraqi Government that the coalition set up and the army it trained are hollowed out and militias provide much of the manpower against ISIL. Iran dominates politics in Iraq today. I commend the Foreign Secretary for the work that he has done to bring Iran in from the cold.

As we fight to end the war and restore peace, we must recognise that real peace—a peace that lasts and allows people to feel safe and get on with their lives—can only come from self-government, federalism and political reform. That is the aim and it is a noble one, but challenges stand in the way. Syrians and Iraqis may want strong representative Governments, but that may not be what Iran or Saudi Arabia want. That is not what all Shi’a, or indeed all Sunni, in Iraq want, and it is not what Assad and the Shi’a minority in Syria may want. Why? Because all they have ever known is rule by the strongest. Those who are not on top are under the thumb of whoever is on top. People see a protracted fight as preferable to letting down their guard in a compromise that they might not survive. That lesson has been scarred into the region by systematic killing right from the death throes of the Ottoman empire to the murderous regimes of Saddam Hussein and Hafiz and Bashar al-Assad. However, we are not passive on this matter, and it was made clear to me in Iraq last week that we can influence Baghdad—indeed, those who agree with us are crying out for more influence in Baghdad.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Mr Tobias Ellwood)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee) and my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Stephen Phillips) for securing this timely debate on the middle east and north Africa. It is my usual manner to try to respond to those who have spoken. I am aware, however, of the time constraints and the desire to have further Back-Bench contributions. If I may, I will write to colleagues on the questions they have raised.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell invited us to recognise Britain’s historical relationship with this complex part of the world. That is wise advice. Seeking solutions to today’s challenges must be done through the prism of understanding the peoples and their history. It is fair to say that the fertile lands found between the Nile, the Jordan and the Tigris-Euphrates rivers formed the umbilical cords of the area we now call the cradle of civilisation. Many of the foundation stones of modern humanity come from this part of the world: basic laws, agricultural techniques, the alphabet, the wheel, and, of course, the three monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

An impressive number of tribes, religious groupings and communities huddled around those sparse water resources and coastlines, subject to the waxing and waning of a series of empires and dynasties: the Sumerian empire and the Hittite, Assyrian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Phoenician and Persian dynasties. The region experienced 8,000 years of societal development, wars, culture and governance before the first stitch of the Bayeux tapestry was made.

[Tom Tugendhat]

The Minister is making some excellent points. We talk very often about cyber-terrorism. Al-Khwarizmi wrote his book on algebra, explaining the correlation of numbers, before the Bayeux tapestry even existed. Indeed, he wrote it before there was a King of England: Ethelbert was the King of Kent, and there was no Duncan and no kingdom of Scotland.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)]

On behalf of my party, I applaud the Back Benchers who have secured today’s debate. We now know from one of the Conservative contributions earlier that we will be asked on Wednesday to vote on whether or not to go to war in Syria. It is timely and appropriate that in a week in which such a proposition is being put, we should consider the wider historical and political perspectives in the region.

It was less than 100 years ago when the then colonial powers carved up the lands that were once controlled by the Ottoman empire and created the map of the middle east and the territories that we see today. I have to say, on reflection, that some of those decisions were arbitrary and that some did not take into account the territorial and ethnic identifications of the people who lived there. Most importantly, those powers certainly did not consult the people who were to be governed by these arrangements and nor did they have at their heart the democratic and secular principles to which I think we all aspire.

Those arrangements have not served us well in the last century. They have been the source, I believe, of much of the insecurity in that region. If we are to have a wider debate and a wider strategy, this country needs to be concerned not to repeat the mistakes of the past and to ensure that it sees a future in which people will be consulted on their own government. There is probably widespread agreement in this Chamber on the type of political arrangements we would like to see in that part of the world. We believe that they should be democratic and that people should be allowed to elect those who govern them. We would also agree that we want them to be secular or, if not entirely secular, at least to be states that will tolerate religious freedom and allow religious expression.

In pursuing those objectives, I believe that we have to be both consistent and coherent in our foreign policy. It is fair to say that that consistency and coherence have been absent from the foreign policies of this country under successive Governments. I want to pick up on three examples in respect of which more work is required.

The first is the situation with the Kurds. Many have applauded the peshmerga, and we and other western countries are coming to their assistance and providing them with the resources they need in the current war that they are waging. We will need to consider and support demands for Kurdish autonomy in the north of Syria, and we will also need to consider, I think, whether the time has come to recognise that there should be a national state of Kurdistan, which would not just bring confidence to the Kurdish people but might end up providing more security in the region in the longer term.

[Tom Tugendhat]

The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point about the very policies that Her Majesty’s Government and our allies have pursued in the region. On the possibility of a Kurdistan, the hon. Gentleman has elucidated some interesting arguments. The only narrow point I would make is that the creation of a Kurdish state, if that were to happen, would cause such unrest in the region that it might be something best considered in due course rather than at a time when the region is already inflamed.

[Tommy Sheppard]

My point is that it must be on the agenda, and that we cannot have a situation whereby we appear to be allying with the Kurdish forces in Syria and Iraq, using them in many ways as a proxy, yet at the same time denying their aspirations.

That brings us, I am afraid, to the situation with Turkey. I regard the recent Turkish elections, in which President Erdogan strengthened his position in the country, to be a retrograde step. This country needs, I think, to have a serious dialogue with the Turkish Government and to bring our other allies into that dialogue as well—and we need to say that the way in which they regard the Kurds is not acceptable and will not lead to the longer-term peace we want to see in the region.

The second aspect of Saudi Arabia has been mentioned already. It is a state that, frankly, is barely beyond the medieval in how it treats many of its people. I, for one, am dumbfounded at the continuing closeness of the Foreign Office with the Government of Saudi Arabia and our continuing desire to arm them, even in a situation where there is now credible evidence that the Saudi royal air force is using British-supplied weapons against the civilian population in neighbouring Yemen—contrary to this country’s rules relating to arms supply. I think we have seriously to question what our attitude should be to the Saudi Government and what their role would be in preparing a lasting settlement in the area.

My third and final point, relating to the need for consistency and coherence, is the Israel-Palestine question, which has in many ways been overlooked in the last few years. The situation there is getting worse than it has ever been before. The violence is reaching very intense levels, and, as was pointed out earlier by, I think, the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter), the disparity in that violence is really quite marked. The number of casualties on the two sides is entirely unequal, and many aspects of the reaction of the Israeli defence forces are disproportionate and, indeed, could be considered unlawful. We cannot continue to ignore the situation in Palestine, in the occupied territories and the green zone.

[Tom Tugendhat]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Tommy Sheppard]

I am not sure whether I will be given extra time, but I will take the intervention anyway.

[Tom Tugendhat]

Will the hon. Gentleman forgive me if I make a very short comment on the Israel-Palestine question? He has raised some excellent points, and is advancing an extremely fluent argument encompassing most of the middle east. What has struck me over the past four or five years—and I wonder whether it has struck him as well—is that since the so-called Arab spring, the question of Israel has not been mentioned on the Arab streets. The question is not whether or not Israel is legitimate or illegitimate; it relates to the governance of the Arab countries themselves. Is it not incumbent on us to focus on that question of governance—of which the hon. Gentleman himself has just spoken so fluently—rather than sending ourselves down a rabbit hole and talking about the Israel-Palestine question, which is, let’s face it, distinct from the question of governance in the region?

[Tommy Sheppard]

It is distinct, but it is not possible to consider a lasting peace in the middle east without addressing the situation there, which I think is being brushed under the carpet at the moment.

In the occupied territories, the Israeli Government are sponsoring and supporting both the development of new settlements and the demolition of Palestinian homes and properties, which is creating a situation that is close to the annexation of those occupied territories by the state of Israel. That may be Israel’s intention, but if it pursues the same path, the viability of a separate Palestinian state will not be there, and hence the two-state solution will not be there. If the Israeli Government intend to continue their present policies, the Israeli Government should be challenged to say what they consider to be the longer-term conditions for a settlement of the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis in that part of the world. Meanwhile, millions of Palestinian refugees are still being held in the refugee camps in neighbouring countries, in a sort of holding pattern, and are being denied any hope or any prospect of a place that they can call home.

I must say in all seriousness that one of the things that this country could do—acting in concert with other western countries—is try to take a fresh initiative on the question of Israel-Palestine, and be seen to try to advocate the human rights of Palestinians and the requirement for a lasting and balanced peace in the area. I think that that would, single-handedly, do a great deal to undermine and counter much of the mythology that is being put about on the issue of Daesh, and the suggestion that this is a conflict between the west and Islam. We should be seen to take new action on Palestine, but at present no one is talking, and no talks are planned for the future. I know from correspondence with the Minister that he is sympathetic to much of what I have just said, but this seems to be the policy that dare not speak its name. The United Kingdom cannot continue to be silent on what is happening in that part of the world.

Let me now say something about Syria, which is the main event that we are discussing. I must make it clear that the Scottish National party understands the threat that Daesh poses to our way of life, and that we sympathise absolutely with the requirement for international action to undermine and eradicate that organisation. We are, however, anxious not to do something in the short term that would make things worse in the medium and the long term. That is why we remain unconvinced about the need for air strikes, which, it is proposed, should take place not with a ground strategy to follow, but in isolation.

Aerial bombardment in isolation means rearranging the piles of rubble, and it invariably results in some innocent casualties as collateral damage. It creates more refugees, and, above all, it plays into the narrative of Daesh that the crusaders are coming to deny the Muslim people their way of life. Unless there are forces on the ground, all that air strikes do is destroy territory rather than controlling it. Unless the air strikes are linked with a proper ground campaign, we think it irrelevant to make the Royal Air Force the 13th air force in the skies over Syria. For 15 months the Americans have been bombing these positions almost daily, yet the situation on the ground in Syria has not changed by one inch, and, if anything, Daesh is stronger than it was 15 months ago.