Lord Bishop of Manchester
Main Page: Lord Bishop of Manchester (Bishops - Bishops)
The Lord Bishop of Manchester
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for securing this debate and his deep and long-standing commitment to these issues, which serves as a great example to us all in this House.
In one of my unpaid personal roles I chair USPG, a global Anglican mission agency. We are celebrating our 325th birthday this year. We have been operating for a long time, and we operate across much of the globe. It is in that capacity in particular that I have become aware, through the contact we have with people in various jurisdictions, of places not only where atrocities are regularly committed against religious and ethnic minorities—sometimes Christians, but not exclusively—but where the security or the political situation is edging towards a greater risk of atrocity crimes and crimes against humanity in the future.
I am going to avoid the word genocide, because I am cautious about where I use it. If we use it too widely, we devalue a very powerful word that we must save for situations that are absolutely clear.
Clearly, sometimes there are atrocities committed in Britain. In my time as its bishop, Manchester has suffered both the arena attack of 2017 and the murderous assault at Heaton Park synagogue just a few months ago. But my remarks are about the wider global context. They are about places where the situation descends into a context where atrocities become systemic, and we are very much not that.
The one thing I have learned is that there can be so many different reasons why this happens. Some are cases of weak government—think of the eastern DRC, where Christian civilians are targeted by armed extremists, some of them affiliated with ISIS. There are attacks on churches, massacres during worship and killings of whole villages. The DRC is an example of a long-standing weak state. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, mentioned Darfur. I will not repeat his comments, but that is a similar example.
For these places, where the problem is the weakness of the governmental institutions, what can the UK Government do? Can we still use soft power as we often have so well in the past to support the establishment of better governmental institutions? How can we help regimes manage their countries better? Sometimes, that is by taking a long view. We have educated many future leaders. They have not all turned out to be good ones, but at least some have. What is it today?
It is not always about weak and ineffective government. Sometimes, atrocities happen where the Government themselves are behind them. Earlier this evening I was at a meeting on the estate discussing Iran. There are lots of Iranian refugees in my diocese. There are several Farsi-speaking clergy and several Farsi worshipping congregations. Perhaps Iran—along with Myanmar, which the noble Lord, Lord Alton, spoke about so eloquently—represents what happens when long-standing authoritarian Governments begin to face serious challenge.
One particularly distressing development in Iran is the increased use of maiming rather than killing. Not only does that reduce the fatality figures that inevitably dominate the news cycle but it can be politically expedient. As we have seen in the past in parts of Africa and elsewhere, if you kill someone, you make their family your enemy. If you maim someone, you make their family their carers.
How can the UK Government better support those at risk from the most oppressive regimes? We have debated refugee status so many times in this House— I will not go there tonight—but what can we do to support those at risk from the most oppressive regimes, particularly when those regimes are beginning to collapse?
We need to be alert to a lot of places where perhaps there are not a lot of atrocities committed at the moment but there is great potential in the future. I worry greatly about the situation in India—the increasing violence and the way in which the current regime in India does little to restrict that violence and its more extreme adherents and followers. The situation there has deteriorated dramatically over the last 10 years. Christians, Muslims and other minority groups are often picked on and treated in the most appalling manner. I will not go into a great list. That is an example where I fear that one of the problems we face is that our own commercial interests can trump challenging atrocities.
I remember an OQ that the noble Lord, Lord Alton, asked about a year ago, and I came in behind him. It was about West Papua, and we were told, “Indonesia is an important trading partner; we can’t get too cross with it”. I am old enough to remember the ethical foreign policy of the incoming Blair Government in 1997. That did not last very long, did it? Are we now in an era when UK commercial interest trumps—and the pun is intended—any matters of morality? That was the principle that justified the worst excesses of our own colonial history in centuries past. Does it have to be how we choose to exercise our foreign policy in 2026?