Israel and Palestine

Lord Desai Excerpts

Thursday 13th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, for getting time for this debate.

I will start by saying that next year we will have the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, and in many ways what is going on in the Middle East right now—not just in Israel, Palestine and Syria, but what has already happened in Iraq and so on—is basically cleaning up the mess left by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. We played a big role in dismantling the Ottoman Empire and in the unsettled business of the borders of Syria, Iraq and Kurdistan. All those problems are still there and we are still trying to solve them. Indeed, we see from Syria how bloody it can get if people do not take a reasonable view of where they belong.

I have always held the view, which was once upon a time held in the Labour Party, that the two-state solution is not viable. There is a single piece of land and two peoples each believe they have an historic right to it, going back to time immemorial. In some points of view they are both right; they are both passionate; and of course the settlement that has been made has not satisfied anybody—neither the winners nor the losers.

I have always believed that we ought to abandon the search for a two-state solution in drawing or not drawing boundaries. There ought to be one multi-ethnic, multireligious state in that territory which can accommodate the Arabs and the Jews together so that they can live in harmony and peace. It will be the land of both those people, not exclusively of one of them. That is why the only sensible solution to this problem—but of course it will not happen, because nobody gives up what they have, especially when it comes to land. The history of the 20th century and now the 21st century is littered with land disputes in which people have killed each other in incredible numbers.

I do not know how we can create a neutral force of well-intentioned people who can promote the idea that it is possible to have a state in the Holy Land in which Muslims, Jews and Christians can live together. Jerusalem, after all, is the centre of all three religions. Somehow, because they are ultimately the same people—they are not different people—I hope that at some stage somebody, somewhere, will start a movement to create a single, peaceful, multifaith state in that territory.

I am reminded of how we solved the problem of Northern Ireland. There was a very passionate dispute there among people of the same religion but different sects. It took a long time—100 years—but we solved it. There was the good will to solve it, and I hope that we can solve this problem.

Outcome of the European Union Referendum

Lord Desai Excerpts

Wednesday 6th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure and a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Norton—and just as he stuck to his speciality, I will stick to mine.

The women’s movement has taught us the very interesting slogan: “what part of no don’t you understand?” I say, “What part of ‘out’ do people not understand?”. People say that the referendum was based on too simple a question, but a referendum cannot be based on multiple-choice questions. It was in or out, and the message is that we are out. It is our duty to implement what the people told us.

Forget about the fact that they were misinformed. We have fought elections, and do we think that people were better informed in elections than in the referendum? Do we not think that people were made false promises in manifestos? I belong to the Labour Party, where every conference is about the betrayal of manifesto promises. The people may be illiterate; they may be racist; but they are the people and they were right. Our duty is to implement.

Secondly, on Thursday 23 June we had an economy. Today we have the same economy. It has not changed. It has not collapsed. Whenever the stock market collapses, people say, “The fundamentals are all right”. They never talk about fundamentals when the stock market is rising. I think that the fundamentals are perfectly sound. The British economy has not run away anywhere. The same people are working in the same jobs with the same ingenuity and enterprise. I also believe that the forecasts of recession are exaggerated. If we keep our heads there will be no reason for any panic or large-scale capital outflow because this happens still to be one of the most prosperous and productive economies—as it was on Thursday 23 June, and as it is today.

I would say only one thing about the right honourable gentleman the Chancellor. I expected him to be out there on Friday morning, giving the message that I am giving. He should have come out and said, “Don’t panic”. He might have added, “I don’t like this result but the economy is sound, and from there we proceed”—because we do not want to make mistakes in false panic. Let us remember that.

I will move on to what to do next. There are two phrases that people are confusing. One is the divorce. We have decided on a divorce, and then of course there is the problem of remarriage. What arrangements will we make when we are out? Shall we come back in with half a step, or really pretend that it never happened and be friends ever after, and act a little bit like Switzerland, Norway or whatever?

These things are sequential. The technicalities may be left to lawyers, but first we have to negotiate the out. The divorce has to be negotiated. There are 6,987—or however many—pieces of legislation that we have to review and decide how many of them to accept or not accept. It will be an enormous task. A friend of mine who works in the private sector said that one leading agency had made some contingency plans. He told me that two months ago they had decided to hire 4,000 people in case Brexit was voted for—and they have done that, let me assure you. The Government may have to hire 10,000 extra people to get through this, because it is going to be an enormous task. We will need a very large Joint Committee of both Houses of Parliament to be able to absorb the amount of work which has to be done. I think that the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, will have to bear most of the burden—and good luck to him.

Once we have worked out the divorce, we should work out what alternative arrangements we want. As far as I can understand—though I may be wrong—legally, those things are treated as separate negotiations by the European Council. We may be able to do something but first the divorce has to be worked out. Since the divorce will take two years from whenever we trigger Article 50, we are looking at the end of 2018 or 2019. Until then, we are in the EU; everything is fine, all the grants and agreements are still working, we are still in low-carbon territory and so on. So let us all calm down, let us say that we may be in this position until the end of 2018 or maybe the middle of 2019. Our rearrangement negotiations will start then, but it is very hard to predict how long they will take. They may take another two years.

Regarding Norway or Switzerland, I have one suggestion, which your Lordships may or may not like. The WTO option is the only option that does not require negotiations; it is a case of, “Okay, we have done the divorce, we will walk away, thank you very much”. In the remain campaign there were two tendencies that were mixed up. One was the liberal, free-trade element of the Conservative Party, which has never liked the customs union logic of the European Union. They are Adam Smith people, not Friedrich List people, and good luck to them; they got a bit nervous when they won, but that is another issue. If we are in the free-trade, liberal area, WTO is the best option—and, since everybody else is in the WTO, we may as well be there. That was the promise made by a lot of people. It is something that we had until 1973, so I do not know why we could not try it again. So I will just say: first the divorce, then the WTO—good luck.

EU Foreign and Security Strategy (EUC Report)

Lord Desai Excerpts

Tuesday 7th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, for his committee’s excellent report. Its title is “Towards a more effective EU foreign and security strategy”, and I will concentrate on just how we can get a more effective strategy.

Given that the EU, despite its size, total income and so on, has 28 separate foreign policies, which the 28 member states are entitled to have, the question is: what can the EU, as a sort of weak confederation, do to have an effective security strategy? One almost feels like quoting Dr Johnson who, in another context, mentioned a dog standing on its hind legs: it is not that it is done well—the remarkable thing is that it is done at all.

I note one great success the EU has had: the policy on Iran. It is a significant achievement of the office of the high representative—which was of course lately occupied by my noble friend Lady Ashton—that somehow, the EU ended up playing a much more pivotal role in the delicate negotiations than anyone expected. If we ask why that was so, it is because while the EU is a large collection of countries, it is non-threatening as far as Iran is concerned. Iran does not trust the US, the UK or Russia to have its interests at heart, but it somehow thought that the EU being there was a guarantee of fair play in the process. Perhaps one of the things the EU ought to reflect on is how to exploit that advantage—being large but having a low profile—because it is convenient and helpful at certain times.

While that was a success, it did not work that well as regards Syria. Let us look at the Syria process. Of course, the EU was a late joiner in that process; it should have been there right at the beginning when the conference was being organised. As I have told noble Lords before, my own preference is that the conference should be not only on Syria but on all the interconnected Middle Eastern problems. The EU could have taken a much bigger lead in that process than it has, and perhaps there may yet be time for it to play a more significant role.

The third issue is the refugee and migrants problem. Here, there has been a substantial failure on the part of the EU because there is nobody who corresponds to a high representative on refugee policy. Individual countries have tried to take the initiative, especially Germany, as we saw eventually in the negotiations with Turkey. But there are a lot of differences among member countries as to whether the initiative taken by Germany in dealing with Turkey was a success. That tells us that there is a possibility of achieving good results if there is a single high representative who can be trusted by member countries to represent their interests. At the same time, the high representative has to act early enough and strategically enough. If that had been the case with the Syrian process, there would have been more success.

It is clear that there is no agreement—not even a weak agreement—among the 28 countries on the best policy on admitting refugees. The refugee problem has been confused with the problem of migrants. The refugees come from Syria and the Middle East, and the migrants come from north Africa, and they have a completely different motivation. The refugees are involuntarily displaced, whereas migrants come voluntarily, and somehow we have not been able to make a distinction between which ones to be nice to and which ones not to be nice to. The lesson that I take from reading the report is that, if there is better co-ordination among the 28 member countries and if there is someone like a high representative to speak for a united policy, the chances of success will be greater; otherwise, there is bound to be failure.

That leads me to make a suggestion. In relation to the eurozone, there is a council—the eurogroup—headed by a president, Mr Dijsselbloem, which formulates economic policy on the euro. I do not see why there should not be a similar group underpinning the high representative to help properly to represent the policies of the various countries. Maybe thought should also be given to having a high commissioner for refugees. Such a role will be needed because the refugee problem will not go away any time soon.

Having said that, the report is very welcome because it raises these questions. Whether we are a member of the European Union or not, the report will continue to be relevant not just to the rest of the world but to us as well.

Middle East and North Africa

Lord Desai Excerpts

Thursday 30th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Cope of Berkeley. Of all 35 speakers, I am the only one who is not a child of Abraham, which at least relieves me of a lot of responsibility for the situation in the Middle East. I see the Middle Eastern situation as an unsolved problem caused by the First World War. Lots of problems were posed by the First World War and solving them has occupied much of the 20th century. For example, I do not think that the problem of Germany was solved until 1991, when it became a united democratic country and part of the liberal democratic order. The repercussions of the Bolshevik revolution took until 1991 to sort out; eastern Europe was finally freed at that time. The noble Lord, Lord Cope, referred to the Middle East and the problem of the Ottoman Empire.

As a principal ally in the First World War, we knew that the Ottoman Empire would lose the war and decline, and that we would demolish it. As part of that, there was the Sykes-Picot treaty, which I have mentioned before in this House, and the Balfour Declaration. The Sykes-Picot treaty drew arbitrary boundaries and all that ISIS has shown is how arbitrary those boundaries are as to where nations can be formed.

My own view is a very pessimistic one. I do not think there will ever be a two-state solution. I do not think the two-state solution was ever the best thing to do. I remember in Labour Party discussions back in the 1970s, we thought a single multi-faith state was the only solution to the Palestine-Israel problem and that is not going to happen. The single multi-faith state is not going to happen; the two-state solution is not going to happen; there is going to be occupation; there will be things built on occupied territory; and there will be a continual war. It is somewhat like Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films, in which two sides fight and fight until they have both destroyed each other— and that is when peace prevails. Maybe I am being too pessimistic but, realistically, after all these years, I do not see why it should be solved.

I am much more concerned, however, about what is happening in the rest of the Middle East. I have spoken on this before. I believe that this is one of the most tragic situations for the Muslim world that we have witnessed in recent years. I think it was the noble Baronesses, Lady Falkner and Lady Nicholson, who mentioned the genocide of the Yazidis. That is indeed a very serious problem. But Muslims are killing Muslims in the highest numbers possible. Sunnis are killing Sunnis, Sunnis are killing Shias and the other way around. It has not just been going on for four years. This Middle East war has been going on for 40 years, more or less since 1973, after the last Arab-Israeli war, which was lost by the Arabs. As the noble Lord, Lord Sacks, said in his brilliant speech, at that stage the Muslims lost their faith in a secular democratic alternative. They decided that they had to abandon secularism, abandon all those stories of socialism and so on, and go back to religion.

The religion they have gone back to has been heavily subsidised by Saudi Arabia, and is a particularly extreme form of Islam: Wahhabism. Then you have Islamism, which has done more to destroy Muslim majority states than it has done harm to us. We are all worried about terrorism coming to our shores, but what Islamists have done to Algeria and other countries, in both the Maghreb and the Middle East, is very serious. From Pakistan to Algeria, Islamism is the enemy of Muslim-majority states.

There is nothing much we can do but we have to be aware that, because we have gone in—we have been in and out—this war will not be over any time soon. There is no quick solution to the ISIL or ISIS problem. We will have to, if not destroy it, at least de-fang it. We cannot kill an ideology but it will become less harmful than before.

I will say two more things, which I have said before but are worth repeating. The first is we have never had a large international conference on all the problems of the Middle East. Versailles was not a great success but at least everybody got into it. I have said this before. Again and again from the government Benches, I have been told to forget it, but I will say it once more. The problems of Kurdistan, Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran and even Israel and Palestine are interconnected. They have a common history. We cannot solve one without solving the others. It is at least worth trying, even while the war is going on. We owe ourselves and the Muslim population of the world, something better than what is going on right now.

Lastly, a lot of people have remarked that many of our young people have gone to Syria or Iraq to fight for ISIL. I think we should not call them extremists and we should not threaten them with immediate arrest and prosecution if they come back. These are our children. Some of our other children take to alcohol, take to drugs and join gangs, and we see the effects of that. When we see that, we feel we ought to do something positive to get them out of their addiction and out of their problems. Now some young people—men and women—have taken to believing in extremism. It happens. It is very attractive to believe that you have a higher cause than your daily living in a rich consumer-oriented society. So they have gone there. However, it is up to us to understand why they have gone there and tell them that when they come back we will try to rehabilitate them and help them re-establish their lives, and not immediately threaten them with prosecution. If they are fed up with ISIL, they will want to come back. We ought to welcome them.

Middle East: Jihadism

Lord Desai Excerpts

Thursday 19th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, for getting time to introduce this subject. I am going to take a very different stance from him. I spoke in the two debates that we had on Syria on 1 July and 29 August last year. I think that we are witnessing one of the biggest tragedies for Muslims in the world. Let us forget about the idea that we are responsible for everything bad in the whole world, and we should forget about asking, “What are we going to do about solving the problem now?”. This tragedy has been going on for about 40 years, if not since the Sykes-Picot affair of 1917.

Modernity has been a challenge to Islam. There have been different responses to it, especially since the three defeats that the secular and socialist Arab Governments faced against Israel in 1948, 1967 and 1973. There has been a revival of fundamentalism, a return to religion, and within that we have noticed the rise of Islamism, which is more of an enemy of Muslim majority states than of anyone else. The Islamists’ whole programme has been to undermine civilian Governments of Muslim majority nations, whether they be democratic or authoritarian. This latest phase of the tragedy has been going on since the Syrian civil war started. I remember saying in the two previous debates that this was bound to spill over into Iraq. It is a Sunni/Shia war, and Sunni/Shia wars are not something that any western nation, with whatever intention, can solve.

My concern is not what we did or did not do. My concern is whether the world can somehow devise a way of saving the civilian population who are currently suffering a lot of misery. There are refugees in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan because of the Syrian war. The latest phase of the war in Iraq is causing a lot of misery. Obviously we are reluctant to intervene as western nations. No one has a desire to maintain the international order, as we did. That will has gone. We did not intervene in Syria, and we are not going to intervene in Iraq. We are not going to send armies. We might not even bomb the place.

However, we have a duty to protect to human lives. The question is what are we doing on that. I do not think we can go around saying, “The good guys are Iran and the Iraqi Shias, and the bad guys are the jihadists who are the Sunnis”. That is the wrong way of looking at the problem. The problem is a human tragedy and it has to be prevented to the extent that we can through humanitarian efforts, peacemaking efforts and rehabilitation efforts.

One presumes that the United Nations should be somewhere in the centre of the action. Until now, in the public discussions that we have seen, the United Nations has not been mentioned. The United Nations Security Council failed to do anything in the Syrian case because there was a conflict of interest among the permanent members. It is very much the responsibility of our Government and any other Governments who have force in the United Nations to start a big proposal to do something about humanitarian aid and the protection of the civil population because this war is not going to stop any time soon. To the extent that we can reduce harm or people’s misery, we should do so. What are the Government doing about that?

Right now, this problem may look like it is in Syria and Iraq, but it has reached as far as Pakistan. In Pakistan, the battle going on between the Taliban in the north-west and the democratically elected Government has just entered a new phase. At the same time there is a tremendous Shia/Sunni conflict going on in Pakistan. It happened in Karachi not all that ago, and it goes on. Whether these jihadists are a danger to us is a separate question. The question right now is about what can we do as members of the international community to reduce suffering, solve the refugee problem, alleviate the situation and along the way, if we can, propose a solution to the political problem.

I shall repeat what I said once before. The noble Baroness has rejected the suggestion twice, so I am expecting a third rejection, but the world needs a general conference on all the Middle Eastern countries’ problems: the problems of Iran and Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Kurdistan, the Shia/Sunni conflict and the Israel/Palestine problem. All those problems are interconnected—we have not taken that seriously. We have taken them piecemeal. That may or may not happen. I feel the more urgent task is to devise a strategy for relieving suffering. If we can do that, we will have done our best.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Desai Excerpts

Tuesday 10th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great honour to follow the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon. In the short time that I have, I want to do two things. The first is to try out a somewhat novel idea, and maybe it will be one for the Government to take away and work on, and the second is to talk a little more about the manufacturing strategy that has been discussed.

We have now had four years of austerity. By and large, the deflationary move has been successful inasmuch as the economy has now revived. However, there is a particular anomaly which I want to point out and which has not attracted much attention. Our debt is about £1,300 billion, give or take £100 billion here or there. The surprising thing is that the policy of quantitative easing followed by the Bank of England means that the Bank owes £385 billion of that debt. Therefore, we are in the peculiar situation of the Government paying interest to the Bank of England, which the Bank of England returns to the Government with thanks.

Nobody has said this yet, although my noble friend Lord Myners mentioned it in the debate on the Budget, but the Government could take that £385 billion of debt owed by the Bank of England and cancel it. However, there is a snag: against the £385 billion of assets, the Bank of England has created a liability—that is, it has printed money. Therefore, I think that the best thing for the Government to do would be to sell the Bank of England £385 billion-worth of zero-interest bonds so that the books could be balanced and the Government could say what interest should be paid on the £385 billion. This is a very simple, effective device which nobody has thought about but I offer it to the Government out of the goodness of my heart.

By and large, monetary policy has not worked. At best, you could say that it has prevented things getting worse, but only active fiscal policy can do things which monetary policy cannot do, and a device such as that would release funds for fiscal policy to do more than it has been able to do so far. In a sense, it would give the Government a clever escape hatch through which they could save £30 billion or whatever, depending on how much interest they pay on the debt. That is something that I hope somebody will think about.

It may be said, “You can’t do that because you’ll have to print money against this debt”, but the money has been printed and is out there. With QE, the Bank of England bought £385 billion-worth of debt from the market. One alternative would be for it to sell it back and withdraw the money, but we do not need that. Inflation is very low. The central banks are competing with each other to raise the rate of inflation up to 2%. I thought that I would never live to see it, having lived through the great monetarist days when the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, was cracking the whip with his policy. So we already have a situation where the money is out there. We want the money to go out and stimulate the economy. The Government are paying too much interest— about a quarter of it to the Bank of England, which makes no sense—but if they think slightly outside the box, they could improve the prospects for the economy.

I shall now get a little more down to earth. When I came to your Lordships’ House roughly 23 years ago, on 18 June 1991, my maiden speech was on manufacturing and why there was no future in manufacturing at all. We ought to stop getting obsessed about manufacturing because it diverts attention from the economy. In his brilliant maiden speech, the noble Lord, Lord Bamford, pointed out that manufacturing is very valuable. Of course it is very valuable—there is no doubt about that—but it does not need to be expanded. Over the past 23 years since I made that speech, manufacturing has shrunk and the economy has become more prosperous.

The point is that in manufacturing we have concentrated on genuinely high-value-added jobs in high tech, which is the only place where we can survive in international competitive business. The UK economy cannot survive in labour-intensive manufacturing. You cannot create millions of jobs in UK manufacturing—there are people in China, Indonesia and Malaysia who will beat us at that—so we have to concentrate our manufacturing on high-value-added, high-tech products. It is a very competitive business which requires as a minimum, as noble Lords have said, a lot of research on the triple helix and so on. A good higher education sector is also required. Along with that, we have to be quite ruthless about eliminating non-competitive business and not subsidising it.

If we are to have a prosperous economy, we need a small highly valuable manufacturing sector whose contribution to national income in percentage terms is way above its contribution to employment in percentage terms—that is, we have to have the most productive people going into manufacturing. That is why this song and dance about apprenticeships surprises me. In around the 1880s, there were government reports that we were falling behind Germany. It was asked why the Germans were ahead of us. It was said that they had apprenticeships and we did not. Some 130 years later, we are still talking about apprenticeships. Nobody needs 2 million apprentices—certainly not in manufacturing.

Talking about apprentices produces a false concreteness —it looks as though people are doing something useful and highly skilled. We need a lot of people in healthcare, for example. Our real labour needs are going to be in what we might call the soft industries: healthcare, education and the arts. The arts are a very valuable and profitable part of the economy and one in which we have a comparative advantage. Therefore, when thinking about apprenticeships or the economy, we should not think too much about expanding manufacturing. Economic prosperity depends on doing what we do best, and very often that is not the concrete but the abstract. Britain is very good at abstract things—one has only to think of Shakespeare. We can sell good, expertly made products abroad. Let us stick to that and not get into metal bashing.

India: 1984 Operation in Sri Harmandir Sahib

Lord Desai Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warsi]

I am sure that these matters will be looked at. My noble friend will be aware that this Government are hugely committed to the issue of transparency, which is why we brought in the 20-year rule, bringing the period down from 30 years. It is important that documentation—subject of course to national intelligence issues and national security interests— is put into the public domain. The documentation that was destroyed was part of a 25-year review. As my noble friend says, it was fortuitous that elements of that documentation were present in other departments. I am sure that lessons will be learnt from this incident.

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness was quite correct in saying that Operation Blue Star was the responsibility of the Indian Government. However, there have been reports in the press that the advice given by the military adviser to the Government in India was to not undertake Operation Blue Star but to wait out the people who were in the temple and settle the issue much less violently than was the case. Has any evidence been unearthed to confirm that? If so, would it not be to the advantage of all concerned to make it public?

[Baroness Warsi]

The noble Lord may have heard in my Statement that the advice given was that entering the temple should be seen as a last resort and that a negotiated settlement was the right and the first way to proceed in these matters. In any event, it is clear what advice was given by the British officer and it is also clear that that advice was not followed. That is also an important element of the Cabinet Secretary’s report.

Iran and Syria

Lord Desai Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warsi]

I can give my noble friend confidence by saying that the chargé whom we have appointed is someone who has served in Tehran before; in fact he was the deputy ambassador there. Indeed, when I spoke to him this morning, he was brushing up on his Farsi. He knows the country well, is incredibly well equipped and is the right man for the job. Of course, it is an important role and we hope that he will visit the country before the end of the month.

The Russians have been working closely with my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary, in relation to Syria and Iran as part of the E3+3. They have indeed taken a leading role in relation to the destruction of chemical weapons. It is a strong relationship; it is a relationship which we know we need to continue to work on because their role is crucial to achieving a settlement.

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, in the Statement read out by the noble Baroness it was clear that there are three conflicts: the negotiations with Iran, the Syrian conflict and the Israel-Palestine negotiations. Is there scope for expanding the Geneva process to be much more inclusive and to take these various things together because they are interconnected? The Minister mentioned, for example, that the Syrian National Coalition has recognised the Kurdish Syrian party and I am sure that the Turkish Kurdish party and the Iraqi Kurds are also trying to get together. We might be at a crucial juncture in the Middle East and it might be helpful to have a much more general Geneva conference, expanded to include all these problems together.

[Baroness Warsi]

The noble Lord makes an important point but I think that he will probably accept that although each of these situations has overlapping issues, they are uniquely complex in their own ways. To try to bring the various issues together might make it too difficult to resolve any of them.

Syria and the Middle East

Lord Desai Excerpts

Monday 1st July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, we are having a very rich debate. My noble friend Lord Wood started by mentioning the collapse of the Ottoman empire. We were then treated to very good historical accounts by the noble Lords, Lord Howell and Lord Ashdown, while the noble Lord, Lord Bates, gave us a flavour of what he has been reading. I could have spared him the trouble had he read my book, Rethinking Islamism, where I do it in 100 pages.

Let me put it this way. I see the Syrian civil war as just one chapter in a 40 year-old crisis of Islamic society in the Middle East. It started in 1973 after the third defeat of the Arab armies by Israel and of course the quadrupling of the price of oil. The secular socialist alternative in all the countries of the Middle East lost its prestige and a lot of people in the region turned to religion as the answer to their problems. If we follow that trail—we could go back to the Sykes-Picot affair, but let me stick to past 40 years—in country after country, and between countries, there has been a revival of religion, a hardening of Sunni and Shia identities, and among the Sunnis the revival of Wahhabism and Salafism, which has been encouraged partly because the Saudis got lots of money from the rise in oil prices.

The Iran-Iraq war lasted for eight years. It was one of the biggest wars in the Middle East, but none of us intervened. We may have supplied arms, but we did not intervene. Saddam proceeded to destroy as much as he could all the Shias’ means of livelihood in Iraq. I supported the Iraq intervention, not because of weapons of mass destruction but because I considered Saddam to be a danger to his own people. We have to think further along those lines. We now have a much more explicit chapter in the Shia-Sunni conflict in the Middle East and it is not going to stop. Whether we intervene, whether we have a Geneva II or a Geneva VI, the conflict will break out in another location, because this is a deep crisis in the Muslim society of the Middle East that has not yet been resolved as it has to confront modernity and its own weak position in the Middle East and to reconcile religion and civic life. We have here something that we ought to take a much broader view of.

If we do not intervene now, we will intervene later. I assume that it is going to go on and I do not think that we have the choice of not intervening. Sooner or later we shall intervene because this war is not going to come to an end any time soon. If we consider this to be a long-running Shia-Sunni conflict, we have to ask what the dangers are. In this case, and for the first time in 40 years, there is a serious danger of this war becoming much more general across the Middle East than any previous war has done, such as that between Iran and Iraq.

Noble Lords have already mentioned that Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan have been affected. Very soon, Israel will be affected. Given the strategic weapons that the Russians are giving the Syrians, it will not be much longer before there is a general war in the Middle East. It has nothing to do with whether we intervene or not; the dynamic of the war is such that there will end up being a general war across the Middle East. Whether we do or do not give any weapons, we will end up with Sunni terrorist groups or Shia terrorist groups. It is true to say that we are watching a general conflagration in the Middle East, and unless we understand its full dimensions we will be too preoccupied with our own particular, narrow and local role in this conflict to see the more general picture.

We ought to be thinking about this in the following terms. Would an intervention on our part now bring about all the unintended consequences that the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, told us about? There are always unintended consequences following any action, so that is nothing new. Obviously we will do some things wrong, we will get into a mess and it will take a long time, but eventually some good may come out of it. There is one good thing that we would like to come out of any intervention, whether an armed intervention or a diplomatic one: a lessening of the probability of this crisis continuing for another 40 years. It would have to be a general confluence of all the Middle Eastern countries, not just Syria. The Israel-Palestine question would have to be a part of it. Unless we take a view on the very comprehensive nature of what is going on here, we will not be effective in our intervention. Obviously if there is an armed intervention, it would be better if we had friends to come along with us, but it is more important that we get along with them and take a comprehensive view of where we can intervene so that the next chapter is not even bloodier than this one already is.

Let me make a couple of points that are perhaps more controversial. The two subsequent big questions are going to be Iran and the problem of Israel-Palestine. I have not actually understood why Iran cannot have nuclear weapons. If India, Pakistan and Israel can have them, why cannot the Iranians? Pakistan is a very unstable democracy; or rather, not even a democracy at all. The more countries that have acquired nuclear weapons since 1945, the less the probability that anyone will use them. Indeed, nuclear weapons are among the few weapons that have not been used since their invention, unlike gunpowder. We ought to take a much broader view of what we object to in the Iranian plan for nuclear weapons. Obviously there is the fear that if Iran has nuclear weapons, the existence of Israel will be threatened. Therefore, any general and comprehensive dialogue on the Middle East has to include Iran’s ability to have nuclear weapons while at the same time guaranteeing that the Israeli nation will survive and is not threatened by anyone in the Middle East.

That leads to the Israel-Palestine problem, which a number of noble Lords have talked about. I do not believe that the two-state solution has any future, but I am old enough, and I have been a member of the Labour Party for 40 years, to recall that a long time ago the party had a one-state solution: a single, secular, multifaith state in which Muslim Arabs, Jews and Christians could live together. That will not happen and we will never be at peace.

Pakistan: Religious Violence

Lord Desai Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd May 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, we are very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, for bringing this topic to our attention. He described the problem, and I do not need to add very much. I shall concentrate on the why of this problem and on what we can do about it as an interested party.

A persistent problem since the foundation of Pakistan is its duality. Although Muhammad Jinnah supported a Muslim nation in pre-independence India, he was not an Islamist or a very religious person. He wanted a western, liberal regime for the large Muslim population in the subcontinent. As it happened, the majority of Muslims lived in Hindu-majority areas, and Muslims in Muslim-majority areas were a minority of Muslims. Pakistan was established, but soon after its establishment, Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan died, so there has been an identity problem. Is Pakistan a western, liberal-type democratic regime or a state founded upon the Islamic faith that should put forward Islamic policies? Along the way, especially after the departure of East Pakistan—Bangladesh—a persistent problem has been the tendency to emphasise Islamic anger, most particularly by military dictators who have no democratic legitimacy. Zia-ul-Haq played the Islamic card and was encouraged to do so because at that time the Americans were interested in getting the Russians out of Afghanistan, so they aided Zia-ul-Haq in his programmes.

To some extent, some of the emphasis on orthodoxy and Islamism has been engendered by international forces, but there is a problem that even in establishing an Islamic nation, sectarian violence within Islam is the most serious problem of Pakistan. As the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, has already pointed out, it is a Sunni/Shia, Sunni/Ahmadi battle. There is also a battle against Christians. There has been violence against the non-Muslim minority in Pakistan, which was 10% at the time of independence, but has now dwindled to about 2% or 2.5%.

How do we understand and tackle this religious violence? As the noble Lord pointed out, you have to see Pakistan not as a part of south Asia but as the eastern limit of western Asia. The tensions in Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Iran between Sunnis and Shias—Iraq is the battleground of Sunnis and Shias—are now happening in Pakistan. One thing we ought to be able to do is to contribute to a real understanding of why it has happened. In UK universities, government, NGOs and embassies, we have expertise; we ought to understand why the problem persists. How much of this problem is religious and how much economic and social? Are there economic and social roots to this battle between Shias and Sunnis? In India, for instance, some of the so-called communal riots have economic and social roots. They may be jockeying for land, jobs or economic resources.

Our first task should be to deepen our understanding so that we can help Pakistani society and the Pakistani Government to understand and tackle this problem. Obviously, we cannot say anything to a sovereign country about how it should conduct its affairs.

I think that going to the UN Security Council, as the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, suggested, would be a drastic step and I do not know whether the Security Council would actually decide anything, given the Cold War differences that persist. As an interested power with a large diaspora from Pakistan, we really ought to try to help Pakistan to reach an understanding and do whatever we can to ameliorate the situation.

The most interesting thing that has happened in Pakistan is the establishment of a new Government. For the first time in its history, Pakistan has had a proper constitutional transition from one democratically elected Government to another. Pakistan may be turning over a new leaf. Our task is to be there to help Pakistan improve matters at home as far as possible.