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Middle East

I commend the speech of the hon. Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Richard Burden) and the enormous amount of work he has done over a prolonged period to advance the understanding of the situation in the occupied territories as chairman of the Britain-Palestine all-party group. It is a pleasure to work with him on that group as vice-chairman. One of the purposes of these debates should be to advance our understanding of the region, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Mr. Turner) on obtaining this debate and on his speech. I do not necessarily agree with every dot and comma, but I agree with his general thesis. The past five years have been a disaster for the British national interest in the middle east. There has been constant debate about how we arrived at that position, but whatever the reasons, the reputation of the United Kingdom has taken a heavy hit, and the war in Lebanon has made that position even worse. The right hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Jane Kennedy) said that we are engaged in a war against our way of life. I urge caution in the use of such rhetoric. There is a conflict, but much of it is about the future and shape of Islam, and we are in many ways witnesses to it. When we take part in that conflict and try to act on the side of the people who want a rational interpretation of Islam consistent with liberal western values, often the consequence of our policy is precisely the opposite of what we intended. Direct foreign intervention in a number of countries has in fact helped the people who really do have very different values from ours. A week ago, I returned from a day in Syria and four days in the Lebanon with the Conservative Middle East Council. We had an outstanding visit, and I am grateful to the ambassadors of both countries for helping us to arrange it. We did not ask our embassy in Syria to assist, because it is Government policy that we should not talk to the Syrians—which I think is a mistake. I understand why the Government wish to isolate and punish Syria for its activities, some of which, in the light of the Hariri inquiry, look deeply unattractive. However, Syria is governed by a secular, socialist party—in name—and we have driven Syria into the arms of Iran. When we ask Syrian politicians how that has happened, with two Governments with very different attitudes now in almost formal alliance, we find that they feel that my enemy’s enemy is my friend. Following the sense of hope that accompanied the arrival in office of President Bashar al-Assad, we should continue to work at reinforcing what we believe and understand to be his policy to aim at modernising Syria and breaking it away from its past record, particularly under his father. One of the encouraging parts of my visit to Syria was to meet Deputy Prime Minister al-Dardari, who is in charge of economic affairs and is a most impressive figure. He has a clear idea of the economic challenge faced by Syria and the need to liberalise and modernise its economy. When we engaged with him about the capacity of Syria to do that in terms of its administrative structure and ability to find the entrepreneurs to deliver economic modernisation, he had a clear idea of the difficulties that he faced, but it was very clear to us that he enjoys the unqualified support of the President in the effort to modernise the economy. If the system is open and liberalised and can bring benefits by, for example, providing transit routes from port facilities to Iraq, there is an opportunity for the Syrian economy to develop, and that can only be a good thing. The right hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree said that we know the history of Hezbollah. I am not sure that we do. Lebanese politics is horrendously complicated: the Lebanese ambassador once said that if one had begun to think that one understood it, it was a clear demonstration that one had not. The history of conflict in the Lebanon between all the different groups that make up Lebanese society is long and involved and goes back many hundreds of years. For example, we went to the Shatila refugee camp. We had all heard of the massacre of the Palestinians in 1982 when the Israeli armed forces surrounded the camp and enabled the Phalange to carry out the massacre. What I was not aware of was that the camp was entirely flattened between 1985 and 1987 as an extension of a row between President al-Assad of Syria and Yasser Arafat of the PLO. Although the camp that we saw had been completely rebuilt since 1987, it still looked as if it came out of one of the worst parts of medieval London with buildings on top of each other, very narrow streets, poor light and frankly appalling conditions. One goes from there to the wealthy side of Lebanon, the success of entrepreneurs and the amazing renaissance of Beirut. In trying to understand Hezbollah, we should avoid characterising its supporters too simply. One example will suffice. I spent some time talking to a young Shi’a Muslim man who was a convinced Hezbollah supporter, but when I tell hon. Members that his occupation of choice was clubbing and his drink of choice was vodka, they can see that to characterise Hezbollah as some fundamentalist Islamic organisation might be slightly wide of the mark. Hezbollah enjoys enormous public support in southern Lebanon from the Shi’a Muslims, because it is seen as the liberator of most of Lebanon in 2000. Lebanon remains to be fully liberated. The issue of the Shebaa farms continues to exist and to give Hezbollah a cause and a reason to remain armed as a militia. If nothing else, it is essential that Israel deals with that excuse for Hezbollah to remain armed. One beneficial consequence of the war—there are not many—is that the Lebanese army is now deployed right down to the border in southern Lebanon, and there will be a substantial United Nations force, but we need to remove as far as possible any excuses that Hezbollah has to remain an armed organisation within a state, and the continued occupation of part of Lebanon is one of those reasons.