[Mr Philip Hollobone in the Chair] — Arms Exports

Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall at 2:05 pm on 13 December 2012.

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Photo of Mike Gapes Mike Gapes Labour, Ilford South 2:05, 13 December 2012

Thank you, Mr Hollobone. I apologise for being slightly late for this debate. I had responsibilities to attend to at the Inter-Parliamentary Union.

I congratulate, the Chair of the Committees, my right hon. Friend Sir John Stanley, on his comprehensive and excellent introduction. As always, he has gone into great detail and shown that our Committees are assiduous in their work. I have served on the Committees on Arms Export Controls in both of their incarnations—first as the Quad and then as the CAEC—for many years. I have also been on the Defence Committee, and then on the Foreign Affairs Committee during the last Parliament and this one. It is important to place on the record that the Committees, which are not easy to manage because of the rules under which we operate, have done and continue to do an important job. The Chair plays a particularly important role. That is now being carried out by the right hon. Gentleman, as it was by his predecessor, Roger Berry—he also did an excellent job—in the last Parliament.

It is important to recognise that the Committees do not ever split on party lines and do not normally split on Committee lines. Sometimes, there are tensions between people from the defence, the international development, the foreign affairs and the trade and industry or business sides, but we nevertheless come to an agreed position. When the Government look at our reports, they need to understand that they too should have a joined-up approach. I sometimes get the impression that some parts of the Government are pulling in one direction and other parts in other directions. That is not a party political point; those tensions have always been there. There is nothing wrong with the Prime Minister going to countries that have issues about human rights and the process towards democracy specifically to promote UK arms exports, but there needs to be a common presentation of the context. We cannot have situations in which, internationally, many people think that human rights issues are being downplayed in some countries as opposed to others. I flag that up as a general problem of politics and governance in this country.

I also want to talk about what is about to happen with the European Union arms embargo on Syria. A decision has been taken, apparently at the instigation or with the support of the UK Government, to change the review of the continuation of that arms embargo from three months to one month. It is on the record that in the Syrian conflict or civil war, the Syrian Government are using cluster munitions and, just yesterday, Scud missiles—they presumably got them from Russia, perhaps in the dim and distant past or perhaps more recently. We know that the Iranians are arming the Syrian regime, and that the Governments of Qatar and Turkey have been giving military assistance to the Syrian opposition forces, or at least to elements of them. There is a question about which elements are being well armed, but it is clear that some more extreme jihadist groups, including the one that has just been designated as a terrorist al-Qaeda affiliate by the United States Government, are well armed and involved in the conflict.

Following the decision taken by NATO to supply, authorise and support the deployment of the Patriot anti-missile system in Turkey—presumably to stop stray fire over the border from Syria—is a decision imminent to modify, change or lift the European Union arms embargo on exporting arms to Syria to allow the arming of elements within the Syrian opposition. That raises some important questions of principle, and there are international parallels. We can go back to what happened in the Bosnian civil war, but at that point, it was the state of Bosnia-Herzegovina that was requesting weaponry. Elements in the US, under the Clinton presidency, wished to lift the embargo, but the British Government at that time—Douglas Hurd was the then Foreign Secretary—were vehemently against such action, and the embargo continued.

There is of course the issue of what happened in Kosovo. Other issues also come to mind that set historical precedents. Today, it appears that the Syrian regime is being armed by the Iranians and the Russians. No UN Security Council position is being applied to stop that arming. There may be UN resolutions, but they are weak and ineffective because Russia and China refuse to allow a stronger resolution. At the same time, it is reported clearly in the press that not only the Qataris and the Turks are supporting some of the Syrian opposition, but the French and perhaps the Americans.

Given that discussions have been taking place recently, what is the British Government’s position on the future of arms control and exports and supply of weaponry to elements within Syria? I will not accept just a bland phrase that says, “There is an international embargo through the EU, so we are not supplying.” There is a live debate on this matter. There was a meeting in Qatar recently of some of the key players in the process, including top military, defence and intelligence advisers. We in this Parliament should be informed, and we should be able to discuss and debate the matter. There may be a strong case to be made. I am one of those who have been advocating support for humanitarian

intervention. There may well be a case for supporting those elements in Syria, but it should not be done by subterfuge or in an underhand way, or without full public debate and political accountability.

It is also clear that whatever happens in Syria will have knock-on consequences for its neighbours. This country supplies armaments to many of those neighbours, and we are in a partnership with, and allied to, some of them. We have excellent relations with Turkey, a fellow NATO member. We have excellent relations with Jordan, which, like Turkey, is harbouring many refugees who have fled the civil war in Syria. At this moment, there are 240,000 refugees who have had to flee the country and go into neighbouring states, and there are more than 2 million internally displaced people. An estimated 40,000 people in the region—no one is sure of the exact number—have lost their lives in this conflict, mainly, but not entirely, killed by the brutality of the Assad Ba’athist fascist regime.

Twenty one years ago, when the current Foreign Secretary was a member of the Cabinet, we brought in a no-fly zone to protect the Kurds fleeing into the mountains in the winter. This winter in Syria, hundreds of thousands of people will be fleeing into the mountains, which can get very cold. Many, many people will die because the international humanitarian support will either not get through or will be insufficient.

We are involved in this conflict because of our partnerships, our neighbours and our support for our allies. We also know that things could drag on for months or years, or could come to a very speedy conclusion. We need clarity from the Government about what our position is, what we are doing, and what discussions are going on with our French and American allies and partners, with Turkey and with the Arab states in the region. Furthermore, if a generalised Sunni-Shi’a conflict is going to come out of what is going on in Syria and potentially in Lebanon, which could perhaps spill over into Iraq, we need to think through very carefully the actions we might be taking over the coming weeks and months. That goes beyond the representations and the report that the Chairman introduced, but when we take a decision to supply arms, or not to supply arms, there are long-term political consequences.

A few years ago, during the civil war in Sri Lanka, an arms embargo was put in place and yet when there was a ceasefire, that embargo was not maintained—this was under the previous Government—and the Sri Lankan Government bought all kinds of things, including ammunition, small arms, components and a huge amount of hardware that was used by their armed forces. That ceasefire broke down after 2002, and in 2009 we saw scenes of absolute carnage and brutality when the Sri Lankan armed forces decided to eliminate the Tamil Tigers. I am not here to speak for or defend the Tamil Tigers, but it is clear that there is strong case for the Sri Lankan Government to participate in a proper independent international inquiry into the war crimes that were carried out. Many of those crimes were carried out using weaponry that had been imported from around the world. Officials in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office were unable to tell us whether UK-supplied ammunition, components or weapons were used by Sri Lankan Government forces, but I suspect that they were.

There is a wider issue. My right hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling referred to the Government’s revocation of the 158 licences as a result of the events in the Arab world—I am no longer using the term “Arab spring”. If we look at what is going on in Egypt today and in some other countries, I can no longer talk about a “spring” any more. The Prague spring was, no doubt, the parallel that people wished to draw, but it was not followed by a move to authoritarianism, undemocratic behaviour and a theocracy; it was followed by Vaclav Havel, leading to a democratic transformation of Czechoslovakia and ultimately to the Czech and Slovak states becoming part of the democratic European Union and NATO. It is unclear to me that what is happening in Egypt will have a similar outcome, and it is also unclear whether events elsewhere in the Arab world within 15 or 20 years will be as positive as the developments we have seen on our continent since 1989.

I return to the issue of the revocation of licences. It is clear that the previous Government—the Labour Government—and this coalition Government continued to export materials, weapons and components to authoritarian, undemocratic regimes, regardless of the internal situation in those countries, because there was clearly an economic agenda. There was also a political agenda. If we were trying to wean Gaddafi away from his past terrorist activities—that was the right policy to adopt, and Tony Blair was absolutely right to adopt it—and if we are trying to keep Egypt as a stable country with a “cold peace” with the Israelis, it was probably right that we had to pay some price for those aims.

Nevertheless, as the Committees point out, we did not ask enough questions and our restrictions were not tight enough. As a result, many of the weapons that are now slushing around north Africa, and many of those that are in the hands of Islamist groups and Salafist groups in Egypt, in other parts of Arab north Africa and in Mali, were exported to that region—to Gaddafi in particular—by western European arms manufacturers, with the approval of western European Governments.

We cannot duck that issue, because there are lessons here—from Sri Lanka, and from north Africa. My right hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling said that we in this country have the best parliamentary scrutiny of arms export policy, and probably the best transparency in that regard. Nevertheless, we are not perfect and never will be, and decisions that were made in the past will potentially come back to bite us.

I conclude by congratulating my right hon. Friend. It is very important that the Committees—the four component Committees in this House—continue their work in all political circumstances under this Government, as they did under previous Governments. I hope that those in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, or the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, who draft the responses to the questions we ask will try to persuade the Ministry of Defence and the Department for International Development that we must have a joined-up, holistic, comprehensive and clear approach to these questions. There is a danger that, given understandable commercial and economic pressures, we might take our eye off the ball regarding the long-term implications of what we export or sell.