UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be
published as HC 1583-i
House of COMMONS
MINUTES OF EVIDENCE
TAKEN BEFORE
FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEE
The Middle East
Wednesday 13 September 2006
DR KIM HOWELLS MP, DR PETER GOODERHAM and MR PETER
FENDER
Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 60
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Oral Evidence
Taken before the Foreign Affairs Committee
on Wednesday 13 September 2006
Members present
Mike Gapes, in the Chair
Mr Fabian Hamilton
Mr John Horam
Mr Eric Illsley
Mr Paul Keetch
Andrew Mackinlay
Sandra Osborne
Mr Ken Purchase
Sir John Stanley
Richard Younger-Ross
________________
Witnesses: Dr Kim Howells, a Member of the House,
Minister of State, Dr Peter Gooderham, Director,
Middle East, and Mr Ben Fender, Iran
Desk Officer, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, gave evidence.
Q1 Chairman: Good morning, everybody. Can I welcome you, Kim, and your
colleagues. As you know, this is a
rather unusual event; we have called a special evidence session of our Select Committee
whilst the House is in recess. As you
know, there has been a lot of pressure from many Members of all parties for the
House as a whole to come back, but we as a Committee thought it was important,
whether or not that happened, that we should call a session to discuss the
situation in the Middle East, and that is why we have done this. We are grateful to you for finding the time
personally to be with us today; I know you have been very busy and I know you have
been travelling in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
I also know that the Foreign Secretary has been travelling quite a lot,
although I have to say that we, as a Committee, are disappointed we have not
got the Foreign Secretary herself, but of course we understand that she is also
busy. We hope that we are able to get
through a lot of business today and lots of questions - brief questions and,
hopefully, brief answers - and in that way we will cover a lot of ground, but
we are also conscious that with just the hour we have got we may not succeed. Certainly we, as a Committee, will consider
whether we need to call another special session with the Foreign Secretary in
evidence if we do not succeed in covering all these areas, because the House
does not yet come back for another month and, clearly, developments are ongoing
in a number of places and there is a lot of public concern. I just want to place that on the record at
this moment, but thank you for coming today to be before us.
Dr Howells: Can I just say,
Chairman, I was at a very early morning meeting on Afghanistan this morning and
I saw a little piece in one of those appalling gossip columns which said I had
only agreed to do an hour and that normally this Committee has one-and-a-half
or two hours with a Minister. I would
be very happy to do three hours with this Committee if the Committee needed it,
but the Committee asked for an hour originally and that is what was programmed
into my diary, and that is all I understood until I read the piece in some
newspaper this morning.
Q2 Chairman: I do not know what information you have had
from your private office, but certainly the Clerks of this Committee contacted
your office last week to ask for more than an hour and were told that only an
hour was available. If you are prepared
to stay longer than an hour today then we will be very happy to.
Dr Howells: Sure. I think I can squeeze another half-an-hour
in, if that is all right.
Q3 Chairman: Thank you; that would be helpful. Can I then begin by taking you to this awful
conflict that has taken place over the last few weeks in regard to Israel and
Lebanon? As you know, there has been a
lot of criticism about the position that the British Government took with
regard to the ceasefire. Do you still
believe the Government was right not to call for an immediate ceasefire?
Dr Howells: Yes, I do,
Chairman. I was out there in the middle
of the conflict and I saw for myself the appalling consequences both of the
bombing of Lebanon and the rockets that were being fired into northern
Israel. It was very distressing and
there were a lot of people, in my view, being killed needlessly and a lot of
infrastructure being damaged. However,
I also saw very clearly that the only way that this could be stopped was by a
UN resolution, and there had to be some real teeth behind any ceasefire that
would occur. I believe that was the
right decision. I notice that the
clamour for a ceasefire at the time was not replicated when it came to putting
troops into the stabilisation force, or whatever it was to be called. They were far more reluctant to do that, of
course, and I think that it bears out the wisdom of what the British Government
did and its attitude towards the call for a ceasefire.
Q4 Chairman: Do you think that if our position had been
presented in a different way, by saying we supported a mutual ceasefire, that
would have changed the debate?
Dr Howells: It might have but
I am not sure how that would have worked if the ceasefire would simply have
meant that the Israelis could have put their jets back on the ground and
serviced them as they wanted to and that the Syrians and the Iranians could
have got more weapons back to Hezbollah.
One wonders what would have been the result of that. I would think even more fierce fighting
after three or four days, or whenever that ceasefire broke down. What we needed was a permanent
ceasefire. From Kofi Annan's report
issued today it looks as if the ceasefire is holding pretty well - touch wood.
Q5 Mr Horam: There is no mention, Minister, in the UN resolution of any
disarmament of Hezbollah. Perhaps it
was not possible to achieve that in the UN resolution which was possible, but
given that and given Israel's obvious concern about the continuing threat from
Hezbollah and, indeed, the threat from Hezbollah to the whole of the State of
Lebanon, how, in fact, do you think that problem can be dealt with?
Dr Howells: Mr Horam, I am
trying to find my copy of Resolution 1701 but I think in there there are
passages which call upon all parties to disarm in that area. In other words, that it becomes a
weapon-free zone, apart from ----
Q6 Mr Horam: There is nothing specific in the statement.
Dr Howells: I do not think it
does mention Hezbollah, Peter, does it?
I cannot remember.
Dr Gooderham: It does not
explicitly mention Hezbollah but as the Minister was saying there are
arrangements envisaged in the resolution both in respect of a zone free of all
weapons other than those belonging to the Lebanese armed forces.
Q7 Mr Horam: My question is how will that be achieved in practice, because if
that is not achieved you will still have a continuing threat to Israel and real
alarm in Israeli circles.
Dr Howells: I think, Mr Horam,
it is a real problem. While I was in
Lebanon I found it very, very difficult to understand how a terrorist group as
firmly entrenched as Hezbollah are, in not just southern Lebanon but in
Lebanese politics in general, is going to be disarmed or persuaded to give up
their arms, which is the ideal really.
Remember, it is almost certainly the case that they are the only militia
now in Lebanon that refused to give up their arms, or at least continued to
brandish their arms in public and to use them.
Q8 Mr Horam: My question is that they have quite a lot of arms still left.
Dr Howells: From the
intelligence we have about this they have a lot of rockets left, the country is
awash with small arms and we know from political assassinations that they are
not short of explosives either. So it
is going to be a very big problem, and I think Kofi Annan has highlighted that
himself. He has called for patience and
for negotiation and diplomacy to work on this one. Yesterday I spoke to the new Iranian Ambassador to London and I
told him that we were deeply unhappy about the prospect that armed shipments
might be renewed to Hezbollah. His
argument was that: "We only give moral support to Hezbollah and political
support to Hezbollah". However, I think
nobody has got an easy answer to this question of how those weapons are either
given up or taken off Hezbollah.
Q9 Mr Horam: Finally on this point, Syria has said it will not accept any UN
forces on its border, which is presumably where the arms come through. That makes it more difficult to monitor not
only what they have got and what they are willing to give up but what will come
in.
Dr Howells: Yes, indeed. I understand that Kofi Annan is discussing
this with the Syrians. They have taken
a very hard line on this. I remember
many months ago speaking with the Syrian Ambassador to London who told me that
there was really no border between Syria and Lebanon - "They are our brothers,
our kith and our kin" - and I asked him why Syria would not set up an embassy
in Beirut. He said: "There is no need
for one; we are the same people. We are one and the same people." Of course, Syria's involvement in the
politics of Lebanon is long and nefarious.
They have done enormous damage, I think.
Q10 Mr Horam: It looks like a recipe for continuing instability though.
Dr Howells: Yes, indeed, and I
think that that question of border stability and monitoring has to be
sorted. I think 1701 has a long way to
go yet before it is implemented fully or even partly inside Lebanon. It is a good start but there is a long way to
go.
Q11 Sir John
Stanley: Minister, in answer to the Chairman's initial
question you seemed to be taking the view that the calling for an immediate
cessation of hostilities and, at the same time, working for a satisfactory UN
resolution were two mutually incompatible policies. Surely, a very much better foreign policy position for the
British Government would have been to combine the two; to say that we were
wanting an immediate cessation of hostilities and, at the same time, working
for an effective UN resolution. Has
there not been a foreign policy misjudgement in that by not calling for an
immediate cessation of hostilities the British Government gave the clear
impression that it was actively supporting the Israeli operations against the
whole of Lebanon? As we know, the
longer the war went on the stronger Hezbollah emerged politically, as indeed
has been the case, and there has been a vast cost economically in damage to the
Lebanon and huge loss of life, almost half of which have been children.
Dr Howells: All of those facts
about the consequences of that war are true and I would not dispute them for a
moment. It was a horrific and
terrifying conflict, there is no question about it. I do not agree with you, Sir John, about the possibility for a
dual track diplomatic progress at that time.
I think actually it was much more difficult than that. I, for one, was very worried, as I tried to
indicate in my answer to the Chairman, that we were going to see Hezbollah
re-armed; we were going to see the Israeli forces revitalised and that the war
would begin again very, very quickly. Whether
that was the best policy in hindsight is very difficult to say. We certainly took a lot of fire
diplomatically and if there is such a thing as "the Arab street" I think we
probably generated a lot of hostility there because of that - no question about
it. However, in the long run I think we
have been proved right. May I add this
as well: even in my discussions with members of the Lebanese Government at the
height of the bombardment they were very, very bitter about Hezbollah; they
were very well informed about the way in which the self-appointed theocrat
Nasrallah was prepared to issue these commands - to have a kind of foreign
policy of their own - and to jeopardise a sovereign state. I had the distinct impression, a terrible
one though it is, that there were many influential people inside Lebanon who
were hoping the Israelis would do the job for them because they knew that
sooner or later they were going to have to tackle Hezbollah. I do not think that is where we were coming
from for one minute; I do not think we were there to protect the reputation or
anything else of the Israelis; we were there, I think, to try and say: "We must
have a ceasefire, we must have it as quickly as possible but it must be one
which has permanence to it and which is not going to result in a resumption of
violence after everybody rearms themselves".
Q12 Sir John
Stanley: Why would it not have been better to be
calling simultaneously for an immediate cessation of hostilities while saying
we were doing our utmost to get a satisfactory UN resolution?
Dr Howells: For the reasons I
tried to set out, that I think it would have been used as an excuse simply,
perhaps, to stop for a few days or a week and then for the thing to start
again. I had no confidence whatsoever
in a temporary ceasefire.
Q13 Mr Illsley: Just on that point, Minister, you made an interesting comment
there. You said that you got the
distinct impression that the Lebanese would welcome the Israelis doing the job for
them. I just wanted to ask you whether
there is any credence to the suggestion which is current at the time that there
was a period during which the USA and the UK were prepared to stand back and
not call for a ceasefire to allow Israel to try and destroy as much of
Hezbollah as they could, and the suggestion was a four-week period, before then
serious negotiations took place at the UN.
Do you have any comment on that?
Dr Howells: I would reject
that totally. We certainly were not
party to any such agreement, nor have we ever talked to anybody about anything
like that. Certainly, in terms of our
current assessment while the bombardment was going on and subsequently, we
thought it had gone on for too long; that all players could have made much
greater efforts to have arrived at a UN resolution more quickly. Really, it was only when Margaret Beckett
went to New York that the thing really got moving and the following day, of
course, we began to see a real movement towards 1701. That was a very important moment. So, no, we did not want to see that war go on a day longer than
it did. I have seen many conflicts like
this one through my life, and I know that all a terrorist movement has to do is
survive. It does not have to win; it
does not have to defeat. I remember a
statement from a Vietcong leader at the end of the Vietnam War when he met for
the first time an American general. The
general said to him: "You know, you never beat us in a battle", and he said:
"No, we never had to". Hezbollah's role
recently, I think, should have re-taught us that lesson. All they had to do was survive. That is why when I was in Beirut I
questioned the tactics that Israel was using.
Q14 Mr Keetch: Minister, I want to come on to that very
point of your visit, round 22 July, to the Lebanon, because you have a reputation
here as being a Minister who speaks it straight, frankly. What you said there was clearly criticising
the Israeli policy. I will just quote
one thing you said: "The destruction of the infrastructure, the death of so
many children and so many people. These
have not been surgical strikes." "You
don't go for the entire Lebanese nation", you said. Given what you saw there, do you agree that the response of the
Israeli armed forces was, frankly, disproportionate?
Dr Howells: I tried, Mr
Keetch, to clarify in my own mind what would be disproportionate, and that
attempt to clarify what was going on was not made any easier when I went to Haifa,
because during the period I was there 80 rockets fell on Haifa. These were not fireworks; these were,
essentially, missiles that had a 40 kilo explosive charge in them surrounded by
ball bearings. Shortly before we drove
up a road a taxi driver had been killed there as a consequence of one of these
landing near his taxi. The city was
gripped by a state of fear. I
understand that about a million people in northern Israel were living in
shelters. It was a very, very serious
situation, and it was put to me by the mayor of Haifa: "How would you feel if
Brighton was being subjected to rocket attack every single day? What would you do about it?" I knew this guy because he was one of the
politicians who had persuaded Israel that it was a good idea to pull out of
Lebanon on the last occasion. He felt a
great sense of dubiety, I guess, about what was going on. On the one hand he knew full well the
consequences of that massive air attack that was going on - dead children, the destruction
of infrastructure, a lot of people killed and horribly wounded and relatively
indiscriminate (no question about it) - but he also had to answer to his own
people, which was to say: "How do we protect this city and this region from
attack by an enemy that is accountable to no one?"
Q15 Mr Keetch: You have already stated that is a terrorist
organisation, and the actions of a legitimate government, like the State of
Israel, you cannot compare its disproportionate use to the terrorist of Katyusha
rockets. I am in no way trying to
defend the Katyusha attacks on northern Israel but the action of the Israeli
Government, which was stated by a number of countries but never by Britain -
would you agree that the actions of the Israeli Government was disproportionate
to the attacks being made on it at the start of that conflict?
Dr Howells: No, I would not
say that. I have tried to explain why,
and I certainly would not condemn it as that.
I will say this, if I could, Mr Keetch: I understand that there are now
- I am not sure - 17 UN investigators in Lebanon at the moment and they are
investigating these charges. I just
wonder about the wisdom of speculating on that question of proportionate or
disproportionate. I think there are
proper authorities there and the proper systems for examining that, and they
should be allowed to do their work and come to their conclusions.
Q16 Mr Keetch: We shall wait for their conclusions. Let me ask you one other thing, if I may:
you certainly appeared to be giving a view from the Lebanon that was more in
touch, I believe, with what the British people felt as opposed to what the Prime
Minister was saying. The Prime Minister,
on 28 July in the White House, rejected a call for an immediate ceasefire, but
two days later he said he wanted an urgent cessation of hostilities. What is the difference between "an immediate
ceasefire" and "an urgent cessation of hostilities"? Is the only difference the fact that the day before the 30th
The Times leaked a letter from Sir
David Manning criticising what the Prime Minister had said? Is that what caused that change of language?
Dr Howells: I did not see that
leaked letter and I am afraid that when I was in Beirut I was trying to speak
as much as a foreign minister and a representative of this country but as a
human being who was watching these terrible events unfold. I have only been in the Foreign Office for
about 16 months or something so I do not know the difference in that diplomatic
language between those two - perhaps I will learn that. Just to say that I think that the Prime Minister
was almost certainly trying to clarify something that I have tried to do to
this Committee already this morning, which is to say that there has to be an
urgent end to hostilities, but it has to be something more than just a call; it
has to be backed by some real authority.
The only authority that I could see, and I am sure the Prime Minister could
see, was the UN.
Q17 Sandra Osborne: I think we can all agree that progress has been made through the
UN and that is very important, but what do you feel about the reaction of the
people here in the UK to the fact that our Government was not calling for an
immediate ceasefire? Do you think more
could have been done by the Government to explain what the tactics were and
what was trying to be achieved in the face of the fact that people felt there
was disproportionate action on the part of Israel and that they were being
given, if you like, a free hand to up the ante against Hezbollah?
Dr Howells: No, the short
answer is we did not do enough, and we did not try to explain it very
well. It was a very, very difficult
statement to make and it was a difficult position to defend. I think very often we do not pay enough
attention really to the way in which we try to communicate those decisions to
people. A few days ago in Pakistan I
was asked by Pakistani journalists very perceptive questions about how does a
state take on a terrorist organisation which is accountable to no one, because
they face that on a day-to-day basis.
They have got an insurrection in Baluchistan at the moment and they are
trying to arrange a new kind of ceasefire in Waziristan - they have got great
difficulties. I had to admit that it is
extraordinarily difficult to do it and doubly difficult to try to explain to a
public which uses terms like "terrorist organisation", "resistance movement"
and "freedom fighters" - they substitute for them whenever the thought occurs
to them. It is not an easy thing to
explain, actually. We have got to put a
lot more work into this, I think.
Q18 Sandra Osborne: What breaches of international
law do you think have been committed by Hezbollah and Israel with regard to
distinguishing between civilian and military targets and proportionality? You are suggesting there is a UN
investigation into that, but surely the international community must speak out
against these actions as and when they happen and not just institute an
investigation after the fact.
Dr Howells: I think you are
quite right; I think we all have a duty when we observe a catastrophe like that
happening to say what we feel about it.
Whether what we say about it reflects the reality of the situation on
the ground and whether it is going to bring forward a peaceful solution is
another matter, of course. I think
there is no question that what I saw out there begs many questions about the
way in which we try to define what constitutes a war crime in the future,
because I heard from many people, on the Lebanese side as well as on the
Israeli side, that Hezbollah had taken the old terrorist tactic of hiding
behind the skirts of women and children to new depths; that they had their
rockets located inside rooms in apartment blocks and that they had caches of
arms that were in schools, in mosques.
Every time - every time - the Israelis responded to that and smashed a
building down, every picture of a burnt child and every picture of a building that
had housed people and which was now pancaked on the ground was propaganda for
Hezbollah. If an organisation like
Hezbollah is ruthless enough to exploit those tactics then one wonders how it
can ever be possible in the future to, if you like, win with justice on your
side against such an enemy. It seems to
me we have to do a huge amount of reassessment about this in the future, about
how we define this kind of warfare. I
think the military now call it "an asymmetrical response" - very, very
difficult to do. I think we are facing
these problems in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and many countries face them; the
Pakistani Government is certainly facing it.
These definitions that have held good since the Second World War, I
think, are probably going to have to be reviewed very extensively from now on
out.
Q19 Mr Purchase: First of all, Minister, may I congratulate you on catching the
moment as you did so well in Lebanon.
Whatever the cool heads are saying now, however it is being presented,
for me personally I was most relieved to hear a Westminster voice, a Labour
voice saying what you said at that time.
So for that I am grateful, thank you very much. Now we have to peel back the different
layers of the onion and first ask you, on your protestations, why a twin-track
approach would not commend itself diplomatically. A short period of ceasefire, you say, may just have resulted in
people rearming. Could I say that in
even a day of a ceasefire hundreds of lives would have been saved.
Dr Howells: Sure.
Q20 Mr Purchase: I think it is quite extraordinary that it is now presented in the
way in which you have done this morning.
I know you are not the author of that presentation. If we talk about propaganda, this is a prime
piece of propaganda, for it beggars belief that we could not have called
simultaneously for a ceasefire on humanitarian grounds whilst recognising it
was necessary to get a longer term solution which we all, of course, want to
work towards. I do ask now that we drop
this charade and recognise what everybody knows, that the Americans believed,
conventional wisdom, that the Israelis had the firepower, the organisation and
the military know-how to absolutely take Hezbollah out of the game once and for
all. That is what was commonly
believed, that was the wisdom, that was the opportunity the Israelis were
seeking, and that is the opportunity that we by being complicit with the
Americans gave them. The fact of the
matter is that Hezbollah were disorganised, without real firepower (no matter
what we say about how many rockets they were firing) compared to what was
available to the other side. You were
right in your analysis, they do not have to win, but the fact is we have ended
up with a massive tragedy that could have been, if not avoided, certainly
ameliorated. To know that it was based
upon the capture of two Israeli soldiers who the Israelis demanded were
released, and on the failure to secure that launched this ferocious attack
which you rightly said in a humanitarian way was quite disproportionate to the
seriousness of that affair.
Dr Howells: Well, thank you
very much for your kind comments, Mr Purchase.
I appreciate those. Can I say,
first of all, that this was not a charade; I was not part of any charade, nor
would I have been part of any charade.
We were certainly not complicit, as you put it, with the United
States. This conflict had a life of its
own right from the very beginning. It
was very interesting that Nasrallah the Hezbollah leader said: "If I had known
what the extent of the Israeli retaliation was going to be like I would not
have ordered the kidnap of the two soldiers in the first place." A pathetic
statement. Nevertheless, it gives some
indication of the kind of people we are dealing with. I am not saying, and I would never say to Sir John - he has been
around too long and he has seen too many of these conflicts - that a dual
approach might not have worked. I am
not saying that and I am not dismissing that at all. Maybe it would have worked.
What I am saying is we had to take decisions at the time based on what
we knew and what intelligence we had.
That is why we took those decisions, and they were taken in absolute
good faith, not complicitly, as you put it, with the Americans or anyone
else. I just want to say that. Can I say that you have hinted at something
in your question which is a very big issue and one which is, as you know,
troubling the Israelis enormously at the moment - certainly Prime Minister
Olmert enormously at the moment - which is whether or not the tactics were the
right tactics. I felt at the time that
they were the wrong tactics. It is easy
for me to say; I am not a citizen of Haifa, as I have tried to point out, who
was being bombarded, but it seemed to me that to try to either reduce the
effectiveness of an enemy like Hezbollah or fundamentally damage it that
probably you would need to do the kinds of things that happen in these kinds of
wars all over the world; you probably need ground troops, in the end. The Israelis, I think, realised this was an incredibly
sensitive subject, and I think they made a wrong decision. They assumed that an airborne assault would
probably draw down upon them less international criticism than if they tried to
reoccupy that territory. Obviously that
is my assessment of what was going on.
I thought it was the wrong tactics, not because of some notion of
disproportionality, which I find a very difficult concept, as I have tried to
explain ----
Q21 Mr Purchase: These all were, actually.
Dr Howells: ---- but because I
think it was not effective in reducing the ability of Hezbollah to go on
fighting and to survive. In the end, of
course, as you pointed out, Hezbollah emerged stronger for it, politically. Whether that remains the case is another
matter. What I am hearing at the moment
from Lebanon is that there are many people in Lebanon who are saying, as they
said to me while that conflict was going on: "What Hezbollah has done is
absolutely appalling because they have drawn down the wrath of Israel upon us
and they are destroying our nation."
That is what they said to us. I
think Hezbollah, with their allies the Iranians and the Syrians, are going to
have a very, very big job to try to regain in any permanent sense this kind of
reputation that they held for some weeks during that war of being the kind of
resistance movement against Israel.
Q22 Mr Hamilton: Minister, a few days ago the
Deputy Ambassador of Israel in the United Kingdom, Zvi Ravner, made a statement
on British media that the death of a single, innocent non-combatant was an
affront to Jewish morality. Yet they
were fighting an enemy in Hezbollah, as we have already discussed, whose stated
aim is the destruction of the State of Israel - nothing more, nothing less -
and they are backed whether morally or, we believe, by practical means, by Iran
and certainly by Syria. What are we, as
a British Government - what is the Foreign Office doing to try and help those
who would remove Hezbollah from the equation? Clearly, as we have said, they
are accountable to nobody except themselves, and even by losing they win.
Dr Howells: The short answer
is, Mr Hamilton, we are talking to everyone we can, including the Iranians and
including the Syrians, to try to persuade them that if 1701 is going to work
then they must not continue with the tactics that they used previously, and
they must not arm Hezbollah and they should think very hard about giving it the
moral and political support even that they have been doing. Whether they will stop is another matter altogether. When President Ahmadinejad says that he
wants Israel wiped off the face of the map one wonders if they could ever
succumb to the diplomatic temptation to renounce their support for Hezbollah
when it is the one really effective military force that they have got in that
region outside of Iran itself. I am not
convinced that they have arrived at that stage yet. We know for a fact that they trade their support for Hezbollah
and Hamas in response to the way in which we plague them with our demands that
they give up their nuclear weapons programme.
They are very skilled diplomats, the Iranians; they always have been;
they have got a great reputation for it.
They will use any tactic that they can to try to disrupt our efforts and
the efforts of the E3+3 and of the UN and Dr El-Baradei to try to get them to
come back into the process on the question of their nuclear enrichment
programme. So I do not hold out a great
deal of hope that we will be able to persuade them in the short term, but I
very much hope that the divisions that we have seen in the region, in terms of
what our attitude should be to Iran especially, start to heal because I think
it is a great threat to everyone. There
is a very curious thing, you know: if you talk to governments in the Gulf or
anyone in that region they all express great concern about the behaviour of
Iran, and they are worried about the Shia crescent, as they inevitably refer to
it, but it is very, very difficult to get people to break ranks, if you like,
and make those criticisms publicly.
Q23 Mr Hamilton: Do you not think that there is more we can do
through the United Nations? After all,
there is no other country in the world whose very existence is threatened and
whom other members of the United Nations have said they want to destroy completely. That is why Israel is so sensitive. I do not condone for one minute the use of
any sort of violence and force, and I am sure all my colleagues in the room
agree that one life lost is one life too many and that we want to see an end to
that violence immediately. I know you
did your absolute best to bring that about, and I know the Prime Minister as
well, from the quotes I have read, was working behind the scenes to do that,
but can we not make it clearer in the United Nations that the eradication of a
state is totally unacceptable and that we must use whatever sanction we can to
stop the sponsorship of those organisations by other members of the UN who
would see states like Israel eradicated?
It is the only state in the world under that sort of threat.
Dr Howells: Yes, I think we
have to do much more. I think that Kofi
Annan's approach over the past month or so has focused on this very much
so. He has counselled against a kind of
military approach to the whole question of Iran and Syria's involvement with
Hezbollah and with Hamas as well, of course.
He has counselled for patience and diplomacy. I think he is right; there has to be another way through this and
there has to be a political process. I
think the debate in Israel at the moment understands that. How many times does Israel feel that it has
got to go into southern Lebanon or it is right to go into southern
Lebanon? How long does it feel that it
can maintain this very strange relationship it has with the Palestinians and
with the people in Gaza? There has to
be a proper political process, and I think it is a great condemnation on all of
us, really, for a long time now that the political process has rather run into
the sand. I can understand why and I
could rationalise it, but the point is we have got to reinvigorate it. I was very, very glad to see Tony Blair
going there, and I was very glad to see it mentioned in his August 1 speech in
LA. It was an important moment, I
thought, because if we do not sort out this Palestinian/Israeli issue then we
will have more wars and there will be many more innocent people killed.
Chairman: We are going to come on to the Palestinian
issue in a little while. Before then
some of my colleagues want to ask a few more questions about Lebanon.
Q24 Andrew
Mackinlay: If we go back to those final days of July,
you were in Lebanon and your utterances on television are, I think, just in
time because public opinion was feeling, as someone neatly said (and I
associate myself with the comments made earlier), that there did appear, not
just to me but to other people, not joined up government; there did seem to be
this difference between the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (and, for that
matter, the Foreign Secretary) and I deliberately say Number 10 Downing Street
rather than the Prime Minister. I want
to put to you that there were mixed messages coming. I also want to ask you: what was the decision making process? In the domestic situation we have
COBRA. Was there a standing body and
who was on it? Was Mr Gooderham on it,
morning, noon and night? Was his
opposite number in Number 10 Downing Street on it? There were mixed messages coming and there did not seem to be
joined-up government. I recognise it
was a dynamic situation but I think we need to know who is the lead department
and the lead minister in that kind of crisis at that time.
Dr Howells: If I could, Mr
Mackinlay I will answer and then I am sure Mr Gooderham will want to
answer. Can I say this: remember, I
went out to Lebanon initially to have a look to make sure that we had
everything in place for the evacuation.
The evacuation had been under way for a couple of days; we were
extremely worried that if everybody who had British citizenship wanted to leave
Lebanon we would be very, very severely stretched to get them all to Cyprus or
to a safe place. By the time I got
there events had moved on; the evacuation was going very smoothly and the
demand was declining very rapidly. In
fact, by that time, we were taking a lot more non-British nationals than we had
expected to take out as we had space on our ships. The remit I had when I went out there was to try to get the
maximum amount of intelligence back, to talk to our staff who were operating
under very difficult circumstances in Beirut and then to move on to try to find
out what exactly the Israelis were thinking about this. Then, as it happens, we added a bit on which
was to go to Ramallah and see what the impact of all this had been on the
Palestinian Authority. It happened very
quickly. I know that we had had some
emergency meetings of COBRA prior to me going out there and that had been
because, of course, we had to ensure that British people were not going to be
hurt and that they were going to be offered a means of escape. As far as, if you like, the structure of
command and control at the time, while ultimately of course that is the Prime
Minister ----
Q25 Andrew
Mackinlay: Is it?
I say: "Is it" because one cannot always assume that, because we do have
a Foreign Minister. Therefore, if it is
the Prime Minister, to what extent does his representative (because there is a
foreign policy unit in Number 10) drive the policy or is it Margaret Beckett
and you that drive the policy? If you
say: "Well, it is both", how does it work?
That is what I want to know.
Dr Howells: It is joined up
government, Mr Mackinlay.
Q26 Andrew
Mackinlay: Tell us about that. This is your opportunity.
Dr Howells: We will discuss
this. I attended this morning what is
called an Afghan Ministerial meeting at the unearthly hour of eight
o'clock. In that Afghan Ministerial
meeting there will be the Chief of the Defence Staff and other military
representatives. There will be, via
television, our embassy representatives and DFID representatives in Afghanistan.
Q27 Andrew Mackinlay: And Number 10?
Dr Howells: And Number 10 is
there, of course. There will be
representatives from the intelligence services, and so on. We work together, and in all of these crises
that is the way it operates. We share
intelligence. Nobody holds anything
back from each other. You will know, Mr
Mackinlay, because you are familiar with it, we have an organisation called
JTAG, which is the Joint Terrorist Assessment Grouping, which is now the envy
of the world. It is much better than
anything the Americans have got, it is better than anything the French or
anyone else has got, and JTAG's work is made no easier by the fact that there
is a stream of visitors from all of these intelligence services who want to see
how it might be possible for that information to be shared and for decisions to
be made on the basis of that. I know
what you are hinting at: notoriously, departments, intelligence agencies and
military organisations know that a bit of intelligence and a bit of knowledge
is power. All too often when we deal
with our allies sometimes we know that they are not sharing that information
and they ought to be sharing that information.
If they did they would make much better decisions.
Q28 Andrew
Mackinlay: There did appear to be a difference between
Margaret Beckett and Number 10 Downing Street.
Is that wrong?
Dr Howells: I think it is
wrong. I did not detect any differences
there. Perhaps Mr Gooderham could say
something about the way it works.
Dr Gooderham: I would have to
say it was very well joined up and within days of the crisis breaking out we
established what we call our emergency unit in the Foreign Office, which is a
dedicated area within the building which gives us the ability to be able to
operate on a 24/7 basis, which is what we did right the way through the
conflict and, indeed, in the days after it as well in the clearing up process
in the aftermath of the UN resolution. There were also regular meetings
convened by the Cabinet Office, bringing together all the relevant senior
officials like myself from different departments, to assess what was going on
on the ground and also to determine what our policy recommendation should be to
ministers. We in the Foreign Office
also held regular or ad hoc meetings necessarily involving representatives from
other government departments, including of course Number 10, so, certainly from
where I sit, at no stage did it seem to me that we were not well joined up and
at no stage did it seem to me that there were any differences or difficulties
between ourselves or Number 10 or any other government department. It was an extraordinarily harmonious and
well-co-ordinated effort, if I say so myself.
Q29 Andrew Mackinlay: The other question I wanted to ask was that a
few moments ago at 10.35, you were answering a question about your meeting with
the new Iranian Ambassador yesterday and I just want to go back to that. What precisely is your understanding of the
support given by the Iranian Government to Hezbollah because he said to you, I
think, "Oh, we just give moral support".
Is that your view and, if not, what do you know and believe to be the
position and did you press him on this?
Did you say, "Well, what's this all about then, chum?"?
Dr Howells: I pressed him very hard on this and on several
other subjects, including the fact that, as this Committee knows, we are very
worried about some of the bomb-making technology and passive infrared devices
that are used against our troops in Basra.
We know that fingerprints of Hezbollah bomb-makers are all over this and
we cannot imagine that there are many other ways that that could have reached
southern Iraq other than through the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, so we are
very worried about the role that Iran plays in this. We do not believe for one moment that the missiles, the guns and
the finances which are available to Hezbollah have not come from Iran via
Syria. Syria also has a very dark role
to play in this and I pressed him very hard on it. I think he is a pretty tough diplomat, the new Iranian
Ambassador, and he was absolutely intransigent on this. He said that, as far as he was concerned, he
would resist any implication that Iran had anything to do with arming or with
financing Hezbollah. I do not believe
it and I do not believe that anyone else in the area believes it.
Q30 Richard
Younger-Ross: I had the
opportunity to visit Israel and Haifa two and a half weeks ago and I have seen
the bomb damage in Haifa. I also know
that between one site and another you actually have a five-minute drive down
Acacia Lane and very pleasant avenues, not to deny the fear that a city under
attack would be under. Having seen that
and having seen the sort of damage there is, I can understand the terror, but I
still do not understand why we could not say at the time that there was a
disproportionate response. I
particularly do not understand why we cannot say that it is disproportionate
for the Israelis to deny the UN aid convoys to take much-needed relief into
southern Lebanon. Can you comment on
that and why the Government did not say more to ensure that UN aid was able to
get through?
Dr Howells: We said a great deal about the need for aid
to get in and for reconstruction to begin as quickly as possible and we were
very worried about the fact that our co-ordination with the Israelis in order
to get our own people out, for example, had to be very, very precise. The helicopter that transported me and
colleagues and some troops out of Beirut, we landed on the HMS Illustrious, our aircraft carrier, on the way back to Cyprus
and there the Commander of the Fleet explained to me how very precise they had
to be with navigation because otherwise they were going to get shot down, they
were going to get attacked by Israeli aircraft. I think the situation was that acute that it was an
extraordinarily delicate balance between the desire to get humanitarian aid in
and, as the Israelis saw it, to continue to hit Hezbollah. Now, we urged the Israelis at every
opportunity that we could to allow humanitarian aid to get in there. The Israelis came back to us time and again
and said, "As long as that humanitarian aid is humanitarian aid and those
trucks do not contain spares for Hezbollah's rocketry". There were some very unfortunate incidents,
we understand, where convoys containing aid that probably came from elsewhere
in the Middle East, humanitarian aid, was stopped at the Syrian border because
the Syrians themselves had inserted other vehicles into those convoys which
were carrying armaments. Now, I do not
know if that is true, but I am trying to give you a sense of what the
atmosphere was like at the time. I
would hope that this UN investigatory mission that is there at the moment to
look at these questions of whether or not Israel was denying humanitarian aid
when it could have allowed it to happen, I will await the findings of that
investigation, but I am not in a position to tell you whether or not that is
true or false. I can only give you my
impressions and a kind of picture of what life was like at the time, but it was
a very, very difficult situation. It
was so difficult in fact, and I am sure, Mr Younger-Ross, you remember, that
Hezbollah had, amongst other things, some land-based missiles which are a bit
like Exocet missiles. They are made by
the Chinese, we understand, or maybe by the Iranians under licence from the
Chinese. These were fired from the
shore and we understand that they destroyed two Israeli naval vessels. The commanders of our naval task force which
was to evacuate people from Beirut, from Lebanon, were very worried about the
fact that they might get hit by these missiles and this was not a frivolous
consideration, but a very, very serious one.
Q31 Mr Hamilton: Can I just ask, Minister, what additional
diplomatic, consular and financial resources the FCO has had to find during the
crisis in Lebanon? I would also just
thank you on behalf of one of my constituents who was evacuated very
efficiently right at the start of the conflict.
Dr Howells: I think our latest estimate is that it cost
us about £1/2 million more than the normal running costs because we got a rapid
deployment team in there and we had to find somewhere for them to stay, we had
to pay transportation costs of course and all the rest of it, but it looks as
if it was about £1/2 million extra for the Foreign Office. There are lots of other costs of course and
I think the MoD are still assessing their costs.
Q32 Chairman: You have referred in a previous answer to Mr
Mackinlay to Iran and its role. Can I ask you for your assessments of what the
Iranians are actually doing at the moment?
Are they using the conflict in Lebanon as a way to divert attention from
their nuclear ambitions and do you believe it is still possible, despite the
recent statements of Mr Ahmadinejad and Iranian officials, that we will not be
having a breakdown of the relationship with the UN and that we might actually
be moving very, very soon towards UN resolutions and sanctions?
Dr Howells: Mr Gapes, I think we have reached a very
special point in these discussions with Iran about their nuclear enrichment
programme. We have tried to make it
clear to them that we have got absolutely no objections to them having a civil
nuclear programme and I think Mr Albaradi has pointed that out to them time and
again. What they have done through this
summer, I think, is they have played a masterly delaying game. They have put off decisions and put off
decisions in the hope that perhaps other events would eclipse the importance of
dealing with this problem. Where we go
from here is very difficult to say. I
think the world looks with great scepticism at some recent attempts at imposing
restrictions on a country like Iran.
There are often ways around it of course when one looks at the way in
which Saddam Hussein played the Oil for Food Programme, when we look at the way
in which these UN resolutions sometimes break down when it comes to countries
like Zimbabwe where we put travel restrictions on them and then somebody
suddenly invites them to some conference somewhere. I think somehow, and this sounds a bit aspirational, we have got
to engage with the Iranians and try to make them understand that with their
great history and their enormous potential, they are a nation that should be
fulfilling that greatness in terms of their diplomacy as well and their
relationship with their neighbours. I
cannot see a military way through this and I am not sure even that there is an
easy way for the UN to impose sanctions.
It is a very diverse country and I do not doubt that it could survive
for a very long time and continue doing what it is doing. What I know is that there is a great deal of
opposition to President Ahmadinejad's regime within Iran. There are many people within Iran who think
that ordinary people in Iran ought to be a lot better off than they are and
there are many people who believe also that the vast amounts of money which
seem to be going into programmes like uranium enrichment ought to be spent on
more basic provision for the Iranian people.
Therefore, I think there is a lot to negotiate on yet and that we have
to try to persuade President Ahmadinejad no matter how difficult it is and we
have to convince the self-appointed theocracy that pulls the strings in Iran
that there is a better way for Iran to move forward.
Q33 Chairman: Is not the reality though that if you have
got the reluctance from China and Russia, and particularly from China, towards
a credible UN resolution and at the same time the Iranians hold all these cards
and you have got the Arab street which is agitated because of the events you
have just referred to, there is almost no possibility in the next few months
that we are going to get any real progress on this issue? Are we actually really talking here about
two or three years ahead before we actually can come to any conclusion on this
matter?
Dr Howells: I think your pessimism is very well
placed. I live in hope that we can move
more quickly than that, but it could well take a very long time, I think. Now, how fast the Iranians move on their
nuclear enrichment programme is another matter. We know that they have got some trifocal systems at work at the
moment, we know that they are working on the uranium hexafluoride, and they
have got quite a lot of this material around at the moment. We do not know how far they are from
actually designing a bomb, but I feel very pessimistic about it. I do not know what the Committee is going to
make of that and it would be very difficult for me to explain it more
precisely. What we do know is that they
are also working on delivery systems on long-range missiles and that is a very
worrying combination, I think, and that is why we have to redouble our efforts,
I suspect, to try to get President Ahmadinejad to see sense and the
manifestation of the Iranian people to be what they ought to be, a great world
player, but they do not have to do that by developing a bomb which is going to
unsettle everybody in that entire area.
Q34 Richard
Younger-Ross: There is a
belief amongst some of the Jewish Israelis we met that a peace deal with Syria
is possible. There is also a belief
that America is obstructing that, although not one I would necessarily hold to
as there are conspiracies everywhere.
What do you believe can be done and what hopes do you see in there being
a proper and long-lasting peace being secured between Israel and Syria and what
can we do to assist that?
Dr Howells: Syria is a very major player in all of this,
there is no question about it, and Syria is a major player in Iraq. Those arbitrary frontiers that were drawn up
on a weekend in Cairo by Winston Churchill in 1921 disrupted a lot of natural
movement across that border and unfortunately some of that movement has
continued since the invasion of Iraq.
We hope very much that Syria will take a more positive role than it has
up until now. It has, I think, played a
very negative role in sabotaging the peace efforts between Israel and the
Palestinians. When I met President Abu
Mazen of the Palestinian Authority, he said to me that he thought that there
were really three factions now even inside Hamas, that there was the Damascus
faction, which was the hardest line of all, there were the kind of Provisional
IRA equivalents in Gaza and there were those who found themselves suddenly in
government in Hamas who realised that if they were going to make any progress,
they had to move themselves politically and they had to begin to think about
some of the positions they had taken up previously, and I think he is probably
right. Now, if Damascus refuses to, if
you like, assist with that process of trying to encourage, however gently as
possible and saving as much face as they need to save, some kind of political
reassessment within Hamas, then I fear for the worst. Their position vis-à-vis Hezbollah, I think, is a very confused
one for Syria. Syria, I think much more
than Iran, feels much more vulnerable to international pressure and it has not
got the enormous potential and wealth in oil and gas that Iran has. It needs to be a trader, it needs to be just
like Lebanon and just like Israel actually and I think it understands, or at
least there are elements within Syria who understand, that if it does not
become that creature, that kind of nation, it is going to become a very
difficult place for Syrians to live in.
It is going to be a very poor place and its economy will not flourish
and it needs it to flourish, although there is a bit of hope there, I think,
but we have got to work very hard on our diplomatic relations with Syria, there
is no question about it.
Q35 Mr Horam: Could I say I strongly agree with what you
said about Iran. I thought that was
wholly realistic and I think you struck a chord there about the nature of the
Iranian nation, its history and so forth and also the feasibility and realism
of sanctions. Do you think there is any
possibility of a change in the tone of our diplomacy - and I am interested to
hear what Mr Fender might say here - in appealing (a) to the other elements in
the leadership of Iran, as we know there are other elements in the leadership
of Iran, and (b) other elements in the Arab world who are concerned about what
you call the "Shiah Crescent" as well as moderating our own Bush-like rhetoric
on some occasions? Do you think there
is a possibility of a change in the tone of diplomacy for dealing with this?
Dr Howells: I am not sure actually that the change that
you describe is as kind of abrupt or as sharp as some people might have
it. I think we have been pursuing the
right kind of diplomacy with Iran and it is very hard to see at the moment how that
diplomatic approach could change very dramatically. Remember, we are conducting this diplomacy in close collaboration
with the Germans, the French and other EU nations as well as with the Russians
and the Chinese. We do not buy any oil
from Iran, or very little anyway or I am not sure we buy any actually, but the
Chinese are very, very keen to buy Iranian oil and the Russians have always
worried about their southern flank, and the idea of Iran on their southern
flank armed with a nuclear weapon with long-range missiles is something that
must worry President Putin a good deal, I would think, so people are coming at
it with different priorities. I think
somebody mentioned earlier on that this has got to involve the UN, it has got
to be co-ordinated in some shape or form, but I think you are absolutely right,
Mr Horam, that it has also got to constantly be able to reassess the political
realities from week to week and day to day because they do change very quickly
and Iran is notorious for the tactics that it uses diplomatically; they are
very, very clever diplomats.
Q36 Chairman: On the Middle East generally, do you think
that there is a need for a real move, and you have already referred to it on
the Palestinian issue in passing, and the Prime Minister has been there? Do you think we are actually making any
difference? Are we moving things
forward or are we actually just recognising that things are in a really very
difficult situation?
Dr Howells: Mr Gapes, I have been amazed ever since I
have been interested in this area, and that has been for a very long time now,
at the potency of this conflict and its effect upon the world. Almost everywhere I go, people say to me,
"The great motivator for our terrorists is the plight of the Palestinians",
almost everywhere. It is unbelievable
really and when you think of what a tiny area it is, I remember the first time
many years ago when I went to Gaza, Gaza is about the same size as if you got
in your car at Merthyr Tydfil and you drove down the valley to Cardiff and that
is about how big it is, it is about as wide as that valley.
Q37 Mr Illsley: As long as that?
Dr Howells: Maybe not even as long as that, you are quite
right. Yes, you are probably right,
that is about 21 miles or something, 22 miles, and it has a population that is
a bit bigger. It is not an enormous
population. It is one of the most
crowded and poor places on earth, I am told.
There is a lot of business there, there is a lot of ingenuity there and
they are people with huge potential and it seems to me that it ought to be
actually quite a wealthy place. It is
on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and it is very close to potentially
very good markets, so it ought to be a great place, so why is it not a great
place? Why has this political paralysis
been around for so long? The people I
have been most impressed with when I have asked these questions have been
people like Bernie Cohen of the Portland Trust and others who have said, "We've
got to come at this not just politically, but economically as well". I keep coming across projects, especially
Gulf States, who have said to me, "Do you know what we'd really like to
do? We'd really like to build perhaps a
railway line or a road or a combined railway line and road between Gaza and the
West Bank. We'd like to give those
economies a chance and we would like to be able to help to liberate those
people". This is not rocket
science. This ought to be a lot simpler
than we present it. The problem is that
we have been fighting these wars by proxy for so long in that region now that
we do not know how to take that step forward and we ought to be able to do it
and we ought to be able to do it relatively quickly, I think, so I was very,
very glad when I saw the fact that a British Prime Minister had travelled to
Tel Aviv and gone to Ramallah to talk to people directly about it because I
think it could be solved. There have
been many people around, like me, who think it could be solved and who have
disappeared into the sand. I may be an
absurd optimist in this respect, but I think it can be solved and that the
world ought to be ashamed of the fact that it has not worked hard enough to
find that solution.
Q38 Mr Purchase: The Arab street you mentioned earlier, which
may be no more than a virtual reality construction perhaps, but I am afraid
that our Prime Minister got a welcome slightly less warm than he had at
yesterday's TUC ----
Dr Howells: I thought he did quite well at the TUC
actually!
Q39 Mr Purchase: In those circumstances, is there any further
point, at least for the foreseeable future, to any British diplomatic activity
in that region at all maybe as part of ----
Dr Howells: Yes, yes, Mr Purchase, and I will tell you
now ----
Q40 Mr Purchase: Our reputation frankly is on the floor.
Dr Howells: No, I do not agree with you for one
minute. You know, this Arab street
which everybody talks about is a very complicated place and it is a very
perfidious place as well. If you talk
to the Egyptians, for example, who have a big role to play in trying to construct
a permanent peace there along the lines of the road map, they will say to you
that opinion changes very quickly from week to week and month to month. The fact that our Prime Minister has shown
enough commitment to go there and try to get talks started again will be
remembered. It may not at the moment
compensate for the perceptions that are on some parts of this Arab street at
least over the events in the Lebanon, but eventually I think it will and I will
tell you why. We in so many ways
historically are responsible for the configuration that now exists in that
area. We tried, I think, with the best
will in the world to make an almost impossible situation work. We have said that we believe that Israel
should be a proper sovereign state with a right to exist like any other nation
on earth. There are people and there
are countries and there is opinion on the Arab street which says that is not
true. They trot out the old arguments
that this is stone territory and that nothing that can ever happen diplomatically
will ever make any difference whatsoever.
I will tell you what difference it makes. I went to Jerusalem recently and in Jerusalem we followed up,
because I wanted to do it, a couple of consular cases that we had been handling
and it involved the way in which this wall or barrier had been built through
Jerusalem where some of the decisions, these arbitrary decisions, about which
direction this wall should move in had affected the day-to-day lives not just
of all the Palestinians who lived there, but also British citizens who happen
to be married to Palestinians. I went
to one house which made a great impression on me of a husband and wife. The husband was Palestinian, he was a doctor
and the wife was also a doctor and they were able to travel to work via their
children's school and it took them four minutes. They were able to put the kids in the car, drive to school, drop
the kids off at the school and then go on to the hospital where they worked,
one of the big Jerusalem hospitals.
They built the wall across the end of their road and now they cannot do
it. Now it takes them God knows how
long, 40 minutes or something, to get to their place of work, they have to
negotiate to get their children to school and it is a dreadful situation. I discovered while I was there that I was
the only Foreign Minister of any country and we are the only Consulate in
Jerusalem that bothers to follow up consular cases. Many countries may posture about this, but in fact the only
people who are doing any work on the ground to challenge what is happening with
that barrier as it passes through Jerusalem is Britain. We are challenging very, very hard on this
and we have opposed the way it has been done right the way along. Now, it is very curious really that we do
not trumpet that fact. We do not say it
very often partly also because we do not want to alienate the Israeli
Government from the possibility that there might be a change in their attitude.
Q41 Mr Purchase: And the Americans as well.
Dr Howells: Well, I cannot speak for the Americans and I
am only speaking for the British Government.
We do an enormous amount of work there and we are a continual voice in
opposition to these illegal settlements which have been built, and I have seen
them myself many, many times. They are
not contributing to a peaceful solution.
They are illegal under UN resolutions and they should be dismantled and
withdrawn. Now, I think we ought to be
telling this Arab street that as a very potent and positive fact, but of course
it is a story that never gets told and it certainly does not get told by
Al-Jazeera.
Q42 Mr Keetch: Minister, I am sure many of us around this
table, possibly all of us around this table, would agree entirely with those
sentiments and certainly I am very grateful that you, as a British Government
Minister, are making that very clear in public and you are right, we ought to
make more of that as a country and a Government. I also think you are absolutely right that the settlement of this
issue is key to a future of world peace and it affects all of us in all of our
constituencies and all of the organisations you have discussed. Hamas - you rightly said that there are
different types of Hamas. The Finnish
Foreign Minister recently has said that the EU should be prepared to talk to
Hamas, that we are part of the quartet.
Is that something that you would envisage could happen in the near
future and would the British Government
support direct talks between the EU and at least the elected Hamas Government?
Dr Howells: Well, I think if Hamas moved towards the
quartet's position on the Middle East Peace Process, I do not see that it would
be a problem to talk to Hamas, but Hamas has got to make some movement. You know, we cannot talk to a government,
however democratic and this Government was elected democratically, there is no
question about it, they were free and fair elections and a great triumph for
the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian people, but we cannot be
negotiating with a government that is providing funding to terrorists and
paying the families of suicide bombers.
What would the British public feel about that, I just wonder, but if, as
Jack Straw said when he was Foreign Secretary, there are signs of some direction
of travel by Hamas towards a position where they could start to believe that
there is a two-state solution and that Israel has a proper right to exist as a
sovereign nation, I cannot see that there is a problem with talking to the
elected representatives of Hamas, as long as of course they are not associated
directly or we know they have got associations with these appalling terrorist
acts that they have been part of.
Q43 Mr Keetch: But you have indicated to us that the
governments of Syria and Iran may well be involved in at least supporting or at
least being aware of, for example, attacks on British troops in Iraq. You have already accepted today that the
Government of Iran has publicly called for the destruction of the State of
Israel. What is the difference between
talking to the non-democratically elected Government of Iran and the
non-democratically elected Government of Syria and yet we will not talk to the
democratically elected Government of Hamas, even though those governments say
much the same things?
Dr Howells: No, I think that we can pin terrorist
bombings directly on Hamas, there is no question about that and nobody disputes
it, and there is a great deal of sentiment on Mr Purchase's Arab street about
the right of Israel to exist, there is no question about that. The Iranian Ambassador said to me yesterday
when I challenged him about President Ahmadinejad's statement on "wanting
Israel wiped off the face of the map", he said, "Oh, that was only one sentence
in a great many". That might be
sickening, which it certainly is, but I think we have got a different problem
with Hamas. Hamas, I think, is still
involved in a very direct and in a day-to-day way with much of this terrorist
activity in Gaza and in the West Bank, but sooner or later I think they will
move and I think the tactics have been the right ones up until now. As soon as we see that movement, I think we
should certainly be ready to engage with them.
Q44 Richard
Younger-Ross: One of the
problems with the two-State solution is the continued expansion of the
settlements. I was in, as I said,
Bethlehem and apart from meeting an elderly Palestinian lady who said she was
glad to meet a British politician because it was all our fault from the 1920s -
they have long memories - very clearly from Bethlehem you could see the settlements
being constructed, the cranes were in action, building work was going on and it
is going to be very hard to find Palestinians who say that there can be a
two-State solution when Israel is expanding into what they see as their State.
Dr Howells: I agree with you entirely. It is a situation that cannot be justified
and it generates huge resentment throughout the Middle East and throughout the
world, there is no question about it.
We have urged the Israelis and I will be urging the Israeli Ambassador
this afternoon, a very civilised and humane individual, to take that message
back to his Government again that this is not helping the Peace Process in any
shape or form and that they should not just desist from expanding existing
settlements, but they should start dismantling illegal settlements.
Q45 Richard
Younger-Ross: Can you also
take the message back that I met the Deputy Mayor of Bethlehem and he had been
shot and his daughter had been killed by Israelis in an accidental shooting and
he wanted to work for peace. They are
undermining in their actions at the moment and they are likely to end up with
Hezbollah getting a foothold in the Palestinian West Bank which it does not
really have at the moment, and that is very dangerous for the long-term safety
and stability of Israel.
Dr Howells: I am sure he will be watching you at this
very moment, but I will repeat your words.
Q46 Sir John Stanley: Minister, I entirely agreed with you when you
said that the Israeli/Palestinian issue can be solved. Yes, it most certainly can be solved and I
would go further, that I think that everybody who is not in one camp or the
other knows that there is only one solution that is actually going to endure
territorially and that solution is of course the withdrawal of Israel broadly
to the 1967 boundaries, withdrawal from the West Bank, withdrawal from east
Jerusalem, the proper connecting up with road and rail links to which you have
referred between the two halves of the Palestinian State, Gaza and the West
Bank, coupled absolutely crucially with absolutely cast-iron international
guarantees for the future security and continuation of the State of
Israel. Everybody knows that that is
basically the only solution that is going to endure, and the question I put to
you is: why does the British Government not put its head above the parapet and
not just talk in terms of trying to solve it, regarding it as a priority issue,
et cetera, et cetera, but actually say, "This is the solution", and to try to
get the rest of the international community in support of that one solution
which is the only one which is going to end this war?
Dr Howells: Well, Sir John, I do not think there is a
major disagreement among us about this.
I think basically that is the framework for the solution that the
quartet is aiming at and which the road map hopes to achieve at the end. I am sure that there will be disputes about
final status and one thing and another about where 1967 ended up and whether
that is the proper place to be, but I absolutely agree with you, I think we
have got to have much greater clarification than we have had about this and we
have got a very clear target to aim at and, if we have got that, then I think
we can make the kind of progress that you have identified which is absolutely vital.
Q47 Sir John Stanley: Minister, no British Prime Minister in recent
years, and I think including under Conservative Governments and certainly under
the present Labour Government, or none of the Labour Foreign Secretaries has
ever said, to my knowledge, that this is the solution, that that territorial
solution, that security solution which I have just outlined to you which you
have confirmed is broadly what is going to be the outcome, I do not believe
that any senior minister has ever said, "This is the solution and this is what
we've got to achieve". Why can this not
be said and championed publicly? In my
view, it would be a magnificent piece of foreign policy and world leadership by
the British Government.
Dr Howells: Well, I would dispute the fact that we do not
agree with those aims. You have got me
on the question of whether or not Prime Ministers over the last 50 years or
something have ever stated it as importantly as that. What I would say is this: that I think there is the most potent,
multilateral effort being made at the moment through the quarter to achieve
some kind of settlement and I would feel very worried about our Prime Minister
or anybody else who basically as part of that quartet move through the EU tried
to disrupt the progress of those discussions and those efforts to bring peace
to that area, but I take your point entirely.
I think all too often the language which we use to describe what is
happening in the Middle East and what ought to be happening, I think, is very
obscure. It is an extreme kind of
diplomatic language and people do not understand it and they see things in much
sharper and contrasting tones and they see the subjugation of the Palestinian
people, they see Israel in a very different light and somehow we have got to get
across that this is a solution to this.
I feel instinctively that there will be a different kind of language
from now on and you may be right, it may be a language which is a lot clearer
than it has been up until now, but I want to reiterate that we are big
supporters of the quartet's efforts and we do not want to see them derailed in
any shape or form because we cannot see another game in town at the moment.
Q48 Mr Hamilton: I just wanted to come back to the
Palestinians for a minute because obviously once Hamas were elected
democratically as the Government of the Palestinian territories, all EU aid
stopped, aid from this country, and the Israelis withheld Customs' revenues and
taxes owed to the Palestinian Authority and collected on their behalf. It cannot surely help any efforts towards
peace to see the Palestinians living in the kind of poverty that they are now
suffering. We have already seen the
strikes against the Government by civil servants in the Palestinian Authority,
but it could be argued that they are amongst the better-off Palestinians, and I
am thinking of the very poorest of people that we ourselves have met in
Ramallah and other parts of the Palestinian territories which we have visited,
people who really need those revenues.
Are we going to start paying those monies again, those aid monies that
we supply? Are we going to persuade the
European Union to resume their aid to the Palestinian Authority or at least to
the Palestinians and are we going to try and persuade the Israelis as well to
pay those Customs' duties? I understand
why they are not doing it, but my concern is not the Government, but it is
actually the people who are suffering dire poverty at the moment.
Dr Howells: Well, we have certainly been trying to
persuade the Israelis to handle the money that they have collected in taxes and
we believe that they should. As you
know, Mr Hamilton, we have been very much involved in getting the temporary
international mechanism up and running, the 'TIM', as it is called, and that
seems to be working pretty well at the moment, but, as you pointed out, the
problems are enormous. Whether we
should try to persuade other EU countries, for example, to resume aid to the
elected Palestinian Government is another matter. I am not sure that I could go back to my constituents and say,
"Yes, we're paying a subvention to a political party which is arming suicide
bombers" ----
Q49 Mr Hamilton: But can I just interrupt you for one second
because one of the reasons Hamas was elected is because they are not only a
terrorist organisation that does support suicide bombing, but they also
supplied some of the welfare, health, education and social services which were
so badly lacking under the previous administration, so it is a very big
problem, is it not?
Dr Howells: Yes, it is a very, very good tactic. When I went into the earthquake-affected
area of Kashmir shortly after the earthquake, some of the Pakistani military
there said, "Do you know what is extraordinary, that within days of this
earthquake happening we had Jihadists setting up new madrases in this area, new
schools in this area, bringing the children in, the survivors, giving them
food, working very hard on it", and they were very upset by that development,
but it is a very good tactic. Now, it
is another matter, however, for a democratically elected government, like
Britain, to say that we oppose terrorism and we support the UN as far as
terrorism is concerned and then hand over money to a political organisation
that is actually paying terrorists.
Q50 Mr Hamilton: Are there not NGOs there that could use that
money? I am thinking of the people who
are suffering. I am not ----
Dr Howells: You are absolutely right and that is why we
have worked so hard on TIM. Do you want
to say something on this, Peter?
Dr Gooderham: We do of course also fund NGOs. What the Minister has been talking about is
funding to the Palestinian Authority itself and that is the temporary
international mechanism, the TIM, but the Department for International
Development also funds NGOs and of course we also contribute to UNRA, the
United Nations Refugee Agency, which is obviously very active and has a very
significant role in both Gaza and the West Bank, so money is going in those
different directions.
Q51 Sir John Stanley: Minister, I am not going to raise the defence
dimension, but, if I may, I would like to express my own, and I am sure the
Committee's, tribute to our British Forces in Afghanistan in the incredibly
difficult and dangerous operations in which they are engaged and I express the
hope that the NATO Secretary-General's call for additional forces there is
going to be responded to. Can I turn to
a key responsibility of the Foreign Office in Afghanistan which is
counter-narcotics where of course the British Government after the war took the
lead on behalf of the international community in Afghanistan and, as we all
know, the whole issue of poppy money, drug money is actually fundamental to
funding the Taliban, funding the insurgency and is fundamental to the
exercising of political and economic control over the lives of countless
communities, particularly in the south.
It is very, very depressing and saddening that here we are four years
after the invasion and we have a record-sized poppy harvest in Afghanistan and
I have to put it to you, Minister, is it not the case that sadly the Foreign
Office's leadership on counter-narcotics has been, it appears, an almost
complete and total failure?
Dr Howells: Well, I certainly would not accept that and I
do not think you would believe for one moment that I would accept it, Sir
John. I was very disappointed with
UNODC figures that came out of the hectarage of opium poppies planted and grown
this past season in Afghanistan, but within that report I felt there were some
very salutary lessons for any observer who wants to take a look at the problem
of narcotics and counter-narcotics in Afghanistan. The huge increases in production were mainly in the south, mainly
in the Helmand province where they were planted, I may add and we need to be
clear on this, not under our watch, but they were planted before we got there,
and I know that because I went down to Alashniga(?) almost a year ago now and
there were about 100 GIs down there in a province three and a half times the
size of Northern Ireland where at one point we had 30,000 troops stationed and
we spoke the language. This was an
extremely difficult situation for the Americans down there and quite frankly I
do not think they in any sense engaged in counter-narcotic activities down there. When we got down there, we discovered that
in fact there was a lot of opium that had already been planted and we knew also
that there were some very, very powerful figures involved down there in the
opium trade that went right to the top, if I might put it like that, of local
governance. The moment we got down
there, it was like poking a hornets' nest because everybody and everybody's
grandmother came out from the shadows because they could see that here was a
very potent military force backed by a political desire to do something about
Helmand, to reduce the lawlessness, the sense of anarchy and the ease with
which drug-traffickers moved around that province, and they attacked us and
they have been attacking us every since and they attack us very hard. We have killed a lot of Taliban and
tragically we have lost soldiers down there, but what we have been trying to do
down there is to bring some sense of extending the Government of Afghanistan's
democratic remit to a province that has never known law and order or certainly
not since the late 1950s/1960s, so it is going to be a long haul and, Sir John,
it has reminded us that in countries like Burma and so on it took decades to
get rid of the heroin trade from down there and they never did it entirely of
course, but they reduced it pretty dramatically, as they did in Pakistan as
well. I think essentially this is going
to have to be a long political process and we cannot win purely a military
victory down there and anybody who thinks that by killing lots and lots of
Afghanis we are going to somehow stop them growing opium poppy is deluded. There has got to be a proper political
process down there and that is what we have been looking to start. There is a reconciliation process under way
at the moment in Afghanistan and it is a bit fragile at the moment, but it
could contain the germs of a way forward that does not involve pitched battles
between us and the Taliban who tell the farmers, "Don't worry. You plant your fields and we'll protect
you". You are quite right to point out
the connection between these holier than thou "God's terrorists", as they love
to refer to themselves, and their connection with the filthy trade of heroin
production. They are like that [indicating]
down there and they are in cahoots with every gangster and smuggler and lawlord
they can get their hands on, so it is going to be a long and difficult process.
Q52 Sir John Stanley: Can you just tell us what role the British
Government wishes the NATO troops and British troops to play, if any, in
counter-narcotics in Helmand province?
Dr Howells: Well, we went there for a very specific
purpose and that was to provide an environment in which the Afghan
counter-narcotics authorities and agencies could go in and try to persuade the
farmers not to grow opium and to go for those medium- and high-level targets of
the traffickers, the organisers of the trade, the guys who are making billions
of dollars out of this and to try to capture them, and we have been working
very hard at this. There is a new
prison which has been built, for example, the first prison, as far as I am
aware, in Afghanistan that meets all the UN human rights stipulations. That has been built and I saw it for myself
near Kabul. We have got a terribly
delayed reform to the judicial system and we have now got a judicial system
which could begin to try these people publicly and properly and sentence them
properly and put them into a prison that will meet UN standards. Now, they have never had that before. There has been lots of talk, "Oh, we'll find
these drug-traffickers and we'll hang them from the nearest lamppost", and I
have heard this time and again and our troops have brought, I think, a new
perspective to this. They have been war-fighting
because I think the Taliban and their fellow travellers, if I may describe them
that way, know that they have got a force to reckon with here that is going to
challenge their authority to operate their own law within that area. It is a difficult fight for us and that is
why I hope with you, Sir John, that NATO understands today that it has got to
start pulling its weight because that poison that is going into the veins of
our kids from northern Scotland to southern England and Wales and Northern
Ireland, that is going into the veins of kids from Estonia to Chicago and
everybody has got to realise that they have got to play their part if they are
serious, as they always stated they were, about counter-narcotics in putting
their resources and their soldiers on the line to help us out because we are
bearing a very big brunt of this military conflict at the moment.
Q53 Andrew Mackinlay: Our deployment in Afghanistan has the cover
of international law and it is a laudable objective, but it does come back to
the question of resources. The plea for
more troops through NATO today underscores the fact that there clearly is a
need for more if the objective is to be fulfilled, but it seems to me that you
and I, as Labour Members of Parliament, have a particular responsibility
because in a sense we have been privy to downsizing our Armed Forces. It does seem increasingly to me, as a
legislator, that frankly our commitments are now too great in comparison with
our Armed Forces, our resources. Now,
of course you might say that this would be a matter for the Defence Select
Committee, but it seems to me that foreign policy dictates that we are there
and, as I say, I think it is a very laudable objective covered by international
law, but is it not now obvious that clearly the United Kingdom as such is now on
overstretch with regards to its Armed Forces in relation to the commitments we
have entered into of which this is one?
Dr Howells: Well, Mr Mackinlay, can I say that I went out
to Afghanistan on this past trip to ask the Commander of IFOR, General Richards,
precisely these questions, and I have no doubt that you will have the
opportunity to speak to General David Richards. He is an outstanding commander, he is somebody whom President
Karzai relies on a great deal and he has got the respect of everybody of the 36
nations that are in Afghanistan, working with the UN.
Q54 Andrew Mackinlay: He is very professional.
Dr Howells: I asked him these questions very directly and
he told me that in terms of what British troops are doing, they have the
resources, but he said to me quite clearly, and I am sure he will say it
publicly quite clearly, "We need NATO to be pulling its weight. They need to put more resources in there and
we need help". We went in there on the
understanding that there would be a kind of strategic reserve battalion that
would be ready to come in and help us and we assumed that would be coming from
NATO. Now, that reserve battalion has
got to be found and it has got to be activated very soon, I think.
Q55 Andrew Mackinlay: Well, if it is not, and I listened carefully
to what you said and I do not mean this in a facetious way, but carefully
crafted, the point is that he is saying and you are saying, "Yes, we can", but
it is predicated, it is dependent upon there being this reserve battalion. Also I can understand that we are
professional and disciplined Forces and we can cope for a while, but we cannot
sustain this commitment and achieve our objectives unless there is relief and
that is the way I understand it. As I
say, we cannot let this opportunity go and there needs to be an unequivocal
statement by Her Majesty's Government that we can sustain this and not put in
jeopardy, or unreasonably burden, our Armed Forces, the best generals, the best
soldiers.
Dr Howells: The way that General Richards described it to
me was like this: he said that we are not in danger of not achieving our
objectives, but we could achieve them and we could achieve success much more
quickly if NATO pulled its weight as it should be pulling its weight, and that
is the point that I want to make. In
other words, he said, "We can achieve what we've set out to achieve in
Afghanistan along with all of our allies out there in terms of the troops that
we have there and the resources that we have there at the moment, but if we want
to do it more quickly, then, if you like, the 22 other members of NATO out of
the 26 have got to think very hard about putting more resources in there", and
I agree with him entirely.
Q56 Mr Illsley: When the Committee was in Afghanistan, we
realised that there are a number of lawlords out there who earn maybe £250
million per annum running border controls by farming the opium. The farmers were in hock to the warlords and
they had to grow the opium to pay the debts they owed to them. Now, given that each one of these warlords
has a standing army of about 8,000 men at arms and heavily armed, you reach the
situation where no matter how many troops we or NATO put into that country, we
are not going to succeed in that direction.
Have we now reached a stage where, rather than try to destroy the crop
and put it into alternative production, we simply use the resources to buy it
from them and control the supply of it that way or destroy it?
Dr Howells: Mr Illsley, this is one of the dafter ideas I
have heard out of many in my time in this job.
I remember asking a very distinguished proponent of the argument that
the world needs this for the pharmaceutical industry ----
Q57 Mr Illsley: Not use it, but destroy it, use what we are
spending on the troops to spend on the damned opium and destroy it.
Dr Howells: Well, you would have to of course be able to
police this brilliantly because these people are geniuses. I often ask about the balloon effect ----
Q58 Mr Illsley: But there is a huge economic driver out
there.
Dr Howells: Well, the problem is that you buy the crop,
but I would put a lot of money on the fact that the moment they have the
opportunity, those drug barons would be growing it again somewhere else because
they have got three million customers in Pakistan just over the border, they
have got another three million customers in Iran just over the border, they
have a growing body, maybe as many as a million people, who are hooked on some
form of drugs inside Afghanistan itself, so this is a very, very lucrative market
for them. The very idea that you could
buy it and thereby kind of legalise the crop means of course you would have to
keep buying it up every year and I do not know what it costs even, though we
heard a figure the other day that somebody made about $1.2 billion out of it
who lives in Dubai now ----
Q59 Mr Illsley: What does a NATO Force cost?
Dr Howells: ---- but it would be an enormous amount of
money. President Karzai himself has
said, "Look, the most corrosive element in our life at the moment is the drug
industry and the drug culture and it is undermining everything we are trying to
do to rebuild this country and to create a viable economic state".
Q60 Mr Illsley: I take it that is a no then?
Dr Howells: It is a no.
Try and persuade Gordon Brown!
Chairman: Minister, can I thank you for coming along
this morning and your colleagues. I
would also particularly like to thank you for staying longer. It is very important for us, as a committee,
and I think the public also will appreciate the fact that we have had a
Minister answering on so many different issues.
