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23 May 2007 : Column 435WH—continued
“is a threat to international peace and security”,
United Nations sanctions have not imposed much of a penalty on Iran. Similarly, the Security Council’s resolutions are very limited. There are few concrete restrictions. They call for vigilance and restraint, but make no demands on Iran for which it can be held to account.
The United States’ actions must be followed by the European Union and properly supported. In a moment, I shall go through one or two of the actions that we could impose. Above and beyond everything else, we must act as a sovereign nation to encourage dialogue between the United States and Iran. However, without Iranian compliance, we should be looking to impose much stronger United Nations penalties on Iran if she will not co-operate. When the UN meets to consider its next resolution on Iran in the last week of May and early June, the Security Council should either impose or raise the prospect of a number of different measures, such as a travel ban on individuals involved in Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programme; a formal ban on the training of Iranians in nuclear disciplines; the designation of Bank Saderat Iran, which is said to be used by Iran to transfer money to terrorist groups; and adding leaders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, which controls Iran’s ballistic missile programme and is thought to orchestrate violence in Iraq, to the travel ban and assets freeze list. I could go on, and I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Norfolk (Mr. Simpson) will add to that list.
I have spoken for long enough, Mr. O’Hara, but while we are mesmerised by such eye-catching events as we have seen over the past two or three weeks and while we agonise over the potential development of nuclear weapons in Iran, our servicemen are being eviscerated by weaponry that comes from Iran to both Iraq and Afghanistan. We cannot allow that to continue. It is an undeclared act of war. Unless we seize this opportunity to harden Government policy, to propose concerted, orchestrated and coherent actions across the alliance, I suggest that the next few months will be bloody, hot and lethal for our troops who are trying to serve this country with all their courage.
Mr. Edward O’Hara (in the Chair): Order. I remind hon. Members that the Front-Bench contributions should start not later than 10.30.
9.56 am
Andrew Mackinlay (Thurrock) (Lab):
I welcome this debate because during a half-hour debate in this Chamber on 25 April there were, as has been demonstrated, some unanswered questions, certainly from my perspective. I hope to explore those today, but I want to thank and
congratulate the hon. Member for Newark (Patrick Mercer) on securing this longer debate because it allows us to examine more forensically the position of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Her Majesty’s Government’s inconsistent approach to our bilateral relations with Iran.
The Minister is somewhat testy and irritable, and obviously thinks I am unfair or unreasonable in my criticisms, but that is against the backdrop of Her Majesty’s Government saying different things at ministerial level, and not being consistent in demonstrating their distaste for Iran’s human rights record and the hon. Gentleman’s central charge this morning that weaponry and ordnance are coming from Iran with the knowledge and acquiescence of the regime, which is obviously working against our interests both in Iraq and Afghanistan and putting our service personnel in peril.
That is broadly the charge and, as the hon. Gentleman effectively said, we are acquiescing, through our silence and inaction, in outrages outside Iran but emanating from there, and human rights violations in Iran to which we have an entirely different response from that to other regimes in other parts of the world that perpetrate the same actions.
Belarus is a pretty awful regime, but it does not export terror. Yet we do not entertain officials from Belarus and our relations are in deep freeze. As far as I am aware, we do not welcome to the United Kingdom formal delegations from the Belarus Parliament, although individuals may come, which is correct and appropriate. Yet we welcome parliamentary delegations from the Majlis and we send delegations there, which is absurd. Was there a recent visit by members of the Majlis with the acceptance and approval of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office? If so, it was done sneakily, and that does not make it legitimate.
Why do I say that Her Majesty’s Government are sending inconsistent signals? If we look at what the Prime Minister has said as recently as 9 May in the House, we can see why. He said:
“What is happening in Iraq is essentially that al-Qaeda on the one hand and elements of the Iranian regime on the other are backing terrorism”.
It is the Prime Minister who said that
“elements of the Iranian regime...are backing terrorism”.—[Official Report, 9 May 2007; Vol. 460, c. 154.]
I did not say that; the Prime Minister said it. Yet, we have the kind of response that we had on 25 April, and which I believe we are likely to get today, implying that we must go softly on the Iranian regime. If the Minister says, “The hon. Member for Thurrock is wrong. We are not going soft with the Iranian regime,” why do we continue to allow exports that have dual use?
Following our Westminster Hall debate, the Minister wrote to my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton, North (Frank Cook) on 18 May and referred to the EU agreed “Common Position” relating to
“restrictions on the supply of arms to Iran as set out in Resolution 1747”.
The Minister went on to state that it
“covers all items on an agreed Military List”,
“does not include dual use chemicals such as zirconium silicate, which will continue to be”
available under export licences. I cannot understand why we do that. It seems to me to be bonkers to allow the export to that regime of things that are demonstrably of value in the development of nuclear energy or weapons. Zirconium silicate can contribute to many parts of the process. I use zirconium silicate only to indicate and illustrate our silliness.
The list of people who are not allowed—frankly, not made welcome—in the UK and the EU is not really effective. As I indicated, we host so-called parliamentarians—they are anointed by the regime rather than popularly elected—here in London. That sends a confused signal. On the one hand, the Prime Minister talks frankly and candidly, and I believe correctly, but in another part of the Government, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office takes, in my view, a completely different approach and, if I may say so, seriously misreads the gravity of the situation.
To buttress my case and that of the hon. Member for Newark, I noticed that a Lieutenant Colonel Simon Browne, commanding officer of the 2nd Battalion the Royal Anglian Regiment, told The Sunday Telegraph:
“I’m sure there is outside influence here and it is from Iran. It is clear the insurgents are getting supplied from somewhere. I would believe it comes from Iran, or at least comes from Iranian sources”.
He was talking about the weapons that were putting his troops in peril in Iraq.
Reference has also been made to the fact that in a previous debate I put forward the proposition that the People’s Mujaheddin of Iran should not be proscribed. Perhaps I have approached the matter in the wrong way. May I use this occasion to ask Her Majesty’s Government to say what more the PMOI can do, or what they would like it to do, to demonstrate beyond doubt that it is not involved in terrorism in the United Kingdom, the European Union or anywhere? What more can or should the PMOI do?
The Government have moved the goalposts. They know that the PMOI is not a terrorist organisation, but they are frightened of the consequences of taking it off a proscribed list because of our bilateral relations with Iran. That is the truth. It is not sufficient for the Minister to scoff or dismiss what I am saying. It would be fair both to the PMOI and to Parliament if the Minister or another member of the Government—either this morning or on a piece of paper—were to list the PMOI’s deficiencies and failings in demonstrating its good will and that it is terrorist-free.
Mr. Gale: Is it not the case that the PMOI and its associated organisations have never participated in any terrorist activity in or against the interests of the United Kingdom? Is it not a fact that the PMOI and its adherents in Iraq are providing succour, at great risk to themselves, to the allied forces in Iraq, and providing both the Americans and the British with intelligence that is being used by our forces in the cause for which we are present? Is it not shameful that the Government should lead the call in Europe for the maintenance of the proscription of the PMOI?
Andrew Mackinlay:
I subscribe to those views. It is also interesting that the American commanders of the coalition forces that have jurisdiction over the part of Iraq in which PMOI members have been disarmed, Camp Ashraf or Ashraf city, have given the
organisation consistently, on paper, a clean bill of health. We are talking about the United States of America, whose commanders are in Iraq. They have indicated clearly that the PMOI members in Ashraf city are not acting as terrorists. They are allowed bank accounts. One is bewildered as to why Her Majesty’s Government maintain the proscription. I say that I am bewildered, but the only logical conclusion is that which I and the hon. Gentleman have come to: they do so to placate the Iranian regime. That is wrong and shameful.
In the letter sent to my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton, North, the Minister more or less says that I have misread the situation and the PMOI has been on a terrorist list for much longer than our negotiations with Iran on the nuclear issue have been going on. That is true, but I believe that it buttresses my view. The PMOI has demonstrably been disarmed since 2001, but nobody, including the Government, has produced one instance of a breach of the disarmament. The Government are frightened to alter the existing arrangements, because they have a fear of offending Iran.
In his letter to my hon. Friend, the Minister did not address the fact that the EU has subsequently said that it will continue to proscribe the PMOI if the UK collaborates. We will see that tomorrow in the Official Report because the hon. Member for Newark read out the offer. The Minister needs to deal with that issue, which I raised on 25 April, and which the hon. Member for Newark raised this morning, rather than the history of the matter.
The other issue that needs to be raised this morning is the fact that the PMOI has used the European Court of First Instance to secure some remedy. The Court challenged the European Union and, implicitly, the United Kingdom, to produce evidence of terrorism, but it has failed to do so. Neither Parliament, nor the European Court of First Instance have seen any evidence. The matter is becoming increasingly embarrassing and unfair, and it compounds the mixed signals that we are sending to Iran.
Many Members want to contribute to the debate, so I shall conclude by saying that I hope that the Minister recognises that he cannot be selective. When he sends a letter to you, Mr. O’Hara, or to your fellow Chairman, my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton, North, he must answer all the points raised in a debate, not just some of them.
10.9 am
Mr. Bernard Jenkin (North Essex) (Con): I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Patrick Mercer) on securing this timely debate. It is extraordinary that the issue of Iran, its role in Iraq and the causes of that role have been so underreported.
For the record, after I first visited Iraq as shadow Secretary of State for Defence, shortly after the invasion in 2003, one of the key issues that I raised with the then Secretary of State for Defence, both on and off the record, was the role that Iran was already evidently playing in Iraqi politics and in the violence in that country. The Government and the coalition as a whole have been asleep at the switch on the issue. They
have completely failed to confront the problem, which has resulted in the loss of perhaps many more lives than we should have lost.
The external involvement of Iran cannot be separated from its internal politics. I beg for a much deeper, more three-dimensional understanding of that amazing country, Iran. It was an extremely powerful and influential country, with its own empire. It has many diverse and proud traditions, and there is no reason why its strand of Islam should not be peacefully expressed, but Iran has suffered historic decline over the past 200 years.
I am afraid that the western powers have played a shameful role in the decline and humiliation of Iran over the past century, not least through some duplicitous treaty-making by our country and the overthrow of the flowering of democracy in Iran in the early years of the cold war. It was the western powers that installed the corrupt regime of the Shah of Iran, which led directly to the Iranian revolution, which has led directly to the situation that we face today. Not only that, but when the Shah was overthrown, we tacitly supported Saddam, in the containment of what we regarded then as a hostile power.
I am afraid that our record is deeply inconsistent and nothing to be proud of. We may find excuses for it, but we must recognise our failings in our engagement with Iran. It is hardly surprising that an irresponsible leadership in Iran can capitalise on the deep suspicions that many Iranian people feel about the role of the United States and the United Kingdom in their decline and misfortunes. Finally on that point, what interest does Iran have in stabilising Iraq, when it is in Iran’s national interest, as the Iranians perceive it, to keep the United Kingdom and the United States in particular bogged down, instead of targeting this other member of the axis of evil? I believe that the Iranian regime is indeed part of an axis of evil, but that is the regime, not the people.
That relates to my second point, which is that we must understand the nature of Iran. As my hon. Friend pointed out, we are not dealing with the equivalent of Nazi Germany or with the monocultural police state that we overthrew in Iraq. We are dealing with a very much more diverse and relatively liberal society, where many strands of opinion are capable of being expressed and where there is even a semblance or pretence of democracy and elections. There are dissident movements operating in Iran with which we should be actively engaged, although I shall not revisit the PMOI/MEK issue, which is a subject for a whole debate. Our inconsistency in dealing with those questions underlines the immaturity of our policy and discussion.
Ahmadinejad is not just a deranged madman in charge of a whole country; he is part of a machinery. The religious leaders in Iran may not even have intended him to win his election, but it is important to see him as part of a machinery, rather than a rogue leader operating on his own. To underline that point, look at the sophistication with which the Iranian regime plays the international media and the way in which the British hostages were paraded in front of the cameras and encouraged to thank their captor for his munificence. Look at the timing of that operation,
which skilfully removed from the public agenda the issue of UN sanctions, which should have preoccupied us over that period. That operation paralysed the international campaign of sanctions, stole a victory in the United Nations from the west and gave an unparalleled propaganda victory to Ahmadinejad and his regime at such a crucial moment.
As my hon. Friend pointed out, Prince Harry’s deployment has unfortunately turned into another such debacle. I fail to understand why Ministers did not realise that the deployment of a member of the royal family was fundamentally a political issue. How they could ever have understood it to be merely a military decision beats me. The episode demonstrates that the Government have no understanding of the complexity and breadth of the campaign that they have to fight against Ahmadinejad’s regime. That campaign has to be fought on every front. We are not just fighting a diplomatic battle, a counter-insurgency battle or a military battle in Iraq and Afghanistan; we are fighting a propaganda war. We are fighting for the hearts and minds of the Arab street, but at every turn we deliver Ahmadinejad and his regime the propaganda victory that he needs to be seen as the champion of the Islamic world against the perfidy of the western powers.
To underline that point, we need to acknowledge the failure of current diplomatic efforts. There was a period when the EU3 was given its head by the Americans to take the soft power approach towards Iran, as opposed to having the United States holding the big stick. However, neither the soft power approach nor the big stick can possibly work separately. The idea that the European powers could be Mr. Nice Guy or do a good cop, bad cop routine against a country as sophisticated as Iran was always moonshine. We must have a seamless policy with the US and the EU, involving all the other senior powers in the United Nations. We have been moving towards that, but my goodness it has been slow, because we are not treating the issue as the top international issue that it should be seen as. Even the outcome in Iraq is now of secondary importance to the outcomes that we face in Iran.
To conclude, Iran is the test case. If weapons proliferation succeeds in Iran, there will be a domino effect throughout the entire middle east. Every Gulf state will say, “Well, I will need one, too.” Already we know that Israel has nuclear weapons. The Gulf states are prepared to tolerate that, but they will not be prepared to tolerate a rogue regime in Iran possessing nuclear weapons, while they remain defenceless. Furthermore, if we cannot confront this terrorism-exporting regime as forcefully as we did Iraq, we are inviting Hezbollah to become active in Europe and the west, in the same way that al-Qaeda is already.
My hon. Friend referred to the possible identity of interests between al-Qaeda and Hezbollah. We have already seen how incredibly effective and sophisticated Hezbollah has been in Lebanon. It is not widely known, but Hezbollah used unmanned aerial vehicles in its war against Israeli forces in Lebanon. We are dealing not with unsophisticated, ill-educated people but with serious forces.
To succeed in our diplomacy in Iran, not least in order to deal with the externalities, we must change the emphasis of our rhetoric. First, we must elevate the issue in our domestic politics and in European and
American politics, so that people begin to understand its urgency. Secondly, we must emphasise our good intentions toward the people of Iran. We must talk about the shameful human rights record of the Iranian regime—I do not have time to elaborate on it now, but it is a subject that will connect with the vast majority of Iranians. As Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher raised the issue of the Soviet Union’s human rights record in the 1980s to undermine support for that regime, we must do the same with regard to Iran. It will legitimise our campaign to contain Iran’s terrorist activities and encourage Iran to expose its weapons development programmes.
There is no doubt that Iran seeks to obtain a weapons programme, but I emphasise again that a change of rhetoric might be helpful. We should acknowledge that if Iran wants an enrichment programme, albeit at utterly ludicrous expense to itself—if it really wants a domestic power generation programme with uranium enrichment on its own soil—we do not object in principle so long as it complies with the non-proliferation treaty to which it remains a signatory and accepts the comprehensive verification and surveillance necessary. It is demonstrably necessary, as the regime has clearly lied and lied and concealed and concealed what it is doing.
I commend to the Government the statement made earlier this week by my right hon. Friends the Leader of the Opposition and the shadow Foreign Secretary. They laid out a seriously thought out, comprehensive approach that the Government should be willing to adopt. I find it distressing that the Minister has sat through this debate without taking a single note; I fear that he will read out a text prepared for him by his officials. I hope that he will engage with the points raised, and that he will press his colleagues in Government to hold a full day’s debate on Iran. We have held full-day debates on Iraq, and it is time that we had one on Iran. Otherwise, we cannot demonstrate that our Government are treating the matter seriously enough.
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