Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180-199)
DR. KIM
HOWELLS MP, SIMON
MCDONALD
CMG AND DR.
PETER GOODERHAM
14 MARCH 2007
Q180 Mr. Keetch: Do you want to write
to us on that?
Dr. Howells: I certainly do not.
Q181 Mr. Moss: Would the Minister
agree that there are a considerable number of external actors
in the Lebanese crisis? Are those external players helpful or
unhelpful?
Dr. Howells: They are very unhelpful,
Mr. Moss. We are extremely worried about the continuing role of
Syria and Iran, and the Ahmadinejad Government—particularly
the way in which they have rearmed. Hezbollah is not rearming
and from our intelligence it seems to be back to the pre-war levels
as far as rockets and other weapons are concerned. They have come
across the Syrian border and we have called upon the Syrians many
times to police that border properly and, if anything, the Syrians
have done the opposite and have threatened retaliatory action
if there is a serious attempt made at policing it. That is a serious
situation and is a real violation of the sovereignty of Lebanon
and its Government.
Q182 Mr. Moss: Is our intelligence
accurate on that particular facet?
Dr. Howells: Obviously, we cannot
comment on that in detail.
Q183 Mr. Moss: Every time I ask a
question you do not answer it. We are going there in a week's
time.
Dr. Howells: We are pretty confident
about our intelligence. It will be interesting to see what you
find when you go there.
Q184 Mr. Moss: We will not be looking
for weapons, I can assure you.
Dr. Howells: The problem, Mr.
Moss, is that one of the most disturbing things that I found when
I was there was that Hezbollah is completely ruthless about where
it positions its weapons, rockets or mortars. A picture may be
taken of every child that is killed as a consequence of those
weapons and sent around the world. During the times I have been
to Basra, where I have seen Hezbollah tactics being used successfully,
I have noticed that rockets are fired out of Shi'a flats and are
aimed at killing our soldiers in the Basra palace compound and
other places such as the Basra air station. Those firing at our
soldiers know damn well that, unlike some people, we do not send
up helicopters and strafe the entire area or bomb it in the hope
that we might hit some of those teams. We do other things, but
we believe that every time a civilian is killed under those circumstances,
10 more enemies have probably been created. Such a tactic is a
Hezbollah tactic, which from its point of view has been very successful.
It does not care how many Lebanese or Palestinians die as long
as it looks like the great heroes of resistance against Israel.
Q185 Mr. Moss: Under the UN resolution,
the UN force is supposed to be disarming Hezbollah or at least
preventing a build-up of armaments in the southern zone. Is that
happening to your knowledge? Are they doing that job? Also, are
the newspaper reports correct that Hezbollah is digging in north
of the Litani river, which is its next fall-back position from
the border?
Dr. Howells: We are depending
on you to come back with that intelligence, Mr. Moss. We are very
worried about that as Hezbollah seems to be preparing for another
war.
Q186 Mr. Moss: My final point is
that Arab, European and American diplomats have been told that
some of the money going into Lebanon for the Siniora Government
is being hived off, particularly by Sunni or al-Qaeda backed units.
Do you have any information on that? Is that accurate?
Dr. Howells: I do not have any
information on that.
Dr. Gooderham: Certainly we are
very confident that the money that the British Government have
provided to the Lebanese Government has been properly disposed
of and is properly accounted for. Rigorous systems are in place.
Q187 Mr. Moss: So there is no evidence
of arming Sunni groups to counter perhaps the Shi'a Hezbollah?
Dr. Gooderham: Not as a result
of international assistance provided to the Lebanese Government,
no.
Q188 Mr. Moss: But otherwise there
might be?
Dr. Gooderham: Again, we have
no evidence of that.
Dr. Howells: There is a lot of
money slopping around there, Mr. Moss, as I think you will find
when you go out there. Across the whole region there are sources
of money that everyone knows are available for arming militias
and groups. That is from Waziristan and right across the Middle
East.
Q189 Mr. Illsley: I turn to a more
benign area, Dr. Howells—that of Jordan. This Committee
hosted a meeting back in November last year, when King Abdullah
made a speech to both Houses and spoke of his fear of being surrounded
by civil war in three separate territories—Iraq, Lebanon
and Palestine. On 8 March, he spoke to Congress and suggested
that the resolution of the Israel-Palestine situation was perhaps
more important than resolving the Iraqi situation. Is Jordan an
important player in the peace process? If so, how important is
it? Does Jordan have a role in resolving any of these crises?
Dr. Howells: That is a good question.
I have no doubt whatsoever that Jordan is a very important player.
It is also a country that has taken in a huge number of refugees
from Iraq, and is still taking them in—probably 700,000
of them. It is not a rich country; its economy is vulnerable,
and it plays an important role in terms of being a kind of prime
interlocutor both for the rest of the Arab world and for Israel
and Palestine. Some 1.8 million Palestinians live there, which
I think is about half the population.
Dr. Gooderham: More than half.
Dr. Howells: So it is more than
half the population of Jordan. It often has to walk on eggshells,
diplomatically speaking. It is also a key player in counter-terrorism
in general. It suffered badly from the attentions of al-Qaeda
and of Zarqawi who, before he was killed, planned and carried
out the dreadful bombing of the three hotels on that wedding day.
Q190 Mr. Illsley: It is interesting
that when King Abdullah was speaking in the United States on 8
March, he spoke to Congress about the involvement of the international
community in moving forward. I seem to recall that we were here
four years ago, just before the Americans moved into an election
phase, and the chances were that there would be little international
action in the run-up to the elections. The next elections will
begin perhaps later this year or early next year. Do you share
that concern—that there could be a period of substantial
inactivity on the part of the United States in the run-up to the
forthcoming elections?
Dr. Howells: I hope not. We need
the United States to be very heavily involved, not least because
it has such a powerful economy and because it is the most powerful
nation militarily. Everybody wants it to be involved, and I was
very glad that King Abdullah chose to speak to Congress. It was
an important move on his part, and I hope that the American political
Administration has taken his message on board.
Q191 Mr. Hamilton: Can I move on
to talk about Iran? It is an increasingly important player in
the region. I wonder whether you would comment on some of the
points that we heard last week when we took evidence from both
Professor Anoush Ehteshami and Dr. Ali Ansari, both academics.
Professor Ehteshami told us that "Iran sees Britain much
less as a European Union power than as a transatlantic actor",
and that is "what causes Tehran to give weight to Britain's
voice internationally."
As far as international engagement with Iran
on the nuclear issue and regional security concerns is concerned,
Dr. Ansari said "that the Iranians see everything in a holistic
way. I do not think that they separate those issues . . . The
tendency of western analysts to categorise and compartmentalise
things does not work" in Iran.
We are a key interlocutor with Iran on the nuclear
issue. Given the interrelation between the nuclear issue and regional
security, how do we see our diplomacy with Iran reflecting that
interrelation? In other words, how can we separate the two?
Dr. Howells: I will preface my
attempt at an answer by saying that wherever you go in the world,
and certainly wherever you go in the Middle East, everybody tells
you that the best diplomats are Iranian. By the best, they mean
the trickiest.
Q192 Mr. Keetch: Is that what a
good diplomat is?
Dr. Howells: They have at least
a 3,000 year history of doing that. Was it Brad Pitt who stopped
them in their tracks in a film the other day? I cannot remember
now, but they have a got a very long history and occupy a very
important place in the Middle East. They are probably, along with
Turkey, one of the emerging great powers in that area. We have
got to understand that. They do not consider themselves to be
Arab, and they resent the notion of being lumped in with the whole
of the Middle East—I have heard that from them first hand.
Iranians are very proud of their history and
if you do not understand that history, you will not understand
them. They do not think that we respect them enough. When I spoke
in Vienna with Dr. el-Baradei recently, for example, he said that
the Iranians have a thirst for knowledge. His explanation of why
it is such a ramshackle economy and such a poor country is because
they have been stymied by a series of largely self-induced, but
sometimes externally induced disasters. He is probably right—Iran
should be much wealthier than it is. It should be a country identified
with, if you like, the causes of modernisation and globalisation.
They certainly see themselves in that context, but they act very
differently. For example, the whole business of how they enrich
uranium hexafluoride and use centrifugal cascades—a very
difficult technology—is, in some ways, indicative of that
attitude. They want to be seen as a country that is capable of
handling this kind of engineering. They use the rhetoric of global
warming at the moment. They say, "Sure, we have plenty of
gas and oil, but we want nuclear energy because we want clean
energy in the future." It is a very interesting ploy.
Iranians probably do see us as being different
from the rest of the EU. They certainly see us as a kind of bridge
to the Americans. They have an incredible love-hate relationship
with the Americans—and there is love as well as hate in
it, by the way. If we forget that, we forget it at our peril.
So, yes, I think they probably do view us as a unique and independent
entity—that does not mean that they like us much.
Q193 Mr. Hamilton: Shame, they ought
to. If my statistics are correct, I believe that their economy
has shrunk by 30% since 1979, which would be unthinkable in UK
terms. I am told that one of the causes is that although they
are sitting on a sea of oil and gas, they do not have any petrol
refining plants. They can therefore export oil at a high price,
but have to pay a higher price to re-import the refined product.
Finally, do you think that there can really
be security and peace in the Middle East without engaging the
active co-operation of Iran?
Dr. Howells: I think we can probably
go a long way even if Iran remains as it is at the moment, although
I do not think that Lebanon can go a long way. Iran is an increasingly
disruptive influence inside Iraq—I choose the word "increasingly"
intentionally, although it also has enough political nous to know
that it has to get along with other neighbours, and it is trying
to do just that. It has a kind of multi-pronged approach. Its
relationship with the Afghanistan Government concerns us greatly,
for example.
We have our own relationship with Iran on its
eastern border, because we are keen to work with the Iranians
to stop heroin coming into Europe. There are 3.5 million opium
and heroin addicts in Iran, and the Iranians have been glad to
co-operate with Britain to try to do something about stopping
the big drug-smuggling gangs pushing their armed convoys across
the eastern border.
The Iranian relationship with Russia is different
from that with other members of the Quartet. After all, Russia
is building a nuclear power station for the Iranians down at Bushehr
and the Iranians are not about to endanger their relationship
with Russia.
On the first part of your question, the economy
is shambolic. Iran ought to be a much bigger oil and gas producer
than it is. I think that the Iranians know—certainly the
merchant class does—that unless they can start to forge
better relationships with countries that ought to be their major
trading partners, they will not get the investment that they need
to rejuvenate the industrial base, which in turn is needed to
pay for rebuilding of infrastructure. Iran is getting poorer,
not richer, at a time when the price of oil is at unprecedentedly
high levels.
The bit that always intrigues me about Iran
is that we want it to be much more engaged, because western Europe
needs Iranian gas very badly. We need to break the Russian monopoly
on supplies of gas to western Europe. That is a pretty controversial
statement to make, but the Russians need rivals. As long as there
is an absence of effective sanctions that would drive Iran to
the negotiating table, and as long as there are people who are
prepared to dangle a bit of support to Iran now and then, the
position of President Ahmadinejad and of the theocracy is strengthened,
and as a consequence the country remains poor.
Q194 Mr. Hamilton: Surely sanctions
would have the same effect.
Dr. Howells: I think that strong
sanctions would certainly drive the Iranian Government to negotiate
more seriously than seems to be the case at the moment. The issue
is a complex one, however. Who would be prepared to go along with
sanctions, where would they come from, and who would make the
decisions?
At least 300,000 and possibly 400,000 Iranians,
many of whom comprise the merchant class of Iran, have moved to
Dubai.
Q195 Mr. Hamilton: Four hundred thousand?
Dr. Howells: Yes indeed—they
are a huge part of the Dubai population, and they are clever people.
Iran is not North Korea. It is an ancient trading country with
a sophisticated merchant class, and the members of that class
are not about to see their profits completely squeezed down as
a consequence of future sanctions—they want to be able to
do business.
Chairman: Can we switch focus?
Q196 Sir John Stanley: May I turn
to Iraq, Minister? I have with me the UNHCR figures from its publication
on refugee global trends for 2003 and 2005. They show that the
number of refugees originating from Iraq at the end of 2003 was
estimated at 368,000. Two years later, at the end of 2005, that
figure had risen to 1,785,000. In other words, there was an increase
of 1.4 million in the number of refugees from Iraq in just two
years flat. As we know, those refugees are basically those who
were able to get out—who could afford to get out—and
they represent in many cases the very capable, talented people
whom Iraqi society needs.
Is not that an absolutely catastrophic humanitarian
disaster, and not just for the individuals concerned? It is for
them, because in most cases they have had to leave all their property
and assets behind and they have come out with nothing, but is
not it also an absolute disaster for Iraq itself? It flows directly
from our regrettable failure to be able to provide internal security
in that country. Can you hold out any prospects that that trend
will be reversed, or is that now just pie in the sky?
Dr. Howells: I entirely agree
with your analysis, Sir John. I think it is a disaster and it
was largely a hidden one until very recently. Last week, I met
the secretary-general of the International Committee of the Red
Cross, and he described to me some of the most obvious implications
of the huge movement of refugees. If they leave the country, they
are going mainly into Jordan and Syria, in very large numbers.
The international community is looking at how it can best support
those people, but you are right to say that the cause is the lack
of security inside Iraq. That is what must change.
Simon represented us, for example, at last Saturday's
Iraq neighbours meeting in Baghdad, and we made it very clear
that we considered that the provision of good security inside
the country must be not on a sectarian basis but on an inclusive
basis and must look after every part of the Iraqi population.
Can that be done? I do not think it is pie in the sky.
I understand that you have had discussions with
leading Iraqi politicians over the past couple of days. We are
watching carefully the result of the so-called surge in Baghdad.
We know from our experience in Basra that the movement out of
the city has stopped and we are seeing a return to Basra even
of some Sunni families. I remember that about four months ago
the Kuwaitis were very worried that they were receiving Sunni
families into Kuwait, but now they tell me they are going back,
although that is Basra. It is a city of 2.5 million people, or
whatever it is. The situation is not the same in Baghdad, from
where most of the refugees appear to originate, so it is an extremely
serious problem, but there is no way around it really. The only
way of countering it is to improve security within the country,
and especially within the provinces of Baghdad and around Baghdad.
Q197 Sir John Stanley: You say that
it is not pie in the sky to expect the humanitarian disaster to
be reversed. Do you agree that we are dealing with a fearful combination
of two quite separate factors that come together and produce the
same result—refugees? We are dealing with religious fanaticism,
which makes people leave because they are the wrong branch of
the Muslim faith in the wrong area. Coupled with that is the second
huge pressure, which is the force of naked criminality—gangsterism
and the kidnapping of people for money. That is out of control
also and it is coupled with huge, widespread corruption, so you
cannot trust the police forces and you cannot trust the judicial
system to provide you with the protection that we assume is in
place in a country such as this. When you take those two factors
together, do you still feel confident that the trend will be reversed?
Dr. Howells: Yes, Sir John, I
think it will be reversed eventually. Iraq is not the only part
of the world that faces these tremendous difficulties; they are
most acute in Iraq at the moment, but they are by no means unique
to it. I have been very concerned recently, for example, by Sri
Lanka, where 1 million people are displaced and 60,000 people
have died as a consequence of the war that is going on there.
The fighting is going on now, and people were killed just up the
road when I went there the other day. At its basis is a sectarian
divide, and that sectarianism grows partly out of religion and
partly out of the desire for land, and we have to find a way through
that.
What I refuse to do is say that the problem
is insoluble, because it is soluble. It is going to take a big
push in Iraq, and ultimately the problem is going to be solved
by the Iraqis themselves. Prime Minister al-Maliki and his Government
have to take the question of sectarianism far more seriously than
they have, and they have been told that openly, including by Simon,
among others. You cannot have a police force that is infiltrated
by Shi'a militias and becomes a death squad. When I was in Basra,
the then police chief told me that half the murders there were
committed by men wearing police uniforms, some of whom were policemen
and some of whom had just got hold of police uniforms.
You are quite right to talk about criminality
and gangsterism as part of the problem. They say that it is the
same in Gaza, by the way: criminal elements there, as you will
find when you go there, are responsible for a good part of the
violence. We experienced the same in Belfast—very much so.
Basra is a lot like Belfast was: people are making fortunes smuggling
petrol and oil; they run protection rackets and extortion rackets,
and criminality is an important element. The people of Iraq have
suffered particularly. In Basra, somebody said to me, "We
had only one thief three years ago. Now, we've got 3,000 thieves."
The question of policing and law and order is
of enormous importance, and it is one of the issues that we have
addressed more seriously. We have been trying to persuade all
our EU colleagues and everyone to pay more attention to it and
to put more money and resources into training police and training
and protecting judges. We have a huge problem because of the number
of people who have been picked up by the Americans as a consequence
of their search. We do not know how many there are—some
people say 13,000 and some say 17,000—but they will need
to be tried and either sent to jail or released. That means that
we have to have many more judges than there are at the moment,
and that requires a big training programme. I very much hope that
our allies will help to pay for that.
Q198 Andrew Mackinlay: Following
on from the refugee crisis in Iraq, to which Sir John referred,
you will be aware that I take a particular interest in the Iranian
exiles in Camp Ashraf. I do not want to keep raising the issue
like a long-playing gramophone record with you, but I am concerned
because I recognise that Iran clearly has to be a player in any
possible solution on Iraq and the wider region. There is a danger
that it will demand that the people of Camp Ashraf be surrendered
to it and/or that their status as protected persons under the
fourth Geneva protocol be abrogated. I am nervous that, albeit
unintentionally, they could be made the Cossacks of our generation.
I would like an assurance from you, Dr. Howells, that we will
not abrogate the commitment, which has been reinforced by the
United States command out there, that those people are protected
persons and that that will endure.
Dr. Howells: We have no intention
of abrogating any agreements about those people. The MEK is proscribed
under the Terrorism Act 2000. Its self-imposed exile to Iraq in
the 1970s and its support for Saddam Hussein, including during
the Iran-Iraq war, means that it is not very popular inside Iran—not
even among the Iranian opposition. To answer your question, we
have no intention whatever of turning over anyone to the Iranian
Government; we believe that they should be treated humanely and
that their human rights should be protected, and I have every
confidence that they will be. Some have gone back to Iran already,
as you know.
Q199 Chairman: Finally, I want to
ask some questions about the wider perspective and what is happening
in the region as a whole. Do you believe that there is arc of
extremism in the Middle East?
Dr. Howells: I believe that we
have underestimated the power of ideas. There is a notion that
if you can raise people's standards of living or introduce models
of western democracy, everything will ultimately be okay. I do
not think that that is true. I think that some strands of Islam—some
parts of Wahabi Islam, some parts of Deobandi Islam, or Islam
in southern Asia—cannot be reconciled. They consider themselves
to be what one author described as "God's terrorists".
They believe that it is their duty to challenge those who do not
agree with them and to say, "Join us or die." That is
a fair choice: that is how they see it.
It goes back a very long way. We lost two and
a half armies in Afghanistan, and part of the reason for those
defeats was that those who set up what is now the great Deobandi
Islamic school of thought believed that they had a holy duty to
kill Christians. Now, you try reconciling that.
| 
