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4 Mar 2009 : Column 267WH—continued
10.17 am
Mr. David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op): Like the hon. Member for North Thanet (Mr. Gale), I did not intend to take part in this debate, and I apologise for having to leave a few minutes early, so I shall have to read what the Minister says.
I want to concentrate on the narrow but important domain of human rights. The greatest condemnation of the mullahs’ regime should be reserved for their dreadful human rights record. I remind hon. Members that that state is probably second only to China in the number of people it kills by capital punishment, and there is an argument that it may kill more people than any other state. The hon. Gentleman referred to the way in which it conducts those punishments. Hanging people publicly from various capital equipment is horrific, and last Saturday’s Daily Mirror shows graphically the 59 people who were hanged in January.
Whatever else one thinks about Iran, it is a great nation. It is not Arabic, but consists of Farsi-speaking people. We should always respect it and want to work with it, but until it improves its human rights record, it is up there with the nations that I feel deeply about—including Sudan, Zimbabwe and so on—because of the way it subjugates its people.
As has been said, do not be a member of the opposition in Iran, because people who are have every chance of being arrested, imprisoned and subsequently hanged. Do not be a Baha’i. I was pleased to see early-day motion 937 on that issue, tabled by the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Lembit Öpik). Again, the Baha’i are being singled out for mistreatment, arrest and worse.
I was also pleased to see in today’s Hansard that the Minister has answered the hon. Member for Romford (Andrew Rosindell) on how many representations he has made to Iran on behalf of Christians. He said that he had made more than 40 representations. Do not be a Christian in Iran. Those are minority religions, but they are important religions. If we were mistreating Muslims in this country, I would expect us to be held to account in the court of world justice. Iran does it, because it appeals to the mob, and that has to stop.
Mark Williams: Does the hon. Gentleman share what I am sure is the concern of the whole Chamber about the position on juvenile executions? The Minister, to his credit, has raised the issue and has had assurances from the Iranian ambassador that, in October 2008, there was a decree outlawing juvenile executions, yet there have been reports since then that that practice still happens in Iran.
Mr. Drew: It does, and again there is no effective defence for people.
The other issue, besides human rights, is the failing Iranian economy. In a sense, the suppression mirrors the economic failings. I know that in these times, when the whole world seems to be in difficulties, we can perhaps exaggerate the difficulties in other parts of the world to make ourselves feel less worried about our own situation, but there is an economic crisis in Iran, and it has resulted in even more pressure from the centre to deal with any form of opposition.
Iran is, of course, an oil economy: as the price of oil has collapsed, it has been able to earn far less revenue. It also has very high inflation, and the public of Iran are therefore hit both ways. We know that there is great unhappiness. Anyone who studies Iran will know that there are regular street demonstrations, until they are put down. There is a lot of insurrection on university campuses, but of course the secret service ensures that that does not last long. Even within the regime itself, there is a split between the hard-liners and the more liberal element, represented by Khatami. It is reputed that he will make another attempt to run for the presidency, but at the moment Ahmadinejad seems to have the support of the great leader Khamenei. That will probably mean that he is likely to win any election.
I shall finish by echoing the remarks of both my hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet (Dr. Ladyman) and particularly the hon. Member for North Thanet. There are concerns among those of us who would be quite proud that we have supported the Iranian opposition that we need to look at what is happening to the PMOI in Ashraf city. I ask the Minister to examine carefully what is happening now that the Iraqi Government have taken responsibility, to ensure that there is no revenge against the people there and particularly to ensure that they are not doing the bidding of the Iranian Government, because that would be a tragedy and a negation of some of the things that they have done.
My hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet reminded us about the nuclear situation. Without the PMOI and the NCRI, we would not necessarily have known about the enrichment going on at Natanz. They did immeasurable good in announcing that to the world. That is where the process started of trying to get Iran to understand that it is not acceptable behaviour. I ask the Minister to consider that issue and to consider the general issue of human rights.
It is right of Parliament to look at parts of the world where the human rights record is abysmal. We should never be frightened to highlight such things. Even though we continue to talk and do business with people and we want to bring them into the great body of democracies, we can never do that until they improve their human rights record, so that it is at least tolerable. At the moment, the one that we are discussing is absolutely unacceptable.
10.25 am
Mr. Edward Davey (Kingston and Surbiton) (LD): I congratulate the hon. Member for Lancaster and Wyre (Mr. Wallace) on securing the debate and on introducing it in such an intelligent and informed manner. I agreed with a great deal of what he said. It was almost like coming to a seminar, and I am particularly grateful to him for that. I plan to go to Tehran, but perhaps I should go to Thanet, where there is clearly a lot of expertise on Iran.
Mr. Davey: No doubt. I was particularly interested in what the hon. Member for South Thanet (Dr. Ladyman) said about Iran’s negative influence on many parts of the middle east, which is a huge worry. I should say that it has not just been a worry with the current regime, as over the centuries, the Iranians have undertaken their foreign policy in that way. Rather than foreign conquest, which many Iranian rulers have never gone for, partly because of the geography that the regime is dealing with, the country’s mountainous nature, its supply lines and so on, Iranian leaders have tended almost to conduct their imperial ambitions by proxy. That does not make it right, but it is a typical approach by the Iranians, and one has to understand how they work, both historically and in the current regime, if one is to deal with them.
The only point that has not come out in the debate so far is the urgency of the Iranian question. Much of the evidence suggests that the Iranians could be close to being able to produce a bomb. Recently, we have seen reports saying that they have enough low-enriched uranium to build a dirty bomb. When I speak to people at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Israel and to the Foreign Office in this country, my impression is Iran could be a year, or perhaps two or three years, away from having enough highly enriched uranium to make the sorts of weapons that would be particularly threatening and destabilising, leading to the proliferation across the region about which everyone is rightly concerned. Even if they are not going to go to weaponisation by getting the highly enriched uranium and putting it in a missile, they will be near to what is known in the terminology as break-out. They could keep within the rules of the non-proliferation treaty, but within three months, get themselves weaponised and break out in the way other countries have done in the past. The potential for them to get to that threshold creates a dynamic, particularly with Israel but also with other countries, that is very destabilising, so this is not just a theoretical discussion. It is something that we could be dealing with as a country and as a world very soon.
The question is how we approach the issue. There will be two major events in the next six months that relate to that question. The first and most important is the conclusion of the review undertaken by the new President of the United States. We are told that later this month the Americans will decide their new policy and tell us all about it. Clearly, that is critical in how we develop our policy. The other big event is the Iranian elections. I think that they are slightly less important to the development of our policy, partly for the reasons that the hon. Member for Lancaster and Wyre discussed. Even if President Khatami returns and defeats Ahmadinejad in the elections—it looks as if that will be the contest—he
maintained the nuclear programme under his presidential leadership before, so the nuclear issue will not go away, even after the election. Understanding what the Americans will do is therefore critical.
What must the Americans be thinking, what questions must they be asking themselves and how should the Foreign Office interact with their review, as I hope that it is doing? There are a number of issues to consider. First, there are the sanctions, then there are the negotiations and the preconditions, and, finally, there is the rhetoric, which can be important. On sanctions, we and the Americans have to ask ourselves whether the current sanctions regime is working, and the answer is clearly that it is not. There are therefore only two options. First, we could strengthen the regime, because we think that it could work politically but we need to plug the gaps in the way that the hon. Member for South Thanet said, getting the Chinese, Russians, Austrians, Cypriots, Italians and all the others who have been mentioned to sort themselves out and creating a regime that brings Tehran to book, so that it will listen to us. That is a possibility, but it is clear from my description that it might not be as easy as some would hope. That option should certainly be considered, because sanctions regimes can work, but they must be rather more far-reaching than the current one.
The alternative view is that sanctions might not work. We might regret that, but we should perhaps look at another way of doing things. Perhaps sanctions are sending the wrong political message and preventing engagement. I genuinely do not know, but that is a matter for debate, and we need to ask the Americans how they will proceed. There is genuine concern that the sanctions regime is ineffective and, arguably, counter-productive. We then come to negotiations. Her Majesty’s Government have done an awful lot of work through the E3 plus 3 to get negotiations off the ground, and I pay tribute to them for doing so. On the face of it, Iran has been offered some fantastic deals and economic inducements, but, again, that does not appear to be working, and one has to ask why. Again, I am not sure and I am speculating, which is why I was particularly interested in what the hon. Member for Lancaster and Wyre had to say.
Part of the problem is understanding why Iran wants nuclear power or, indeed, why it wants the prospect of being able to get a nuclear bomb or to get a nuclear bomb itself. Is it because Iran wants to attack the rest of the world—perhaps Israel or somewhere else? Is it because it feels particularly insecure and thinks that it will be attacked? It has seen the American army in Iraq, and NATO in Afghanistan. It has also seen the instability in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and it knows that Israel has a bomb. Perhaps the Iranian leadership is worried that someone might attack it—let us face it, there has been an open debate about whether Israel would attack it, and we thought at one time that President Bush’s Administration might do so. Iran may therefore want to arm itself because it fears being attacked.
Another reason, which is presented as more potent for Iran in some of the material that I have read, is that Iran is seeking stature and status; it wants to show that it has arrived in the modern world. It believes that it has a proud Persian past and it thinks, “If everyone else has these things, why can’t we?” We have to understand that. Whether we like the regime or not, and even
though we might think that it is appalling, we have to understand where it is coming from and why it wants to pursue its present course, even though we may find it distasteful. If we are to move the regime from its present course, we have to meet that status issue in some other way in our negotiations. We therefore really have to engage in the negotiations. Some Democrats in the US are talking about a diplomatic surge being required to get the negotiations going, and they may well be right.
A key issue for the negotiations, which the hon. Member for Lancaster and Wyre touched on, is the preconditions that we set. The current preconditions—in effect, that Iran must cease enrichment—are clearly not working, because nothing is happening. Despite all the inducements, the cessation of enrichment condition is not working. In some of the academic material and diplomatic debates, we have seen that preconditions can be finessed and tweaked, and that is clearly an option in the review. We have heard about the freeze-for-freeze option, under which we will freeze sanctions if Iran freezes enrichment. Several years ago, the International Crisis Group talked about a phased delay, with the west saying, “Yes, of course you have the right to enrich, but we want to negotiate with you and we want you to delay enrichment.” Such an approach would recognise Iran’s status, but get rid of the precondition that prevented negotiations.
The Americans’ review may look at those preconditions, and they may decide to drop them all, as the hon. Member for Lancaster and Wyre hinted. Candidate Obama certainly talked about that, although he got a lot of flak from the Republicans and slightly switched his position. However, he talked about negotiations with the Iranians with no preconditions, and I imagine that the Americans are reviewing that option.
I have dealt with the sanctions review and the negotiations, and I will finish with the rhetoric. Whatever the review decides, we have to tone down our rhetoric. Iran has rightly been criticised for some of the rhetoric in which it has engaged. That is particularly true of Ahmadinejad, whose rhetoric has been absolutely appalling—particularly the things that he said about Israel. However, I should quote former Vice-President Cheney, who said about Iran:
“We don’t negotiate with evil; we defeat it.”
The rhetoric is on both sides. The “axis of evil” rhetoric is not helpful, and we have to ensure that we drop that nonsense from our approach.
This is an incredibly complex and nuanced debate. Besides the hon. Member for Lancaster and Wyre, and perhaps the hon. Members for North Thanet (Mr. Gale) and for South Thanet, there are few people in the House who really understand all the levels. However, we tend to reach consensus on the issue in our debates, and I hope that we can take that forward so that Britain has the influence that it should have, particularly with the new American Administration.
10.37 am
Mr. David Lidington (Aylesbury) (Con): I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Wyre (Mr. Wallace) on securing the debate. There could hardly be a more important foreign affairs topic and one more deserving of debate in the House.
British policy towards Iran should be based first and foremost on a hard-headed and pragmatic assessment of where the British national interest lies. That interest certainly lies in seeing Iran once again become engaged as part of the mainstream of the international community. Several hon. Members have talked about the impact of economic change on Iran. Anybody who has been to Iran and experienced the planned power cuts every day or looked at the half-mile queues outside filling stations in that oil-producing country will have some awareness of the economic pressures that are biting on ordinary Iranian families.
There is no doubt that, with 60 per cent. of the population under 30, there is a tremendous appetite for economic growth and educational development, and for Iran to become part of the world once again. However, as my hon. Friend and others have said, the political obstacles in the way of that re-engagement are formidable, and the time available—particularly given the crisis over nuclear policy—is very limited.
As I look at Iran, I see a country that takes enormous pride in its history and cultural achievements. There is perhaps a parallel with China, in that Iran also has an abiding sense of resentment at having had its interests trampled over by the dominant powers in the world—the powers of the western world—for much of the 19th and 20th centuries. We do not necessarily have to agree with the Iranians’ view of the world to want to understand what it is like to be in their shoes. If one talks to Iranian Ministers and officials in Tehran, one hears that they feel surrounded. They say, “We have a nuclear Russia to the north of us, which occupied the northern part of our country not so many decades ago; we have a United States fleet to our south in the Gulf; we have an American army in Iraq to the west and Afghanistan to the east; we have a nuclear-armed Sunni power in Pakistan; and we have Israel, which is assumed to possess nuclear weapons, which talks about Iran representing an existential threat.” One of the starting points in considering policy must be to appreciate how the other side sees the world.
There are huge differences. I want briefly to digress, because the hon. Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) was right to flag up the continuing importance of human rights in any dialogue between London and Tehran. It is ironic that when one visits Tehran the Iranians talk with great pride about how there are designated seats in the Majlis for representatives of the Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian minorities. That must be contrasted with the appalling apostasy laws and the ruthless treatment of members of the Baha’i faith, whose leaders are even now imprisoned without trial, possibly awaiting charges for which, if found guilty, they could face a capital penalty. As the hon. Member for Stroud pointed out, not only is the death penalty used, but it is used in the most barbaric fashion, and there is imprisonment without trial or due process. I encourage the Minister to continue to exhort the Iranians to improve their record on human rights.
Mr. Wallace:
Does my hon. Friend agree, on the subject of rights, that the Iranian constitution gives many rights, and protects human rights for all, but that the problem is that the present regime especially has tried to step outside the constitution and veto those rights, continually using terrorism and national security as an excuse? Does he agree that one thing that the west
should do is urge Iran to stick to its constitution and stop it making exemptions in its laws under the guise of national security?
Mr. Lidington: My hon. Friend makes his point effectively.
Iran has the capacity to play an important and constructive role in the politics of the middle east and south-western Asia. Initially, it was hostile to the Taliban and it co-operated with the coalition forces in 2001 when they first entered Afghanistan. There is no doubt, from talking to Iranian leaders, that they are acutely aware of the damaging impact of the drugs trade and large numbers of Afghan refugees on the stability of their society. There is scope for Iran to become a partner for stability in Afghanistan, but it would need a change of heart from Tehran, which would need to be willing to turn language about wanting co-operation into concrete policy.
It is fair, too, for the west to acknowledge that Iran has legitimate national interests at stake in Iraq and the wider Gulf region. However, if Iran wants the west to take its interests seriously, it needs to understand how destabilising are comments such as those made recently by one of the President’s advisers, asserting that Bahrain should be part of Iranian territory. I should like the Minister to say whether the Government have pressed the Iranians to make a clear assertion—because I think it is now needed—that they respect Bahrain’s sovereignty and independence. The current President of Iran has used inflammatory language about Israel. I have said to Iranians that they grossly underestimate the fear that such language has provoked in Israel. There is no doubt that there is genuine fear in Israel that Iran poses a threat to the state’s very existence, yet speeches are made by Iranian leaders—most recently by Dr. Larijani at the Munich security conference in February—in which they talk about Israel as they talk about other states; they do not talk about the Zionist entity, but about Israel, a country that exists: it is a country that they do not like, and with whose policies they are at odds, but they see it as part of the region, and part of the world. If the Iranians would make it clear that they are willing to accept the existence of Israel, and the reality of the Israeli state, it would help things to move forward.
I must finish with a few words about the nuclear programme. There are some unpalatable facts. The programme is popular in Iran. There is a question as to how far we can trust any opinion survey, but there are surveys that show that up to 80 per cent. or more of the Iranian population support the case that Iran should have a nuclear capability. There is no doubt that the non-proliferation treaty gives Iran the right to civil nuclear power, but that right is subject to the rules and inspection regime of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The verdict set out in the IAEA’s most recent report of 19 February is clear: the Iranians are still refusing either to accept the additional protocol, which provides for unannounced inspections of key installations, or to provide full access to and co-operation with inspectors along the lines that the agency has been seeking.
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