UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 56-ii HOUSE OF COMMONS ORAL EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE THE FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEE EXTREMISM AND POLITICAL INSTABILITY IN NORTH AND WEST AFRICA TUESDAY 25 JUNE 2013 PROFESSOR MICHAEL CLARKE SIR RICHARD GOZNEY VIRGINIA COMOLLI Evidence heard in Public Questions 50 - 140 USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT 1. This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others. 2. Any public use of, or reference to, the contents should make clear that neither witnesses nor Members have had the opportunity to correct the record. The transcript is not yet an approved formal record of these proceedings. 3. Members who receive this for the purpose of correcting questions addressed by them to witnesses are asked to send corrections to the Committee Assistant. 4. Prospective witnesses may receive this in preparation for any written or oral evidence they may in due course give to the Committee. 1 Oral Evidence Taken before the Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday 25 June 2013 Members present: Richard Ottaway (Chair) Sir Menzies Campbell Mike Gapes Mark Hendrick Andrew Rosindell Mr Frank Roy Sir John Stanley Rory Stewart Examination of Witness Witness: Professor Michael Clarke, Director General, Royal United Services Institute, gave evidence. Q50 Chair: I welcome members of the public to this second evidence session for the Committee’s inquiry into the UK’s response to extremism and political instability in North and West Africa. May I extend a very warm welcome to our first witness, Professor Michael Clarke, the Director General of the Royal United Services Institute? Welcome, Michael. You are perhaps more used to appearing in front of the Defence Committee, but the fact that you are here shows the overlap and the strategic importance of this region. Is there anything that you would like to say by way of an opening statement? Professor Clarke: Only that, in headline terms, the apparent threat from foreign jihadist terrorism seemed at one time to come from North Africa. It seemed to originate from North Africa, and in the years around 2001 to 2005 that was the prevailing assumption. That assumption was changed by Operation Crevice in 2004, and then the 7/7 bombings in 2005 and everything that happened thereafter. In a sense, the wheel is coming full circle, because the present concern is now much more on the old areas of origin of a lot of jihadist terrorism, which goes back to North Africa. It has migrated, partly as an unexpected consequence of the Libyan war of 2011, into the Sahel and into West Africa, so in a sense we are partly revisiting some of the issues that seemed to be more important to us in the years immediately after 2001. Q51 Chair: Our inquiry was sparked off by the In Amenas incident and the Prime Minister’s statement on the Floor of the House. I would not say that you were critical of his statement, but you had some comments to make about his phraseology then. The PM said that 2 we were involved in a “generational struggle” with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and its jihadist fellow travellers. Do you agree with that, or is it bigger than that? Professor Clarke: No, I agree that it is a generational struggle. It is generational in the sense that the ideas behind what I call jihadism—I know that there is no really good term for this, but let us assume we all know what we mean if we say jihadism—are part of a generational evolution of thinking that could be expected to last at least for a generation if not for more. In that respect, yes, I think that the issue is generational. It is also generational in the sense that it arises from alienation among a spectrum of youth—not always disadvantaged, but nevertheless a spectrum of alienation in people by and large under the age of 40—with one or two gurus who are considerably older than that, so it is generational in that revolutionary sense. Where I disagree with the Prime Minister—in the statement he made after the In Amenas incident—was in his apparently by implication uniting all of these forces, as if they were all al-Qaeda. I think that that gave far too great a prominence to al-Qaeda core as an organising group, and it also ran the risk of uniting some of these disparate groups, who often will go along with the jihadist rhetoric on a temporary basis and for their own reasons. The danger in the Sahel seemed to me that our rhetoric would unite groups who will, by their own volition, tend to be fractious and fall apart given some time. Time is on our side in the Sahel area and North Africa. The worst thing we could do is to make the mistake of uniting them by glamorising them and by assuming them to be a universal threat to western interests. Q52 Chair: Is there any other way of phrasing it? How would you put it then? He had to address the issue. You would have said, “They are and remain a disparate group”? Professor Clarke: Yes. Some of the ideological hardliners in these groups had pulled along a lot of relatively secular groups. Boko Haram, in northern and western Nigeria, is pretty secular and is actually more concerned with a degree of territorial independence. It is not particularly committed to Sharia law, whereas Ansaru, which is connected to Boko Haram—it is a splinter group—is very Sharia-minded. The best thing we could do is to try to split those two things apart. Equally, instability in both Algeria and Mali was stimulated by the Tuareg peoples, who found that they were in a different situation after the Libyan civil war. The Tuareg fall into some ideological hardliners and some determined secularists. The most important thing is to recognise that there is an ideological element to this struggle—what I would define, quite seriously, as Islamo-fascist. The jihadists are Islamo-fascists, and I would be prepared to defend that position on the basis of political theory. They are a group of Islamo-fascists who attract, through glamour, a group of warlords, criminals and fellow travellers, who can be easily motivated but just as easily disentangled from them if our strategy is correct. Q53 Chair: That is interesting. Do you think that there is any support for this at grass- roots level? If you have an Islamo-fascist group, I would have thought that it would be pretty unpopular at the grass-roots level—the people in the villages who are struggling to get by. Is there hostility there, or do they support these people? Professor Clarke: In various parts of the region and in South Asia, these groups can be fairly popular, certainly in the short term, because in a period of chaos, they represent something, and they are better organised. We should not be surprised that in the aftermath of the Arab Spring or Uprising—whatever we call it—political Islamists will do well, because they are better organised than most of the others, and they do stand for something in a time of chaos; anyone who stands for something carries a certain amount of support. 3 Yes, there is some support for these groups, but that support very often wanes when such groups take power, even locally. They can often take power by offering—they say— accessible justice. They set themselves up as an alternative Government. They are quick and arbitrary. They make decisions that local people very often like, at least in the short term, but not many groups in the world actually want to live under a strict interpretation of Sharia law. Q54 Chair: One of our witnesses spoke of the democratic bulge—the population growth fuelling instability through creating a number of young men and women with little economic prospects. Do you think that that is a fair comment? Professor Clarke: Yes. Young people without prospects are ripe for radicalisation of all sorts. There is plenty of evidence across the region and other regions of growing alienation among the under-30s and, in many cases, the under-25s. The question that we must address is what form that alienation takes. It does not always take a jihadist form. It does not even always take a violent form. It may take a form of indifference. It may take a form of complete apathy. But alienation is the background from which it is easy for determined ideologues to recruit followers and supporters. Q55 Chair: Do you agree that the demographic bulge is fuelling that? Professor Clarke: Absolutely. Yes. Across the greater Middle East, the proportion of young people under the age of 25 is growing all the time. The effect of that is clear: if those people can be satisfactorily accommodated with prospects and jobs, that is a source of prosperity. If they cannot, it is a source of endless instability. Q56 Mark Hendrick: Professor Clarke, what evidence is there in North and West Africa of the jihadist groups getting funding from outside the area? Professor Clarke: There is some evidence. I have to say that most of it is anecdotal, even to the security services, but there is some evidence of funding that finds its way from Saudi Arabia, which disburses so much funding to Wahabist movements that a lot of it gets passed on.