House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee British foreign policy and the ‘Arab Spring’: the transition to democracy This is a volume of submissions, relevant to the inquiry British foreign policy and the ‘Arab Spring’: the transition to democracy, which have been reported to the House. Only those submissions written specifically for the Committee have been included. List of unprinted written evidence Page 1 Dr Christian Turner, Director, Middle East and North Africa Directorate, FCO 1 2 Professor Caroline Rooney, University of Kent 4 3 Roger Higginson 8 4 Rt Hon William Hague MP, Secretary of State, FCO 12; 252 5 Christian Aid 15; 216 6 British Council 21; 149 7 Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) 29; 192 8 The Redress Trust (REDRESS) 95 9 Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) 101 10 Amnesty International UK 109; 218 11 Local Government Association 119 12 Robin Lamb 123; 244 13 Middle East Monitor 126 14 Barnabas Fund 130 15 Platform 137 16 Human Rights Watch 143 17 Henry Jackson Society 155 18 Royal African Society & Libya-Analysis.com 171; 177 19 Bell Pottinger Public Advocacy 185 20 BBC World Service and Global News 229 21 Eugene Rogan—supplementary evidence 242 22 Alistair Burt MP, Minister for the Middle East and North Africa 247 23 Letter from the Chair of the Committee to Rt Hon William Hague MP 249 AS 01 Written evidence Dr Christian Turner, Director, Middle East and North Africa Directorate, Foreign & Commonwealth Office MIDDLE EAST & NORTH AFRICA EXPERTISE AND RESOURCING At the informal briefing with FAC members on 18 May, you requested further information on our efforts to boost regional expertise in the Middle East and North Africa region, and how the FCO had organised to cope with the “Arab Spring” crisis. The MENA Cadre initiative To achieve the Foreign Secretary’s vision of a distinctive British Foreign Policy, the FCO’s Diplomatic Excellence initiative aspires to pursue and reward excellent policy thinking, diplomacy, public service, leadership and management. As part of this effort, MENA Directorate (MENAD) launched its “MENA Cadre” initiative in November 2010. The Cadre initiative’s principal objective is to ensure that the FCO has the right linguistic and geographic expertise to operate in the MENA region in years to come. Its activities are organised under three strands: building expertise and knowledge, strategic workforce planning to ensure that we have the right officers for the right jobs, and promoting and building a community of MENA experts (see attachment). A key part is a renewed effort on language skills, which the Foreign Secretary has prioritised. We have therefore: • restored the length of training for Full Time Arabic Training to 18 months, and are working with external experts to improve the content and rigour of the Arabic programme; • provided more opportunities and encouragement to staff in London to learn and maintain foreign languages, with weekly conversation classes for existing Arabic speakers, a 12-month beginners Arabic class (to which over 60 FCO staff have subscribed), and French classes, and • reclassified approximately 20 existing jobs at MENA Posts overseas as speaker slots, as part of a wider FCO uplift in speaker slots. Once trained staff are in place, this will represent an approximate 40% increase in Arabic speaker capacity in the network compared to 2010 levels; there are now approximately 70 speaker slots in the overseas MENA network (out of over 155 UK based staff). In MENA Directorate in London, we have over 30 officers who speak Arabic, Farsi or French to operational standard (about a quarter of the directorate). On regional expertise, the transfer of MENA Research Group from Research Analysts Department to MENAD in July 2010 further strengthened the quality of our policy advice. Research Analysts are an integral part of the policy-making process, with their all-source analysis, historical perspective and contacts with external expertise informing—and at times 1 challenging—policy formulation. MENA Research Group also regularly hosts in-house seminars and roundtables with visiting scholars, the heads of academic and think-tank programmes, and retired Diplomatic Service staff. This year they are running heavily subscribed seminars on MENA history and politics for staff across the FCO. Crisis staffing The “Arab Spring” has obviously put a significant strain on MENAD’s resources, in particular our crisis response to events in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria. Prior to January 2011 MENAD’s headcount was approximately 90. Since January, over 570 members of staff based in London and Milton Keynes volunteered to bolster the core staff available to Consular Directorate and MENAD to deal with the crises. For example, the Libya Political Crisis Unit had to staff up to 370 slots per week on a 24/7 basis on a 3-shift pattern; and the Consular Crisis Management Department had to staff up to 720 slots per week on a 24/7 basis, with a shift pattern varying from a 2- to 3-shift pattern. Consular Crisis Management Department also deployed 16 Rapid Deployment Teams overseas, totalling 90 staff, in support of the consular response to the crises. Many others volunteered and over 50 deployed to Libya and Valetta to work alongside our Embassy teams. These additional staff were drawn from existing crisis management structures (such as the Emergency Response Team, and the Rapid Deployment Team) as well as ad-hoc volunteers from across the FCO. Directors across the FCO were instructed by the PUS to identify areas of work that were less immediate priorities, and release staff—wherever possible with relevant experience—to work on the crises. In order to counter the effect of a smaller workforce, directorates were asked to reconsider their priorities, downgrading policy and representation work not related to our top prosperity and security goals, and were able to authorise overtime if necessary. Future staffing In April 2011, the FCO Board decided to increase staffing in MENAD on a more permanent and sustainable footing. The Directorate was reorganised as five departments: Libya Unit, Near East and North Africa Department, Northern Gulf Department, Arabian Peninsula Department, and Arab Partnership Department. The new Libya Unit has approximately 25 new slots. In the remainder of the Directorate, three slots were upgraded and approximately 15 new slots created, including an additional Director. The FCO Board also decided to wait until the long-term impact of the “Arab Spring” on our operational needs was clearer before making further changes to our network of posts in the region. We plan to consider that further in the Autumn. 7July 2011 2 MENA Cadre summary 3 AS 02 Written evidence from Professor Caroline Rooney, University of Kent Summary • The long held British and American position was that the repressive Mubarak government provided stability, but the Egyptian revolution came about because the experience of the Egyptian people was that the ineffectuality of the Egyptian government brought chaos, not stability. • There is evidence to show that it was possible to foresee the Egyptian revolution. • The reason the FCO did not anticipate the revolution seems to have been because of the prevalent ideological fixation on extremism, at the expense of attention to broader cultural and social factors, and because of insufficient differentiation between extremism and radicalism. • The forces driving the Arab Spring are also largely supportive of justice for Palestine, and regional stability is best assured by a one state solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict. Factual Evidence Filmed and/or recorded interviews conducted with writers in Cairo between November 2009 and April 2010. Please see appendix for excerpts.1 Introduction/Area of Expertise Professor Rooney is currently a RCUK research fellow on the ‘Global Uncertainties’ scheme with a project entitled ‘Radical Distrust’. This project examines both how extremism is fueled by distrust, together with forms of paranoia, and how policies aimed at countering extremism are themselves prone to engendering distrust. The first phase of this project, beginning in 2009, has entailed a study of global youth culture especially as regards the politics and culture of hip hop, the blogosphere and Facebook. Another strand of it has entailed a study of the ways in which Egyptian literary culture was actively engaged in imagining the transition to democracy in the run up to the uprising. Professor Rooney was based in Cairo from November 2009 to April 2010, working with Egyptian writers, activists and intellectuals, also staging in Cairo a hip hop theatre show on terror and civil rights. She has further research expertise on the 1982 Siege of Beirut and its aftermath and on cultural aspects of the Israel/Palestine conflict. Responses to Specific Questions 1. What forces are driving the movement for reform and reconstruction in Egypt? 1.1 In Egypt, according to Egyptian writers and intellectuals (source: interviews2), people across all sections of society had reached breaking point with respect to the 1 Not printed. 2 Ibid 4 extreme ineffectuality of Mubarak’s government, a government which chaotically left people to fend for themselves in hopeless conditions that encouraged widespread corruption from top to bottom. 1.2 In addition, the government was seen to use repressive violence in the absence of effective policies and Mubarak was seen to be a cynical puppet of, as well as manipulator of, American support for Israel. Writers claimed that Mubarak exaggerated the extremist threat to keep himself in power, while also stoking political Islamism through allowing it media outlets, as his excuse to cling on. It was also claimed this excuse suited America and Israel since by funding Mubarak they assured his compliance with Israel. 1.3 The drastic loss of faith in government resulted in ‘a nothing left to lose’ attitude. The activism was mobilized by a combination of a) workers’ protests taking the form of a series of strikes and demonstrations in the run up to January 2011 and b) youth media (especially blogs, hip hop and Facebook).