Leading British diplomat says engaging Islamists bound to fail

A leading British diplomat and one of the country’s most experienced envoys to Arab states has said western engagement with Islamists has uniformly failed to moderate the views of radical movements in the Middle East.

Sir John Jenkins, who has been ambassador in Riyadh, Baghdad and Tripoli, said he does not believe diplomatic engagement with a range of groups, notably the Muslim Brotherhood and Hizbollah, has ever extracted any real concessions.

“I cannot think of a single example where western diplomatic or any other sort of engagement has produced any change in the position of any political Islamist,” he wrote in a blog for the Policy Exchange think tank in London.

He listed a set of failed dialogues.

“Occasional attempts in Iraq to shape the thinking of Ahmad Al Fartousi, leader of the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Al Sadr’s militia and the Lebanese Hizbollahi, Ali Musa Daqduq (aka ‘Hamid the Mute’) together with the Khazali brothers, the leaders of the murderous Iraqi Shiite militia, Asa’ib Ahl Al Haq, failed. They gamed us instead.

“We have seen the same with the Houthis in Yemen and over the years with Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza and Lebanon.”

Sir John said claims there were exploitable divisions between moderates and hardliners inside Islamist factions were constantly proven wrong.

“I can’t think of a single example where this has actually happened.”

Such contacts continued as late as last week when the British minister for the region, Alistair Burt travelled to Tunisia where he met Rashid Al Ghannouchi, the Muslim Brotherhood stalwart and leader of Ennahda, one of the country’s biggest political parties. Sir John questioned a statement last year that Ennahda had repudiated the Muslim Brotherhood.

“It remains unclear what it means, especially given Ghannouchi’s star status with global Muslim Brotherhood circles.”

Experience suggested a far more effective approach was to shun outfits that harboured ideologues.

“Indeed, it is often a refusal to engage that has the most effect, as it was for those elements of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s who eventually formed the moderate offshoot Al Wasat because they thought the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to be a political dead end and no one would talk to them otherwise,” he added.

“Much of the British government’s policy work on the Muslim Brotherhood – and indeed Hizbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and even Iran – in recent years has been shaped by claims that we can influence the thinking of Sunni and Shia Islamists if only we engage with them.”