Anti-interventionist UK Lord now insists Britain support human rights in Syria – for the PKK

Jan 15, 2025

Britain’s Lord Peter Hain, formerly Tony Blair’s foreign minister, has uncharacteristically expressed concern about human rights in Syria, though only insofar as these extend to the PKK/SDF, which has been reliant on Western military support since 2014.

Speaking to Kurdish news site Rudaw based in Iraqi Kurdistan in an interview published today (January 15), Lord Hain, who’s consistently opposed any intervention in Syria since 2011, claimed, “They're [the SDF/PKK] under attack from jihadis inside Syria and they're also under attack from Turkey. And we've got to make sure that wherever Kurdish people are…their rights are respected and their heritage and Kurdish values and cultural rights … are recognized.”

This comes after the Kurdish National Council in Syria (ENKS) and other Kurdish organisations urged the PKK to dismantle its Syrian affiliates and support the transitional government, something Lord Hain apparently hasn’t heard about, just as he hasn’t heard about the resentment towards the PKK among many Syrians, including Kurds.
It also comes a couple of days after Iranian regime officials reportedly met with PKK representatives in Iraq to discuss supplying them with drones and missiles.

This demand for British intervention in Syrian affairs, more especially on the basis of supporting human rights, is a 180-degree change for the resolutely anti-interventionist peer. As Blair’s Foreign Minister, Hain’s first one-to-one meeting with Bashar al-Assad took place in Damascus in 2000, and he subsequently praised Assad in the UK parliament as a leader with "a lot of vision and a modern outlook" who he said knew Britain well and was apparently thus "well placed to lead Syria forward".

Peter Hain’s believed to have been among the Blair government ministers who lobbied for a knighthood for Assad in 2002 when Bashar was an honoured guest of Blair’s in the UK, being granted audiences with Queen and Prince Charles during his state visit; this proposal was thankfully rejected. From 2003 and throughout the first decade of the 21st century, UK and US intelligence services “outsourced” torture to Assad, among other dictators, as part of the CIA’s ‘extraordinary rendition’ program for ‘War on Terror’ suspects. None of those tortured were charged. There is little doubt that Hain knew about and approved this initiative.

Throughout that time, Hain (ennobled in 2015) never mentioned any concern for human rights, either for those tortured under the extraordinary rendition program or for Syrian dissidents.

Hain’s prioritization of realpolitik over human rights continued throughout the 13 years of the Syrian revolution and of the Assad regime’s slaughter from 2011 up until Assad was deposed in December 2024.

Indeed, on September 1, 2013, 11 days after Assad’s regime had used chemical weapons to kill over 1400 people, many of them children, in Ghouta on August 21, Lord Hain recommended that Assad and his collaborators should be granted immunity from any charges for such internationally outlawed crimes against humanity, in order to persuade him to ‘negotiate’ with the survivors – with the idea that the survivors and other Syrians wanting freedom and human rights would be mollified and made to accept genocidal hereditary dictatorship, to write off their loved ones’ lives and to forgive that and all Assad’s other crimes against humanity, for the sake of a few nice speeches from Assad about supporting human rights, despite knowing his commitment to human rights to be as meaningless as Lord Hain’s. For the sake of “stability”.

In that article published by the Sunday Telegraph on September 1*, Hain wrote, “abhorrent though chemical weapons are, experts estimate they account for just 1 per cent of all the terrible casualties in Syria” – given such grotesque calculations, one shudders to think what he might have proposed for appeasing Nazis had he been around in the early 1940s. Regardless of Syrians’ suffering, what mattered most for Lord Hain was preventing the “chaos and anarchy” which he insisted could be the only result of Assad being ousted. As with the vast majority of Western politicians and pundits (mainstream or ‘alternative’), Lord Hain never even considered the idea that Syrians other than Assad or his accomplices should be consulted, let alone be the only ones with the right to decide Syria’s future.

While Lord Hain didn’t consider the human rights of Assad’s countless civilian victims as worthy of any intervention or even legal action against a genocidal tyrant using Sarin gas to slaughter children, however, he now claims to be so moved by the rights of the PKK/SDF militia, who he characterizes as representing all Kurds – something Kurds hotly contest – to terrorise people, including Kurds, that he’s now demanding Britain intervene on their behalf.

Lord Hain will surely forgive Syrians and others for being a little sceptical of his newfound commitment to human rights.

‘’The Syria catastrophe’ article, published by the Sunday Telegraph, September 1, 2013, republished on Lord Peter Hain’s website:
https://www.peterhain.uk/p/syria-policy-catastrophe

Photo and quote from Rudaw article: 'Kurds in Syria must be respected: UK Lord' by Znar Shino
https://manage.rudaw.net/english/middleeast/syria/150120252