Your Highnesses, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to the 6th IISS Manama Dialogue.
We, at the IISS, are again delighted to be in Bahrain, hosting with the Kingdom, this regional security summit. Over the last five years together we have built an event intended to act as an official trans-regional forum for discussion and debate on Persian Gulf security. Over the years, foreign and defence ministers of every GCC country, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Yemen, the UK, France, Germany, the US, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Japan, China, Australia, Singapore and numerous other countries have addressed this gathering.
As from early next year, the IISS will establish in the Kingdom of Bahrain a regional office, intended to provide analysis and information on security and geo-economic issues relevant to the whole MENA region. We aim, also from the IISS regional branch office in Bahrain, to bring perspectives from the MENA region on key international issues into the mainstream of international debate. The IISS looks forward to hiring more analysts from the region to inform the wider world on regional perspectives and to bringing to this region the best and the brightest from Asia, Europe and North America and other regions to animate debate here on the ever-growing links between the Middle East and other parts of the world. The IISS Middle East office in Bahrain will support the work of world-class specialist analysts on defence, security and geo-economic issues and will work with all countries of the region. With a regional branch established, we will be able to run meetings here and in other regional states on core issues of concern: non-proliferation, counterterrorism, defence and arms control issues, the changing nature of the financial and economic balance of power and its impact on regional relationships, demography and regional security, human and drug trafficking, organised crime and security, the changing regional balance of power and role of outside powers, the increasing role of Asia in the region, energy security, political and economic modernisation in the region and numerous other topics, informed by the priorities as set by regional trends and requirements. The IISS-Middle East office will bring the world of strategists to the Middle East and Middle East strategic perspectives to the wider world.
From this office too, we hope to support even more effectively this Manama Dialogue process, providing the opportunity for senior officials in the region to meet regularly to plan for future Manama Dialogues and ensure that this summit serves the evident needs of the region for a more wide-ranging, trans-regional and inclusive regional security dialogue. Current institutions and organisations do not serve that purpose, and current freelance ad hoc diplomacy does not provide the necessary coherence to advance wider regional stability. Institutions alone cannot prevent conflict or forestall dispute. The proliferation of meetings is no inherent sign of stability. But a forum that requires the regular assembly of parties who are often in dispute or at conflict creates the possibilities for the planned discussions that are a pre-condition to potential diplomatic reconciliation. It is this purpose that the IISS Manama Dialogue is meant to serve. It is an ambitious and difficult project. Yet if every worthy enterprise is built on a conceit, every worthy enterprise succeeds when its’ obvious necessity is perceived. We have no agenda of our own for the Manama Dialogue other than that it should provide an informal mechanism for the increased formal security dialogue that this region so clearly requires.
At the first IISS Manama Dialogue HRH Prince Saud al Faisal, foreign minister of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, argued that the essential pillars for regional security in this part of the world were an integrated GCC, a unified Yemen, a stable Iraq and a friendly Iran. To some, those four pillars occasionally appear cracked, or even illusory. We will have authoritative perspectives during this Manama Dialogue on all four of these vitally important columns. But they are in any case now only part of a wider supporting structure that needs to be erected in the interests of regional stability.
The internal conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan directly affect the politics and security of this region. The outcome of these twin and interconnected security crises are sufficiently important for the region that the states of the area need to become more engaged in creating the political underpinnings, especially in Afghanistan, for a more stable polity. It is to be hoped that as military forces surge in Afghanistan, imaginative diplomatic processes are set in train to create not just the possibilities of internal reconciliation but also the devolved political order that corresponds to that country’s natural inclinations. A more con-federal Afghanistan would be a more governable Afghanistan. How the states of this region can be more creatively involved in South West Asian stability is an important subject here this year as people try to think of a regional cushion for the Afghan turmoil.
If relations among states were the only diplomatic challenge in this region then formal institutions might be able to cope, but non-state actors, with state-like aims are legion. This Manama Dialogue will look at the increasing role of non-state actors in shaping the political futures of a number of states in the region. The fragility and lack of governability of some regional states, and their vulnerability to the political intrusions of outside, often sectarian interests, is a major security worry. Will economic aid and the promise of a closer association with the GCC offer Yemen a clearer path to stability, or do more imaginative policies need to be put in place to build stability there?
While much international attention has shifted to the problems of Afghanistan, people in this region are all too aware that the political and economic re-construction of the Iraqi state remains crucial to building wider regional harmony. Drawing Iraq progressively into wider regional security discussions is also a necessary part of its own political rehabilitation. As perceptions of the balance of power shift in this region, military modernisation plans continue and the need for security collaboration with outside powers, the US, Europe and Asian states grow. Military co-operation agreements are being looked at afresh, purchases of arms and defensive systems are taking place, the multiplication of security arrangements, overlapping and reinforcing are being contemplated. All these subjects will form important parts of the specialist debate in break out groups on Sunday.
In summary, enduring containment of conflict and more effective regional diplomacy can only emerge through more dynamic and professionally organised regional security architecture. It is with this theme that we will conclude. Moving towards 2010, the IISS will do all it can to help the dialogue between all the shareholders in this vital region’s security and strengthen the Manama Dialogue process to inspire the bilateral and multilateral meetings that can help build sound policies and regional confidence.
Before that, we have the honour of hearing one of the region’s most powerful voices for regional dialogue, a friend of the IISS, whose country is the host of this year’s GCC Head of State summit meeting, to give us his thoughts. Allow me to invite, Francois Heisbourg, Chairman of the IISS, to introduce him. Thank you.
