Syria: Refugees

Baroness Falkner of Margravine Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd April 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, for giving us this opportunity to debate Syria in this short period of time. It is sobering to speak yet again on the situation of the people of Syria in the context of humanitarian assistance. It speaks to our impotence that more than two years into the civil war, which is bordering on genocide, all these rich and powerful countries are simply squabbling between themselves about not violating national sovereignty.

We are in 2013, eight years since the General Assembly of the United Nations passed overwhelmingly a resolution defining the international community’s responsibility to protect, yet all we can do is offer sticking plasters and bandages to the 22 million people who have had the misfortune to be born of Syrian nationality, who are now killed or driven from their homes, or take up arms on one side or another.

It is right that we have a generous programme of assistance to those unfortunate enough to be displaced, either formally as refugees or informally, relying on their friends and families or simply co-religionists in neighbouring Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq or Turkey. We have heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, as well as the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, and the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, about the fragile situation in those countries. Our attempts to stabilise them are to be commended but to restrict this debate to the humanitarian situation, while pragmatic in the best British tradition, is to miss the point.

If the civil war continues for the next few years, there will potentially be no Syria left. What we might find when everyone is exhausted of fighting and everything is destroyed is a series of provinces run by warlords or rebel armies, ethnically cleansed, existing in a sullen peace if peace is there at all—a larger Yemen, in the grip of al-Qaeda or other Salafi groups, controlling their own territories with different degrees of terror, in the name of Islam.

So what is to be done by the West or at least by the United Kingdom and France? For a start, we should let the EU arms embargo expire so that arms can flow to the Free Syrian Army. Syria is flush with arms. They are mainly going to our opponents in the terrorist groups or to our opponents in the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Moreover, we should seriously contemplate enforcing a no-fly zone, at least over the part of the country that we might declare a humanitarian enclave, and then press the Syrian national coalition to work with the elements of the FSA that are representative of all communities to run that enclave peacefully. To do so would require us to equip the Free Syrian Army more adequately.

Noble Lords will have seen the interview in the Financial Times with General Salim Idriss, the chief of staff of the various groupings in the rebel forces, which are described as the “supreme military command”. He says:

“What’s the point of medicines to save one wounded soldier if the regime’s air force is striking and killing 40 people at the same time?”.

The only argument used against supplying lethal weapons to the Free Syrian Army is that the weapons we might give them will slip away into the hands of Jabhat al-Nusra, which declared its allegiance to al-Qaeda only last week. In Istanbul General Idriss gave a commitment to the West that his people would track every single advanced weapon provided and return it when the conflict was over. If one did not believe his assurance, the question remains: how do we expect the conflict to end when Qatar, Saudi Arabia and other neighbours are arming some factions, while Russia and Iran are arming the regime? Our Government must ask themselves how they expect to bring the conflict to an end. Is it the surest way to stop humanitarian disaster just to continue if everyone bar us puts arms into the equation or provides military support? How do we somehow obtain a peaceful Syria? What are we to do if chemical weapons are used or if genocide is committed but we do not live up to our legal obligations under the genocide conventions? Noble Lords will know that the ICJ ruled only a few years ago that every state has a duty to prevent genocide. That was the ICJ’s case in Bosnia-Herzegovina v Serbia.

Therefore, for those who fear a repeat of Afghanistan, their inaction may well bring about an analogous situation nearer our borders and lie heavier on our consciences than they have seen before.