Conflict in Fragile States

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Thursday 15th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Loomba, not only for securing the time for this debate on this incredibly important subject but for the way he introduced it.

There has been rather a dreadful irony this week in Westminster. The Foreign Affairs Committee published its indictment of Cameron’s actions which led to Libya joining the failed states list, while at the same time the new Secretary of State for DfID, Priti Patel, has been busy telling us how she will reform the aid budget according to a very different set of criteria. I have no problem with her wish to target corruption and seek transparency but surely the aid budget should be linked firmly to a criterion of need and not to criteria of what will benefit the UK most in trade terms, which is what she seemed to be saying.

The Government must realise that of all the refugees in the world, 50% are children, yet globally they receive about 4% of the funds set aside for refugees. Every day, some 17,000 children are forced to flee their homes as a result of conflict. Those sorts of people should be at the top of the priority list for our aid budget.

The charity War Child, from where those figures come, is at the sharp end of the result of failed or failing states. Yesterday I met a War Child member of staff who had just come back from the Zaatari camp in Jordan, the second-biggest refugee camp in the world. The group she was working with in the camp were girls—we would call them girls, given their age, but war and refugee life is turning them prematurely into young women. In her work with them, one of the most traumatic issues for them, and indeed for the boys in the camp, that they have had to deal with—even given all their experiences—is the way their education has just come to a halt with no prospect of it being renewed unless one of the NGOs can afford to put in place temporary schools.

Yet, time and again, we are reinforced in our knowledge that the importance of education in improving life chances is massive. Therefore, just at a point where these children’s life chances have taken a massive dip, their educational chances have been taken away. I was struck by a powerful piece written by Gordon Brown in today’s Guardian about the betrayal of half the current generation who live in the world as regards their chances of getting a decent education. I feel his anger at that. Therefore, if Priti Patel wants to make a difference, she should focus on aid to the next generation and on ensuring the educational chances of thousands of young refugees. That would have multiple benefits, not just to them but to the eventual rebuilding of the failed states and the migrant situation.

One small organisation that is starting to make a dramatic difference to children from failed states and their education is called PositiveNegatives. I will take a little time to explain its work and the effect it has. It produces what your Lordships would recognise as comic books; noble Lords may have seen a couple of examples in the Guardian this year. These books are about humanitarian and social issues in fragile states such as Somalia, Eritrea, Syria and Guinea-Bissau. They work in the following way. People in such countries or refugees from them tell their stories to PositiveNegatives, which then puts them into book form, using the accounts of the people affected, and an artist converts the story into illustrations and speech bubbles. It is at once an immediate, powerful and gripping way to address the issues.

Next week, Obama’s forthcoming leaders’ summit on refugees and migrants at the UN General Assembly will feature one of the most recent projects, of particular relevance to this debate. That project, with Care International, is about a Syrian mother whose husband was kidnapped, presumed killed by ISIS. She subsequently fled with her two young children. She is stuck in a refugee camp in Serbia, which is where the PositiveNegatives researchers interviewed her. The comic explores the vulnerabilities and dangers that war widows and women in general face while making these horrendous journeys with young children.

I accept that, in this instance, the word “comic” is not suitable, but that is what we in this country call illustrated books of this nature. These comics have a very powerful impact because they are real stories from real people. No matter what their ethnicity, age, gender or literacy levels, people can understand and empathise with such human stories.

Given the hostility, ignorance or lack of understanding that refugees often face, these books form a great resource for schools. Let me give your Lordships one example, from Fleeing into the Unknown, a comic adapted from the Overseas Development Institute’s report from Journeys to Europe: The Role of Policy in Migrant Decision-making. This comic tells the story of Merha, an Eritrean woman who escaped forced conscription to the Eritrean army and fled to Europe. The comic follows her across Sudan, Libya and the Mediterranean to the UK. On her journey, she faces extortion and sexual and physical abuse, and her experiences in north Africa are very difficult. That is before she makes the perilous journey across the Mediterranean.

This book became a resource in a secondary school in south London. I should emphasise that the books are not just available in printed form; they are available electronically for tablets and computers and are highly interactive. If you want to know, for example, more about Eritrea, you can click on the “history of Eritrea” bar on the left and learn more. It is, at once, a real-life human story but you can also get to the facts behind that story. An Eritrean student at the secondary school read the comic and so did her classmates. This is what she said: “The comic has allowed people in my class to understand what my mother and I experienced on our journey. People just know about crossing the sea, but there were many experiences before that”. She felt that, after reading the comic, her classmates were far more willing and able to be friends with her because they understood something about her background.

This resource should be more widely available in our schools. It is about geography, history and, ultimately, many of our neighbours. I hope that the Department for Education, and the Minister this afternoon, will take back those thoughts. Given the rise in hate crime after Brexit, given the need for this sort of resource, and given the need for children to have something in front of them that is not just a dry text, this is exactly the sort of material that we have a great need for. For as long as there are failing states and a volume of refugees fleeing them, the need for this material will become ever-more crucial.