Counter-Daesh Campaign: Iraq and Syria

Desmond Swayne Excerpts

Thursday 3rd November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Boris Johnson]

We are looking at that. It will not surprise the hon. Gentleman to know that the advice I have had so far is that that would almost certainly not work, but I have asked our officials to go back and see what they can do. I have studied the proposal with interest and with care. The hon. Gentleman should not get his hopes too high, but we should rule nothing out.

[Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)]

How likely is reform in Iraq, which is so vital to this enterprise?

[Boris Johnson]

My right hon. Friend asks the fundamental question. Everybody who has talked to Prime Minister Abadi or Foreign Minister al-Jaafari, as I have, will feel that they understand what they need to do. They get the scale of the problem and the credibility that they need to build with their own people. Whether they will achieve that is a matter for them. It is vital that they do not shirk their responsibility, and we will give them every possible support.

Oral Answers to Questions

Desmond Swayne Excerpts

Tuesday 18th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Ellwood]

As I mentioned, the UNDP is co-ordinating all aspects of the UN. Working with the Iraqis, it is taking the lead on the stabilisation and reconstruction of the city. Prime Minister Abadi has made it clear that no peshmerga—no Kurdish forces—or Shi’ite mobilisation forces should enter the city. This is a predominantly Sunni city and it should be liberated initially by Sunni Iraqi forces. A civilian-trained police force will provide important security after that.

[Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)]

11. What recent discussions he has had with the Syrian opposition.

[The Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Boris Johnson)]

I spoke to Dr Riad Hijab, the general co-ordinator of the Syrian High Negotiations Committee, on 6 October and again on 13 October. We discussed the importance of the Syrian opposition’s continued commitment to the political process.

[Sir Desmond Swayne]

What importance does my right hon. Friend attach to countries in the region in bringing together the Syrian opposition?

[Boris Johnson]

I am most grateful to my right hon. Friend. As the House may know, on 7 September we had a meeting in London, together with the High Negotiations Committee led by Dr Riad Hijab, of the interested parties in the region. He set out what I think was a very compelling case for a post-Assad Syria with a broad-based Government and pluralist democracy. I think they have a plan for 30% female representation in their politics, which is perhaps better even than the Labour party. He answers one of the key questions: is there a future for Syria after Assad? There most certainly is—and a great one, too.

Aleppo and Syria

Desmond Swayne Excerpts

Tuesday 11th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Twigg]

I do agree with my hon. Friend. The people of Liverpool have made a similar pledge, as have the city council and the mayor of Liverpool. The National Audit Office published a report last month on this very issue, in which it praised the progress made by local government in the last year but pointed to some of the issues my hon. Friend has highlighted—not least that it is not clear what funding will be available to support local authorities beyond the first-year costs.

Will the Foreign Secretary address another aspect of the current crisis? Some 70,000 Syrian refugees are currently in what is known as the “berm”, which is a demilitarised zone between Syria and Jordan. Those 70,000 people are, effectively, being prevented from going to the safe space of Jordan. Our former colleague, Stephen O’Brien, who is now the head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, has described conditions at the berm as truly dire. My understanding is that a plan to deal with the crisis has been agreed by the United Nations but not yet by Jordan. Will the Foreign Secretary use his good offices to pursue this as a matter of urgency with the Jordanian Government?

Earlier this year the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield and another former International Development Secretary, Clare Short, brought to the International Development Committee’s attention the issue of the unintended consequences of counter-terrorism legislation for the delivery of aid. Several non-governmental organisations have been in touch with the Committee in recent weeks to raise that question and, in particular, two areas that require action from the Government.

The first area is the need to ease the concerns of banks. My understanding is that even when NGOs are fully compliant with counter-terrorism legislation, banks are sometimes nervous about lending, leading to delays in processing payments and the aid not getting delivered. The second is the need to use our good offices with Turkey. My understanding is that it is not always easy for NGOs to function on the Turkish side of the border region between Syria and Turkey. For example, Syria Relief UK has told us that it has been waiting for its application to establish an office in southern Turkey to be processed, and that the Turkish authorities can be overly restrictive about the means by which they allow funds to be transferred to Syria. I realise these are rather technical points, but they are about how aid can most effectively be delivered, and I would be grateful to Ministers if they addressed those points during this debate.

The scale of the challenge is truly enormous. The heartbreaking scenes mentioned by colleagues on both sides of the House, particularly those in Aleppo, touch us all. They touch our constituents and they touch people in all parts of this country. I am pleased that several speakers have reaffirmed the important principle of the responsibility to protect, which arose from what happened in the 1990s in Rwanda and the Balkans. In the meantime, we need urgent action to secure the safe delivery of aid to all parts of Syria.

[Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)]

There have been suggestions that the International Development Secretary is disinclined to allow officials to shovel money out of the door towards the year end to meet a 0.7% target if those projects are not up to scratch. She is quite right to say so, but does the hon. Gentleman agree that, given the state of need, there is no shortage of very effective ways of spending that money?

[Stephen Twigg]

I entirely echo what the right hon. Gentleman the former Minister says. I entirely agree. The scale of need in Syria, but also, frankly in other parts of the world, including Africa, should mean that we can both deliver the 0.7% target and do so with true efficiency and value for money.

The safe delivery of aid is clearly urgent, but as others have said, we need to move forward to some kind of political process, with a return to the ceasefire. We need to explore every option: no-fly and no-bombing zones; airdrops; and we need to look at the role that Russia is playing.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Speaker, for granting time for this debate. Until today, we had not debated the atrocities in Syria substantively since June, so it is thanks to the work of brave journalists at “Channel 4 News” and elsewhere, and to fearless humanitarians in Syria, that the killing and maiming of Syrian people has not passed unseen in this country despite our recess. In this House, we can make sure that the call for help from the Syrian people does not go unanswered.

Let me thank the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell). I am privileged to work with him as the co-chair of the all-party friends of Syria group. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness (John Woodcock) and the other officers and members of the all-party group for their work. I was a member of the International Development Committee when the right hon. Gentleman was the Secretary of State, and I am not ashamed to say that I took pleasure in trying to find questions he could not answer. However, today I stand united with him. He is a relentless champion for human rights and international law, and I pay tribute to him. I also thank the Foreign Secretary for attending today’s debate, alongside the International Development Secretary, who was in the Chamber earlier.

Just a few weeks ago, the fragile ceasefire in Syria was shattered in a disgraceful attack on a UN aid convoy carrying desperately needed humanitarian aid to the people of Aleppo. The brave drivers and volunteers in that convoy risked everything to help the people who need it most, and they represent the best of humanity. It is an outrage that they have paid for their decency with their lives. The peace in Syria had lasted barely a week. At the time, the ceasefire was very welcome, arising shortly after the publication of a transition plan from the opposition Syrian high negotiations committee just a few weeks earlier in London. However, through the callous targeting of civilian aid—let us be very clear that that is a war crime if it is shown to be deliberate—the Syrian regime has shown it is interested not in peace, but only in suffering. This is not the only war crime committed by Bashar al-Assad and his allies.

These are the facts. More than 400,000 people are dead. Millions have fled for their lives. Hospitals, which are supposedly protected by international law, are now attacked as a matter of routine. Some 600,000 people are still besieged in eastern Aleppo, under constant bombardment from the regime and the Russians. As we have heard, Aleppo, which is under bombardment today, is just one of about 17 besieged cities, and many neighbourhoods and entire towns have been razed to the ground. One report suggests that three quarters of children in Aleppo now suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Anas, a little boy there, spelled out what it is like to grow up in Syria today:

“All the days are similar to each other; the only new thing is what time the shelling comes…the shelling is the thing which scares us a lot and it is not possible to get used to it.”

No child should have to live like that.

It is a fact, as a recent report from Human Rights Watch revealed, that incendiary weapons similar to napalm have been dropped on civilians in the opposition-held areas of Aleppo and Idlib. Napalm, a weapon all of us might once have thought had been consigned to the worst chapters of history, is being dropped on civilians in the 21st century.

It is also a fact, as established by the UN joint investigative mechanism in August, that the regime is using chlorine gas as a weapon by dropping barrels of it on densely populated civilian areas. This gas, when dropped in barrels from helicopters, disperses quickly and fills the lungs of people who inhale it with fluid until they choke. Such gas attacks are taking us back to the worst times of the first world war. As a result, experts are warning of the risk of normalising chemical weapons after decades of sustained international effort to keep them beyond the pale. Meanwhile, Syrians on the ground talk of hearing the sound of helicopters and praying that they are carrying just explosives and nothing worse.

It is important to be clear not just about what is happening in Syria, but about who is to blame. Clarity is necessary because confusion results in equivocation, indecision and inaction. When the Serbs were slaughtering thousands in Bosnia, international action was delayed by false claims that Bosnian Government forces had staged attacks against civilians to try to provoke an international response against Karadzic. The result was that the Major Government—to their shame, I am afraid—opposed arms sales to the Bosnians and at first resisted a no-fly zone.

The same campaign of misinformation and propaganda is being waged today. We have seen the denials and the lies about what is happening and who is to blame before, and they cannot stand. The truth is that British airstrikes are targeted at Daesh and are hundreds of miles from Aleppo, where the worst suffering is occurring. The truth is that the vast and overwhelming majority of civilian casualties in Syria are the victims of Assad’s aggression against his own people, sparked by the democratic uprising of the Arab spring.

I recognise the concerns of many about how we must think through the consequences of our actions. However, as others have said, let us be clear that it is not just when we choose to act that the consequences of our action must be accounted for, but when we have the capacity to act and choose not to. When we choose to look away, that has consequences, too.

Of course, it is natural to feel powerless in the face of such horror, but our knowledge of horror must drive us to action, not transfix us with despair. So what can be done? First, with bombs raining down on the people of eastern Aleppo as we speak, it is urgent that the ceasefire be salvaged, if at all possible. If it is not possible, there are still actions that the UK can take. We should volunteer to take the lead in tracking aircraft over Syria, using our assets based in the region. There must be absolute clarity about who is responsible for these crimes, not just in the hope that the aggressors will change their tactics, but to keep alive the possibility of prosecutions. We have Type 45 destroyers and monitoring aircraft off the coast that could do that job and make a difference.

Speaking of accountability, I hope that there is now consensus in this House that we can support the French initiative to send Syria and Russia to the International Criminal Court, and the strongest possible sanctions against Russia to show that there are consequences for what it is doing. The Foreign Secretary has said this before and I agree with him: we have to be at the forefront of applying sanctions.

In the longer term, the protection of civilians from aerial bombardment, along with the destruction of chemical weapons stockpiles, must be the aim. There is a legal precedent in Kosovo for the establishment of a no-fly zone without Security Council backing. My view is that that must not be off the table if it can be shown to be the most effective way of protecting civilians.

[Sir Desmond Swayne]

We must be absolutely clear as a House precisely what we mean by this demand for a no-fly zone. The right hon. Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd) pointed out how that worked in Iraq, where we had to take down Iraqi planes. This would require the will to take down Russian planes. Perhaps that is the right answer, but we must be aware of what we are contemplating.

[Alison McGovern]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention. He anticipates the very point I am about to make.

Given that barrel bombs and chemical weapons are mainly delivered by helicopter, experts have calculated that a no-fly zone just for helicopters could reduce civilian casualties by up to 90%. Even failing that, there are things that we could do. We can push for bigger windows to get humanitarian aid into the worst-hit areas and look at using other assets to drop aid into besieged areas. We can also get more support to the heroic White Helmets, the Syrian volunteers who risk their lives to save as many people as they can from the death raining down on them. Many people will have seen the White Helmets in the news in recent weeks because of their nomination for the Nobel peace prize. These heroes risk it all every day to save lives, often running towards the sound of the shelling and risking being caught in second strikes. They need our support. Even if the only result of this debate is that all those people watching make a donation, it will have been worth it.

Central and East Africa

Desmond Swayne Excerpts

Monday 25th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Fabian Hamilton (Leeds North East) (Lab)]

I will not attempt to compete with the eloquent poetry of Robbie Burns on this Burns night.

[The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Mr Desmond Swayne)]

Hallelujah.

[Fabian Hamilton]

Yes, I thought you would be pleased.

I, too, congratulate the hon. and learned Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Stephen Phillips) on obtaining this debate from the Backbench Business Committee. It is very appropriate that we are discussing these issues today. I am sorry that the hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy)—the hon. and learned Gentleman’s co-applicant for the debate—is not with us for this evening’s debate. He is extremely knowledgeable on these issues and always adds a lot to any debate on the subject of east Africa.

It is good that the hon. and learned Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham was able to get back promptly this morning, and I expect that he is feeling the effects of his long journey from Rwanda via Addis Ababa. I thank him for returning and enlightening us with the eloquent points that he made, which have set the tone for our whole debate this evening.

The Library’s introduction to the debate identified eight countries as the ones we would talk about this evening—the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Chad, Burundi, Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Indeed, those are the countries that we have discussed at some length. As we have heard this evening, the Department for International Development currently has bilateral aid programmes in five of those eight countries—DRC, Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. As has been said, the bilateral programme in Burundi—which has slipped back into political violence and crisis over the last year—was closed during the last Parliament, a decision criticised not only by the former Secretary of State for International Development but the International Development Committee, of which I was a member until last week. There are now many calls for the programme to resume once the current crisis is over, but even in 2014 £6.1 million was spent in bilateral aid from the United Kingdom. That compares with a total of £587.4 million for those other five countries in 2014—a considerable sum of taxpayers’ money.

The hon. and learned Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham spoke eloquently about the lack of stability in many of the countries we have discussed this evening. He mentioned the estimated growth in population—the United Nations estimates that it will double by the end of the century, with 4.4 billion people living in Africa by 2100. He also said that stable economies allow stable Governments, but I would perhaps argue that stable government often flows from economic development and wealth creation. Is stable government a prerequisite for economic progress? That is a question that we need to discuss and decide, and I wonder whether the Minister would care to comment on which comes first.

The hon. and learned Gentleman also mentioned several other countries, and sadly we do not have time to go through them in detail this evening. He made the point about DRC, a country that has been in the news over the last 10 years or so, following the appalling civil war and strife there. Its current situation was summed up in a book called “Blood River”, written about eight years ago by the former Daily Telegraph journalist, now author, Tim Butcher. I recommend the book to anyone who wishes to know more about the origins and current state of DRC.

The hon. and learned Gentleman also mentioned the Rwanda genocide, which other right hon. and hon. Members have mentioned this evening. In this week in which we remember the holocaust—remembrance services happened up and down the country yesterday and will continue this week—the genocide of 1994, which I remember all too clearly, must also be remembered, although it must never be repeated.

My hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty), who was my immediate predecessor in this role on the shadow Foreign Office team, talked eloquently about Somaliland. It is interesting that he supports recognition, Somaliland being part of a former United Kingdom colony. He said that, de facto, it is already a separate, democratic, plural and stable region within the benighted country of Somalia. Somaliland has seen many positive developments in trade and investment, and made huge progress.

My hon. Friend mentioned that Cardiff, Sheffield and Tower Hamlets recognise Somaliland. I was not aware that they were able to recognise other countries. Of course, that beacon of stability, as he so eloquently put it, in the horn of Africa is subject to serious threats from al-Shabaab and other extreme organisations that would destroy all the progress that has been made. Elections in Somaliland have been postponed but, as the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), the former Secretary of State, mentioned in his very important contribution, we should not be too worried. Somaliland has proved it has a democratic tradition and will abide by the will of the people expressed through the ballot box, even if the election is won or lost by just a few thousand votes. That is very important indeed.

Tonight’s debate has fused political and Foreign and Commonwealth Office interests with issues of governance, which come under the FCO and DFID. Of the “10 International Development Priorities for the UK” in the Overseas Development Institute’s excellent document, we have discussed at least seven this evening: leave no one behind; support for women and girls; a focus on transformative economic growth, which many Members raised; support for conflict-affected countries; support of the private sector in helping to develop economies; and bringing trade and development together. I just want to mention one of those extremely important aims, on which the International Development Committee and DFID have concentrated over the years.

When I joined the Select Committee in 2013, it was producing an excellent report on violence against women and girls. The Committee visited villages in Ethiopia and looked at the work being done to educate women and girls. It found what many right hon. and hon. Members have mentioned this evening: where there is more equality between men and women, and where girls are educated and able to make an economic contribution to their communities, societies are more prosperous and peaceful, and violence abates. There is an interesting statistic from the ODI report: every day 800 women still die from preventable diseases and causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. It remains the leading cause of adolescent deaths for 15 to 19-year-olds. The report compares the risk of dying in childbirth in Europe, one in 3,300, with the risk of dying in the regions of Africa we are discussing: one in 40. We should be ashamed of that statistic. It is beginning to change, but not fast enough.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hyndburn (Graham Jones) has a huge interest in, and knowledge of, Rwanda. He talked about the extraordinary progress it has made since the terrible genocide in 1994. He rightly pointed out that it has lower levels of crime and corruption, and an average growth in GDP of 8% over the past 10 years. Efforts to eliminate corruption have come from the very top. Rwanda is perhaps also a beacon to other countries in the region.

I recently met the chief commissioner of the Independent Commission on Aid Impact, an organisation set up by the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield when he was Secretary of State for International Development. Indeed, I had the privilege to chair the International Development Sub-Committee on ICAI. The new chief commissioner, Alison Evans, called Rwanda the Switzerland of Africa. In many ways, that is very true. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hyndburn pointed out, there are concerns with perhaps the increasingly authoritarian nature that some say Paul Kagame has shown, but that has to be balanced against the enormous progress that has been made in Rwanda.

I pay tribute to the many Members, on both sides of the House, including my friend—I hope she does not mind me calling her that—the hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton), with whom I served on the International Development Committee, who have spent a lot of time and effort visiting and upholding the cause of countries such as Rwanda. It is the reason relations are so good between our two nations and the reason much progress can be made. Let us hope that Rwanda can be an example to other parts of Africa, so that violence and conflict may end and prosperity, economic growth and peace may break out. We continue to hope.