Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting and Philippines

Lord Naseby Excerpts

Monday 18th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

The right reverend Prelate makes an extremely wise point about the long-term future. I am grateful for what he says about the short-term response, although, as he rightly says, a lot of that is down to the natural generosity and human feeling of the British people in terms of their charitable response. The Government are glad to have been able to play their part alongside them in increasing the amount of aid that they have made available.

The right reverend Prelate is obviously also right that there is a difference between the short-term crisis response and what one can do longer term. As he has said, DfID was working with the Philippine Government prior to the emergency on some of the issues which he mentioned which come from climate change. Certainly, helping those countries invest in homes and infrastructure that in future would be better able to support some of these natural disasters is the wise thing to do. I am sure that through the work of DfID, the Government will continue to reflect on that.

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

As chairman of the all-party group I welcome enormously that the Prime Minister went to Colombo. Is my noble friend aware that the reaction from the nearly 500,000 Sri Lankans living in the UK, whether they be Sinhalese, Tamil or Muslim, has not been at all positive? My e-mail has virtually collapsed because people are deeply concerned at the way in which the Prime Minister raised, in their view, an unbalanced view of what progress had been made, particularly the manner in which it was delivered to the President of Sri Lanka? I have to say that I partially share that concern.

As we move forward, which is the key to all this, does my noble friend, as he sits in the Cabinet, recognise that it has been only four years and that in those four years there is peace? There are no bombs and you can go where you like. You do not have to have your cards with you and there are no checkpoints. That is enormous progress in four years. After all, we took nine years to get rid of rationing. Even as one of those who suffered from the bombing in London, we did not succeed in producing an ideal situation within four years.

Perhaps I may bear on the House for a moment; two dimensions are involved. First, we now know the number of people who disappeared, of whom, sadly, some 600 were children, who I suspect are child soldiers. We now know that. There is a commission. I think that it would be great progress if the International Committee of the Red Cross were to join that commission, because it has helped in producing the numbers.

Secondly, we now have established the numbers who were killed. We know from the Tamil teachers who did the audit that the number is somewhere around 9,000, which is a number that we can handle. Will my noble friend please give maximum encouragement to the processing of those 9,000 to make sure that we find out exactly who they were?

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, I certainly accept the point. The Prime Minister was very clear in his Statement that one cannot disassociate oneself from the awful history of Sri Lanka over the past 30 years and the history of bloodshed and civil strife that it has gone through. That having been said, I do not accept that the Prime Minister made his case to the President of Sri Lanka in an unbalanced way. There is quite a lot of contention around figures of the sort to which my noble friend refers. That is precisely why my right honourable friend the Prime Minister stressed the importance of having a credible transparent and independent inquiry to get to the bottom of what happened during the closing phases of the civil war and then addressing the situation so that it is possible on that basis to move forward with reconciliation to a shared understanding of what the future might be like. Until that has happened, it is very hard to work out how there can be reconciliation that will last.