Sri Lanka

Lord Swire Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

I agree. That is the fundamental challenge. When we are trying to answer the important question of how we prevent this kind of thing from happening, the most important first step is to properly understand the motives of the people who try to perpetrate these attacks. We do not know that at this stage, but it seems clear that one was a religious motive to try and set faith against faith, and one was a cultural motive to try and target western tourists who are visiting Sri Lanka. We have to be alive to both of those, but the shadow Foreign Secretary was absolutely right in saying that one of the things that we can do to support Sri Lanka is—obviously subject to travel advice, which is very carefully kept under review—to continue to visit a country that depends on tourism to show our support and to show that we are not going to be put off by this kind of terrorism.

[Sir Hugo Swire (East Devon) (Con)]

Whoever perpetrated these hideous crimes and whatever their warped ideology, they are murderers, and cowardly murderers at that. Will my right hon. Friend therefore convey to the high commissioner James Dauris, his staff and to the Government of President Sirisena and Prime Minister Wickremesinghe that we want to show our solidarity and sympathy with our Commonwealth cousins at this extraordinarily difficult time? Will he confirm—it may be premature to do so—that many of those arrested to date appear to have connections of one sort or another with Syria? And if that is the case, will he look very carefully at extending whatever assistance he is giving to the Government of Sri Lanka to include offering similar assistance to the Government of the neighbouring Maldives, where there is also a problem with returning foreign fighters from Syria and where we have many British tourists on holiday at any given time of the year?

[Mr Hunt]

As I would expect, my right hon. Friend, being a former Minister for Asia, makes an important point. He is right that there are early indications of Islamist extremism that we need to investigate properly, and the Maldives is a very young democracy to which we want to give every support, so I will take his point away.