Syria

Alec Shelbrooke Excerpts

Wednesday 6th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hague]

A no-fly zone is sometimes advocated, including at international meetings. The greatest difficulty with a no-fly zone is, of course, that it is a response of a totally different nature. It is a military intervention of the sort that we have been talking about and against which many hon. Members have warned. It would require military force externally on a substantial scale. A good argument of principle can be made for that on the basis of relieving human suffering by doing whatever is necessary, but the willingness of nations around the world to implement such a military intervention is limited, for understandable reasons. Indeed, such a no-fly zone could be achieved in practice only with the full participation of the United States of America, so major practical difficulties are involved. What we must not get into is saying that there are protected areas or humanitarian corridors, but then not being able to protect people. There is a sad and tragic history of those things. We should only take the step that the hon. Lady is talking about if the world and the international community were truly ready to bring it about.

[Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is right to say that Syria can count on being shielded by some countries at the United Nations; not least, we know that Russia had the opportunity to bring about some sanctions in the Security Council early on. Will he start talking to his counterparts in the European Union and, indeed, in the United States about saying to the Russians, “If you don’t want to take part in this and put on the blue berets, get on the ground and do something, there will be consequences”? If the Russians refuse to take that sort of action, and are willing to stand by and let tens of thousands of people be slaughtered, we should work with our European partners, the US and south American countries to say to them, “We are not going to come to your country to showcase it in the World cup in 2018.”

[Mr Hague]

I say to my hon. Friend that we must use every art of persuasion we know in our talks with our colleagues in Russia. I can assure him that we do that. The shadow Foreign Secretary argued earlier that we must put the case to Russia about the growth of extremism in Syria and so on—and we do. I have lost count of the number of occasions on which I and other western Foreign Ministers have put the case to our Russian counterparts that everything Russia most fears in Syria is more likely to come true the longer the conflict goes on. That includes the rise of international terrorism and instability in the whole region. The Russians clearly have a different analysis, and we have not had any meeting of minds on the issue. I have to say that I am not a great fan of sporting sanctions. As a country that has just hosted the Olympics, we have a well-established position on that, but we will use every other art of persuasion in dealing with Russia.