Aleppo/Syria: International Action

Alison McGovern Excerpts

Programme motion: House of Commons
Tuesday 13th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)]

I thank those Members who have already spoken and made remarks that I agree with. It is an honour to speak after the right hon. Member for Tatton (Mr Osborne). I have vigorously opposed so many times in this House everything that he has put to us. Today, I respect his very thoughtful and important contribution.

I rise today with one purpose, which is to persuade the Foreign Secretary that if he chooses to listen to the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) and take the action that he suggested, he will do so with wide support across this House. Overnight, we have seen reports of the fresh hell that Aleppo has become. We hear this message from the White Helmets:

“100,000+ civilians are packed”,

as the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield said,

“into a tiny area. Bombing and shelling relentless. Casualties unimaginable. Bodies lie where they fell.”

Last night, we heard the final distress call. Today, we decide whether to answer.

The situation in Syria is so dire and the need so urgent that we must not waste further time in deliberation and delay. It is as simple as this: civilians in Syria cannot be left to the mercy of Assad. Ban Ki-moon was very clear in his message yesterday that we all have an obligation

“to protect civilians and abide by international humanitarian and human rights law.”

He went on:

“This is particularly the responsibility of the Syrian government and its allies.”

Like the Secretary-General of the UN, we here all know what President Assad and his allies are doing to the people of Aleppo—and the Government know it, too. A letter of condemnation signed by our Prime Minister last week described the bombing of hospitals and children being gassed. It described these acts as war crimes. These are strong words, but strong words will not rescue a single child while Assad continues to drop bombs on their heads. The Prime Minister rightly condemns the Russians for their

“refusal to engage in serious peace talks”,

but I say it is time for our Government also to rethink their efforts.

As has been said, we can now clearly see the consequences of our inaction. We have asked our Government to step forward with a strategy to protect civilians. Without this, we can see the consequences: so many bodies that the White Helmets can no longer count them, let alone mount a rescue. So our inaction must now become action, which is why, 18 days ago, when I asked Members of this House from all parties to sign a letter to the Prime Minister in support of getting aid to Syrians—by air, if necessary, as a last resort—I was unsurprised, though very glad, that within one day, 100 Members had agreed to put their names to such a request. Very quickly, that number had risen to over 200 and is now 221 if we count all parliamentarians—Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, Scottish nationalist, Social Democratic and Labour party, Democratic Unionist party, Plaid, Green; Mr Speaker, who cares what party we are today? Human beings are being slaughtered without mercy, and I say, never mind party policy; that is a sin against nature itself.

So what should the Government do? We know that Russia will continue to frustrate the UN process by using its veto to protect Assad. Strongly worded letters from our Prime Minister and others are worth nothing if we are not prepared to back them up with actual action. First, we need to get the vulnerable out of there. Children, medics, the injured and the disabled urgently need safe passage to somewhere with shelter, food and basic medical facilities.

Secondly, as 221 parliamentarians are begging the Government: get aid in—by whatever means we can. The reality in front of our eyes is this: even to save a single life, aid is required. We know it is there, and even at this late stage we must do what we can to get it to people.

Thirdly, we must protect those left behind. The Government must press with the full capacity of the British legal profession for UN monitoring, or even just British monitoring, of the atrocities now being committed. If we offer Syrian civilians so very little, the least we can do is promise that, however long it takes, Assad will see justice.

We have all heard the Government’s usual lines on this: they say they are doing all they can, they are keeping their options open, and nothing is off the table. That is not good enough. We are calling on the Government to put something on the table. The reality is that by delaying we are not keeping our options open; we are closing them off. Every day we miss a chance to do what is right.

I am sure that the Government will put out another press release telling us how tragic the fall of Aleppo is, but then Assad will move on, maybe to Idlib or somewhere else, and then somewhere else, and the whole thing will play out again; and we will see more bombed-out hospitals, more dead children, more war crimes, and no doubt more well-written press releases from Governments.

So I have two final questions today. First, will the Foreign Secretary support the call of the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield for an immediate ceasefire to evacuate the children and medical staff still trapped in the rubble of east Aleppo? Will the Government help make that happen, yes or no? Will they go further and do everything possible to secure a more permanent ceasefire and humanitarian access in Aleppo?

The Foreign Secretary knows that the support is here in this House for airdrops of aid if the Government give it their backing. As I have said, more than 200 hon. Members have signed a letter in support of that; the only obstacle is the question of action from the Government. If that is the wrong option and we need another way to open humanitarian corridors, all I ask is for the Foreign Secretary to come back to this House with a strategy to protect civilians.

Secondly, will the Foreign Secretary commit here and now that the Government will not stand by as the Syrian regime moves on to the next city, because does anybody seriously believe that if we allow Assad to have his way now, he is going to stop?

I want to finish by reminding the Foreign Secretary that, alongside the bombs and the gas, the Assad regime has been dropping propaganda leaflets into eastern Aleppo in recent weeks. These leaflets tell the people there that the world has abandoned them and there is no hope. It is up to us to show that that propaganda is a lie. We must show the desperate people of Syria that there are still people in this world who have not forgotten them—people who will honour the commitments we have made in international law and will stand with them against barbarism.

Aleppo may have just hours left, but there are still souls alive in Syria who we can help. If we do nothing—if we just stand by and watch—thousands more people in Syria will die in agony, and millions in Britain will live with the shame of our inaction.

The Foreign Secretary sits on the Treasury Bench. For more than six years, I have sat here on the Opposition Benches with my Labour friends, and I am deeply proud of my party. Yet I have to tell the Foreign Secretary that if he chooses to act—if he chooses to offer a hand in friendship to people in Syria—there will be no Front Benches or Back Benches, no Government Benches and Opposition Benches; there will simply be all of us here—British citizens, representing the British people, wanting him to act, not in the worst of our country’s traditions, but in our best, and wanting him, on behalf of all of us, and for the sake of those in Syria who cannot escape and who desperately need safety, in our name and for them, begging him, to lead.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

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[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Speaker, for calling me. I follow on from the many excellent speeches that we have heard in today’s debate. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty), I have visited—in my then role as chair of the all-party group on genocide prevention, alongside you, Mr Speaker—Rwanda, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo and, more recently, South Sudan, and I have seen there the long, painful process of rebuilding in countries where genocides have taken place.

One of the many problems when genocide and war crimes take place is that there is a fog of war around them. I remember living and working in Brussels during the Rwanda genocide and not really understanding, as I was reading the newspapers in French, what was happening between Hutu and Tutsi, who were the good guys and who were the bad guys, but seeing the people fleeing from Rwanda and later from Zaire, now DRC.

In the Syrian conflict, however, there has been no lack of information. Everything has been appearing on social media. People have been live tweeting their own suffering and their own death. That is why the citizen journalists and the humanitarian workers are more feared by the regime and by the Russians than the rebel fighters. We have seen the images—images that I personally would rather not have seen—of dead children who were murdered in Homs and Hama in 2011 and 2012. We in the west, in particular the US and the UK, drew a red line by saying that we would intervene if chemical weapons were used. That fatal vote in August 2013, as the right hon. Member for Tatton (Mr Osborne) said, has had long and very significant consequences.

Our inaction created the political space for the Russians to move in and to offer to decommission the chemical weapons. We have all seen how successful that decommissioning process has been—we have watched as sarin gas, chlorine gas and napalm have been dropped on schools and hospitals in Aleppo and throughout Syria. We have seen the Russian propaganda campaign of misinformation and their pretence of being honest brokers when the west failed or stood by.

Our inaction also opened up military space—Assad released the jihadis from jail to go out and create mayhem in his country. It served as a recruiting sergeant for 30,000 jihadi fighters from more than 100 countries to go and fight for Islamic State, and it served to create the geographical space where Daesh could claim its caliphate, and groom and lure our own young people to go over there and waste their lives as jihadi brides or jihadi fighters. They now find themselves stuck there in the horror of a nihilistic death cult.

The result has been political space captured by the Russians and military space given to Islamic State-Daesh, enabling them to create mayhem in the region and to export it to Turkey and to Iraq where, let us not forget, Mosul has been under Daesh rule for two years, notwithstanding the long and painful efforts of a coalition trying to take back the space in Iraq. The export of chaos from Syria has resulted in 11 million refugees, 7 million of them in their own country, and 400,000 dead. We cannot claim that we did not know what was happening. That toll has been the result of our own political inaction.

It is a bitter irony that this country went to war in Iraq over weapons of mass destruction which were subsequently found not to be there, possibly having gone over the border to Syria, where we see that they have been used. Now, when we see weapons of mass destruction being used in Syria, we are not prepared to take action. How weak, how diminished, how futile is the rules-based international order. We see Secretary of State Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, telling the US Secretary of State to “stop whining”. That is the contempt in which Assad and Putin hold western powers in the region.

When the Foreign Secretary replies to this debate, will he tell us how the workers of UK charities who are currently in east Aleppo will be evacuated and rescued? They have not been spoken about in the debate. When we had our first debate on Syria in October, I contacted Bana Alabed and Omar Ibrahim, who was a neurosurgeon working in east Aleppo. Bana Alabed is still alive.

[Alison McGovern]

My hon. Friend is making a characteristically detailed and important speech. Will she say a little more about the fate of civilians who have put themselves at risk?

[Mary Creagh]

Absolutely. Civilians have put themselves at risk as citizen journalists, going out while the bombs are falling and filming what is happening. There is also solidarity between our national health service and Dr David Nott, whose foundation is doing excellent work, training people in Turkey to go back into the hell hole that is Aleppo or that is Idlib to perform life-saving surgery.

I have been in contact with Omar Ibrahim during this debate and I have been telling him what we are doing. He has live tweeted to us and shared what he is doing; it is only fair to live tweet back. I said that we are calling on the US and Russia to create safe corridors for humanitarians and civilians to leave. His response is, “It will take a lot more than calling.” These are people facing imminent death or torture from the pro-Assad regime. We have seen the pictures of the 100 or so civilian men and boys in that compound with the Syrian army general in front of them. We do not know their fate. We are back to Bosnia, back to Srebrenica. When we say never again, we must put force behind those words.

I would like to conclude by asking the Foreign Secretary what the Prime Minister will do at the EU Council this weekend. Will she work with our European allies and our NATO allies to make sure we get a speedy humanitarian resolution to this conflict?

--- Later in debate ---

[Boris Johnson]

We are gathering all the information that we think will be necessary for the prosecution of those guilty of war crimes, but the diplomatic pressure must continue. It was asked earlier what we are doing in the EU; I can tell the House that the UK stood up at the last meeting of the Foreign Affairs Council and argued for tightening sanctions against Russia in respect of Syria as well. I wish that the rest of the EU would follow suit.

Last Saturday I broke off a visit to the middle east to fly to Paris to discuss these matters with Secretary Kerry. I pay tribute to John Kerry for his efforts, but they have not prevailed. We jointly demanded that the “regime and its backers” allowed the UN to deliver aid “with immediate effect.” Assad has doggedly refused to allow the UN to deliver supplies to hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom are now starving. He is content for his own people to be reduced to starvation, even though there are UN warehouses full of food within easy reach.

[Alison McGovern]

What specific action to protect civilians will the Foreign Secretary tell the Prime Minister that she should propose to our European colleagues when she goes to the European Council next week?

[Boris Johnson]

What the Russians need to do—this is what our European colleagues should do as well—is to institute an immediate ceasefire. It is up to the Russians, and, I am afraid, to the Assad regime, to institute a ceasefire. I will come in a minute to the deficiencies and problems that our decision in 2013 left us with today. Many Members have sought to find fault with the UK Government and what we have tried to do. Given that we are contributing £2.3 billion of aid, many Members have asked an entirely legitimate question: why we do not fly in aid ourselves? Labour Members have asked that very question: why do we not drop aid on eastern Aleppo from the air? Many have spoken in favour of airdrops. In recent weeks since we last discussed this matter in the House, we have studied that option with great care. Working with my colleagues across Whitehall, and working with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence and the RAF, I must tell the House that we have come up against some hard realities.

--- Later in debate ---

[Boris Johnson]

I am afraid I will not.

There is another inescapable reality that Members must accept. On 29 August 2013, this House voted by 13 votes not to use force against Assad, even after he had poisoned hundreds of his people with sarin nerve gas. We, as a House of Commons and as a country, vacated the space into which Russia stepped, beginning its own bombing campaign on behalf of Assad in 2015. Ever since that vote, our ability to influence events in Syria, to protect civilians or to compel the delivery of aid has been severely limited. The dictator was left to do his worst—along with his allies, Russia and Iran—and the bloodiest tragedy of the 21st century has since unfolded.

I must say—the House should listen to this—that Assad’s conquest of Aleppo will not mark the end of the war. The victory will turn to ashes in his mouth, because even if he reimposes his rule over the rubble of that city, about two thirds of Syria will remain outside his control. Millions of Syrians are viscerally hostile to the rule of a tyrant who has the blood of hundreds of thousands on his hands. Already Daesh has taken the opportunity created by Assad’s assault on Aleppo to surge forwards and capture again the ancient Roman city of Palmyra. Assad has repeatedly said that his aim is nothing less than the re-conquest of “every inch” of Syria. If he is allowed to pursue that goal, I fear that this war will continue for more years, and victory will still elude him.

My question to those who ask what we would do—let us turn the question around—is: do Russia and Iran want to stand behind Assad in this futile and indefinite struggle to subdue Syria? Do they want to be with him siege for siege, barrel bomb for barrel bomb and gas attack for gas attack, as the tyrant reduces his country to ashes? In the months or perhaps years ahead, does Russia still wish to be dispatching warplanes to bomb Syrian cities while casting votes in the Security Council on behalf of Assad, a man for whom it has no great regard?

[Alison McGovern]

The Foreign Secretary mentions the vote in 2013; I will live with that for the rest of my life. May I ask again the question that I asked him earlier? There is no pressure on Russia at the moment, so why does he not tell the Prime Minister to go to the European Council and propose action that is led by the UK and supported by our European allies?

[Boris Johnson]

I can tell the hon. Lady that we are doing everything that we can within the constraints we face. I have described the restrictions on military options, which I think most people in this country understand.