Aleppo/Syria: International Action

Debate between Alison McGovern and Mary Creagh

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

[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?