Ethiopia

Andrew Mitchell Excerpts

Monday 14th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs (James Duddridge)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this urgent question, and I thank him for his work not only on Ethiopia, but on Zambia and Angola, where he serves as a trade envoy, and for the excellent work he does on the Business Council for Africa.

The Government are deeply concerned about the situation in Ethiopia. Our greatest concern is the rapidly growing human rights and humanitarian crisis in Tigray. We are now more than seven months into the conflict in Tigray, and there is no sight of an end. It has taken a terrible toll on the people of Tigray. More than 350,000 people are assessed to be in famine-like conditions in total—more than anywhere else in the world—and, sadly, this is expected to rise. A region-wide famine in Tigray is now likely if conflict intensifies and impediments to the delivery of humanitarian aid continue. This crisis has been caused by insecurity, an ongoing lack of humanitarian access and the deliberate destruction of agricultural equipment and medical facilities. It is a man-made crisis.

Officials from our embassy in Addis Ababa have visited Tigray five times to assess the situation and guide our humanitarian response. The UK’s special envoy for famine prevention and humanitarian affairs, Nick Dyer, visited Tigray last month. Our ambassador is due to visit this week. During these visits, we have heard many harrowing reports of atrocities committed by all parties to the conflict. This includes extrajudicial killings, and widespread sexual and gender-based violence. It is simply unacceptable, it must stop and the perpetrators must be held to account.

The head of the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Mark Lowcock, has said the humanitarian disaster is in part due to the presence of the Eritrean troops in Tigray. He says they are using hunger as a weapon of war, and we therefore need to see the immediate withdrawal of Eritrean forces from Tigray and Ethiopian soil now. The Government of Ethiopia have said this will happen, but it has not yet happened. I am particularly shocked about reports that Eritreans are dressing up in Ethiopian uniforms and committing atrocities.

The concern of the G7 nations about the situation was set out in yesterday’s communiqué, following the leaders’ summit this weekend. The G7 leaders called for an immediate cessation of hostilities and unimpeded humanitarian access to the area. I am pleased that all G7 nations in the EU, along with a growing number of other nations, including Spain, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Belgium and Poland, have joined the UK’s call for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. His Holiness the Pope expressed his concerns and also called for an end to fighting this weekend. It is vital that that happens to allow life-saving aid to reach the hundreds of thousands in need.

The international community response to this crisis needs to be scaled up urgently. That will involve co-ordination to ensure aid gets in.

[Mr Andrew Mitchell (Sutton Coldfield) (Con)]

Hear, hear!

[James Duddridge]

I am glad my right hon. Friend agrees with me on that issue. I am conscious that there will be a number of questions, so I will cease my comments there.

--- Later in debate ---

[James Duddridge]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his comments. I would like to be associated with his comments on the HALO Trust, which does excellent work in Africa and elsewhere around the world.

Sadly, the numbers are even worse than those the hon Gentleman cites. Nearly 23 million people across Ethiopia will require assistance in 2021. The vast majority of those, and the vast majority of the increase on the normal assistance, are in Tigray, with 6.2 million of the population requiring assistance.

The hon. Gentleman asks about aid getting through. The process for humanitarian assistance getting through was very convoluted. It has improved, but it is still not sufficient to get the materials through, even if we did have them to distribute. However, that is something we are working on very closely; the famine prevention and humanitarian affairs envoy talked about it, and the ambassador will talk about it when he visits Tigray this week. One of the first people to visit Tigray was our development director, looking at these very issues of gaining access.

Crucial to all this is ensuring that the Eritreans get out of Tigray, to create a situation of stability. I very much hope that the turning point of the elections will be a pivot, where the Ethiopian Government will look again at some of these issues.

[Mr Andrew Mitchell (Sutton Coldfield) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Tewkesbury (Mr Robertson) on securing this urgent question, and I echo the comments of the Foreign Affairs Committee Chair that many responsible people throughout our country are worrying about a return to 1984 famine conditions. I urge my hon. Friend, who is a decent and humane Minister, to take two key things away from the House. The first is that 2 million people have been driven from their homes—many across the border into Sudan—and 350,000 people, according to the UN, are now in IPC phase 5, which means they are quite literally starving to death. Secondly, in 2020, the UK recorded $108 million in humanitarian money for Ethiopia; so far this year, with the cuts resulting from our broken promise on the 0.7%, the UN tracking system says that Britain has provided only $6 million—that is the figure scored against ODA so far. Will my hon. Friend bear in mind those two facts in his discussions with his Treasury colleagues?

[James Duddridge]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his long-standing interest. Like him, I do not want to go back to 1984, although there are chilling similarities. He talks of the number of individuals who have gone across the border to Sudan. We have provided £5 million to refugees coming over. We also recognise the number of 350,000.

I think my right hon. Friend explained the source of another hon. Member’s figure of $6 million. I will have to check it, because that is a gross distortion. This is one of our biggest aid programmes. We are the second or third largest aid donor, so that must be a snapshot of a single programme or a very small period of time, because our programmes are many multiples of that.