Hazara Community (Pakistan)

Andrew Smith Excerpts

Monday 4th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Iain Stewart (Milton Keynes South) (Con)]

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr Denham) on securing this important debate, and I thank him for his courtesy in allowing me to say a few words. He has comprehensively and eloquently set out the plight of the Hazara community in Pakistan. I am happy to endorse the points he made.

Like Southampton, Milton Keynes is home to a sizeable Hazara community. My hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North (Mark Lancaster) and I have spent a considerable amount of time meeting members of that community and working with them. Last year, we had the great honour of attending their annual school prize-giving day—a warm and jolly occasion that served to underline the warmth and depth of community spirit among them in Milton Keynes. That makes it even more galling to learn about the stories of their kinsmen and loved ones being persecuted, injured and killed in Pakistan.

The numbers involved are quite shocking. The right hon. Gentleman has given us a list. The impact of the killings and of the injuries sustained among the community as a whole has been absolutely shocking. Let me provide a few other examples. A decade ago, there were 300 students at the main university in Quetta. After all the death threats and the persecutions, there are not any today. About 80% of Hazara businesses have either had to be sold or closed down. There are 3,000 orphans or children living in poverty because the main breadwinner has been killed. As we have heard, there is no semblance of a social security system there. Then there are the thousands killed or maimed—yet not one arrest of the perpetrators. Those figures are shocking, but it is only when we hear personal examples that the true scale of the horror comes home.

[Mr Andrew Smith (Oxford East) (Lab)]

I join the hon. Gentleman in congratulating my right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr Denham) on securing this enormously important debate. I was pleased to join the big meeting that the hon. Gentleman sponsored in the House of Commons, for which I thank him. Was it not deeply moving both to hear the testimony of the people there and to experience their confidence that making their representations through this House to the Government might produce real change in the interest of justice for the Hazaras?

[Iain Stewart]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for that intervention and he is absolutely right. That recent meeting was one of the most powerful I have ever attended in this place. It was heart warming to encounter the strength of feeling and the optimism among members of the community that we might be able to effect some positive influence or change. I will certainly continue to do all I can, and I know that the right hon. Gentleman and his colleagues will do the same.

In preparing for this debate, I spoke to some of my constituents and those of my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North to get their personal stories about what has happened. A gentleman by the name of Nasir Abbas was a relative of my constituents Mokhtar and Shalia Ali. He was 34 and he was the main breadwinner of the family; the rest of the family depended on him, yet he was killed in a suicide attack. The family is now living in squalor, with no real way of supporting themselves. The family then suffered again, when the father-in-law received a death threat and not long afterwards suffered a fatal heart attack—yet another tragedy for the family. That is just one of many similar examples that go on today.

As the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen mentioned, we have not long since marked Holocaust memorial day. At the weekend, I attended a couple of plays in one of Milton Keynes’s theatres by a group called “voices of the holocaust”. The very powerful plays depicted the escalation of persecution in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. It was an historical reminder of what went on and of the fact that that same kind of persecution happens today, which places on us a great duty to stand up and speak out against it. I have done a lot of work with the community across the country, and I am happy to endorse the resolutions they passed in the conference on genocide.

I appreciate that this area is a dangerous and difficult part of the world, but that does not absolve us from taking action. I know that the Minister has taken a keen interest in the matter. I urge him, in addition to answering the specific questions raised by the right hon. Gentleman, to do all he can to work bilaterally with the Pakistani authorities, but also multilaterally through the United Nations. I think that it, too, has a significant role to play.

Of all the points made by the right hon. Gentleman, the one I would particularly emphasise concerned the need to use the lever of British aid to bring about some positive action. As the conference has demonstrated during the past couple of days, we are not without influence in that part of the world. I owe it to my constituents to stand up and highlight the plight of their kinsmen, and this country owes it to those people to stand up for them, to speak out, and to use what influence we have to improve this dreadful situation.