Aleppo and Syria

Angela Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 11th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Mitchell]

That is the very point I was making.

We should single Russia out as a pariah. Like any bully, the Kremlin craves relevance, and it is winning as long as no one stands up to it. Russia must be confronted for its attacks on innocent civilians, both diplomatically and using hard power including sanctions and economic measures. We must seek to build support for multilateral military action to discharge our responsibility to protect. This is not about attacking Russia. It is about defending innocent civilians. It is about basic humanitarian decency and protection from the kind of barbarism and tyranny we hoped we had consigned to the last century.

[Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)]

I completely concur with the right hon. Gentleman’s words about Russia and the atrocities that it is committing against the people of Syria, but should we not also look at this in the context of Russia’s previous actions in Ukraine and Crimea? Ought we not to remember that Russia as a state is increasingly out of control? It is not playing by the rules, and we absolutely have to confront its behaviour internationally.

[Mr Mitchell]

The hon. Lady makes an extremely powerful point. We cannot do this alone. We must use Britain’s outstanding connections, not least through our diplomatic reach, our membership of NATO, our relationship with America and our centrality in the European firmament—Brexit notwithstanding.

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[Emily Thornberry]

Absolutely there is not a ceasefire now; that is what I am moving on to. Of course there is no ceasefire, and there needs to be an initiative. In the end, we all know that we can move forward only by way of negotiations, and that no negotiations will happen without a ceasefire.

[Angela Smith]

Can my hon. Friend present us with the evidence that she clearly has that it is realistic to believe that the Russians will seriously engage in further ceasefire negotiations? Does she think for a minute that they will stop bombing Aleppo while they are doing that?

[Emily Thornberry]

I have thought about this a great deal and spoken to a number of experts about it, and I have some suggestions that I wish to make to the House and to put before the Secretary of State. We want to be helpful. If she will give me a moment, I will explain.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Woodcock (Barrow and Furness) (Lab/Co-op)]

It has been a privilege to be in the House today for some of the best—although I also have to say some of the worst—traditions of where our democracy is at the moment. I will say briefly that there is no one better to seek to step into the shoes of our dearly missed friend, Jo Cox, than my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern). We will all do our best.

I want to dwell for a little longer on what happened on 19 September. It is no mean feat to put together a cross-line convoy. Some 31 lorries had been assembled by various nations under the clear banner of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. I will read from a couple of eye witnesses. One said:

“The bombardment was continuous, continuous.”

Someone else said:

“I saw the bodies of men on the ground…I was told they were truck drivers and volunteers who had been unloading...medicine, food and other desperately needed items”—

desperately needed by the people of Aleppo.

That bombing went on for more than two hours. It came from helicopters and land forces, and started immediately after a Russian drone that had been directly overhead disappeared. There is no doubt as to who was the perpetrator of this grotesque war crime. It was President Putin of Russia. He was sticking two fingers up to the United Nations and the international community of which he still has the audacity to claim he is a working part.

I have to say this: shame on anyone, from the UN official report to Members of this House to members of my party, who fails to acknowledge that grotesque war crime. I hear the platitudes about bread, not bombs, but the bombs are destroying the bread, and when the people who are making the platitudes are obstructing the possibility of any peace in the region I say that they are directly complicit in what is happening. It is time for us to choose—as individuals in this Parliament and as a country—which side we are on. Do we want to act or to stand by?

Last week I was in Istanbul, where I met the leadership of the Syrian opposition coalition in its headquarters. Those people are of course exiled from their country, where they still have families. Members of their communities live in fear of their lives there and their lives are taken every day. I met the president and the secretary-general, a man called Abdulelah Fahed. He does not speak English, so spoke to me through an interpreter. He looked at me with cold and cynical fury in his eyes, and said, “We are grateful for the sugar that is sent to us from the international community and is bombed by the Russians. We hope you send more sugar that will be bombed. But actually this is not primarily a problem of a lack of aid being sent. It is that the aid is being bombed by the regime and by Russia, and until you help us with tackling that at source no amount of goodwill and humanitarian handwringing is going to help to solve this situation.”

There are different interpretations of what a no-fly zone or a no-bombing zone would mean. I recognise the grave danger of escalation in saying that we would be prepared to shoot down a Russian plane. I will say two things. My sense—and I would like to hear the Foreign Secretary’s initial views on this—is that a no-bombing zone could work. We could say that every time the Assad regime and Russia committed one of these atrocities in the full of view of the international community, the coalition that is currently fighting Daesh would respond, primarily with naval assets, by targeting part of the regime’s infrastructure. No one would be bombing Russia or taking down Russian planes, but we would target that infrastructure every time they committed an atrocity. Each time they killed civilians we would respond, targeting only the military.

The Foreign Secretary knows his history. We could also say that he knows a thing or two about bullies. President Putin is a classic bully. Over the past few years, and in fact beyond that, the international community has cowered every time he has advanced. When you do that with bullies, they go further and further. I say to the people who say every time that we must not do something because we will enrage Russia and we do not want another world war, that their cowardice is making conflict more likely—both the continuation of conflict in Syria and the possibility of further conflict in Europe. The only thing to do with bullies is stand up to them.

We are going to have to do that, sooner or later. I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy). The people of Syria do not have three months to see how the presidential handover goes and what the new president is like; they are being killed in their hundreds every single day.

[Angela Smith]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[John Woodcock]

Okay, really quickly—we are getting frowned at by Mr Speaker.

[Angela Smith]

I will be very quick. Does my hon. Friend agree that the suggestion from the Labour Front-Bench spokesperson that we go through a different process, which involves engaging with the Syrians at various levels, will not work, because we have no time whatever, as Aleppo will have disappeared by Christmas?

[John Woodcock]

Who are we kidding? There is no process, because no one is standing up to the Russian regime’s bombs. People understand that, but they do not want to get involved. The question is ultimately for the Foreign Secretary and the Government, because my party is making itself more and more of an irrelevance with every pronouncement from the Front Bench. Are we prepared, as the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) said at the beginning, to oversee another Guernica or a collapse of the UN, like the League of Nations before it? Are we going to be a latter-day generation of Neville Chamberlains, or are we going to take courage and act in the manner of the great Winston Churchill, which the Foreign Secretary knows very well from his time as his biographer?