Refugee Camps

Guy Opperman Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd July 2014 Westminster Hall

[Guy Opperman (Hexham) (Con)]

To misquote Charles Dickens in 2014, these are the best of times and the worst of times. It is an age of wisdom and an age of foolishness. There is a season of light, there is a season of darkness. There is a spring of hope and there is a winter of despair.

To look at the worst of times, others have set out graphically the vast scale of the problem. There are 50 million refugees, and huge numbers of Syrians, for example, are fleeing that conflict zone—it is that country I particularly want to focus on. We debate the issue on 22 July with conflict in Gaza and Israel, with no cessation of rockets or hostilities, no durable ceasefire and no progress to a two-state solution. At the same time, Russia and Ukraine are in a separatist dispute that is producing ever more refugees, and there has been the horrifying loss of flight MH17.

One could say that the debate brought by my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire (Pauline Latham) is particularly timely because there is a risk that while all those atrocities are going on and being shown on the television, conflicts and refugee situations that have been going on for a considerable time have almost been forgotten. It is a fantastic aspect of the House of Commons, first, that when we get this job we gain a greater understanding of the huge complexity of the problems faced around the world and secondly that, on a hot and steamy morning, Members from four different parties are here, making the case that we genuinely all care, on a cross-party basis, about the suffering of the individuals involved in these situations.

I will touch briefly on what I consider to be the best of times. In January this year, I travelled with a number of colleagues to the Nizip 2 camp. It is on the River Euphrates, a wonderfully peaceful and soulful spot on the Syrian-Turkish border that is revered in religious history. Right next to the Euphrates are 17,000 people in the Nizip 2 camp in a combination of tents and containers.

We are debating the conditions in refugee camps. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire, I have had the privilege of seeing the amazing work that the Turkish Government in particular are doing to make the Syrian refugees, who have fled primarily from Homs and Aleppo, feel very welcome. I have also seen the quality of care and of the camps there. My hon. Friend talked about the gold standard of the camps that she visited; I recommend wholeheartedly the efforts of the Turkish Government in looking after Syrian refugees in Nizip.

We travelled there to see in particular how taxpayers’ money is spent. One of the benefits this Parliament has over the previous Parliament is that the argument that international aid is money worth spending is almost overwhelmingly won. It was patently clear that British taxpayers’ money was being used constructively and properly, particularly in the systems for payment for food and the debit card system for the supermarkets there. That drives away the dependency culture and creates an independence that is vital. The House of Commons Library debate pack featured an outstanding article by Mac McClelland in The New York Times from 13 February 2014, which is helpfully entitled “How to build a perfect refugee camp”. If anyone wishes to understand how we should be doing it, that sets it out.

In Nizip we saw many things. I can only praise the container system there—it works and is way better than the usual tents and the difficulties with those. I certainly praise the remarkably open and welcoming approach of the Turkish Government. It was refreshing to see people so frank in their desire to help their fellow man and also to see the degree of support given by a multitude of agencies: DFID itself is very much involved and there is support from UNICEF and from some of the Arab nations, particularly Qatar.

It was noticeable that the quality of life and the optimism about going home, as well as the lack of a dependency culture, were so much better in Nizip because of the quality of the camp. It was not creating a dependency culture but a desire to regroup and to go home at some stage in the future. That is what I understood from all the people I met during my time there. My hon. Friends the Members for Braintree (Mr Newmark), for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew), for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly) and for South Basildon and East Thurrock (Stephen Metcalfe) also attended, and my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) did the majority of the organising. We were all struck by the fact that these were people who, fundamentally, simply wish to go home.

As for the situation going forward, I have to raise the fact that on 29 April this year I held a debate with this same Minister about aid and relief getting into Syria. It was six or seven weeks after the passing of UN Security Council resolution 2139. I will remind the Minister of what she said on that occasion. That resolution was adopted unanimously, which is rare for Security Council resolutions on refugees. It calls for an immediate end to all violations of international humanitarian law and violations and abuses of human rights, and demands that all parties fully implement the provisions of the Security Council. It asks them immediately to lift the sieges of populated areas and—this is the crucial point— provide unhindered cross-border and cross-line access for UN humanitarian agencies and their implementing partners, stressing the need to end impunity for violations.

I regret to say that not a lot has happened about implementing resolution 2139, so I would very much like the Minister, who promised on 29 April to take the matter back to the United Nations, the Secretary of State, and the individual organisations involved, to explain why aid is still not getting through—why that is not being enforced by the United Nations—given that a Security Council resolution makes it clear that it should be provided, and should get through. The overriding impression is that a resolution was passed and that nothing was done about it.

One cannot talk about the future without hope springing up, and, much like the hon. Member for Bradford East (Mr Ward), I was tremendously struck by the young women and children whom I met at the Nizip camp. They were overwhelmingly positive about the life they would lead in the future. We did a straw poll of the year 6 and 7 children we met. Most of the young ladies wanted to be doctors; most of the young men wanted to be engineers. All intended to go back to their country, rebuild it, and look after the people.

I met a young man called Suleiman, who had come from Homs and had left behind many members of his family. He was a qualified engineer, aged about 21. He was trying hard to teach people in the camps. One could talk a lot more about the quality of the education. Today’s debate is about conditions in refugee camps, and I urge DFID and the humanitarian agencies to bring more attention to bear on the quality of education, because a silo system is operating, to some extent.

The overriding impression is that individual charities, DFID and the nations that are involved provide fantastic amounts of basic aid, and then allow limited education to be provided, effectively from within the camp. I am utterly convinced that we could do more to provide education, and assistance with education, in individual camps. That might include providing books, with charities organising that in the camps. There is massive need, and there is a huge role for DFID and others to play. Without a shadow of a doubt, I want more such work to be done.

The need for refugee camps will clearly never disappear. The quality of what I saw at Nizip was amazing. I look forward to visiting Jordan with the Tearfund charity, which has invited me to go there in the near future. I praise my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire, and look forward to a response from the Minister about resolution 2139.