Syria

Hilary Benn Excerpts

Monday 16th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern) on having made this application for an emergency debate and on the passion she showed in her speech—a passion she has shown over many years in pursuit of principle.

There will not be any victors in the war in Syria; there are only victims—the 400,000 or so whose lives have been lost and the many others whose lives have been changed by the injuries they have suffered. More than half the population have been forced to flee their homes, which have been destroyed, and large parts of the country have been laid waste. We all, without any equivocation, support the upholding of the convention on the prohibition of chemical weapons, and I am sure that the House would support effective action to stop their use—we shall see whether the action taken on Saturday has a deterrent effect on President Assad—but as I said in my question to the Prime Minister, I genuinely believe that if military action is to be taken in these circumstances, it must be Parliament’s decision, not the Cabinet’s. If we do not get Parliament’s support, I do not think we will win the support of the public and give our decisions the greatest force they could have.

Why does that matter? First, ever since the vote on Iraq in 2003—I had forgotten about the Falklands vote, to which the Father of the House referred—Parliament has been asked to approve the commitment of UK forces to action: in Libya in 2011, Iraq in 2014 and Syria in 2015. That gives me the opportunity gently to point out that, two and a bit years after we took that decision, following the combined effort, on the ground by the Iraqi forces and the Kurds in the main, with the support of a number of countries from the air, more than 3 million people have been liberated from the cruel rule of Daesh, which committed genocide, war crimes and many other things. Parliament rejected both motions on Syria in 2013, although in the retelling of that story the House needs to remember that either of those resolutions, had they been carried, could have resulted in military action against Assad for the use of chemical weapons. If it was right to seek Parliament’s approval then, in respect of exactly the same country and exactly the same issue—the use of chemical weapons on innocent Syrian civilians—it was right to have done so last week, for exactly the same reasons.

The second reason I argue that Parliament should have taken the decision is that military action is never without risk, particularly in this case given the number of states that have become directly involved in the Syrian conflict. I freely confess that the temperament of the current occupant of the White House, who shows little if any understanding of the responsibilities he holds as the President of the United States, made me worry last week very considerably about the consequences of what he might do. I also freely admit that those worries have since been considerably assuaged by the targeted nature of the strikes and the great care taken to ensure that there was no collateral damage, physical or diplomatic, while seeking undoubtedly to damage Syria’s chemical weapons capacity.

By definition, there are no easy choices and no certainty in the response to this conflict. There is also no shortage of advice on what we should not be doing. Earlier today, in Parliament Square, we saw the placards that appear from time to time, bearing the words “Don’t Bomb Syria”. I say from time to time because their appearance is somewhat erratic. I have never seen those placards, or reports of their appearance, outside the Russian embassy—or, indeed, the Syrian embassy while it was still open prior to 2014—although Russia and, in particular, Syria have been bombing Syrian civilians for years. Selective silence in the face of brutality is neither principled nor a policy.

Then there is the issue of humanitarian protection. If we accept the argument that no action to protect civilians can ever be undertaken or will ever have any legitimacy unless it has been authorised by the United Nations Security Council, we will have accepted that the use of a veto by any one of the five permanent members will prevent the taking of any unilateral action to protect human beings in need. I want the United Nations to work, and I want the Security Council to do its job, but the question for the House is whether the Security Council’s decisions—or the lack of them—can always be the end of the matter.

As we heard earlier from my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes), who is no longer in the Chamber, we should remember the no-fly zone in northern Iraq. The Kurds were profoundly grateful for what this country did to prevent them from being bombed from the air. We should think of the action that we took in Kosovo, or the action that we took in Sierra Leone. If I were asked whether I thought that we were doing the right thing at the time, I would say yes. Would we have been wrong—I use the word “we” in the collective sense, meaning the world—to intervene in, say, Srebrenica or Rwanda to prevent the massacres? No, we would not, and it is to our eternal shame that we, as the world, failed to do so.

To the charge of selectivity, which has some force, I simply respond that the fact that we cannot do the right thing everywhere has never struck me as a very good argument for not trying to do the right thing somewhere. The truth is that airstrikes will not end this civil war, and they may not stop the use of chemical weapons. I therefore strongly agree with my hon. Friend that we need to reflect on the situation in which we find ourselves, and ask how we got here and how we can be more effective in the future.

We have been here before. The United Nations was created out of the ashes of the second world war because the world wanted to do better. In 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted and proclaimed the universal declaration of human rights. Article 3 states:

“Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.”

Article 28 states:

“Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.”

Yet for millions of people in Syria, those rights, so nobly expressed all those years ago, have remained only words on paper—because they have lacked the means to protect themselves and their families from the attacks being made on them, because we have lacked the will to act or have acted imperfectly, or because some have chosen to look the other way and to pass by on the other side of the road. I believe that we all support the principles of the universal declaration of human rights, but we should ask ourselves how we are to uphold them in practice. They mean something—they are the ultimate expression of our responsibility for one another—yet we live in a world in which they cannot be fully realised. Let us imagine for a moment a United Kingdom in which there was peace and stability in London, genocide in Manchester, and civil war in Leeds. We would not regard that as in any way acceptable. We live in a country where it is not the case, because we have established the rule of law and democracy, but we live in a world where it is the case.

What are we discussing here? We are discussing how we fashion the means, collectively, through the United Nations, to ensure that those rights and principles are applied to all our fellow citizens.

The reason why this matters is that now, at the beginning of the 21st century, more than at any other time in human history, our relationships are defined by our interdependence. There are those who argue—I have heard them: “It is not our problem; it is not our business. We really feel sorry for them, but there’s nothing we can do about it.” The truth is that we live with the consequence of this in our minds, in the shame or concern we feel, and also in respect of refugees. My hon. Friend the Member for Wirral South made that point extremely forcefully, because that is a consequence of allowing conflict to happen that is not brought to an end. We cannot shut the door and close the curtains and wish that what is happening in other countries will go away.

It was out of this concern that the idea of the responsibility to protect was born—developed by the Canadian Government, adopted by the world summit. In 2009, following Ban Ki-moon’s report, the UN General Assembly adopted its first resolution on the subject. It was based on the simple but important idea that state sovereignty is a privilege, but it also comes with a responsibility. The responsibility to protect is concerned with preventing genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing.

Of course, that responsibility is not without controversy. Some argue that the nation state should be sovereign, and some object to military action in all circumstances. Others say its scope is too narrow or that we have been selective or inconsistent in how we have chosen to act in the world, and I freely grant that that is the case. But the answer is to make the system work more effectively, and I want that system to be the UN. It has a unique responsibility because of its authority and legitimacy, but it is not always capable of acting. That is why the question of the veto and whether that will in all circumstances stop us doing something is so important. I commend to the House the initiative the previous French Government took to try to persuade the five permanent members of the Security Council to agree that they would forgo the veto in circumstances where there were war crimes—crimes against humanity, genocide.

I am the first to recognise the difficulty of trying to persuade countries to do that in those circumstances, but it was, and is, an attempt to deal with the conundrum we are facing. One has only to read the list of the UN Security Council resolutions that have been vetoed or threatened with vetoes or the list of the resolutions on Syria that have been passed, including at least three that call for ceasefires. We do not want in this conflict for resolutions, even passed by the UN Security Council, which call for a ceasefire.

The second issue is how we build diplomatic and public pressure and capacity to act. We know that one of the most powerful forces for action is bearing witness to what has happened—those who risk their lives to go and report on what has occurred. That is why President Assad is so anxious to kill those who are reporting and the doctors who say, “Why have so many hospitals in Syria been bombed?”

We must also acknowledge that we live in a world in which fake news is becoming ever more common. We used to call it lies. It is lies, but for a purpose; it is about sapping morale, undermining understanding and preventing people from acting.

I make this argument because the truth is that we have been here before, and we will be here again unless we can build a better system for stopping conflict before we get to this point. Let us be honest: in relation to this conflict, the chances are that President Assad is going to win, although what he will do with his country—which he, more than anyone else, has been responsible for destroying—I have no idea whatever.

In conclusion, I simply say that we can debate particular action at particular times and we hope it will have a beneficial effect, but the truth of this tragedy is that we can, and we must as a world, do much better.

[Several hon. Members rose—]