Hazara Community (Pakistan)

Debate between John Denham and Fiona Mactaggart

Monday 4th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Denham]

One of the most serious problems is that there has been no acceptance of responsibility by the Pakistani authorities of the kind that we would expect in a serious situation such as this. I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us what representations Her Majesty’s Government have been able to make to the Pakistani authorities on this matter.

The problem with the ill-informed, shallow or sweeping reporting that we have seen is that it tends to obscure the real causes of the violence and to obscure the responsibilities. It allows the incidents to be shrugged off as though that is “just the way things are”. Since 1990, the violence has included ride-by and drive-by shootings, personal attacks, suicide bombings, rocket attacks and car bombs, as well as the ambushing of buses and taxis and the subsequent selection of Hazara passengers for execution.

This is not the first time that my constituents have alerted me to what has happened to their relatives. Under the last Government, I took constituents who had family in the Swat valley in Pakistan to meet Lord Malloch-Brown, then a Foreign Office Minister, to alert him to the violence being carried out by the Pakistan Taliban. My constituents had come to me with stark examples of what had happened to members of their families in the recent past. I shall not give the House details of names, as family members might suffer as a result, but I have received clear documentation of constituents who had seen family members—male breadwinners—singled out for murder in three separate incidents over the past three years. The effects of that are devastating for the entire family. In a country with little in the way of a social security system, the loss of a male breadwinner has an impact on every member of the extended family.

There are wider consequences too. The Hazaras in Quetta have to live in isolation from other Pakistani citizens, not least because those other citizens fear being caught up in the violence. They suffer travel restrictions, and virtually all the Hazara students in Quetta have dropped out of university, following attacks on student transport. Hazara people have also faced difficulty in accessing civil service jobs. As has already been pointed out, however, not a single terrorist has yet been prosecuted. On the rare occasions when individuals have been arrested, they have been released. The provincial governor has been replaced, but little action seems to have been taken as yet.

The failure of the Pakistan authorities to safeguard the Hazara community is surely beyond doubt, but concerns remain about a much more sinister involvement. It is alleged that the intelligence services, the Inter-Services Intelligence, sections of which have a history of involvement with extremist forces, have links in some ways to the LEJ. I want to put it on record that I do not know whether such links are documented or what the strength of the evidence is, but the concerns about those potential connections are widely shared among those I have spoken to.

There are complicated provincial politics in Balochistan, involving not only the movements I have mentioned. The province is also tied up in the wider regional conflict, and there have been separatist movements and movements calling for autonomy. Many Hazaras believe that they have been caught up as innocent victims in the wider geo-politics.

[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend is describing the confusion and rumours that are spreading about this issue. There seems to be a real case for a proper judicial inquiry to expose what is happening and to call the Government of Pakistan to account. The chief justice of Pakistan has expressed his willingness to do that, and I believe that he is the right person to conduct such an inquiry. Will my right hon. Friend urge the Minister to make representations to the Government of Pakistan to convince them that that might be a way forward that has not yet been tried?

[Mr Denham]

My hon. Friend has put forward an interesting proposal. I am about to put my specific points to the Minister on the action that could be taken, and I invite him to respond to my hon. Friend’s proposal about the chief justice as well.

The points I wish to put to the Minister are these. First, will he tell us whether the position of the Hazaras been raised with either the President of Pakistan or members of his delegation over the past two days when he was in this country on other matters? If not, when were these issues last raised by Ministers from Her Majesty’s Government with the Pakistani authorities, and what was the response?

Secondly, there are, of course, huge issues in this region that are currently under discussion—not least today between our own Prime Minister and the Presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Does the Minister agree that while these supra-regional questions are being settled, the position of those such as the Hazaras must not be overlooked, left on one side or seen as too small, too trivial or too local to be taken into account? Will the Minister give me an assurance about the Government’s efforts to ensure that the Hazara community—in Quetta, of course, but also in Afghanistan—are not left on one side?

Thirdly, will the Minister give us an undertaking that the plight of the Hazaras in Quetta will be an explicit issue to be raised when the conditions of aid to Pakistan are discussed? Fourthly, what has the British high commissioner—and, indeed, Ministers—done to raise the profile of this persecution within Pakistan itself? Have Ministers or high commission officials visited Quetta to see the conditions faced by the Hazaras?

Fifthly, would the Minister be willing to facilitate a visit to Quetta by Members of this House? Sixthly, at UN level, will the Government ask the conflict prevention unit within the Bureau for Crisis Prevention of the UN Development Programme to assess whether the situation in Quetta is, or is tending towards, genocide, and in general to push for the engagement of the conflict prevention unit in this particular situation?

I have two further points. The Minister has in the past rightly expressed the truth that a range of minority groups have suffered and do suffer oppression and discrimination in Pakistan. In part, though, the Pakistan Government have tended to respond on the Hazara issue by questioning why a single group should be highlighted for attention. Does the Minister agree that although a number of groups face oppression, that is no good reason to lump them all together as part of a generalised concern for human rights, but makes it all the more essential to understand the history, the particularities and the nature of the oppressors in each case and to ensure appropriate action is taken in each case?

For the past two years, the position of the Hazaras has been referred to by name in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office human rights report. I welcome that, and I assume the same will happen again this year. In the Minister’s response to my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle last March, he quite rightly stressed the importance of our relationship with Pakistan and our friendship with that country. My own experience has been one of positive engagement with the high commissioner on a range of issues. The importance of this relationship makes it all the more vital that we are consistent and insistent on raising these issues, particularly for my constituents in those cases that are so intimately linked by family and history to communities in this country.