Aleppo and Syria

Lord Soames of Fletching Excerpts

Tuesday 11th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

I apologise to the House for my lateness in attending the debate; I was chairing the Environmental Audit Committee.

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) on securing the debate and my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern) on her passionate and heartfelt speech. I echo her sentiments about how much we miss the good sense and the good will of our lost friend, the late Member for Batley and Spen.

I visited Lebanon last September as Labour’s shadow International Development Secretary and saw at first-hand the scale of the appalling humanitarian crisis spilling out from Syria and across the middle east. I stood in a sandstorm on the Beka’a valley on the road to Damascus, just 12 miles from Assad’s presidential palace. I certainly felt very close to everything that was happening. A charity worker from Islamic Relief said to me that just six miles away there were Jihadi fighters. I had been live tweeting a lot of photos from the camps and at that point I thought it best to turn off the geo-location from the Twitter account and not do any tweeting until we got back to our safe haven of Beirut. I must admit that I felt like a bit of a coward doing that.

What we know about Syria is that 400,000 people have been killed in this humanitarian catastrophe, 5 million Syrian refugees have fled their country and 8 million more are displaced within its own borders. They are fleeing the terror of Assad, ISIL and now Russia. I met a woman called Hadia who told me how her husband was killed in Homs while working as a Red Cross volunteer. The UN had offered to take her and her children to Germany, but she declined because her mother was unable to accompany them. Four of her adult children are still trapped in Homs. Cases like Hadia’s demonstrate the terrible choices refugees face: you lose your husband, you bring your mother with you and then you are forced to leave your mother behind in order to seek safety for your children.

I also met a man who had a pacemaker fitted in Damascus and who, upon his return to Lebanon, was deregistered as a refugee because he had left freely and returned. This left him and his wife destitute. He was 65 years old and unable to work. He was destitute, lying on his back in a camp.

The vulnerability of those refugees in the Beka’a valley and elsewhere in Lebanon is growing, as we heard in the speech from my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg). Their food allocation has been cut. They are on pretty much starvation rations, capped at five family members. I met 10-year-old girls labouring for seven hours a day in the fields, earning $4 a day and working one hour a day just to pay the rent for their family to pitch a little ragged tent on a disused onion factory. Those children’s childhoods have been stolen. Eight million people have been displaced internally in Syria, having suffered attacks from cluster munitions and chemical weapons, and the collective punishment of siege warfare.

At the last meeting of the all-party group on Syria that I attended with the then hon. Member for Batley and Spen, Jo Cox, we heard about 60,000 people disappearing and their families paying extortionate sums of money for news of their loved ones or just to receive their bodies for burial. We are seeing Assad carry out the extermination of his people. He has destroyed his country. He has destroyed one of the oldest civilisations in the world. He has destroyed the economy and destroyed all good will in that country. It is now a wartime economy, based on looting, corruption, arms and people smuggling. People are living under siege, their access to basic services denied. Eleven per cent of Syria’s population—2 million people—have been wounded or injured, and we have seen the terrible suffering of Syria’s children.

In August 2013, this House voted against military action in Syria. I shared the regret of many on our side of the House and of the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) at our cowardice on that occasion. We are now living with the consequences of that inaction. That vote was prompted by a sarin gas attack on civilians in eastern Damascus that killed 1,400 people, 426 of whom were children. The UN doctrine of the responsibility to protect allows military intervention to protect civilians from genocide and war crimes by their state and provides a valid legal basis for intervention. That responsibility to protect weighs upon us as heavily today as it did on that August day in 2013, when, after the vote, we went home, turned on our televisions and saw that Assad had carried out a napalm attack on a school. Using chemical weapons on sleeping children is a war crime. We know all the reasons for that vote, but we now know that we have to protect civilians from Assad and, now, from Russian intervention as well.

[Sir Nicholas Soames (Mid Sussex) (Con)]

Does the hon. Lady agree that what the Russians are doing now to Aleppo is exactly what they did to Grozny? We need to learn the lessons from that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Nicholas Soames]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that this catastrophe represents a terrible failure of the security order that protects our very civilisation, and that if these prosecutions are not made, a terrible, terrible failure will be laid at our door?

[Boris Johnson]

I certainly agree with my right hon. Friend that we are all judged in the House by our actions and our resolve. I think it was my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield who spoke of the will of the House. I am afraid that that was absent three years ago when, as several Members pointed out, we took an historic decision not to intervene. I hope that we will show a different measure of resolve this afternoon. Those who are conducting this bombing and who are, in my view, culpable of these crimes should realise that the mills of justice grind slowly, but they grind small.

The same penalties should apply to those involved in deliberate attacks on humanitarian convoys. As many Members have pointed out, on 19 September a UN aid convoy was destroyed near Aleppo and at least 20 people were killed. The vehicles were clearly marked, and the convoy had official permission from the Assad regime to deliver those desperately needed supplies. Satellite photographs that are in the public domain leave no doubt that the convoy was struck from the air. The incident took place after dark; by Russia’s own account, the war planes of Syria’s regime cannot strike targets after dark, and—also by Russia's own account—its aircraft were in the vicinity at the time. All the available evidence therefore points to Russian responsibility for the atrocity.

I trust that the UN board of inquiry will establish exactly what happened, and we in the United Kingdom Government stand ready to help. I emphasise that it is the UK which, week after week, is taking the lead—together with our allies in America and France, and all like-minded nations—in highlighting what is happening in Syria to a world in which, I fear, the wells of outrage are becoming exhausted.

I listened to the passionate speeches from the right hon. Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd) and the hon. Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern), the co-chair of the all-party friends of Syria group, who is carrying on the tradition of Jo Cox, whom we mourn. I listened to all the speeches that made the point that there is no commensurate horror among some of the anti-war protest groups, and I agree with the right hon. Member for Cynon Valley: I would certainly like to see demonstrations outside the Russian embassy. Where is the Stop the War coalition at the moment?

It is up to us in the Government to show a lead, and week after week in the UN we are indeed doing what we can to point out what the Russians are up to and to build an international understanding of what is going on in Syria. I believe that we are having some effect. As Members have pointed out, the Russians have now been driven to mount a veto in the Security Council to protect their own position five times. This is not some anti-Russian campaign; we are not doing this out of any particular hostility towards Russia. Indeed, the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, did his utmost to negotiate an agreement with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, that would at least have reduced the killing. Anyone who has studied the Lavrov-Kerry talks will know that John Kerry threw himself into that task in a Herculean way. However, on 3 October, he was driven to abandon his efforts by the attack on the aid convoy and the pounding of Aleppo, which destroyed all hopes of a ceasefire. The US Secretary of State has concluded, I think rightly, that Russia was determined to help Assad’s onslaught against the women, children and families of Aleppo regardless of any agreement.