Bangladesh

Debate between Rehman Chishti and Martin Horwood

Thursday 16th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)]

It is a pleasure and, in this context, an honour to follow the hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali), whose remarks struck exactly the right tone. I also compliment the hon. Members for St Albans (Mrs Main) and for Rochdale (Simon Danczuk) on securing this debate and note the wide interest in it, including from the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), who is unusually silent. He has to remain quiet, being on the Treasury Benches, but I know he has been a great friend to the Bangladeshi and Bengali communities in his constituency.

Today’s debate reflects the traditionally strong cultural, political, business and diplomatic ties between Bangladesh and the UK. We are fellow sovereign states within the Commonwealth, we are allies in the battle against climate change, in the UN framework convention talks and elsewhere, and there remains the strong relationship fostered by the work of the British Government as part of their historic achievement of spending 0.7% of national wealth on overseas development assistance. The £238 million that DFID spent in Bangladesh in 2013-14 has had an enormous impact: 205,000 more births attended by skilled carers who would not have been there otherwise; 295,000 women giving birth more safely and with better care for their infants; 24 million people benefiting from better protection against floods, cyclones and the impact of climate change, thanks to early-warning systems; and millions benefiting from better water and sanitation. This is a proud record and a demonstration of this country’s commitment to the success of Bangladesh. I should also mention our assistance with transparency and anti-corruption measures, supported by the Bangladeshi Government, and championed by the previous Secretary of State for International Development, the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell). It is right to pay particular tribute to his commitment to getting value for money for the British taxpayer from that spending in Bangladesh.

It is also right to point out the contribution of the Bangladeshi community to this country. About 500,000 people of Bangladeshi origin live in the UK, employing millions and contributing massively to the British economy and, in particular of course, contributing to British digestion and cuisine. My constituency does not have a huge Bangladeshi community, but its presence in the restaurant trade is still significant. We have the Krori family’s Curry Corner, which rose to national fame through Gordon Ramsay’s television programme; we have Mohammed Rahman’s Spice Lodge, which was a national finalist in the British curry awards and the Tiffin cup, organised in this place; and we have Abdul Mannan’s Brasserie Group, which owns 20 businesses in the Gloucestershire area, employing many people and contributing massively to the local economy. Those people are active members of the local area, supporting communities not only in Cheltenham and Gloucestershire, but back home in Bangladesh—remittances are an important part of the relationship between the two countries. Mr Rahman contributes to primary education, helping students to remain in education, while another constituent, Mr Arosh Ali, has founded a charity to help the Nowder district, and only recently, the wonderful new Koloshi restaurant hosted a fundraising event for victims of the Rana Plaza disaster and for advocacy of their rights—another important aspect.

I recently attended the first Bangladesh victory day celebration in Gloucestershire, which saw 300 people gather at Cheltenham race course to remember the history of Bangladesh and to remind people, especially the young generation, of the country’s difficult birth. Millions were displaced and hundreds of thousands—perhaps as many as 3 million—lost their lives in that terrible conflict, which was the birth pang of the state of Bangladesh. Despite its difficult beginnings and years of political violence, however, there are enormous achievements to Bangladesh’s credit: it still has the institutions of democracy and the rule of law, it has, as hon. Members have said, enormous economic potential, and it has achieved a lot in development.

The UN development programme has highlighted the achievements of Bangladesh in reaching many of the millennium development goals—targets set in the 1990s that many people at the time thought were unrealistic for many countries. Bangladesh has reduced the poverty gap ratio from 17% to 6.5% since 1990; attained gender parity at primary and secondary education; reduced under-fives’ mortality; contained HIV infections through access to antiretroviral drugs; reduced the prevalence of under-weight children, which has nearly halved from a staggering 66% to 36.5%, virtually meeting the 2015 target of 33%; seen increasing enrolment in primary schools; reduced the infant mortality rate, and so on. Many challenges remain—the incidence of poverty is still enormous; hunger and poverty reduction, primary school completion and adult literacy rates are still a challenge; and the creation of a decent wage economy, particularly for women, is also an enormous challenge—but much has been achieved.

As hon. Members have rightly said, this progress will be threatened if a fundamentally peaceful and democratic environment is put at risk. There is no simple solution to this problem and no simple blame to be attributed—I have been lobbied by constituents with views on all sides of the debate between the political parties—but I am afraid that the current election situation fits into a pattern of distrust bred by worrying developments in Bangladeshi democracy. The Foreign Office’s latest human rights report emphasises that politics is still done in a violent and confrontational atmosphere, as has been true for many years, as the hon. Member for St Albans said. The situation has echoes of 2006. Human Rights Watch makes it clear that the Awami League Government have many questions to answer, not just about the controversial decision to abandon the system of caretaker Governments during elections, but about press freedom and the imprisonment of political opponents. The decision to suspend the system of caretaker Governments at election time might have been technically justified—after all, there is an independent electoral commission in Bangladesh supported by the British Government—but it clearly further undermined the confidence of civil society and political parties that the elections could be conducted freely and fairly.

[Rehman Chishti]

A country that I know well, Pakistan, which shares much history with Bangladesh and many of the sad stories of military takeovers and political parties with bitter differences, agreed on a caretaker Government last year and saw its first transition from one civilian Government to another. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that if the caretaker system, with the support of the electoral commission, has worked well in Pakistan, it can work well elsewhere, including in Bangladesh?

Afghanistan and Pakistan

Debate between Rehman Chishti and Martin Horwood

Wednesday 6th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)]

There have been some fascinating contributions to the debate, not least the eloquent and expert contribution by the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind).

I start by doing what many others have done in the Chamber many times, but is still worth doing—paying tribute to our armed forces and, in particular, to those who have lost their lives. I would like to make special mention of Colour Serjeant Kevin Fortuna, who went to school in my constituency and who lost his life not that long ago in Afghanistan. I do not think that he died in vain. The presence of Colour Serjeant Fortuna and many others helps to achieve the central aim of our presence in Afghanistan, which is to protect the security of this country, but has also increased the chances of Afghanistan being a more stable and peaceful country at some stage in the future. If it is not a perfect democracy, that was never one of the core aims of our intervention.

That is why I am slightly puzzled by some elements of the Foreign Affairs Committee’s report. It makes a couple of highly controversial claims. It states that the core justification of the UK presence, which was the threat posed to national security by al-Qaeda in particular, was removed some time ago, but somewhat contradictorily, it suggests that the security situation is still precarious. The right hon. and learned Member for Kensington made exactly the right answer to that, which was that even if that was true, and even if al-Qaeda has been massively damaged in its capacity to regain control of Afghanistan, we still have to find a way of extricating ourselves from the position we are in now in a way that maximises the Afghan Government and society’s chances of stability and peace. We cannot simply walk out.

The report also suggests that there were wider secondary aims that have now proved unachievable, one of which was the defeat of the Taliban. Again, I am not sure that that was ever one of the core aims. The idea was to increase the capacity of the Afghan national security forces to contain and manage the security situation themselves. That is still an important aim as we proceed through withdrawal.

Rather paradoxically, the report goes on to query the 2015 deadline for withdrawal, but accepts that it has concentrated minds. That is an important function of deadlines, but in some ways the debate has moved on, especially after the Prime Minister’s announcement earlier today of further troop reductions. Quite a few hon. Members have pointed out the hard-headed realism that is needed, and the fact that we are not in a leadership position in Afghanistan—a role that effectively falls to the Americans, as we have only one 10th the number of forces that they have there. That leadership will inevitably pass at some stage to the Afghan Government and the people themselves. Therefore, the troop reductions that the Prime Minister announced today are not only right but inevitable.

Political reconciliation ought to be part of the process that we encourage as the withdrawal takes place, which is something that liberals and democrats might find difficult to accept. Would we have wanted political reconciliation with our enemies in previous wars? Has political reconciliation worked everywhere else it has been tried—in Zimbabwe, for example? If we support democracy, should we not defend it at all costs and recognise that there are non-Pashtun political leaders in Afghanistan who really do not want reconciliation with the Taliban at this stage?

I think that there is a role for political reconciliation if some of the points made in the report and elsewhere are acknowledged, including the importance of recognising the regional context and finding a solution that takes into account not only Pakistan and Iran, but India and Russia, and approaches the region on a wider scale. It should also encourage a political solution that recognises the complexity and diversity of Afghan society, its highly tribal structure and perhaps the need for less control from Kabul and a more decentralised approach. In that situation, such an approach to political reconciliation might be, as the hon. Member for Croydon South (Richard Ottaway) described it, distasteful but worthwhile. It might not be successful, but in a regional context and with an attention to complexity and diversity, it might become more likely.

The UK’s role must be to support development, and preferably not just in militarily volatile areas, to support the institutions of government and society—such support ought to be, if anything, increasing—and to do whatever we can to embed universal human rights in Afghan politics and society, especially the rights of women, while accepting that ultimately that will not be our job, and that those responsibilities will have to pass to the Afghans themselves.

We have to encourage the same thing in the border areas of Pakistan. I commend to the Minister an extraordinary report that recently landed on my desk, produced by an organisation called the Community Appraisal and Motivation Programme, which I am happy to say is funded by the British high commission. That extremely revealing report explores in great detail opinions in the federally administered frontier tribal areas of Pakistan. It shows that there is, unfortunately, a high degree of hostility to British and American policy, but far from universal support for extremist or Salafist militancy. Of the respondents, 42% identified terrorist attacks as the main threat to life, 57% said suicide bombing was never justified, and there was support for military operations by the Pakistani army. The BBC World Service was rated highly as a source of information, and the same kind of attention was given to issues such as education and schools as we would expect to find among people all over the world.

[Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Martin Horwood]

I cannot, because of the time and because I am drawing my remarks to a close.

We must have a realistic approach, but in some senses a more optimistic one, that accepts that the whole debate on Afghanistan is moving into a different phase, but in which we are still determined to support the stability and peace of Afghan society.