Syria: Humanitarian Situation

Rushanara Ali Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd November 2020 Westminster Hall

[Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir David. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern) on her powerful speech, and I congratulate the two speakers who followed her. I too pay tribute to our dear friend, Jo Cox, who was a powerful advocate for Syria and Syrian refugees.

I declare an interest, Sir David. I visited Lebanon in 2013 with the international children’s charity World Vision, and I also visited Jordan with the Westminster Foundation for Democracy. I visited Syrian refugees during those visits. During the trip to Lebanon, I visited a number of informal refugee settlements and saw the extent of the crisis. That was right at the beginning of the crisis, but things were unbearable, with hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing to Lebanon, ultimately making up more than a quarter of the population.

Recently we have seen the challenges facing countries such as Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan. They have hosted the largest number of Syrian refugees, compared with other countries, including our own, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral South pointed out. I saw at first hand the devastation the crisis brought to people’s lives, and especially children’s. I will never forget the hundreds of children who were living in an informal settlement of makeshift tents on the outskirts of a town in the Beqaa valley.

The Palestinians, who had fled decades ago from Palestine and moved to Syria, had been forced out of Syria during the war, into the Palestinian camp in Lebanon. I will never forget the face of an elderly woman, who had been there since the ’40s, and then the children of the successor generation who had fled from Syria and were put in the overcrowded Palestinian camp in Lebanon. The plight of Syrian refugees is horrific, and alongside that, of course, there are the many Palestinians who were living in Syria and who were then forcibly displaced once again.

Almost a decade has passed now since the conflict began, and we see no end in sight in terms of a peaceful settlement, but the coronavirus pandemic has made the situation much worse. It is vital that our Government redouble their efforts to keep the pressure on those countries such as Russia and China that are blocking peace. They have blocked efforts by the British Government and the international community to bring an end to the conflict through various UN resolutions proposed by the UK Government and other Governments back in 2011, 2012 and so on.

The pandemic has meant that refugees face even greater risk. The spread of coronavirus is impossible to control in camps, not only in the camps that Syrian refugees live in, but in many other camps, whether in Bangladesh or in other parts of the world where people have been forced out. We need a resolution on achieving peace, but we also need to provide greater assistance to those countries that are bearing the brunt when they have their own challenges. I hope the Minister can say more in his response about what we are doing to reduce the risk of the spread of the virus in camps and to provide more protection. UN appeals have historically been significantly underfunded over many years, and those countries are bearing the brunt of the crisis in terms of providing for refugees.

I turn finally to the issues around trying to get an agreement for an at least temporary peace, while negotiations continue. At the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, the UN Secretary-General called for a global ceasefire. We have to ensure that our Government take a leadership role in making that happen as we face a second wave that could spread into refugee camps.

I end by quoting the UN Secretary-General, who said at the beginning of the coronavirus crisis:

“COVID-19 is menacing the whole of humanity—and so the whole of humanity must fight back.”

Those sentiments are more important than ever now, especially as we consider the plight of Syrian refugees in different countries around the globe and the plight of other refugees around the world. We have to act together to protect refugees and to stop the conflicts going on in Syria and elsewhere, if we are to protect people’s lives.