Humanitarian Crisis in the Mediterranean and Europe

Debate between Stephen Pound and Peter Kyle

Wednesday 9th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Peter Kyle (Hove) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard) for his speech. I share his passion and was very moved by how he spoke with personal commitment about the plight of individuals. Many of his colleagues have spoken with great humility and humanity about the personal challenges faced by migrants. I commend the SNP for calling this debate and for allowing enough time for a detailed discussion.

I also pay tribute to the International Development Secretary. Although we disagree on many issues, including the key issue of the number of people allowed into this country, she spoke with great warmth and insight about not only the individuals she has met when visiting refugee camps, but the plight of those in crisis.

This crisis has at its core two huge challenges: war and mass migration. War is chaotic and unpredictable, and mass migration has brought these challenges to our doorstep. As we have seen, this is also a time when the best and the worst of humanity are on display.

I was an aid worker in the Balkans and eastern Europe throughout the 1990s, and in that time I saw a lot of places impacted by war and refugee crises. I worked in Albania from 1992, which was years before the refugee crisis, and got to see at first hand a country being impacted by refugees when the Kosovan war broke out. I worked in a town called Korçë in southern Albania. In the late 1990s, when people started fleeing the murderous intentions of Slobodan Miloševic, the town took in 50,000 refugees in a single night. The population of the entire town was doubled overnight and we took part in the operation that cared for those people. It was extraordinary not only that the host town, in one of the poorest countries on our continent, responded with extreme generosity, but that the international community supported it in that endeavour. It was also interesting to see how the next-door country, Macedonia, responded very differently. We have seen how different countries on our continent have responded differently over time.

I do not want to talk in detail about those experiences, other than to point out a few lessons from my time dealing with refugees and humanitarian crises up close. The first issue that I would like to raise with Ministers is the role of the UNHCR. In my experience, the UNHCR is one of the most underfunded and overstretched humanitarian organisations, certainly within the United Nations. In one crisis that I worked in, it took three weeks before the UNHCR was capable even of deploying staff to an area that had received 50,000 refugees in a single night. When the staff did arrive, they were few in number and it took time to build the resources to get an operation up and running.

The Government are placing most of the responsibility on the UNHCR to co-ordinate the refugees who will come to the United Kingdom. I would like assurances that the Government are ensuring that the UNHCR has the right resources behind it to carry out that function with enough diligence and to make it an effective operation.

[Stephen Pound (Ealing North) (Lab)]

It is always a privilege for the House to hear from a person with experience in these matters. We heard the Prime Minister say the other day that the UNHCR will be tasked with sifting refugees in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. From his personal experience, does my hon. Friend feel that the UNHCR has the resources to undertake all that additional work?

[Peter Kyle]

I thank my hon. Friend for his comments. He has predicted something that I was about to say.

[Stephen Pound]

Oh, sorry!

[Peter Kyle]

No, I welcome that because it is an important point. I was about to say that the Government are relying on the UNHCR to sift the people who will come here, and to ask for reassurance, because this is a good opportunity for the Government to reassure the House that the UNHCR has the resources to carry out the sifting in the right way. That process is incredibly important. My experiences are a little out of date so I cannot talk about how the UNHCR operates today, but based on those experiences, I think that it is cause for concern and something that the House needs to be reassured about.

The second issue I want to raise is the population that remains behind. When sifting happens in a refugee population, it is quite often the people with skills who are taken first. Sometimes, the population that will be left is not given due consideration. In a camp of 5,000 or 10,000 people—or even more, as is sometimes the case in the current situation—it is important that the population that remains after a sifting process has all the skills that any population needs, even more so considering that they are living in encampments that have very basic conditions. I hope the Minister can reassure the House that the UNHCR is being encouraged, on behalf of the British Government, to give due consideration to the population that remains.

The spotlight is on the generosity of the British people, because this crisis is unfolding on British soil. That brings aid work closer to home than it usually is. This crisis is challenging both abroad and at home. I do not see this as a zero-sum game. When we have said that not enough people are being welcomed to these shores, some people, particularly on the Government Benches, have pointed out that money is being given abroad. It should not be an either/or situation. The fact that we are being generous abroad should not stop us being generous at home.