Refugee Communities: Covid-19

Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi Excerpts

Thursday 12th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

I am extremely grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for granting this important debate on covid-19 and its effect on refugee communities, and I would like to place on record my congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali) on leading the charge. At its core, this is about the injustice of millions being forced from their homes by genocide, hunger and war, and the injustice that 85% of refugees find shelter not in the richest nations but in low and middle-income countries where healthcare systems are already under-resourced and overstretched. It is also about the injustice of the pandemic now threatening the most vulnerable displaced people far from their homes. As David Miliband, CEO of the International Rescue Committee, said:

“We know coronavirus doesn’t respect borders and that it hits the vulnerable hardest”.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says that there are 86.5 million people today who are refugees—stateless, internally displaced or seeking asylum.

Like many hon. and right hon. Members, I recently had the pleasure of visiting a refugee camp, thanks to the efforts of the Yunus Emre Institute. The camp in Gaziantep, on Turkey’s border with Syria, is home to thousands fleeing the civil war. Turkey has opened up its heart and borders, providing compassion, shelter and food to Syrian refugees. I met refugees learning new skills and heard about their efforts to find work. One thing that stayed with me is its sheer size and scale, and I think that is true for camps across the world. The Kakuma camp in Kenya has roughly the same population as the city of Oxford. The Tindouf camp in Algeria has the population of Lincoln. The Adjumani camp in Uganda has the population of Durham. Bangladesh, which my hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Bow mentioned, hosts almost 1 million Rohingya fleeing genocide, over 600,000 of whom are concentrated in the Kutupalong-Balukhali expansion site—more people than the city of Manchester.

These camps are vast, sprawling settlements filled with people traumatised by violence, malnourished, preyed upon by people-traffickers, and anxious about their future. Camps across the world, from Syria to Jordan, from Bangladesh to Calais, and in and around Yemen, have one thing in common—they are overcrowded and susceptible to infectious disease. In Cox’s Bazar, for example, there are 40 people per 1,000 square metres. In Moria in Greece, there are 204 people per 1,000 square metres—a situation made worse after terrible fires there. People are sharing toilets and showers, unable to socially distance, with no space at all for self-isolation.

When the pandemic first struck earlier this year, many of us were concerned that it would rip through refugee camps, but over the summer, although there were some tragic deaths in camps, the reports from the aid agencies were encouraging. Through isolating, enhanced sanitation and other measures, the scale of disaster that we feared was averted. Come November, that has changed, and all for the worse. The aid agencies, non-governmental agencies and people living in the camps are warning that we are on the brink of disaster. In September, The Guardian reported:

“Numbers of infections in camps across Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories have risen sharply throughout September.”

Similar reports are coming in from camps on the Greek island of Chios, from Mahama in Rwanda, from Ethiopia and Somalia, and from elsewhere. It is clear that we need an immediate programme of emergency aid—PPE, hand sanitiser, screens, soap, disinfectant, thermometers, oxygen hoods and other medical equipment, especially ventilators. We need doctors, nurses and paramedics on the ground. We need to maintain supplies of water and food to keep people healthy.

We need a UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office that responds swiftly to the challenge. Many of us believe that it was an unforced error to merge DFID and the FCO. Now is the first major opportunity for Ministers to prove us wrong by the ambition and scale of their response to this crisis.

We should be cautiously optimistic about the prospects of a vaccine announced this week. Perhaps we have indeed turned a corner, but the vaccine will not come in time for thousands corralled in refugee camps. A cold winter is coming, and hundreds of thousands of people are at risk. The Minister must tell the House today what concrete plans Her Majesty’s Government are making to reach across oceans and borders to help our sisters and brothers and to save lives.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I thank hon. Members for showing great time discipline—I am really grateful for that.