Humanitarian Crisis in the Mediterranean and Europe — House of Commons, 2015-09-09
Topic: Mixed Topics
Nicola Blackwood (Conservative, Centre-right): It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire (Martin John Docherty). Let me gently mention to him that I speak as the daughter of a South African migrant nurse who left apartheid South Africa in the early 1970s and arrived here with £5 in her pocket The International Development Secretary is right to say that this is not a distant crisis, but one for which we bear a moral responsibility, and, moreover, one that we feel is closely connected to us. That is certainly how many people feel in my constituency, where there has been a surge of support and where offers of help have come from all sides. I agree with the motion’s call for clarification on straightforward practical fronts, because the decisions that we make in this place to take more refugees, and the offers of help that are pouring in, will need to be co-ordinated and delivered by our local authorities. They do that willingly and they do it generously, but what we are asking will be challenging, and we must be as clear as possible, as soon as possible, so that we can deliver effectively what we promise We have heard a great deal today about our tackling the problem at source, and about the drivers of the crisis. In 2013, two years into the Syrian crisis, I visited Lebanon and met refugees in makeshift camps in the Beka’a valley and in the Shatila camp in Beirut. Already 80,000 had died in the conflict, and already refugee numbers were reaching a fifth of the Jordanian population and a quarter of the Lebanese population. No one can question the generosity of our humanitarian response to date. As we have heard, we are the second biggest bilateral donor, and the biggest donor in the European Union. No one in the Chamber should take this lightly, for that money saves lives: it saves the lives of people who are in the greatest peril In Lebanon, I met schoolteachers, business owners, police officers and aid workers. Some were local, while others were experts who had been shipped in from hotspots elsewhere to troubleshoot. I was trying to get a sense of how a country copes with that kind of influx, but it is not those conversations that have stayed with me. In Shatila, I met women and girls who had fled from southern Syria. They told me that they had received warnings over the internet that their community was about to be attacked. All the women and children had left on foot that night. Four days later, their entire village was razed to the ground. They did not know what had happened to their husbands and brothers, some of whom were still in Syria fighting Menal, a beautiful 19-year-old, sat there silently. She was not crying, but tears were falling down her face. Eventually I asked her what was wrong, and she said that she felt in danger all the time, and that in the camp the Lebanese police had no jurisdiction. All that she wanted to do was go back home to Syria, but she now had no home to go to: it had been bombed out of existence. Her final words to me should haunt us in this Chamber, and should remind us of the despair that drives this crisis. She said, "I was going to go to university next year. What will I do now?" Without exception, all the Syrians to whom I have spoken since the crisis want their country back. They want their lives back. The Syrians whom I met in Lebanon were anything but economic refugees looking for new lives in Europe; they wanted to stay as close to home as possible, ready to go back and rebuild their country as soon as it was safe. Since then, however, the fighting has dragged on, and the situation has deteriorated markedly As the International Development Secretary says, our refugee response models do not match the scale and the time frame of this crisis. Insecurity for women and girls in the camps means that we are seeing families face the terrible choice of having to marry off 11 and 12-year-old daughters to strangers just to keep them safe. In countries such as Jordan, which is trying to maintain a delicate political balance, refugees are not permitted for fear of destabilisation. Unsurprisingly, the majority of refugees in Jordan have chosen not to live in the camps, and many are trying to eke out a living illegally in the cities. As we have heard, access to primary education—let alone secondary education—can also be hard to come by Given that context, it is not surprising that some refugees are losing hope, putting themselves at extreme risk at the hands of people-smugglers, and coming to the European Union in search of safety and some kind of future. We must ensure that refugees who are already in the EU find sanctuary, but I, too, accept the core principle set out by the Prime Minister in his statement on Monday. As we seek to do everything we can, we must not act as recruiters for criminal gangs and people-smugglers who are preying on the most vulnerable people. However, I also accept the principle that was set out by the shadow Foreign Secretary, that our humanitarian response must be on the basis of greatest need. That is why I think the Prime Minister is right to say that we will take 20,000 refugees from UNHCR camps in the region There can be no doubt that those camps, where refugees face insecurity, lack of education and no job opportunities, are the point of greatest need. There can be no doubt they are entirely unsuitable for the most vulnerable refugees—victims of torture and chemical weapon attacks, and unaccompanied children. I also share the view of the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) that the principle of greatest need may well extend to exceptional cases from the EU. Let me end by saying that if we are to have any hope of genuinely tackling the problem at source, our efforts to combat ISIL and disrupt people-smugglers will have to be matched by the delivery of a new model of humanitarian response that is fit for a crisis on this scale and with this time frame. We need camps that are safe for women and girls, we need primary and secondary education to be available to refugees in the region so that girls like Menal do not despair, and we need innovative solutions that offer job opportunities to refugees I completely understand why countries such as Jordan are trying to preserve a delicate political balance, and do not want refugees to enter their labour market, but de-skilling an entire generation of Syrians—the very Syrians whom we want to return and rebuild their fragile post-conflict countries—is in no one’s interests. I encourage the Minister to consider the proposal by Paul Collier, a pre-eminent development economist, for job havens. That is a solution which the EU could offer now, and which would restore hope to many This country has a proud history of giving sanctuary to those who are fleeing conflict, and of protecting the persecuted. In the midst of one of the worst forced migration crises in our history, it is our job to find new and better ways to respond. We must not be the generation that fails this test of humanity.