Syria: Refugees

Lord Warner Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd April 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Warner]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend Lady Blackstone on securing this debate and I support everything that she said. I declare my interest as an adviser to the Council for European and Palestinian Relations, under whose auspices our parliamentary delegation recently went to Lebanon. The Syrian conflict is a huge humanitarian disaster with well over 4 million people, and growing, still within Syria’s borders needing humanitarian assistance, in addition to the at least 1.5 million people who have fled to neighbouring countries. The scale of the population displacement caused by this conflict must start to call into question the sustainability of some of the smaller neighbouring states involved, unless there is significant international help over a long period of time.

I want to focus briefly on Lebanon, which has received over 450,000 Syrian refugees across its lengthy border with Syria. That is more than 10% of its population. Let us imagine how we would feel if 6 million people suddenly appeared in the UK, considering the fuss that we have made about a relatively small number of eastern Europeans coming into this country. Around 10% of the people coming across the Lebanon border at the rate of about 7,000 people a day are Palestinian refugees. They are fleeing from their camps in Syria, which have been bombed by Bashar al-Assad’s military. It is very difficult to explain to them why a no-fly zone was appropriate in Libya but is not appropriate in Syria.

The plight of these refugees, especially that of children, is heartbreaking. Most of them are fleeing across the border with little more than the clothes that they are standing up in. Lebanon, which has considerable political and economic problems of its own, as has already been mentioned, is paying a huge political and economic price for keeping its borders open—and, one must say, pretty much welcoming these people into their country in many ways. It is asking its own population for the most part to host these people. They call them guests, not refugees, and there are relatively few refugee camps into which these people are moving and living.

What we saw in Beirut when we visited the city were families of 20 to 30 people living in two or three rooms in bombed buildings that are open to the elements, with little access to water or toilet facilities. They sleep in shifts because there is not enough space for them to sleep at night. They are struggling with exorbitant rents, sometimes $500 a month, which is an enormous sum for these people. It is charged by what I can only describe as racketeering landlords, and there is a lack of food, clean water and medicines. Some have untreated wounds and illnesses. Many are groups of vulnerable women and children with few, if any, accompanying working-age men. Where there are men, they are forbidden by local labour laws from working. Even in the well run volunteer organisation camp that we visited, where the accommodation and facilities are less primitive, dangerous electricity systems and inadequate sanitation present their own hazards on top. The meetings that we had with UNRWA on our visit were less than encouraging. Many of the countries that pledged money at the January Kuwait summit have simply not followed through with the cash.

I do not have time to go further, so I should like to close by posing a couple of questions for the Minister. Are the Government satisfied that all the pledges made at the Kuwait summit are being delivered in terms of hard cash for UN relief agencies to use for Syrian refugees? If not, what action will they take with their international colleagues—with a particular focus, I have to say, on the Gulf states, which do not seem to have delivered on the promises that they made? Do the Government accept that the population displacement caused by the Syrian conflict is likely to prove permanent in many individual cases? What discussions do they contemplate having with international partners on this issue, particularly with regard to Palestinian refugees, many of whom have been subject to multiple displacements? We need to engage with these serious issues in a more strategic manner than we have been doing so far.