Yemen

Debate between Tobias Ellwood and Mike Gapes

Thursday 26th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Ellwood]

I do. People often ask what they can do as individuals, and their contributions, whether financial or otherwise, are certainly very much appreciated. It is also very important that we thank the non-governmental organisations providing the facilities to make sure that such processes can be followed. I pay tribute to Oxfam, which is conducting a conference on this subject today, at which the Minister of State, Department for International Development, my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border will be speaking.

[Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)]

The Minister mentioned the discussions within the United Nations. When the Prime Minister meets President Trump, will she emphasise to him the important role that the United Nations has in resolving regional conflicts such as the one in Yemen, and will she tell him not to undermine the UN by cutting the US contribution to it?

[Mr Ellwood]

I read an article, in The New York Times I think, suggesting that there may be such changes. It is important that people not just in America but across the world understand that the United Nations is pivotal as the international forum in which countries can come together to resolve their issues. If it did not exist, we would invent it. However, we must recognise that the troubled period it has had in the past six months or so, because of the use of the veto, means that it is perhaps now time for it to be reinvented.

Aleppo

Debate between Tobias Ellwood and Mike Gapes

Monday 28th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Ellwood]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend’s military experience. The role of the C-130 in conducting these airdrops would be exceedingly difficult. As I have said, we do not rule this out, but it would be a huge challenge. He asks what more can be done. At the heart of this is the role of Russia, which is pivotal in being able to exercise influence over Assad, to introduce a ceasefire and to allow access to humanitarian aid. Unfortunately, Russia has vetoed five United Nations Security Council resolutions, thereby preventing even the most basic humanitarian aid from getting through. The Canadians are now seeking to pursue a General Assembly vote, which, if not in an emergency session, would require half the votes. This would be tricky, however, because Russia would use its influence to prevent it from succeeding. We are collectively looking to see what could happen in this dire situation that is reminiscent of Rwanda and Srebrenica. If the UN machine is not working, we have to find ways of circumnavigating it.

[Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)]

Can the Minister confirm that the action taken in Kosovo did not have a UN Security Council resolution? Many of us called on William Hague, when he was Foreign Secretary in 2011 and 2012, to support no-fly zones similar to the ones John Major had established to protect the Kurds in Iraq. Is it not time for us all to recognise that we have allowed Russia to get into this position because we failed to act, not in 2013, but in 2011 and 2012, when Assad started murdering peaceful protesters? Is it not time to recognise that the UN Security Council is hamstrung and that we need to act, even without a Security Council resolution, to save hundreds of thousands of lives?

[Mr Ellwood]

Following Rwanda, a new international initiative establishing a duty of care was agreed, under which the international community would not stand by when a leader chose to kill his own people. That agreement was introduced so that comments about acts of genocide and other phrases that came out at the time could no longer be used to justify the hesitancy of the international community to step forward. The hon. Gentleman is suggesting that we bypass certain legal processes to move forward. In Kosovo, we had troops on the ground and we had collective international, regional and local support. In Kurdistan, a UN resolution backed the action taken there. He has raised a profound question. Should we go into a situation to do the right thing, even though we do not have international legal cover because such cover has been vetoed by a P5 member at every opportunity?

Aleppo

Debate between Tobias Ellwood and Mike Gapes

Tuesday 3rd May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Ellwood]

I do not agree with what my hon. Friend has said, but I agree with the direction of travel he wants. Russia has influence over Assad. We are speaking with the Russians. John Kerry is in Geneva along with Lavrov, al-Jubeir and others, acknowledging the urgency of getting a renegotiated cessation of hostilities so we can get humanitarian aid back in.

[Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)]

The Minister referred to the long term. Can he tell us how long is long term? He also made reference to the vote in this House in 2013. Is not the real failure the fact that our Government and the United States Government did not impose no-fly zones and humanitarian corridors when they could have done in 2011 and 2012? Now it might be very difficult to do so. That is the real failure. Non-intervention is not necessarily the best policy.

[Mr Ellwood]

I am a former soldier, and I looked at the idea of no-fly zones and humanitarian corridors. I even wrote some papers on it when I was on the Back Benches. The trouble is: who implements them, and what authority would they have to be in the country? We wanted to take Syria through the UN Security Council to the International Criminal Court, and guess who vetoed it: China and Russia. That is the difficulty we have. We have to ask ourselves how we would implement and enforce such a no-fly zone. I concur with the spirit of what the hon. Gentleman says, but these are the realities of where we actually are.

Britain and International Security

Debate between Tobias Ellwood and Mike Gapes

Thursday 2nd July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mike Gapes]

I agree entirely. That was the point of my intervention on the Secretary of State earlier.

The German Government have provided far more weaponry than we have to the KRG in Iraq, but the United States and our Government are still reluctant to directly provide weaponry. The Syrian Kurds may be getting some limited support, but because of Turkey’s concerns and Baghdad’s objections, the Kurds in Syria and in Iraq are not getting what they absolutely need. These are brave people, and they are putting themselves on the line in defence, in the case of the Iraqi Kurds, of a democratic, pluralistic society that welcomes those internally displaced from the rest of Iraq and refugees from Syria.

I, like the former Secretary of State for International Development, the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), visited a refugee camp in Kurdistan in 2013. At that point there were only 250,000 Syrian Kurdish refugees inside the KRG. The KRG has a population of about 4 million, but now 1 million people have gone there to seek refuge and survive. They need humanitarian help, but they also need military assistance, which we should be giving directly to help the Iraqi Kurds in their existential fight against Daesh.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Mr Tobias Ellwood)]

I was in Iraq on Friday. I had an opportunity to speak to the Deputy Prime Minister of Kurdistan, and we are upgrading our military contribution. We have to bear in mind that this is not a competition with NATO allies. We are working together on providing important assistance to the peshmerga, an incredible fighting force, but there are requests for Warsaw pact-calibre capabilities. We obviously provide NATO ones, and we have to be careful about what we provide them.

[Mike Gapes]

I look forward to seeing the details. No doubt, as a Select Committee member in future, I will be able to question the Minister on those matters more directly.

Libya is partly our creation. Members of this House overwhelmingly—I was one of those Members—supported military intervention in 2011 to stop the prospect of mass slaughter in Benghazi. An indirect consequence was the downfall of the Gaddafi regime. There was a democratic process and an election, but it all went wrong, and the weaponry that left Libya can now be found throughout north Africa. I saw that myself when I went to Mali.

Libya has played a major role in the destabilisation of democratic, pluralist, modern Tunisia, and the Egyptians are also facing concerns. We have a responsibility to deal with the situation in Libya and to eliminate the potential for Daesh to use it as a safe area. The former leader of the Scottish National party, the right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond), was absolutely right to say that we need to look at Libya. I am not sure whether he was advocating military intervention, but that is one interpretation of what he said. I agree that if we are going to do something in Syria, we should also be considering how we can combat Daesh in Libya.