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Human Rights Annual Report 2005

I am pleased to follow the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the hon. Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes), and I congratulate him on steering his 14-member Committee to a unanimous report in response to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office report, which is about 300 pages. It is therefore necessary to be selective, and I shall confine my remarks to just four areas of serious human rights concern. I start more or less where the hon. Gentleman finished: with Zimbabwe. I am glad to see, from the interventions so far, that this matter is of considerable concern to Members on both sides of the Chamber. I am sure that that is also true of Members in the House generally. To appreciate the sheer magnitude of the violation of fundamental human rights in Zimbabwe, one need go no further than the opening page of the section on Zimbabwe in the Human Rights Watch ““World Report 2006”” covering the calendar year 2005. It commences:"““The continuing erosion of human rights in Zimbabwe was highlighted in 2005 by Operation Murambatsvina, the government’s program of mass evictions and demolitions which began in May, and, which, according to the United Nations, deprived 700,000 men, women and children of their homes, their livelihoods, or both throughout the country.””" The report goes on:"““The evictions and demolitions led to widespread homelessness, lack of freedom of movement, loss of livelihood and minimal access to food, water, health care, education, and justice for hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans…The scale of destruction was unprecedented, and the victims were mainly the poor and vulnerable in Zimbabwe’s cities and towns including widows, children, elderly and chronically ill persons.””" If one wants to appreciate visually what the so-called operation constituted physically on the ground, one need look no further than the remarkable satellite pictures that were published in The Independent on 31 May showing the 13,000-strong community at Porta Farm outside Harare—13,000 is approximately the size of Tonbridge in my constituency—before and after the destruction of that community, by it being razed to the ground. Those satellite images show graphically and with visual clarity just how appalling the destruction there was. I am glad that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office—it refers to this in its report—managed to bring the issue of Zimbabwe before the Security Council in July 2005. However, simply bringing the issue before the Security Council is not good enough when 700,000 people have been driven from their homes and the economy has been so wrecked by the Government’s policies that 4 million people are estimated to be in need of food aid. We now finally have the first ever Security Council resolution to refer the issue of Darfur to the International Criminal Court, and now that we have achieved that precedent, it should surely be the clearly stated objective of the British Government and many others around the world to refer the situation in Zimbabwe to the court. The second issue that I shall raise concerns a serious human rights abuse involving more than 100,000 people. I have scoured the FCO’s annual report and the index, but, regrettably, the issue does not appear to warrant a single mention. For more than 10 years, more than 100,000 Bhutanese refugees have been in refugee camps in southern Nepal, but, sadly, they have been more or less forgotten. In March, I had the opportunity to visit the Sanischare camp in southern Nepal with, I am glad to say, my hon. Friend the Member for Cotswold (Mr. Clifton-Brown) and a parliamentary delegation. We found charming, disciplined and industrious people who had maintained their refugee camp to a commendably high standard. It was immaculately clean and, for a refugee camp, remarkably socially progressive; indeed, there was a facility for women who had been subjected to abuse, as well as special recognition of the needs of the disabled and the handicapped. The camp was a tremendous tribute to the progressiveness and spirit of the Bhutanese refugee community in Nepal. Those people have suffered quite outrageous treatment from three separate Governments. They were outrageously treated by the Bhutanese Government, who ethnically cleansed them from their part of India, or their country, more than 10 years ago. They have been, and continue to be, outrageously treated by the Indian Government, who refuse them passage across India and back into Bhutan. They have also been outrageously treated by the Nepalese Government, who refuse to allow them to work or to trade outside their camps and who, perhaps most reprehensibly, refuse to allow them to go to third countries, even when such countries are willing to take them. On returning from Nepal, I pursued the issue with the former Foreign Secretary—the current Leader of the House—and I received a reply on 6 June from the Minister for the Middle East, who concluded:"““The Deputy High Commissioner from New Delhi visited Thimpu in April and raised the refugee issue with the Bhutanese Foreign Minister and the Indian Embassy. We have urged the Bhutanese and the Nepalese Governments to resolve this issue.””" I must tell the Minister that raising the issue and urging its resolution is unlikely to achieve any more success in the next 10 years than it has in the past 10 years. The Bhutanese will remain trapped where they are unless and until there is a significant change of policy, and if I may, I should like to propose such a policy change. In many ways, the long-standing refugee problem that we faced in Europe in the 1950s was similar. We had to solve the residual problem of the world war two refugees who were still in refugee camps in Europe at the end of the 1950s. The issue was resolved by the UN taking the initiative and declaring 1959 world refugee year, with a particular focus on refugees in Europe. Third countries took in most of the refugees, and houses were rebuilt at public expense for those who remained. I speak with just a little personal knowledge of these matters because I was a United Nations Association volunteer labourer in a refugee camp in Austria. Hon. Members might be amazed and shocked to know that I was eventually promoted to work leader, although I was almost certainly the least technically proficient on any building site that there has ever been. Despite my limited involvement, however, world refugee year was a success, and the refugee problem in Europe was solved. I put it to the Minister in all seriousness that that is the route to solving the present problem. If the United Nations takes the initiative and declares that 2007 will be the year in which we solve the Bhutanese refugee problem, I am certain, given the discussions that we had in Kathmandu, that a sufficient number of third countries would be willing to take what is, when shared around, a quite small number of refugees and that the small number who remain could be looked after in Nepal. I put that to the Minister as an alternative that would bring about a solution to this neglected, but still serious refugee and human rights problem.