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Foreign Affairs and Defence

I welcome this opportunity to speak in support of the Loyal Address. I will speak of two islands: Cyprus and Sri Lanka, both of which merit our attention and our action. Earlier in this debate, the Foreign Secretary spoke of the cross-party agreement on the eventual accession of Turkey to the EU. Yesterday I was privileged to spend an evening in the wonderful company of His Eminence the Orthodox Archbishop of Thyateira and Great Britain. We were both guests of the congregation of St. Panteleimon church, which sits on the edge of my constituency. That congregation does not share the cross-party agreement of the House. My constituents urged me to pose the following few questions to my right hon. Friend. How can we in the EU entertain for accession a country that refuses to recognise the legitimacy of one of the EU's existing members, Cyprus? EU law required Turkey to open its ports and airports to Cyprus by the end of 2006. It failed to do so. More than that, how can we in the EU entertain for accession a country that is currently in military occupation of one of our own members, Cyprus? There was a perverse incentive for Turkey to increase its settlement in the north of the island. That resulted in the rejection of the Annan plan by the Greek Cypriot community. I urge my right hon. Friend to focus his attention on the need to resolve the partition and occupation of Cyprus. Without a fair settlement of the Cyprus issue that recognises the rights of my constituents and many like them who are refugees and whose homes still stand beyond reach, across the green line and under Turkish occupation, there can be no progress in Turkey's aspiration to EU membership. I welcome the wise and worthy remarks of my old boss in Northern Ireland, my right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Mr. Murphy). I, too, wish to say a few words about the situation in Sri Lanka. It is now almost a year since my friend Anton Balasingham died. He had led the political engagement of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, seeking a peace settlement in Sri Lanka for a quarter of a century. In paying a brief tribute to him, I wish to bring to the House's attention the appalling deterioration of the situation in Sri Lanka in the year since his death. From reading reports, I am given to understand that Tamils with a permanent home but no job and also Tamils with a job but no permanent home in Colombo have in the past year been rounded up and summarily transported out of Colombo to the north and east of the country. Such behaviour is entirely unacceptable in a Commonwealth country. I urge my right hon. Friend to be uncompromising in his representations to the Sri Lankan Government on such forced deportations and on the reports that many of those detained and transported have not reached their destinations alive. Over the past decade, I have been privileged to play a small role in the process of bringing opposing sides into dialogue. In that role, I have spoken with successive presidents and prime ministers, including the current President of Sri Lanka, Mr. Rajapakse, whom I entertained in Northern Ireland when he came to see how the process of dialogue undertaken there might apply to his country. The situation under his presidency has not borne the fruit that I certainly hoped it might after our meeting on that occasion. That is another example of where our Foreign Secretary must engage with the Commonwealth and partner countries in the region to ensure that our demands for human rights observances are met. In the few minutes left to me, I want to turn from foreign affairs on a small scale to the question of globalisation. Earlier the Foreign Secretary powerfully contrasted the policy of humanitarian intervention that he attributed to his opposite number and the policy of international scepticism that the Leader of the Opposition espoused in a recent speech. Nothing brings us closer to the reason why a policy of scepticism is inappropriate for this and every other country than the issues of globalisation and climate change. Climate change has made us all aware that we live in a world where the actions of one country integrally affect the lives of those in many others. We have experienced development in this country over the past 250 years or more, and during that period we have contributed to the CO2 emissions in the atmosphere that are now causing the problem of global warming. We shall be involved in the international negotiations in Bali in December that will seek to establish a post-Kyoto protocol and take the matter further. Those negotiations are essential for this country and for our international relationships. We must understand that the issues of the environment and human development that have long been held to be separate are, in fact, not separate at all. We must regard the environment and development as one issue. We will not be able to tackle the great causes of development and aid around the world if we do not focus on the environment and its needs, because many of the poorest communities in the world depend on their environment. Equally, we shall not be able to solve the problems of our environment unless we give due recognition to the need to take seriously the development aspirations of people who have not been able to catch up with the western speed of growth over the past 200 years and whose aspiration is to come up to that level and to that quality of life. We must therefore see the two aspects of our international engagement—human development and the environment—as being essentially one. The Foreign Secretary was absolutely right to speak of a need to see the world from a perspective of humanitarian intervention and not from one of scepticism and isolation. For those reasons, I welcome the Gracious Speech.