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Iraq: Refugees

My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, not just for securing this debate but for the determination with which, as I was reminded while going through the press cuttings in preparing for this debate, he has pursued this issue over considerable time. I am sorry that in a Conservative debate of this sort he is so thinly supported on the Conservative Benches. This is an important issue, which I hope that he and others will continue to push on all sides. Post-invasion Iraq is one of the major failings of British and American planning. Since the Minister may say this, let me say for him that we all recognise that the previous regime was dreadful and that it created refugees and internally displaced people. Saddam Hussein’s behaviour towards the Marsh Arabs, the Shia and other minorities was appalling. But Prime Minister Blair told us that we were going into Iraq to make things better. As we can see from the opinion polls, many people in Iraq think that we have made things worse. That is a huge failure of a misplanned invasion, whose implications were not thought through and whose consequences have not been dealt with. Previous speakers have talked about where the refugees are. As we all know, they are primarily in Syria and in Jordan, with a significant number, particularly Christians, in the Lebanon. Part of the continuing failure of American and British policy for the region is the extent to which different policies are being pursued towards different countries. The United States, above all, is pursuing an Israel/Palestine-led policy towards Syria, Jordan and the Lebanon. Even in the past few days, I have read in the American press that the Americans are thinking again of moving in against Hezbollah in the Lebanon and that the rest of the Lebanese population would turn against Hezbollah if the Americans started to bomb civilian infrastructure. That is a disastrous approach to the region. The United States is refusing to talk to Syria. One needs to talk to Syria about a number of things, including the refugees. Similarly, the United States has just sacked a very senior admiral for suggesting that it needs to deal on a rather more intelligent and open basis with Iran. Anyone who knew the smallest bit about Iraq knew that removing Saddam Hussein would directly increase the influence of Iran on Iraq. The refusal to recognise the very evident link between those two is part of what has been wrong with American policy, which all too often, sadly, our Government have followed. I read the Washington press and get cuttings from Haaretz and other media in Israel. I read about the Israeli-American determination that we need to support the Sunnis against the Shias across the region because Hezbollah and Hamas are supported by Iran: therefore, there is a Shia conspiracy and, therefore, we need to arm the Sunnis. The most disastrous development for the Middle East as a whole would be to encourage what my noble friend Lord Ashdown described the other day as a Middle East civil war between Sunni and Shia that would stretch from Afghanistan to Egypt. However, that is what some people in Washington are encouraging at the moment. In approaching policy towards Iraq—the territory where the Sunni-Shia conflict has been most acute—we should recognise our responsibilities for the whole region and the need, as Liberal Democrats have been strongly arguing, for a policy towards the whole region, into which policy towards Iraq, Iran, Syria and Israel/Palestine needs to fit. As part of the refugee problem, we now have no-go areas in the cities in Iraq—above all in Baghdad but also in Kirkuk and Basra—which means that people cannot go back to their old homes. That is part of the problem of internal displacement and of refugees. Unleashing sectarian fundamentalism has been one of the most unfortunate results of the invasion. It distresses me that there are still those within the Washington international community who think that harnessing the forces of sectarian fundamentalism for western aims is what one should be doing. Then there is the Kurdish issue. Some internally displaced people are being created—noble Lords have particularly spoken about Kirkuk—about whom, again, we have no coherent policy. There is one policy towards Turkey and another towards Iraqi Kurdistan. The two have just got very badly across each other with the recent Turkish incursion into northern Iraq. There are other minorities such as the Chaldean Christians, about whom the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Swansea, spoke powerfully. Evidence suggests that a disproportionate number of these refugees—Christians, Sunnis, Turkomans and Shias—are professional; they are the middle classes on whom we would wish the Iraqi economy and society to be rebuilt. We all understand that safe return requires law and order to be re-established, the economy to be revised and—if, sadly, people cannot go back to their own homes—new areas to be developed. The noble Lord, Lord Fowler, has usefully and doggedly pursued the issue of interpreters who worked for the British forces. The noble Lord, Lord West, said last October in Answer to a Question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Fowler: "““I agree entirely that we have a moral obligation to look after people who have worked with our forces abroad””.—[Official Report, 8/10/07; col. 2.]" We are failing to fulfil that moral obligation. I hope that the Minister, in answering the debate, will give us some useful figures on what is happening under the gateway scheme. Reading through some of the earlier Answers to Questions on the gateway scheme, I was extremely confused. If I understand correctly, there has been only one formal application so far—that was according to one Written Answer. Another Written Answer said that no applicants have yet been resettled. Yet another Written Answer said that the UNHCR has submitted 131 applications. We are being very slow and reluctant in our approach to a scheme for these people. The Foreign Secretary said last October that Her Majesty’s Government have directly employed many thousands of Iraqis over the past five years. Well, bully for her Majesty’s Government if they have accepted their responsibilities towards one of those people, but that seems to me rather slow. We read that the Danes, who have had a smaller effort in Iraq, have directly airlifted out of Iraq to Denmark some 400 people with their families. Incidentally, I know that many on the Conservative Benches have criticised other European Governments for not pulling their weight on a number of things, but the Danes and others have pulled their weight pretty well. The Danes were in Bosnia and are now in Afghanistan and Iraq. There are areas in which some of our European partners put us to shame. On the overall responsibility towards refugees, Sweden also puts us to shame. The last time that I saw the Swedish figures, Sweden had accepted some 50,000 refugees from Iraq. If one multiplies that relative to our population, we would be talking about a quarter of a million Iraqi refugees in Britain. Again, our record compares badly with those of our European partners who did not participate in the decision to overthrow the Saddam Hussein regime. I have a specific question for the Minister. How many applications both from people who worked for British forces and from Iraqi refugees has the United Kingdom so far accepted and how does that compare with other European and North American states? This is, after all, part of the legacy of the invasion. We broke it, so we have to pay for it and repair it. This is a Labour Government; it is the Government of a party that used to stand for international co-operation and for the acceptance of responsibility. However, it seems to us that we have here a denial of responsibility and a backsliding on obligations to refugees.