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Iraq: Refugees

My Lords, I offer my warmest thanks to my noble friend Lord Fowler for securing the debate and to all other noble Lords who have spoken. My noble friend, in his tireless fashion, raised the issue of Iraqi refugees. In this short debate we have heard what have been to my mind extremely impressive speeches from the Benches of all three political parties, and one just has to hope that what we say this afternoon will do some good and move the thinking forward in a positive way. This is a story which is certainly five years old today, as has been said. The timing is excellent, and it is a story which is both shameful and tragic. It is called the ““hidden crisis”” because, as the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, reminded us, the public do not seem to be fully aware of the sheer scale of the misery and horror, as well as the numbers involved. That is in part because the refugees and their problems are scattered throughout the Middle East and not concentrated in one visible, media-viewable site. I shall deal with the shameful side of this issue first. It concerns the way in which Iraqi citizens who were formerly employed by the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for International Development are being treated. The matter has been raised by my noble friend Lord Fowler and the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, in considerable detail. I shall come to it myself in a moment. In turn, it is part of a bigger and deeply tragic picture of millions of Iraqis, some say that the figure is 4 million or so, of whom around half have been displaced while the remainder have fled the country. They are now living in absolutely desperate circumstances in Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon. That in turn is part of an even bigger tableau of disaster into which the Iraq scene has been allowed to develop, with the latest twist in the pattern of indecision being the announcement here in London of a change in plan for our brave troops. They have acted so valiantly, but apparently they are now to stay on in Basra airport in larger numbers after earlier announcements that they would be run right down in accordance with Operation Overwatch, which many of us thought from the start was a foolish and unreliable plan. Let us start with the shameful part, which covers the most direct and prominent issue for this country, the Government and this Administration: the position of the interpreters. The situation is both unclear and, echoing what the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, rightly reminded us of, morally reprehensible. These are people who served our forces dutifully and are now in fear of their lives. Some have fled to Damascus and Aleppo, while others have gone to Amman. Policies were announced last August to give them asylum, and the question is what has been the result of those announcements. Parliamentary Answers given recently in the other place confirm that of the supposed 400, which may be an unreliable figure, employed by the British authorities, 74 former MoD employees have been screened by the Border and Immigration Agency, as have eight former FCO and three DfID employees. The question, naturally, is how many of these people, having been screened, have been granted indefinite leave to come here for protection under the Locally Engaged Iraqi Staff Assistance Scheme? The answer to that is that up to yesterday, apparently none has been granted such leave. I am told that not one local employee has been evacuated for resettlement in the United Kingdom. How many have come here under the so-called Gateway Protection Programme, which in some complicated way involves applying through the tireless staff of the UNHCR? We learn that 131—I think I heard the figure of 121 mentioned, but the numbers are always uncertain—Iraqi citizens, including dependants, have applied. How many of those have reached safety? I have here the correspondence of desperate family men who have served us well, but who are now lost in the bureaucratic labyrinth of eligibility questions and conditions. These papers have been supplied by the excellent Dan Hardie who has done a great deal of work in this area and was mentioned by my noble friend Lord Fowler. One of them says that there is no chance of him getting a sensible answer out of the British authorities. He sent off all the papers, but has been told to wait. Another has been told that he was not employed directly by the British authorities, but he insists that he was. Another is still waiting hopelessly for a reply. A fourth says his friend and his uncle have already been killed and he waits in fear, but he is told that he is not qualified because he does not satisfy the 12-month criteria. All this is shocking, frankly; it makes me ashamed of what our Government have done or have failed to do. Even so, this pales into insignificance when set beside the larger question that has been described by your Lordships of the plight of the 4 million or so Iraqis scattered across the Middle East or displaced within Iraq itself. No one who saw the recent Channel 4 programme ““Iraq’s Lost Generation”” could fail to be moved by the sight of disfigured and hungry children and of people trapped without hope, without money and without work in Syria and Jordan—the dreadful harvest of the Iraq situation. Regrettably, as my noble friend Lord Fowler reminded us, some of them blamed not Saddam Hussein but the Americans and the British for having taken away their homes and their security. The UNHCR has said that the ability of these countries to handle these large numbers is just about exhausted, so what are we going to do now to help? There are reports that some refugees have returned, but these reports are very hard to verify. Of course, for those who have returned, there are many more still trapped. We are told also that nearly all Christians have had to leave Iraq, a point rightly raised by the noble Lord, Lord Anderson. It would be interesting to know whether that is correct. But this is just one dreadful aspect of the still wider scene of misery into which, after all the high hopes for Iraq with the removal of Saddam, the country has subsided. I do not know whether the surge strategy is going to be sustained. It is said to be working under General Petraeus, but it may or may not continue to work and it may or may not be sustainable. In Basra, which was our area, we have come upon bad days, to use the phrase of Sir Hilary Synnott, our man, for a time, in south Iraq who has written a very telling book upon the subject. His book is not the only one. Accounts and memoirs are now pouring out, on both sides of the Atlantic, about what has gone wrong and how, again in the words of Sir Hilary Synnott, "““hardly any Whitehall Departments got involved in Iraq””." That is a very serious indictment. Account after account confirms how we failed to influence the Americans, failed to learn from our own past experiences and failed to plan properly after the military invasion. I agree with other noble Lords who say that the time has come—and, indeed, is overdue—for a full inquiry into what went wrong, why we were misled, how intelligence failed and how policy failed after the invasion. We have heard this view more than once today, both in Questions and this debate, from my own party and the Liberal Democrats. The cost has been titanic in lives and injuries to our soldiers and in resources. The latest estimate for the UK is said to be about £6 billion on the military side. Large though that may seem to us, it seems almost minuscule compared with the cost to our American allies which is said to be in trillions of dollars. More than 3,000 American troops have been killed, as well as 174 British troops. We need this inquiry now and not later. We owe it to our fighting men and women, to the frightened personnel who loyally served us and feel betrayed, and to the lost millions of refugees about whom we have heard today in this short debate. For them there will be no Easter break, no happy family reunions; only sickening fears, hunger, insecurity and misery. Having done what we were led into doing as a nation by the previous Prime Minister, by his Government and by his convictions, however much they were in good faith, we must now take our full and proper share of responsibility for repairing the consequences of this almighty tragedy.