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Burma

It is always a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Leeds, West (John Battle), with whom I enjoyed working for a number of years on the International Development Committee. As ever, he spoke a considerable amount of sense. Those of us who have witnessed humanitarian disasters know that the scale of the Burma disaster requires an enormous amount of professional logistic assistance and support to ensure that food, water and medical supplies get to the right people. That requires a great deal of expertise, which the international community has. The task cannot be accomplished by army personnel unloading cartons at airports. Getting sizeable amounts of water and food to large numbers of displaced people is a difficult logistical exercise. There are, as we understand it, hundreds and hundreds of children who, tragically, have been orphaned. Looking after those children and ensuring that they do not become dehydrated or die of malnutrition is incredibly important. Someone has to take responsibility for that. The concern of many of us is that, to date, the Burmese authorities do not look as though they want to take responsibility. They did not have warning systems in place. For many days after the cyclone struck, there seemed to be very little, if any, response from the Burmese authorities, and their resistance to allowing the international community to come into Burma—their refusal to grant visas and so forth—is a matter for considerable concern. It is heartening to hear from the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State that NGOs are slowly beginning to be able to get into Burma, but one has to recognise that the scale of the disaster is enormous. It will require large numbers of people and expertise in the very near future if a major humanitarian disaster is to be averted. The right hon. Member for Leeds, West made another point that I wish to amplify. In the case of a drought, such as that in Ethiopia, it is hoped that the rains will fall the next year and people will be able to return to their homes and villages, plant crops again and restart. The entire topography of the Irrawaddy delta looks as though it has been changed for ever. Relocating and rehousing thousands of families and children would be a massive humanitarian and political challenge to any Government, let alone a Government who are inherently secretive. To amplify a further point made by the right hon. Gentleman, we are seeing throughout the world from Burma to Somalia to Zimbabwe the impact of rising food prices. That gives enormous power to whoever controls the food. Allowing the army in Burma to control humanitarian food supplies substantially enhances the position of the Burmese authorities and army. The same happens anywhere. We had Foreign Office questions yesterday. From reading in the regional press about what is happening in Somalia, it is clear that the militias are seeking to control the food supplies. In terms of the broader conflict in Somalia, that puts the militias in an incredibly strong position. We should bear that in mind. We must also bear it in mind that the architecture of international institutions such as the World Food Programme will probably have to change dramatically. For a long time the World Food Programme took surplus grain from countries such as Australia and the United States, kept it in reserve and made it available, when necessary, to countries such as Malawi. Serious structural deficits in world food supplies will require the World Food Programme to become a kind of hunger agency and to be much more proactive in trying to ensure that countries become more self-sufficient in agricultural production. It is, for example, crazy that Sierra Leone, which used to be able to export rice and had some of the best rice production in west Africa, is still importing rice. There is no reason why Sierra Leone should not be growing rice again. It is not a difficult crop to start to grow, it takes only one year to get it going, and the conflict in Sierra Leone has been over for some time. The Burmese cyclone demonstrates, tragically, yet again that when natural disasters hit, they invariably hit the poorest and the weakest worst. Whether it be the tsunami in Sri Lanka, the earthquake in Kashmir or the cyclone in Burma, because people are unbelievably poor they are less able to resist natural shocks. We must not forget that at the best of times Burma is a very poor country. Before the cyclone hit, about a third of Burma's population lived below the poverty line and infant mortality was extremely high. Before the cyclone hit, the World Food Programme estimated that about a third of the children under five were malnourished. The country was extremely fragile even before the recent disaster. I am not necessarily suggesting that a cyclone is caused by climate change, but the point that I want to make to the House is that all those climate-related disasters hit the poorest and the weakest hardest, which is why, when it comes to the Climate Change Bill and the work that we are doing on climate change, there is a moral imperative to support some of the weakest people on the planet by ensuring that the Bill goes through and that we have effective legislation on climate change. I shall not add to what the Secretary of State or my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr. Mitchell), the shadow Secretary of State, said about the immediate future in Burma. Knowing both the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development, I am sure that with DFID's experience over the years in disaster intervention it is doing an exceptionally good job. Like most Members of the House, I am sorry that there seem to be some unnecessary divisions across the Chamber. I shall take this opportunity to try to tease out the Government's position on the concept of the responsibility to protect. That is an important issue. For some time now, the international community has been groping with the question of how to protect vulnerable people in countries where their own Governments cannot or will not protect them. On a number of occasions the Security Council determined that there was a threat to peace, even if the situation was internal. We saw examples of that in Somalia in 1992, Haiti in 1994, Rwanda, Zaire, Yugoslavia and East Timor, which the right hon. Member for Leeds, West had much to do with when he was a Minister at the Foreign Office. There has been a tendency, however, for the international community to make it up, so to speak, as we go along. For example, Lord Hurd of Westwell, when he was Foreign Secretary, justifying the no-fly zones over northern Iraq in 1991, said that"““we operate under international law. Not every action that a British Government or an American Government or a French Government takes has to be underwritten by a specific provision in a UN Resolution provided we comply with international law. International law recognises extreme humanitarian need . . . we are on strong legal as well as humanitarian grounds in setting up this 'No Fly Zone'.””" As has been said, in September 2003 Kofi Annan, when Secretary-General of the UN, established a high level panel on threats, challenges and change. It followed the Canadian example and endorsed that work in producing what was described as an ““emerging norm”” of responsibility to protect civilians from large scale violence. The panel's report, which the UN endorsed, makes two further points that I would like to cite. It stated:"““We endorse the emerging norm that there is a collective international responsibility to protect, exercisable by the Security Council authorising military intervention as a last resort in the event of genocide and other large-scale killing, ethnic cleansing, or serious violations of international humanitarian law, which sovereign Governments have proved powerless or unwilling to prevent.””" It also states:"““There is growing recognition that the issue is not the 'right to intervene' of any State, but the 'responsibility to protect' of every State when it comes to people suffering from avoidable catastrophe—mass murder and rape, ethnic cleansing by forcible expulsion and terror, and deliberate starvation and exposure to disease, and there is growing acceptance that while sovereign Governments have the primary responsibility to protect their own citizens from such catastrophes, when they are unable or unwilling to do so that responsibility should be taken up by the wider international community””." I am concerned that the Government's amendment makes no reference to the responsibility to protect. We all know that parliamentary clerks in the various Departments will have pondered the wording of the resolutions carefully. I was concerned to see press reports that John Sawers, who—as many people will know—was an excellent Foreign Office diplomat for many years and is now our representative at the United Nations, had said that the doctrine of responsibility to protect applies only to intervention in response to genocide and war crimes. If that is the line that the Foreign Office is now taking, it is a much more restricted line than the Government took in the past. It is certainly a much more restricted line than the previous Administration took, and it would be helpful to understand what the Government mean when they talk about the responsibility to protect. I understand if the Secretary of State's response is to say that this is not a dispute about the responsibility to protect, but a pragmatic difference of opinion about how we keep China and Russia onside in the Security Council, but I hope that he will make that clear. The amendment says that the FCO"““urges countries in the region to increase their efforts to persuade the Burmese authorities to allow in unfettered international assistance””." That seems to suggest that it is not a matter for the Security Council or the UN, but for us just to try to help regional partners put pressure on Burma. If that is the situation—let us not forget that the UK chairs the UN Security Council—we would be giving way too easily. I also wish to flag up the concern that at some stage we will all have to engage more closely with China so that we better understand how it sees its role in the international community and the international community's role in humanitarian disasters. So often—as in Darfur and now in Burma—the Security Council is semi-paralysed because France, the US and the UK take one view, which is broadly the responsibility to protect, and Russia and China take a different view. China and Russia are often preoccupied by access to natural resources and their own internal political agenda, but we have only the UN to act as the voice of the international community as a whole, and if the Security Council is paralysed, it will make the expression of that voice incredibly difficult.