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Burma

I thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and the House for giving me the opportunity to sum up this debate. Outrage has quite rightly been expressed at the climatic disaster that occurred on 2 May, Cyclone Nargis. We have heard speeches of despair and of outrage at what happened in Burma from my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr. Mitchell), the hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (Mr. Moore), the right hon. Member for Leeds, West (John Battle), and my hon. Friends the Members for Ribble Valley (Mr. Evans), for Banbury (Tony Baldry), and for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Mr. Crabb). Last, but by no means least, we heard the brief contribution from the hon. Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr. Sharma). It was very nice to have his support in the debate today. Cyclone Nargis was a climatic disaster on a huge scale, the like of which has not been seen since the tsunami of 2004. The UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, reckons that 1.5 million people have been affected in one way or another, including 1 million who have been made homeless and—depending on whom one believes—up to 100,000 who have died in the Irrawaddy delta and the Rangoon region. Anyone who has seen the pictures—described in such graphic detail by my hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley—of bodies floating in the water cannot fail to be moved and to feel desperate to help. As my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury has already made clear, the sad, poor, egregiously repressed people of Burma lived in appalling conditions long before this climatic disaster struck. One third of them already lived below the poverty line, and one third of children under five were already malnourished. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley said, 1.5 million oppressed people had already been forcibly moved from 3,000 villages in the Karen region and adjoining states. It is hard for us to understand the junta, led by the generals, stopping aid getting in to save its own people. The right hon. Member for Leeds, West made an extremely good point when he said that 10 days had already passed since the disaster, and that disease would spread exponentially if this situation continued for another 15 or 30 days. That is what will happen if we are not careful. The climatic disaster, which was unavoidable, could well be followed by a second, humanitarian disaster, which is completely avoidable. It would be a disaster of hunger, thirst and, above all, disease. Without sufficient medicine, if measles, cholera and other killer diseases start to take hold, it will be very difficult to stop them. A plea should go out from the House today to the Burmese generals, to tell them that the aid workers do not want to go into their country for political purposes, and that they want to go in purely for humanitarian purposes. When the Minister winds up the debate, will she tell us exactly what the current position is regarding the Burmese Government's granting of visas? As my hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley pointed out, it is a disgrace that Burmese officials went on holiday for three days to avoid giving visas to NGO workers. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield that it makes a welcome change to see the Chinese dealing with their own humanitarian disaster. Their Prime Minister was prepared to go to the site of the earthquake to see for himself what was happening and to reveal to the world what was happening. That is a welcome change from what would have happened in that vast country a year or two ago. I believe that the Chinese are changing. I also believe that they put pressure on the North Koreans to reach some kind of deal at the negotiating table. We know that many North Koreans were close to starvation, so it was not simply an issue of nuclear proliferation; it was a humanitarian issue as well. I believe that the Chinese Government recognised that fact. The fact that that the Chinese Government have, almost for the first time, given $5 million in aid to the appeal in Burma is also a welcome sign. In fact, that sum matches what little the Burmese Government have themselves given. I congratulate our excellent ambassador in Rangoon, and thank him for all the work that he has done. I also thank the excellent and experienced DFID team. Of course, a good range of NGOs—Save the Children, Merlin, the International Red Cross and Oxfam, among others—are already on the ground, as we have heard. I praise what they have been able to do so far. It is not a question of whether enough money and aid have been given; rather, it is a question of allowing that aid to get into the country. Much has been said—notably by the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee and my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury—about the responsibility to protect. That doctrine, of course, was designed not for humanitarian or climatic disaster on this scale, but for genocide, ethnic cleansing and crimes of humanity. We need to debate very quickly within the UN how to get a UN aid effort into the country, co-ordinating the NGOs and other unilateral and multilateral aid. It would be much better if, instead of bickering over how aid should be got into the country, the generals allowed the UN to take a lead on this subject. I hope that Thailand's Prime Minister and the European commissioner, who I believe are both in Rangoon today, succeed in persuading the generals to open their doors, as it is hard to know how else we shall get a good lead on getting aid into the country. However, as the Foreign Secretary has made out, we have to rule nothing in, and we have to rule nothing out. If the right hon. Member for Leeds, West is right, which I suspect he is, disease will become rampant in the next week, 10 days or so. Is the world going to stand by and allow that to happen? I ask the Under-Secretary to clarify what precisely the UN is going to do if that situation develops. She is trying hard to get a UN resolution, which must be the preferred route, but what are the UK Government going to do if, in a week or 10 days' time, we still do not have it? What alternatives will she consider? That is a really important question for her to answer. It is also important that we ask neighbouring countries—our friends, China, India and Association of South East Asian Nations countries, which could put considerable pressure on the regime—to do more. It is wholly unacceptable for these people to be left to die. As the hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk said in what I thought was a statesmanlike speech, only a trickle of aid is going in at the moment—two or three planes a day when what we need, as he said, is 35 planes a day. That is the scale of the aid needed. Will the Minister tell us whether she is establishing any form of forward bridgehead, which has been done in other humanitarian disasters? It seems to me possible for us to establish in some place a forward bridgehead of all the essential supplies rather than have them coming in from all over the world. They should be accessible in one place—perhaps one that is acceptable to the Burmese junta, such as Bangkok. We should consider what more we can do in that respect. We also need to consider how to put Burma back together for the longer term. Once again, the right hon. Member for Leeds, West made a very perceptive point about that. Speaking as a farmer, I understand only too well how the sediment of the Irrawaddy basin has been washed away, altering the pattern of rice and other crop growing in the area for a very long time. The ground will become saline for many months to come, so the people will simply not be able to feed themselves. In view of the fact that 40 per cent. of Burmese rice comes from the Irrawaddy delta, a big effort will be required of the World Food Programme to deal with the problem, as the hon. Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes) said. We need to think about that now. How can we get a sufficient volume of food in? Assuming that we can solve the first wave of the problem by letting in humanitarian aid, medical supplies and emergency food and water, how are we going to deal with the second ongoing wave and keep the Burmese population alive and flourishing? In conclusion, this is a humanitarian disaster that could yet get substantially worse. It is a harrowing experience to watch people die on our television screens every night. We, the UK Government and the world community must summon every effort we can muster from wherever it might come to try to stem this disaster. We have to impress on the Burmese regime that it is in their own and their people's interest to stop this crisis and allow aid in. I very much look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say about how our Government are managing to procure that situation.