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Horn of Africa

It is a pleasure to serve under your benevolent eye, Mr. Gale. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for The Wrekin (Mark Pritchard) on raising this important issue. As colleagues have said, this debate in Westminster Hall gives us the opportunity to have a slightly more reflective debate than we often have on the Floor of the House. [Mr. Martin Caton in the Chair] The debate is about regional security in the horn of Africa. Like other colleagues, I sometimes hear contradictory views when I talk to people who have worked and lived in the region, be they local people, expats or experts of one kind or another, including those from the aid organisations and the United Nations and officials from the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence. One view is that we should look at this as a regional issue, and colleagues have flagged up the fact that many of the countries in the region are interconnected. One example is the trade and the flow of people between Somalia and Yemen; if we could only stop some of the flow of arms from Yemen into Somalia, we could make considerable progress. There is also the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea. There is therefore a whole raft of issues that show how the region is interconnected. At the same time, however, the experts rightly tell us that each area is unique. As the hon. Member for Islington, North (Jeremy Corbyn) said, there are unique elements in their histories and cultures and there are differences in their populations. I suspect, however, that many countries and outside organisations have approached the problem with the idea that one size fits all and that there is one single threat. Here, I probably slightly disagree, on balance, with my hon. Friend the Member for The Wrekin about the threat from al-Qaeda. There is a threat, but it is much more complex than we sometimes think, so our response should be much more complex too. Secondly, we should also be aware that we, the outsiders, have often made the situation worse by blundering in, sometimes with the best of motives. The current condition of Somalia, in particular, is undoubtedly due to the activities of many countries, ranging from the United States to European Union countries, including ourselves. It is also due, as hon. Members have pointed out, to the introduction of an Ethiopian force into the conflict. However, we should also be aware that the countries in question have played host to some political organisations that have developed into terrorist activity. Al-Qaeda and other organisations are only too well aware of that. The issue is crucial; we could have an academic debate, and in another environment and another age I used to enjoy such debates, because one could argue things to a conclusion and go away and have a decent lunch. However, in the business that we are all interested in, which is the rough trade of politics, one must argue things to a decision. As the late Marshal Foch would have asked, what is actually to be done? In particular, what can the United Kingdom do? The first thing to recognise is that we are talking about a desperate area. Other hon. Members have spoken of the level of sheer political instability—Somalia is effectively a failed state, and although Yemen is not, the experts say it is under enormous strain—the poverty and the number of refugees. The scale of that is vast. Also, for many of the people living in poverty in the area, what we regard as quasi-terrorist activities—piracy and the slave trade, which still goes on—are things that they and their ancestors have been involved in for hundreds of years. Undoubtedly there are people involved in piracy who have a terrorist bent, but we must ask whether, if Somalia had a reasonable Government and there were reasonable prospects for employment, particularly in fishing, there would be piracy on such a scale. The United Kingdom Government, to be fair to them, recognise that all the aspects of a response must be integrated; the response should not be purely military or purely a matter of aid.