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Somalia

I am very pleased to follow the right hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Alun Michael) because we, together with the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), are officers of the all-party group on Somaliland and Somalia. We have been working very closely on all these issues and very much welcome the initiative being taken by the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister in organising the London summit later this month. This is a tale of two countries. In 2004, the Select Committee on International Development, which I chaired at the time, paid a study visit to see how DFID development assistance was being used in Ethiopia. On that trip, we had a free weekend, but ambassadors do not like it when Members of Parliament have a free weekend because they are never quite sure what the MPs are going to get up to, so they like to keep Select Committee teams busy. Myles Wickstead, our excellent ambassador in Addis Ababa at the time said that he had recently been to Hargeisa for Remembrance day for the Somaliland Scouts. We should remember that during the last war many from Somaliland served in the armed forces. There is in Hargeisa a Commonwealth graves war memorial to the Hargeisa Scouts, to which he had been. He said, ““Look, no one has been to Somaliland for a very long time. Would you be interested in visiting it?”” To be totally honest, with one exception I do not think that any of us on the Select Committee had ever heard Somaliland. We knew nothing about it, so we said, ““Yes, of course, we'd be interested in going to Hargeisa,”” and we flew there. We were the first parliamentary delegation to have visited Somaliland for many years and the scene at the airport was one of crowds the like of which I have rarely seen, holding banners saying ““We love our Queen””, ““We want to come home””, and ““Support the Commonwealth””. It was amazing. From the airport to the hotel in Hargeisa, the crowds welcoming members of the Select Committee were about 10 deep.