Violence in Syria
The final item of business is a members’ business debate on motion S4M-02265, in the name of Jim Eadie, on violence in Syria. The debate will be concluded without any question being put.
Motion debated,
That the Parliament recognises the growing humanitarian crisis in Syria; supports the call by Ban Ki-moon, United Nations Secretary General, for the world to speak with one voice on this issue; condemns the violence in Syria and notes the need for immediate and full access to humanitarian relief for vulnerable people in the country; acknowledges the work of organisations such as Oxfam for their campaigning efforts in Lothian and across Scotland; pays tribute to the work of all non-governmental organisations that are already present in countries bordering Syria and preparing to deal with the humanitarian crisis, and considers that the impact of violence on civilians is a clear example of the need for an international arms trade treaty that would stop arms transfers.
18:08
Without any doubt, each of us in the chamber would wish that circumstances were such that the debate was unnecessary. The anguish of the people of Syria is truly heartbreaking and is impossible for any of us to imagine. While we cannot imagine what the people of Syria are experiencing, we must not ignore their plight. That is why I took the view that the motion was necessary. It allows the Parliament to unite on behalf of the people of Scotland in showing our solidarity with the people of Syria in their hour of need.
I thank MSPs across the Parliament for their support and I warmly welcome the members of the Syrian community who have joined us in the public gallery. I am also grateful to my constituent Mr Adam Terris. It was his initiative and his request that led me to lodge the motion.
In early 2011, people in Syria started to protest against the governing Ba’ath party and President Assad. The Syrian Government’s response can be described only as brutal, inhuman and without doubt illegal. According to Oxfam, to date more than 8,000 people have been killed, more than 50,000 people have been declared missing and up to 59,000 people have been incarcerated. In February 2012, the violence escalated sharply. For nearly a month, Baba Amr, a suburb of Homs, was under siege. Heavy artillery and shells were used against civilian areas.
Amnesty International has said:
“The level and gravity of the human rights violations committed in Syria amount to crimes against humanity. The abuses are part of a widespread and systematic attack against civilians.”
Those crimes against humanity have included torture. Amnesty International has documented fresh evidence of systematic torture in detention and has presented yet more evidence of crimes against humanity.
Beyond the grim statistics lie individual acts of the most appalling brutality: crucifixion-type beatings, electric shocks, and male rape with broken bottles or metal skewers. One of the most appalling aspects of the conflict has been the way in which children have been targeted by the Syrian authorities. Only today, the United Nations human rights commissioner, Navi Pillay, told the BBC that
“Syrian authorities are systematically detaining and torturing children”.
She said:
“They’ve gone for the children—for whatever purposes—in large numbers. Hundreds detained and tortured ... Children shot in the knees, held together with adults in really inhumane conditions, denied medical treatment for their injuries, either held as hostages or as sources of information.”
When she was asked whether President Assad bore responsibility for the abuses, she said that there is sufficient evidence
“that many of these acts are committed by the security forces [and] must have received the approval or the complicity at the highest level ... President Assad could simply issue an order to stop the killings and the killings would stop.”
Ms Pillay said that she believed that
“the UN Security Council had enough reliable information to warrant referring Syria to the International Criminal Court”.
The suffering does not stop with the killings and torture. Up to 200,000 Syrians have fled their homes to escape the fighting. Food and water are becoming scarce and conditions are becoming dire. Aid agencies such as Red Crescent and Oxfam can assist refugees who make it to neighbouring countries, but humanitarian assistance in Syria is badly restricted.
Today, we have heard reports that there may have been a diplomatic breakthrough. We must all hope that a peaceful and lasting settlement can be found. According to the BBC,
“a spokesman for UN and Arab League envoy Kofi Annan said he considered the Syrian acceptance of his six-point peace plan an ‘important initial step’ but that implementation was key.”
The six-point plan calls for the Assad Government to remove troops and heavy weapons from population centres and for all parties to allow a daily two-hour ceasefire for humanitarian aid to reach affected areas. It also requires that the authorities release those who have been detained in the uprising.
I am sure that we all support the call for a daily pause in the fighting to ensure the evacuation of the wounded, permit safe passage to those who wish to leave and allow for the delivery of much-needed humanitarian assistance, but the weakness in the plan is that it does not impose any deadline for President Assad to implement its terms or call for him to leave power. Amnesty International has called on the UN Security Council to condemn the violations, to issue a comprehensive arms embargo and to freeze the assets of the President and his associates. The UN Security Council must take measures to hold to account those who are responsible, including referring the situation to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.
To look to the future, the international community must work towards the better regulation of the arms trade. UN members have the perfect opportunity to do that as they negotiate an international arms trade treaty later this year. Russia supplied ammunition to the Assad regime very recently, and Iran continues to smuggle arms. In the hands of such repressive regimes, that action can only exacerbate civilian suffering. An arms trade treaty must address such arms transfers.
The devastation in Syria is going on under the watchful eyes of the international community, but it weighs heavily in our hearts. As an international community, we have proclaimed that
“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”
As United Nations, we have declared that
“Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person”
and, as an international community, we have stated that
“No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
Therefore, let us unite to condemn the fact that those fundamental human rights are being breached on such a massive scale and to endorse whole-heartedly the call by Ban Ki-moon for the world to speak with one voice to condemn the violence in Syria, ensure immediate and full access to humanitarian relief, and uphold fundamental human rights.
Given the number of members who wish to speak in the debate, speeches should be of four minutes or less.
18:14
I congratulate Jim Eadie on securing this important members’ business debate.
Presiding Officer, 18 December 2010 will go down in history as the day when democracy began to spread across north Africa and the middle east. The sacrifice of Tunisia’s Mohammed Bouazizi will never be forgotten and the price of freedom is a permanent debt that will be owed to that brave man by generations to come.
Although Tunisia has moved on in leaps and bounds since the protests began, the violence in Syria has been going on for more than a year, as Jim Eadie mentioned, and the UN estimates that more than 9,000 people have been killed by Assad’s forces. In particular, the bombardment of Homs, about which I expect we will hear a lot more during the debate, was a massacre of men, women and children in the full glare of the media spotlight. With such audacious brutality, it is clear that there cannot be a peaceful transition to democracy while Assad and his regime remain in charge. He should do the honourable thing—I have called for this many times—and step aside instead of continuing to inflict violence on his own people.
I would like to concentrate on what we can do in Scotland to play our part in helping those who are suffering as a result of the brutal regime’s actions. Although we are limited in relation to foreign affairs, we must do what we can as a Parliament and as a Government and use the powers that we have to help those innocent civilians who are caught up in such a hellish situation.
Scotland has always been quick to show her compassion and her willingness to help those who have been affected by disasters, be they man made or otherwise. Scottish hospitals recently provided individuals who were injured in the Libyan conflict with new prosthetic limbs, which demonstrates how our medical expertise can help citizens of other countries. Previously, we opened our hospitals to help those who were injured in the Israeli assault of Gaza in 2009. In the case of Syria, the refugee camps in neighbouring countries are overflowing and the Assad regime is making outside access difficult, but if there is any possibility of opening up our hospitals and using our medical expertise to help to treat the injured, I hope that that will be done.
At home, I have met a number of Syrian students who are registered at Scottish universities and heard at first hand the difficulties that they have faced since the outbreak of the violence in their home country. Some students have been deregistered from university and confronted with a somewhat unsympathetic stance by academic staff. Others are struggling because the Syrian Government has stopped their scholarship funding, throwing their educational future into uncertainty. I urge the Scottish Government to look into how best it can support those students, as it did previously with students from Libya.
What we see unfolding in Syria is the result of a geopolitical power struggle, largely between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which seem intent on carving up the middle east for their own self-interests. As the violence continues in Syria, we have to ask ourselves where the Arab League is in all of this. The peace road map that it proposed in November was treated with disdain by Assad and his regime. The Arab League has been relegated to the sidelines and ridiculed for its inability to get to the heart of the conflict. The Arab League countries, many of which have escaped almost unscathed from the recession, have accumulated gross domestic products that run into a surplus of hundreds of billions, yet their inability to act is making them look more and more impotent as the days go by.
I welcome the announcement yesterday that the Syrian Government has agreed to accept the peace plan that has been put forward. However, as was mentioned, implementation is key, so we await it with bated breath. An end to the violence and bloodshed in Syria can truly come about only through regime change. Whatever intervention is needed, it must be made through a UN mandate.
Will the member take an intervention?
I am afraid that the member is concluding, and we are tight for time.
We should be wary of sending our brave troops, once again, into an environment where they will be met with hostility. We should do that only as a last resort.
We can be silent no more. The global family has not done enough in Syria and we all carry the burden of the near 10,000 who have been massacred by a brutal dictatorship. For the sake of our own conscience, if nothing else, we must delay no further.
18:19
I, too, congratulate Jim Eadie on securing this evening’s debate, which is on an issue of great importance. I apologise to him if he feels that I am slightly plagiarising his speech. That is not my intention. The fact that more than one of us focuses on an issue perhaps shows the importance that we ascribe to it, and also the solidarity of feeling on the matter across the Parliament.
The catalogue of atrocities that is slowly emerging from Syria—often as a result of the extreme bravery of individual citizens and journalists—makes horrific reading, but coming as it does from a country and a regime that were already the subject of much international concern, we should not be surprised that the response to civil unrest has been extreme and brutal.
Amnesty International has recorded the names of 8,000 people who it thinks have been killed in protest or unrest in the past year. It has documentary evidence of torture and degradation and the names of more than 18,000 people who have been imprisoned. Although the majority of the violence can be laid at the door of the state security forces or others acting for them, there are some reports of armed gangs imprisoning and attacking Government supporters.
At the same time, Oxfam estimates that between 100,000 and 200,000 people have fled their homes, taking little with them. Many of those who remain endure a shortage of food and water, and the injured have little or no access to medicines or medical care.
Driving home last night from a constituency event, I heard the welcome news that Syria had accepted Kofi Annan’s six-point peace plan. The UN and Arab League envoy was quoted as saying that this was an important first step but that the implementation of the plan is key. Mr Annan is, of course, correct, and that caution is understandable given what Hilary Clinton has described as President Assad’s
“history of over-promising and under-delivering”.
The six-point plan does not call for Mr Assad to give up power, nor does it impose any deadline for the removal of troops or heavy weapons. Nonetheless, it is important because it is the first UN Security Council-backed strategy for ending the conflict that has the backing of Russia and China.
However, we also need Russia and other states to end the supply of weapons to Syria, both to end the conflict in Syria and to prevent the further destabilisation of the region.
Amnesty International is right to call on the UN to ensure that any UN mission that is deployed in the country must contain human rights monitors who can consider the situation on the ground and pass evidence to the independent international commission of inquiry on Syria.
Earlier, I mentioned the faint glimmer of hope I felt when I heard on the radio news last night about the adoption of the six-point plan. However, less than 12 hours later, while I was travelling to the Parliament, the BBC quoted Navi Pillay of the UN, whom Jim Eadie mentioned, as saying that the Syrian authorities are now systematically detaining and torturing children—not one or two, which would be bad enough, but hundreds. No matter how effective diplomatic efforts are, they will come too late for those children.
We must never allow ourselves to be numbed into silence by the scale and horror of the situation. We must speak out and put on record our extreme concern in this Parliament for the men, women and children of Syria, and send our respect and thanks to those aid organisations and human rights bodies that stand ready to help the people of Syria and bear witness to their suffering.
18:23
I thank Jim Eadie for securing this debate and join others in welcoming the announcement that the Syrian authorities have agreed to the six-point plan that was put forward by Kofi Annan. Like others, I sincerely hope that that will go some way towards alleviating the tremendous suffering of the people of Syria, which Jim Eadie and Patricia Ferguson described eloquently. As colleagues have said, however, it is a short-term plan and we need a long-term plan. I hope that this debate will go some way towards helping to bring that to fruition.
I want to concentrate on the humanitarian crisis that is unfolding as people flee Syria to many of the middle eastern countries, Lebanon in particular.
Jim Eadie mentioned the Lebanese and Syrian people in the public gallery tonight. I met them earlier today, and they told me in couched terms about what is happening to the Syrian refugees who are in Lebanon. It has been said that something like 100,000 people have fled Syria. Some reports put the figure at 200,000. They have gone to other middle eastern countries apart from Lebanon, including Turkey and Jordan. From speaking to the Syrian people and some people who have had direct contact with Syrian refugees in Lebanon, I know that the problem is compounded by the fact that many of those who are fleeing are unwilling to register as refugees, so they are not counted as refugees. They are unwilling to register because they are frightened of being identified and of reprisals being carried out, not just against them, but against relatives back home in Syria. That is a real problem that we must look at.
In Lebanon, where some 20,000 people have fled to, the situation has been exacerbated by the failure of the Lebanese authorities to recognise the rights of the refugees, which is leading to many of them being unable to access medical treatment or food and water. Even if they are treated in hospital, they are discharged in a day or two. They do not have basics such as shelter.
As I said, I met some members of the Syrian community earlier. I feel that, alongside their efforts and the diplomatic efforts that are being made by our Government and others, we need to do something else to secure a peaceful solution to the current situation. I remind the cabinet secretary that, in the past, Scotland has always been ready to recognise when other people have needed our help. An example of that is our response to the Palestinian situation, when many organisations, MSPs, pharmacies and health boards got together to send medical aid to Palestine; I am sorry, but I get quite emotional when I think about what we did. I am talking about out-of-date prescription medication, tablets, equipment and so on, which we collected and sent to the Palestinian people. Perhaps we could show our solidarity with the Syrian refugees in Lebanon and elsewhere by starting a similar campaign, and I ask the cabinet secretary for her advice on that.
Among the charities and voluntary organisations in Scotland is Aid4All, which has just been set up. It wants to help to establish a co-ordinated approach to the delivery of humanitarian aid. Perhaps a meeting could be arranged with the cabinet secretary to talk about what it would like to do.
We need peace in the middle east. With that in mind, I invite the cabinet secretary to send a copy of the Official Report of the debate to her counterparts in Westminster and perhaps even to President Assad, to let them know how the Parliament feels about the treatment of the Syrian people, not just in Syria but in Lebanon.
18:27
Dictators come in all shapes and sizes, but even the most tin pot of them can be extremely dangerous. I am afraid that the house of Assad numbers among that group.
I am old enough to remember Assad senior and the contribution that he made to middle east politics over a long and bloody life. He was the spine in the back of all those who opposed any progress whatever in the middle east. He was a repressive and brutal dictator. Thousands—I suspect that we will never know the number or the names of those concerned—perished under that regime.
I remember that when Assad senior died, there was an expectation of the son. He was one of those individuals in whom the west had invested a certain amount of effort and hope. Would he be like Juan Carlos, whose actions in succeeding Franco proved to be counterintuitive? Before the Arab spring, to which Humza Yousaf referred, there was an expectation that some enlightenment might come from the new president of Syria, but although he engaged with the west and ostensibly—on a superficial level—moved things forward, the minute his regime was under any threat, that brutal imperative reasserted itself in an extremely distasteful manner.
What makes regimes such as those of Assad, Idi Amin, Mugabe, Gaddafi, Saddam and Marcos so sickening is that we are all too aware, in the modern media age, not only of the death of all those around them as they seek to retain power, but of the counter images of them revelling, in a sickeningly offensive way, in the moment of their celebrity and in the excess that seems to go with such people in terms of their own personal comfort, wealth and complete indifference to the suffering that goes on around them.
When I heard that the six-point plan had been agreed, it almost made me wonder about the plan’s value. I hear what Sandra White says about a peaceful solution, but I do not think that there is such a thing. Ultimately the only solution, in the view of those of us—all members in the chamber, I am sure—who want to see Syria move forward as other countries have done to a future that, although uncertain, can be determined by the Syrian people themselves, is for the Assad regime to go. That is difficult to achieve.
The investments that we have made in individuals over the years have not produced much of a dividend. New technology has produced a far bigger dividend, because it has allowed into the homes, hearts, handsets and telephones of individuals in all those countries the information that there is wider support, and a recognition of what is happening in all the surrounding countries in which people are striving for a better future. It gives those people an expectation.
It is not for us—as it is not our blood that is being shed—to encourage anyone to follow that path, but it is for us to let those people know that, as they seek to fight for that better future, they have support from others around the world and here in this Parliament.
18:31
I thank Jim Eadie for raising the subject. The key points on which we all agree are that there is a humanitarian crisis, which appears to be worsening, and that we as a Parliament want to speak with a united voice and commend Oxfam and others for the work that they are doing.
The motion and the Oxfam briefing refer—as Jim Eadie did—to the need for an international arms trade treaty, and I fully support that call. It seems almost inevitable that if arms are poured into an area, violence will be encouraged. Situations can be so chaotic, and the opposing sides of conflicts can be so ill defined, that weapons are almost bound to be abused and are often not used as the suppliers intended—if the suppliers had good motives, which is usually not the case.
It is clear that there is a need for regime change in Syria. It would be good if that progress could be made without as much western involvement as there has been in other countries, in which it sometimes seems that more harm than good has been done.
I hope that the future regime will be better than the present one, but that is sadly not always the case. Some of us can remember when Milton Obote was ousted in Uganda and there was a lot of celebration internationally, and yet his replacement was Idi Amin, and things went from bad to worse. That has also been the experience elsewhere.
I am concerned about how minorities—Christians, other minorities and women—will be treated in Syria. I had a good briefing from a group called Open Doors, which seeks to help Christian minorities who are under pressure. It currently rates Syria 36th in the world on its list of countries that most oppress Christians.
There are around 20 million people in Syria, of whom around 1.5 million to 2 million are at least nominal Christians. The rest of the population is about 74 per cent Sunni and 12 per cent Shia. We support democracy and believe that the majority should be enfranchised in a way that it has not been in the past, but we hope that that majority will be tolerant of minorities.
Christianity is a middle eastern religion that has spread to the west and is sometimes now seen as a western religion. That has not often helped local Christians in countries such as Syria. When western powers have blundered into countries such as Iraq—often illegally—the situation can get worse, and it can be said that the situation for Christians in Iraq is now worse than it was before.
One issue that is of particular concern is the freedom for people to change their religion or to have no religion at all, just as we would want people to be able to choose any political view that they wish. All those things must be hopes for the future of Syria. The freedom to choose one’s religion or to have none is not just a western value, but a human right that is non-negotiable.
Although we want regime change in Syria—and I add my voice to the voices of others who have said that—we do not want just any regime to come in. We want a regime that looks after women, Christians and other minorities.
18:35
I join other members in congratulating Jim Eadie on bringing the debate to the chamber, and on the powerful and moving way in which he articulated the sickening situation in Syria. As Jackson Carlaw and others have observed, the importance of the debate lies in providing an opportunity for the Parliament to join the wider international community in making clear our revulsion at the atrocities that are being perpetrated in that country.
Gaining access to information is highly problematic, not least because of the crackdown by the Assad regime, but there is no disputing the fact that the situation is serious and worsening all the time. The United Nations is quoting figures of around 9,000 deaths and around 50,000 incarcerations, and there is mass widespread torture that is directed particularly at women and children, which serves only to increase our sense of revulsion. The humanitarian disaster that we are witnessing is spreading further, through the displacement that Jim Eadie and others have talked about, and much of the population is suffering from a severe lack of food and water.
This is a humanitarian disaster and what is being done constitutes crimes against humanity. Whatever the current difficulty in accessing reliable information, there can be no let up in gathering evidence and making it clear to those responsible that they will be held to account.
Although the situation has developed over the past 12 months or so, the decision by Russia and China to veto the UN Security Council resolution on 4 February tragically gave an extra impetus to the behaviour of the Assad regime. It gave the regime breathing space and there has since been an acceleration and a worsening of the violence. The use of the veto was rightly condemned by the United Kingdom and US representatives on the Security Council, but the French representative probably spoke for most when he said that it was a
“a sad day for the Council, a sad day for Syrians, and a sad day for all friends of democracy”.
Like many, I welcome Kofi Annan’s appointment. Humza Yousaf made a valid point about the Arab League’s role and the weaknesses in the organisation that have been exposed by the crisis. Kofi Annan’s new plan to end violence is not as strong as the Security Council’s resolution in February but, nevertheless, it is an advance. Like others, I greeted the news of the diplomatic breakthrough as an all too belated glimmer of hope.
Patricia Ferguson and Jackson Carlaw rightly pointed out the potential weakness of a regime that has overpromised and underdelivered. There is no getting away from the fact that regime change, as soon as possible, is the only solution.
Jim Eadie’s motion refers to the need for a comprehensive arms trade treaty. That valid point is brought home even more strongly in the current circumstances.
Despite a perhaps less than glorious past, the UK can now lay claim to having a fully robust regime of export controls, in which issues such as regional instability, internal repression and human rights are taken into consideration. It is also flexible in response to circumstances. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that, no matter how much satisfaction we can take from how that is operating, it counts for nothing if the arms trade more widely is fuelling and fanning the flames of situations such as the one that is taking place in Syria. That is why it is important that we use the debate to redouble our efforts to press for an international arms trade treaty. The UK must continue to take the lead in the creation of such a treaty. The more we can do collectively to regulate the arms trade, the better we can ensure our national security, the safety of our service members and the promotion of human rights.
I congratulate Jim Eadie again, not only on bringing the debate to the chamber but on the way in which he led it.
18:39
I join others in congratulating Jim Eadie on securing the debate.
Sadly, the state violence in Syria against its own people is not an isolated instance and certainly not only a middle eastern phenomenon. However, it is symptomatic of events that have occurred at regular intervals over the past 90 years or so following the collapse of the European empires. Whether they were French, British or Italian, such empires of the late 18th and 19th centuries left something behind that has caused many lives to be lost long after the empires ceased. Many of the countries to have emerged following that period have unfeasibly straight borders between themselves and their neighbours. That is a result of the cobbling together of client states for the economic and trading benefit of their former colonial masters.
The modern Syrian state is just such a fairly recent construct, arising out of the Arab Levant on the fall of the Ottoman empire. That followed the first world war, when Syria and Lebanon were established as French mandates. Independence was at last gained in April 1946, although that was followed by a number of military coups, the last of which, in 1961, brought to an end the short-lived union with Egypt as the United Arab Republic.
This is not just a history lesson. The fact is that the Syria that we now see grew out of that tumultuous history. It has not always been thus, and it need not always be thus.
From 1963 to the present day, however, the country has existed in a state of emergency law that has suspended most constitutional protections for its citizens, with Hafez al-Assad ruling for 30 years and his son Bashar in effect inheriting that role in 2000. Although the constitution limits the holding of the presidency to Sunni Muslims, who make up 74 per cent of Syrians, in practice it is the Assad family who hold all of the real political power. Significantly, they are of the minority Alawi sect, which makes up only 12 per cent of the population, although the state is nominally secular.
It is true that Hafez al-Assad instituted modernisation, with a guarantee of women’s equal status in society and an attempt at industrialisation and by using Syria’s oil wealth to invest in growth in education, medicine, literacy and infrastructure. However, the cost came not only in oil but in the repression of free speech, summed up in the 1982 Hama massacre, which has been described as
“the single deadliest act by any Arab government ... in the modern Middle East.”
When Bashar Assad assumed the presidency in 2000, popular feeling had become rife with festering dissent waiting to bubble up. With the Arab spring of 2011, the stage was set for an outpouring of protest and calls for the establishment of a democratic Syria. The result has been approaching civil war.
The people of Syria need the support of outside intervention, but not through bombing or invasion. Instead, Russia and China, in particular, need to come into the 21st century and to start to use their international influence in a positive way, as is suggested by their belated support for the Kofi Annan six-point plan. As the states with the ear of their client—the Assad Government—they can cause the Government guns to fall silent and allow all parties to come to the table of diplomacy.
Proxy wars should be consigned to the history books of the 20th century; the people of Syria do not deserve it. In that way, Russia and China may find that they have a loyal friend in those who form the democratic state that emerges from a negotiated peace.
18:43
I welcome this debate to draw attention to the awful situation in Syria. I welcome the contributions from members today and the powerful way in which Jim Eadie introduced the debate.
For more than a year, we have witnessed the citizens of a number of countries in north Africa demanding to be heard and demanding the right to choose the Governments that they want. After decades of not having any democratic representation, they have demanded change. Change has come in many of those countries, although we have to realise that a lot has still to be done. We urge the international community to continue its support to ensure that the promises that have been made are fulfilled and that the countries emerge as true democracies.
We live in a democracy; this Parliament is proof of that. We are free to cast our votes to choose the Government that we want, so it is hard to imagine what it would be like to live in a country without such freedoms. Therefore, we should not forget that the changes that have taken place in those other countries have come at a high price to people who have faced significant opposition, especially through physical force. We should remember the sacrifices that many people have made to gain their freedoms.
As we have heard in the debate and from the daily media reports, the situation in Syria is appalling. The facts speak for themselves—in a year of protests, more than 9,000 civilians have been killed. We cannot forget the pictures from the city of Homs after a nearly month-long bombardment by Government forces left hundreds dead, large parts of the city devastated and many civilians fleeing for their lives.
As Patricia Ferguson was, I was shocked to read the comments today by Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, on the detention of hundreds of children by the Assad regime. She said that the regime has been deliberately and systematically targeting children. We welcome the involvement of the UN Human Rights Council in highlighting the abuses that are taking place in Syria, and in calling for those who are responsible to be held to account.
The Scottish Government condemns the continuing violence by the Assad regime against the people of Syria. We support a political process for Syria, within the framework of the United Nations, to help to resolve the crisis. On 21 March, I wrote to the Foreign Secretary, William Hague, adding the Scottish Government’s support to that of the UK Government, the United Nations, the Arab League and others in the international community in trying to find a resolution to the situation in Syria.
We welcome the appointment of the well-respected diplomat Kofi Annan as the UN-Arab League special envoy and we support the work that he is undertaking to begin political dialogue. His efforts are working—the Assad regime has announced that it agrees with Kofi Annan’s six-point peace plan, which has the backing of the entire UN Security Council. However, as many members have said, we urge the regime to make good on that promise. Actions speak louder than words.
We welcome the news that several Syrian groups have agreed to recognise the Syrian National Council as the official representative of the Syrian people. International pressure on the Syrian Government has been intensifying; Syria has been suspended from the Arab League, and the EU and a range of countries have imposed a series of sanctions, including in relation to arms sales and the import of Syrian oil. Two weeks ago, I met a delegation from the Syrian community in Scotland and this afternoon I met constituents of Bruce Crawford who are involved with the Aid for All charity to discuss the situation in Syria. They are rightly worried about what is happening in Syria and the impact that it is having on the Syrian community here.
Sandra White and Humza Yousaf asked about what we can do from here in Scotland. As the UN humanitarian affairs co-ordinator Baroness Valerie Amos has reported, the situation in Syria continues to worsen. Many people have been displaced and have no shelter, food or water and many require urgent medical attention. Therefore, the Scottish Government, the Parliament and the people of Scotland more widely call for immediate humanitarian access in order to help those who have been wounded and displaced. The situation cannot continue. One of the greatest needs is for unhindered and full access to all areas of Syria for the UN and other international humanitarian agencies, including the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Red Crescent.
The UN is leading efforts to deliver a single co-ordinated response to the humanitarian situation in Syria to ensure that needs are prioritised, that aid gets to those who are in need as quickly as possible and that the international community works effectively together. It is only right that the UN co-ordinates in that way. The Scottish Government will continue to monitor the situation and consider how best we can support the Syrian people.
We welcome the launch of the regional response plan by the UN Refugee Agency and the Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs to help the estimated 96,500 Syrian refugees in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, who have been referred to. However, the main issue is not about providing humanitarian supplies such as water canisters or food; the situation in Syria is a result of the on-going action of the Syrian Government in committing violence against its own people. In that situation, the most urgent need is for a political solution to end the violence. In the interim, it is for the UN to provide what support it can to help those who are in greatest need, working with the Red Cross and Red Crescent in dangerous and difficult conditions to bring what support they can to the areas of Syria that they can access.
There is also a role for non-governmental organisations. For organisations that were active in Syria before the civil violence, that can include providing support on the ground for the people of Syria, where it is possible to do so. NGOs play a wider role in raising awareness and campaigning politically. As Jackson Carlaw pointed out, new technology has had a role in making that communication possible. The global campaigning as well as this debate and others like it across the world show solidarity with the people of Syria and can make a contribution.
I urge everyone to continue to press for an end to the violence and to look for a rapid resolution for the sake of the people of Syria. It is important that the Parliament, on behalf of the people of Scotland, stands in solidarity with the people of Syria.
Meeting closed at 18:49.