The speech made by Khalid Mahmood, the Labour MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, in Westminster Hall on 3 November 2022.
It is always a pleasure to serve under your stewardship, Mr Davies. I thank the hon. Member for Meon Valley (Mrs Drummond) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Walsall South (Valerie Vaz) for putting the debate together. It is of huge importance, and good to hear of the fond memories that they, and certainly the right hon. Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart), have of the place where they spent part of their lives. I gained my information on this subject over almost 40-odd years. My father had a friend called Said Abdi who came from Yemen. He would tell us about the issues and what was going on there. He was a Labour councillor, and he introduced me to the Labour party, so I have a lot to thank him for.
As has been said, significant human rights abuses have taken place in Yemen. There has been huge, indiscriminate mining of the ports by the Houthis, and they have recruited young people as soldiers. That is inhumane and barbaric. As the right hon. Member for Beckenham said, there have been issues and mistakes made in some of the military attacks by the coalition, but there have also been huge sacrifices, particularly by the UAE. It lost over 150 soldiers in an ambush on its camp; we have to recognise that. That is a huge tragedy, but the biggest tragedy is for those people in Yemen whose children are starving, and who have all sorts of diseases that we would not expect people to have in this day and age. It has been a sorry state of affairs for the whole country. What is essentially a proxy war should not affect the people of Yemen, but it is being played out by people from a different arena using Yemen as a base.
My concern—it was raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Warley (John Spellar), who is not in his place—is about south Yemen. We have a group of people who can, in this difficult situation, make at least some things work. On the negotiations, I am not advocating a partitioned country; I am saying that there should be support given to people to manage their own affairs regionally. That would not only give some stability to the region, but get the peace process moving, because we could see elements of peace there. It is no secret that the interference—the supply of arms—has predominately been by Iran. The only way we will get the peace process moving is by engaging people and getting them together to understand what the conflict is about.
The United Nations is producing a report, and has been involved for a long time, but that work needs to be reinforced with more robust reporting about what is going on, and that reporting needs to consider people’s actual position. It needs to consider all of Yemen, but particularly south Yemen. We need to make progress, and we can only do that by trying to resolve at least an element of the problem, and seeing how we can move forward. Considering the time, I will stop, but it is important for the Minister to look at how we can get the peace negotiations going and engage with the south.
