He was held for an hour without explanation in the arrivals hall after all other travelers had passed through border control. An immigration officer then led him to a holding room where he was locked and held alone for three hours.
A delegation of three officers, including the head of the border immigration service appeared and told him that he would not be allowed to enter Djibouti. Instead, they said they would put him on the next plane out of the country. He was escorted onto the airport tarmac to wait in the spartan departures lounge for a 7.15pm flight to Dubai.
“They didn’t give me a reason. I kept saying, “Why?” and they couldn’t tell me,” Mr Lawton said. “In short, it was a very intimidating and very lonely experience in a very strange country.”
Appeals by the deputy ambassador, who came to the airport after the MP finally managed to get a Wi-Fi connection to call the embassy, were rejected without explanation.
A Chinese embassy spokesman claimed the claims about China were “purely baseless” and called them “fabricated and slanderous rhetoric that attempts to defame China and poison China-UK relations”.
A Foreign Office spokesman said: “We have provided consular support to a Briton in Djibouti.”
As well as Mr Loughton, the seven MPs sanctioned by China are Tom Tugendhat, the security secretary, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, former Tory ministers Nus Ghani and Neil O’Brien and lords David Alton and Helena Kennedy QC;
The Djibouti embassy in Paris has been contacted for comment.
I’m one of seven MPs sanctioned by China – and kicked out of Djibouti
by Tim Loughton MP
According to a whizzy app on my mobile device, I’ve visited 86 countries around the world. Last week I was due to turn 87 with a brief stopover in the tiny East African nation of Djibouti on my way back from a mission to the neighboring breakaway Republic of Somaliland. Under these circumstances, I did not manage to get past the immigration office and the tarmac of the airport from which I was abruptly expelled without explanation after more than seven hours in a rather terrifying detention.
According to Djibouti government advice and our own Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, you can purchase a visa to enter Djibouti on arrival. All you need is a one-way ticket and proof of your itinerary and accommodation. Except it seems, if you are a British MP on a hit list of Chinese sanctioned MPs, as I have been with four other Tory MPs over the past three years.
I politely explained that I would only be in the country for 24 hours, was picked up at the airport by a tour guide for a visit to the lowest point in Africa, Lake Assal, before going to one of the most expensive hotels in the country where I was meeting the British ambassador for a brief update. But once I revealed I was a British MP and my passport was checked, things got decidedly frosty. Despite showing every piece of paper I had for my 24-hour layover in Africa’s smallest country, one particularly grumpy border official was having none of it.
I was ushered to a rowdy corner seat while everyone who had spilled off my flight behind me was welcomed into the country like long-lost friends. After an hour with no progress and having made sure there was no problem and they were just following procedures, I was led to another room with a staircase leading nowhere. I should have bolted when the guard doing the drawing quickly turned around and locked the door behind him. Another hour passed without any explanation, without any prediction, as it was still Ramadan and most of all without a Wi-Fi connection.
Extremely intimidating
Three hours into my ordeal, a delegation of three immigration officers came to inform me that there was a problem but they wouldn’t tell me what. that I would not be allowed into the country and that I would be put on the next plane out four hours later. And that with access to duty free and a cafe (closed for Ramadan) I had everything I needed for the long wait ahead. Except of course I had no way of knowing if there was a seat on the next plane out or how I secured a ticket, let alone what had happened to my luggage. In short, it was a very scary and very lonely experience in a very strange country.
The only crumb of comfort came when I was finally able to connect to the airport Wi-Fi and contacted the British embassy. Beyond the call of duty, but very welcome nonetheless, the deputy ambassador duked it out at the airport stopping only to stock up on chips, cookies and drinks. However, even he could not convince the Djibouti commissioners to release me and I was duly escorted on the flight home 24 hours ahead of schedule.
It is now clear that this was no accident, but instead was a direct consequence of him being one of seven British MPs sanctioned by China three years ago now for speaking out against human rights abuses by the Chinese Communist government against of the Uighurs and Tibetans. and now increasingly those from Hong Kong.
During our visit to populous Somaliland, the threat from China was regularly voiced. While African regimes have seen their leaders’ mouths stuffed with gold from the generous Chinese, Somaliland has steadfastly resisted the curse of Croesus. Indeed, Somaliland has almost uniquely recognized China’s enemy Taiwan as a sovereign state and granted reciprocal diplomatic status.
China has now built 100 ports around Africa since 2000 as part of its trillion dollar Belt and Road Initiative. Like many African nations, Djibouti has benefited from China’s seeming kindness. They have funded a new stadium, the People’s Palace, a foreign ministry, an $8.2 million hospital and now a $1 billion project to build Africa’s first spaceport.
In 2016, they started building a Chinese naval base by paying rent on a long-term lease. 2000 Chinese troops are now permanently stationed there and have built a jetty large enough to accommodate Chinese aircraft carriers. Not far away, two Iranian military vessels are anchored, reportedly feeding intelligence to their Houthi friends in the Red Sea.
But all this comes at a price. Djibouti is one of the most heavily indebted countries in Africa. And who is their biggest creditor? You guessed it – China. China has more than $1.4 trillion in debt – the equivalent of about 45 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, according to the International Monetary Fund. Djibouti is among 22 African countries considered to be facing economic distress, according to the World Bank.
Systematically tightening freedoms
And of course, money buys influence. While in 2019 we denounced China’s genocide in Xinjiang, ambassadors from 50 countries at the United Nations, including Djibouti and several African countries, signed a letter to the president of the UN Human Rights Council to express their support for China’s position on issues related to the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. The following year Djibouti was one of 53 countries to support China’s national security law, which systematically stifles freedoms and the rule of law in Hong Kong.
In 2018 Djibouti’s government barred Emirates-owned DP World from running the main port that dominates the country and two years later awarded a 23.5 percent stake to the Chinese, a deal that is the subject of ongoing international legal action. Fueled by more than a modest sense of distortion, DP World now manages the fast-growing port of Berbera in Somaliland with the potential to become the most important port in the Gulf of Aden, transforming the country’s economy and threatening Djibouti’s sovereignty.
An impressive new motorway funded by Dubai and the UK links Berbera with the capital Hargeisa and the border with Ethiopia, with the motorway then on to Addis Ababa under construction.
Ethiopia is one of the emerging economic powerhouses in North Africa, and key to its success is a sea connection previously centered on Djibouti. But now a Memorandum of Understanding between Ethiopia and Somaliland threatens to change all that. In exchange for a long-term access agreement to Berbera, Ethiopia offered to formally recognize the state of Somaliland, which would bring the breakaway state into the international fold. It would pave the way for Western countries to recognize this oasis of stability and relative security in a troubled region since this republic of 6.2 million people declared independence from the anarchy that is Somalia in 1991.
Somalis cannot understand why the UK and other Western nations have not exactly been quick to recognize Somaliland, based on its historical boundaries as a former British protectorate. The country is an emerging investable democracy that actually likes its former colonial power and is pro-Western.
Pirates, terrorists and authoritarian left-wing regimes rule the coastline to the south and north, while in the Red Sea the pro-Iranian Houthis fire missiles at Western shipping. Certainly Western powers should be biting the hand of the Somaliland government to recognize their legitimacy, create closer relations, investment opportunities and a strategic military base.
Threat to her financial investments
So, for China, Somaliland is a threat. A threat to its economic investments in this part of Africa. a threat to its military ambitions in the Gulf of Aden and the Horn of Africa; and a threat to the influence it has bought in international assemblies through its many African “client states” because of the desire for a better settlement.
What China wants, Djibouti also wants. And when an annoying but insignificant British MP turns up in the neighborhood, who has supported the integrity of Somaliland and denies China’s real intentions in the region, then of course Djibouti wants to stick it to him and impress its biggest creditor.
This is just the latest example of the intimidation suffered by the seven British MPs who have been sanctioned over the past three years. It is difficult of course after the recent revelation that three years ago our parliamentary email accounts were hacked and the security of Westminster compromised by the malicious Chinese state.
It pales of course in comparison to the decades of violence, torture and murder suffered by millions of Tibetans, Uyghurs, Hong Kongers and others whom we defend in our Western democratic institutions.
So I will not notice the arrivals office in Djibouti as I visited my 87th country. Instead, he will head a new list of countries I have been expelled from, a list that threatens to grow unless the West wakes up and takes seriously the Chinese regime’s malevolent and encompassing tentacles at home and abroad.