The UN estimates that there are 70m refugees and displaced
people worldwide.
And your organisation, the IRC, has identified five crisis
zones that are particularly at risk from Covid-19.
What does that threat of coronavirus
look like for people who are already
living in dire circumstances, and this
is a sort of crisis upon a crisis, if you like?
Well, the great danger, obviously,
is that the virus is a death sentence for people
who don't have access to the health facilities that
can save their lives if they catch the disease.
We are looking at places where population density is high,
where underlying health infrastructure is very weak,
where the health of the population
is compromised by issues of malnutrition,
and where poverty represents a second half
of a double emergency.
There is a health emergency because of the weakness
of the health infrastructure.
And there is a second aspect of the emergency in the collapse
of economic life.
So in places like Iraq, northeast Nigeria, Central
African Republic, even the refugees packed
into the refugee camp in Bangladesh from Myanmar,
or in Greece where there are 20,000 people packed
into a refugee camp for only 1,500,
the conditions for the disease to spread like wildfire
are present.
And the danger that if and when it does spread,
there isn't proper access to healthcare to prevent the worst
is very real.
So we are sounding the alarm.
By a quirk of the passage of the disease...
...we still have some time for prevention in sub-Saharan
Africa, in South Asia, in parts of the Middle East outside
Iran.
But we've got to get on with it, and we've
got to bolster the primary health infrastructure so
that when the disease does come, it doesn't run rampage.
And you refer to some of the conditions there.
I think you were referring to Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh.
How do you fight this virus from inside a refugee camp?
What is the IRC doing on the ground?
I think you have to fight it by starting simple.
Prevention does mean establishing
handwashing facilities at every conceivable service point.
Secondly, it means strengthening the health infrastructure.
We're not going to be able to get thousands and thousands
of ventilators into Cox's Bazar, but we
can create the triage systems, and then the isolation space
that is so important to stopping the disease running rampant.
We can also make sure that health service
staff in primary care get the proper equipment,
because if the staff get the disease then
there's no way we can even treat the mild symptoms of it.
And what about in developed countries?
What about the role that immigrants
are playing in the health service
of many developed countries, including the US?
I think the IRC's own figures show
that 17 per cent of health system workers in the US
are immigrants, and 29 per cent of doctors
were born outside the country.
What do you think of President Trump's decision
to suspend immigration at a time when immigrants
are providing a hugely important service
and helping to fight this crisis?
Well, that's a great point.
At best, President Trump's decision
to try and fight the disease by limiting immigration
is a waste of time because the disease is obviously
already so present across the United States.
At worst, the announcements are going
to make the situation significantly worse
because the immigrants and refugees who we support
have got so much potential to contribute
to American healthcare.
Just to take the US example, we know
there are 160,000 refugees and immigrants in the US who
have foreign medical qualifications,
either as doctors or nurses, and are not
working in the health system.
We've responded to that by creating our own system.
It's a website called refugees.rescue.org,
which allows foreign-born or foreign-educated refugees
and immigrants to register and try and go to work.
500 people in the first week of this website
have already volunteered to join the fight in the United States
against Covid.
And in states like New Jersey, New York, California,
the governors are trying to create the systems that allow
for appropriate skills to be recognised,
and for those refugees and immigrants to contribute
to the work to limit the spread the impact of the disease.
And let's talk about funding for a minute.
How significant do you think the decision was for the US
to suspend funding to the World Health Organization during this
pandemic, and does it send a dangerous message that
governments can shirk their responsibilities
to multilateral organisations during this crisis?
Surely people can understand that the pause in funding -
and at the moment, it's only a 60-day pause in funding -
threatens real damage.
27 per cent of the US funding for the World Health
Organization goes to polio eradication.
17 per cent, I think, goes to nutrition and vaccines.
So this decision, if it becomes a cut
in funding in 60 days' time, threatens
to be a death sentence for some of the most vulnerable people
in the world.
My lesson from this crisis is that we need stronger
international organisations, including the World Health
Organization.
We need stronger and better funded international health
and other organisations.
This disease of the connected world
has not been created by the strength
of international institutions.
It's been exacerbated by the weakness of them.
And of course, organisations like the World Health
Organization and other organisations
at the international level make mistakes.
But the rocket boosters have been put on this crisis
by domestic decisions that have involved denialism
and head-in-the-sandism of a very dangerous kind.
And so I hope that the international reaction to US
withdrawal or threatened withdrawal from the World
Health Organization is to urge the US Congress and the US
administration to see sense, and actually to recognise that
the lesson of this crisis is that we need a stronger
and better funded WHO.
And if indeed the US does withdraw,
then other nations need to fill the vacuum.
Now, if I've got the space, I'd like
to just make one other point, which
is, of course, geopolitically it's
the worst possible signal for the democratic world led
by the US, the liberal democratic world,
to pull out of international institutions.
Because it creates a vacuum that will be gratefully filled
by those who come with a different political tradition.
And of course, out of this crisis
there's going to be a big argument about which countries
did better in which countries did worse.
But there'll also be an argument about which systems did better
and which systems did worse.
And you can already see from some of the Chinese messaging
that they want to argue that one-party states, notably
their own, have dealt with this crisis better.
We know, if you look at the facts,
that there are democratic countries that have done well
and democratic countries have done badly.
There are autocratic countries that seem to have done well,
and autocratic countries that seem to have done badly.
And one of the danger signals from the US withdrawal from
organisations like the WHO is that it cedes the ground
on this vital argument about which are the systems that are
able to deal better.
And it would be a crushing blow if the lesson of this crisis
was that democracy was somehow a hindrance to public health,
when no such thing shall be the truth.
On that point, I mean, are you worried about that happening?
I think there are a number of contests
that come out of this crisis.
One is about nationalism versus internationalism.
One is about equality and the holes in the global safety net.
A third contest is about privacy,
and what government knows, and what Google knows, frankly,
about you.
But a fourth contest that I've written about
is about the contest over liberal democracy
and its efficacy versus authoritarianism
and its efficacy.
We know that 2019 was the first year in 100 years when
the global income that came from autocracies
was greater than the global income that
came from democracies.
That's the first time in 100 years that that has happened.
And we know of the tendency that Fareed Zakaria first
wrote about 20 years ago.
Illiberal democracy.
We've seen that in countries like Hungary,
with the crisis being exploited to entrench one party, or even
one person or rule.
And I think it's very, very important
that the facts are out.
That we should recognise that democracies like South Korea
and Germany have dealt with this crisis well.
They've used the openness of liberal democracy
to good effect to fight the disease.
And my hope is that the democracies of the world
recognise the threat that exists,
recognise the importance of the argument about which systems
have done well, and then band together in a way that allows
them not to exclude the autocracies.
We need to recognise that a global connected world needs
all nations within it - within organisations like the WTO.
But I think the democracies of the world do need to recognise
the threat that exists that out of this crisis there will be
a determined push against the liberal democratic freedoms
that heretofore have been taken for granted.
There seems to be a lack of global leadership
in responding to this crisis.
Do you, first of all agree, with that statement?
And what does that mean, then, for solving the most
protracted conflicts, like the Syrian war, that
create refugees and displace people in the first place?
Well, I think there's undoubtedly
been a crisis of global co-operation.
I mean, the G7, the group of seven
leading industrialised democratic countries,
couldn't even agree a statement about the crisis.
The G20 has been slumbering.
The Saudi leadership of the G20, the rotating leadership,
has had one virtual meeting, I think.
So one would have to say that there
has been a striking lack of global co-ordination.
Certainly the comparison to the financial crisis...
I was in government, although not in an economic ministry.
I was in the foreign ministry at the time of the 2008-09
financial crisis.
And I saw the way my colleagues, including at the head
of government, Gordon Brown, President Obama,
came together to create the G20, and to recognise
the international need for a response alongside domestic
measures.
There's been a striking vacuum at the international level.
Now, I do want to highlight, though, one potentially
positive ray of light.
The secretary-general of the UN made a very important statement
four or five weeks ago about the need for a global ceasefire
to take on the Covid crisis.
And for all sorts of reasons, there
is some momentum behind that call.
In Colombia, in Yemen, even in Syria,
there's been some coming together
to try to exploit or use the Covid crisis and the fact
that it doesn't discriminate in who it infects
to try to ensure that there is some space
for humanitarian agencies, like the International Rescue
Committee, to work in Yemen, to work in parts of Syria.
Previously, we know that in the northwest of Syria,
85 hospitals were bombed.
There is a ceasefire at the moment,
albeit one that started just before the full depth
of the Covid crisis came clear.
And I would like to see much greater piling in behind that
call for a global ceasefire, as well as a determined effort
to recognise that the central lesson of this crisis,
this crisis of the connected world,
is that we're only as strong as the weakest link in the chain.
And the weakest link is the growing number
of fragile and conflict-affected states.
States where the crisis of diplomacy
has been very strongly felt in the last five or 10 years.
And states where the weakness of international co-ordination
threatens to run riot with the health
and welfare of local populations under this double emergency.
And so I think the argument is on not just about how
to ease the lockdown in those countries that
have been hardest hit so far, but also to learn
the right lessons from the crisis.
And in terms of helping people in those the weakest, the most
vulnerable in society, and in those crisis zones you just
described, do you think that government
is relying on NGOs, like the IRC, to fill a gap, as it were?
I mean, are they doing enough right now during this crisis?
Well, I certainly think it's the case
that, for understandable reasons,
governments have been focused on their own citizens.
But there's a danger of that understandable domestic focus
turning into myopia about the global nature of the disease.
It's been very welcome to hear Chancellor Merkel and President
Steinmeier of Germany, for example,
recognising that Germany can only return to full normality
when other countries do the same.
And that's been an important message,
but it's been an unusual message and an exceptional message.
In most countries, there's a domestic focus to the exclusion
of the international dimension.
Now, when it comes to the relationship
between the multilateral agencies and the NGOs,
I'm afraid that we don't yet have
the kind of full partnership that's necessary.
The UN appeal, for example, the $2bn appeal that
was, in various ways, way too small,
but leave that to one side for a moment.
It reserved only $100m for the frontline staff of NGOs
even though it's the NGOs who are the vast majority
of frontline workers.
So there's a new global humanitarian response
plan due out on the 7th of May.
I'm very hopeful, or I'm very determined,
to try and make the argument that that response plan needs
to fashion a much more equal partnership
between the intergovernmental system and the NGO system.
Because the truth is that, in the end, the NGOs do
have the manpower.
We have the people on the ground.
We have the staffing.
But we don't have the resources.
It's the intergovernmental system
that has the power and the resources.
And we need a much more balanced partnership
between the entrepreneurialism and can-do and risk appetite
of the NGOs, and the power and resource
of the intergovernmental system.
And finally, do you think this crisis will
make people see migrants and refugees differently?
So take, for example, the UK.
I'm sure you were acutely aware, in the years leading up
to the Brexit vote, of some hostility that
existed towards migrants, towards refugees.
And of course, in the EU, the EU's
been divided in recent years about how to handle
the migrant crisis there.
Is this a crisis that you think could change attitudes?
And is this the type of crisis that you think unites people,
or divides them?
Well, I'm an optimistic person, so I always
hope that people learn the lessons of rationality
and facts and reality around them.
There is a dystopian version of the future in which xenophobia,
nationalism - zero-sum nationalism -
gain the upper hand.
And devil take the hindmost, beggar my neighbour politics
profits from the crisis.
But there's also not a utopian alternative to dystopia,
but I think a commonsense - a humane - outcome to the crisis.
You see that humanity in the cheering for health and care
workers - sometimes a slightly guilty
cheering that it hasn't been done enough before -
that you see in Europe and the US 7
o'clock every night in New York.
And I hope that that spirit really comes through.
I've been very struck, for example, that in the UK
the call for 250,000 people to volunteer for the National
Health Service was met with 750,000 people volunteering.
It's not a draft.
It's not a conscription that's going on.
But there are the makings there of the social solidarity
that, in the end, is vital for countries to make progress.
The social trust that is vital to ease the lockdown.
And so I think there is a version of the future that does
learn the lessons, that does recognise that it's holes
in the domestic and international safety net that
have given the turbo charge to this crisis,
and that need to be addressed.
And so, because I'm an optimistic person,
there's too much dirge around, there's too many good reasons
to be fearful.
But I think that there is a version of the future where
this is a reality check.
It's a chilling and morbid, in some ways, reality check,
but it's a real reality check.
And we know that from history, out of crisis,
you can have renewal.
And so I hope very much that that's
the right message that comes out of this, but it's a contest.
And the contest won't be won without argument
and leadership.
David Miliband, thank you very much.
Thank you so much.