Conflicts and Violence: Religion

Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts

Thursday 10th December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend for initiating this debate so appropriately on Human Rights Day, for introducing it so coherently and for her long-standing commitment to this troubled country. I thank her for shining a light on this crisis, in which religion has been used by leaders on all sides of the conflict as a means to divide people. Both Christians and Muslims have been targeted by different armed groups.

Although the conflict is portrayed as religious, the group that is most affected is children. The crisis in the Central African Republic is a children’s emergency and they are bearing the brunt of it. Children are being killed. More than 10,000 children under 18 are currently being used by, or are associated with, armed groups. Children are being subjected to sexual and gender-based violence. Many children are displaced and separated from their families, which exposes them to even greater risk of abuse and exploitation. This is not acceptable.

Let me share with your Lordships the story of a 13 year-old boy, named Francis, from the Yaloke district in CAR. World Vision, working in CAR, met with Francis in June and shared his story with me. At the age of 13, like many other young boys in his community, Francis joined a local armed group after his brother and uncle were killed by community members from a different religious group. He told World Vision that he joined an armed group because he,

“did not want the death of his brother and uncle to go unpunished”.

By the time Francis reached his 14th birthday he had killed five people—four children and one adult. He explained that he had killed these people because they were Fulani, which means that they were Muslim.

Francis is a victim of CAR’s entrenched culture of violence. He has not received any form of psycho-social support to help him deal with his experiences in the armed group. Most aid programmes in CAR are funded only for short periods at a time, often little more than nine months. Psycho-social support and reintegration programmes for former child soldiers like Francis are both desperately needed and desperately underfunded. Often, because they are not short-term programmes but would take at least two to three years to be run effectively, they are not run at all.

So Francis, like many other children in CAR and other fragile states, continues to carry deep scars from the violence. Yesterday at the UNICEF board meeting—I declare an interest as a trustee—we saw a picture of a child just like Francis, but in southern Sudan, who, with UNICEF support, has given up his weapons and army uniform, has been released by the militia and is going back to his last opportunity of any kind of childhood.

There is an urgent need to support programmes which help to address the violence in CAR, such as trauma healing, a package of psycho-social support for those affected by the violence, and livelihood programmes to help local economies recover from the violence. This should fit in with the commitment in the recently published aid strategy. I am sure everyone in the Chamber will welcome the increased resource and expertise to tackle the drivers of violent conflict that threaten stability and development in countries such as CAR. I hope that some of this increased expenditure might be invested in programmes to support survivors of sexual and gender-based violence in CAR. I encourage the FCO to make CAR a PSVI priority country. I am sorry about all those acronyms.

Work in fragile states such as CAR has always been a key part of DfID’s overall portfolio. Since 2013, DfID has committed £58 million to address the needs of central Africans, central African children and refugees from CAR. This funding has enabled agencies to support children who have been separated from their families, to provide services for boys and girls who have suffered sexual and gender-based violence, to reduce malnutrition and to give children access to education and training. So, when DfID explores new options for programming in March next year, I encourage it to pursue a coherent and long-term approach to its engagement there, including long-term programmes to tackle religious conflict and violence.

I, too, welcome the courageous visit by Pope Francis, and his commitment to raise awareness of the situation in the Central African Republic and to highlight the need for forgiveness, tolerance and reconciliation in divided communities. This message was heard throughout the world, and my mother tasked me endlessly during his visit to find more coverage on the television. It really awoke an interest. These values are shared by the Christian and Muslim faiths. As the noble Lord, Lord Alton, said, the Pope’s visit to the mosque to deliver a message of peace and reconciliation was a tremendous show of solidarity.

It is important for all involved—Governments and other stakeholders—not to simplify the role of faith in conflict and to draw more on the social capital of faith to deliver stability and reconciliation. Without that, the story of Francis and other child soldiers will become more common, rather than a thing of the past.