Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead
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Sudan: War Crimes
Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead Excerpts(11 years ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire
The question of what is the international community for these purposes is very delicate. Arresting an active head of state in his own capital is not the easiest thing to do without going to war. We are deeply concerned about the current situation, but I should stress that the fighting which broke out in South Kordofan and Blue Nile two years ago was in fact sparked by the SPLM-N and it is the Government of Sudan who have responded in a particularly brutal and indiscriminate fashion.
Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead
My Lords, in an appalling repetition of history, the Government of Sudan have spent the last two years deploying the same brutality that they used in Darfur to crush the rebellions that have been mentioned in South Kordofan and Blue Nile. Does the Minister agree that the lessons of Darfur have not been learnt and that the United Nations Security Council is again failing to respond to the suffering of the Sudanese people, who are being bombarded by their own Governments?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, we have to be careful not to assume that the United Nations can do too much. The UN has been actively engaged in this extremely complex series of wars. Let us be quite clear: there are not just two sides on this, as the noble Baroness herself well knows. There is conflict within South Sudan; there is conflict within Sudan itself; there is conflict between groups which are claimed to be supported from across the border. It is now 10 years since the Darfur conflict started. Things are a little better than they were. I speak with some direct experience, having a close friend who has worked both in Darfur and in Abyei in the past three years. Sadly, there are limits to what the international community can achieve, but I assure the noble Baroness that the British Government and others are working extremely hard and providing as much humanitarian assistance as they can in this dreadful situation.