Sudan and South Sudan

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Monday 8th December 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Sandwich has a long-standing and consistent interest in the people of Sudan, and we are all indebted to him for instigating today’s debate. When the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, comes to reply, I hope that that she will share whatever information she has about the continuing humanitarian crisis in Blue Nile and South Kordofan states—which my noble friend talked about—about Khartoum’s refusal to allow charities and NGOs into the area, and about the regime’s aerial bombardment of civilian populations.

Endorsing what my noble friend just said, the South Kordofan and Blue Nile Coordination Unit told me that, last month, a total of 28 Antonov bombing raids dropped more than 130 bombs on 20 different villages. Can the Minister tell us when we last raised what Dr Mukesh Kapila CBE, a former senior British official and former United Nations resident and humanitarian co-ordinator for Sudan, described at a meeting held in Parliament as,

“the second genocide of the twenty first century … unfolding in South Kordofan”?

The first was in Darfur, and the perpetrators in South Kordofan are the same indicted war criminals and fugitives from justice.

I will use my short time today to concentrate my remarks on Darfur, where up to 300,000 people have been killed and 2 million people displaced. A further 300,000 people have been displaced this year. Darfur is a region where governance as a civil concept has collapsed, law and order are a distant memory and the social fabric has been left in tatters. The current policy responses, including UNAMID, the Doha Document for Peace in Darfur that was finalised in 2011, and the government-led national dialogue, are all wholly inadequate to address the national political and the local social and economic drivers and consequences of the crisis. Are the objectives of the DDPD now being reviewed?

In its paper, Darfur 2014: Time to Reframe the Narrative, the Sudan Democracy First Group says:

“The relevance and performance of UNAMID continues to be severely questioned by many observers. Recent events and revelations have not only shown that UNAMID is unable to undertake its mandate to protect civilians and provide protection for humanitarian actors, but it has become complicit in undermining these goals”.

Following my visit to Darfur in 2004, I welcomed the UN Security Council’s decision to send a peacekeeping force with a Chapter VII mandate to protect civilians. However, peacekeepers were only part of what was required: it was also crucial for the international community, and the UN in particular, to hold Sudan accountable for the continuing aerial and ground attacks against civilians by its armed forces and their proxies. UN Security Council resolutions imposed targeted smart sanctions on the architects of the ethnic cleansing. They should have been enforced but they were not, sending Khartoum a signal that there was little political will to hold it to its commitments under international law. Little wonder, then, that Darfur has happened all over again in South Kordofan. That failure meant that there was no peace to keep, and it soon became apparent that UNAMID was not fit for purpose, despite its annual £1.29 billion cost.

There is a wealth of anecdotal evidence that UNAMID has repeatedly failed to properly investigate alleged attacks on Darfur civilians, and that it has been systematically impeded and intimidated by Sudanese security services and the Sudanese authorities, in direct contravention of the 2008 status of forces agreement signed by the Khartoum Government.

Those concerns, expressed by local people and international NGOs, have been reinforced by the testimony of former UNAMID spokesperson Aicha Elbasri. The events on the night of 31 October in Tabit, in which 200 girls and women were allegedly raped—and which I have raised in questions and correspondence with the noble Baroness—are only the latest incident in which UNAMID has failed the people of Darfur. When UNAMID personnel finally went to Tabit to investigate, they allowed Sudanese security services not only to accompany them but to film, and therefore intimidate, the local witnesses to whom they spoke.

Following Aicha Elbasri’s allegations, the UN Secretary-General set up an internal review of UNAMID—the Cooper review. However, the Security Council has not been given the full Cooper review team report, and the Secretary-General gave an incomplete summary of its contents to the Security Council. This only adds to the sense that fundamental problems at UNAMID are not being addressed as they should be by either the Department of Peacekeeping Operations or the UN Secretary-General. I hope that the noble Baroness can tell us what we are going to do to insist on transparency and accountability

As a permanent member of the Security Council, and as a general contributor to the peacekeeping operations, the UK must hold Hervé Ladsous, the head of the UN’s peacekeeping operations, accountable for UNAMID’s lamentable performance. There must be an independent external evaluation that examines Aicha Elbasri’s accusations and Ladsous’s appeasement of senior Sudanese officials. Moreover, lessons learnt must be applied to other vastly expensive peacekeeping operations, because this is hardly the first time that civilians have been badly let down by those who were ostensibly protecting them.

Dag Hammarskjöld, one of the great Secretaries-General of the United Nations, once said:

“We should … recognize the United Nations for what it is—an admittedly imperfect but indispensable instrument of nations working for a peaceful evolution towards a more just and secure order”.

He also said:

“The UN wasn’t created to take mankind into paradise, but rather, to save humanity from hell”.

What has happened in Darfur—and most recently in Tabit—does not reveal an imperfect organisation creating a more just and secure order, nor has it saved the people from the hell which Khartoum has imposed. It is our duty to say so.