(10 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberIt is a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire (Pauline Latham) and, indeed, everyone who has already spoken. We have heard some excellent and moving speeches.
In April 1994, I and my family lived in Tanzania and our only real contact with the outside world was the BBC World Service. At this point, I pay tribute to the importance of the World Service for broadcasting by and large the best unbiased news around the world. We have already heard how important the service was to many Rwandans. Whenever we talk about the future of the World Service—whether in this Parliament or the next—let us never forget how much it is valued by hundreds of millions, even billions, of people around the world.
I was particularly interested in two things that were going on in April 1994. The first was the remarkable events in South Africa, where a really serious situation that could have resulted in severe civil unrest—possibly even a civil war—was turned around by national reconciliation and international mediation, which resulted in the wonderful election that brought President Nelson Mandela to power. There could have been chaos, but there was not.
At the same time, the opposite was happening in Rwanda, where the Arusha accords—which had given a glimmer of light not just to Rwanda, but to Burundi—were torn apart when the plane carrying the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi crashed on 6 April 1994. I remember that particularly well, because on that very evening someone was waiting at Kigali airport to receive a friend of ours who was going to work in Rwanda for a few weeks before coming to Tanzania. His plane had to be diverted and the man who was meant to meet him at the airport did not survive that night—he was caught up in the genocide.
Since then, as we have been reminded, Rwanda has made enormous progress. This is not just about the economic growth of up to 8% a year on average, but about education. It is investing in higher education and there is recognition, as has been said, that the future of Rwanda is in its human capital. It lacks natural resources other than its beauty and its agriculture. It does not have the minerals, but it does have the people, which is why the President and the Government are absolutely right to invest in higher education.
One example of the progress Rwanda has made is the way in which it is tackling malaria. The President and the Government have now said that they want to eliminate deaths as a result of malaria by 2018. I do not doubt that that is possible, such is the progress they have made with the distribution of bed nets, indoor residual spraying and the improvement of the health service. Other Members have referred to the lack of corruption, and Rwanda is indeed a model of a country that says that corruption is bad for development and for the ordinary people.
The UK has played a major role under both the previous and the current Government. My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire and I had the pleasure of going on an international development trip, during which we saw an excellent programme for the establishment of a land registry and the granting of titles to every single plot—about 10 million of them—in Rwanda. That has already resulted in improvements in investment, productivity and agriculture, particularly smallholder agriculture, which is vital for employment and household incomes in Rwanda and elsewhere. Rwanda also has stability, which is vital and prized and probably the primary reason why President Kagame is so popular.
Instability, however, remains in the region. The people of Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania and particularly the Democratic Republic of Congo have felt the consequences of that instability at various times. Nowhere is that more true than in the DRC, which has seen millions of people die and hundreds of thousands, even millions, of women suffer the brutality of rape and sexual violence. There must be no let-up in the work to bring peace to that region. We cannot focus on Rwanda without focusing on the entire region. We must ensure that those who, for whatever reason, perpetrate this violence are defeated and brought to account.
If there is one lesson that I want the United Kingdom and the international community to learn above all—I hope that we do learn it—it is that when there is prevarication and delay in confronting evil, it consequences will only be worse. The example of the Rwandan genocide was one of prevarication and delay in confronting evil, a word which I do not use lightly. Evil was present in Rwanda at that time, as it has been in other places that have subsequently seen the kind of devastation experienced by Rwanda.
This is a time to remember not just those who perished and their families, but the survivors. I, too, have been very privileged to take part in Project Umubano, and I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell). One organisation we work with in Rwanda is SURF, or the Survivors Fund UK. With tremendous support from the UK—from DFID and Comic Relief, and from individual donors—it is working with local organisations to support survivors, whether widows, young people or orphans, and umbrella organisations. Together, such organisations care for the needs of more than 300,000 survivors and their dependants, who are often some of the poorest. They obviously suffer from disability and unemployment, and they include widows and children who have had to bring up their siblings from a very young age. The work of all the organisations aims to foster self-reliance. I read about a lady called Francine, who said:
“Before I was alone, I never thought about the future of my life. After joining this group”—
a project supported by DFID in Rwanda—
“I can look forward because I share my life experience with others.”
That is so important. We should not forget the survivors, and I am sure that we will not do so.
Survivors have a need not just for food and employment, but for justice. For many of them, justice has still not come. There has been the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, which will close this year. It has cost $1 billion, which is an enormous amount of money. It has done important work, but it has no mandate for reparation, and the Rwandan survivors have received none. In many ways, the Gacaca courts have been much more effective and efficient than the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda—they have a mandate for restitution and have made many thousands of restitution grants, although many of them have not been fulfilled—but even they do not have a mandate for reparation. It is very important to the survivors—or, God forbid, to victims of any future mass killings—that the concept of reparation is implemented and not forgotten, because it is a vital part of justice.
I thank my hon. Friend for his amazing work in leading Project Umubano, and I commend his excellent Swahili, which I have heard at first hand. Does he agree that, following this terrible tragedy, what was most impressive was the ability of the Government to abolish the death penalty, rather than to use it to seek retribution?
I did not realise that that had happened until my second or third visit to Rwanda, and I was hugely struck by it. If we compare even the reaction of the allied powers after the second world war with what Rwanda has done, I think that it was a very gracious and humble but formidable act that speaks very powerfully and should be much better known.
What lessons can we learn? We have heard much about the responsibility to protect, which is absolutely vital, but I want to draw a few other conclusions. The first is about intelligence. General Dallaire, who has often been mentioned—I have read his excellent book—knew and passed on information at quite an early stage, and certainly several months before the genocide took place, about a potential catastrophe in the country, but it was ignored. We ignore intelligence at our peril in such matters. We may at the moment have intelligence from countries around the world about something serious that is brewing, and we must take note of it and act on it.