Democratic Republic of the Congo

Debate between Eric Joyce and Pauline Latham

Tuesday 23rd October 2012 Westminster Hall

[Pauline Latham]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for raising that point. The situation is difficult, because Rwanda has itself suffered terrible conflict. I understand that the money that has been given to Rwanda was not to support the Government but for humanitarian reasons.

The war has had economic as well as political implications. Fighting was fuelled by the country’s vast mineral wealth, with all sides taking advantage of the anarchy to plunder natural resources. That vast mineral wealth has also led to illegal exploitation.

In September last year, the DRC held its first democratic elections. Observers hoped that for the first time the Congo’s history of poor governance and rebellious factions could be put to rest. However, for those living in many parts of the country there has been no such relief.

In April of this year, a rebel military group, the March 23 movement commonly reported as the M23, was formed. It is based in eastern areas of DRC and mainly operates in the province of north Kivu. The group is currently involved in a conflict in the DRC that has led to the displacement of large numbers of people. On Friday, the United Nations Security Council reiterated its condemnation of and demanded an end to all external support being provided to armed groups, particularly to the M23, which has been destabilising the DRC over recent months.

Several experts currently based on the ground—for instance, the director for central Africa of the International Crisis Group—recently confirmed to the all-party parliamentary group on the African great lakes region that many facts point to a likely resumption of attacks from rebels and army in the coming weeks or even days. That has been confirmed by the M23, which declared in a statement released last Saturday to announce the new name of its military wing, the Congolese Revolutionary Army—ARC—that it expected imminent attacks from the armed forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, FARDC.

The M23 mutiny has also contributed to a less commented-upon consequence: the increase in activities of other armed groups in other parts of the Congo, especially the Ituri region of the Orientale province and the Masisi territory of the north Kivu province. Rebel groups took advantage of the security vacuums created by redeployments of the army to M23-affected areas. Casualties since April are hard to assess precisely, but the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights declared that preliminary findings from missions of the UN joint human rights office in the DRC, carried out in Masisi territory, suggested that civilian massacres perpetrated by the FDLR—the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda—and the group known as Raia Mutomboki may constitute crimes against humanity.

In particular, the DRC’s eastern provinces of north and south Kivu have witnessed increased fighting over recent months between Government troops and the M23. The ongoing violence has led to an alarming humanitarian situation, marked by rape, murder and pillaging. The fighting has displaced hundreds of thousands people, including many who have fled to neighbouring Rwanda and Uganda, as well as within the DRC. Peacekeepers from the UN organisation stabilisation mission in the DRC—MONUSCO—have been aiding the DRC Government’s troops in their efforts to deal with the M23. Last week, six UN peacekeepers and a local interpreter were wounded in an overnight ambush, while returning from a patrol with 12 other peacekeepers, near Buganza in north Kivu province, after finding the bodies of four civilians.

As well as expressing deep concern about the deteriorating security and humanitarian crisis in the eastern DRC, caused by the M23 and other armed groups, the UN Security Council also condemned the M23’s attacks on civilians, humanitarian actors and UN peacekeepers, and its abuses of human rights, including summary executions, sexual and gender-based violence and the use of child soldiers. An M23 combatant, who recently spoke to Human Rights Watch, was candid about the recruitment of child soldiers in Rwanda. He said:

“We recruit everywhere in Rwanda and street children are very susceptible to recruitment.”

Let me very clear about where I stand on the issue. As far as I am concerned, Rwandan military and civilian officials who recruit children under the age of 15 for the M23, or any other group, are responsible for war crimes. Sexual violence is a common tragedy facing women and children in the DRC and the charity Tearfund estimates that 48 women and children per hour are raped in the country, mostly by armed groups as well as civilians. If that happened in this country, there would be an outcry.

The correlation between rape and the spread of HIV has been demonstrated in several cases. Some reports estimate that 20% of raped women are HIV-positive. Diseases such as cholera, diarrhoea and nematode infections resulting from poor water, sanitation and hygiene are also commonplace in the area. The links between sanitation and sexual violence become apparent when, owing to the lack of access to private latrines, women face no choice but to find private places to defecate, often at night and a considerable distance away from their homes, further increasing their risk of sexual violence. The organisation War Child states that this is the

“most dangerous place in the world to be a woman”.

Those sentiments were echoed by Hillary Clinton, who added:

“It truly is one of mankind’s greatest atrocities. This country has witnessed humanity at its worst.”

Rape as a tool of war is, in my opinion, a war crime and must be condemned in the strongest manner possible by the whole international community.

There are now more than 2 million internally displaced persons—IDPs—in the DRC, the highest number within the past three years, with 1.5 million IDPs in the Kivu provinces alone. There are now more than 320,000 new IDPs from north Kivu since April, owing to the M23 mutiny alone—as mentioned in the latest UN Security Council presidential statement released on Friday, which I referred to earlier—and more than 400,000 new IDPs across the provinces since the mutiny.

Aid workers in the region claim that they have exhausted their resources and capacities and that numerous IDPs are unreachable either because they are in remote areas or for security reasons, and dealing with that would require humanitarian corridors to be set up. The global UN-led DRC humanitarian action plan is still only 47% funded. The UN refugee agency has launched an appeal for almost $40 million to cover the needs of 400,000 internally displaced people in north Kivu, south Kivu and Orientale provinces and of 75,000 refugees—25,000 in Rwanda and 50,000 in Uganda—who have appeared since the M23 rebellion started in April.

The UNHCR has warned that the situation remains volatile and that it expects further displacement this year. It fears that the number of new IDPs may reach as many as 760,000 in the coming months. The agency also said that it was particularly alarmed about the large number of human rights violations in north and south Kivu, where more than 15,000 protection incidents, including, murder, rape and forced recruitment, have been reported since April.

Given the magnitude of the new displacements, the World Food Programme has launched a new emergency operation from September 2012 to June 2013, which will assist approximately 1.2 million people in five provinces. Three weeks ago, it declared:

“We need additional funding to be able to continue to assist this very poor population. So far we have mobilised only 15% of the total cost of this emergency operation.”

UK aid to the DRC will increase from about £147 million in 2011 to £258 million a year by 2015, which amounts to £790 million between 2011 and 2015, with £176 million to be spent on wealth creation, £130 million on humanitarian aid and £109 million on governance and security.

In 2010-11, the DRC was the UK’s seventh largest recipient of bilateral aid and the third in terms of bilateral humanitarian assistance. In the past five years, western countries alone have invested more than $14 billion in the DRC. International aid is now equivalent to nearly half the DRC’s annual budget. As such, donors have considerable leverage over the DRC. Yet despite all that aid, nothing substantial ever seems to happen to stop the suffering of the people of the DRC.

The DRC will continue to receive billions in aid, including in humanitarian assistance, to help to relieve the suffering of the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the numerous ongoing conflicts, while the lack of efforts by the Congolese Government on good governance, on structural reforms in the security sector, the army and the justice and administration sectors and on decentralisation will thwart any positive developments in stabilisation.

Despite all the ongoing work and the amount of aid being given by the UK and the international community, the DRC will not meet any of its millennium development goals. However, if the UK Government continue with their current policy, which I sincerely hope they will, then by 2015 we will without doubt fulfil the targets for the DRC, set by the Department for International Development. Those targets include delivering more for poor people by promoting economic growth and wealth creation; helping to build peace, stability and democracy; and meeting various specific targets such as safer births, clean water for 6 million people, and protection from malaria for 15 million adults and children.

[Eric Joyce (Falkirk) (Ind)]

I simply want to refer to the destabilisation effect. Does the hon. Lady agree that one of the problems is that the lack of movement on the reformation of the armed services creates enormous pressures on Rwanda and Uganda to act over their borders into eastern Congo?

[Pauline Latham]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. He has a huge experience of this subject.

Finally, at a time of such economic hardship at home, there are those who question the purpose and the amount of aid going overseas, but this is an investment. I passionately believe that providing aid to people in such desperate conditions is morally right. It is also in our national interest to have a safer and more secure world and less suffering in such destitute conditions. It is time to move the world with us in embracing the 21st century.