South Sudan

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Tuesday 19th July 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

The noble Baroness is right and reinforces what I was saying a moment ago. This report is extremely worrying and full of evidence of really serious atrocities. She has further elaborated and underlined that. The question is what the UN agencies, UNMIS itself and the reporting authorities are going to do about it. I have to tell the noble Baroness that as far as the British Government and my honourable friend Mr Bellingham, who was at the United Nations, are concerned, our urging has been that this report should go forward to the Security Council and be fully discussed in the light of the grim and terrible reports that it contains. That is the position so far. I cannot tell the noble Baroness exactly what is going to happen next or how it will be handled, but that is HMG’s position on the matter.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

My Lords, on the report that the noble Lord has referred to and which I sent him a copy of yesterday, he will recall that two weeks ago I sent him a report from Kadugli where UNMIS soldiers themselves were responsible for handing over people who were seeking refuge in the refugee camp there—“like lambs to the slaughter”, according to a witness. What does this tell us about the nature of peacekeeping in Southern Sudan and of the UNMIS force itself? Are we intending to refer these crimes against humanity to the International Criminal Court, not least because of the thousands of people who are trapped in the Nuba mountains and suffering from aerial bombardment?

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

I can only repeat what I said earlier. The noble Lord very kindly sent me a copy of this report, as did a number of other people. As I have already said twice, it makes very grim reading. The noble Lord has rightly raised the quality and behaviour of existing UN troops a number of times. Of course we are worried that there was inadequate behaviour or that troops stood aside while people were dragged from their cars and shot, and so on. We have encouraged the Under-Secretary-General at the Department of Peacekeeping Operations to examine these claims very carefully and to bear them very strongly in mind when and—I regret to say—if a new mandate can be agreed and established for UN forces after independence, the original UNMIS mandate having finished. This is a very serious issue and one which we are watching very closely indeed.