Sudan

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Friday 13th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I join the noble Baronesses, Lady Suttie and Lady Anelay, in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Collins, for the way in which he introduced today’s important debate. He has a long-standing commitment to the people of Africa, and he will bring humanity and expertise to the many challenges that he will face as Minister for Africa—the most urgent of which is the catastrophic war in Sudan.

On Wednesday, the Minister attended part of a two-hour briefing which I chaired on behalf of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Sudan and South Sudan. I pay tribute to the outgoing chair, Vicky Ford, and the incoming chair, of whom I have great expectations; Rachael Maskell, the MP for York, is a wonderful Member of Parliament, and I know that she will follow well in the footsteps of Vicky Ford. During that meeting, we heard harrowing contributions from Geraldine O’Callaghan of the World Food Programme, Sibongani Kayola of Mercy Corps, Will Carter of the Norwegian Refugee Council and the Sudanese women’s shuttle diplomacy initiative.

Along with the mass displacement of what is now approaching 11 million internally displaced people—adding to the 120 million people worldwide who are displaced—we learned that

“famine is no longer a threat. It is a reality”.

We heard that people are dying of hunger; that skeletal children are some of the nine out of 10 who are suffering from some form of malnutrition, with 14 million children in need of humanitarian support; that 16 humanitarian aid workers have been killed in Sudan this year; and that ever-present dangers have compromised the delivery of aid to starving people. We heard that food is being used as a weapon of war.

A Sudanese lady doctor told us that 95% of hospitals and clinics are closed; that disease, including cholera and dengue, is raging; and that 19 million children are out of school and education, and, inevitably, are likely to be used in human trafficking and other forms of exploitation, or as child soldiers. We heard that those responsible for atrocity crimes have acted with utter disregard for the suffering that they are inflicting on their own people, and that impunity and the failure to bring to account those responsible for the genocide of 2004 have sown the seeds for a war which, because of other competing global priorities, fails to make the media’s small print, let alone the headlines.

We often say that black lives matter. If that is so, why has the world been so silent about the suffering in Sudan? We glibly say, “Never again”, and then, in a total failure of international statecraft, we watch it happen all over again. There is no greater indication of the failure of international justice and accountability than Sudan.

I joined the all-party parliamentary group over 20 years ago, after travelling to Sudan during the second Sudanese civil war, which raged from 1983 to 2005, and in which 2 million people died of killing, famine or disease and 4 million people were displaced. It ultimately led to the death of the country itself and to partition. In October 2004, I went to Darfur. The Independent newspaper carried my report under the words:

“If this isn’t genocide, then what on earth is?”


As many as 300,000 people perished, and 2 million people were displaced. Atrocity crimes included the Government-backed Janjaweed’s systematic rape of women and the burning and looting of villages—90% of which were razed to the ground—all driven by an ideological hatred of difference. The International Criminal Court said it was genocide. Omar al-Bashir and some of the others involved in those crimes have still not been brought to justice.

Reports of new outrages in early 2023 led to the all-party group asking me to chair a new inquiry. Our report, Genocide All Over Again in Darfur?, described the consequences of daring to think you can neglect the issue of justice. We concluded that, whatever happens when the violence in Sudan ends, there will be no lasting and credible peace without justice.

On 18 July 2023, I tabled a Private Notice Question asking the Government,

“following the discovery of mass graves and an increase in crimes targeting non-Arab ethnic groups in Darfur, what assessment they have made of the risk of genocide in that region”.

I quoted the current prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan KC, who had told the United Nations Security Council the previous week that we were

“in peril of allowing history to repeat itself”.

He said that Darfur was

“not on the precipice of a human catastrophe but in the very midst of one. It is occurring”.

At the time, the noble Lord, Lord Collins, asked the then Government

“what we are doing to put pressure on Sudan so that people cannot act with impunity in the future”.—[Official Report, 18/7/23; cols. 2206-07.]

To find the answer to that crucial question, I hope that the noble Lord will agree to convene a round table to examine with Members of your Lordships’ House ways for us to honour our duties under the 1948 UN convention on the crime of genocide, which lays upon us, as a signatory, the duty to predict, prevent, protect and punish. We do none of those things.

What will be done about the horrendous evidence not just from the past but in this week’s fact-finding mission report given to the United Nations Human Rights Council? I was appalled to read, yet again, about the same things that I have myself seen. The report detailed instances of rape and sexual violence occurring now, with the rape of girls as young as eight and of women as old as 75. I repeat: girls as young as eight years of age. The fact-finding mission attributed these crimes to

“men wearing RSF uniforms … who victims referred to as Janjaweed”.

It said that international crimes are being committed by the SAF and the RSF, including

“murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment, and torture; and committing outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment”.

Crimes against humanity intersect with the persecution and forcible displacement of people on grounds of ethnicity and gender. Karim Khan says that the current situation in Sudan is within the purview of the ICC’s mandate. He has been collecting and analysing the evidence. Can the Minister tell us how the UK’s war crimes unit is working with him and other like-minded nations?

We should not foolishly imagine that what happens in a faraway place stays there. In the foreword to our report, I said:

“More refugees will be coming our way if we do not act now and address the situation”.


The failure to tackle root causes both fails the displaced and plays into the hands of those who wickedly whip up fear and hatred of refugees. Undoubtedly, the immediate priority must be humanitarian aid. The situation is too urgent to wait for permission from the men with guns to enter Sudan. Does the Minister agree? In the Security Council—this was referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay—the United Kingdom should call for an international intervention force under UN or African Union auspices, and initiate a Chapter VII mandate to do so. Can the Minister tell us whether that is our intention?

Building on something said by the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, I say that we must do far more to support Abdalla Hamdok and those Sudanese people who are committed to the popular democratic calls for peace, justice and freedom. In our all-party group’s report, we talked about a “tantalising” glimpse of hope but, if hope is to be sustained, it needs more than a glimpse —it must be a long-term commitment.

Sudan deserves much better than the SAF and the RSF. Since independence in 1989, the SAF has been an army only ever deployed against its own people. Wars end when one side clearly wins, when one side surrenders or when one side becomes exhausted, none of which seems to be about to happen. Both have weapons, money and, sometimes, opaque external support driven by jihadist ideology, as was referred to by the noble Baroness. What is our strategy for dealing with this?

At the end of today’s debate, I would like to give the Minister a book of pictures drawn by children in Darfur, which was put together by Waging Peace. I hope that it will always be a reminder to him to keep them ever in his thoughts and actions.