Sudan

Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts

Friday 13th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, yet again the western world allows itself to drift in ignorance and indifference as a vast human tragedy unfolds in Africa. There is intense interest and emotional absorption among the peoples of the West in Gaza and, to a lesser extent, in Ukraine. If such can be measured, the scale of human suffering in Sudan dwarfs even the monstrous suffering in Gaza, yet we mostly avert our gaze. It is therefore much to the credit of the Minister, my noble friend Lord Collins of Highbury, that with his deep concern for suffering in Africa he has brought this debate to your Lordships’ House. It has been moving and comforting to learn in this debate the extent of the knowledge and committed concern in your Lordships’ House.

Why is the West so reluctant to engage with the tragedy of Sudan? Is there a psychological inhibition? Is it the coldness of the statistics that estimate, more or less, that there are 8 million internally displaced people in Sudan, that 2.3 million people have fled to neighbouring states, that 19 million children cannot go to school, that 25 million people are facing food insecurity, that 2.5 million people are critically malnourished and that 750,000 of those are on the brink of death from starvation? Is it impossible to enlarge our empathy to embrace horror on this scale and to understand what it means that both the Sudanese army, the SAF, and the Rapid Support Forces, the RSF, have adopted starvation and sexual violence in their military strategy, that the RSF is seeking to perpetrate genocide on the Masalit tribe in western Darfur, that living children have been piled up and shot, and that women have been mass raped?

Is it because we depend on the media to activate our faculty of empathy and the media find it difficult to report from that part of Africa? Is it because Sudan is a faraway country, about which we know little? The noble Lords, Lord Kerr and Lord Loomba, alluded to that notorious verbal formulation. Is it because Sudan is just another country in Africa, cruelly tearing itself apart—and what else do we expect? Is it because, for millennia, Sudan has been a vast zone of conflict, with few and brief moments of remission? We should ask ourselves tough questions about the West’s public, journalistic, humanitarian and diplomatic neglect.

There is, for sure, a gulf of understanding between the characteristic mindset of the liberal westerner and that of the Islamic and military leadership in Sudan. To speak from my own experience, I visited Sudan in the mid-1990s under the auspices of the British Refugee Council, led at that time by my noble friend Lord Dubs. I travelled with the then MP Hugh Bayley, a friend of many of us. We saw the deeply distressing plight of the internally displaced people, and, indeed, their astonishing resilience and grace, not least in the case of the children.

The embassy secured a meeting for us with Hassan al-Turabi, consigliere to the dictator Omar al-Bashir. Turabi had studied at King’s College London and the Sorbonne. As secretary-general of the National Islamic Front, he was instrumental in establishing sharia in northern Sudan. He oversaw the creation of a police state enforced by militias. Human rights abuses in Sudan at that time included arbitrary detentions, torture, amputations and summary execution. In 1990-91, he had established, with its headquarters in Khartoum, the Popular Arab and Islamic Congress, a regional umbrella for Islamist militant organisations, and he facilitated training camps for militants from Somalia, Afghanistan, Bosnia and elsewhere. He publicly denounced the US as the “incarnation of evil”, and invited Osama bin Laden to move al-Qaeda’s base of operation to Sudan. I was surprised, therefore, to meet an elegant, courteous individual who spoke perfect English. Hugh and I found ourselves debating the obvious issues with an extremely intelligent man, whose view of the world was utterly alien and whose morality was repulsive. Our conversation was fascinating and entirely unproductive.

Be that as it may, whatever the difficulties of communication, and whatever the tut-tutting of those who say that dialogue gives legitimacy to men of violence, western diplomats and senior politicians must enter dialogue with leaders of all sides in the terrible conflict that is taking place. Dialogue must be not just with the belligerents but with the powers that are feeding the conflict: with Egypt, Iran and Saudi Arabia, which are backing the SAF, and with the United Arab Emirates, Russia and Chad, backing the RSF. Turkey and China are also sending weapons into Sudan. Russia is supplying arms to both sides—perhaps the ultimate expression of Putin’s cynicism. He is, of course, beyond moral reach.

The talks that began in mid-August in Geneva must not be abandoned. Perhaps, as the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, suggested, it is now for us to take the diplomatic lead. The SAF must be brought to the table and the RSF kept there. A high-level and sustained effort must be made to bring to an end the intolerable state of affairs whereby several countries are using the tragedy of Sudan as a proxy war to advance interests of their own. Effective pressure must be brought to bear on Sudan’s seven neighbouring countries, so that the situation ends whereby aid is still largely blocked from crossing into Sudan while arms flow copiously into the country. As UN experts have recently urged, the arms embargo must be expanded beyond western Darfur, and UN or African Union peacekeepers must be deployed immediately. The urgency is acute if Sudan is not to experience the worst famine since Ethiopia 40 years ago, yet I read that international donors have committed a thousand times as much aid to Ukraine as they have to Sudan.

If the countries of western Europe will not bestir themselves to help stabilise Sudan and work towards a sustainable long-term solution for reasons of decency, they should still do so out of self-interest. The potential impact on shipping in the Suez Canal carries obvious dangers in the near term; in the longer term, if anarchy persists in Sudan, the more likely it will be that its people will flee from their misery northwards, the stream becoming a torrent as the years pass and climate change intensifies the unendurability of their lot.

I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister for telling the House how the Government see this conflict and what their policy is to alleviate it. I know that he himself will use his good offices unstintingly at the UN and with our allies to mitigate the suffering and advance peace and reconstruction.