Sudan

Lord Hussain Excerpts

Thursday 28th June 2018 Grand Committee

[Lord Hussain (LD)]

I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, for securing this debate, for taking a keen interest in Sudan and for helping to establish the APPG on Sudan. His continued work in that country is highly appreciated.

I have visited the country twice in the last few years. The first time that I went, I knew very little about it and was encouraged by some Members of this House to attend a conference at the University of Khartoum. The information available at the time from the Foreign Office was not very encouraging: British citizens were advised not to make trips there unless they were necessary. The only information I could rely on was from Members who spoke about the country in the House of Lords. In many cases, this was very terrifying. From their contributions, I believed that the army ran the country, one would find armoured vehicles and armed men all around the streets, women had absolutely no rights, and so on. I landed in Khartoum about three years ago with a very dark picture. However, from the outset, at the airport, in immigration and at the hotel, I saw men and women working side by side. That was surprising for me, against the backdrop of the information I had gone with.

In the university where the conference was held, I again saw no distinction between men and women working at all levels. Subsequently we met many Ministers. I particularly wanted to visit the downtown market, to see how ordinary people live in Khartoum, and it was a pleasant surprise not to see much difference between it and other Arab or Muslim countries. There were many cultural similarities, and I could have taken it for Cairo, say. Women were working alongside men in all aspects of life.

We went on to learn more about the country—for example, that when South Sudan separated from Sudan it took 70% or more of the oil revenue, leaving Sudan with very little of its major source of income and little to run the country with. It is no wonder that we hear that Sudan is suffering from poverty.

The international community supports the liberation of South Sudan; that is what the people chose in a referendum and it is proper and fine. I wish it had happened in other parts of the world too, particularly where I was born—Kashmir is still waiting for the United Nations to implement its resolutions—but I am of course glad that South Sudan is to get its UN resolutions implemented in the end. In the case of Sudan, not only were the UN resolutions implemented—South Sudan got its independence—but it was clobbered with economic sanctions. Once you have had 70% of your oil revenues taken from you there is nothing much left to run the country, and these sanctions do not help at all.

I am running out of time and need to move on to my next visit, when I accompanied the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, and other parliamentarians on a trip that included Darfur. When we met the UNAMID officers in Darfur—I may have mentioned this previously—I asked them about the aerial bombardment that we often hear about in this House, and the answer was that in the past year two incidents had been reported to the United Nations forces. I asked what had happened. They said that they could not get much information. I asked them to explain further, and they replied that when they went to the first incident that was reported they found a hole in the ground. They could not establish what had made the hole. In the second case, they went down to a road where they had been told that an incident had occurred and were told that no, it was not here, it was a few miles in the other direction, and so on. Eventually, the officers had returned with no evidence of any bombardment.

That raises a big question about what to believe when people tell us things about countries that we have not visited. When you visit a country it makes a great difference, and I suggest that, if they have not already done so, noble Lords should visit Sudan at their earliest opportunity.