Sudan

Lord Loomba Excerpts

Friday 13th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Loomba (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Collins, for introducing the debate on this urgent and important topic. To those who are tempted to dismiss the conflict in Sudan as a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing, I say that a glance at our history and at what the future holds clearly shows that Sudan is also our problem. The way Britain, nominally with Egypt, governed Sudan for six decades until 1956 directly sowed the seeds of the first civil war in Sudan. This still echoes in the conflict today.

According to the UN, since the civil war started in Sudan in 2023 more than 13,900 people have been killed, with 27,700 people injured and more than 13 million forced to flee their homes due to the widespread violence. More than half the population of Sudan faced crisis or worse conditions of food insecurity between June and September this year and famine is projected during the following season, between October 2024 and February 2025. People need access to safe shelter, healthcare services, food and water. The intensity of the conflict has been steadily rising, meaning more hunger, fatalities and people having to flee.

As many of your Lordships are aware—here I declare my interest—my focus is on those who are caught up in conflict through no fault of their own, particularly women who are widowed or abandoned. They are ostracised by the community and unable to care for themselves and their children. In poor countries and conflict zones, women, single mothers and widows are invariably at the bottom of the pile, destitute and vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Since conflicts involve high mortality among men, the number of families left exposed is much greater than usual. It is important that we see the suffering in Sudan not just as numbers but as people with particular needs; we need to tailor our intervention in ways that address their situation in the community, as well as the overall need for water, food, medicines and other essentials.

However, neither money nor the United Kingdom on its own can change the tragedy that afflicts Sudan. We are spending nearly a quarter of a billion pounds in this part of the world this year alone. During her visit to the region recently the Development Minister, Anneliese Dodds, rightly called on the warring parties to stop using starvation as a weapon of war. She also pointed out that most of those suffering are invisible. This brings us back to the individuals, many of them mothers and children, suffering in the shadows; they are invisible and without hope.

This factor is all too familiar to those who support marginalised widows around the world. In 2015, the World Widows Report recorded more than 700,000 widows in Sudan. It also noted the high level of child marriage in the country, with the age range for widowhood starting at 12. There is no doubt that the numbers involved have significantly grown since, particularly in the past 17 months. The most important lesson we learned from the report was not what we already knew—although it remains the only global, country-by-country compilation of data and research about widows—but how little we know, and how that hampers us in bringing about the changes that are desperately needed.

This was reinforced by Not Leaving Widows Behind, a study of 11 countries across Asia, Africa and South America by University of Cambridge researchers, commissioned by the Loomba Foundation, which we published last week. This concluded, first, that we cannot hope to achieve the United Nations global goals for sustainable development without addressing the plight of those who are most in need; and, secondly, that we cannot address their plight effectively without substantially increasing our research and data-gathering to understand what is going on.

This certainly applies to the continuing tragedy in Sudan. I applaud the Government’s approach of engaging with all parties to de-escalate the conflict through the Security Council, the G7 and directly supporting the aid agencies in their work. I am heartened by the importance attached by the Minister to understanding what is happening on the ground. My appeal to the Government is that we redouble our efforts to gain access through wider and much-needed research, to gather evidence so that we can deliver the right support where it is most needed and avert further catastrophe.