Sudan

Lord Oates Excerpts

Friday 13th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as chief executive of United Against Malnutrition and Hunger and a trustee of the Royal African Society. I am pleased to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, with her great knowledge and experience of Sudan. I join others in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Collins, on his appointment as Minister for Africa. It was a pleasure to work with him in opposition and I welcome the renewed focus and vigour that he is bringing to addressing this crisis in Sudan. I very much welcome his powerful opening statement.

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to visit Khartoum and to meet with many brave people who were standing against military tyranny, and campaigning for peace and a return to civilian rule. Tragically, hopes that such an outcome might be achievable were ultimately betrayed by the self-interest and greed of the leaders of the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces. The result, as we have heard from the Minister and other speakers, including my colleague my noble friend Lady Suttie, who has such knowledge of the area, is catastrophe. Tens of thousands of people, perhaps well over 100,000, are already dead. Over 10 million people have been displaced from their homes, with 2 million of them externally displaced, causing tensions and instability in surrounding countries and driving migration further afield.

It is facile to pretend that there are simple solutions to a crisis of this scale and complexity. None the less, there is much more that the world can and should be doing to address the situation in Sudan and, as the penholder on Sudan in the Security Council, the UK obviously has particular responsibilities in this regard. I strongly agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Amos, said in her powerful speech about how, ultimately, the political track is the most important, because we have to have a political agreement and resolution if we are to bring a sustainable end to the suffering, but I want to focus on three areas of practical action in my remarks today. The first is humanitarian access, the second the funding of the humanitarian need and the third the accountabilities of the parties to the conflict.

Humanitarian agencies tell us that hunger has become the primary cause of suffering for the people of Sudan. The World Food Programme estimates that over 8 million people, as we have heard, face emergency levels of food insecurity and that 755,000 people in 10 Sudanese states are facing starvation and death. Access to provide humanitarian relief to people in the greatest need is severely constrained by the warring parties. Aid deliveries are hampered by lengthy clearance and bureaucratic hurdles imposed by the Sudanese Armed Forces and, in RSF areas, by violence, threats to the security of convoys and attempts to elicit bribes. The World Food Programme told the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Sudan and South Sudan—the noble Lord, Lord Alton, referred to its excellent briefing—that 45 separate negotiations are required to get aid from the Adre border crossing point into Darfur. Meanwhile, the trucks that left Port Sudan three weeks ago for Zamzam refugee camp, where famine has been declared, have still not got there.

The situation, of course, is highly complex, but there are things that the UK and the international community could do to improve the supply of aid into these regions. First, international organisations argue that we should specifically delink negotiations for humanitarian access from ceasefire talks, so that if such talks fail, as they currently tragically are, a track to humanitarian access can continue separately. Secondly, we need to be willing to take greater risks and be innovative with our approach to aid if we are to reach the people in the most desperate need. That means being more open to supplying aid through local NGOs on the ground, which have the best chance of reaching the hardest areas. Innovative approaches to get food where it is needed are also required, which the UK could champion.

In addition to direct funding to supply food, emergency therapeutic supplements and medicines, the international community needs to use cash transfers and market mechanisms where they are the most effective means to reach people. Markets continue to function in Sudan and cash transfers can be the most effective methods of providing vulnerable people with the means to access food and other necessities. However, if such transfers are not to drive inflationary spirals, investment is required on both the supply side and on the demand side. Market operators need access to liquidity to meet increased demand, but they also need the assurance the cash transfer model can provide that demand for increased supply will be sustained.

The second area that I want to focus on is funding. The UN appeal for Sudan is only a third funded and the regional refugee response just 8.5% funded. The failure of the international community to come anywhere close to meeting these funding needs is short- sighted in the extreme. The shortfall in the Sudan appeal points to a likely spiralling of the hunger crisis within Sudan, greater displacement of people internally and externally, and further pressures on surrounding countries. Likewise, the almost complete failure to fund the regional refugee response is morally unacceptable, placing as it does huge burdens on neighbouring countries least able to bear them. It is also catastrophically short-sighted, as a failure to address the refugee crisis regionally is only likely to see migrant movements towards our borders and those of our partners. While the UK contribution is welcome, much more is needed to meet the scale of the refugee crisis.

According to data from the Economist magazine, 60% of the refugees in the camps around Calais are already from Sudan. Meanwhile, the UK expends huge amounts of aid funds intended to be used overseas to meet in-country refugee costs. Sudan demonstrates the counterproductive folly of this approach and I hope that the new Government will change it. I hope that, in his response, the Minister can reassure us that the UK will use its role as penholder to urgently convene donor countries to step up to the plate on both the Sudan appeal and the refugee response appeal, and to explain to them the catastrophic consequences of failing to do so.

Lastly on funding, while commitments are welcome, it is disbursement of those commitments that make the difference. Can the Minister look at how the £97 million pledged by the UK Government can be disbursed as rapidly as possible, utilising the approaches proposed by the humanitarian agencies, while being prepared to raise our risk tolerance for humanitarian funding?

On the accountability of warring parties, particularly what seems to be the deliberate use of hunger as a strategy in this conflict, can the Minister tell us what progress there has been towards the UK’s ratification of the amendment of Article 8 of the Rome statute to include starvation as a war crime in the context of conflicts not of an international character, as organisations such as Action Against Hunger have repeatedly urged? Can he also tell us what efforts have been made to reiterate the responsibilities of warring parties to comply with Resolution 2417?

No one who listened to the testimony given to the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Sudan and South Sudan on Wednesday could come away anything other than horrified by the suffering of the Sudanese people that they bore witness to, or by the silence and indifference of the world to that suffering. The leader of the delegation from the Sudanese women’s shuttle diplomacy initiative powerfully conveyed to us the sense of abandonment that the Sudanese people feel: “We have the right also to live as humans, but we are forgotten”, she said. We must ensure that the people are not forgotten, but we must do much more than that. We must use our role as penholder at the Security Council to galvanise international action to resolve this conflict and end the terrible suffering of the Sudanese people. I welcome the Minister’s obvious commitment to this end.