Africa: Post-conflict Stabilisation

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 8th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Chidgey for opening this fascinating debate in which I have learnt a lot. I have spent my professional career much more on a broader Europe than on a broader Africa. We have certainly spread our debate across Africa, from Zimbabwe to Somalia.

I particularly welcome the noble Lord, Lord McConnell. My namesake and good friend wishes me to say, in particular, that he apologises very much that he is unable to be here today. He had indeed sent me the article from Scotland on Sunday on the virtues of a coalition Government, and I hope that the noble Lord will ensure that it is circulated on all Labour Benches. Perhaps I may be allowed to quote another short section of the article, where the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, asks,

“can a pragmatic deal between two previously warring tribes really work for the benefit of the country?”.

His answer is:

“I would argue that, if managed properly, coalition can produce strong, stable government and deliver transformative public policy”.

I thank him for that constructive remark.

I am sorry that my noble friend Lord Avebury is not able to be with us. I have always regarded him as the one person on the Liberal Democrat Benches who knows even more about Africa than my noble friend Lord Chidgey. I very much hope that he will be back with us soon.

This is an area where there is a huge amount of cross-party consensus. The coalition Government have been in office now for almost two months. We have taken up and hope to build on the contributions and achievements of our predecessors. The United Kingdom is one of the largest donors to all the countries in eastern and central Africa, a record that we are proud to inherit from our predecessors and intend to maintain. This Government have committed themselves to fulfilling our commitments in the millennium goals and to reaching 0.7 per cent of GNP as development assistance in difficult circumstances. I trust that even the most tribalist of Labour’s haters of the new coalition Government will grant us credit for that.

Having said all that, we note that some other Governments have fallen far short and that, sadly, a number of other members of the G8 and beyond do not share Britain’s sense of global responsibility. We also note that British NGOs are among the most active and constructive all the way across this troubled region. There are of course limits to what the United Kingdom can achieve on its own, so we have to work as closely as we can with others both bilaterally and within multilateral groups. We are working in the DRC with two EU missions to train the army and to improve the quality of the police. We are providing finance for the various UN missions in the area. We recognise that co-ordination between those UN missions across frontiers has not always been entirely effective. These are separate missions, which are separately constituted, but we are doing our best to consult our EU partners about how that co-ordination can be improved. We are working as a member of the international contact group on the Great Lakes of Africa, a grouping of donor countries and organisations, which includes, apart from the United Kingdom, the United States, Belgium, France, Netherlands, the UN and the European Union. We are doing our best in this immensely complicated area.

As has been mentioned, we need to co-opt others as well, including the Arab League, the Indians, who are, after all, one of the largest providers of UN peacekeeping forces in the area, and, even as far as we can, the Chinese, who are themselves beginning to discover the difficulties of working in the area, the risks to their citizens and the dangers of corruption to Chinese economic interests in the field.

The emphasis that my noble friend Lord Chidgey made in his speech was very much on stabilisation. We all of us recognise the links between security, good governance—or indeed government as such—human rights and social and economic development. However, we also all recognise the obstacles to effective delivery. The noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, asked if we could ensure that no aid falls into the wrong hands. I regret to say—I am sure that the noble Baroness, Lady Kinnock, would agree—that no British Government can ensure that no aid falls into the wrong hands. We can put in the best monitoring efforts possible in the hope of minimising how much goes astray, and work with Transparency International, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative and others to try to prevent leakage out to accounts in offshore financial centres, which we are all well aware goes on. The despoiling of the mineral riches of the region, in particular of the DRC, is something against which we all have to operate. That has to be done on an active multilateral international organisation level.

Whether our priorities are for direct budget support, as we have done in the DRC, or in micropolicies at the local level, we run into some difficulties. Some time ago my son was teaching at a school in south-western Uganda. Money to pay the teachers at the school had simply not come through for several months. One can work at the microlevel but things occasionally break down.

How far does security need to come first? The noble Baroness, Lady Kinnock, suggested that we need to be very careful about involving the military, although the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Winchester remarked that security is the absolute key to development in the DRC. There are some real tensions here which, again, the new Government are exploring and discussing how one provides security as the basis for economic and political development. Again on a personal level, last year, while one of my nieces was in southern Darfur working with a British charity, my wife and I developed an extremely active interest in local security, kidnapping and all the other problems. If there is no security on the ground, one cannot begin to provide either emergency aid or the other dimensions, such as education and assistance in economic development, which are necessary.

Delivering effective stabilisation across the region is an extremely complex task. The quality of governance across the region is also very mixed. It is a sad reflection on the quality of government across Africa, but the Mo Ibrahim prize for heads of government who have stepped down in Africa has not been awarded this year because too many are managing to fix their elections so that they can stay on.

We all of us recognise, and we have to inform our public, that this is not just a matter of idealism. There is strong British self-interest in the stabilisation of the region. We have a Somali population in this country which is somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000. It has arrived in Britain partly because of the collapse of that country. We have somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 Congolese refugees. We are conscious that if the security situation in some other countries in the region were to deteriorate further, there would be strong pressure from the educated, from those across the region with links to this country, to come to Britain as well. We therefore have strong interests in providing stability, security and effective government across the region. I share the right reverend Prelate’s fears that, while we have to work hard to improve matters, we risk conflict reappearing across the region as Southern Sudan moves towards independence and as the situation in the eastern DRC appears not yet to be improving.

Perhaps I may say a little about the Lord’s Resistance Army and the about the suggestion made by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, that we really should have caught Joseph Kony before now. The noble Lord will be aware that it has taken a great deal of time to apprehend a number of war criminals in the western Balkans in rather more open country and a rather smaller space. These things are not entirely easy. The LRA has been operating across the borders of four countries in which the level of security, information and intelligence is very low. While we may work to encourage closer co-operation among the armed forces of Uganda, Congo and Southern Sudan, this is a necessarily difficult task.

Mention has been made of what is happening in Somalia. We recognise that while Somaliland is, relatively speaking, a haven of stability within this very troubled country, southern Somalia is a source of active concern to all of us. Her Majesty’s Government are providing support to the African Union for its force there. The noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, asked what will happen if Sudan does vote for independence—and indeed that is the great question of conflict prevention for all of us at the present time. Her Majesty’s Government are providing the region with emergency aid and assistance so far as we can, and I can tell the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, that the UK is providing about half of its £140 million development assistance for 2010 to Southern Sudan to build governmental capacity and that we are also doing our best to assist in the remote regions of east Sudan and the Abyei area. But she will know better than me that none of this is easy in the troubled circumstances and in some of those extremely remote areas. Sudan is the largest country in Africa, even larger than the DRC. We are working with the Government of Southern Sudan to improve the quality and capability of both the police force and the army, and we are consulting other EU Governments on how we can better work with them to manage to catch up with the Lord’s Resistance Army.

Other noble Lords mentioned the situation in Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda, while one or two even touched on the question of Kenya. We were troubled about the presidential elections in Burundi, which appear to have been blocked by the withdrawal of the opposition and by fears as to how fair those elections would be. Noble Lords will know that the British Government are represented on the ground more strongly in Rwanda than in Burundi, but we do have a liaison mission in Burundi, along with an aid programme. Again, we are working with partners to see what we can do to help.

The situation in Kenya also raises concerns. As Members of this House will know, for a long period the British High Commission has brought to the attention of the Kenyan Government allegations of corruption, and concerns about the extent to which the elite are living off the country and on occasion promoting intertribal rivalries in order to further their own case. We remain actively concerned and engaged in a constant dialogue with the Government of Kenya. So the British Government’s response is clear. I should say that this is not a collection of new initiatives by the coalition Government rather, that we have inherited from our predecessors a worthwhile set of policies. Naturally we are reviewing them, but we do not intend fundamentally to alter them. We hope that the Government’s new National Security Council will provide for a greater coherence of effort.

The Foreign Secretary, in a speech last week, talked about the closer integration of the international departments, in particular the efforts of the Foreign Office and DfID and, where necessary, the Ministry of Defence. The MoD has only a few personnel in these various countries in training roles. Where we can, we want to work with local forces bilaterally and with the African Union to improve the quality of those local forces, but on occasion the UN and others will have to assist. The Government’s Stabilisation Unit, owned by the three departments, is an invaluable source of expertise and is actively engaged with this area. So Her Majesty’s Government are addressing all these difficult issues.

Somalia remains an enormous concern. Perhaps we should recognise that we wish to involve countries that have not shared responsibilities in Africa. The Chinese Government are taking an active part in anti-piracy operations off Somalia and are now co-operating with the multilateral command, so others are being called in. The Transitional Federal Government of Somalia remain sadly weak. We are doing what we can to assist, both financially and in helping them to build a broader coalition for peace and stability. We will remain a significant bilateral donor in Sudan, and that will continue to require immense resources, particularly in Southern Sudan, for the foreseeable future.

We contribute approximately £207 million a year to the Democratic Republic of Congo both bilaterally and through multilateral UN and EU commitments. DfID is now conducting a careful review of both bilateral and multilateral programmes, including which partners we should prefer to work with, as any new Government should, and we expect to have the outcome of that review later this year. There is a parallel review across departments on how best to ensure that sufficient emphasis is given to violence against women, and we hope that that will come to a review later in the year.

Over the next four years, the United Kingdom will provide £1 billion for regional programming across this area. We are of course concerned that weak governance and corruption in all of these countries hampers development and increases longer-term threats to stability. We recognise that NGOs, British and others, have a useful role to play in all this, but we are also painfully aware from experience on the ground that some NGOs get across each other and that when too many different organisations compete with each other, that can add to the problems, as on occasion they have in Darfur. So far as any Government can, we have to encourage NGOs in the field to work together.

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester remarked that religion can be a force for reconciliation, as sadly it has proved so often to be a force for division across the region. We are immensely grateful for the useful role played by the Church of England and other churches in the area. Incidentally, as part of my briefing I was told that Muslim Aid is one of the most effective and positive NGOs in Somalia and the Horn of Africa. Interfaith operations are precisely the sort of thing we need to be encouraging.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

My Lords, could I remind the noble Lord of the question I put to him about the re-export of arms Bill sponsored by myself and the noble Lord, Lord Judd, and what he has to say about the flow of arms? I would be grateful if he could write to us about that question, as well as about the culture of impunity. I ask this because, unlike Joseph Kony, others have been caught and arrested, but not brought to trial. I mentioned some specific cases, including the recent killing of a human rights activist in the DRC.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I would be happy to write to the noble Lord about those issues. Indeed, I was briefed on some of them but within the period it is not possible to cover all these areas.

On the question of the arms trade, legal and illegal, the AK 47s that he mentioned do not come from Britain. As the noble Lord knows, they are actively traded across the region and are in sufficient surplus to be relatively cheap. So it is not simply a question of arms re-exports and arms controls, but of how we manage to gain some sort of handle on the illegal trade which goes on across the region.

I would like to thank all noble Lords for their contributions to the debate. I recognise the valuable work done by a number of Members of this Chamber in and across the region, and by encouraging others to contribute and NGOs to work together. I look forward to continuing debates in this House, but I hope not with a deteriorating security problem across the region.