Conflict in South Sudan

Debate between Nic Dakin and Stephen Kerr

Tuesday 5th June 2018 Westminster Hall

[Nic Dakin]

My hon. Friend has had a strong, passionate commitment over many years to the situation in South Sudan, speaks with great perception and is to be listened to.

Humanitarian statistics rarely tell the whole story of a conflict, but the latest figures coming out of South Sudan are truly staggering. Some 1.8 million people are internally displaced, with a further 2.4 million seeking refuge in neighbouring countries. That is over a third of the country’s population forced to flee their homes, with 85% of those fleeing being women and children. South Sudanese refugees can be found in Uganda, Kenya, Sudan and Ethiopia. It is testament to the horrors of the conflict in South Sudan that refugees are also seeking safety in countries ravaged by their own civil wars, such as the DRC and Central African Republic. At various points in the conflict, the Bidi Bidi camp in Uganda was receiving more than 1,000 refugees every single day. Now covering an area bigger than Birmingham, it is the largest refugee camp in the world.

We all remember the famine that spread through east Africa last year and the remarkable response from local NGOs, aid agencies and ordinary people in the UK who gave money to the fundraising appeal. This year the UN predicts that famine will return and food insecurity will be greater than last year, with starvation being used as a weapon of war.

[Stephen Kerr (Stirling) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on bringing this issue to Westminster Hall. I have the good fortune to have in my constituency the headquarters of The Leprosy Mission Scotland. With other partners in The Leprosy Mission International, it is doing tremendous work in South Sudan in incredibly difficult circumstances, which the hon. Gentleman is highlighting in his powerful speech. One aspect of its work is that the relief workers and aid workers are now themselves targeted for extortion and violence. What more can our Government do to protect these people and their good work, so that their influence can help in a very difficult situation?

[Nic Dakin]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point, which I will pick up later in my speech. I am sure the Minister will want to come to it when she responds.

In statistical terms, more than half the population in South Sudan is facing severe hunger right now. The conflict has devastated educational infrastructure in South Sudan. Almost 1.2 million children aged between three and 18 have lost access to education because of conflict and displacement. Almost a third of schools have suffered attacks. The destruction of educational opportunities is trapping South Sudanese kids in inescapable cycles of poverty. An adolescent girl in South Sudan right now is three times more likely to die in childbirth than to complete primary school.

As ever in stories of conflict, women and children pay the highest price. A recent study from the International Rescue Committee and the Global Women’s Institute at Georgetown University revealed that more than 65% of women and girls have experienced some form of gender-based violence. That is double the global average. The UN has found

“massive use of rape as an instrument of terror”.

Amnesty International has reported sexual violence as “rampant”. Those abuses are perpetrated not solely by fighters from the army or rebel groups, but by UN peacekeepers and sadly, on some occasions, by aid workers too. For women in places such as South Sudan, there are few safe places left. It is no surprise that a report from Plan International last week revealed that one in four South Sudanese women has considered suicide.

South Sudan also holds the grim title of the most dangerous place in the world to be an aid worker, as the hon. Member for Stirling (Stephen Kerr) pointed out. While delivering life-saving assistance to 5.4 million people in South Sudan in 2017, 30 aid workers were killed. Their work is routinely obstructed by both Government and opposition. Aid workers are intimidated, supplies are looted and arbitrary fines are applied to those seeking to travel around the country.

Through those statistics, we glimpse the horrors facing South Sudanese people, but I want to tell the story of a woman who lived in Malow village in the north-west of the country, as reported by the UN Human Rights Commission earlier this year. When the army of the Government of South Sudan arrived in Malow in July 2017 it destroyed the schools, the water points, the local hospital and even the local church. It abducted local aid workers and destroyed humanitarian compounds. The village had seen women with their eyes gouged out by soldiers as they sought to protect their children and mutilated men lying in the mud. This woman watched as her husband was castrated in front of her, trying to shield her new-born child from the violence. Three Government soldiers then raped her 70-year-old mother and forced her 12-year-old son to have sex with his grandmother at gunpoint. This is a truly horrific, true tale. The soldiers later shot her mother, and the new-born child and her husband would later die from their injuries. The report makes for very grim reading as it details countless tales of brutal violence from all parties to this conflict, inflicted on innocent civilians.

The violence led the Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan to draw some stark conclusions, of which two stood out for me. The first stated:

“Rape, mutilations of sexual organs and other forms of sexual violence, targeting girls, boys, women and men, are often committed in front of children”.

The second stated that all parties to the conflict are

“deliberately targeting civilians on the basis of their ethnic identity…Those acts constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

The South Sudanese people know better than anyone that the only sustainable route to preventing human rights abuses and providing security and prosperity is through peace.

I will now turn to the ongoing peace process, which the hon. Member for Henley gave us some encouragement about earlier, before asking the Minister a few questions about where we go from here. I acknowledge the commitment and skill of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s South Sudan unit, which is ably led by the UK special envoy Chris Trott. It faces an incredibly difficult task, but the UK is rightly at the forefront of the international effort to promote an inclusive peace in South Sudan. The Intergovernmental Authority on Development, which is made up of regional Government representatives, has convened the high-level revitalisation forum in Addis Ababa since June 2017. Last month, the last round of those peace talks achieved little, with no sign of an agreement.

The cessation of hostilities agreement, which was signed in December 2017, has been repeatedly violated by all sides, and the monitoring mechanism that was set up to find and punish spoilers has failed to do so. As it stands, leaders on all sides of the conflict have refused to make the compromises necessary to make peace in South Sudan, but hopefully, if they say they will make it different, they will follow through with those promises, otherwise those promises have no value to the South Sudanese people.

Faced with this truly desperate situation, I would be grateful if the Minister would respond to the following questions. First, following the breakdown of peace talks in Addis Ababa last week, what concrete steps will the UK Government take to punish the spoilers through sanctions, arms embargoes and other measures?