Sudan and South Sudan

Pauline Latham Excerpts

Tuesday 18th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) on securing the debate, as well as my hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester (Stephen Mosley). South Sudan and Sudan are very important areas in Africa and when South Sudan seceded from Sudan in 2011, the hopes of the world were there. Everybody thought it would work, albeit with many difficulties, including having to build a nation from scratch. Unfortunately, they are in a desperate situation. I visited the region with the Select Committee on International Development and our report shows a lot of the problems that there are.

As my hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester said, one cannot get about in South Sudan. One has to fly from one place to another, which is fine for us westerners going in, but impossible for the local population. There are about 15 km of made-up road in the whole country, which makes nonsense of local people trying to get anywhere.

So many people have been sent back from Khartoum even though they have lived there for generations. Because their origins are in South Sudan, they have been told that they are South Sudanese and they must return to their own country. However, the people who came from Khartoum and the surrounding areas spoke only Arabic. They may be well qualified—for example, as doctors or engineers. They had a wealth of western-style qualifications, but when they got back to South Sudan—they had never been there, neither had their parents or, in some cases, their grandparents, but they were classified as South Sudanese—they could not converse with the local people, who speak English as well as their own local language. So there was no way that those people, who were well qualified, could get jobs.

Those arriving in South Sudan had no homes to go to. They were put into camps, where there were no latrines. In the camp that we visited, there was open defecation, which is appalling, given that the area that we went to is often flooded. All the open defecation would then flood through the camp. The worry for the mothers of the children—some of the children had travelled with them and some had been born in the camp since they arrived—was that as there were no latrines, they had to go out quite a long way from the camp to be able to go to the toilet, which meant that they were frightened for their safety.

We, the UN and all the international agencies have a responsibility, when building camps, to provide latrines where children and women in particular can feel safe to go. None of that has happened in South Sudan. It must happen there and everywhere that camps are built; otherwise there will be rape and violence against women, girls and children, which is totally unacceptable.

There was no education going on for the people who had come back, so they could not even learn the local languages. They had no jobs to go to. Some of the people we met had been in the camp for nine months and had not even seen a doctor. One girl I spoke to had some form of chest infection. She was coughing badly, but she had had no access to any medical professional of any sort since she had been there. She had caught the chest infection or whatever it was on the march back, because the people had had to walk much of the way back to South Sudan. I keep saying “back” but of course it is not their home: they were born and brought up in Khartoum, but they had had to go to their place of origin.

It seemed to me that these people were being totally disadvantaged because the Sudanese Government had said, “We want everybody out.” It is still happening. We saw areas where the troops were and where there had been problems. We had to be very careful. The civil war that has been going on for generations in what had originally been Sudan has not stopped. We have heard today that there is no cessation to the civil war.

The humanitarian and development challenges in South Sudan remain and will continue for some time to come. We went there last year, but this year there are still people stranded at railway stations. Some 40,000 people remain stranded in open areas around Khartoum because they cannot get to South Sudan. A further 3,500 people have been stranded at Kosti railway station in White Nile state for more than 15 months. GDP is rising in other African countries by between 5% and 7%, but here it is bound to go down when such numbers cannot contribute to the country’s economic well-being.

[James Duddridge (Rochford and Southend East) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is a great advocate for international development. Far too often these trips are talked down, but clearly it is incredibly valuable to go there and speak from the heart and about the reality of what has happened. Much to my shame, I have not read the detail of the report. I would be interested in an analysis of its recommendations and to what degree the Government have already been able to respond and take action.

--- Later in debate ---

[Pauline Latham]

The Government are doing a lot of hard work and are working on the report’s recommendations. I do not have the report with me so I cannot go into the detail of each individual recommendation, but the coalition Government are working hard to alleviate the problems in South Sudan, and DFID is doing a lot of work in the Blue Nile area and South Kordofan. DFID is doing a huge amount of work with women and girls to make their lives much better. DFID is keen to promote the well-being and safety of women and girls, which have not been priorities for the Sudanese and South Sudanese Governments. The previous Secretary of State for International Development sent a huge number of textbooks to the schools, but when we returned from South Sudan we met its Education Minister, who said that it was great to get the textbooks, but it does not have the buildings or teachers to put them to use. Not just the children but the adults coming from the north into South Sudan need education so that they can get jobs and be economically active. Often they are skilled people, having lived a western lifestyle, but they cannot function if they cannot speak the language. As we all know, the older one gets, the longer it takes to learn a language, although being immersed in it makes it much easier.

I strongly believe that South Sudan could still be a success if the fighting stopped. I do not believe that the UN is doing as good a job as it could. It could work much harder to reduce the conflict and to work with the people in the area to make sure that they are safe and feel safe. It is important that the oil flow continues, because with the oil will come prosperity. Both the north and the south can be prosperous. They need that income to be able to build South Sudan, which is a beautiful country and needs investment for people to survive. It needs roads, schools, and hospitals and medical care. The standard of the very few there are is very poor. The north of the country, as it was when it was united, has starved South Sudan of resources. In Khartoum and in the north it is great, but in the south no one has anything. Our Government are working hard to help and mediation work is going on, but we need to ensure that the south can build and renew itself and become a proper functioning country. Until then, and until the violence and war end, it will never succeed. It could succeed, but we will need to work very hard to provide all those services. Our Government are providing a lot, as are other Governments, but that needs to continue for some time to come.