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Democratic Republic of Congo

I congratulate the hon. Member for Falkirk (Mr. Joyce) both on his excellent speech, which I wholeheartedly endorse, and on the excellent way in which he chairs the all-party group. I, too, was a member of the group that went to the DRC. I should also like to add to his praise for the work done by Oona King, the former hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow. The fact that in 2003 the DRC did not feature at all in the top 10 recipients of UK aid but by 2004 was the second biggest recipient after India shows the success of Oona King's work in setting up the group and raising the profile of a part of the world whose profile certainly needs to be raised. Africa, for all its vibrancy, sometimes seems to prove the inverse of the saying, ““The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.”” One could say that in Africa the grass is always browner on the other side of the fence, because wherever one goes and whatever appalling poverty one finds, there always seems to be somewhere even worse off. One goes to a Nairobi slum, where children with HIV eat charcoal because they are so hungry, and one wonders what could be worse. Then one goes to the DRC. There, despite the street children, the begging and the hunger, security is so bad that poverty alleviation is barely on the agenda. People simply do not have the luxury of worrying about starving: they face the even more immediate danger of being raped or murdered as they sleep in their beds at night. On the all-party parliamentary group trip, we met villagers who slept in the tea plantations at night, terrified that if they slept under their own roof they would be attacked as they slept. In visiting Panzi hospital, to which the hon. Member for Falkirk referred, we visited what is perhaps the world's only specialist rape hospital, where hundreds of women wait for operations because of rapes that are often so bad that multiple operations are needed. I met a woman who witnessed militia kill her five children and husband and put their bodies into sacks. She was then raped by three men. I heard of a 22-year-old woman who was raped by seven soldiers, after which a gun was fired into her genitals. Remarkably she survived, although she needed six operations. Now, amazingly, she wants to become a nurse. With no justice system to speak of, rape in the DRC can barely be called a crime. It is more a weapon of mass destruction. It is the means by which militia know that they can destroy a village: if they rape the women, they destroy the slender fabric on which some of the poorest and most fragile communities in the world depend. The lesson of this terrible madness is simple. There can be no poverty alleviation without security, no AIDS drugs without security, no agricultural development without security and no democracy without security. But there is no security. The army, whose soldiers are supposed to be paid a meagre $10 a month, remains unpaid. The salaries are issued by the central bank and then lost in a giant river of corruption that has as many tributaries as the River Congo. Government soldiers therefore end up practising the rape and extortion that they are supposed to be stamping out. For example, four senior officers are currently being sought for various offences, including a lieutenant colonel who is being sought for the rape of a 14-year-old girl. The army is refusing to hand the officers over—[Interruption.]