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Democratic Republic of Congo

: I thank my hon. Friend for that useful question. Before we left for the DRC we had a briefing about the demobilisation and demilitarisation. In general, a series of armies travel with their women, children and families. They are sometimes transported thousands of miles to be demilitarised in one place and are then put back into a brigade in another place. I am unsure about the situation of children being demilitarised and demobilised, and I shall be interested to hear what he finds out. There is a problem of women sometimes being left thousands of miles away from their partners and ending up in new camps. We visited camp Saio in Bukavu. It is not like a military camp as we in the west would imagine one; there are bunches of chickens hanging around and cabbages growing, because people have no food or money. They live on $10 a month if they are lucky—if they receive it. While their men are away being demobilised those women and children have no money on which to survive. There are problems with the men and their families in the demobilisation campaign and the payment of their wages. As the hon. Member for South-West Surrey said, it is clear that the money simply is not getting through. One in five children in the DRC will die before their fifth birthday. We visited a Batwa pygmy village, where the children looked like they had chicken pox because they had so many spots on their heads. I asked what was wrong with one of the babies and the interpreter told me that I was looking at mosquito bites. The babies had so many bites because the mothers were sleeping out with them under the tea plantations every night, as the hon. Gentleman mentioned. We cannot imagine what it must be like to sleep in the rain with a tiny baby. Development or progress will happen only when such children and their parents have the security to sleep in their beds, when we can provide them with bed nets and when they can receive the education that they so desperately want. We visited Mbuji-Mayi in Katanga province, where three years ago it was estimated that 5,000 children were living on the streets. People are currently trying to ascertain how many street children there are in Mbuji-Mayi itself. Some 80 per cent. of them have been accused of witchcraft. We visited a centre run by Save the Children, which aims to reunite those children with their families, and to give them a roof over their heads, something to eat and somewhere to wash. Our first sight on arriving at the centre was of 40 naked boys. I took a picture, which I probably would not have been permitted to do had I been in the UK. It was one of the few moments of light relief—all these naughty boys squirting each other and dancing around for us in the puddles. It is important to put the accusations of witchcraft into the social and economic context in which they occur. There is no slack in families any more, because of the years of disruption caused by the war and the poverty of families. People are unable to feed the children. Some children have been tortured in order to be exorcised; they suffer all sorts of violence. We heard one story of a 16-year-old girl who was beaten to death by her father for being a witch. I was impressed by some of the leaflets that have been produced—I have copies, should colleagues like to look at them—which try to educate the local population that every family can suffer bad luck and unemployment and that a child who sleepwalks or who has epilepsy is a normal child, not a witch. I conclude with a few remarks about the hopes for the DRC. We all hope that the elections scheduled for early July will represent a new dawn, but they are unlikely to be either elegant or flawless. I hope that they will be good enough to convince the DRC's citizens and the international donors that the first step on the path to a better future has been taken. I want the UK Government to play an active political role in the great lakes region to ensure the repatriation of armed foreign groups, whether we are talking about the Lord's Resistance Army or Interahamwe. We also have a role to play in Kinshasa in ensuring better aid co-ordination between the many countries that offer goodwill and are working there to improve people's lives. Like the hon. Gentleman, I want the UN to remain in the DRC to provide long-term protection for the civilian population. We should extend the UN's mandate to training the FARDC, which is currently being done informally. I want it put on a formal footing. In addition, as the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) said, an international small arms treaty to end the traffic in small arms is vital. I want our Government to work with that of the DRC to end the culture of violence with impunity, to instigate rape laws to punish those who currently engage in sexual violence with complete impunity, and to work on the better management of resource exploitation through the mining code, the forestry code and western companies. The DRC needs to abolish the death penalty to give some comfort to the people who have committed such atrocities that they will at least be guaranteed the right to life. The new Government need to think carefully about the quick wins that they will have. I look forward to working with politicians in all parts of the House to ensure that the DRC is at the heart of all our parties' political policy development over the next 20 years, rather than just over the next 10 or five. I look forward to working with civil society and the Churches in the DRC to provide basic services and ensure that people can sleep in their beds at night.