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Darfur Crisis

I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Susan Kramer). I shall come back to some of the points that she made. It was also good to hear the spokesman for the official Opposition, the hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr. Mitchell), who went to Darfur and, I am sure, learned a lot. I also want to say how much I appreciate the efforts of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State—I have been able to put that in print in the form of an early-day motion. He addressed the all-party group on Sudan just after he had got off the plane from the Darfur peace talks. I thought that he could not do any more, but he went off to northern Uganda and Somalia and returned to address us today. I do not know whether there is much more that one can say about his stamina, let alone his interest in these issues, with all the problems that they bring with them. It is easy to criticise some groups for the way in which they raise money and for some of the lobbying that they undertake. However, the all-party group on Sudan is a model for what it has tried to do in this place and beyond. I pay tribute to my predecessor, Hilton Dawson, who was a wonderful chairman and who went to Darfur with the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) and me. I also pay tribute to our current co-ordinator, Senait Petros, who keeps us wonderfully well informed of everything that is happening with Sudan, and to her predecessor, Sultana Begum. I do not want to speak for long because this will be a consensual debate, albeit we could disagree on what more could be done and what lessons could be learned. However, something that may not have come out as clearly as it should is that, although we have had to analyse and play our part in trying to resolve the recent crisis, many of the problems date back some considerable time. Anyone who has time to read the two recent books on Darfur by Flint and de Waal, who are well known commentators, and by Gérard Prunier, whom I have had the opportunity to meet—yes, I will put those books back in the Library shortly—will at least gain an understanding that these are, in some respects, age-old conflicts. I am talking about the question of who belongs to the Fur and who belongs to the Zaghawa. The Masalit is another tribe that is very dominant in Darfur. Sadly, tribal conflict goes back a long way. In many respects, this is where, as always, the British come in, because it was largely our decision that put Darfur in Sudan. We cannot escape that responsibility. With regard to what the hon. Member for Richmond Park said, I would not exaggerate and say that this is the first conflict for which global warming has been directly responsible, but it certainly contributed, in that the nomads have been driven south and have come into conflict with the pasturalists. In many respects, the conflict is about land—who has the land and who is keeping animals there. One should never underestimate the importance of animals. One lesson that the hon. Member for Buckingham and I learned was that, as much as seeing people starve to death is terribly difficult to come to terms with and when we see dead donkeys we think, ““Well, thank goodness they are not children””, the Darfurians would say, ““But those animals are our future.”” If people do not have a donkey to carry firewood back to the settlement, they have no future—they will die. Let me explain another fact from which we can never escape. As the hon. Lady mentioned, Sudan—that huge area that we call a country—has suffered from the problem of balkanisation for a considerable time. Many of the antecedents of the conflict came from the south; in the early days, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Sudan People’s Liberation Army had a lot of influence over the Sudan Liberation Army/Sudan Liberation Movement. Furthermore, the work of Mr. al-Turabi through the Justice and Equality Movement cannot be underestimated, given that it added to the belief of those in the Darfur area that they were getting less than those who had taken up arms in the south, and made them ask why they should not take up arms, as they could become beneficiaries by fighting in that conflict. The hon. Lady was right to mention east Sudan. I make no apology for asking that this time, please, the world must get ahead of the conflict, given that there is already evidence that it is happening on the ground. We have to prevent it from happening, not just pick up the pieces. It is vital that we look at what is happening in the east of the country and continue to support the comprehensive peace agreement in the south. Given that the eyes of the world have been on Darfur, the danger is that it is easy to say that that is where the aid and effort should go, but the south might begin to slip back into problems. We have reached a good stage. Six months ago, some of us would have despaired about whether there was ever going to be anything like a peace agreement. There will not really be peace be until we get it on the ground. However, Minni Minnawi’s faction has been willing to come formally into discussions via my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State’s good agencies and Robert Zoellick, through the Sudan Government. It is good that that has moved forward rather rapidly. However, as the hon. Lady said, there are still the other two factions—that of Abdel Wahed, and the Ibrahim faction of the Justice and Equality Movement. Both are still outside the process. One hopes that they will see the benefits that the Minni Minnawi faction gets—sooner rather than later—and that that will encourage them to lay down their arms. One of the challenges that has not been mentioned is who will disarm the Janjaweed. It is easy to cast aspersions. In an intervention on my right hon. Friend, I mentioned the role of Musa Hilal. In his eyes, the Janjaweed was not a tool of the Sudanese Government, although he was occasionally seen in a Government of Sudan army colonel’s uniform. He lectured us at length about his justification—that his people had for years been abused and shut out from the opportunities to share in the riches of the area, let alone the wider country. In recent times, it has been clear that some of the things going wrong on the ground have been not about political movements, or even about people feeling that they are justified in doing the things they do because of what has happened previously, but about sheer banditry. That is the difficulty with putting a force in on the ground. We need numbers because the operation is not only for peacekeeping, but policing. People have grown used to the fact that they take what they believe to be theirs—even if it is not theirs in any way, they still take it. The all-party group has built a relationship with the Sudan Organisation Against Torture, in the face of the most vicious attacks by the Government of Sudan, who demand that the British Government stop funding it. We have continued to fund it. It brings to our attention some of the worst aspects of depravity, whether they be the attacks on villages or the summary justice that is issued on the back of them, where the so-called ““perpetrators”” are arrested and all sorts of things happen. One can never cease to be amazed at the irony that we must get used to when dealing with the Sudan. In terms of the Darfur-to-Darfur dialogue and civil society, some of us found it difficult that the representative who was put before us as the best person to talk on behalf of civil society when we were dealing with the south-south dialogue was Mrs. Garang. She, of course, was the wife of John Garang. Some of us found it difficult to understand that we were dealing with civil society, because her husband was leading the SPLM. Likewise, the previous time that we were in Darfur, we heard a wonderful lecture by the Minister for human rights—at least, he called himself that—Ali Osman Taha’s brother. He said that the best thing to teach people about human rights was to indulge in Hudood—lopping people’s hands and legs off—because they then understood what human rights were all about. Irony is strong in the Sudan, and it is sometimes difficult to bring ourselves back to western values and understand how we approach the problem. As the hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield said, there is clearly an issue about the role of international non-governmental organisations. The worst offences against them are the delaying of visas and people making it difficult for them to operate on the ground. I hope that my right hon. Friend will say something about how we will engage with the Government of Sudan in particular, this time, so that we allow those organisations to operate freely and with a degree of effectiveness that has not been possible in the past. We are all aware that we do not know what has been happening in whole areas of Darfur, because the NGOs have not been able to get into them. They have had no protection, and that is as much to do with the Sudanese Government as it is to do with the rebels’ activities. The UN Security Council visit on 5 June to 9 June will presumably begin to examine how the UN can take over from the AU. I pay tribute to the AU. It can be much criticised about the things that have not gone as well as they might have done, but, as my right hon. Friend said, this is its first real test. It has performed as well as could be expected and in many respects better than that, but there is still a shortfall in manpower. There is also an issue about how the transference of power is to be managed: whether things go through NATO or directly to the UN. It is a bit worrying that, in a sense, as the transition occurs, people take their eyes off the ball. The last thing we want is the AU to start thinking it can withdraw troops because its job is over. In addition, those who have been funding it might think that they might as well start funding the UN or NATO as an interim agency. In reality, we must keep people doing the jobs that they are doing. We cannot allow a further vacuum to develop. That is an important consideration. The humanitarian situation is everything. I have talked about the human rights abuses. We sometimes grow use to them, but we must never ignore them, and they need to be highlighted. There is an idea about a donor conference; I gather it is being planned for September. It would be useful if my right hon. Friend tells us what is expected. We clearly need more money. How will that be organised? What is being sought? Are we seeking just money, money and food, or money, food and the means to be able to move to the UN mandate being properly delivered? Who else are we trying to bring on board? It would be wonderful if the Chinese could think outside their self-interested approach to the country and be brought on board as part of the resolution rather than as a large part the problem because of their specific role, as I said to the hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield.