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EU Committee: EU and Africa

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, for initiating this debate on a clearly important report. I shall also talk about Zimbabwe, in particular the EU sanctions agreed in 2002 against Zimbabwean officials and Government personnel, and precluding personal and official travel in and from that country. It has long been a concern of mine, which I have raised in previous debates. I am grateful for a letter from the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, in answer to a question, in which he unequivocally says that we will push for the targeted measures to be maintained. That is a great relief. In 2003 I was working with an organisation called the REDRESS Trust, an anti-torture organisation. Mr Henry Dowa was a chief inspector at Harare Central Police Station, an accomplished and brutal torturer. We found out that he was a member of the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) working with CIVPOL, an organisation that trains policemen. He had clearly been sent there by President Mugabe as a reward for doing a good job. We unsuccessfully attempted to persuade the UK Government to arrest him, particularly since we thought it likely that he would be travelling back from Kosovo via London, either to go on leave or when his term of office came to an end. We tried to persuade the Government to arrest him for crimes against humanity, under the UN Convention against Torture, which imposes an obligation on states to act on such serious crimes, using the umbrella of universal jurisdiction or customary law. We had collected sworn affidavits from two of his victims, one a bona fide refugee in the UK—with all the rights that that implies—the other a dual British-Zimbabwean citizen. The Attorney-General’s Office wrote back to us and said that we were not dealing with British citizens, so they could not do anything about it—““Let it be””. I wrote to the UNMIK High Representative in Kosovo, Mr Steiner, pointing out the record and telling him about the sworn affidavits of Mr Dowa’s victims. Eventually, Mr Steiner wrote back that he was regrettably unable to act because he had scarce resources and, indeed, his job was really to seek out Serbian war criminals, not to arrest those who might have committed crimes against humanity—I am not quoting him exactly. I then wrote to the UN Secretary-General, which I thought appropriate at that stage, pointing out that the UN had a strong obligation to ensure that it did not enable torturous regimes to reward their own people with what is seen as quite a prize: being able to travel abroad and have tax-free allowances. Eventually, I got a reply from someone in the secretary-general’s office, who pointed out that Mr Dowa had returned to Zimbabwe. He had clearly been tipped off, and I suppose the only small gratification was that we had curtailed his tax-free allowances and stay in Kosovo. However, the UN Secretary-General’s office made it quite clear that they would insist upon a proper procedure to investigate the case, and that proper action should be taken. That is fine, and one would expect that to be said. As things are in Zimbabwe, however, that is a very vague and faint hope. Of course, nothing has happened since. It is now reliably reported that Mr Dowa is once again practising his brutal trade, and was implicated in the most recent torture of trade union officialsin Harare. No one did anything—not the UK Government, the UNMIK forces or the UN Secretary-General—and nothing really has happened since, except for a report by the REDRESS Trust, which records the following paragraph from the Herald, a Mugabe-supporting newspaper in Harare: "““We had to prematurely call back one officer from the contingent you are going to replace in Kosovo not for misconduct but because he had been subjected to stressful treatment after a group called REDRESS had falsely accused him of torturing suspects here at home. We are not in the habit of torturing people in this country and allegations are always made now and then””." I retell the story because there is a good case for sanctions not only to be maintained but possibly extended when the EU reviews them after five years, in February 2007. I ask the Government to see what they can do to persuade the EU to extend sanctions against officials and Government members by precluding recruitment to any EU peace or other mission and to make representation to the UN to ensure that it does likewise. If we are serious about getting a loud and clear message to Mr Mugabe, we must use what means are at our disposal. The noble Lord, Lord Hughes of Woodside, has already mentioned a potential EU/Africa summit. There is a great deal of discussion about it. I understand that at least two EU member states would be quite keen to have sanctions against Mugabe and any of his officials dropped so that the summit could take place in one of the EU member states—one of them is Portugal. I am very worried that it takes only one country to veto a decision on sanctions for them to be dropped. It might be possible for either one of those two countries, or indeed another country, to prevail upon the new accession states to veto the sanctions against Zimbabwe. That would mean that Mr Mugabe could once again strut the international stage, with the added honour, as it were, of having sanctions against his country and his officials dropped. That would be a great tragedy. It is important to conclude that we are not talking about trade agreements but about a regime which is murdering people day in day out, and in increasing numbers. Unless we can use the means at our disposal—in particular, now we are talking about sanctions—there is some question about how complicit we are in this kind of human rights abuse.