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Democratic Republic of the Congo

I agree absolutely, and I shall return to that. The prisoner in the case that the hon. Gentleman mentions has been adopted as an Amnesty prisoner of conscience and an early-day motion has been tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North, which has been signed by a number of us. We certainly hope that the Government will take up her case. I do not want us to try to run the DRC as it has been run by foreigners and others over the centuries, but at the same time we have a huge responsibility to keep on the backs of the elected politicians and to try to make them behave in a way that enables the processes to go forward. If we are to invest a great deal in the DRC, as we do—it is expected that a substantial proportion of its revenue will continue to come from international donors—those politicians have a responsibility to adopt good governance and human rights. Our Government have an important role to play in that. The declaration said that"““democratisation is a long process in which elections represent only a single step””," and that is absolutely right. The declaration is wonderful. It was read out in ringing French, and it does not read nearly so well when it is translated into English; the whole thing was rather magnificent. One of the speakers said that"““derailing the process of democratisation is untenable, it could disintegrate in to a situation where the country is ungovernable. It could be catastrophic.””" A number of issues were raised, from resource extraction to how food is dumped on the DRC, the international trade rules and what has happened to the agricultural industry, as well as a number of other issues that the group wanted us to promote. That was an important reason why I wanted the debate to promote the subject. My first question concerns the Government’s commitment to the DRC and my wish to ensure that we reassert the commitment to working in the Congo and with other countries around us. To illustrate some of the difficult issues, I want to talk about one of the most moving parts of our work. I talked about the Congo, that mighty river that has woven its way through the tragic history of the country. We are told that it could provide electricity for the electrification and industrialisation of the whole of Africa and also export some through a southern Mediterranean connector to southern Europe. We do not know what that will do for development and the environment of the Congo, but we do know that a large part of the population does not have access to safe drinking water or electricity. Those are the sort of contradictions that we face.