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Debate on the Address

My Lords, I infinitely prefer the approach of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, to that of the noble Lord on his Front Bench. I have listened with great interest to his comments on China, particularly with regard to its growing influence on the international scene. He said it had already been instrumental in arriving at a solution to the North Korean nuclear problem and was being increasingly helpful in other areas of the world; he cited Burma and Darfur. I hope the changes in Chinese policy that he examined will extend to other parts of the world, particularly Zimbabwe, with which China has always had a close relationship. That relationship is increasingly intimate but does not include the exercise of China’s political influence on that dictatorship. As the gracious Speech reminds us, in two weeks the Commonwealth Heads of Government will be meeting in Kampala and they will need to formulate a collective response to the crisis in Pakistan, which, as the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, said, is a source of huge anxiety worldwide. With the constitution suspended, martial law in force, the free media silenced and thousands of people detained, including two-thirds of the supreme court, lawyers, democrats and human rights activists, CMAG is holding an extraordinary meeting here in London next Tuesday. If Musharraf is still defying the call, made by the Foreign Secretary and others, to restore the constitution and the rule of law, CMAG should recommend that the CHOGM suspend Pakistan from membership of the Commonwealth. There should also be a Commonwealth travel ban on Musharraf and his collaborators, and both military and development aid should be suspended. Domestically the auto-putsch and the emasculation of civil society will encourage the extremism and terrorism Musharraf said it was intended to counter and make it even harder to restore peace and stability in neighbouring Afghanistan. The utmost pressure must be brought to bear on him to hand over the reins of government to the president of the Senate, as provided by the constitution, and to hold an election within 90 days. Africa is not mentioned in the gracious Speech, and the Government seem to have forgotten the commitment of Mr Blair’s Commission for Africa, billed two years ago as ““Changing a continent, saving the world””. Aid was to have increased by $25 billion, with improvements in the governance of receiving countries. But there was no plan to follow up the ambitious goals, or to sustain the momentum created by the UK’s presidency of the G8. The target date of 2015 for the millennium development goals is approaching and Africa is faltering. My noble friend Lady Northover paraphrased the UN Secretary-General when she said that Africa is lagging behind the rest of the developing world. The proportion living on less than a dollar a day, the under-five mortality rate, the proportion living with HIV, the number lacking basic sanitation and the urban population living in slum conditions are worse in sub-Saharan Africa than in any other region of the world, and the goals will not be realised at the present rates of progress. The commission examined some of the manmade hindrances to development but was silent on population growth, which is the biggest of the lot. In many parts of the Sahel, the land cultivated per head has declined by half over the past 25 years, with a growing landless workforce migrating to the slums or to neighbouring Nigeria or the Middle East. Escalating oil and gas prices, climate change and the switch to biofuels are already leading to a global food crisis, and the pressure from population growth has the combined effect of increasing demand and reducing supply, with loss of soil fertility, reduction of crop yields and extended desertification. It was good to see that access to reproductive and sexual health services, including contraceptive advice and services, has been added to the millennium development goals. How will the Government implement that goal, starting from such a late point in the MDG cycle? Armed conflict is a second brake on development. The UN Peacebuilding Commission has a much narrower remit than was envisaged, and has no part to play, for instance, in the stalemated dispute between Eritrea and Ethiopia. There is no real pressure on Meles Zenawi, who was a member of Mr Blair’s team, to comply with the recommendations of the Boundary Commission which both parties had agreed beforehand to accept without reservation. Instead, Ethiopia has found spurious excuses for refusing to comply, and now that the commission is about to dissolve at the end of this month, the war could start again. What are we, as friends of Mr Zenawi, doing to get him to honour his undertakings? Many of the conflicts in Africa have been fuelled by the competition for resources. Unfortunately, the UN panel on the illegal exploitation of resources was wound up four years ago and the evidence that it uncovered has never been pursued. The Blair commission recommended a permanent body to monitor the trade in conflict resources and ensure that sanctions on them are enforced. Why have the Government not taken up that proposal with the Security Council? Where does the wanted war criminal, Laurent Nkunda, obtain the resources to pin down 20,000 government troops in eastern DRC, causing the internal displacement of 700,000 people, and tens of thousands to flee into Uganda? The Government earned only a paltry $23 million from mining royalties last year and are aiming to cancel or renegotiate some concessions that were the subject of allegations by the expert panel. Is DfID giving them technical help in getting a better share of their own mineral wealth? In Sudan, failure to reach agreement on control of oil-rich Abyei contributes to the fragility of the comprehensive peace agreement between north and south, and the withdrawal from the south of the Government of national unity. The UNMIS mandate had to be extended to the end of October 2008 at a cost of $850 million. It is only one of eight UN peacekeeping operations in Africa, which will cost more than $4 billion in 2008. The conflicts destroy even huger economic and human potential. The Blair commission said the international community should invest in the continent’s own early warning, mediation and peacekeeping capacity, yet the AU has neither the resources nor the expertise to contribute effectively to those objectives. It did not protect 200,000 victims of the genocide in Darfur, or even its own soldiers who were murdered at Haskanita. I hope that it will be possible to bring the war criminals of Darfur to justice, but the best memorial to the victims would be to endow the African Union with the power and the ability to stop mass murders and genocides on African soil.