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Debate on the Address

My Lords, in yesterday’s gracious Speech, I confess that I had my ears cocked for one word in particular—Africa—but cocked in vain, as it turned out. The nearest that the gracious Speech took us was Uganda, and that only in the context of the CHOGM later this month, although I was glad to see that there was a mention of global poverty and the millennium development goals. Where has gone the front-line commitment—the concentration of the last Prime Minister and the present one when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer—on the Commission for Africa? It has gone to a thing called the Africa Partnership Forum, whose latest report the Government have not thought worth bringing to Parliament, nor, I think, any of its previous reports. Its latest report studiously avoids attention to any of the most difficult places in Africa, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is to that country that I want to give attention. It is a truism that peace and security in the DRC are a prime key to peace and security in the eight or nine countries that surround that huge entity—it is larger than western Europe—in the middle of central Africa. Later, I want to attend particularly to the relationships between Congo and the countries down 800 or so kilometres of its eastern side—moving from north to south, they are Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. However, it is worth noting that that relationship is at the moment poisonous to the north. Kony, the leader of the LRA, is almost certainly holed up in areas of northern Congo impenetrable to law and order. He has been rearmed and revictualled, virtually certainly by Sudan as part of its effort to destabilise northern Uganda and places south. On Monday last week we had the benefit of hearing, through a Question asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, about northern Uganda shortly after her return from that country. The House was then able to give attention to the difficult questions of the ICC charges against Kony and some of his lieutenants, and that strong sense in northern Uganda that peace must take preference over the ICC process, which to many there is foreign, distant and inadequate beside their local, indigenous judicial accountabilities. It is a sign of the complexity of the situation that, however much that argument has power regarding northern Uganda and peace there, the situation in the DRC is almost the other way round. Human rights abuses and impunity from them, and an ending of that impunity, are a prime question in the DRC. In the DRC, it is good news that only two people of what must be dozens who might be candidates are in The Hague charged with human rights offences. Without the security sector reforms urgently necessary in Congo, the place is very little better—if any—than it was before the elections and the processes of last year. There is a crying need for the accountability of the justice and police systems to be worked at and, if security sector reform is not given priority, there will be no peace and security within Congo or along and across its borders, no containing of pillage of mineral resources, and no working at good relationships with the countries of the Great Lakes region. Many of the issues of ethnic tension are intertwined, and the matter is of deepest urgency. After four years of transition and a year after the election of President Kabila—itself a remarkable achievement, remarkably supported by this country and the EU—an indescribable amount still needs to be done. In many places even where there is peace and security, it is—as I was told by everyone I met in Bunia in late April, whether in English or French—fragile, and very fragile indeed. About one leg of the security sector reform—the establishing of a working, honest, independent judicial system, of accountable police, military, intelligence and prison services, and of the beginning of an end to impunity—the title of a recently published Amnesty International report says it all: Democratic Republic of Congo—Torture and Killings by State Security Agents Still Endemic. That report maps in horrifying detail a story familiar to many of us, not least those of us who have been trying to persuade the Home Office that it dare not deport people, whatever their asylum status, to the DRC. Critical too is progress towards the creation of a reliable, trained—including training in human rights—national army and police, whose pay, food and equipment are not constantly siphoned off to senior officers, with the effect that the FARDC is just as much a threat to local people in most places where it is present as are the militias and bandits whom it exists to combat. That huge task leads naturally into the current tragedy for hundreds of thousands of Congolese—the resurgence of war these last years in eastern Congo, specifically in Nord-Kivu. That is vividly documented in two excellent reports published in the past few weeks by Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group. There in Nord-Kivu are all the terribly familiar ingredients of the recent history of the DRC, in the war at the heart of which are the Tutsi-favouring and Tutsi-defending forces and the political party led by General Nkunda. It would be interesting if the Minister could tell us by whom that war is being funded, because it would be good to get to the bottom of the matter. There is military action involving a shifting range of actors and alliances of all sorts, but the forces of the Governments of Rwanda, Uganda and of the United Nations are among them. There is widespread and horrific abuse of civilians, including women and children—and there are large numbers of child soldiers. Some 400,000 people have been displaced in camps and in the bush. At the war’s heart is the generational mutual fear and suspicion of Hutu and Tutsi; the effects are evident on land use and the struggle for the control of the vast mineral resources. All of that demonstrates the inability of the national Government to exert convincing control of the east and evidences the weaknesses of the UN and its forces, in admittedly difficult circumstances. I have a number of questions for the Minister. In particular, what are the UK Government doing as regards its colleagues in the EU and in the P3 plus 2 in response to all this? What are they seeking to support? What contribution are we making now to security sector reform, to land distribution reform in the context of demobilisation and resettlement, to the control of mineral resources and to the vetting of contracts? How careful is DfID regarding the human rights records of companies with which it is entering into partnerships? What proportion of DfID’s activities is with local NGOs and sociétés civile? Why is DfID so unwilling in the Great Lakes and more widely to funnel aid through church-based organisations? How do the Government view the contemporary scramble for Africa by China and a range of Islamic states? In the face of talk of the withdrawal of MONUC in 2009, are the Government arguing that nothing of the sort must be done until social security sector reform is vastly further down the road? I have two last questions. What training for our Armed Forces is being offered as a contribution to civilian protection? On page 47 of the IPPR’s Safeguarding Civilians, there is an interesting series of paragraphs asking that crucial question. I would be interested to hear the Minister’s response to a question put to me separately on successive days in April in Burundi by two thoughtful Burundian Christian leaders. They said: ““We would really be interested to know who is running the Great Lakes region””.