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Democratic Republic of Congo (Development)

I am pleased that we are having this debate. I wanted a debate on the Congo, and the question was whether the Department for International Development or the Foreign Office would reply to it. In reality the issue is coterminous, because we wish to examine the problems of poverty in the Congo and developments there and how this country and others can assist. I have just returned from the Congo, where I was part of a delegation including my hon. Friends the Members for Falkirk (Mr. Joyce) and for Amber Valley (Judy Mallaber). The trip was funded by a combination of the Catholic Fund for Overseas Development, International Alert and Christian Aid. That is my declaration of interest. We are grateful to Stephen Carter, the secretary of the all-party group on the great lakes region and genocide prevention, who accompanied us and stayed on afterwards to visit some courts and observe some justice processes. He was extremely helpful in organising the visit and ensuring that we had a packed programme. I also wish to put on record our thanks to our ambassador in Kinshasa, Nick Kay, who was extremely helpful in arranging a lot of things at short notice and giving us a full briefing, and to the DFID representative there, Phil Marker, who was equally helpful and very supportive of our delegation. I have the pleasure of representing a constituency that includes a Congolese community, many of whom have been in this country for a long time and are victims of the history of the Congo. I find it constantly depressing that one of the world's greatest current conflicts is largely ignored by the world's media, as are the good works done by many people in the Congo who are trying to bring about significant improvements and changes. There is not time to go into the country's history today, but we should be aware that Leopold's rule in the Congo was among the most brutal anywhere on the face of the earth. It was a wholly extractive and acquisitive rule, intended simply to take out the natural resources. Such infrastructure as King Leopold and the Belgians developed was solely related to the extraction of the riches of the Congo. It was nothing to do with the internal development of that country. Sadly, that pattern has continued for a long time. With the new hope for a long-term period of peace, one hopes that the Congo's resources will be developed for the benefit of its people rather than to be exported to the nearest coast and off to the rest of the world. However, we are quite a long way from that. On independence, the country did not achieve the peace and concord that was due it. There was interference from outside and then a long period of Mobutu's dictatorship, which was finally ended with the current elected Government. I shall return to that later, because it is important that we all support the development of a democratic process, accountable administration and an independent judiciary. Our delegation came into the country through Rwanda and went first to Goma, in the east. It is difficult to comprehend from the outside just how devastating the war has been in the east of the country. In the past 10 years, 5.4 million people have been killed in the conflict there, which is far more than have died in Iraq and Afghanistan combined or in almost any other war in the same period. It is the biggest death toll by armed conflict anywhere in the world in the recent past. First world war proportions of death and destruction have been visited upon the people of the east of the Congo. As ever, the victims of war are the poor, children, women and civilians. Half of all those who have died in the conflict are children. During our visit, we met a number of organisations that are doing their best to support people and help them get through the terrible process. One must understand what Goma is like as a town. It is potentially beautiful; it is on the east, next to the lake, and contains the remains of what I suspect are the holiday homes of various wealthy Belgians from the colonial period. Yet the streets are potholed, the administration is shaky at best, there are large numbers of refugee camps all over the town, there is constant traffic chaos and there are destroyed and blown-up buildings. In the midst of that, luxury hotels are in use and various fairly luxurious office blocks have been constructed. Goma is to some extent a frontier town, in which the civil war is being played out. At the same time, large quantities of minerals, particularly coltan but other precious metals as well, are being exported through Goma and either being flown from there or going directly through Rwanda. There is a sense of lawlessness about the place. While we were there, there was a plane crash in which more than 80 people died. It was a wholly preventable accident. The runway has a lava flow across it from the volcanic eruption three years ago, and nobody has got around to removing it. Planes therefore have to take off using half the runway. As I understand it, the plane was unlicensed for that runway. It tried to take off, burst a tyre, was probably overloaded and ploughed into a lot of very poor houses alongside the airport. The local hospitals had great difficulty in coping, and but for the presence of an Indian United Nations force nearby, the death toll would have been far higher. One should pay tribute to the Indian army for what they did to save lives. I found it depressing that we all immediately got calls from various media sources in this country to ask our views, what had happened and so on. Although they never said it, the subliminal questions from the news media were, ““How many westerners were involved? How many tourists were involved? How many international business men were involved in the death toll?”” It turned out that the answer was zero to all three. I checked the news media carefully when I came back, and the story had disappeared unaccountably from the media. That shows a quite disgusting sense of news values. If a light plane overshoots a runway in Florida, the world knows about it the next day. If 80 people die in a plane crash in the Congo, it is just one of those things that are ignored. I appeal to people in the media to have some sense of humanitarian values in their reporting of things. As soon as we arrived, my hon. Friend the Member for Falkirk and myself went to a women's centre, where we spent some time talking to women who were victims of violence in the war. Rape is a weapon of war in the Congo and those women had been brutally treated. They had been raped and injured severely, and many were disabled as a result. They were frightened to go out of the centre and were in a parlous and desperate situation. They treated us extremely well, but unless there is a legal process that means that legal judgment will take place against people who have committed rape and sexual violence, it will continue and probably get worse. Although I pay the greatest tribute to ActionAid and the other groups that are doing a great deal to support such women's organisations and centres, a great deal more needs to be done. We raised the matter with representatives of the armed groups when we met them. We also went to Mugunga II, a very large refugee camp which mainly contained women and children while we were there. There were large numbers of people living in tiny bender tents with a UN tarpaulin covering a few sticks, and food was brought in by the UN every day. They were doing their best to provide some degree of education for the children there. Within the camp, there was also some degree of medical support and some degree of activities to encourage people to keep their lives and families together. There is a difficult decision that must be made by anybody that is operating refugee camps. Goma is probably one of the most fertile places in the world: it has very high rainfall, a very warm climate and fantastically fertile volcanic soil. It is possible to grow anything there very quickly. I am told that tomatoes come up in six weeks and any of us who have tried gardening in Britain will find that amazing. However, none of the people in the refugee camp are allowed to grow any food there, because those running the camp do not want to encourage people to stay in the camp for ever more. So there seemed to be something slightly bizarre and absurd about a UN truck arriving with rice and maize from the United States to feed people in the most fertile place in the world. The lack of security, the instability and the fear of returning to the villages are the factors that have led us to this crazy and completely illogical situation. So we must look seriously at the whole peace process and what is happening in the east of the country. While we were there in the east, we met all the non-governmental organisations, and representatives of the European Union, United States Agency for International Development, the United Nations and, of course, DFID and the Foreign Office. We also met representatives of a lot of Congolese NGOs and they were very impressive people. We also had a very long meeting with two of the armed groups that are currently on ceasefire following the Nairobi and Goma accords: the Mai Mai group, who are dealing with north and south Kivu, and the Congress for the Defence of the People, or CNDP. We had a meeting with both the groups, then they divided and we spent some hours talking to them separately. At one level, everything that they were saying was logical, political and well-put, demands were made and so on. We then raised various questions with the armed groups: their use of violence; their treatment of women; their use of child soldiers; their arms; their equipment; their money and where it comes from, and how serious they were about a long-term peace process. We are not the interlocutors who will bring about peace; we were there as a visiting parliamentary delegation. However, we obviously did our best to urge that a peace process should go forward. Having said that, if we do not seize this opportunity that is there now, following Nairobi and Goma and the ceasefire that is more or less holding at the present time, goodness knows what will happen in a year or two, further down the road. In the east of the Congo, there are riches, potentially a lot of money and also an awful lot of weaponry, including guns. At the same time, only half the children—maybe even less—manage to go to school and the health service really does not exist for most people there. The prize for the people in the east of the Congo of a lasting ceasefire and a meaningful peace process is a very great one indeed, but it requires the co-operation of all the neighbouring countries, disarmament and, I believe, a continuation of an arms embargo on the country. As I have said, the issues of justice, recognition and treatment of women are very important. As this is a debate about development, it is also important to recognise what help, support and assistance we can give. I pay tribute to the DFID aid package—we spent a long time talking to DFID representatives in the country—and to the other support that has been given by Britain. I am also looking forward to reading Lord Mance's report. Lord Mance has been to the Congo on an extended mission to look particularly at the treatment of women and the justice process that is going on there. Apparently, he is due to produce a report in July and that is very welcome; all the people that we met in the Congo were certainly very welcoming of his visit. We then went to Kinshasa and had meetings with representatives of the National Assembly, the Senate and various Government Departments, as well as with representatives of many NGOs. All of us in our group had been to the Congo previously as election observers and we had watched the election process. Personally, I have no great criticisms of the voting process itself that I observed during the election, but I have concerns that an election campaign that was dominated by the very great wealth of two of the candidates and a lack of any kind of robust political debate will not necessarily bring about a very strong democratic result. The reality is that the Congo is potentially a very rich place indeed, but it lacks the necessary political infrastructures to control the mining companies, the logging companies or anyone else. It is a question of building the capacity for the democratic involvement of the people; that process was a very important part of what we were looking at in the Congo and hopefully we will be looking at it in the future. However, unless we move some way down the road of the peace process, we will not get very far in building up that democratic involvement. Before I conclude, I will look at some of the issues that are facing the country as a whole. First, although I have already said quite a lot about the peace process, it is essential that everyone recognises that, if they want to see the wealth of the Congo being used for the benefit of the people of the Congo, alongside peace and development in the entire region, supporting the ceasefire is important but so is supporting the development of democratic institutions. That means that where people have been demobilised from any particular armed group, the provision of some degree of financial support for demobilised fighters to return to their village and have something to do there is very important, as has been done in Burundi and Rwanda. I think that my hon. Friend the Member for Falkirk will talk to some extent about security sector reform. Clearly, however, a very large Congolese army that is mainly unpaid but universally equipped with some type of gun should not be disbanded willy-nilly; instead, the members of that army should be given some incentive to resume normal civilian life. The experience of Iraq, where the whole army was disbanded without much thought for the future, has been pretty disastrous and I would not want to see the same thing repeated in the Congo. However, it is important to look at this issue of security sector reform.