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Democratic Republic of Congo

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have so generously referred to what we on this Front Bench have sought to do. In my time in this House, rarely if ever have I heard such a well informed and thoughtful set of contributions, from a group of Peers who follow this issue very closely. I should say immediately that this kind of attention is critical. I can think of few conflicts whose fate rises and falls so much in sequence and in lock-step with political attention and political will. We must keep an international focus on this situation, and I commend all noble Lords who have spoken today for that reason. The noble Lord, Lord Avebury, has spoken before about the Security Council’s lack of attention. I take his point that there may have been an absence of resolutions over the months, although, as I have argued to him before, there has not necessarily been an absence of attention. As I have said, a resolution has now been introduced by France, co-sponsored by the United Kingdom, on the specific intervention of the Prime Minister, and there is no doubt in New York about the concern that we and others have to see a rapid deployment of a strengthened MONUC and a forceful political process, led by Mr Obasanjo. There will be a further resolution before the year is over to re-approve MONUC’s mission for the coming year. Several noble Lords and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester asked whether the mandate should be stronger, as the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, and others suggested. I put this question to General Gaye, the force commander, who argued that the question of the rules of engagement and the mandate is a red herring. This is a very robust mandate. It is a so-called Chapter 7 mandate, which spells out the obligation of the MONUC forces to protect civilians. His argument, and my view, is that it is not in the language of the mandate or the rules of engagement but rather in the capacities and the leadership of MONUC forces, and in the role of MONUC’s partner, the FARDC—the national army—extraordinary though that might be, which is viewed in the mandate as the partner on whose behalf MONUC acts, to reinforce its own actions. I shall respond to each of the points that have been made. On capacities, MONUC, as I said in my opening remarks, has grown from what was originally intended as a light monitoring force to monitor a series of ceasefires to a situation in which, as the right reverend Prelate observed, it is active on four fronts. It seeks to contain the LRA, the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army. It is active in several other parts of the eastern Congo and, not long ago, was active in Kinshasa after the elections to make sure that violence did not break out between the losing side and the Government. I should clarify for the noble Lord, Lord Howell, that when I said that 95 per cent of MONUC’s forces are now in the east, that does not refer solely to North Kivu. It is in all the provinces of the east because it is engaged in very delicate, difficult stabilisation efforts in the whole of the eastern Congo, which is a vast area. As has been pointed out, North Kivu is a very big area. At the moment, it has 3,500 troops, which is a huge enhancement of what it had before. With the intended enlargement, that will go up to 6,500. However, there is a real reluctance to pull troops out of southern Kivu, Katanga or other areas of the eastern Congo where they are deployed, precisely because, as the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, suggested, there is a risk that those areas might again destabilise and conflict might flare up. As General Gaye put it to me, the issue is not just troop numbers, it is that there still is a nine to five, Monday to Friday, civilian logistics backbone, which was designed when MONUC was a monitoring mission. Very typically, as MONUC’s role has become that of a Chapter 7 mission intended to undertake peace enforcement functions, it has not been given the kind of logistics, mobility or hardened military capabilities to undertake that role sufficiently robustly. If that is General Gaye’s point, the second point is one that I would not associate with him. He is a forceful Senegalese general, surrounded by a number of very good national force commanders or contingent commanders. I met with a very able Indian brigadier-general, and the Indian forces are well regarded for the role that they are playing. However, other forces are performing in an entirely pathetic and desultory way. They barely leave their bases and do not engage to protect civilians with anything like the vigour that we would wish to see. Clearly, that needs to change. We need to make sure that all the deployed forces understand their mission and live up to their responsibilities of a Chapter 7 mandate. For me, the third issue is the most difficult in terms of the effectiveness of MONUC; namely, its partnership with a national army which has been defeated by a militia and which itself is a source of at least 50 per cent of the incidents in North Kivu. Let me confirm what the noble Lord, Lord Howell, said. The FARDC is, frankly, more than alleged—because there is compelling evidence—to be selling weapons to the FDLR and, through the weakness of its military behaviour, to be having weapons captured from it by the CNDP. Essentially, it is the armoury to the militias of the region. It is, at least in North Kivu, a defeated, failed force, but, worse than that, it shows all the ill discipline and spontaneous military actions of a militia. I was briefed by MONUC on how many of the incidents it has faced in recent weeks, which began with the FARDC lobbing shells at the CNDP across civilians who lay between them, thus provoking a CNDP response and, usually, its occupation of land as it drove the FARDC back. Complicated though this is, it is hard to imagine that even a European force going in would be willing to say that it would treat the national army of the host country as just another combatant to be directly confronted and, if necessary, fought. That is a very hard proposition because it is then not peace enforcement but becomes invasion by almost any other name. There is this real problem of the weak partner we have in the Congo in the form of the national army. A major DfID and MoD-supported investment worth £80 million over five years is being made into security sector reform. While I was in the country I opened a rehabilitated officer training school, where Sandhurst officers were busy training soldiers in issues of discipline and response to civilian emergencies, with a bias towards training in combating sexually based violence and other key issues that an army in this kind of country faces. But we have to work with other donors to achieve a much more effective and co-ordinated effort, to reconstitute a smaller, better paid national army able to undertake properly its responsibilities to protect its own civilians. We will never reach a final solution unless that is achieved. I turn to the issue of the political process. Most noble Lords pointed out that there is an absence of trust between the different sides. Only yesterday, President Kabila again declared that he would not talk to General Nkunda, and the question was raised that if he was limiting himself to talking within the Goma Accord, surely it meant that he was not serious. There is a very important point here. President Kabila asserts that he is the democratically elected president of the country—that is absolutely correct, and is the result of an election that Her Majesty’s Government strongly supported—and that he will therefore limit himself to giving General Nkunda a role within the existing democratic Government, either reintegrated into the armed forces or in some other institutional role in the country, and will provide security to those who do reintegrate. But President Kabila is not willing to negotiate away political power that he has won at the ballot box against force of arms by General Nkunda and his militia. General Nkunda confirmed to President Obasanjo that his demands were of a reintegration character and he was not demanding suzerainty over eastern Congo or some other grandiose political objective. This is a perfectly reasonable position for the two sides to be in, but the issue is to move quickly to secure that kind of reintegration and demobilisation. It is clear that the FDLR must be quickly demobilised and either voluntarily repatriated to Rwanda or relocated to other parts of the Congo. If, as is thought likely, a group of them refuses to move, they must be dismantled by military means. That will be another tough and difficult military challenge, one probably beyond even an enhanced MONUC’s capacity and perhaps requiring military action concerted either by Governments of the region or of SADC, but we will not be able to leave the issue unresolved. Almost every noble Lord who spoke also referred to the economic sources of this conflict. As the noble Lord, Lord Howell, pointed out, the violence and chaos in the DRC mean that the country is no longer an economic source of coltan, the mysterious metal to be found in our cell phones. Indeed the coltan in our cell phones, particularly the newer models, is unlikely to have been sourced in the DRC. But what remains very active is trading in tin and other semi-precious and precious metals. It is important to understand the nature of the mining sector in eastern Congo, which is not so much one of large and powerful mining multinationals, but of extortion rackets run by the FDLR and the other militias. They tax individual miners who dig the stuff out of the ground and go to Bukavu and other regional centres to sell it to traders. That trade is now being disrupted and the miners are forced to sell at a 50 per cent discount to these Mafia-like militias. We need to break that. Something else that we need to break—an issue which has not been adequately raised today—is the practice of the FDLR, the Hutu genocide militia, still raising money in Europe and its leadership still living in Europe. There are long legal explanations for it that I do not have time to go into, but we need to address that issue. To Rwandans, the sheer unfairness of a prominent Rwandan individual being arrested at an airport in Germany and turned over to France for trial when, two weeks earlier, a convicted genocidaire, the secretary-general of the FDLR, was not deported to serve a prison sentence in Rwanda because of concerns about the condition of Rwandan gaols, is an unacceptable double standard that has highly complicated our handling of this issue with the Rwandan Government. It is not only the American Government who deeply admire Rwanda; both sides of the House admire Rwanda as well. It has become a favourite Tory summer vacation spot, of which I strongly approve. It was remarkable to see many Tory MPs and party workers go there last summer and I hope the same thing happens this summer. I utterly support the education of the party opposite in international development and welcome its strong support, as a consequence, for the UK Government’s policies on development. We do not come second to that side of the House in our support for its Government as an effective development partner. On the question of Rwandan complicity, or not, with the CNDP, I had this issue out with President Kagame in very frank terms. It is enormously important that we are satisfied that there is not active support of the CNDP and General Nkunda. President Kagame assured me that he has never met General Nkunda. He acknowledges that there are strong kith and kin connections and that he has appointed a senior member of his Administration to liaise with General Nkunda, but he insists that it is for the purpose of persuading Nkunda not to attack civilian targets such as Goma. He committed to me that he will continue to use that influence to stay Nkunda from further military operations. He said that he was committed to the CNDP negotiating with the Government of Congo through the good offices of Mr Obasanjo and that, in that sense, he intended to play a positive role. I believe that President Kagame is a good partner of ours and I feel obliged to take his word that that is the role he is playing and intends to continue to play. Noble Lords have been very patient; they have raised many issues and I regret that I have not been able to respond to all of them. There will be an opportunity to return to this subject next week in the Queen’s Speech debate, as has been mentioned. However, through the APPG and other vehicles I will do my best to keep noble Lords informed of developments around an issue of common concern that unites us all on each side of the House. On Question, Motion agreed to.