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Conflict Prevention

I congratulate the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) on his speech. He mentioned that regional conflicts could become international conflicts, and that we need to keep a lid on them at the regional level when we can. We tend to talk about places such as Afghanistan and Iraq, which have become the focus of international attention, but the hon. Gentleman listed a few of the many other places across the world that are witnessing conflicts, and I want to say a few words about the eastern Congo. Most people would not think of it as a place of great strategic interest, and when Governments such as ours think about where to place their emphasis and spend their money, it is not always in such places. It has to be said, however, that the UK Government are actually the main donor to every nation bordering the eastern Congo; that is certainly true of Rwanda and Burundi and, indeed, of the Democratic Republic of the Congo itself. I want to refer to two UN Security Council resolutions in terms of conflict resolution and prevention. The conflict in the eastern Congo is a consequence of the genocide in Rwanda, which took place in 1994. There are many armed groups in the area, and the Congolese Government have little capacity, so we rely very much on the work of the international community. UN Security Council resolution 1857 relies on member states to give the Security Council the names of people and companies involved in trading minerals in the eastern Congo and the wider region, although the process is not always smooth or easy. It is often said, although I am never absolutely clear how much truth there is in this, that UK privacy laws make it harder for the UK Government to provide the names of individuals whom they believe might be trading in minerals in the Congo in a bad way. That can simply mean that money is changing hands in a non-transparent way, but we all know what happens when that is the case: the money will invariably fund armed groups. Perhaps the Minister will comment, therefore, on how prepared the UK Government are to provide the names of people and companies operating in the UK, because one or two companies have been mentioned in international and UN documents. Britain is far from the worst offender, but in the case of at least one of the companies involved, we might not be ensuring the free flow to the UN of information that will allow it to take action. The other UN Security Council resolution is 1906, which essentially relates to having a better focus on international efforts to resolve and prevent conflict in the eastern Congo. The United Nations mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is the largest UN contingent in the world, with about 20,000 peacekeepers, will reach the end of its current mandate on 31 May. MONUC does its very best to keep a lid on things, but its capacity will always be pretty limited, and many hon. Members who have been to the DRC will have observed that for themselves. The capacity of the armed forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is, if I can put it this way, enormously limited; often, they are an offender themselves. The Congolese Government's remit does not really extend to protecting their citizens in the eastern Congo, so the international effort is all the more important. There are, of course, many other demands on the UN's resources, and each time resolution 1906 comes up for negotiation, there is talk of MONUC's being downsized so that the peacekeepers can be used in other important fields of conflict; indeed, we might hear more about those later. However, I hope that the Minister will assure us that when the new mandate comes up for negotiation—Alan Doss, who is a UK citizen, runs MONUC and is seized of all this—we keep the same focus on co-ordinating the international effort. I also hope that he can assure us that we will do much more than we have in the past, once the mandate has been negotiated. Of course, we must recognise that there is demand in other parts of the world, but the mandate is extremely important, and I hope that the Government will place it as high as they can up their list of priorities.