Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
MS MANIZA
NTEKIM, MR
STEVE CRAWSHAW
AND MR
TOBY PORTER
14 DECEMBER 2004
Q60 Tony Worthington: But they must have
acknowledged the scale of the damage that is being done to the
people. Do they express any regret about it?
Ms Ntekim: As I have said in the
example of the rape cases, because this is what Amnesty does whenever
we have produced our reports if we are in the country at the time,
we produce our findings and enter into a dialogue with the authorities
to discuss ways of dealing with that. We were told that our evidence
on rape was not correct, that there were not these mass cases
that we were talking about. There is a denial about the scale
of some forms of violation that we are talking about. Then there
is also a denial of their responsibility for violations that do
occur. "It is armed militia who are committing this, that
and the other, it is nothing to do with us, and you cannot blame
us for what they are doing because we have no control over them."
We have not got that initial admittance that the Sudanese government
is responsible for the violations that we are talking about.
Q61 Tony Worthington: I deplore but I
can understand the denial of rape because you cannot produce hundreds
of thousands people out on the streets, but in the case of the
displacement of people in their hundreds of thousands, the involvement
of Chad and so on, that cannot be denied. Is there any regret
about it?
Mr Crawshaw: What one of course
so often hears is—and again it is a pattern it is not only
here—"These things are terribly regrettable. Terrible
things happen in war," and treating this as though this were
simply the regrettable result of rebel conflict and, "We
wish the conflict was at an end and unfortunately it is not."
Again, as Maniza indicated, a complete denial of responsibility
for what I imagine all in this room would agree are very, very
serious crimes against humanity. There are vast numbers of civilians
dead and you can absolutely put to one side the issue of a rebel
conflict with the government, which also exists but is in parallel
to these very serious crimes that are being committed. It is not
just the Khartoum government because it is again a familiar pattern,
but what the Khartoum government has done is to merge those two
and say because there is conflict with rebels therefore it is
very sad that people die while at the same time (and this again
echoes Amnesty's findings with the rape) denying the scale repeatedly,
absolutely denying the scale. This is also true of the humanitarian
disaster. Repeatedly refusing to address the scale of the humanitarian
disaster. On a small footnote—and again I am sure the Committee
very much has a sense of this—it has been regrettable that
sometimes, especially to some extent now, the humanitarian catastrophe,
the multiple tragedies that we have seen have been treated as
though they could be seen in isolation, something, if you like,
which came from the sky as opposed to something that was very
directly related to human rights abuses on a very gross scale.
I think that it is a very dangerous trap to fall into and it of
course does not help those who are doing their best at the front-line
to ameliorate the position of those facing humanitarian catastrophe
if the underlying cause of these human rights abuses continues
and people are being driven out and so on.
Q62 Mr Bercow: I want to raise a question
too but I wonder if I could just say in passing to Steve and Maniza
that it is interesting to hear what you said about the government
denying the scale of atrocities committed or claiming ignorance
of them or saying they might have taken place but we are not responsible.
There does seem to be something of a tension in those statements
on the one hand and the commitment of the Government of Sudan
nevertheless "to rein in the Janjaweed militias" on
the other hand. I am struck by the fact that this is the response
that you have consistently had because I was in Darfur in late
June/early July and from Mustafa Osman Ismail downwards I got
precisely the same, I would not say unintelligible but at any
rate inconsistent and unsatisfactory, message. I wonder if I could
just ask Toby this question. The memo from the Sudan Advocacy
Coalition[1]
talks about there being two conflicts in Darfur. According to
that analysis one is between the Government of Sudan on the one
hand and the SLA/M and Justice and Equality Movement on the other.
The second, which is linked to it but not indistinguishable from
it, is the conflict between African tribes on the one hand and
Arab tribes on the other. Potentially—and I say "potentially"
because I am a bit uncertain about this—this analysis could
go some way to explaining the complexity of the situation, although
one has to be careful, does one not, that it cannot be allowed
to absolve the government and the militias of their huge and overwhelming
burden of responsibility? If such an analysis is broadly correct
what do you think it implies, Toby (and if other colleagues want
to contribute) in terms of resolving a conflict or conflicts in
terms of what the UK Government in particular should be doing
to help to resolve the crisis?
Mr Porter: Yes, we do believe
there are two strands of the conflict. What is important to add
also is that there are some African tribes who are in conflict
with some Arab tribes but equally there are some other tribes
that have stayed out of the conflict all of this time which is
grounds for optimism. In terms of resolution of the conflict,
I think the most important implication of this is that in this,
like in many conflicts in the developing world, there are elements
of underlying marginalisation and exclusion and competition over
scarce resources and growing impoverishment and growing desperation
at the local level that contribute to the conflict taking root.
I think the important implication of there being two dynamics
to the conflict, or two separate conflicts, is that both elements
need to be addressed in any eventual solution. So, for example,
it will not be sufficient for there purely to be a political solution
between the SLA/M and the JEM and the government because that
does not address the underlying economic marginalisation and impoverishment
of the Greater Darfur region. In terms of the UK Government's
role in particular, many of you have been involved in aid for
many years and there are patterns to aid flows, one sees a tremendous
volume of assistance that is channelled to countries when there
is a major humanitarian crisis and in a sense you are reflecting
the compassion that the population of UK feels for a particular
crisis when it is in front of their eyes every other day on a
television screen. What then happens when the conflict is solved
is often the flows of aid evaporate as quickly as they have begun,
so for the UK, which has been so generous relative to most donors
in the funding of the humanitarian response in Darfur, what we
would be saying is please do not walk away from this as and when
you have evidence that a political solution has actually been
signed and reached. We are saying stay engaged. At the moment
obviously the most pressing needs are the need for survival and
the need for protection from violence in Darfur but this was one
of the poorest areas of the world before this crisis erupted.
As you will have seen in many of the submissions, many of the
attacks were not just killings or attacks on people's physical
integrity, they were also attacks on their means of production,
attacks by poisoning of wells, burning of houses, looting of livestock,
removal of land, if you like, and the implications of what it
would mean to take these 1.6 million people who have been seriously
affected by this conflict even back to a baseline which was utterly
below, for example, the aspirations represented by the Millennium
Development Goals in terms of basic livelihoods is both very complex
and very difficult and extremely expensive. History tells us that
donors that are very generous in major humanitarian emergencies
tend to be rather less generous in the post-conflict stage. This
would be relevant here, particularly as the UK has already shouldered
a disproportionate share of the relief assistance. It is important
that some of the larger donors are brought in and share a sense
of responsibility for reconstruction of livelihoods in Darfur,
as and when this does end.
Mr Crawshaw: I would echo all
of these things. In the political context as well there is that
sense of follow through. It is difficult to overstate the importance
of that follow through. When things fall out of the headlines,
as inevitably Darfur has already begun to do and will continue
to do, that is precisely the moment when the political follow
through will be very badly needed, which does include what we
were discussing earlier, the accountability and other mechanisms.
It is important for Darfur itself and it is important for messages
to be sent for the future. Just as we would certainly argue that
there was a very slow reaction at the beginning, equally the problem
of moving on and no longer wanting to look at an issue is clearly
very serious, and I think that that is one lesson. It has been
said so many times before, but really one would hope that Darfur
makes us understand not only the danger of coming to something
too late but also of leaving a problem too early, not thinking
that when Naivasha is possible, the sun comes out and Darfur is
done, we can wash our hands. That would be an absolutely disastrous
message to send.
Q63 John Barrett: If I could follow up
on what you are saying, Steve and Toby, talking about funding
in the future. You mentioned things got off to a slow start as
far as the humanitarian response effort was concerned. The Government
in its memo[2]
was very critical about the response being insufficient, unco-ordinated
and said that really there was a lack of a strategic approach.
Could you comment on what happened and also what the role of the
UK Government played itself to make sure that our input into that
humanitarian response was effective, on time, and then learning
from the past what can be improved as the situation develops?
Mr Porter: Just one clarification,
that was the Government of Sudan that you referred to?
Q64 John Barrett: No, the UK Government.
Mr Porter: I see, sorry. There
have been problems with the humanitarian operation. Many agencies
were slow to scale up. There was a critical absence of leadership
in the United Nations after Dr Kapila was required to leave Sudan
and that post of Humanitarian Co-ordinator. At a time when there
were so many issues about negotiation of access and removal of
restrictions and articulation of humanitarian principles, it was
so important to have that leadership there. We had no leadership
and I think that was a very critical deficit at that time. It
is interesting because there are two dynamics that do not particularly
add up which is firstly that there were a number of aid agencies
who had been ringing the bell about Darfur since halfway through
2003, some even earlier, and that was certainly the case for some
members of the coalition who have been operating in Darfur for
years. It was very clear that an extremely serious situation was
developing back then. If I would be critical of the response of
the international community, and indeed the UK in this, I think
it would probably be the factor of not appreciating early enough
the gravity of what was going on in Darfur and the urgency with
which a robust and concerted international response was required.
There was a prevailing view that the problems in Sudan were best
dealt with sequentially, in particular that the peace deal between
North and South had to be dealt with before the crisis in Darfur
would receive the attention that it deserved. It is not for me
to judge whether or not that was a satisfactory diplomatic assessment
but it was a profoundly unhumanitarian assessment, the notion
that the fate of one group of people has to be predicated on the
successful outcome of peace talks involving two other sets of
people. I suspect that it was a logic that many of the civilian
population in Darfur, as they fell victim to savage attack in
early 2004, would probably have found a very unsatisfactory and
unjust sequencing of the events, and I think that there are lessons
in that for all of us. Of course, it is a good thing that peace
agreements have been signed between North and South. I myself
have worked in South Sudan for many years and there are needs
there, but it was really only in March and April this year when
Darfur started to get the levels of attention that the situation
deserved, and I think that the most frenzied period of violence
was probably between February and April this year, so it was too
late in that respect.
Ms Ntekim: I would really follow
on from what Toby has said. From January 2003 Amnesty International
was raising its concerns about what was happening in Darfur and
said at that point that the international community should not
let what was happening escalate into all-out war. By April 2003
we were calling for an international commission of inquiry. Whenever
we had discussions with members of the diplomatic community we
were told that, yes, they were aware that violations were occurring
in Darfur and that these were being raised privately with the
Government of Sudan but not publicly in order not to jeopardise
the North/South process which we have just been discussing. On
our part we do think that that was short-sighted because we believed
then and we believe now that unless there is an attempt to resolve
all aspects of the crisis, lasting peace in the Sudan will remain
a pipe dream, which is also why we were so concerned about the
latest UN Security Council Resolution 1574 which appeared to be
taking a step back. The previous Council resolutions had made
clear that the Government of Sudan had a duty to disarm and disband
the Janjaweed. Clearly that had not happened. By the time this
discussion was occurring we were noticing on the ground an increase
in insecurity and yet on that occasion the decision was taken
to encourage the government and encourage the peace process. Like
Toby, of course as an organisation we do not disagree with peace
processes but doing that without acknowledging what was seriously
going on in Darfur was a mistake.
Q65 Mr Colman: Again pursuing this point
in terms of whether the UK Government is at fault and whether
it has done enough to ensure timely and co-ordinated responses
is the crucial question that we keep going back to. Should we
have pushed the UN more? You talked about the fact that there
was a loss of leadership of the United Nations in Sudan and this
was a critical deficit. Should not the UK have been shouting about
it? Should they not have offered secondment? Is it the view that
the United Nations failed in Darfur? How did the UN agencies do
there? Could they cope with very large numbers of internally displaced
people? UNHCR, crucially, look at refugees over state boundaries.
Did the United Kingdom fail to blow the whistle, particularly
when you had talked about a critical deficit for some time, and
did the United Kingdom fail the people of Darfur in terms of getting
the UN to behave more effectively? Perhaps Toby could answer that.
Mr Porter: I think that to reach
such a strong conclusion would be rather unfair because I think
that what the UK did do is that—and this is entirely consistent
with the fact that DFID does overall have a much better understanding
of the nuts and bolts of what is needed for effective delivery
of emergency assistance than most other donors—they took
a number of very practical steps to improve the co-ordination
of the United Nations' assistance in Darfur. One illustration
of that would be that while many donors were concerned about the
lack of co-ordination and wanted to see the UN strengthened and
up and running, DFID I think seconded really a very large number
of its own experienced aid personnel whom it recruited, put under
contract, and then seconded them into OCHA.
Q66 Mr Colman: The UN system?
Mr Porter: Yes, and they were
immensely significant in getting assistance going in March and
April and May. As I understand it, and this is true of many of
us NGOs and is also true of some UN agencies, we found it harder
than we had foreseen to scale up our operational response, initially
because of the constraints but also because we have had trouble
with getting experienced personnel because there is a tremendous
demand for experienced aid workers in a crisis such as this, and
we are all essentially after the same pool of people, which is
well below the amount needed. I think that the UN system as well
as the broader humanitarian system is engaged in taking a very
long look at itself to see what it can learn and change for the
future. The United Nations, for example, are currently involved
in a real-time evaluation which is an important study led from
New York, to look at things like the fundamental capacity of the
system.
Q67 Mr Colman: Is it set to deal with
large numbers of IDPs?
Mr Porter: The IDP question is
complicated because there is no agency which has institutional
responsibility for IDPs within the UN system or indeed any other,
and UNHCR have come to a modus operandi whereby they accept
the invitation to deal with that in some contexts and in other
contexts decline the invitation. I am not sure, I am afraid I
do not have the information about whether or not they were asked
to take on that role in this context but—
Q68 Mr Colman: Would Maniza or Steve
know?
Mr Crawshaw: Not on that specific
question. I did want to pick up on the question of diplomatic
response both from the previous question and from yours as well.
Everything I am about to say should be framed in the context of
the fact that what the British Government has been doing through
summer and through the autumn where there has been pressure it
has been fantastically useful, there has been no question that
the personal engagement by Hilary Benn and Jack Straw and indeed
the Prime Minister has been very helpful and very useful. I was
interested to see from the memo from the Secretary of State that
there was a lot of talk about responses being too slow and other
people doing things wrong. I did not have a sense, although I
perhaps read it wrongly, that there was very much self-reflection
on this. You will have seen from our submission there was, for
example, the London-cleared Embassy speech. That was a speech
that was made in late April at a time when all of us at this table
and many other NGOs were trying very, very hard to get this more
onto the agenda. Because of the desire (at least I interpreted
it this way) to emphasise the Naivasha peace process so much,
and the word that Toby mentioned earlier "sequential",
which we have heard again and again, could really be interpreted
as "we need to sew this one up before we even think about
a big problem over there". That speech seems to me to be
interesting in that it does send a message. It talks about Sudan
being on the threshold of a new era, talking in very optimistic
terms about British economic trade figures and so on. In terms
of the Government as a whole, as opposed to one particular department,
they did need to confront at an earlier stage quite how grave
the problem was there. Another phrase that was in the note from
the Secretary of State talks about how there were donors "without
a strong presence in Khartoum" who did not have all the information.
Britain of course is not part of that category. There was a great
deal of information in Khartoum coming directly from the field
and one cannot seriously argue that people who—and of course
the general public had no knowledge and few had probably heard
the name Darfur back in April—had reason to be interested
in the Sudan that they did not know what was going on. It was
entirely to do, as Toby mentioned, with the sequential thinking
"we do not want to look at this other issue until we have
finished with the previous issue", and that really is a most
misleading and unhelpful way of proceeding, just as of course
one has heard the criticism if one only looks at Darfur and forgets
about the North/South that would be equally problematical. However
complicated it may seem, these things have to be seen in the round
and to try to parcel them off really does not make any sense at
all. It seems to me that that was at the heart of where some of
the gravest problems came from.
Q69 Mr Colman: If you are talking about
a speech made in April this year, earlier on you said that a number
of members of the coalition had actually raised all of this in
early 2003, 12 months earlier. Did the United Kingdom Government
totally fail to take this on board? Did they fail to alert the
media? Did they put any stories out in terms of what was going
on in 2003 when they should have done so? Is the UK Government's
failure in terms of telling the media and therefore the media
did not speak out?
Mr Crawshaw: It is a very personal
interpretation but I think the short answer to that question is
yes. I think there is enormous self-reflection that the media
need to do. I myself am a former journalist and I talk to many
other journalist colleagues. There are failures there which can
be analysed at great length and they are all very interesting
about why the media do not pick up so quickly. It has happened
before.
Q70 Mr Colman: Would you like to offer
that?
Mr Crawshaw: I am happy to offer
it. In crude terms if you have got an expensive story, because
you have to send people out there to do it well, and it sounds
like a "familiar story", lots of terrible things are
happening, especially in Africa but also out there somewhere,
crucially in terms of a news editor's judgment—and this
is my personal view—one has a sense that "If this was
as big as these NGOs were saying to us, everybody else would be
running this story. Since I cannot see it on everybody else's
editorial I am not going to get into trouble if I do not run this
story." That is a natural response of journalists: "Am
I going to be caught short by not running this story?" I
would be pleased to think that can change, but you do need to
reflect that it was the same with Rwanda, identical with Rwanda;
Rwanda did not get reported properly until later; the same, you
will remember, as we say so often, with the Ethiopian famine back
in 1984. Crucially, if we leave that to one side for the moment,
that is an important media issue and the way the media works,
but I think the lesson which must be learnt is that it should
not be necessary to wait until it is on the front page of all
the main newspapers and on the TV and voters are writing letters
because they have seen it on the television news and are saying,
"This is terrible, what are we doing about it?". The
Government is in a position to know the facts, in this case because
it was already there and because many different organisations,
humanitarian, aid and human rights organisations, were drawing
the UN's attention to it.
Q71 Mr Colman: So the Government failed?
Mr Crawshaw: The Government ought
to be able to react. It does not need to wait for the story to
be on the front pages. It was so very obvious; there is no single
person who was interested and involved in the issue of Darfur
earlier, before it was on the front pages, who did not know. Everybody
who knew about it knew this would be acknowledged, when it was
recognised, to be a truly horrendous series of events. That I
think should have been clear to all those in government and so
one does not need to wait for the pressures which, quite rightly
come, when things are on the television. That is a good reaction
but one really should not need to wait for that.
Q72 Mr Colman: But you are also saying
the Government failed to set the news agenda on this and they
should have done?
Mr Crawshaw: Yes, and would have
done if either the Foreign Secretary or the Prime Minister had
taken any opportunity to stand up, whether at a press conference
or in Parliament, it really does not matter what context. Governments
are able to stand up and say, "Terrible things are going
on in a particular place at the moment, we are very worried the
rest of the world does not seem to be focusing sufficiently on
this." That is something of news interest, that would make
television news, even if it was about a place which the news agencies
had not until that moment heard about. So I think a greater intellectual
political courage, if you like, is needed to speak out. Just as
journalists should not be following other people's agendas, so
politicians should not be following the media agenda as well.
Q73 Mr Battle: Could I ask about a remark
Toby Porter made, I think, about the capacity of NGOs? As Steve
was speaking I was thinking about the South African crisis two
years ago, on which we wrote a report, and the Ethiopian crisis
and Malawi and the famine there which got very dramatic coverage
but did not work out in the terms in which it was highlighted,
and I did not then pick up any references to NGOs struggling with
their capacity of experienced personnel. Is this a new thing?
Could you say a little more about NGOs' capacity to respond?
Mr Porter: There seems to have
been something particularly difficult about getting people to
Darfur as well as what we have had to do several times over the
last ten years, which is to get huge numbers of people to any
place in a short period of time. Humanitarian aid is an interesting
profession because almost all of the activities we do are tightly
defined by timing and by donor funding and by location, and one
thing that it is harder than getting resources together is to
train and retain staff in the profession or in the individual
agencies in the quite large slack moments that you have. It is
a curious system in that you suddenly get tremendous peaks of
demand for experienced personnel and then if, in a hypothetical
situation, in six months' time Darfur calms down, it will be a
completely different dynamic for aid agencies to recruit because
they will have all the people who have had their experience—many
people will have had their first experience—in Darfur and
then they will have more people than there are jobs for at any
one time. It also appears that there were specific difficulties
in getting experienced people to go to Darfur. If one were to
speculate as to the reasons why that might be, one would be it
is an extremely tough operating environment. During the period
April, May and June, you are having temperatures of over 50°,
you had some of the hardest and most frustrating restrictions
which have been placed on aid agencies for many years, you have
a dangerous security situation, you have some people who say,
"And to cap it all, you can't get a beer". It seems
to have been a lot of experienced people maybe did not want to
go to Darfur. I was speaking with a friend from one of the agencies
in the Coalition a few nights ago who had just been recruiting
water engineers to go to the Philippines—and you will have
seen there was serious flooding there last week—and he has
spent the last four or five months ringing up everyone he knows
a hundred times to try and get people to go to Darfur and found
it very difficult, but he found five people who would go to the
Philippines in the space of a day. I hope that answers the question.
Q74 Mr Battle: What kind of numbers are
we talking about? Roughly? Hundreds of people? Fifty? A thousand?
Mr Porter: There are now about
700-800 international aid workers in Darfur. It is difficult to
say precisely what numbers are needed, but probably that is about
half the optimal amount.
Q75 Mr Battle: So you would not have
these people on the books, as it were, back in central office?
You would have to recruit cold and ring up people who may have
been there before? That is how it works? Who knows whom and you
get as many hands on deck as you can and get them out there?
Mr Porter: Exactly.
Q76 Mr Battle: Again, not under-estimating
the access problem, which may well put a lot of people off, and
with some good reason, but also the difficulties for yourselves
as organisations, have you had enough help from the British Government
trying to get access? Have they put enough pressure on the Government
of Sudan to get them to allow people to go in?
Mr Porter: Yes, I think the UK
Government in particular was very instrumental in the easing of
some very real and widespread restrictions on access to displaced
populations early on in the crisis. I think that was a real achievement.
It made a huge difference. In the last couple of months the main
constraints on access in Darfur and the fact we are now again
retrenching and reducing the areas in which we work—let
us be quite clear on this—are not due to the reimposition
of bureaucratic restrictions and so forth, but because of a deteriorating
security situation in which the rebels have actually been responsible
for more than their fair share of security incidents in the last
couple of months. Certainly it is the first time I can ever remember
in my career, which goes back 13 years, the specific range of
operational concerns of humanitarian agencies in great detail—visas,
travel permits, et cetera—being taken up at Secretary
of State level. It is extraordinary really to see this. But the
counter to that is, was similar weight attached on the "political"
side to address the underlying causes of the conflict. That is
why people talk about humanitarian aid possibly occupying a fig
leaf in this situation.
Q77 Mr Battle: Can I move to the UK funding
streams? I came across the other day—and it is not the first
time in Sudan, I remember this happened last year—people
in the camps waiting, aid workers had gone out there and aid had
been promised and they were waiting for the bird in the sky from
the west with the food. So we have aid workers out there and money
had been promised but food had not arrived yet. What have the
flows been like? Have they been timely? Are they flexible enough
for the NGOs to handle and get on with the job?
Mr Porter: Yes. In this case,
and again with special appreciation of the role that DFID have
played in this, resources were never the issue in Darfur.
Q78 Chairman: The BBC World Service had
a fairly lengthy programme on the region not so long ago, two
or three weeks ago, and one of the concerns raised in this programme
was that if the internally displaced people actually in the camps
moved out and went collecting firewood they were at risk of being
raped or indeed being murdered. Of course security in camps for
internally displaced people must in the first instance be the
responsibility of the Government of Sudan and be the responsibility
of the sovereign state, but as I understand it the NGOs have been
deploying quite large numbers of protection officers, and I just
wondered, relying upon that enhanced protection, how have NGOs
taken into account the issue of rape and gender-based violence
in the work which has been done in Darfur?
Ms Ntekim: Amnesty has been very
concerned about the prevalence of rape and gender-based violence.
As I mentioned earlier, from our research on the ground, our report
in July pointed to the widespread use of rape as a form of humiliation,
the raping of pregnant women and girls as young as 10, women forced
into sexual slavery and, of course, evidence of women still not
being safe when they were in internally displaced camps. One of
our main concerns is that no one yet, to our knowledge, has been
brought to justice for these crimes. So there is a current consistent
level of insecurity in Darfur, which is why, when we have been
on the ground, one of the main things which has come out is that
the overarching human rights concern has to be the protection
of civilians on the ground and in particular those in internally
displaced camps. Even though the Sudanese government did send
in an increased police force to police the camps, we were always
told throughout all our investigations that the IDPs did not trust
these forces. A consistent comment we had was, "The Janjaweed
are the police, they are the same" so there is a distrust
of those forces, which is why we have been calling for a long
time for an increase in the amount of international presence which
is actually on the ground because that, for us, is the main way
for IDPs to feel safe. People can only start to return home voluntarily
when they are not in any fear of being attacked and that currently
is not the case. Even though there is an AU force at the moment,
it is not fully deployed and the real issue there is the resources
which are there and the fact there are just not enough people
on the ground. From our evidence, and the last time we were allowed
in was October, and unlike you we have bureaucratic blocks which
mean we cannot go back in, what we did feel was that the AU force
on the ground was professional but the main issue was there just
were not enough people. Until that international presence is increased
and until it is able to professionally carry out the mandate which
has now been expanded by the African Union, the IDPs will still
remain vulnerable and women will still remain vulnerable leaving
the camps to go and look for firewood.
Mr Crawshaw: We would strongly
echo everything we have just heard from Maniza. Certainly in terms
of the support for the AU, it is enormously important these things
are not done in isolation, they cannot be sub-contracted, if you
like. Otherwise, just to second everything you have just heard.
Mr Porter: The point you raise
is very important. Aid agencies do a lot of protection activities
now. The distinction I would like to make is, for example, a child
protection activity in a camp in Darfur might be to ensure children
who are separated from their parents are re-united, it might be
to ensure children are not exploited when they are in the camps
or children who do not have adults present in the camps still
receive their rations, that they do not get subject to or at risk
of harm in fending for themselves, but we cannot stop children
being shot, we cannot stop children being loaded on to trucks
and driven away. It is similar to the firewood question, we can
have advisers who can make recommendations that the aid delivery
is factored into the fact it is extremely dangerous for people
to go and collect firewood outside the camps, but we cannot stop
people from being attacked when they go for firewood outside the
camp. It is balancing those responsibilities which is important.
The Committee suspended from 3.31pm to
3.57 pm for divisions in the House
Chairman: Let's go on to the role of
the African Union.
Q79 Tony Worthington: I think this is
probably the first humanitarian crisis where the African Union
has figured so greatly in people's discussions and I am wondering
to what extent it is convenient, as it were, for the western powers
to say, "We would rather the African Union was dealing with
this than ourselves." Are we clinging on to the African Union
as a means of avoiding doing more ourselves?
Ms Ntekim: I would say we certainly
would not see the African Union taking a lead in this role, its
first mission, as necessarily meaning the international community
or the UN or the EU is let off the hook and it is now up to the
AU; not at all. We have been impressed, as I said earlier, by
the professionalism of the AU team we have seen on the ground
when we were last in Darfur in October. What is missing, as I
have said before, is that there clearly is not enough of them.
The African Union need support, not just logistically and financially.
There are only 3,000 on the ground in an area the size of France
and, as of last week, only ten UN human rights monitors on the
ground, so clearly there is an issue about not enough bodies there.
They also do need the support politically of the international
community. For example, the AU have been investigating breaches
of the ceasefire agreements, where it is clear that breach has
occurred it would be important for members of the international
community—the UK as well—to publicly denounce that
and to publicly suggest their support for the AU. I would argue
what is needed, regardless of who does it, is a professional,
competent force to protect civilians. That is what they say they
need and that is what we are pushing for. The AU is currently
on the ground taking the lead on that and we think they are perfectly
capable of doing that as long as they have adequate support from
the rest of the international community.
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