Examination of Witness (Questions 179-199)
DR MUKESH
KAPILA
22 FEBRUARY 2005
Q179 Chairman: Dr Kapila, thank you very
much for coming and giving evidence to the Committee this afternoon.
The acoustics in this room are not brilliant. Although they look
like microphones, these are not actually microphones. I am not
sure quite what they are but they are certainly not microphones.
If you could be very kind and speak up. Also, I apologise that
we are not as full a Committee as we usually are but that is because
quite a number of my colleagues are in Iraq at the present moment.
We divided our resources, so some of us went to Sudan and some
are now in Iraq. It would be helpful for the Committee to understand
why you left the Sudan in 2004 and what the reasons were for that
because I think that would help us in terms of the texture of
your involvement in the Sudan. If you could just help us a little
bit with that, that would be much appreciated.
Dr Kapila: Thank you, Chairman,
and thank you for inviting me to be here. I am very happy to speak
about my time in the Sudan as the UN Resident and Humanitarian
Co-ordinator in charge of development and humanitarian activities
for the 13 month period between 2 March 2003 and 1 April 2004.
Coming to your question, the reason I left at that time, on 1
April to be precise, was because I guess my job was done. I had
to do what I had to do and a certain price had to be paid, so
I had to leave. In substance, you know the official reason that
has been presented by the UN which is that a new mission was expected
to be headed by a Special Representative of the Secretary-General,
and it is not unusual for new missions to have new teams coming
in, so that was par for the course, but behind that background
lay other circumstances. One was that since about October 2003
I had taken an increasingly vocal line, raising my concerns in
increasingly strident ways about the atrocities and the abuses
of human rights and international humanitarian law that were being
committed. Gradually I moved from just expressing concern towards
making accusations against the Sudan government, the perpetrators
of these crimes against humanity. It became quite clear that my
position in Sudan would no longer be tenable. In fact, at the
end it was a close run thing between whether I would be thrown
out of the country, ie declared persona non grata, or would
leave before they had the pleasure of doing that. There were also
threats against me, particularly in the last six weeks of my time
there, and my security advisers felt it wise that I should leave.
That was the immediate trigger, if you like, for the timing of
my departure. The causes were the one I have mentioned and the
other cause was inevitably one expended an enormous amount of
personal political capital in trying to bring this horrendous
situation to the world's attention and I guess my utility was
over.
Q180 Chairman: I think when we were there
our collective experience was finding ministers, fellow parliamentarians
and others in Khartoum in a sort of state of denial about what
was happening in Darfur. Did you experience a similar state of
denial and, if so, why do you think that was?
Dr Kapila: You mean a state of
denial within the Sudanese—
Q181 Chairman: A state of denial within
the government in Khartoum, within parliamentarians in Khartoum,
a state of denial as to what was happening to internally displaced
people in Darfur, what was happening in terms of government helicopter
gun ships going out and beating up villages, not wishing to recognise
in any way this was the responsibility of the Government of Sudan
and just simply being dysfunctionally unconnected with the realities
on the ground.
Dr Kapila: No, I do not agree.
To define the situation as a state of denial is to give an excuse
or comfort to those who are the hideous perpetrators of these
crimes against humanity. There was perfect awareness of what was
going on within the Sudan government, within many organs of the
Sudan government. In my time there I made many contacts and friends
at very high levels and at other levels, in all segments of society,
within the military, within the government administration, including
senior ministers, senior officials, right to the President's office,
and in my conversations with them—and you will accept that
I cannot name individual conversations but I can be open about
the facts—there was perfect awareness about what was going
on. I can only refer to the period that I know about. This was
a highly efficient military dictatorship whose pervasive tentacles
reached throughout Sudanese society and have done so for decades.
There was no denial, there was perfect awareness. The external
representation was, of course, denial that anything was going
on based on the foundation that because access was denied to anyone
from outside with any degree of objectivity they would not get
found out until events had moved on.
Q182 Chairman: DFID in a memorandum to
us said: "The UN in Sudan suffered a leadership vacuum between
March and June 2004 and the work of the various agencies needed
much more effective co-ordination"[1].
What impact do you think your departure—the loss of the
United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Co-ordinator—had
on the effectiveness and co-ordination of the humanitarian response
to the crisis in Darfur? You give the impression that it was a
seamless transition from you to a new mission but, in fact, was
that what happened or was there effectively a vacuum of leadership
for a few months?
Dr Kapila: Obviously I cannot
directly vouch for what happened after I left, but my impression
from contacts and ongoing information at that period of time—I
remained involved in Sudanese affairs for a month or two after
leaving the country—was that undoubtedly the departure of
the UN Co-ordinator had an effect on the way the UN could assert
itself in its ongoing discussions and negotiations with the authorities
and other interested parties. This was partly because the Sudanese
government—they said this to me very openly as I was leaving—did
not want a strong head to create the sort of trouble that I had
created for them and, indeed, they said that they were going to
delay accepting any replacement for as long as they possibly could.
That was one factor. I had to leave when I had to leave, there
was no way that I could stay on, partly because of my personal
safety and partly because I would have been thrown out if I had
not left voluntarily, so to speak. "Voluntarily" in
these matters is a relative issue. There was a gap in the sense
that the strategies that we were working upon at that moment in
time to increase our access and our ability to confront some of
the issues, particularly on the human rights side, inevitably
had to take a backseat while the system figured out what it wanted
to do for the future and subsequently, as you know, the Special
Representative of the Secretary-General was appointed.
Q183 Tony Worthington: Could I just ask
a further question about the Sudanese government. Whereas I would
agree with what you have said, I wonder whether it was your experience
that there is such a deep ethnic antagonism between those who
are in the Sudanese government, but not just in the Sudanese government
perhaps in alternative governments as well, that makes the prospect
of a united Sudan remote?
Dr Kapila: Having travelled up
and down the country, so to speak, and having dealt with Sudan
over many years before in my previous capacity in DFID in London,
and indeed I was a medical student at Khartoum University many
years ago, that was when I first got to Sudan, the Sudanese people
who come from many different communities, different backgrounds
and so on, are some of the most gentle and some of the most tolerant
people in the world. Over the centuries they had evolved a way
of working and, through the successive waves of colonisation and
so on, managed to retain a tolerant sense of themselves as a diverse
community. Therefore, this "ethnicisation" that we see
is very much a modern phenomenon, it has happened perhaps in the
last 10 years, and increasingly in the last three or four years
the militarization has certainly happened. It is very much something
that is imposed upon the Sudanese people by a group of self-seeking
and vicious leaders who have manipulated the Sudanese people for
their own power seeking interests. I am optimistic about Sudan,
that it will remain a united country, as a united nation, and
it is very important for the world as a whole that this strategically
important country at the crossroads between the Arab world and
Africa remains as a tolerant society. By removing some people
who are behind these crimes and allowing society to come out and
express its views, maybe this will happen. If not, then the country
will continue to fragment. There are other conflicts that are
there that are only just under the surface and they will ultimately
take their toll.
Q184 Tony Worthington: Is it your impression
that the North-South element having become a no-win game where
there had to be some kind of settlement, there has been a deliberate
start to East-West conflicts in Darfur or Port Sudan, that for
some reason the government does not want peace?
Dr Kapila: Again, I refer to the
period I know about. In everything I say I am not making comment
on the current Sudanese government or the current evolution of
affairs but speak with full frankness about the period that I
know about. What I found in dealing with the government at that
time was that there was not a unitary view. Undoubtedly, certain
groups were in powerful positions, especially in relation to military
and intelligence matters, which ultimately ruled the roost but
there were many good people, including in the military, who were
completely dismayed by what was going on within their own government.
I had ministers who said to me, "I am deeply ashamed to be
part of a government that treats its own people like that".
There was an ideological struggle within the government and I
think certain people have benefited from these conflicts, in a
sense, but there were very, very many other people who were completely
dismayed and depressed by what was going on. In terms of whether
it was a very great, centrally organised attempt, I think it is
more complicated than that.
Q185 Tony Worthington: Obviously because
of your resignation you were despairing at alerting the world
to the scale of what was going on, so you thought the humanitarian
response was too slow. How would you allocate responsibility for
that between the controls on access brought in by the Sudanese
government and the UN's response, the international community's
response?
Dr Kapila: To answer that in a
more comprehensive way it is important to start off by saying
that it despairs me, and it was so even when I was in my previous
role as head of humanitarian affairs in DFID, that every time
there is a major political crisis anywhere it is categorised as
a humanitarian problem and those who are in charge of humanitarian
operations are then burdened with the task of doing something
about it and when they inevitably fail the blame is put on the
humanitarians and those whose responsibility it is to seek political
solutions get off scot-free by saying that the humanitarians did
not do their job, that is the implication. I will come to the
humanitarian impact. My great struggle in Sudan was to get the
conflict in Darfur portrayed as what it was, a vicious ethnic
struggle which I ultimately described as ethnic cleansing. As
you know, legally there is very little difference between ethnic
cleansing and genocide, it is a form of genocide, as stated by
the General Assembly itself. Every time people kept on saying
to me, as the UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator, why I or my staff
or my colleagues could not be more creative, more efficient, work
harder to find humanitarian solutions, the truth of the matter
was that was virtually impossible. Even if twice the money came
in from the world and we had all the resources and the support
we needed, the arguments would have been the same. To come to
your question, which is related to that, undoubtedly I would say
that 75-80% of the problem we had on the humanitarian side was
certainly due to the systematic obstruction by the Sudanese government
of humanitarian access. There is absolutely no question about
that. I spent hours, weeks, months, personally negotiating at
the highest levels of the Sudanese government and their bureaucratic
restrictions and their military and intelligence restrictions
and their constant rescinding on their promises and so on, were
an organised and systematic attempt at humanitarian obstruction
which, as you know, also is a form of crime against humanity,
which was effectively what happened. Yes, the humanitarian response
was slow, one could have done a bit more of this, that and the
other, but this is tinkering at the margins. Fundamentally the
issue was that the Sudan government refused to allow us access
when we needed it most. If the access had been allowed we had
enough resources and stocks and people in the country to deploy
from other theatres. After all, I, as a UN Co-ordinator, was heading
one of the UN's largest operations in the world, including the
largest UN air force, if you like, the fleet of aircraft that
was at my disposal as a UN Co-ordinator, which is the largest
anywhere in the world. We had thousands of staff, we had vast
stocks of supplies. Even if the world had been slow to respond
specifically to the additional resources, we had the capability
to deal with the issue by redeployment, at least temporarily,
so that was not the issue, it was very much obstruction of humanitarian
access by the Sudan government.
Q186 Tony Worthington: What I think you
are saying is very interesting, that your appointment was as UN
Resident and Humanitarian Co-ordinator—that was your title—but
people, I suppose, were looking at you as a political leader also
on behalf of the world community and you were not that—that
was not your title—but in the end you left because you were
speaking politically.
Dr Kapila: Yes. You raise a very,
very interesting point which is worth exposing. Yes, my mandate
as the UN Resident and Humanitarian Co-ordinator was very much
on the resident co-ordinator side in charge of development activities,
what little there was of that in the country, and on the humanitarian
side you know. I was also the official for security, meaning the
safety and welfare of the staff and their families as well as
various other roles. There was no political role given to the
UN as a whole because the Naivasha peace process was contracted
out to this troika of Member States, which is the US, UK and Norway.
The UN was an observer at the peace talks but that very often
meant being in the antechamber and being allowed in under sufferance,
but certainly it had no direct presence at the talks. The UN had
no formally mandated political role in that. I think also there
comes into this a question of personal interpretation, how one
interprets one's role. My personal ideology in this and any other
work I have done is that when it comes to struggles for achieving
human development or meeting basic humanitarian needs these are
fundamental political struggles, so the dichotomy between that
and what is an improvement in the human condition, if that is
not a political condition I do not know what is. However, that
said in a philosophical sense, in a practical sense it really
did promote real dilemmas, especially as the UN was reluctant
to raise its political voice because it did not have a mandate
to do so and partly because certain Member States said, "Leave
it to us, we will solve the political problem and then you come
and do the peacekeeping afterwards". That was the broad picture
but as the situation evolved my attempts at drawing the attention
of powerful Member States of the Security Council and others to
what was evolving in Darfur failed through private diplomacy,
and I visited all the major capitals of most permanent Security
Council countries myself, as well as one or two others in the
period from October onwards. Of course, I was also present in
Rwanda immediately after the genocide on that occasion for DFID,
or ODA as it was in those days, and we had all the speeches about
never again and never again, but here I was, the most senior UN
official in Sudan, and it was happening on my patch. Having tried
all the private channels of diplomacy and all the bureaucratic
mechanisms that were open to me, in all conscience I had no alternative
but to follow the recommendations of the Commission of Inquiry
into the Rwanda genocide which said that when it comes to crimes
against humanity every individual in any position of authority
is personally responsible for his or her actions. Coming back
to your question, as an elaboration of your question, you have
to ask the question whether or not it was right to disempower
the United Nations from that political role at a critical stage
in the evolution of Sudan's history. The private diplomatic measures
that were being taken in the troika and other countries, well
meaning as they might be, and I was fully supportive of them and
worked very well with them and I have got nothing but praise for
the efforts that were made, whether that was the right way and
whether that dichotomy that was created effectively led to a weakening
of the international ability to respond to the political aspect
of the crisis in Sudan.
Q187 Tony Worthington: This is fascinating
but the resemblance to Rwanda, it seems to me from what you have
said, is that in both cases there was a conspiracy not to see.
Dr Kapila: Correct. As I have
said publicly, and I welcome this chance to say it here, what
happened in Darfur was becoming increasingly evident from the
middle of last year [2003]. This was no secret. This was known
in the chanceries of the major capitals around the world. I know
because I went and visited and spoke to all these places myself.
We had reports coming from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty and many
other organisations, and even if you discount them because they
are campaigning organisations, they still alert you and put upon
you a duty to do something about it. However, the feeling was
there were two forces in play at that particular moment in time.
One was, "We do not believe you. Yes, I am sure horrible
things are happening but so what, this is Africa, this is Sudan,
and horrible things have happened for centuries so what is special
about this one?" Within my own UN family there were UN agencies
who were reluctant to upgrade their operations because they felt
it would compromise their operations in other parts of Sudan and
because of their scepticism at what was going on. That was one
element of that. The second element was the distraction one, let
us sort out the North-South peace talks in Naivasha and when that
is done that will give us a framework for lasting peace all over
the country. As I kept on saying to anyone who would listen to
me at that time, there would be no peace in Sudan, and it is two
years later that the agreement was signed at the beginning of
this year. This was because, as I kept on saying at that time
in my own talks with both the Sudan government senior officials
and SPLM in the South, who were involved in the Naivasha talks
at the highest levels, the SPLM said that they would be very reluctant
to be part of a government of national unity post-agreement that
was still fighting in Darfur because they would then become part
of the problem because they would have to solve it and everyone
knows you may have a government of national unity following the
signing of a piece of paper but they know who commands the real
power, which is the same military force that was there before,
so the moral high ground which the SPLM had in relation to the
South would be lost because they would be dragged into the mess,
so they would rather they sorted out Darfur before they signed
the peace agreement. In the case of the Sudan government it was
obvious that as soon as there was a peace agreement with a peacekeeping
force under the full attention of the Security Council and the
Member States and all of this, their room for manoeuvre in Darfur
was going to be limited. What happened was that as the Naivasha
talks intensified, the window of opportunity that the Sudan government
had to do their deadly work in Darfur was reducing, so in fact
the violence got worse. As you can see if you trace the events
that took place between April last year [2003] and the critical
months of November [2003] to February [2004] before the UN regained
access, it was basically people doing the last act, if you like,
before they had to come to the table and turn the chapter. That
was obvious to anyone. I find it extraordinary that this was seen
as some sort of great insight. This was very much the evolving
political situation at that moment in time in those critical six
to nine months.
Q188 John Barrett: You mentioned the
Sudanese government were doing their deadly work in Darfur, but
were you able to establish during your time there as to whether
they had a plan or strategy as to how they wanted to see this
issue come to an end, or was it, as someone put it to us, a dysfunctional
government that drifted into this?
Dr Kapila: Both are true to some
extent. It is a dysfunctional government in a sense but the dysfunction
is a saving grace. As I said earlier on, there are many, many
heroic people in Sudan official circles, people who are biding
their time for a better day. These are heroes because every day
they quietly mount their resistance within the Sudan structure.
They are trying to keep faith for the future. It is dysfunctional
and that is a saving grace, if you like. Having said that, please
have absolutely utterly no doubt that the Sudanese military machine
and intelligence machine is as efficient and ruthless and organised
as anywhere else in the world. After all, you do not survive in
power for so long, you do not do what they have done in southern
Sudan—even though they did not win the conflict in southern
Sudan although they came very close to it, it was effectively
a stalemate—you do not do that without having a degree of
coherence and organisation. To characterise the organised attempts
to do away with a group of people in Darfur on the grounds of
their ethnicity—my words which I repeat here—ie ethnic
cleansing, a form of genocide, you cannot do this without some
carefully orchestrated leadership, some very careful planning
and organisation and strategic intent. I saw evidence of all of
that in my interactions at different levels of the system. I hope
that one day an International Criminal Court will look into these
particular matters and will invite people like me to give evidence
on these particular matters.
Q189 Mr Bercow: Dr Kapila, I would like
to ask you, if I may, about both the humanitarian and human rights
aspects of the crisis because it seems to me that the dichotomy
between them is essentially false, they are inextricably linked
one to the other. On the humanitarian side, and again with reference
obviously above all to the period of your stewardship, how effectively
do you think the various UN development and humanitarian agencies
worked together in late 2003 and early 2004? Do you think that
there was a recognition, tacit or express, that the UN is one
family, working for a common cause? Was that sufficiently understood
and was it institutionalised into the ways of working? What lessons
can be learned from this? This is really very fundamental to our
inquiry to try to establish exactly what happened and what did
not happen.
Dr Kapila: Indeed, it is a very
fundamental question and I answer it openly but carefully. I want
to make sure that you reach the right conclusions. I am sure you
will. Let me answer more generally first and then come to the
specifics. I have learned in my short but very intense time as
a UN Co-ordinator that it is very difficult to run a UN machinery
on the basis of a single organised company or civil service or
unitary government machine. This is because in a multinational
system what is at your disposal is a range of interests and forces
and pressures upon you. When we say "the UN", we have
to distinguish between the signals and the incentives that the
Member States send and, therefore, the behaviour that generates,
and the behaviours that are generated as a consequence of procedures
and systems that are within the purview of the UN. It is very,
very important to distinguish between the two. My own experience
was that if the Member States had been more disciplined in the
way they allocated resources and did not use resources to pursue
particular ends, which would be either perceptions of their own
analysis of the situation or particular political ends, then on
the bureaucratic side of the UN we might have a more rationally
disposed system which would be able to work objectively according
to an analysis of the problems and approaches which follow from
that particular analysis. That luxury is denied to us so what
happens is donors decide that their favourite organisation is
this or their favourite issue is that, or their favourite part
of the country is this, or their favourite political imperative
is the other, and then the flow of resources follows that. Then
it is left to the poor UN Co-ordinator and the system to juggle
these different forces and pressures to try and make some sense
of them within a framework of impartiality and objectivity and
the standards that are expected of an international civil service,
knowing at the same time you are under almost daily attack from
one Member State or another because you have not done their particular
bidding. All that was true in Sudan at the moment of time you
are referring to. Not only that, we had problems of a Khartoum-based
UN and a Nairobi-based UN which was doing its very best with some
very good colleagues, and nothing I say is intended as a criticism
of anybody, it is a reflection of the system for which the whole
world, including the United Kingdom Government, bears responsibility,
so this should not be seen as anything other than that, and that
is why I say I am anxious that you come to the right conclusions
and this is not portrayed in an incomplete sense. We had a situation
where even though I was the head of the UN North and South, there
were certain traditions that had grown up over the previous 17
years. There was Operation Lifeline in Sudan, which was an organisation
within an organisation, very closely allied with the Southern
movement and very closely allied with the resource flows to that
Southern movement from certain countries and, not surprisingly,
the government in Khartoum looked upon that part of the UN with
suspicion and the other way round as well. So we had a situation
when I got there where people would not even talk to each other.
We had reports coming from southern Sudan which would be censored
from our colleagues to their own colleagues, so I, as UN Co-ordinator,
had great trouble in accessing information from my own staff,
if you like. We had a real struggle to overcome that particular
culture and to create one UN approach, and I believe we succeeded
towards the end of it but at a very considerable cost. Also, there
were issues about competition for resources which happens amongst
organisations that are funded in a way which is reliant on what
sort of image you can present and so on. That means that we had
$100 million available for food aid but we had only $1 million
available for human rights.
Q190 Mr Bercow: Sorry, $100 million for?
Dr Kapila: For food, and $1 million
for human rights. Juggling those types of considerations, ie the
supply side which follows the lines individual Member States choose
to take, together with the incentives on individual agencies that
do not necessarily reward corporate behaviour but reward an ability
to represent a particular agency's interests or issues, creates
for a very difficult mix. Put that in the context of Sudan, which
was a fractured country north and south, there are a couple of
things which are specific to add to that which are systemic. One
is that after many decades we still do not know how to look after
IDPs. I had a real struggle and I got into a lot of hot water
trying to find an organisational arrangement that was acceptable
within the UN system as to who would take responsibility for internally
displaced people because no particular entity was responsible.
When I proposed one entity there was an outcry from other entities,
so this remained, if you like, something that was done by matrix
management which in a situation like that basically amounts to
very high transaction of costs, you spend more time co-ordinating
than actually delivering services. That was one issue. The other
big gap was the management of camps, which is an ongoing problem.
More strategic than that was the big divide between the humanitarian
and the development people. The traditional view of the development
of Sudan is because we do not have a normal relationship with
the Government of Sudan in this war torn country, we do not do
any development in it—that is the sort of conditional view
of Member States—but we do humanitarian aid. Both humanitarian
aid and development aid have their own rituals, their own bureaucracies,
their own systems for working. When you are actually in Sudan
and you see large parts of the country are at peace, and even
during the time I am talking about large parts of the country
were at peace, when you look at the content of what you do, if
you are trying to get a clinic running or girls into school, is
that a humanitarian programme or is that a development programme,
I do not know. In practical terms you are relying on the same
infrastructure, the same local counterparts, the same NGOs, the
same organisations on the ground. What I tried to do as UN Co-ordinator
was to use the title "UN Co-ordinator" rather than "Resident
and Humanitarian", just to bring the two sides together and
to have problem driven approaches rather than to have category
approaches. In my view, the only difference between humanitarian
work and development work in certain countries is not what you
are trying to achieve but the methods by which you achieve them.
You do not have development health projects and humanitarian health
projects, in the end you have the Millennium Goals that are fundamentally
about achieving certain objective targets. To answer your question,
a huge gap and a problem with the way we are organised, both in
Sudan and maybe generally, is this split between the humanitarian
world and the development world. It makes sense if you are digging
people from an earthquake or rescuing people after tsunami when
you are literally into a very narrow definition of humanitarian
aid, but in most of the crises affected countries one deals with,
fundamentally you are dealing with a mixed situation. To disengage
from Sudan over the previous 20 years and say, "We do not
do development, therefore we cannot build capacity for human rights,
we cannot build human capacity", fundamentally what do you
get? You get what you got, ie a marginalised country going its
own way. It is a very short-term and narrow view of when you do
development and when you do not.
Q191 Mr Bercow: I have the absolutely
unmistakable impression from what you have said that probably
as a result of the huge political pressures for North-South peace
and the potential dividend therefrom, there simply was not an
overwhelming sense of political urgency about tackling the crisis
that was erupting in Darfur.
Dr Kapila: Yes.
Q192 Mr Bercow: In that case I would
like to lead on, if I may, Dr Kapila, from the humanitarian issue
to the human rights issue because you made the really rather interesting
point that you felt there was an argument about the way in which
you deliver objectives on the humanitarian front and the development
front, that there should not be a Manichaean divide between the
two, but equally, of course, one could say if you are to have
any chance of promoting development you have first to tackle the
most egregious abuses of human rights that would in any case be
an obstacle to the promotion of that development. I wonder if
I can just ask you a number of things on the human rights side.
First of all, if you look back to the period of your tenure, was
it not rather incongruous and almost certainly another example
of governmental dishonesty for the Sudanese government even to
commit as part of the ceasefire to reining in the Janjaweed militia
when it seemed that they either had no serious intention of doing
so or probably knew that the genie by then being out of the bottle
they would be unable to put it back in?
Dr Kapila: Yes.
Q193 Mr Bercow: So it was a nonsense?
Dr Kapila: Absolutely.
Q194 Mr Bercow: So it was dishonest?
Dr Kapila: Absolutely. Not only
dishonest, it was worse than dishonest. It was a deliberate attempt
to obfuscate, avoid and hoodwink the rest of the world so they
could continue with their deadly deeds, as I mentioned earlier
on. I would say this is where I think a comprehensive approach
is necessary. A ceasefire is a good thing and to say the right
things, and one should encourage them even to at least say those
things, but that should not be the end of the story. One needs
a comprehensive and determined approach to address all the dimensions
of the problem and that way try to hold people accountable for
what they have promised to do.
Q195 Mr Bercow: Let us just pursue that
theme very briefly because it is hugely important, in fact it
is pretty central to any serious understanding of this issue.
You said a few moments ago in response to a question from Mr Worthington
that you hoped one day that the human rights abuses, the war crimes,
and the crimes against humanity would be the subject of an ICC
inquiry, and indeed you held out the prospect that you might give
evidence to that inquiry, and I hope that your application to
do so will be noted in the appropriate quarters, but can I just
press you on that. You said quite loosely "one day".
Would I be right in thinking that you would agree with those who
say that there is indeed a great urgency about referral of the
Government of Sudan and senior members of the armed forces of
Sudan to the ICC in relation to crimes against humanity and crimes
described by the international inquiry as no less heinous and
serious than genocide? It needs to happen sooner rather than later,
does it not? You talked about your experience of Rwanda and, of
course, by the time it has finished, the ad hoc, extremely
expensive, rather cumbersome, tribunal in relation to Rwanda will
have taken something like 14 years to deliberate.
Dr Kapila: Again, everything I
say refers to my period of office so I cannot comment on this
subsequently, but I can tell you that when I was in my particular
office I strongly argued for justice through the International
Criminal Court of Inquiry following a Commission of Inquiry and
I was delighted when an inquiry was finally set up. I had asked
for that myself as far back as October 2003. I would say that
justice delayed is justice denied. I would also say that the capability
of the indicted people to evade justice can only be strengthened
as the months pass. In all our experience of sustaining peace
and peace agreements, peace without justice remain fragile and
if the aim now is to ensure that the North-South peace agreement
and the other agreements are held and that we turn the chapter
on Sudan and have a peaceful country in the future then that objective
is compromised without accountability of the perpetrators of these
Darfur deeds. It is not just a question of justice for justice's
sake, that justice is essential for our international objectives
to sustain a peaceful solution and peace in Sudan.
Q196 Mr Bercow: I do not want to get
into trouble with the Chairman because that is always a very dangerous
thing to do but I do just want to push you on two final aspects,
if I may, before I shut up and let colleagues proceed. First,
I do not know whether you have picked up some of the messages
which I have picked up from the Foreign Office in the UK, but
are you not disturbed by talk on the part of some public figures
which suggests or implies that there is a sort of balance of responsibility
between government and the rebel forces for what is taking place?
Personally, as a Member of Parliament, I have asked a number of
questions of ministers, ministers I personally rather like and
in many ways respect, and have been a bit shocked in recent times
to hear answers along the lines of "Right and wrong on both
sides, abuses being committed on both sides, abuses by the rebels,
abuses by the government". It does seem to me that there
is really a rather important distinction, and that is that the
rebels are starting from a very low and weak base. The rebels
do not have Antonov aeroplanes and they do not have helicopter
gun ships. Do you not think that the danger of that, however well
intentioned, apportionment of blame, or attempt to get equitable
distribution of blame, could be yet a further excuse for impotent
hand-wringing?
Dr Kapila: I think anybody who
commits abuses, rebel or government, should be held accountable.
If the rebels are doing that sort of thing now then they should
be held equally accountable. Having said that, undoubtedly I think
the Government of Sudan, certainly from my experiences at the
time, bears the lion's share of the responsibility. Those who
have authority have an extra responsibility. Even if the rebels
did things, the Government of Sudan is the Government of Sudan
and, therefore, has the particular responsibility that goes with
that role as the Government of Sudan. In that sense there is no
equivalence there at all and those who put themselves in a position
of power have to be judged by those standards in a sense. I have
been out of the country so I have not heard what the Foreign Office
have said but all I would say from a general perspective would
be that there is no trade-off between peace and justice. This
country should know better than to say that if people are saying
that. What it means is that a bad peace agreement or a compromised
peace agreement will unfold sooner or later. We have seen this
before. Remember Sierra Leone. I was involved in that myself in
my DFID days and we had a succession of bad peace agreements where
immunities were given to people and so on and war unfolded. Of
course, bringing justice does not mean being punitive and locking
people up in jail forever or hanging them and so on. There are
forms of justice and reckoning and accountability but without
that reckoning, without that acknowledgment, without justice being
done, peace is not worth having and it will not be a help.
Q197 Mr Bercow: The man responsible for
the peacekeeping operation in Rwanda speculated that an African
Union force of 44,000 was required whereas at the moment there
are somewhere between 1,800 and 1,900 African Union troops on
the ground and a commitment to get to 3,000. I must say progress
seems to be pitifully slow. I am inclined to think of Kafka's
castle where every time you take a step nearer the castle you
find you are a step further away. I know you are not a military
logistician, you are a humanitarian affairs co-ordinator, but,
nevertheless, what is your best estimate of the scale of the force
needed in terms of numbers of troops and levels of logistical
support, possibly even clarifications of mandate needed if the
human rights abuses, the killings, the maiming, the rapes, the
tortures, are to stop?
Dr Kapila: From first principles,
a mandate has to be an enforcement mandate rather than a peacekeeping
mandate and it needs to have enough capacity to be able to cover
the different areas of the region, which is as big as France as
you know. Having said that, the tactical question is whether it
is a doable job. In a sense it is a paradoxical question. If suddenly
there were 100,000 troops, international peacekeepers, in Darfur
as opposed to 3,000, would that mean that they would be able to
work effectively? I wonder. The point here is that because of
the sheer size of the country and the logistical challenges and
the nature of the opposition that is going to happen, unless one
had a very, very robust presence, and we know even robust presences
in Iraq do not succeed easily, and so the debate here has to be
between what is doable and the size of it. Yes, a robust presence
is needed but lots more numbers will not necessarily deliver that.
In the end, I think probably it is a question of other measures
to be applied on the Sudan government, including what I asked
for in the past in my time there, which was targeted sanctions.
After all, this war costs money and it is bankrolled by the oil
wealth and other resources and it is bankrolled through the pockets
of a few individuals at the very top and these people should be
hurt where it matters most, their pockets. This would have a salutary
effect on the conflict more than anything else would.
Mr Bercow: Thank you very much.
Q198 Mr Battle: Could I switch the focus
from the last remarks you were making about the internal workings
of Sudan and try and reflect what you have said about the political
aspects of the international community's response. I was very
taken by a remark that you made at the beginning which was this
separation of the political from the humanitarian and then you
made a distinction between the humanitarian and the developmental.
I do not distinguish any of those and I look to ask myself is
the UN an agency for peace and development (including humanitarian
when there is a crisis whether natural or caused by human beings).
You referred to the need for a comprehensive and determined approach
and I think, if I may say, Dr Kapila, you have been courageously
outspoken, and continue to be so, and you reminded us as politicians—I
will check back on the record—on Rwanda that all who know
something and do nothing hoping that those who are suffering may
go away are actually compounding and are part of the responsibility
for what happens, and I take what you have said today very, very
seriously. But if I were then to push that, am I detecting in
what you are saying a deeply political—in the best sense—challenge
to the structural functioning of the UN and the Security Council?
When you say to us that the relationship between the humanitarian
and political was separated out, DFID in a memo said: "Humanitarian
and political aspects of the crisis were not always considered
in the round by some in the international community". Could
we go further and identify and say who and what those forces were
that were arguing against the fusing together of humanitarian
and political aspects?
Dr Kapila: Yes. Let me just say,
so it is on the record, that the failure of the UN to take a political
approach to Darfur is fundamentally responsible for the fact that
we could not deal with ethnic cleansing and ultimately the judgment
of history—to me this will be the greatest regret to my
dying day—will be that we failed in Darfur. However much
we may express outrage now, and having come from Rwanda myself
and having witnessed all those things, and the smell of those
dead bodies still comes to me 10 years after the event, I consider
myself to have failed. It is kind of you to say that I am courageous
but I consider I failed in Darfur because ethnic cleansing did
take place and it happened on my patch and we failed. I failed
and we failed. Essentially the pressures which separate the different
elements are national interests of Member States and a failure
of vision and imagination on the part of the political leadership
to bring these different elements together. By that I mean that
because there was this fragmentation of thinking in the different
centres of power that were exercising their influence on the Darfur/Sudan
situation, and because the United Nations' political arm was disempowered
from this process in large measure, and even if it had been empowered
the mechanisms for political analysis and political action are
not as strong as they could be, there was no way that the weaknesses
that you saw would not have expressed themselves. If you are asking
me to name who was responsible for this, I would say that it was
a collective failure and that every Member State has its own share
of responsibility because of the way they perceived the particular
problem.
Q199 Mr Battle: Going even wider, because
for some of us who were born after the Second World War and during
the early days of the formation and development of the United
Nations that organisation encapsulated great hope that the world
could get together and address problems in common and not go quite
as far as an agreed democratically elected world government that
made all the decisions for us but at least some mechanism whereby
justice and peace could be disseminated, there would be co-ordination
between those nations that would help to bring it about, if you
like. In recent years, particularly in the last five or six years,
for various reasons there has been a massive loss of faith in
the capacity of the UN to be able to either prevent intense conflicts
or deliver fast enough. I just wonder what your view of the UN
is now. Do you hold out the possibility of its re-formation, its
transformation, to form the kind of agency that we dreamed about
after the Second World War?
Dr Kapila: I am optimistic and
remain optimistic but also I know that we will get the UN we deserve
and the UN we fight for. As long as the UN is used, abused and
manipulated by Member States for narrow interests dressed up in
all sorts of rhetoric and wider sentiment, do not be surprised
if the officials of the UN, who are no more than civil servants,
continue to have their own preoccupations with survival and with
the pressures upon them, and I know something of that, and will
continue to behave in the way that the organisation behaves in
the way it does. The question you have to ask, and this question
has to be directed equally to Member States as much as to the
UN civil service—I am not avoiding it—is whether or
not the standards of conduct of the Member States are ones that
comply with the highest ideals and principles of the United Nations'
Charter. Obviously by asking this question I am saying the answer
is it does not, but nobody actually asks that question and when
people criticise it they criticise the bureaucracy of the UN and
when you look at the bureaucracy it consists of rules and regulations
that have been imposed on the organisation by Member States, that
have been part of the checks and balances of the trade-offs of
interests of different groupings and one is lumbered, therefore,
with machinery that in certain circumstances is unworkable. Then
if you happen to feel as strongly as I sometimes foolishly do
on these matters you get into trouble because you are trying to
make the system work by going round and finding other mechanisms
that bypass it and so on, but that is not the way in which to
work. I would say that the UN ideals remain worth fighting for.
There has to be greater accountability. For example, I think some
of the parliamentarians of different Member States should be asking
their representatives—I do not refer to the UK, the UK has
a very good and ethical position, I am talking more generally—how
is the position they take in respect of the UN considered. There
is an accountability and democracy deficit, if you like, in governments,
in relation to the position they take on the UN. I have had some
experience of this simply by observing some of the pressures upon
me. Every day in my office in Khartoum I had delegations, senior
people from powerful Member States, coming to me and pressing
me to pursue this line or that line. If I did not pursue this
line, because it happened to be their favourite client group or
their favourite agencies then I was a bad co-ordinator and they
would report me in New York, and effectively a couple of powerful
donors did that. If I did that, another group would be dis-enfranchised
and then you would be pressured to employ people in your office
or whatever based on certain considerations which further complicates
the way you operate. Fundamentally, I think if the UN is flawed
it is simply a reflection of the way Member States' signals are
sent and the way they govern the organisation. It is not fair
to blame the officials of the UN system. They can be blamed for
some acts of omission or commission certainly but I think there
is a much bigger issue about how we view the UN.
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