Examination of Witness (Questions 200-211)
DR MUKESH
KAPILA
22 FEBRUARY 2005
Q200 Mr Battle: Thank you very much for
that encouraging answer. Could I perhaps go back a little bit
over comments that you have made about the—I think this
is the expression some of the NGOs have used—sequencing,
that the North-South peace process should be the first priority
and Darfur on the backburner. That is the kind of language they
have used. You have made some remarks about that already. I just
want to ask a little bit further about that because, to draw an
analogy, I once recall a group of people who were very anxious
to tackle the issue of homeless, not in the south of the world
but in the north of the world, and there were people knocking
on the doors all night and they decided to do something about
it and build a hostel, so they were turning people away all night
because if they could not get any sleep they could not get up
in the morning and do the work and the hostel would never get
built. It was the immediate crisis of the person on the street
versus the structural issue of building a hostel for the longer
term. Was that what the sequencing was about or were lives in
the short-term in Darfur sacrificed to the hopes of the peace
process?
Dr Kapila: Certainly there was
a policy of sequencing in the sense that when the question of
Darfur was brought up, and I did it myself in my travels around
the world, including to London and in United Nations fora, I was
told, as others have been told, "We sympathise with the problems
of Darfur but do not make too much noise and trouble now, let
us sort this Naivasha thing out and then everything will be alright".
When I raised the question that this was anti-humanitarian, that
it was also bad analysis because there would be no peace without
Darfur being on the way to resolution and so on, there was understanding
of the point of view but fundamentally an unwillingness to accept
it. You have got to understand that there are a lot of national
egos and personal egos tied up in peace making. After all, Nobel
Peace prizes are won on the basis of peace agreements. When you
are a country or an individual engaged in what you think means
you are on the threshold of solving Africa's longest crisis, et
cetera, then there is a natural tendency that anyone else who
comes along with an irritating distraction is going to get short
shrift. Sadly, egos, including national egos, got in the way of
seeing this picture clearly and as a result the people of Darfur
suffered. There is no question in my mind and that of anyone who
actually knows what is going on that there was a policy of sequencing.
I do not think it was an orchestrated policy, in other words I
do not think people sat in the chanceries of the Security Council
countries and said, "We'll deliberately ignore Darfur and
deliberately let the people of Darfur suffer and we will turn
a blind eye to them until we have sorted out the Naivasha process."
It was the effect of a bandwagon which had not only rolled but
had corralled a whole lot of other wagons around it, so they were
all together. Not only was it flawed, it was wrong and certainly
the people of Darfur suffered as a consequence. I have no doubt
whatsoever that if attention to Darfur had been given in the corridors
of Naivasha by the very high level people that were involved in
it, by the presidents and prime ministers who were urging the
two parties to sign up to that particular piece of paper, then
quite possibly the course of events might have been different.
We may not have the peace agreement between the North and South
now, but the peace agreement between the North and South was only
a piece of paper at the time. There was no war going on between
the North and South, there was peace. The circumstances on the
ground made very little difference. Basically we had peace in
southern Sudan, apart from a few warlords here and there creating
trouble now and then and I had my share of trying to sort that
out. Effectively there was no war. In fact, people were returning
back to school, there was life going on and the more it went on
the more people would find it difficult to go back to war. What
was happening in Darfur was mass rape and "ethnic cleansing"
and so on. Undoubtedly this collective bandwagon which led to
a de facto policy of sequencing contributed to the people
in Darfur suffering more than they need have. It does not mean
that the problem would not have happened in its entirety. I wonder
whether or not we would have had less suffering and less entrenched
positions which would have made solving it much easier.
Q201 Chairman: Did you have any suggestion
from the UK Government that you should ease up your comments and
your criticisms on Darfur until the Naivasha agreement was concluded?
Dr Kapila: Yes.
Q202 John Barrett: It seems to me to
be clearly accepted that there was sequencing and Darfur was put
on a back-burner. Are you surprised that there is still a stout
defence that has been put forward, which is that this was the
right way to progress? Are you not surprised that people have
learned the lessons? You are saying that the suffering was intensified
in Darfur while this course of action was being followed, are
you not?
Dr Kapila: Now we are learning
all sorts of lessons, but that is after the event.
Q203 John Barrett: You were quite strong
in saying the sequencing which took place was in fact the wrong
thing to do, but we have taken evidence on this Committee that
has defended that. The Secretary of State put up quite a stout
defence to say that this was the correct way to proceed. Are you
surprised at that?
Dr Kapila: I can only say that
both Clare Short and then Valerie Amos and Hilary Benn have been
fully supportive and very concerned about what goes on in Sudan.
Without their support at different critical stages my life would
have been very, very difficult. So I would like to pay tribute
to DFID and the Secretaries of State that were here during the
time I was there.
Q204 Chairman: Your difficulty on this
policy is that while they were very supportive, the actual policy
so far as HMG was concerned in Khartoum was being led by the Foreign
Office.
Dr Kapila: I think it is a question
of what you call policy. Policy implies a carefully considered
analysis resulting in an explicitly articulated set of objectives
which are then executed in a systemic way by all elements of the
concerned government. I think the UK Government had a policy,
it was stated and it said all the right things, but the problem
on this particular aspect was that there was a certain ambivalence
of approach. There was not a policy of sequencing. I do not think
Hilary Benn or anyone sat here and said, "My God, let's let
the people of Darfur suffer." On the contrary, they were
very concerned about what was going on and so was the Foreign
Office. I can only sing the praises of the Ambassador in Khartoum,
William Patey, and the DFID staff in Khartoum because without
their personal and professional energy and concern we would not
be so far on. There was still an ambivalence of saying this is
serious, it is getting worse, but let us gamble on the Naivasha
thinking working soon and resulting in a positive outcome in Darfur.
It is a risk people chose to take and it is a risk that was morally
and ethically wrong, but in any case it backfired. I do not think
it was a formulated policy, which means in a sense that people
did not want to do it except in one case. I came to London to
have meetings with the Foreign Office in October of last year
and I had the same meeting in Washington, Oslo and Paris etc and
I explicitly asked for the matter to be referred to the Security
Council. There had been no discussion with the Security Council
on Sudan for a very, very long period of time and I said this
was a threat to international peace and security because by then
the numbers of refugees going into Chad was mounting up, there
was the alleged involvement of other countries, therefore this
was a threat to international peace and security etc, etc. Apart
from Washington, who was open to this, all the other capitals
that I attended said, "We hear you, but not yet. Give it
more time. We do not want to disrupt the Naivasha process."
Washington said to me, "We think what is going on in Darfur
is terrible. We should apply the highest pressure on Khartoum
including sanctions and much stronger measures," but unfortunately
the problem was that at that period of time the messages emanating
from Washington, the right messages in my opinion, got confounded
with the wider Washington position on world affairs including
Iraq and so anything that emerged from Washington at that time,
even though in my opinion they were the right things, were not
necessarily going to find favour elsewhere. The one person who
gave me the greatest support in the UN Secretariat was Jan Egeland,
the Under-Secretary-General, who addressed you a few weeks ago.
He also wanted a referral to the Security Council and he was very
supportive of all this and we tried very hard to get this matter
referred and it turned into a political issue and we failed. It
is the members of the Security Council that must ask the question
in their consciences and in the reckoning of history as to why
they did not do so and in my opinion that is a failure, including
a failure of British Government foreign policy. I remember saying
to the Foreign Office, "Please refer this matter. As a UN
coordinator I am bringing to your attention that there are crimes
against humanity being committed. This must be brought to the
Security Council's attention", and I was told "Not yet".
Q205 John Barrett: Following the signing
of the peace agreement expectations are now high as to the volume
of aid that will be poured into the South and other parts of Sudan,
but one of the real dilemmas is dealing with the Sudanese government.
Do you think there is any wisdom behind the thought of linking,
withholding, aid to development towards a peaceful resolution
in Darfur because the one ray of light has been the signing of
the peace agreement in the South? When the Committee met people
in the South we found their expectations are now almost that money
is going to roll in. The expectation from the Sudanese government
is that very large sums are being held up until they move forward
on Darfur. Do you think that is an option worth exploring?
Dr Kapila: I think this must be
carefully looked at. Withholding funds for health, education,
water and so on from ordinary people who have suffered enough
is a bad idea. Our quarrel is not with the people of Sudan. In
fact, the people of Sudan are themselves fed up with this. The
sooner they achieve a state of development in which they can be
more powerful to address these sorts of issues, including better
health, education etc, etc, the better it will be. Also, it is
a basic human right to have health and education etc, etc. I think
the long lesson to learn from history is that failure to engage
with the people of Sudan in a meaningful way and to address their
human development needs basically helped to create the conditions
whereby a certain clique established a monopoly and we had no
other channels to operate. This is not simply an argument for
using NGOs, it is a more complex argument. I would say that assistance
for human development should be provided in all the constructive
and creative ways possible and to as many people as possible without
preconditions. When it comes to other forms of development aid
like, for example, capacity building for government institutions,
economic aid, the benefits of which accrue to organised groups
within Sudan, the elite groups, then that should be withheld until
we have this situation in Darfur sorted out. I think we have to
be very careful what aid we withhold and what aid we continue
to give. It is possible to continue to give assistance in ways
that will help the people of Sudan without strengthening the elements
of war.
Q206 Mr Bercow: Dr Kapila, the Chairman
asked you a few moments ago whether anybody in the British Government
had urged you to tone down your public criticisms of the Government
of Sudan pending progress on Naivasha and you answered very simply
yes. Who?
Dr Kapila: I would find that very
difficult to answer because I will have to name names, but suffice
to say that that was the perspective I had from London on my visits
that I made here. I have to say that in democratic governments,
and Britain enjoys one, there is a diversity of opinion and rightly
so. There are other elements of the British Government who were
very, very supportive and they even urged me to do and say more
because I know quite a lot more than has been revealed here. The
British Embassy in Khartoum was a very, very strong advocate of
taking a very strong line on the Darfur issue and the British
Ambassador was one of the flag bearers for seeing justice happen.
In the end I think the perception was that this was a distraction
that would undermine the wider effort and therefore I should maybe
not make too much noise about this. Of course, this was also beginning
to be linked in some way to the tenability of my own position
because saying all these things does not win you many friends
either in your host country, Sudan, the country to which you are
accredited, or amongst Member States. You may want to pursue a
line which you perceive as your best judgment in line with what
you believe to be the interpretation of the United Nations Charter
and you believe in being an international civil servant without
fear or favour, but that is not necessarily appreciated by Member
States which may have different perspectives and tactics and your
approach is not convenient to them at particular moments in time.
Reforming the organisation into better aid delivery and so on
generates its own tensions which also have a bearing on this.
When you do not have a political mandate and people are saying
to you that you are interfering in political matters, you argue
back at them and say, "Look, I'm trying to save lives and
trying to draw the world's attention to acts of genocide and that
this is an individual human responsibility." This is what
the inquiry of Rwanda and Srebrenica found out and what the Secretary-General
and others acknowledged, that it is an individual responsibility
to act when such crimes against humanity are committed. In that
context I think one had to do what I had to do.
Q207 Mr Bercow: I very much appreciate
the extent to which you have been prepared to share your assessment
with us and I certainly would not want to press you any further
than you have already been pressed. Would it be right to characterise
your view as follows, which is that the advice that you were offered
was misguided rather than malign and that it was folly rather
than knavery?
Dr Kapila: Yes, absolutely. I
am glad you said that. I would want to emphasise that people in
the UK Government and in other governments were concerned about
Darfur. Let no one go away with the impression either that these
capitals were unaware of what was going on or they were unconcerned
about what was going on. In fact, the UN is very often the last
to know. The UN does not have access to the sort of intelligence
and other information that individual Member States do. So there
is plenty of knowledge going on and there is plenty of concern
going on. The policy that was adopted was well meaning in its
own particular way. There were some who were skeptical about the
seriousness of what was going on in Darfur, some governments were
more skeptical than other governments, but they were trying very
hard to do the right thing. History is now sadly telling us that
that was misguided and it was un-humanitarian. Why is it that
we are saying this now and why did we not say it then? Some of
us were saying it then as well. If you believe in an ethical foreign
policy then you work according to certain principles. The general
verdict of history is that by following certain principles the
right solutions emerge. If the Naivasha process had resulted in
success earlier and a stoppage of the Darfur carnage earlier etc,
etc then we might have concluded that that was the right policy.
The chances of being right and for that process to have worked
were minimal and every single commentator was saying this. Therefore,
one can only deduce from this that there was (a) a collective
faulty line that people had gone down and a faulty bandwagon or
(b) there was a wider goal not to address this for reasons that
I do not want to speculate on here. This is more the conspiracy
theory to which I do not personally subscribe.
Q208 Tony Worthington: I just want to
go back to something you said earlier about what you took over
in terms of a divided office. You said that you had the Kenyan
bit and the Nairobi bit and then you had the Khartoum section
of it. By the Nairobi bit I assume you mean Operation Lifeline
Sudan set up from Lokichokio and Nairobi. I remember going there
a dozen years ago and at that time it seemed quite dangerous that
you were flying in what was the most expensive food in the world
in relatively small planes and dropping it there and taking nurses
in in the morning and out at night. Flick on a few years and it
sounds like that had got into a ritualized situation where there
was no war going on and you had got the Sudanese government in
the towns and the rebels in the countryside. The best way of doing
that efficiently is to get into an arrangement with the troops
on the ground, the rebels, so that there is no danger to anybody
and so what you are doing is ringing up the local commander and
saying, "Here is the food coming in to such-and-such."
Is that what was happening?
Dr Kapila: People certainly got
into a way of working, but there were also severe practical difficulties.
For example, when John Garang and I had a discussion about post-conflict
reconstruction he laughed and said "What reconstruction?
There is no construction here at all. Look around you. There has
not been a single tarmac road built in southern Sudan since creation."
Even if we had not been dependent on aircraft, the practicality
of bringing road access would have been a horrendously complicated
thing to do and then there were mines and then there were various
militia groupings and various combinations of insecurity and control
of the territory to consider. I think a more logical approach
would have been, and this is where the authorities got in the
way, to supply food from the north. The logical way to supply
food into southern Sudan is the way it has been supplied in history,
ie not from the Kenyan end of the shore but down the River Nile,
this is a mighty waterway, but the river got closed down in the
late 1990s when people got killed. One of my objectives which
did succeed was to re-open the Nile for North-South transport,
but the southern authorities found it politically unacceptable
to accept food that was coming in from the North even though it
was under the control of the United Nations and this was a big
problem. The other problem we had was that after we successfully
opened the Nile corridor in the summer of 2003 I set my sights
on opening three road corridors and we succeeded with one of them
but not with the others because they were going through territory
which belonged to successive people and negotiations for access
made life very difficult. The second problem was that no one was
going to fund mine clearance and build roads until there was a
peace agreement that was really on the table because that was
construed as development and, as I was saying earlier on, people
do not do development in conflict situations. So basically we
were locked into an extremely expensive food aid delivery operation
by air for both political reasons as well as practical circumstances.
Q209 Tony Worthington: It was called
UN, but it got construed as a pro-southern operation.
Dr Kapila: It certainly got construed
as a southern operation, which was unfair in large part, but that
is the way it was. Pragmatically you had to balance the access
you had with the access you might obtain. In other words, you
gained certain access over many years of negotiations and one
did not want to give that up in return for something else because
if you gave that up you would have nothing. There was this constant
juggling act to do on the one hand of regaining a reputation for
impartiality and trust but at the same time not giving up the
privileged access in the South which had been carefully worked
up over the years.
Q210 John Barrett: You mentioned earlier
on that you thought there was no trade-off between peace and justice
and that we ought not to hold back on pursuing those in the Sudanese
government who had been responsible for this because they were
part of the peace process. When we were out in Sudan it was suggested
to us by the Ambassador that there was a trade-off between peace
and justice. Do you think if we accepted that there was a trade-off
this would be playing into the hands of the Sudanese government
who would want us to accept that? Would you hold on to your original
line?
Dr Kapila: Yes, and not just the
Sudanese government. After all, the Sudanese government has its
backers as well, international backers and so on. There are issues
of precedents that might be established for other countries. Within
the geopolitical context there would be those who would ascribe
to that particular viewpoint. It does not mean that tomorrow the
case will be strong enough against the 51 individuals that are
on the sealed list. With the best scenario it is going to take
time, but to add further delays to it would certainly not help
our cause. People should learn from history. What examples are
there of good peace agreements around the world which have held
by trading off peace and justice? They do not exist. Where they
have existed on a temporary fix things have unraveled in time,
they have unraveled after five years or after 10 years, but by
then people have achieved their Nobel Prizes and retired with
fame and honour. One has to take a long-term view of this. I defy
anyone to give us an example of a successful long-term sustainable
peace agreement that has traded off justice and peace; it does
not exist. That is a lesson that people should be learning and
they should take that long-term view while addressing some of
the urgent and immediate problems.
Q211 Chairman: Thank you very much for
coming and sharing your views with us and for being so candid
and so forthright.
Dr Kapila: May I just say for
the record that my remarks concerned my period of office. I made
no comments or pass any judgment on the current Sudanese government
or international bodies or international processes, but I am referring
entirely to the period that I know of and events and circumstances
at that moment in time. It is in that context that you should
consider my comments.
Chairman: Thank you very much.
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