Examination of Witnesses (Questions 212-219)
RT HON
HILARY BENN
MP AND MS
ANNA BEWES
23 FEBRUARY 2005
Q212 Chairman: Secretary of State, may
we thank you and your colleagues very much for giving us your
time on this. I think, firstly, we are slightly lower on numbers
than usual simply because half the Committee are in Iraq; we split,
and half went to Africa and half went to Iraq—simply a budgeting
thing and trying to fit everything in at this end of the year.
For those of us who went to Darfur, I think it has been quite
difficult trying to describe to people the scale, the size of
these internally displaced persons camps. The nearest I got to
trying to describe it at various church groups at home was that
it was as if every single constituent of mine had been driven
out of their homes into IDP camps. One of the things to which
we got an answer, but it was not an entirely satisfactory answer,
from our Ambassador—who I thought was excellent and everybody
paid tribute to him; he has done a brilliant job—was how
do we manage to get to a situation where 1.5 million people were
driven out of their homes without the international community
actually doing very much diplomatically about that? Whatever the
international community is doing in terms of humanitarian support
now in terms of medical care and food and so on and so forth,
there is an issue that for quite a while those people were being
driven out of their homes and there was no diplomatic or other
intervention. What lessons do you think there need to be learned?
Egeland said to us that he was putting up warning signs and he
was not being listened to. Do you think there needs to be some
kind of system, almost, of the UN flagging up red or amber, or
kind of alerts that people have to respond to in some way? How
do you ensure that that kind of situation does not happen again?
Hilary Benn: First of all, can
I say that I share the view you expressed, having visited three
of the camps myself in June of last year [2003], about the scale
of it. Climbing up the incline at Abu Shouk camp, almost as far
as the eye could see (a particularly well-organised camp in terms
of the way it has been laid out and, if my memory serves me right,
managed by the Red Cross), not for nothing has this been described
as the greatest humanitarian crisis in Africa. I do not think
it is true to say that nothing had been done diplomatically. The
frustration expressed, which I think we all share, is how to deal
with this extremely complex crisis that has gone on for quite
some time. However, I do not think it is the case that the world
was not aware and was not raising it; it was very first raised,
as far as the UK Government was concerned, shortly after the first
attacks in Spring of 2003 by my predecessor-but-one, the Rt Hon
Member for Birmingham Ladywood, and it is a process we have continued
to be engaged in, both on the political and on the humanitarian,
ever since. I think the second thing I would say is that there
have been false dawns with the various ceasefires that have been
signed; so it has been in a slightly different situation to some
other crises involving conflict that have taken place. The problem,
as we know, has been to get the parties to those agreements actually
to honour them, and there has been a repeated failure to honour
commitments that have been entered into. I think the third thing
has been for a period of time, as we know, particularly around
the turn of the year last year and into the early Spring of 2004,
the Government of Sudan made it very difficult for anybody to
see what was going on because of the problems of access either
for the purposes of discovering the extent of the displacement
of people—although obviously that began to manifest itself,
especially as people went over the border—and then a huge
effort to get humanitarian access improved and, I accept, to get
the world to then say: "What are we going to do?" and
to form the AU operation. I think, from memory, the Secretary
General of the UN first expressed his alarm over human rights
violations and lack of humanitarian access on 9 December. I think
the other thing we need to recognise, to be really honest about
this, is not all of the countries in the UN have necessarily seen
the crisis in the same way. I think the UK has played an honourable
role in being very upfront in what we have done, the way we have
done it, the consistency with which we have raised the issue but
not everyone has been persuaded (1) that this was a great humanitarian
crisis and (2) that something could be done about it, and we see
that reflected even in the discussions going on as we speak in
the UN Security Council where there is a draft resolution before
the Security Council which does propose a mechanism for introducing
potential sanctions. My firm conclusion is that that is a road
down which we should go because I think, frankly, given the consistent
failure of parties to abide by the commitments they have entered
into, the world community has got to show that we are serious
about this, but not all members of the UN Security Council actually
agree with doing that. That is part of the problem.
Q213 Chairman: Can I just disentangle
this? The UN not so long ago produced this High Level Panel report
on threats, in which it says: ". . . there should be an emerging
norm of a responsibility to protect civilians from large-scale
violence", and this clearly was large-scale violence. Is
there not, clearly, a responsibility on the UN Secretary-General
and on key players in the humanitarian field in the United Nations
system to indicate if they believe that there is—to use
that phrase—large-scale violence to the civilian population,
and then a responsibility on the international community as a
whole to respond to that? There are two extraneous lots of players
in this: there is the Government of Sudan, whom I think we would
all acknowledge are in denial—
Hilary Benn: Yes.
Q214 Chairman: Mr Bercow, who is not
here today, said to the Minister for Humanitarian Affairs: "What
is it like to be a political leper?" and the guy just smiled;
so they are clearly in denial. Then there are other parts of the
United Nations community who for various reasons in relation to
oil and so forth have their own agendas. One has got the Secretary-General
who has objective responsibilities and we, as a member of the
Security Council, have a responsibility to respond if those concerns
are raised. I just wondered whether there are lessons that need
to be learnt from this about how those systems work and how we
respond to those calls. Otherwise, all that has been happening
on this—and I do not criticise you for it—is that
we kind of say: "This was the best that could be done in
all the circumstances, given the difficulties of the Government
of Sudan preventing people from getting there and given possible
vetoes from members of the Security Council." There is, surely,
some objective tests where the international community intervenes—by
"intervention" I do not necessarily mean military intervention
but by all means available, diplomatic and otherwise?
Hilary Benn: I accept your premise,
because your first point was that the UN and the humanitarian
system do have an obligation to tell it like it is. I think that
looking back on what has happened, and given the number of people
who have been forced to flee their homes, then the primary responsibility
rests with those who attacked them and forced them to leave their
homes (and it is very important that we do not lose sight of that)
but I cannot but help share your frustration that the international
community, in this case, needs to have found a way to be more
effective. It is no good pretending otherwise. In saying that,
I would say that the response of the UK Government has been as
good if not better than anybody else—not because I am interested
in getting into a competition—but we cannot act on our own,
and as the UN Secretary General would point out very forcibly
he is dependent on the decisions that members of the UN Security
Council are prepared to take. If you asked the people in the camps
who have been forced to flee their homes: "What do you think
of the role which the international system has played in trying
to prevent this happening to you?" then they would not, frankly,
be terribly impressed, and I can understand entirely why that
is the case. One of the reasons—there is a whole host of
reasons, some of which I alluded to in my first answer—is
the question of capacity to do things. Even assuming there is
the will, there is limited capacity, as evidenced by people's
willingness to put troops and police people and others on the
ground. What the African Union has done, and why we have given
it such strong support as the UK, having been the first country
in the world to provide financial support to the AU, is precisely
because firstly this has been about Africa taking responsibility
for dealing with the crisis on its doorstep, and a very serious
one, and, secondly, by doing that it has increased the capacity
of the world to respond. That is why we have put so much time,
effort and energy, once the AU force began to deploy, into supporting
it, to helping them to increase their numbers. As we know from
Jan Pronk's reports and the reports of others, they are doing
an increasingly effective job but they need more people on the
ground. They themselves recognise that as they are busy trying
to deploy additional people.
Q215 Chairman: We will come on to the
African Union in a second, Secretary of State. There is a quote
which I commend to you by Michael Walzer from Intervention
and State Failure (a chapter in the New Killing Fields[1]),
in which he observes that (the logic, I think, of what you are
saying): "There are many failed and failing states; the ones
that will actually receive sustained international attention will
be those that directly threaten the national interests and national
security of powerful states", because we have a limited number
of states that have unlimited capacity—ourselves, the United
States, France and one or two others—and if we are not immediately
concerned about helping or threatening to help then there is the
danger that governments such as that of Sudan think they can act
with impunity.
Hilary Benn: I would not accept,
in relation to the United Kingdom, the suggestion that somehow
because the crisis in Darfur has not directly affected our own
interests we have not given it the attention it deserves. I would
refute that unreservedly, because I think any fair assessment
of what we have done on the political front and on the humanitarian
front would show that we have put a lot of time and effort and
energy into trying to do something about it. I do not say that
defensively, but if the argument is that the international community
in general is not interested because its security is not threatened
by this, that certainly cannot apply in the case of the UK; others
will have to answer for themselves.
Q216 Chairman: I do not think we, as
a Committee, are having a go at HMG.
Hilary Benn: Just getting it on
the record.
Q217 Chairman: Maybe if you abandon the
"if pressed" bit of the briefing, okay?
Hilary Benn: That came from the
heart, not from the "if pressed" briefing, because I
believe it to be the case!
Chairman: Your point is a very fair point:
that there are a limited number of countries with the capacity.
So that then takes us on, I think, to the AU and what the AU can
do.
Q218 Tony Worthington: Taking the AU,
we met the AU and I think we were impressed by them; they were
a proper outfit; these were real soldiers, disciplined and going
about their task in a sensible, organised way. However, when you
look at the scale of this, it is like saying "Private Benn,
you are responsible for Belgium; you are the peacekeeper for Belgium."
All right, so we double the number, and you are responsible for
half of Belgium. It is that scale of things, is it not? There
comes a credibility problem. What is the step beyond this?
Hilary Benn: The step beyond this
is firstly to support the AU in deploying all of the people that
they have said they want to deploy, and that is the 3,300. I understand
that General Okonkwo, who is the AU commander, has recently suggested
to the AU that they should further increase the number above 3,300.
I do not know whether you met him during the course of your visit.
I have said throughout, and the British Government has said throughout,
that if the AU decides it wants to increase the size of its force
there then we will support that process as we have done right
from the very beginning. I think the second thing I would say
is that with the draft UN resolution that is now before the Security
Council, and the fact that with the signing of the Comprehensive
Peace Agreement in Naivasha the resolution now looks to establish
the peace support operation in support of that, I welcome very
much what the resolution has to say about ways in which the deployment
of that UN blue-helmeted force might be able to provide support
in Darfur. I think that would be a logical thing to do if the
situation worsens again. As we sit here today, our current assessment
of the position since the beginning of the month has been—I
suppose I would describe it—an "uneasy calm",
again, because we have had these periodic outbursts. I hope that
period of uneasy calm will hold. The withdrawal of the Antonov
bombers which the Government of Sudan has now undertaken to do
is a welcome step, but as I said to the Foreign Minister Mustafa
when I saw him about a couple of weeks ago, what we are interested
in is not what people say they are going to do but what people
do. I think, in those circumstances, the best thing we can do
is support the AU force, to encourage them to get everyone there
as quickly as possible, to look at how the UN might then be able
to support it in the light of the decisions which the Security
Council is now going to look at, but, at the same time, politically,
to say very strongly to the parties to the conflict: "You
have part of the solution in your hands, and the question is are
you going to do what you said you were going to do?"
Q219 Tony Worthington: What commitments,
for example, have we got from the Government of Sudan about their
helicopters?
Hilary Benn: No commitment is
the honest answer, because that was my second question, having
welcomed the fact that they had announced that they were going
to withdraw the Antonovs. I said "Are you going to withdraw
the attack helicopters?" and I did not get an answer to that.
One of the things that we are looking to do in the resolution
is to say: given the undertaking which the Government of Sudan
entered into in the autumn not to engage in aerial attacks, what
role could the AU play in effective enforcement? The issue with
either ensuring that people honour the commitments they have entered
into or enforcing decisions of the Security Council—whatever
they may be when the resolution is finally adopted—is how
do you check whether people are doing it? I think the AU could
potentially play a role, going to the airfields, seeing what goes
out and counting them back. I think that is a role that the African
Union (AU) could play and would enable all of us to be in a better
position to know when there were reports of attacks what exactly
went on. At the moment the AU is, of course, having to chase up
on those reports after the event.
1 The New Killing Fields: Massacre and the Politics
of Intervention, compilation of essays edited by Kira Brunner
and Nicolaus Mills. Back
|
