Examination of Witnesses (Questions 240-248)
RT HON
HILARY BENN
MP AND MS
ANNA BEWES
23 FEBRUARY 2005
Q240 Hugh Bayley: I was very pleased,
Secretary of State, to hear you saying the UK Government sticks
firmly behind the International Criminal Court as being the right
forum to bring people accused of war crimes before. However, there
is an impasse in the Security Council, with the United States,
China and Algeria proposing alternatives. What is the strategy
of the UK Government to reach agreement quickly on where those
guilty of war crimes are to be arraigned?
Hilary Benn: This is not a flippant
answer but diplomacy and talking, and there is a lot of diplomacy
and a lot of talking going on as we speak, and we are working
very hard to try and ensure that there is the right outcome.
Q241 Hugh Bayley: The International Commission
of Inquiry made a strong recommendation that the preferred forum
would be the International Criminal Court, but it also made proposals
for action which should be taken by the Government of Sudan to
sign up to international human rights standards in its own legislation,
and action that could be taken by other bodies. For instance,
it called on the Commission on Human Rights to consider the re-establishment
of a mandate for the special rapporteur on human rights in the
Sudan and it proposed that the High Commissioner for Human Rights
should issue public periodic reports on the human rights situation
in Darfur. If there is a risk, as there seems to be, of a delay
until a tribunal is established because of the diplomatic process,
will the UK Government be pressing for some of these additional
measures to be taken to ensure that the spotlight does not disappear
from the appalling crimes that have been committed in Darfur just
because the passage of time since the report was published deflects
the international media's attention?
Hilary Benn: I think it is very
important that the spotlight does not turn away from Darfur. I
think it will continue to be very important that we get good,
hard, accurate information about what is happening in Darfur,
including as far as human rights is concerned. As I recollect
(and I stand to be corrected), one of the things that we did quite
some time ago was to offer support to the United Nations to help
human rights monitors to deploy in Darfur—this is back during
the course of last year, I cannot quite recall exactly when it
was—because I thought it was important that we got that.
Having had the International Commission of Inquiry we need to
continue to get good reports, and I would be very keen to look
at all the ways of ensuring that we can get good, sound, accurate
information about what is happening, because it is one of the
ways we continue to demonstrate to people who might be thinking
of engaging in human rights abuses that the world is going to
continue to watch what is going on and that impunity does not
just apply to the crimes that have already been committed, but
will also apply to crimes that people might be thinking of committing
in the future.
Q242 Hugh Bayley: Could I turn to the
south, to southern Sudan. The peace is an enormously important
opportunity but my impression at least is that it is a very fragile
peace. The SPLM leaders whom we met have plenty of experience
of local military operations but the SPLM leaders in southern
Sudan have no experience whatsoever of running schools, building
roads, keeping accounts of public money, running customs regimes,
of running a regional authority and they are going to need an
enormous amount of capacity building and technical assistance.
What will DFID be doing to give them the capacity to run an effective
regional administration in southern Sudan?
Hilary Benn: I will ask Anna Bewes
to say a bit about the detail on that, but could I add to the
last question first? To point out that the UN High Commissioner
for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, gave a presentation to the Security
Council a couple of weeks ago, which those who were there said
certainly had an impact on those who were present. You raise a
very important point because it is about how you switch inside
your head from all of the things you have done—the fighting,
the political struggle to get to the peace agreement—to
a very, very different challenge which everybody in the SPLM accepts,
which is making the deal which has been negotiated work, and that
is as difficult again as the process they have just been through
in order to sign the peace agreement. Indeed, what we are proposing
to do in southern Sudan is to provide support to capacity. Indeed,
while the Naivasha Process was going on, we were encouraging the
SPLM at the time. I remember at a meeting which the Rt Hon Member
for Ladywood and myself had with John Garang when he came to London,
which must have been a year and a half ago, one of the things
we talked about then was to begin to prepare for the fruits of
a successful Naivasha Peace Agreement, in other words starting
to think about the very issues you have now raised. I do not know,
Anna, whether you want to say a little more about what we are
planning in the south?
Ms Bewes: As I mentioned earlier,
there is this Joint Assessment Mission which is coming to an end
now and that is setting out the needs within southern Sudan as
well as elsewhere in Sudan. It is in the context of that, we are
talking to the SPLM and the UN and other donors about what we
can best do. Our thoughts at the moment are that the area where
we have the most comparative advantage and where others are the
least likely to be able to involve themselves is in the justice
sector, and that will be very much capacity building, a big focus
on that, in terms of police and in terms of the legal sector as
well as a little bit about capital expenditure, providing the
bicycles and uniforms and so on for the police, and there is a
lot of capacity building and training going on in there. The other
main area of capacity building will be service delivery. A lot
of donors say they are going to come in to provide health and
education support, but what we see a need for is assistance to
the SPLM to see how they can improve their own management of service
delivery, to make sure they know what is happening across the
board and they are the ones who say, "Here is a gap, let's
make sure people within that area get the health, get the education,
they need on a sustainable basis." So we will not necessarily
ourselves be getting involved in health and education projects
but will be working with the government to help them establish
networks and see how most effectively they can ensure these services
are delivered. We have a team out there at the moment looking
at this, looking at what is happening on the ground. Because of
the situation you have just described, most of the services are
now already provided through NGOs and through the UN—
Q243 Hugh Bayley: With respect, they
are not provided by anybody. It is the most under-developed place.
Ms Bewes: Absolutely, but what
is provided is by the UN and NGOs.
Q244 Hugh Bayley: Yes. Compared with
other places I have visited in Africa, it is the part of Sudan
or the part of Africa which has nothing. War over the last 49
years with a big gap in the middle has meant developments such
as we have seen in other places in Africa have not taken place,
so there is an enormous catch-up job which is needed. Looking
then at the North-South process, the Government of Sudan does
not have a good record of standing by the commitments it makes.
What is happening now, the peace agreement, is not the culmination
of a process but the start of a six-year process. I think that
political change is needed, north and south, if the conditions
are going to be there in six years' time—whichever way the
vote goes, secession or maintaining a united country north and
south—and which will be accepted by the administrations
north and south. As part of the Naivasha Process, some of the
SPLM leaders will obtain posts in Khartoum in the Government of
Sudan. That provides an opportunity for political change; a change
in not just people at the top but in the culture in Khartoum.
How can that process be supported so that over the next six years,
if the South were to vote to secede, the Government of Sudan would
say, "We are committed to accept this" rather than start
another war? How will the political process in the South be supported
so if there was a decision to go for unity, the separatist movements
would not break away and start a new war? How can this process
which comes out of Naivasha of a change in the ranks of government
in Khartoum be used as a key to unlocking a process for political
change which brings forward more pluralism and non-polar-politics
so that in six years' time Sudan can find a way forward?
Hilary Benn: I think as far as
the UK is concerned, by continuing to do what we have done throughout,
which has been to offer really strong and sterling support to
the Naivasha Process; our role in the Troika, the role that particular
individuals have played in helping to keep the show on the road.
When the history books come to be written, I hope the historians
will give due weight to the contribution that certain people played.
Q245 Chairman: I want to reassure your
team behind you that we will finish at 4.45 pm, so we will talk
about the tsunami when you come back to see us on 10 March. While
we are on Hugh's question of North-South, and I do not expect
you to respond to this because I suspect it is market sensitive,
but if one reads today's business pages it is not good news in
that a company called White Nile on the AIM Exchange, claims it
has contracts for oil in the south, and they say the SPLM say
they can sign contracts for oil, but the government in Khartoum
say, "No, no, any oil contract has to be agreed in Khartoum".
If there is already a dispute as to who can grant licences for
oil between North and South, that does not bode well. You and
your officials might just like to look at that and ask our post
in Khartoum what is going to happen there because this will clearly
be a company—actually its share price shot up—which
will obviously be of some profile.
Hilary Benn: I will gladly look
at that[2].
Obviously the wealth-sharing agreement was an important part of
the negotiated settlement.
Q246 Mr Bercow: Returning to Darfur,
Secretary of State. I have much appreciated, as always, your answers,
but I think it is very important to be accurate about the historical
record not least in relation to deaths. I put it to you earlier
that my understanding was the WHO estimate of 70,000 deaths did
not include victims of violence. You were advised and you told
the Committee that it did include victims of violence. I am since
told that the Committee has been advised by the WHO that that
70,000 does not include deaths due to the violence from which
people have fled, which is obviously the vast bulk of the violence,
it includes only that violence which has come about through fights
over the distribution and allocation of food within the IDP camps.
I do not sniff at that, but it is very much a minor part of the
equation, which I do think is quite important. I am not trying
to score a point here—
Hilary Benn: No, absolutely not.
I stand corrected and I apologise to the Committee if I gave the
wrong answer[3].
Mr Bercow: That is very fair.
Q247 Chairman: The next matter in all
of this is going to be the Security Council Resolution, and on
a number of occasions you have very diplomatically said, "There
are those on the Security Council who take a different view",
but perhaps we can be somewhat blunt about this. Our understanding
is that what we have got is China, a permanent member of the Security
Council, which has substantial oil interests in Sudan effectively
treating Sudan as a client state. We cannot have a situation whereby
certain members of the Security Council for their own national
interests are perverting objective international norms of humanitarian
law. So can we have an understanding that if it looks as though
that is what is preventing progress on the Security Council or
a final Resolution in the Security Council there will be a mother
and father of a row about that?
Hilary Benn: We have made our
position absolutely clear about what it is we want to see and
each country is going to have to examine its own conscience when
the Resolution is finally in a form on which it is going to be
voted as to what it is they do in support or in opposition to
that Resolution. What I am very clear about is the international
community would be failing in its job if it did not now take steps
which I think all of us know need to be taken to demonstrate to
those who are continuing to cause insecurity, including leading
to people dying in Darfur, that they cannot go on doing that with
impunity. We come back to where this evidence session started
which was your opening question, which was about the international
community being able to demonstrate that it can do something about
this, and that is why it seems to me this Resolution is a particularly
important moment in the history of this sorry crisis.
Q248 Chairman: Secretary of State, we
have not had time to deal with the tsunami, not because we are
not interested in it, we are very interested, but it would not
be in anybody's interests to either truncate questions on Darfur
or truncate questions on the policy implications of some of the
things coming from the tsunami. You have very kindly agreed to
come back on 10 March and perhaps we can address the tsunami on
that occasion, if that is all right.
Hilary Benn: I would be very happy
to do so.
Chairman: Thank you.
2 See letter from the Rt Hon Hilary Benn MP.
Placed in the Library. Back
3
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