Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
WEDNESDAY 15 FEBRUARY 2006
MR OLI
BROWN AND
MS CLAIRE
HICKSON
Q1 Chairman:
Good morning. Thank you very much. Sorry to have kept you waiting
for a few minutes. If you could both introduce yourselves to us
and say a little bit about what your areas of expertise are for
the benefit of the Committee and those members of the public who
are here as well.
Ms Hickson: I am Claire Hickson.
I am Head of Advocacy and Communications at Saferworld. Saferworld
specialises in the conflict prevention side of the conflict cycle,
looking particularly at conflict sensitive development, how to
make development assistance more sensitive to the dynamics of
conflict, to small arms and international arms transfers control
and also the security sector reform and policing side of things.
My background is quite strongly on Africa and conflict. I used
to work for DFID and for the Commission for Africa.
Mr Brown: My name is Oli Brown.
I work for the International Institute for Sustainable Development
in Geneva which is a Canadian-based research think-tank. I co-ordinate
a research project that looks at the systemic impacts of trade
and aid policy on conflict and peace and stability around the
world, but not a specific focus on Africa. I would not present
myself as an expert specifically on the cases of Uganda and Sierra
Leone but more interested in the systemic impacts of the way that
trade and aid policy have an impact on peace and stability. My
background is with Oxfam and UNDP primarily as a trade policy
analyst.
Chairman: Thank you for that. By way
of introduction, before I ask John Battle to come in with his
questions, can I say the Committee is looking at the whole issue
of conflict resolution and post-conflict reconstruction—you
have seen the terms of reference—wherever it occurs, whether
it has occurred or will occur. The point of our visits last week,
those of us who have been there are fresh from visiting Sierra
Leone and Uganda, was simply to look at two specific situations.
It is not a case study of those two; it is an aspect to help inform
us about specific situations. It is not confined to that. I think
the situation as far as Uganda is concerned is that the conflict
is not resolved in spite of the present situation as it is, and
it is clear that its Government recognises it is not resolved.
In the case of Sierra Leone it is, but the anxiety is that it
does not slide back, so how do we take it forward successfully.
Do not feel constrained, we are not talking just about those countries,
those are simply case studies to look at a real situation on the
ground.
Q2 John Battle:
To extend from what the Chairman has said, as someone who has
taken an interest in development for a couple of decades, for
development to involve people working "in conflict",
engaging in tackling actual and live events at the time seems
interesting and perhaps, from the development perspective, it
is a new area. Maybe people were sceptical in the past and asked
the question, "Is DFID's money now being used surreptitiously
to fund the Ministry of Defence and support the Foreign Office
rather than the other way round?" While we can see post-conflict
development and reconstruction and understand you cannot have
development without security, should DFID be at the front end
of sorting out security? DFID pointed to a Public Service Agreement
that they signed up to shared by DFID, the Ministry of Defence
and the Foreign Office, which states: "By 2008, [we intend
to] deliver improved effectiveness of UK and international support
in conflict prevention by addressing long-term structural causes
of conflict," fine, you can see that, what are the causes,
but then it also says: "managing regional and national tension
and violence". I thought that sentence was amazing. How does
DFID contribute to managing regional and national tension and
violence? Of course, supporting post-conflict reconstruction,
it says, ". . . where the UK can make a significant contribution,
in particular, Africa, Asia, Balkans and the Middle East".
The Balkans and the Middle East, I thought they were really off
the map. Where is development going if they are moving into those
areas? Does DFID have the expertise to move into these areas?
We have just visited Sierra Leone and we compare and contrast
different situations in Africa. Conflicts can be caused by different
causes and intense local factors can come into play. Does DFID
have the technical, the personnel and policy expertise to actually
move into that area, or should I really be saying, "Clear
off and let the Ministry of Defence and Foreign Office sort it
out"?
Ms Hickson: I think it is a very
interesting and very current question to be asking. It is a current
question for the Government but also for NGOs on both sides of
the equation, the development and the conflict NGOs. The issue
is that DFID cannot avoid taking conflict seriously and cannot
avoid looking at how it should be responding to these issues because
if it is going to spend the funds it wants to spend, if it wants
to make its own contribution to achieve the Millennium Development
Goals (MDGs) it cannot do that in countries where there is conflict
and obviously poor countries are very vulnerable to conflict so
it is difficult to separate the two things. There is the issue
of using development assistance to address the long-term structural
causes of conflict. In terms of the skills on that, that has not
gone far enough in DFID. There is this conflict assessment framework
but it has not been used comprehensively or used to its full strength
and when it has been done in certain countries it has not necessarily
translated into the development programme being adjusted based
on what has been found from the assessment. In terms of managing
regional and national tensions, I can see your point in terms
of what is DFID's skill and role in that kind of situation and,
again, I think it is to do with how it spends its money. It can
support local initiatives, it can support the capacity of the
government to do things like security sector reform or community
policing, but it can also think about how spending its money might
cause problems. For example, if it is not taking into consideration
human and security issues when it makes a certain aid allocation,
if it is not taking into account how a country is dealing with
its neighbours and what its role is in regional tensions when
it is making those decisions then potentially it could have a
negative impact on those things. Obviously you have seen that
in recent discussions about budget support to places like Ethiopia,
Uganda and the longstanding debate around Rwanda. I hope that
answers your question.
Mr Brown: Perhaps I could echo
what Claire has said. I would make four points on this. I think
DFID has to have a role, as Claire was saying, spending large
amounts of money and having a very big impact on governments'
finances and revenues in countries that are often in very fragile
conditions of stability. It is very important that DFID thinks
about its remit and the impact of its policies. You are absolutely
right that the Public Service Agreement sets out a very ambitious
remit but perhaps it needs to aim high and aim towards those goals.
Secondly, DFID is very aware that it needs to build up expertise,
it needs to build up these policies, and it is working hard to
do so. I think some of its recent policy papers have set out quite
advanced thinking on how DFID should be engaging with fragile
states. That is certainly an advance. This brings me on to my
third point. With the Conflict Prevention Pools and the Post-Conflict
Reconstruction Unit, there are issues of implementation, issues
of how effective they are, but it is worth giving credit where
credit is due, that DFID has set out quite an interesting and
innovative way of bringing together a cross- departmental approach
to conflict across the Government. I think that is an advance.
That is reflected by the fact that other OECD[1]
countries are also looking to the Conflict Prevention Pool model
and seeing how they can do that. I understand that the US has
set up a person with responsibility for conflict prevention within
the State Department and the Canadian and Danish Governments are
also looking at this model to see what they can learn from it.
In terms of managing regional tensions, often the problem with
aid policies and aid budgets is that they have been focused on
individual countries and there has been a silo approach to the
way that programmes are developed within one particular country.
As perhaps you will have seen in Uganda and Sierra Leone, the
conflicts are not limited to one country, there is a whole series
of impacts and relationships that conflict has on countries around
the region. What perhaps the Africa Conflict Prevention Pool has
done, which is a positive step, is to put in place four regional
conflict advisers based in four different areas of Africa who
can look at that regional perspective, help to inform UK Government
policy across the region and try to move away from that individual
country perspective that only looks at the aid programme in Uganda
and you have turf battles between different country programmes.
That is a new understanding that even intra-state conflicts have
inter-state dimensions. The approach of the Conflict Prevention
Pools to putting regional advisers in place is a positive step
in that regard.
Q3 John Battle:
Could I follow through with a question and I ask it from the other
end of the telescope, if you like. Our Committee is the International
Development Committee so we are trying to push DFID perhaps to
be more radical, more progressive, more focused on human development.
Do you see any evidence that the work of DFID in this area is
challenging, changing, radicalising and making more progressive
the work of the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence?
Ms Hickson: I think it goes back
to how effective the pool arrangements are. As Oli was saying,
internationally they are seen as innovative. There is a question
about how much they focus on prevention. I think a fair criticism
of them is that they have been more reactive and less focused
on how to make the Government better at prevention. I think the
other thing is that when you get these departments together that
in itself can be a very good thing, but when you have those discussions
do you actually change each other's minds about the way to approach
conflict and about the way the different departments do things?
There may be coherent approaches in the same document or the same
strategy, but whether they are coherent within that strategy is
a fair question to ask. The Cabinet Office's study on countries
at risk of instability[2]
looked at the whole government approach to these things. I am
not sure whether that is reflected in the report or not. There
were some fairly good discussions around what the competencies
were of different departments and how well they are responding
to these changing challenges. I think one of the things which
should be looked at, if we are asking these things of the Government,
is whether each of the departments is set up to respond in the
right ways.
Q4 Hugh Bayley:
The new kid on the block in terms of interdepartmental working
is the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Unit (PCRU). What has it done
so far? What do you see its potential strengths as being? What
does the Government need to do to realise that potential?
Ms Hickson: I have not worked
closely with the PCRU since it was set up. I understand it has
been looking at various issues to do with bringing the different
approaches of the different departments together. I think one
of the issues with the PCRU is the fact that the name is somewhat
misleading because, as they state frequently themselves, they
are about stabilisation, so they are about quite a narrow time
period following a conflict, which is about immediate needs and
the immediate deployment of expertise and sometimes that can be
more appropriate to a situation like Afghanistan than somewhere
like the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). They are both
fluid situations but this is a more long-term transitional situation.
Q5 Hugh Bayley:
Should we be pressing for it to become a post-conflict reconstruction
and development unit and to involve the MoD and the Foreign Office
in the development part of the post-conflict process as well as
the stabilisation part?
Ms Hickson: There is still a gap
in terms of Whitehall's lesson learning around the longer-term
post-conflict reconstruction process. I would not know whether
the PCRU is set up, as it is currently, to respond to that broader
need, but I do not think it would be. If you are looking to extend
the role of the PCRU you would probably need to look at what the
skills of the staff are in the PCRU and what its remit is and
what its relationships are within Whitehall and address that again
rather than just giving it a new set of topics to deal with.
Q6 Hugh Bayley:
There clearly are development specialists within DFID and people
with an understanding of development and the importance of development
within the Foreign Office and, I would have thought, within the
MoD as well. When you look at the role of the military in Bosnia
and Kosovo for instance, they have not just been a security force.
Are you saying it would be a good idea to broaden the remit provided
you brought in some additional staff with experience of the development
follow-through or post-war reconstruction or should you have a
separate unit?
Ms Hickson: I am not sure. With
a PCRU, because it is set up for that stabilisation phase, if
you were going to expand its remit then you would have to look
carefully at whether it was set up to deal with that expanded
remit and that could involve bringing in a further set of staff.
It also depends on the buy-in of that extended remit from the
different Whitehall departments. One of the risks of having a
co-ordination mechanism set up on its own is that sometimes that
can mean that it separates off the issues from the individual
departments and so you end up with this being the body that deals
with post-conflict reconstruction in the department and the rest
of the department deals with its own issues and you do not end
up with the two being integrated.
Mr Brown: I want to provide a
couple of comments on the last two questions. On this very interesting
question of whether the Conflict Prevention Pools are radicalising
the thinking of the Ministry of Defence and the FCO, obviously
a very current phrase at the moment is policy coherence. The problem
with policy coherence is that it is all very well as long as people
are cohering with your policy. The issue that is perhaps a concern
within DFID is the extent to which its own short-term strategic
objectives are being moved into Britain's short-term defence and
strategic objectives. I think that is a concern that we have to
be very aware of. When we talk about policy coherence we need
to be thinking about whose policy we are cohering to. On the global
prevention pools, I think they are perhaps misnamed in that they
seem to do a lot more about responses to conflict than prevention
and that is something to bear in mind. The UK Government's approach
to conflict at the moment is much more about a response to post-conflict
situations than really thinking about some of the systemic issues
that lead to conflict and dealing with some of the root causes
of conflict. I think one of the key problems, as Mr Bayley was
saying, is that the international community has not really worked
out how to phase in immediate post-conflict humanitarian relief
and an immediate response to conflict with longer-term development.
Perhaps there is an argument for expanding the PCRU's remit to
look at getting over that initial phase and sequencing the various
different interventions into longer-term development. What tends
to happen in the immediate post-conflict situation is that the
most donor attention comes in the one or two years immediately
after a conflict when the government structures in the recipient
country are least able to absorb and make use of that money and
deliver on commitments. Then what tends to happen is that donor
money tends to tail off just as the recipient government's structures
and ability to absorb and make use of that money are coming back
into action. Looking at ways to ensure long-term predictable financing
of reconstruction that moves into longer-term development is a
really important area to look at and so is getting some political
will and buy-in for that sort of process once the initial post-conflict
peace treaty has been signed and it has left the international
headlines.
Q7 Joan Ruddock:
One of my interests is the way in which DFID and other departments
apply or do not apply their duties under Security Council Resolution
1325 on women, peace and security. I just wonder whether you have
any observations in general about the way in which this resolution
is being applied by the departments, particularly in the context
of post-conflict situations and the topics we have just been discussing.
Ms Hickson: Saferworld does not
do a great deal of work specifically on 1325, but I do know that
the UK Government has been one of only five to produce a national
strategy on the implementation of 1325 and that is a good thing.
Q8 Joan Ruddock:
It is not yet complete.
Ms Hickson: Overall it is clear
that internationally 1325 five years on has not gone as far as
it needs to have gone and I think it needs to be one of those
issues that is looked at across the board rather than—again
this is the challenge—just dealing with things on their
own.
Mr Brown: I do not think I can
offer anything on that.
Q9 Hugh Bayley:
DFID say they seek to make their policies more conflict sensitive
with strategic conflict assessments. How do they work? What sort
of conflicts do they work well with and what sort of conflicts
do they work less well with?
Ms Hickson: DFID has its own framework
for conducting conflict assessments as have a lot of donors, the
World Bank has one, the UNDP has one, USAID has one, and it looks
at the economic, social and political and security factors behind
a conflict and it looks at what the national and international
responses have been and where the gaps are in that response. Frameworks
are as good as the way they are used. I think the issue is how
the decision is made to do that conflict assessment. It is done
in a selective fashion; it is not done across the board. For example,
there has been one done in northern Uganda but not for the whole
of Uganda. The use of them is pretty patchy. The real issue has
to be that you can do them at any stage in a conflict, you can
adapt to the methodology and be sensible and intelligent about
it and say this is the situation, how do we use this methodology
in that situation? The trouble is that they need to be used as
a preventative tool so that you are saying in a situation such
as Tanzania or Ethiopia what are the structures in this country,
what are the potential sources of tensions, what are the inequalities,
how do the communal dynamics work and how is our aid going to
interact with those dynamics? They should be put at the core of
that decision-making process so that you are saying we need to
take forward a programme in this area, this is how we should allocate
our aid within this country and also taking in the regional dimensions.
They are not used consistently like that and they are not necessarily
being used in a way which translates into action once they have
been done. The problem sometimes is the word conflict in these
assessments. The issues you are trying to detect are things like
inequality, social exclusion, just the general politics and contexts
you are dealing with, but by using that word conflict you are
making it a far more sensitive issue. I recently had a discussion
with USAID who said they felt the strength of what they had done
with their conflict assessment was that they did not always call
it a conflict assessment, they called it a political context assessment
or something like that, but they did not always push the word
conflict.
Q10 Hugh Bayley:
I think that is a terribly important point because usually conflict
is the consequence of political issues not being resolved through
non-violent processes. If you do a conflict assessment in a preemptive
way, shall we say to look at the potential for conflict at the
moment between Ethiopia and Eritrea or to look at the potential
for conflict between Somaliland and the rest of Somalia, by saying
you are doing the assessment you are making a political statement
which may be very uncomfortable for governments or quasi governments
or other parties involved. How important is it to get the co-operation
of the Government? Could you do an effective strategic conflict
assessment in Ethiopia and Eritrea now without the full co-operation
of the Governments of those two countries?
Ms Hickson: I do not know enough
about the situation between Ethiopia and Eritrea to really make
a good statement on that situation, but I recognise what you are
saying about the sensitivity of that. For example, in Nigeria
the conflict assessment was done with the Nigerian Government
and with Nigerian civil society and a number of donors, so it
was quite an open process and there are pros and cons of that
approach, but that has got a limited applicability. Sometimes
a lot of the donors do the conflict assessments entirely as internal
documents which are for their own purposes, they are not for sharing
with anybody else, but they possibly lose certain perspectives
in doing it that way or at least lose the opportunity to use the
assessment as a means of dialogue between them and the government
and civil society.
Mr Brown: Strategic conflict assessments
have been used in quite a varied way. As Claire was saying, in
Nigeria it was done in a more participatory way and there have
been other examples where it has been much more about parachuting
in Western conflict advisers who do a consultation and then report
back. For me a strategic conflict assessment is a set of questions,
it is a way of making sure you have thought of all of the different
potential areas, that you have questioned what the situation in
the current conflict is, what other donors are doing in terms
of responding to that conflict and what your peace building intervention
should now be, but, like all assessments, it is only as good as
its utilisation is. If it gathers dust on a shelf then it has
absolutely no role at all. I worry that particularly as these
things become a bit more engrained and mainstreamed they become
a bit more formulaic and that they are another hurdle to go through
that does not necessarily lead in to a redefinition of what that
policy should be. It seems to be that often assessments like this
are used as a way of better selling a predetermined policy than
necessarily designing what that policy should be. It needs to
be quite carefully sequenced in with an intervention into a country.
DFID already has similar assessment processes such as a `Drivers
of Change' assessment which in a sense is quite a similar set
of questions. I would agree that there is this problem that if
you are going to try and have a participatory approach with the
government in question then having the word conflict in that is
problematic, it is a taboo word. If you are looking at the more
systemic issues that are leading towards the potential outbreak
of conflict, such as the marginalisation of certain communities,
the inequitable distribution of incomes, inbuilt racism and so
on, it is very difficult to involve the local civil society and
local government in that process if it is seen as just a violent
conflict. That is what the strategic conflict assessment is seen
as, it is violent conflict. Perhaps it should be renamed a fragility
assessment or something like that that does not quite have the
same connotations.
Q11 Chairman:
I wonder if I could probe you on the role of aid in conflict situations.
The British Government has just cut aid to Ethiopia and Uganda
through budget support and in both cases it is to do with the
human rights of governments even though there are conflict issues
in both countries. I and other members of the Committee were surprised,
particularly now having been there, that when the British Government
announced its withholding of budget support to Uganda it was entirely
on the basis of their concerns about the Government's actions
against the opposition leader, which is a perfectly reasonable
issue to be concerned about, but no reference was made to the
conflict in the north in spite of the fact that £15 million
out of the £20 million that was being withheld was being
diverted for humanitarian aid to the north. Does that not raise
some questions in that we are not quite sure what aid conditionality
or the withdrawing of aid is trying to achieve? We saw a clinic
in one of the camps in the north that was being funded entirely
by international agencies. Not a penny of money was coming from
the Ugandan Government in to this health facility in spite of
getting budget support from the United Kingdom. We saw a school
where there were no facilities in some of the classrooms at all
and we were told the ratio of teachers to pupils was 200 to one.
What is your view about how aid should be applied in conflict
situations? Should it be properly linked? How can it be usefully
linked in a way that will put pressure on to resolve the conflict?
Ms Hickson: It is a massive issue
and it is one that DFID is trying to deal with to some extent
at the moment, first of all by looking at how you can deliver
services more effectively in conflict situations. Then I think
there is the real macro issue, which is what you are getting at,
which is the aid allocation criteria and how you allocate aid
to different countries and whether you use budget support. As
you referred to, there has been a long-term criticism of budget
support to Uganda because of the situation in the north and it
raises a question about whether security is seen as an integral
part of governance and the performance of governments toward their
people. I think from most political scientists' point of view
security for its people is the basic function of the state. When
you are making judgments about governance it should not just be
on economic governance or performance on certain development indicators,
although it has got to take those factors into account. I do not
think anybody necessarily has the answers at the moment, but one
of the questions we are asking is when you make those decisions
about whether to go into budget support, when you are reviewing
budget support and then when you are deciding to stay in that
situation, are human security issues, conflict issues actually
being factored into the equation or are they being acknowledged
but left to one side, or are they not even being acknowledged?
One of the issues in Uganda is the separation between two different
parts of the country.
Q12 Mr Hunt:
I am just reflecting on what you have been saying. In terms of
DFID's response to conflict scenarios, it does seem to me that
there have been an awful lot of words but I am not sure how many
actions there have been. We have got these wonderful acronyms,
the SCA[3],
the GCPP[4],
the PCRUs, lots of meetings and assessments and groups being set
up. When we were in northern Uganda, for example, we heard the
one thing that we had not done was send in the SAS to take out
Kony which would have potentially meant 1.7 million people could
go home. We have sent a General over there to assess the situation
but we have not had any offer of help from British troops to restore
the security situation there. Obviously there is the question
of direct budget support. Do you think that we should be doing
more rather than just talking about what we might be doing?
Ms Hickson: I am not sure that
I can comment on the wisdom or the use of the SAS in that particular
situation, but I think your general point is an accurate one.
There is the issue of the whole of the UK Government's response
to situations and I think this brings in the Responsibility to
Protect issues because this has recently been agreed at the summit
last year in September as an international principle, but there
are real questions about how it is going to be implemented and
there are questions about why it has not been implemented in northern
Uganda and why it has not been invoked and why there has not been
more of an international response to deal with the situation.
To be fair to DFID, it is rightly seen as an organisation which
is leading the field in terms of developing policy on these issues
and recognising the problems, but it is a question of whether
those policies are moving into the mainstream action, the implementation.
Is the fragile states policy being taken on by your average adviser
or person working in the country for DFID? I think that needs
to change. We need to see, over the next few years, real evidence
of the impacts of those policies rather than more policy.
Mr Brown: You are absolutely right,
there is a balance between knowing what you are going to do before
you do it and actually doing something. It is a lot more comfortable
to talk about doing things than doing them, especially in such
a long running situation as Uganda. The UN Security Council has
never had a dedicated resolution to Uganda either. Perhaps sending
the SAS in 15 years ago would have been a much quicker solution,
but it is difficult to find justification for that in the absence
of that Security Council Resolution. On your point about whether
DFID is getting that balance right, I think these are areas that
DFID is finding out more about, it is thinking quite carefully
about and is building up expertise on. I think perhaps what the
International Development Committee should think about over the
next few years is looking at whether that balance is right and
saying you have had some time to think about these issues, what
are you doing in terms of actually putting them into action on
the ground? The Conflict Prevention Pools are five years old now
and they have not had a great number of concrete interventions
on the ground that they can point to, but perhaps one of their
more important roles is co-ordinating the UK Government's approach
to conflict. In terms of budget support and how we can make aid
work more effectively in conflict situations, I think in a sense
there are two separate but related issues here. The first is how
we can deliver basic services in conflict situations, which is
a very large topic in itself, and the second is whether budget
support is the best way to deliver improved governance and again
that is a very contentious issue. In theory I would suggest that
giving budget support to governments at least gives money to an
institution that has a mechanised, formalised system of accountability
built into the democratic process, however flawed that democratic
process might be. Compare that to giving money to civil society
institutions who may or may not do a very good job but do not
have any built-in accountability mechanisms. In theory this budget
support could help to deliver improved governance, but what I
would suggest is that it needs to be buttressed by interventions
that help to build up the civil society's capacity to hold their
own government to account, to build transparency and to build
accountability. Whether or not it delivers improved governance
I think perhaps is tricky to say definitively across the board,
but it is an important issue.
Q13 Chairman:
Specifically in relation to Uganda, the situation we are faced
with is that an increasing amount of international aid is going
into the north while budget support is going into Kampala. Kampala
is spending the money in and around Kampala and the international
community is taking the responsibility for the consequences of
the conflict and it takes the pressure off the Ugandan Government
to some extent to resolve it. People were saying should we not
just withdraw humanitarian aid and expose this responsibility
of the Government of Kampala, but nobody wants to do that, you
do not want to face the consequences. The reality is that of the
53 camps in northern Uganda only three have got police. This is
in a situation where there is a crime committed and it is up to
the complainant to get the accused to court several tens of kilometres
away, when no transport exists and these people are living on
the poverty line. What sort of preposterous situation is that
where the central government is not fulfilling its responsibilities
and the international community is picking them up? That is the
real question. We have to make sure that aid is not used to let
governments off the hook.
Mr Brown: The problem when you
have a democratic process that deliberately marginalises sections
of its community is that budget support can help to finance that
government and finance that democratic process. It comes back
to the question of how you deliver good governance. The key lesson
that has arisen out of the last 15 years of attempts to deliver
good governance through a variety of carrots and sticks, of aid
and trade policies and sanctions and so on is that it is very
difficult to get governments to do things that they are not doing
already. In the words of one analyst, it is possible to push a
train that is already moving but it is very difficult to put it
into reverse.
Q14 Mr Hunt:
Of course we will reflect as a Select Committee on whether DFID
is getting the balance right between strategising and actions,
but I think what we would really like to know is what you think
in terms of whether it is getting that balance right. Could you
tell us what you think on that?
Ms Hickson: This is the year after
2005, when there were an awful lot of commitments made. After
2005, with all the attention and political impetus behind those
discussions and those commitments which were made, we now need
to be seeing the impacts of those commitments and we need to be
seeing them taken forward. There is a risk that that policy-making
process is carrying on. I think quite a lot of NGOs are quite
concerned that we have not stopped with the policy, that the policy
is just carrying on and we need to see more about the impact.
The UK Government played a real international leadership role
in taking forward the 2005 commitments and it was asking other
governments to stretch themselves to overcome their problems by
increasing their aid budgets and all that kind of thing, but it
also needs to show that stretch itself, it needs to show that
it is implementing the things that people understand are possibly
not its current policy or things it is not quite so comfortable
with.
Mr Brown: I do not think DFID
has made that transition from policy to action. I think it needs
to be a constant intuitive process of working out what is working
and what is not. I think there has been a little bit of strategising
and not enough action.
Ms Hickson: We want to see the
White Paper being about implementation and not about another set
of commitments which are different to the ones that have already
been made.
Q15 Richard Burden:
My question is about another angle of unintended consequences
of budget support and not about governance in-country. If you
take Uganda or Rwanda, both receive budget support with certain
caveats, both are seen to do something in terms of poverty alleviation
and so on, but, nevertheless, both have also been accused of plundering
the resources of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). What
can the international community do to ensure the support given
to one country actually does not end up making the problems greater
in another country, and what is it legitimate for us to do around
that?
Ms Hickson: I think it comes back
to the decision-making process about something like budget support.
Is the country's relationship with its neighbours being factored
in to the decision whether to go in with that budget support and
whether to stay in budget support and is it being given sufficient
weight alongside personalities, development indicators, economic
governance, corruption indicators? The UK Government and lots
of governments are very keen to support things like the Africa
Peer Review Mechanism, the African Union, the sub-regional organisations
like ECOWAS[5]
and their role in doing peer reviews on governance and also resolving
disputes in neighbouring countries, resolving regional conflicts
and internal conflicts. I think there is a really important question
to be asked about whether those organisations or those mechanisms
are being allowed to play their role by donors. For example, if
the Peace and Security Council and the African Union says, like
the eminent panels of the UN, that budget support to Rwanda is
causing problems for security in the DRC, is the UK Government
going to take on that conclusion and adjust its approach accordingly
or is it going to carry on with business as usual? We know the
eminent panel which reported a few years ago said that aid should
be cut to Rwanda and Uganda and that was not followed up on. I
know that there were problems with that particular report[6].
It is a question of whether that kind of regional mechanism is
able to have the impact it could have if donors are not going
to back that regional mechanism.
Mr Brown: I think if we are going
to look at how donors can try and stop countries like Rwanda plundering
the resources of the DRC then ultimately it comes down to having
to have a unified multilateral response that involves regional
partners, that involves organisations like the African Union on
the ground and it involves having good analysis and actually knowing
what is going on. This ongoing involvement in eastern DRC seemed
to fall under the international radar for far too long, particularly
the economic rationale of it. It involves trying to have the analysis.
Q16 Richard Burden:
Why do you think that is not there?
Mr Brown: I think they are difficult
places to work. It is difficult to bring the attention of these
ongoing forgotten emergencies or long running conflicts to the
international community. I think there is competing interests
for the international media. It is just not a priority of many
governments and many donors. An approach that could help get round
that would be having, as the Africa Conflict Prevention Pool does,
regional conflict advisers on the ground who can have a role in
understanding where an intrastate conflict has an interstate dimension
and also co-ordinating responses. Ultimately it comes back down
to governance and the effectiveness of levers that donors have
on other governments doing things that the donors do not want
them to do.
Chairman: The Prime Minister of Uganda
said to us that he did not regard the Democratic Republic of Congo
as a state and that if it was a nuisance to Uganda then it was
entirely up to Uganda to sort out the problems inside the DRC
that were threatening the security of Uganda. His tone was contemptuous
and he did not have a very high opinion of MONUC[7]
either. MONUC's briefing was we do not have enough forces for
the territory we are asked to cover to do anything other than
a very basic job and yet if you do not stabilise a country like
the DRC you have got a place the size of Western Europe from which
all kinds of trouble can operate.
Q17 John Battle:
We are back to the general view that aid is not the key but trade.
In the Sixties it was said that free trade will be the key to
development and that a rising tide will lift all boats and we
are going back round the circuit, but not all trade leads to peaceful
development and there is real conflict over resources, not least
the big ones, oil and gas and diamonds. I just wondered, given
at least the recognition that natural resources, the management,
the trade, the exploitation of economic resources such as diamonds,
oil and gas can lead to increased conflict, how would the international
agreements on a definition of conflict resources actually have
an impact on conflicts that are funded by illegally traded goods?
For example, in Sierra Leone last week some of us saw diamonds.
There are open cast diamond mines managed by companies, but then
there are thousands of people organised just on the land sifting
gravel to find diamonds in quite a disorganised way, with a few
gangmasters, searching for that key diamond that will break them
through to their economic future and the trade taking place illegally
across borders and out to be processed in Europe by and large.
How do you see the whole of that impacting? Some of the international
agreements, are they worth anything?
Mr Brown: I think they are. It
is probably worth talking a little bit about what we mean by conflict
resources and what role the definition of conflict resources would
have. It has been something that has come up in the last couple
of years. It was one of the ideas of the African Commission; it
was mentioned in Kofi Annan's report[8]
last year. In theory it should be quite intuitive, the conflict
resources, the exploitation of which are funding wars, but obviously
there is a legitimate right for governments to use their resources
to fund the defence of their country as long as they are abiding
by the Geneva Conventions. The really important aspect of that
is that it is the exploitation of resources that is going to fund
wars or rebellions that do not abide by international Conventions
on Human Rights or the Geneva Conventions. So it is not necessarily
the existence of conflict in the abstract that is at question
here, it is whether that conflict is abiding by the Geneva Conventions.
If the UN Security Council, for example, at best or perhaps the
UN General Assembly adopted a definition of conflict resources
and then put in place the permanent professional capacity to monitor
those resources and to monitor when a resource was being exploited
in a way that made it a conflict resource—
Q18 John Battle:
How do you see that working in practice, with customs officers
appointed internationally to man the borders?
Mr Brown: The most common idea
that has been suggested is to have a permanent professional panel
that reports to the UN Security Council, which has some capacity
to make that decision, to make that recommendation on when a resource
becomes a conflict resource, and it would gather information from
different Member States. What that would do is that would give
a set of red flags to the international community that would say
this resource is now being used in a way that is contributing
to conflict, so what we need to do is to think about how we can
control the trade in that resource. A conflict resource is only
really going to be able to contribute to conflict if the people
who are exploiting that resource can get access to international
markets, and there are a number of different ways that you can
control or break that access, whether it is through certification
like the Kimberley process on conflict diamonds or whether it
is through sanctions like timber in Liberia.
Q19 John Battle:
The Kimberley process is in position; how effective it is I think
remains to be seen, but what do you see in principle are the chances
of expanding the Kimberly process to other resources?
Mr Brown: The Kimberley process
is a very interesting example of a large process that was evolved
by governments, civil society and also the diamond industry and
it came out of a particular set of circumstances where there was
a very strong rationale and quite strong evidence for the role
that diamonds had played in various conflicts around the world,
particularly in Sierra Leone. It was a very tricky process, it
took a lot of consultation, it took a lot of time to develop,
it had to go to the World Trade Organization to get a specific
waiver to agree that it was not in contravention of WTO rules.
I am not sure it is necessarily applicable as it stands to other
resources; different resources affect conflict in different ways.
Gemstones are very high value and very portable, so perhaps it
makes sense to concentrate on the consumer markets and perhaps
diamonds have much more of an elastic demand in consumer markets,
whereas illegal timber is quite easy to access but it is very
hard to transport, so there is perhaps an argument that sanctions
could be more effective there.
1 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Back
2
Prime Minister's Strategy Unit, Cabinet Office, Investing in
Prevention: An International Strategy to Manage Risks of Instability
and Improve Crisis Response, February 2005, http://www.strategy.gov.uk/downloads/work-areas/countries-at-risk/report/pdf/Investing.pdf Back
3
Strategic Conflict Assessment. Back
4
Global Conflict Prevention Pool. Back
5
Economic Community Of West African States. Back
6
United Nations Security Council: Report of the Panel of Experts
on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and other Forms
of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of Congo. S/2001/357, New
York, United Nations, http://da.ccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/gen/NO1/323/54/ImG/No132354.pdf?
Open Element Back
7
United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic
of the Congo. Back
8
Report of the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. Back
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