Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60
- 79)
THURSDAY 23 MARCH 2006
MR JIM
DRUMMOND, MR
PHIL EVANS,
MR STEPHEN
PATTISON, MAJOR
GENERAL ANDREW
STEWART AND
MR MATT
BAUGH
Q60 Mr Singh:
And who had this particularly bright idea? Is nobody taking the
credit?
Mr Drummond: It came from the
Cabinet Office but it is something we have all welcomed.
Q61 Mr Singh:
So you are satisfied that you are dealing with duplication and
that things are coordinated well and working well.
Mr Drummond: It is important that
there is a single ministerial committee which looks at this set
of issues and provides some strategic direction for the pools
and, more widely, government's conflict work. We have a meeting
next week and we are looking forward to that, but this is an untried
formula as yet.
Q62 Mr Singh:
The PCRU is a relatively new initiative, not fully established
yet. I understand that it is doing some work in Afghanistan, in
Helmand where we have just increased our commitment as a country.
What precisely is PCRU doing there? What added value are we going
to get from the involvement of the PCRU in Afghanistan? What will
it do that is not being done?
Mr Baugh: It is perhaps worth
reminding the Committee that, as you said, the PCRU is a year
old, 15 months old and it has been established essentially as
an operational capability that did not exist before. It brings
together skills and experiences from across the three departments
into one unit. We are supporting the work of departments in Afghanistan
in a number of ways, both in Kabul and also in Helmand. In Kabul
we are helping to support the work of the strategic delivery unit,
which has a coordination function reporting to the Ambassador
in Kabul. We are also helping to support the work of the British
Embassy drugs team because it requires additional support at this
current time. More significant has been our work in Helmand, working
alongside the permanent joint headquarters and their preliminary
operations team. We have helped define a common set of aims and
objectives for the UK on the ground. That has been done by the
PCRU placing a team initially into Kandahar and more latterly
into Lashkagar to work with our military counterparts. Essentially
what it has done, working with the military, drawing from Foreign
Office and DFID officials based in Kabul, bringing them together,
is that it has facilitated and led an assessment and planning
process. What we have is a more coherent, more joined-up set of
aims and objectives and hopefully, very soon, we shall have a
common implementation plan to go with that strategy. That has
been the added value of the unit to date. Most recently, it is
now helping to establish the provincial reconstruction team in
Helmand and we are providing some core capability to stand that
team up, particularly in the field of governance, security and
justice, and policing which were seen as part of that assessment
process as being key drivers to potential further conflict in
that region.
Q63 Mr Singh:
In those areas of security that you mentioned, are you providing
resource or are you providing—
Mr Baugh: It is personnel.
Q64 Mr Singh:
That is very good that we are getting this coordination between
the different bodies in Afghanistan. I just wish that we could
have had that coherence before we went in; it might have been
more helpful. I just want to talk a little bit about the management
of the pools and the PCRU. I understand that the pools and the
PCRU are jointly managed by DFID, the FCO and the Ministry of
Defence. Is being jointly managed by three departments an effective
method of management? It seems odd to me. Maybe I am not familiar
with this style of management, but it does seem a bit odd to me
that these pools and this unit are managed by three different
departments.
Mr Drummond: The pools have a
lead department each so DFID has a lead responsibility for the
Africa Pool and the FCO had a lead responsibility for the Global
Pool. The resources for the PCRU come from DFID, so that almost
all of the staff salaries are paid from DFID and the accommodation
is provided by DFID. I have a role as chairing a committee of
directors from MoD, FCO and obviously myself from DFID, that provides
oversight and a steer for the PCRU. That is working reasonably
well. Again, as we go through the Comprehensive Spending Review,
we shall want to question whether that is the optimal way of doing
it.
Mr Pattison: That is right. To
pick up on Jim's point, the reason the pools are jointly managed
is that that was the great experiment, to bring together the three
departments who were, before 2001, doing different and maybe diverse
things and to try to bring them together. It has not been easy
and we have struggled to try to develop a common coherent vision,
but that is what we are trying to do. The PCRU of course was created
as a new unit and right from the beginning it was decided that
three key departments would have a role in it. In practice it
has worked reasonably well. The team management and the financial
resources fall very largely to DFID, but the Ministry of Defence
and the Foreign Office are involved in trying to help set the
overall direction.
Q65 Joan Ruddock:
I should like to turn your attention to UN Security Council Resolution
1325 on Women, Peace and Security. The UK Government played a
leading role in bringing that about in 2000, so you have had all
you departments over five years to consider the very important
undertakings that you have made and an action plan was published
earlier this month. I just wonder whether each of you could tell
me what difference the commitments of the UK Government to that
recognition made in your own sphere of operation. What changes
have happened?
Mr Pattison: As you know, we were
very much in the front seat trying to drive 1325 forward and we
have put together an excellent plan. It has taken a while, partly
because of the need to talk to all sorts of people and get ideas
from all sorts of people, but we are committed to it and it has
ideas for action in a variety of areas which touch on all our
department's range of activities with the broad aim of trying
to promote greater gender awareness across a whole area of our
work. You ask, what the one thing is which in my experience has
changed as a result of that resolution. The one thing that has
changed is that whenever I see a draft UN Security Council resolution,
obviously one that is dealing with conflict and particularly one
that is dealing with peace-keeping and particularly one that is
dealing with the conduct of peace-keepers, the principles of 1325
are now foremost in our minds in the office and I think we can
say that they are foremost in the minds of a number of other people
sitting on the Security Council too and that is no mean achievement.
Other departments may want to say what the one thing is which
has changed their lives about this resolution.
Q66 Joan Ruddock:
May I just take you up on that point? You described a very important
process, but it is a process at the end of the day. What we must
do as a committee is ask what the outcomes are.
Mr Pattison: That is a very fair
question. What are we trying to do here? Resolution 1325 was an
effort really at consciousness raising, at trying to put the issue
of gender awareness right at the forefront of the UN's and international
attention, when it comes to dealing with conflict. There are many
different aspects to this. One is obviously the role of protecting
women in conflict situations including, it has to be said, in
some cases from the activities of those intervening to try to
help the conflict, that is UN peace-keeping forces. The other
has been trying to mobilise more women to play a part in conflict
resolution and I happen to believe that that is a very important
area where we can look for non-traditional actors who are a more
natural constituency for peace in a lot of countries than we have
hitherto regarded. Quite often in countries we have had various
sorts of armies, generally speaking of young men taken out of
their homes and so on and it seems to me that the women in those
communities can play a much bigger role than they have traditionally
done in helping to build peace. What we are trying to do with
the resolution is consciousness raise in these two areas. Then
of course we do need to put that into practice. You may think
four or five years is a long time; of course it is. These things
do not happen overnight. We have made progress at the UN on gender
awareness in peace-keeping operations and getting on top of some
of the terrible things which have happened in some of those operations.
Where we are aware we have not made as much progress, is mobilising
women as a constituency for peace. We are trying to do so. Our
action plan has ideas for identifying women whom we can put in
positions of greater influence in that area and we hope to use
our action plan as a model for other countries to encourage them
to do the same. I am afraid it is a long haul and we have to start
somewhere and we have made the first leap.
Q67 Joan Ruddock:
May I ask other colleagues whether they can give me some outcomes?
Mr Drummond: Let me ask Phil to
give you a couple of specific examples from Africa. In terms of
Africa, we have worked very closely with lots of different bits
of the UN humanitarian system on this, provided support into UNIFEM,
to UNHCR and to UNICEF so that, in terms of what they do on the
ground, they are much more gender sensitive than they have been
in the past and we have worked with NGO advocacy groups on this.
Q68 Joan Ruddock:
Just before you finish Mr Drummond, if I may just ask, it is fine
to work with all those, particularly those in the UN who have
a long record actually of trying to advance gender equality, and
to fund and support them but what has DFID itself done? Do you
have a gender adviser working on these issues, working on analysis?
What are the analytical tools that the Department itself is using
in terms of its own spending, its own policy and its own operations?
Mr Drummond: We certainly have
a social development adviser working in the conflict, humanitarian
and security department on these issues and working with the bits
of the UN. In terms of DFID's own programmes in conflict-affected
areas, then yes, all of our country offices will be expected to
take gender issues into account when they are working in these
areas. Phil can give you a couple of examples from Africa.
Mr Evans: Certainly you are right
to be taking us to task about this for we are very conscious that,
whilst we have been championing this, there is a considerable
amount more that we could be doing in terms of delivery and in
improving our capacity to deliver which, as you know, is a quite
difficult and challenging aspect of programming. In fact what
is going on at the moment is that we have a team working in DFID
which is going to produce an updated "How to" guide
on gender, peace and security which we shall then bring to bear
on the work we do. In Africa at the moment, there are several
examples where we are making concerted efforts to take a gender
view, to programme with a clear recognition of the particular
impacts of conflict on women. One example of that is the work
we are putting in now in Sudan in support of the development of
the DDR, the Disarmament, Demobilisation, Reintegration programme
there, which is being developed under the UN umbrella. We are
putting a couple of million pounds all told into that process
over and above our assessed contributions and a significant proportion
of that is aimed at dealing with the issues around women and children
who are associated with combatants, who in the past were totally
overlooked, seen as camp followers for whom there was no provision.
That is going to be very different in the way in which this process
is handled in Sudan. We have been one of the leading advocates
to ensure that that is the case. We are also linking that to approaches
which will try to address questions of sexual violence, questions
of HIV and AIDS and other associated services in the wider funding
work.
Q69 Joan Ruddock:
What about widows?
Mr Evans: I cannot tell you specifically
whether that is a thing we do. It would disappoint me if that
level of differentiation was not being taken. In Somalia interestingly,
a smaller scale, as a result of some assessment work that we did—this
is a practical example of where conflict-related assessment leads
to a change in behaviour—we have started work with the police
to set up women's desks in police stations so that women are more
easily able to report incidences of sexual violence and, in due
course, get some proper response to that. Something which came
out of the survey was that people felt disempowered in seeking
support and a response. There are things going on, there needs
to be a lot more, we need to equip ourselves better. I very much
hope that the new guidance we get will help us and that you keep
asking us about it.
Q70 Joan Ruddock:
We certainly shall. Does anyone else want to reply?
Mr Baugh: As an operational unit,
as a deployable unit and as a relatively new unit as well, our
work essentially has been concentrated on building that operational
capability. For us that has meant ensuring that all members of
the PCRU are sufficiently trained in gender issues and we have
started to undertake that training as part of our broader stabilisation
training programme, which includes things like security awareness.
We are starting to build the awareness of the unit so that gender
issues are fully part of the toolbox that the PCRU can apply on
the ground in these contexts.
Q71 Joan Ruddock:
How long is the gender training for our Armed Forces going out
to conflict areas?
Major General Stewart: Let me
write a reply to that[5].
The only thing I should say is that we spend most of our time
now training people; not just ourselves, but mainly other people
before they go out or training other people for the United Nations,
peace-keepers. It has become a major part of the training that
we do under ethics, under everything else, to try to overcome
what are very difficult social issues. We have significant difficulties
with Iraq. In Iraq we are training potential Iraqi police, because
of course women face a totally different position there. There
are encouraging signs and this is nothing to do with conflict.
For example, in Jordan we have been asked and we are now helping
Jordan establish a women's wing of the officers' training centre,
their equivalent to Sandhurst. We are trying to do the same sort
of thing elsewhere, for example, Sierra Leone, the intent and
how we have managed to get women members of the Sierra Leone Armed
Forces established, which they were not before, but it is only
a start. Let me come back to you on how much we actually do.
Q72 Richard Burden:
I want to talk a bit about the conflict cycle in terms of donor
countries' engagement with conflict-affected areas. There does
still seem to be perhaps a rather neat perception of conflict
cycles following a pre-determined cycle: pre-conflict; conflict
management; post-conflict reconstruction; and then development
coming at the end of it. You probably agree that things do not,
in practice, work in those simple categories. Look at Afghanistan
and Iraq: the battlefield is won but insurgency continues. We
have fragile states like Haiti with ongoing civil wars, one kind
in the DRC, ethnic and religious conflicts in places like the
Sudan. Where issues of conflict would fit in the Palestinian territories
in that category I just do not know. Given all that, how useful
do you think that the concept of a conflict cycle is now to your
work?
Mr Drummond: It is helpful as
an explanation for the simple minded like me, but in the real
world it is very rare that you move from a straight pre-conflict
to a fighting stage to post-conflict reconstruction and peace.
There may be examples of that around, but often you are dealing
with a situation which is much more fluid than that. One has to
be a lot more flexible in the way that we plan and think about
conflict.
Q73 Richard Burden:
I would agree with you on that, but given that, why are you structured
the way you are, where the assumption seems to be that if it is
pre-conflict and conflict prevention, that is FCO taking the lead;
if there is conflict going on, generally MoD takes the lead; immediate
aftermath, you then move into your joint arrangements of your
PCRU; and then development is back to DFID taking the lead. That
is the way the boundaries seem to work in practice and yet that
does not, to me, seem to reflect the complexities of things that
we both acknowledge exist.
Mr Drummond: I do not see it quite
like that really. Obviously if UK forces are involved, then that
is primarily MoD's business. Through all of the cycle, all of
the Departments tend to be engaged. It depends what kind of conflict
it is we are talking about, but what we are trying to do now is
that there is a Cabinet Office mechanism for looking at risks
of instability, trying to identify problem areas in advance, trying
to translate that into preventive action, drawing departments
together to build strategies for that in the UK system. If we
then get into a conflict phase, then all of our departments will
be engaged, even though MoD will of course be leading the fighting
should any British forces be engaged there. We are all engaged
in the post-conflict work: the security agenda the MoD may lead
on, but it depends where it is in the world; the political process,
the Foreign Office may lead on, but DFID will also have an interest
in that; for the humanitarian reconstruction process, DFID will
obviously have the leading role in that but the other government
departments will also have a part to play. It is a much more joined-up
process across Government than perhaps you describe.
Major General Stewart: I always
say that the reason that the three of us are together is to meet
difficulty. If one looks at it in terms of pre-conflict and post,
what matters is the effect that the UK is trying to create on
the ground. Prior to conflict, we are trying to prevent it breaking
up. That is principally a Foreign Office lead for the fact that
it is a political lead-in, where the actual effect on the ground
will be the decisions we made at a political level wherever the
conflicts may be about to take place. In order to change attitudes
and thoughts and feelings and everything on the ground, there
will be a requirement, for example, to give aid in specific areas,
to give training to the forces in order maybe to build a pre-deployment
strategy to prevent action taking place. All of that needs, as
you rightly say, to be coordinated and it may slip suddenly into
conflict where actually the effect then will be that we have to
stop this and naturally then the lead would have to change. In
military terms what we should say is that the military would then
become the support head commander. Pre conflict, they are supporting
the political line. Post-conflict, they would be supporting the
assistance, the aid, the governance line, which is very much DFID's
lead, but during the conflict, they would be supported by the
other two. Actually the establishment of the post-conflict reconstruction
unit provides an operational capability to think this through
a little bit better, so that in the future we do not hit a situation
where we are three separate departments trying to create the combined
effect which is the only way that that effect will really have
true effect without having thought it through first. Again, if
one looks at the Conflict Prevention Pools, they are what they
are: conflict prevention. It is by having these pools and us having
to talk together, but, not unnaturally, the lead, the support
head commander, because it is conflict prevention in global conflict
prevention terms, is the Foreign Office. You may then say, well
why is it DFID in Africa? To which I should reply, surely, as
a military man, that because the poverty in Africa is such a major
cause and poor governance is such a major cause of conflict in
Africa, the people who are most able to deal with that are DFID
and therefore they should be leading. What we as the three government
departments now have, certainly as officials, is that we recognise
the inter-dependence of these three and the requirement for the
other two government departments to be part of it.
Q74 Chairman:
On the point you have just made about the link between poverty
and conflict and why DFID leads in Africa, the British Government's
objective is to have an absolute commitment to poverty reduction
and to target aid to the poorest countries. We also have, on the
other hand, a foreign policy concern about terrorism and security
and there are concerns that these things come into conflict. The
International Development Act gives a substantial amount of protection
to that because it commits 90% to go to poverty reduction in low
income countries. What assurances can you give that there is not
a diversion of resources away from the absolute commitment to
policy to the relative assessment or where the threat is coming
from? If I may plead for Africa, for example, conflict in Africa
threatens Africans more than it threatens us, so in a political
situation you might say that conflict elsewhere threatens us more
directly, so you will divert the resources. I just wonder whether
in your pools you have that debate for a start and, if you take
the specific point of Iraq, in order to increase the commitment
to Iraq as a middle-income country, you have cut the aid support
in Latin America. Can you talk us through it? Does your pool evaluate
these things and do you, Mr Drummond in DFID, say "Hold on
a minute, we have an absolute commitment to these people"?
Do you have to argue your case that money needs to be committed
there and not diverted for what are really foreign policy considerations?
Mr Drummond: We should be clear
that the pools, particularly the Africa pool, and parts of the
other pool as well, are serving a vital purpose for poverty reduction
in Africa. Secondly, the pools are now bid for separately by the
three departments rather than coming out of, as it were, DFID's
budget. When the pools were established in the first place, different
departments did put some of their money in, but now there is a
separate bidding process. The 90/10 split that you referred to
is not a function of the Act, but of the public service agreement
with the Treasury. I see the Africa pool particularly making a
big contribution to the conflict agenda in Africa, which is central
to poverty reduction there. Phil may want to comment as well,
but I do not see that there is quite the clash that you imply.
Q75 Chairman:
You do not feel that there is a tension; you do not feel it.
Mr Drummond: No.
Q76 Chairman:
If you take the British position and contrast it with the American
position, the Americans are quite open and say aid is an instrument
of foreign policy and their overriding priority is the war on
terror and their aid budget is going to be geared primarily, not
exclusively but primarily, to deal with that. USAID[6]
now comes straight under the State Department, so the exact opposite
of the situation here. We have had some evidence on the ground
of the difference between the British approach and the American
approach, but how well can you, as DFID, cooperate with USAID,
given that you do have this clearly declared autonomy and a separate
instrument of policy which is at odds with the American approach?
Mr Drummond: We operate with USAID
on the ground in lots of countries. You are quite right that their
allocation of aid is very different to the way that we do it.
Within the Government of course we have debates about the extent
to which DFID programmes can help with other government priorities.
You mentioned counter-terrorism. Our primary purpose has to be
poverty reduction under the Act and we are very clear about that
and it is respected by other government departments. There may
be countries in the world where some of the things that we would
do for poverty reduction will have an impact on reducing radicalisation,
for example, but that is a legitimate part of business and a conversation
we ought to have.
Q77 Chairman:
I see from our brief that US aid to Pakistan has gone up from
$89 million in 2000 to $775 million in 2001. Our aid has trebled
from $24 to $70 million and Denmark has redeployed $23 million
to the Middle East and $46 million or more to Iraq. Clearly governments
are redeploying their aid budgets in ways that have political
significance. What I am asking is whether, in your international
cooperation, you feel confident that you can hold the priorities
that DFID has without being politically compromised, both in terms
of cooperation within the Government and in terms of your international
cooperation, especially with the Americans but not exclusively
the Americans.
Mr Drummond: We are in a much
clearer position than any other donor government that I know of,
in the sense that we have the Act and the requirements that that
places on us and we have, as you say, the 90/10 split which this
year will require that 90 % of the bilateral programme is spent
in the poorest countries. That gives us some pretty strong guidelines
and the debate that we have around government and with other governments
is held in that context.
Q78 Ann McKechin:
Just following on from that, we all appreciate that in many situations
we have to work together with other countries in trying to achieve
a consensus, but conflict prevention is not just dealing with
the immediate problem, it is also preventing conflict in the future.
My concern is that this difference of approach, particularly if
you look at the issue of debt relief, where much of the US-driven
approach, in writing-off huge amounts of debt for Iraq without
very much conditionality attached to it, yet granting much less
debt relief for the very poorest nations and filled with a long-term
conditionality approach, suggests to me that we are sending out
very inconsistent political messages which would always seem to
suggest that the more spectacular the area of conflict, the more
money you will receive, the fewer the conditions attached to it.
In the long term, do you not consider that there are actually
very serious difficulties if we do not actually apply a consistent
form of both our security approach and our aid and reconstruction
approach to various countries? Otherwise the political message
which will be received in many other parts of the world is that
the more spectacular the amount of conflict that is created, the
more likely in the long run is there actually to be some response.
Mr Drummond: On the debt point,
our position is clear, that we want to have debt relief for the
poorest countries and that the HIPC initiative provides that and
we are very keen that countries emerging from conflict should
have early debt relief. The way that the Paris Club operates on
the rescheduling of debts or writing off of debts is that consensus
has to be reached amongst the creditors. You are quite right that
in Iraq, where no debts had been paid for 10 or 20 years, a decision
was taken to write-off substantial amounts. The prospect of those
debts being paid any time soon was minimal.
Q79 Ann McKechin:
Yes, but the same could be said for the African countries which
have been burdened with debt for many years. The point is that
they were subject to a quite detailed set of economic conditionalities
which were applied to them, a long-term political process about
poverty reduction, whereas in the case of Iraq we simply wrote
off the debt with very few conditions about the governance of
the country, its future policies in terms of poverty reduction,
which to date have not been particularly helpful, or about actually
progress on the ground in any area. To my mind that appears to
be a very bad, inconsistent approach which puts out a long-term
political message which does not assist in terms of conflict prevention
globally. Do you not consider that is a problem?
Mr Drummond: There were some conditions
attached to the Iraq deal. I am not an expert on it, but it did
require the IMF's seal of approval and it did get this. It is
not entirely inconsistent and we have tried to be as generous
as we can be to countries which are emerging from debt under the
HIPC initiative now. Of course we are only one country in this
game and we can advocate, but we cannot persuade other countries
always to agree with us on this.
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