Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80
- 97)
THURSDAY 23 MARCH 2006
MR JIM
DRUMMOND, MR
PHIL EVANS,
MR STEPHEN
PATTISON, MAJOR
GENERAL ANDREW
STEWART AND
MR MATT
BAUGH
Q80 Ann McKechin:
No, but we are an important member of the IMF which is creditor
driven and in which there is very little involvement of developing
nations and in that regard it is undemocratic. I would have thought
that perhaps the UK Government could certainly initiate some sort
of discussion, dialogue, about how we are going to deal with these
issues in the future and that there is a necessity, indeed a very
good political goal about trying to achieve consistency, that
we do not treat one country differently simply because of their
geo-political importance to us. That is what has come across.
Mr Drummond: I am afraid I do
not know enough about the detail of the Iraq debt deal to debate
the Africa versus Iraq comparison that you are making. I fully
take your point about consistency.
Chairman: The Committee are obviously
very supportive of the policy the Government have. What we are
concerned about is, for example, that in dealing with the United
States and other countries, they have such a directly opposed
thing and when we are cooperating these tensions become difficult
and the international community does not speak in a consistent
way. That is just a comment.
Q81 John Barrett:
May I ask a question about Sierra Leone? We touched on it earlier
on and it is often quoted as an example of successful military
intervention in order to prevent conflict. First of all, was that
a one-off solution in a unique situation or are there lessons
that we can learn from Sierra Leone which could be applied elsewhere?
May I add that a few members of the Committee were out there recently
and were impressed at how things have moved on?
Major General Stewart: Let me
first say that we have yet to see whether it is a huge success
because we have not yet treated the causes of the problem. The
causes of the problem there are poverty and poor governance. Those
two need yet to be resolved and can only truly be resolved by
the Sierra Leone people themselves. What we are trying to do is
assist. There are two very significant issues in Sierra Leone.
The first one was that the military intervention was a national
operation. It took place in order to support the United Nations
because the Government felt there was obviously a requirement
to do so and to help the people of Sierra Leone. A national operation
is a considerably easier one to conduct than a multinational operation;
the last comment from the Chairman about how difficult it is to
coordinate policies. We have to be very careful that we do not
learn the wrong lessons from it in terms of a short sharp rapid
intervention of a brigade possibly resolving an issue like that,
because I do not think anybody would be able to respond that quickly
very often in a multinational context. It was because it was of
such importance to the UK Government that they used their highest
and most immediately available forces which were able to operate
quickly. We worked under a national command in order to support
the UN and then handed over to the UN again as quickly as we could.
Thereafter there was the whole question of the way that tying
together aid, military assistance through the training team, trying
to internationalise that early, actually becoming subordinate
to the United Nations in a way but still having a certain amount
of freedom of action in national terms, would fix nearly every
circumstance. It was a lesson that was identified but probably
not learned at the time about the need for this cross-government
organisation for post-conflict and now with the establishment
of PCRU. I know that General Richards, if he had deployed, would
have liked a small team of PCRU people who were trained, who understood,
who had the connections back here, who were able to have the connections
to the international organisations et cetera, in order
to be able to coordinate what, after all, was not his job, but
because he was there he had to do it. It was a very significant
learning curve in those terms, but the difficulty is that we are
still in place, and the Africa Conflict Prevention Pool is paying
for it—Sierra Leone is actually taking 40% of the pool—it
is costing a significant amount and we are not at the end of the
road. We have currently a plan to go through to 2010, by which
time we hope to have reduced the costs significantly by reducing
the military assistance element in particular. It demonstrates
again that all of these things take a long time, they need long-term
commitment, and actually the fact that we can look that far ahead,
that we can probably earmark money that far ahead and we have
agreed between ourselves that this is going on to 2010, is again
very easy in a national sense. It is hugely difficult if we are
doing that with other nations because the nation we are doing
it with is actually Sierra Leone; there is a partnership with
them and that makes it easier. All I am really saying is that
we learned a lot from it. We are now starting to implement a lot
of the lessons that we then identified so that they could become
learnt. There is a certain amount of that through the PCRU and
the way that the pools now operate. We are trying to pass on that
experience, certainly to the French and the Americans, the other
major contributors to assistance within Africa, and in a way the
Africans have learned through that as demonstrated by the African
standpoint in the whole way the AU is now approaching ownership
of looking after itself in Africa, being able to view the conflict.
They will learn much from Sierra Leone because it was significant
in terms of the African Union standpoint.
Q82 John Barrett:
Is it that unique set of circumstances, along with the relative
size of the operation, which gives us hope that Sierra Leone will
carry on to become a success? Is your thought that we can learn
individual lessons from it or was the success because of the whole,
because everything came together?
Major General Stewart: It did
not come together for a bit. The actual incident at the time was
pretty unique. What happened was that there was a very early recognition,
and we had had experience of DDR before—we had been doing
it in Sierra Leone but had actually failed to a certain extent—but
we had experience of the fact that we had to join ourselves up.
I think that helped. If I might give an example of the EU deployment
to Bunia in Ituri, which was French-led, only about a battle group,
a brigade-minus size to deal with a specific issue for a specific
time, it was pretty small and it happened quickly. Sierra Leone
demonstrated that you can do things quickly as long as it is small
and it has a very, very constrained end state to achieve, because
the real end state is going to take 15 years. Actually stopping
the conflict, did we really stop it? No, what we did was to prevent
the UN from being overrun; no, we did not even prevent it, we
gave backbone to the UN in order to be able to survive that. Then
the other lesson which I would say is recognised is that after
that had happened, we then had to hand back to the Africans to
resolve the peace. There was no peace with the RUF created by
the actions we took; it actually happened through negotiation
conducted by the SRSG[7],
who was a Nigerian, and a force commander, who was a Kenyan, and
I can remember being hugely frustrated at how long this was taking
because we still had to have our forces out there while it went
on. Actually they did it in an African way with African ownership
and it lasted and that is another lesson that we probably need
to learn or that I think we have learned and we need to continue
with it.
Q83 John Barrett:
One issue I was very aware of there was the sudden need, if you
are rapidly demobilising a lot of young men who are able, fit,
know how to fire a weapon, in the transition to a peaceful state,
at the same time as trying to build up the police force in the
same country. Are there any lessons learned, mistakes that could
be avoided elsewhere through suddenly, maybe over rapidly, demobilising
troops, finding you then have potential for the next war in the
same country? Is there a way of getting fighting men out of fighting
mode?
Major General Stewart: No, it
is quite a difficult issue. Phil may want to say something about
DDR as a whole. We always have this difficulty; jobs are the real
issue. So many reasons for these conflicts and the reasons you
cannot resolve them are because you have the dissatisfied who
have nothing to do and who for pennies will take up a weapon and
take up arms. When we come to the disarmament and demobilisation
phase, that is actually not too difficult. There are always big
issues around whether we should pay for the gun when it is brought
in, how we should do it, but actually people come in and once
their leaders understand that there is peace, they will demobilise
and they will come in. The difficulty there is how you do the
reintegration. We have yet to see PCRU have to do something like
this or assist like this in something like a Sierra Leone where
one is in a hot situation and the understanding we have as a nation,
as a department now, as three departments, comes through on how
these things all match, government security and the economy are
so intertwined, and you are not going to get good unless all three
of them are working to get proper peace, enduring peace. We have
worked that out. The reintegration of how the money is spent is
now something that we . . . We are used to dealing with a crisis.
We are now beginning to understand how to get these people off
the street, away from the guns and doing things. I cannot say
we are going to get it right, because every situation will be
different and, again, there is culture. One looks at Iraq and
it is an honourable thing to carry guns if you are a man there
and it is hugely difficult to disarm and demobilise. In other
areas it has proved very successful and relatively easy. DRC,
which I think you visited, is one of the easier places for that.
Q84 John Bercow:
The illicit sale of small arms and light weapons very obviously
prolongs conflict, it increases the level of armed violence and
it undermines development. A recognition of that fact was offered
by a host of states in the final communiqué which emerged
from the Commonwealth heads of government meeting last year. Moreover
the British Government, as you yourselves very well know, have
committed themselves to push through negotiations on an international
arms trade treaty in 2006. What is the problem? Well, at least
on the face of it, a part of the problem is that a number of the
countries which in all seriousness committed themselves to the
terms of the communiqué—to name but three, India,
Pakistan and South Africa, and there is a plethora of others to
boot—have expressed reservations about the proposed treaty.
That leads me to ask the obvious question: how does the Government
intend to get those recalcitrant states to agree to such a treaty—I
have mentioned some but I could similarly mention Iran or China
or Colombia, or indeed our friends the United States with whose
president, as we know, the Prime Minister has a particularly close
and enduring relationship—to abandon their current position
and to opt for one which we regard as altogether more satisfactory?
Mr Pattison: I must say I am not
an expert on the arms trade treaty, but let me try to answer your
question, if I may. The key to this is to try to build as large
a constituency of countries as possible to generate momentum.
You are absolutely right, the implication in what you say is that
what we want is a universal treaty and you are absolutely right
that that obviously means that a relatively small number of people
can frustrate our objectives. We are not giving up. What we shall
try to do this year is to get something at the UN General Assembly
which at least creates an expert group to look at what an arms
trade treaty might address in the hope that we shall get countries
to sign up to that as the next step and slowly lure them along
the path that leads to an arms trade treaty. It is not straightforward.
You mention countries who have expressed reservations about it.
Actually, of course quite a large number of countries are supportive
of what we are trying to do; this is a very bold initiative and
it is not going to be easy, but that is the way forward.
Q85 John Bercow:
I suppose my anxiety flows from the all too common experience
of the lowest common denominator emerging triumphant. In other
words, although it is wholly welcome and I should much prefer
to regard the glass as half full than half empty, that there is
a substantial array of countries which are united behind not just
the principle but the proposal before the international community,
the fact of the existence of several who are not, is a problem.
I suppose what I should like to ask as a humble layman—or
at any rate a layman who ought to be humble—of someone who
is presumably familiar with the minutiae of this is whether you
can tell me—because I should like to think that it is in
the forefront of your mind and that if you do not eat, sleep and
breathe it and mention it at the breakfast table, you are not
far off that point—what the particular objections of some
of the individuals states are. I suspect in the case of Iran on
the one hand and indeed Colombia, which is a nest of vipers, on
the other that it is not terribly difficult to think, but do you
know in your mind and can you advise ministers on the particular
points of objection and how they might be circumnavigated?
Mr Pattison: That is what we shall
try to do as we get closer to this and closer to fleshing out
a proposal and thereby fleshing out exactly what people's reservations
are. You know how negotiations happen. You go to someone and ask
whether they would like an arms trade treaty and they tell you
not to come anywhere near them with that. However, as you actually
begin to put flesh on the bones you begin to highlight exactly
what the problems are for them and this would be true in any negotiation.
Q86 John Bercow:
I know it is almost always a mistake to regard any one thing as
a panacea for conflict and I am not suggesting that this is the
be-all and end-all. I do think that one could argue that it is
a sine qua non of making progress. You only have to look
at the truly alarming statistics for the number of deaths caused
by this trade to think that unless we can make some progress we
are simply not going to get anywhere. If these weapons are going
to be thrown all over the place, we have to make some progress.
There are a good many examples, though obviously we want to keep
within the law, of people who are not a million miles from our
own country who are very happily profiting from this practice.
What I should like very briefly to ask is this. Are you confident
that while we are preaching this message we ourselves are on safe
ground in terms of very forcefully adhering to and seeking prosecutions
for breaches of our own export control act? I have had brought
to me several examples of what on the surface seem to be pretty
blatant breaches of the act courtesy of Amnesty and others and
I am not sure how robustly those are being pursued. Secondly,
a completely separate point but extremely relevant to the international
arms trade treaty, how effective can such a treaty be—and
God knows it needs to be—in places such as the DRC where
the Government does not control large parts of the country?
Mr Pattison: I entirely take your
point about the importance of controls in this area. There is
a debate about the extent to which the availability of arms causes
conflicts, but certainly it is true that the easy availability
of arms makes conflicts infinitely more deadly. Despite the arms
trade treaty's slow progress we have been doing other things:
our small arms and light weapon programme funded under the global
pool has made important steps in this direction. We are not complacent
about it and we are not putting all our eggs in the arms trade
treaty basket. I am pretty confident we are implementing our own
guidelines robustly. If you know examples where that is not the
case, then you should bring them to the attention of those who
should be policing this.
Q87 John Bercow:
I feel a Parliamentary Question coming on.
Mr Pattison: How effective it
will be is always a huge question with any of these agreements
I am afraid. The monitoring and verification arrangements will
turn out to be absolutely crucial to its effectiveness. That does
not mean we should not try. The difficulty of effective monitoring
and verification do not mean you should not try. It is likely
the point I made earlier. Sometimes in the international arena
creating a norm is the first step and once you create that, then
with luck you can begin to build in other bits behind it.
Q88 Joan Ruddock:
I am not sure I can make my question really short because I want
to set the scene a little bit. I am a little bit familiar with
Afghanistan, where I have been a couple of times, not with Iraq.
I see parallels there. I really want to ask you all whether we
have made a serious mistake in the way that we have addressed
the post-conflict situation in those two countries. We have put
a lot of money, not just the UK but the international community,
a lot of political capital, into creating democratic institutions,
into holding elections and what we have in both countries is,
yes, I believe, a very considerable success in terms of people
wanting to vote. What have they got as a result of that? They
have a structure which is very centralised, unable to move, unable
to deliver significantly and certainly in Iraq people have less
in terms of water, less in terms of energy supplies. How can you
grow the economy, how can you alleviate poverty in those circumstances?
Was it the right priority when people have not seen an improvement
in their basic conditions?
Mr Drummond: Perhaps we should
not call these post-conflict phases, but for convenience we can
call them that. In these post-conflict phases you need to have
progress on a number of different fronts. You certainly need a
level of security in order to enable other things to happen. In
Afghanistan, in relatively large parts of the country, you do
have a level of security. The rate of economic pick-up in Afghanistan
is reasonably impressive for a post-conflict situation. The benefits
of that are not spread around the country, as you point out. We
are dealing there with a country which has been ungoverned, has
not had the institutions of government that we would recognise
for a very long period, so rebuilding that structure is going
to take a very long time. We see Afghanistan as a development
challenge for 20 to 50 years. We have to see it in that sort of
time frame. Was it right to have elections? On the evidence that
people wanted to vote, yes, and it gives credibility to the Government.
If a government had been imposed from outside, would that have
had credibility? I doubt it. Afghanistan is a very long-term challenge.
In Iraq the security situation is more difficult; a number of
things have happened in the economy. There is economic growth
in the numbers; partly to do with the way oil prices move of course.
The figures I have for water supply and access to sewerage and
progress in schools, reconstruction, suggest a position that is
better now than it was before. You are right on power supplies;
partly because the system has had very little investment for 20
years, partly because of sabotage, partly because there has been
a large amount of importing of air conditioners and other items,
so the demand has risen and the supply has not risen so the position
on power is not better. Was it right to have an electoral process?
It seemed to me essential to have an electoral process so that
you have people engaged and making choices about where they wanted
their government to be. Of course we still need to get a government
out of the latest process; I acknowledge that.
Q89 Chairman:
Paul Collier has this interesting idea that democracy is only
a stabilising force in post-conflict countries with a per capita
income of over $700, which seems to me an interesting point. Clearly
that is not true of Afghanistan in income terms. What is your
view about that?
Mr Drummond: There is evidence
from around quite large chunks of the world. I am not sure what
the per capita income of India is now, but it is getting on for
$700 to $750. India has been a democracy for a long time and it
has certainly helped to stabilise India. There are parts of Africa
where I should say democracy has been a stabilising force and
Malawi is quite a poor country, but the fact that it goes through
a democratic process is helpful. Mozambique post-conflict went
through a democratic process and it has been helpful there.
Chairman: That is a straight repudiation.
Q90 Hugh Bayley:
In a post-conflict situation, when you have soldiers on the ground
trying to consolidate, to fulfil their legal responsibilities
under the Geneva conventions and to create conditions for peace
to grow, there is a need to win hearts and minds and to complete
some quick projects to rebuild schools and get infrastructure
running. Does that conflict with longer term development aims?
How would commanders on the ground relate to the DFID people abroad
and in a longer-term economic development for the country? How
do you get the two to fit together without one impacting badly
on the other?
Major General Stewart: Quick impact
projects are absolutely essential in terms of hearts and minds
and force protection. They end up being the best form of force
protection that you have, they will make you friends and they
allow you to have influence over the locals. They are hugely important.
What happens is that each commander in theatre will be given a
specific amount of money for quick impact projects with a ceiling
on the size of each projects and a ceiling on the overall allocation
for the period that he is there and he will work within those.
As a commander—and I was in Iraq commanding in Basra from
December 2003 until July 2004—I spent about 10% of my time
on military thought and the rest of my time was spent on thinking
political developmental thought. I worked alongside and spoke
daily to the head of the CPA who was in the region from the Foreign
Office, alongside whom working in his headquarters were members
of DFID and he was responsible for the large projects and involved
in talking directly to Iraq, to Baghdad, to try to get more money.
We would have weekly arguments, but though we were arguing against
each other, we were arguing on how we could make these mesh together
better because there are still very strict rules on how one can
actually implement these projects. If you are going to have a
project, for me it was over US$100,000, then it had to be advertised
on the net, you had to take three tenders, you had to take the
tender that was best value for money, because those were the rules
in order to maintain propriety and absolutely right. I would be
talking to my colleague to see how I could circumvent this, not
because I felt that it was the wrong thing to do, but because
I actually wanted it to happen tomorrow. He would help me to do
that. The long-term projects, the big issues of the sewerage,
the big issues of the electricity, the big issues of how you put
a bridge across the Shatt al Arab are something which we should
not even be thinking about in military terms; they will buy us
enormous force protection, buy us influence, but that is very
much developmental business and we will look at whether we can
do a little project on the site where the bridge is actually going
to be built. We could help build a little industry there or get
the baker's shop. It has to be done together. We are not in conflict.
There are occasions when it appears as though we are in conflict,
because of course the money pool is not limitless and we are restricted
as to how much we are permitted to do. I think it works pretty
well.
Q91 Hugh Bayley:
We often have humanitarian agencies and more often NGOs coming
here and saying that it muddies the water because people look
at development workers, some of whom are military personnel, and
tar them all with the same brush. I think back to the early post-war
phase—I cannot remember precisely but I suspect it was before
you took up your command in Basra—and the bombing of the
UN headquarters in Baghdad which could be presented as that kind
of reaction: all these people are invaders, humanitarian workers
as well as the military, and if you are against invaders then
you try to hurt whoever you can amongst your enemy and the humanitarian
workers are inevitably less equipped to protect themselves and
fight than the military so they become targets. How do you seek
to avoid that? Is that a fair representation of the sort of political
background to what happened with the UN? When there are attacks
on humanitarian workers who are seen as aggressors in some way,
how do you try to avoid that and minimise it?
Major General Stewart: From the
UN point of view this was unique and I hope that it will remain
unique. The UN had never been attacked before. Here was an incidence
where they were regarded as occupying forces. I think what we
have is an external organisation—probably AQI[8],
though I cannot tell you that—which saw this as an opportunity
to prolong the conflict and demonstrate the international community's
inability to influence how things were happening there. It was
a specifically well-targeted disturber and I would leave it as
simply as that.
Mr Drummond: From DFID we would
probably distinguish the provision of humanitarian assistance,
which we think of as life-saving assistance, from quick-impact
projects which are the very early stage of small scale reconstruction.
We sometimes fund quick impact projects and when we do it has
to be for the primary purpose of poverty reduction and there may
be a secondary benefit of force protection but that will not be
our starting point. We quite often provide advice into the military
on what the best quick impact project might be and how that might
link in with the longer term development issues which need to
be dealt with.
Q92 John Bercow:
Can you give me one good practical example of how the adoption
of the responsibility to protect has changed British policy?
Mr Drummond: The responsibility
to protect is a concept which was agreed last year and that is
an important first step. What we need to do now is get that translated
down into action and different behaviour. I am not sure that we
are at the stage yet where that has happened on a large scale.
Mr Pattison: The adoption in the
summit outcome document of the principle of responsibility to
protect was actually a major triumph for British policy: it is
not we who are on the defensive on this. This originated in the
Prime Minister's Chicago speech after Kosovo and we have worked
for many years to try to get this principle adopted. It is a big
success. The consensus around it in the summit document was actually
a pretty fragile consensus and the Chinese ambassador, the next
day or the day after, went on record to qualify it quite considerably.
That is because it tries to put a dent in one of those principle
of the UN, the principle that there should be no interference
in internal affairs which has, some would say, often been used
as an excuse to conceal genocide, ethnic cleansing and all those
other terrible things. Having gone as far as we have, it is a
big triumph. The challenge now is to translate it into action.
That will not be straightforward, given the fragile consensus.
We did actually manage to get a reference to the principle in
a resolution at the Security Council in January on the Great Lakes
which also talks about the LRA. These things are glacial, but
that is a step towards consolidating the norm. The challenge now
for us is to continue to try to push the concept and to try to
focus it on those countries where there are real problems at the
moment in this area, particularly Sudan, which is a major concern
of ours. If we can move action forward on Sudan on the basis of
that responsibility to protect idea, we will have achieved something
quite remarkable.
Q93 John Bercow:
It is a pretty big challenge really, is it not? Some of us have
recently read and some people may long ago have read Romeo Dallaire's
rather harrowing account of his experience in Rwanda[9]
and of course there is a lot of talk about how it must never happen
again and all that, but it was not really serious, it was not
meant and it was for the cameras. I wonder whether you agree that
in focusing, as you did spontaneously on Sudan, and presumably
you mean pre-eminently at the moment Darfur, it is a pretty important
test case, is it not? Is the international community serious about
averting genocide or is this really just a rather vacuous exercise
in moral posturing? The Prime Minister's speech was splendid;
the Prime Minister is very sound in these matters in my view,
but it is a question of trying to get others to take these things
seriously. The difficulty in Darfur as far as some European countries
are concerned is, let us face it, that they are Africans and they
are fighting each other and we do not really care very much about
it. As far as some African countries are concerned, we have the
same problem in relation to Sudan as we have in relation to Zimbabwe,
have we not? Esprit de corps and all that: we cannot criticise
an African country; it is not right; it is not the done thing;
it is the African equivalent of the idea of it not being cricket.
It is pretty unsatisfactory.
Mr Pattison: We can have a long
discussion about Darfur and the dynamics of it. On the responsibility
to protect, of course we very much hope that they do not turn
out to be vacuous words. The fact that we squeezed it into the
resolution in January does provide a glimmer of hope that we can
work with other members of the Security Council to try to take
it forward.
Q94 Chairman:
I just wonder whether giving comfort to some people in the Sudan
who seek medical treatment in the United Kingdom would be regarded
as unhelpful in the situation in Darfur.
Mr Drummond: I am sorry, I cannot
comment on that.
Mr Pattison: I cannot comment.
Q95 Richard Burden:
The Government supports the Africa Conflict Prevention Pool and
we also provide quite a lot of budget support to Rwanda—£46
million in 2005-06. Both the United Nations and the Peace and
Security Council of the AU have offered the opinion that budget
support to Rwanda can, albeit indirectly, contribute to further
instability and problems in relation to the DRC. Do you think
that is a fair criticism and is there a conflict in our policies?
Mr Evans: I assume that we would
not regard it as fair criticism, because if we did we would not
have signed the agreement we did with Rwanda. That is not to be
frivolous with respect to the response, because there clearly
are problems. This is again one of the dilemmas similar to the
one we have in Uganda where we know that budget support, where
certain conditions are met, is an extremely effective tool for
poverty reduction and a better tool than any other when it can
be used. We are never going to be able to deliver it, or very
rarely, under perfect circumstances. A constant process of judgment
and decision-making is required to figure out whether you have
crossed the line where budget support should be withdrawn in order
to change behaviour. In Rwanda at the moment the judgment is that,
albeit very slowly, there is more on the plus side than the negative
side in terms of using that instrument and continuing to use it
unless there is a major change of direction. Our puzzle in DFID
is the extent to which people view budget support as a kind of
force for evil in some way or a strange instrument. It is an aspiration
we have in development altogether to move development assistance
as far as possible to budget support because it gives the biggest
return in terms of outcome. As I said earlier in response to the
Uganda question, the question is more about the totality of the
use of aid in a country rather than the use of a particular instrument
and that makes sense in this context. The question about budget
support is one of fungibility: if you put money into box X it
is effectively filling up box Y. However, that is true of development
aid overall and not just budget support.
Q96 Chairman:
The same complaint was made about Uganda.
Mr Evans: Precisely. It is terribly
difficult to get it right and it is always a fine judgment and
very often it is a political judgment which lands on ministers
laps in fact. It is always about the most effective way to use
that tool. Are we going to get policy change or should we keep
using it to reduce poverty? Does it make things better or worse?
Q97 Richard Burden:
The same judgment has to be made by ministers but your opening
remarks on that indicated to me that whilst you were clearly on
one side of that line, at the moment the line is getting fairly
close. Would it be fair to say that?
Mr Evans: I am not close enough
to the details on the ground to know where we are at on that.
Mr Drummond: The story overall
on Rwanda is a fairly positive one, given where Rwanda has come
from. The UK had no particular links with Rwanda before the genocide.
We have invested heavily there and we have a stable country which
is making very good progress against poverty reduction targets.
It is not overall a good story that we should broadcast.
Mr Evans: We did hesitate for
a long time before we did agree to budget support, so I guess
that reflects our judgment that things are improving and that
conditions are getting more favourable, notwithstanding the very
complex problems around that whole region.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed.
It is very useful for the Committee to get people from all the
Departments to see how you are actually interacting. It is important
to us and it has helped us understand a little more the dynamics
of that, although it has probably raised more questions as well.
Thank you very much and thank you for giving us your time and
answering our questions.
7 Special Representative of the Secretary-General. Back
8
Al-Qaeda. Back
9
Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda,
Romeo Dallaire. Back
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