Select Committee on International Development Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 240 - 244)

WEDNESDAY 10 MAY 2006

DR NEIL COOPER, PROFESSOR MIKE PUGH AND DR JONATHAN GOODHAND

  Q240  John Bercow: I am very glad, Dr Cooper, that you did refer to a follow-on initiative; in other words, one is making the point not that such an initiative should not be undertaken but that it is perhaps a necessary rather than a sufficient condition for progress.

  Dr Cooper: Absolutely.

  Q241  John Bercow: Mr Barrett, Mr Battle and I went to Sierra Leone recently and they must speak for themselves but for my part I felt uplifted but only very modestly and my feeling was really that the country had gone from being violent, poor and corrupt to being non-violent, poor and corrupt. There is an anti-corruption commission there but it has got a lot of work still to do. On the assumption, which I think I can now take as read, that you accept that private sector development is pretty important to the promotion of progress in these countries, and taking the example of Sierra Leone, can you think when or why a significant external financial investor would plough money into Sierra Leone?

  Dr Cooper: I have to say, I think that is a very depressing question. I have been out to Sierra Leone recently as well and I think I would have arrived at exactly the same conclusion over the situation in Sierra Leone that you have outlined. I have to say, it is very difficult to think that a disinterested, external investor, without any form of guarantee or any form of external support, certainly would want to risk their shirt on investing a huge amount of money in Sierra Leone, not least, of course, because Sierra Leone itself, however successful reform in Sierra Leone has been, is in the middle of a regional conflict formation, where there are conflicts breaking out all the time. There is this perennial risk that, however good reforms are inside the state, conflict may be imported from outside at any time, so you have got all those kinds of risks. Therefore, I think it means that if you are looking at encouraging people to invest you need to look at how you are going to facilitate that, how you are going to give them a kind of infrastructure of incentives to invest.

  Q242  John Battle: Can I say, I think it has been one of the best discussions we have had for a long time. I think sometimes perhaps we should have a discussion ourselves, as a Committee, with the spark of our witnesses. I am tempted to add two things. One to Jeremy. I think that you do need to think differently in order to do differently. I think that is what the debate in our Party is about this week, actually. Just to John, and it is just a reflection and I will quickly get out of the way, when I was working in the Foreign Office, I spent some time once in an airport with members of the FARC and had an informal meeting with the members of the FARC, one of whom was a trained economist. When I pressed him on his strategy for liberating the poor, he told me he would rely on the economic trickle-down from the profits of the drugs trade, which they were very keen to protect, and I have always remembered that as a measure of how we deal with the free market economy. I just want to say that dealing with the informal economy, which you have raised a lot actually, is as difficult in my inner-city constituency in Leeds as it is in Africa, there are incredible challenges around the whole of that agenda really and I think we should not minimise it. What I am learning, as I grow slightly older, is that the world never ever works out according to the plan, anybody's plan, it is different all the time and we are back at that point. One of the things which was in the plan ten, 20 years ago was regional governance, so in Latin America Mercasol would be the key to break us out of the great terrible times of dictatorship; in Africa ECOWAS[5] was the great hope of being not just a nation state, but economic planning, organisation, regulation, on a regional basis. Has ECOWAS got any power or clout at all to do anything at all about this, interstate, the bikers that we met in Sierra Leone who made the mods and rockers look tame, who were carrying the diamonds backwards and forwards across the trails? Is there any clout in ECOWAS, should we support it, encourage it, enhance it: any role for ECOWAS in the future?

  Dr Cooper: Can I add just one supplementary to your point [John Bercow], before I get on to that: diasporas. I think they are a really important network to tap into, and because they have got links, identity links and maybe family links, with the home country they may be more inclined to take that risk and invest, and I think the active promotion of diaspora investment is something which could be promoted. You [John Battle] had a number of points: difficult challenges, first of all. You are absolutely right; dealing with shadow economies and dealing with post-conflict societies in general is a hugely difficult challenge. I think sometimes therefore you do fall into this trap of judging progress against too high a benchmark. I think it is important to be realistic about what can be achieved in post-conflict societies and really to think through to benchmark activity and post-conflict reconstruction against realistic expectations of what is achievable. It is highly unlikely that you are going to eliminate totally shadow economic activity, and certainly not overnight, it is highly unlikely that you are going to completely eliminate corruption; my goodness, we have not managed it even in the Western developed societies let alone in post-conflict societies, so part of it is about definitely being realistic. In terms of regional organisations, yes, I think there is an important role that regional entities, like ECOWAS, can play. I think, to some extent, this is mitigated of course in these regions because often there are profound security tensions which exist between the individual states, so the aspiration is often proceeding further along than the actual real ability, but they are an important vehicle. One of the reasons why I think they are an important vehicle is that actually a lot of the kinds of issues that these regional conflict formations suffer from is the import of problems from outside, whether it be arms proliferation, mafia groups coming in to exploit the conflict trade, and stuff like that, or the regional role of mercenary groups and stuff like that. Regional entities like ECOWAS sometimes, I think, can provide a forum for pursuing initiatives which are of particular interest to them, which may go further than you can get at a global level. To some extent, one example would be the ECOWAS small arms moratorium. I am not suggesting at all that has worked particularly well but what is interesting about it is that I think, for all its flaws, it has established something of a norm against elicit arms proliferation into the country. There are attempts to build on that, to institutionalise that, and one could see maybe further down the line that something like that could actually be made more meaningful, and certainly it should be supported.

  Professor Pugh: I think it is just worth remembering that it has taken the EU 50 years to get to where it is today, and even now there is disagreement about it and its desirability, and so on. I think that there is this assumption that things can be changed significantly, transformed, in a very short space of time. You have got now people like Paddy Ashdown, for instance, arguing that this is a long drawn-out process, that it may be 15 years before you get any significant integration going on.

  Q243  Mr Hunt: If I could just riposte to John Battle, very briefly. I think the only point of thinking differently is if actually you do something differently afterwards, and I think that was the point really I was trying to make. A very quick question, on a totally distinct topic, if I may, which is gender policy and sexual violence; there is a huge explosion of it in conflict areas. We have got the issue in Liberia of the aid workers, we have got the huge explosion of rape in places like DRC; do you think that we need a different, more systematic approach to how we deal with that in conflict countries?

  Dr Cooper: I have to say, I would make no claims to be an expert on the gender aspects of post-conflict societies so probably I am not going to answer your question directly, but there are a couple of points that I would like to make on gender issues. One is that I think, certainly compared with, say, 10 or 15 years ago, the international community, the aid community, is very acutely aware now of these issues around sexual violence towards women, during conflict and after conflict, and gender issues more generally around equity in terms of numbers of women in particular institutions, and so on and so forth. I do think still what I have a question-mark about is the extent to which the gender lens is applied beyond that. I think sometimes there is a tendency to apply the lens of gender to what you might call women's issues spelt with an I and a Z, but actually there is a whole raft of what appear to be gender-neutral areas, which may well have gendered impacts. If you are proposing a particular regulatory reform or a particular privatisation initiative, or whatever it might be, it may well have particular gendered effects because it may be you are impacting on an area where it is predominantly women that are employed. This comes through on the conflict diamond issue, for instance, because in Sierra Leone it is mainly men that are employed in the diamond sector and what you have is predominantly women in the gold sector. You have a lot of attention on conflict diamonds and you have a diamond development initiative, which is about trying to raise the pay and the training for the men in the diamond fields, because everybody is obsessed with diamonds, but actually the gold-mining side of things just gets completely ignored because the discourse is all about diamonds and not about gold. There is an unintended gender impact there. That is one point. The second point, and again this is about Sierra Leone, is that gender, of course, is not just about women, it is about how men interpret their gender roles as well. I think sometimes it is important to think through the gender lens on those issues as well. Again, on the diamond issue, one of the things which I think is really striking about the diamond-diggers in Sierra Leone is that there is this almost celebration of the risk culture involved in diamond-digging. There is almost a kind of macho thing which is associated with taking the risk of doing the diamond-digging because it is a high-risk, high-reward activity, whereas the gold-mining is much more low risk, more secure, and so there is a kind of gendered aspect to the diamond-mining activity that is going on now. If you talk to some of the diggers and they say, "No matter what development initiatives you put in place, we would still want to do this, because it's in our blood and it's the nature of the risk," and so on and so forth, to some extent, you can say that is a kind of self-legitimisation of their situation. Nevertheless, I think having those kinds of gender lenses is quite important and I am not sure how widespread the application of the gender lens is on those kinds of issues.

  Professor Pugh: I think there is also quite often a lack of awareness of the role that women played in peace-making activities. You can find, for example, situations where women have been really quite influential in getting men to give up their weapons. I think Mali was one of them; certainly Bougainville was another one, in the Pacific. There is a degree of mobilisation in favour of peace in which, in fact, women are influential, but then, because there is a lack of awareness of this on the part of the outside community, peace-keepers, or whoever, who come in, they are not encouraged to take up roles in the post-conflict reconstruction period, and women often get side-lined and marginalised. Certainly that happened in Kosovo, where I think, of all the parallel administrative posts that were established there, only three went to women, and one resigned in disgust, eventually. I think being aware that women have often played a part in mobilising for peace should be a platform for encouraging women to play a more central role in post-conflict reconstruction, even in things like security sector reform, traditionally a male activity.

  Q244  Chairman: Obviously, there is a UN Resolution to that effect but it is not always being honoured in the observance. Can I thank you all. We have gone way past our brief, also we are somewhat under pressure of a potential vote in the House and there is more evidence to take. There may be one or two things which we did not quite complete, which we could write to you about, if that is alright, just to complete the exchange; if you would co-operate with that, it would be very helpful. Thank you very much indeed, all of you.

  Professor Pugh: Thank you for the opportunity.

  Chairman: Thank you.


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