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.
5 Economic Community of West African States. Back
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