|
UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 923-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE
PEACEBUILDING AND POST-CONFLICT RECONSTRUCTION
Wednesday 15 February 2006 MR OLI BROWN and MS CLAIRE HICKSON Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 38
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the International Development Committee on Wednesday 15 February 2006 Members present Malcolm Bruce, in the Chair John Battle Hugh Bayley Richard Burden Mr Jeremy Hunt Ann McKechin Joan Ruddock ________________
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Oli Brown, Project Manager, International Institute for Sustainable Development, and Ms Claire Hickson, Head of Advocacy and Communications, Saferworld, gave evidence. 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 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 no 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 adjusting 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 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 development 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? They may not 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 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 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 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 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[1], the GCPP[2], 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 in DCM[3] over the next few years the real 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 the one 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 commitment 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 and 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 personal 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[4] and their role in doing peer reviews on governance and then 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. 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[5] 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 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 Convention. 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 Organisation 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. Q20 John Battle: I came back at the weekend and the front page of one of the papers - I think it was The Independent - was on diamonds and suggesting that people who go to the jewellers demand when they get into the jewellers a paper chain or trail, an account of where they come from. How realistic is that for the odd jeweller's shop in Leeds where there are queues of people on a Saturday for quite modest value jewellery? There is not a cat in hell's chance of people asking for a paper chain of where the diamond has come from, in all honesty, although it might be at the higher value of diamonds in the middle of London, but not in the smaller value shops, yet that is where the stones end up. What are the realistic chances of tracking it and managing it from the consumer end, that is really what I am asking? Mr Brown: It is like Fairtrade coffee, there is going to be a limited percentage of the consumer market that is going to be interested in the way that the thing they are buying was produced, so inevitably it is never going to have a mainstream impact. In combination with other interventions it can be very useful, and what the Kimberley process does is not necessarily give information to the end consumer in the same way that organic fruit and vegetables tell you how the things are produced. It does provide a paper chain from the production of rough diamonds to the borders of the country of export, and what has happened since is that the diamond industry itself has instituted a system of certification for diamonds after they have actually been cut as well, so it is taking the whole chain a step further on. Q21 Hugh Bayley: At the Millennium Review summit last year the Responsibility to Protect got international endorsement; does it change anything, does it mean anything? Ms Hickson: At this stage it is fairly difficult to tell because that is a high level international agreement about the context and it is about how that is used, how that is implemented and how seriously it is taken by the international community and about the mechanisms that you use. You can agree that responsibility, but you are still faced with many of the obstacles which have always been there about preventing conflicts, making interventions, the role of external actors in intervening in a conflict. In terms of how it is going to be taken forward, the question is how it is going to be understood. In a lot of people's minds the Responsibility to Protect is about military intervention, it is about the responsibility to intervene, whereas if you read the original Responsibility to Protect document, there are three responsibilities in it: to prevent, to intervene and to rebuild, and the report says that the most important responsibility is to prevent. That is not just a matter of a situation where you understand there is a risk of conflict and you send in troops early on, it is about all the stuff we have been talking about, using travel assistance, using different mechanisms to try and prevent a conflict. It is a bit early to say at the moment, therefore, but I think there are a number of organisations working very hard to try and get some test cases, for example northern Uganda, to the attention of the Security Council so that they can actually test the use of this. Q22 Hugh Bayley: It seems to me, using that example of northern Uganda, that the key problem is who has the responsibility to make the first move? It is the government of the country concerned and the responsibility becomes a wider responsibility if the international community believes the government of a country concerned is not providing adequate protection to their own citizens. In the case of the government of Uganda, it is a question about how diligently they are pursuing an end to the conflict. Is it for the government of Uganda to decide whether it goes to the African Union or to other countries to look for logistical support and help to end the conflict, or should it be for other bodies such as the African Union to say we are going to have a meeting about this and ask the government of Uganda to talk about how it is going to fulfil its responsibilities? Who should make the first move? Ms Hickson: The text around Responsibility to Protect gives the primary responsibility to protect to the state, to that country to respect its citizens' human rights and protect those, but the core of your question is about the criteria and who is responsible for that, and that is far from clear at the moment. What you see with the African Union is that at a political level it has demonstrated a recognition of its responsibility to protect because it has made the shift from non-interference to non-indifference, and that has been a notable shift, and it is a question of whether it has got the capacity to back that up, whether that is backed up with a clear division of labour within the international system and whether, if the African Union has not got the capacity to intervene, is it then the UN's responsibility? I do not have the answer to the question, but I think it is one of those extremely difficult but very, very important questions. Q23 Hugh Bayley: Is the key issue the argument on the one hand about national sovereignty and on the other about international responsibility, that other players have a responsibility to intervene in some way to protect if the state does not do so? Who should determine whether the situation is one in which the rights of national sovereignty should be overridden? In other words, can the state - say Uganda - use the national sovereignty argument as a defence against others invoking the right? Mr Brown: Sure, and it has been used time and time again, the evolution of this norm of the Responsibility to Protect which previously was seen more as military humanitarian intervention. You are absolutely right, in theory the responsibility should rest with the Security Council; the problem is that not all of these conflicts get to the Security Council for various reasons of double veto and the interests of the permanent members. What that means for the Responsibility to Protect norm is having had it agreed at the UN, in a sense for the first time, really establishes the fact that the international community has bought into this idea. It does not change any of the tricky political realities about any sort of assertive humanitarian intervention which goes against the wishes of the host country, which is almost the definition of humanitarian intervention, it is when a country itself cannot or will not respect the needs of its own citizens, and it has not been tested in any sense in the few months since that was agreed upon. Q24 Hugh Bayley: You suggest, Oli, that the first responsibility for determining whether the point has come for national sovereignty to be overridden by the responsibility to protect lies with the UN Security Council. Is that actually sensible, would it not make more sense for a regional inter-governmental body to have the first responsibility and for there to be a series of escalations if a regional body or the African Union cannot, by working with the state or even not working with the state, resolve the issue that you refer upwards? That might avoid the problem of a permanent member from far away vetoing action. Mr Brown: It may well be. That would be quite a radical shake-up of international law, if UN states were to agree to say, in the African case, the African Union should be the body that decided on whether national sovereignty rights should be abrogated or not; that would be a dramatic change and I would have thought that at some point the UN Security Council would have something to say about that. It is a very interesting point, but if you look at this responsibility to protect in terms of deliberate action that contravenes national sovereignty when the domestic government cannot or will not protect the rights of its own citizens, that becomes, obviously, one of the most highly charged political issues possible. There has not been enough attention on this whole responsibility to protect argument and, as Claire was saying, in terms of the responsibility to prevent it is really worth focusing on the responsibility of the international community to make sure that its trade and aid policies do not increase the likelihood and longevity of conflict in the developing world and do not work in a way that undermines peace and security. I would suggest that the current way the international community formulates its trade policies fundamentally undermines peace and security in the developing world. Q25 Hugh Bayley: Your point about the responsibility to prevent is well made and well taken, but to go back to Responsibility to Protect, if you are saying the trigger has to be the UN Security Council, I do not think the responsibility to protect means anything at all, because the Security Council already has the ability, in circumstances which it judges merit response, to take international action that overrides sovereignty. Mr Brown: As I understand it, the Security Council under its Chapter 7 powers has the responsibility to intervene and to determine who will intervene in situations where there is a risk to international peace and security, so cross-border peace and security. The difference as I understand it - and Claire can correct me if I am wrong - is where you have intra-state issues which do not threaten international peace and security, where you can perhaps argue -and I will not specify northern Uganda because I do not know enough about the case - that a country that is not respecting the rights of its citizens within its own borders, then under the UN Charter the UN Security Council does not specifically have a responsibility to deal with that. Over time, since its establishment, the UN has been very unwilling to deal with intra-state issues. Ms Hickson: If I could just come in there, one of the things that the Commission for Africa report says is that it recognises the principle of subsidiarity in terms of dealing with conflict, and I think actually there is obviously the international legal dimension of this, but in terms of practice in Africa, particularly in West Africa, you have seen that the intervention has been led by neighbours, and that has often got a UN mandate after the fact. Often neighbours are best-placed to actually know what the situation is and sometimes, obviously, not positively to intervene in the situation, but sometimes positively. That is why the recommendation was made, to clarify the criteria for intervention and to recognise the role of regional and sub-regional organisations. The fact is that these organisations are often leading the way in being the kind of front-line of response, and there have been good things about that and there have been bad things, but a lot of it has been positive, particularly the will to actually deal with the situation. Q26 Ann McKechin: The control of small arms or the lack of control of small arms and light weapons is one of the major difficulties in fragile states. The UK government is committed this year to starting negotiations on an Arms Trade Treaty, but I wonder if you could perhaps give your own views about what the major obstacles are to establishing that Arms Trade Treaty. Ms Hickson: There has been a lot of progress and the UK government has played a strong role in that because you are now seeing around 50 states who have declared their public support, you have seen EU Council statements in support of it, you have seen a Commonwealth statement of support for the Arms Trade Treaty. The issue is that there are a number of obviously pretty important countries which are either overtly opposed to the ATT or have a more subtle approach, but we would assume that they have strong misgivings about an ATT. The challenge to be faced this year is tackling that opposition but also getting the people who have signed up to statements of support to actually be active supporters, pro-active supporters, because the UK government can lead so far but that leadership is only helpful if there is that incentive to do more, so there needs to be that momentum around it. I think also it is important for the UK government to have the capacity itself to take on the role it has taken this year. Q27 Ann McKechin: Given the number of failed states, particularly in regions such as West Africa, Central Africa, where there is very poor response and there is a lack of border controls altogether, would such a treaty really make a difference in sub-Saharan Africa? Ms Hickson: What is important to recognise is that the Arms Trade Treaty is a very important part of a very big puzzle, but it is nevertheless extremely important and therefore needs to happen. The Arms Trade Treaty should improve the control of transfers into and around Africa, but I recognise your point about --- Q28 Ann McKechin: Once you get into the region it is actually then very difficult. Ms Hickson: Yes. This is something that Saferworld works on a lot, you have to build up the capacity both of governments to deal with licensing their transfers and monitoring their participation in the regional and international dimension of it, but also building up their border controls and building up their legislation on small arms, how that is enforced in the country, how do you know where weapons are in order to undertake weapons collection programmes and that kind of thing; that is a whole big dimension of this. It is also a question of whether the Arms Trade Treaty will cover brokering and whether there will be a separate legal instrument on arms brokering, and also whether there will be any further controls on the transportation of arms which obviously in places like the Great Lakes is very important. There is not much international control on those, or not sufficient international controls on that. You then have to also look at the demand issue, why are small arms required in these societies, why are they there? That has also to do with security sector reform, with policing so that security needs are taken care of by the state, not that they need to take care of them themselves. Mr Brown: I would make two points on this. The UK government could play a very important role in moving programmes for the ATT forward, both as a large arms exporter itself and perhaps through DFID, and DFID should be, perhaps, more involved in the process of negotiation of the ATT through its relationships with countries that are affected by arms sales. I do worry though that it seems that the ATT has been kicked into the long grass a little bit; the UK government has made commitments to start negotiations this year and the proposal is to set up a group of experts in 2008 who are then going to think about the terms of this treaty, and I worry that by that time the political momentum for such a treaty might have diminished. Ms Hickson: It is definitely going to be a very long process. Q29 Joan Ruddock: As you know, the EU has recently agreed a new Africa strategy and in that there are commitments to peace and security and post-conflict reconstruction. I just wonder if you think that strategy has been appropriately designed to tackle conflict. Ms Hickson: It is an interesting process to watch because there was an early communication from the Commission, which was much bigger and more detailed and in many ways a far more ambitious document, whereas the final thing that was agreed was much shorter, much less ambitious and much less detailed on how these things would be implemented. In terms of the way it treats peace and security it is prominent, it is the first topic, but there is not much discussion of prevention and there is not much discussion of how the EU uses its own instruments to affect conflict, it is about how it will support other initiatives - it addresses important things like small arms, but not how it will make the most impact, whereas the Commission document was far more focused on those things. Another question we have got is: what is the role of that document, what is supposed to happen with it and what will be the implementation of that document, because at the moment there are not really action points, it is more of a statement. Q30 Joan Ruddock: Just before Oli responds, why do you think that process happened in the way it did? What were the driving factors which resulted in the much briefer - which in itself might be good - but certainly less ambitious document? Ms Hickson: It is difficult to give a proper answer to that question without being based in Brussels and being involved in the process, but from the outside it seems that a lot of it is to do with the issues between different EU institutions and Member States; maybe the initial document was too ambitious - it talked about having very clear and tied-in strategies, not on questions of security but more broadly, and parts of the EU were not interested in having quite that high level of co-ordination. Q31 Joan Ruddock: In fact, therefore, it does not really alleviate the criticisms that Saferworld has actually made and the concerns you had about lack of coherence, they are still there. Ms Hickson: Yes. Also, the lack of clarity about how it relates to other policies means that even if it was a perfect document we could not be quite sure what it is going to drive forward next and how it is going to impact and improve coherence. Mr Brown: I would agree, but it is a positive step that the document has put peace and security right at the very forefront and establishes the point that it is an essential pre-condition for the MDGs. The MDGs themselves do not really mention conflict and security, but this is a really important recognition, except it says all the right things but does not really say necessarily how to go about them, particularly, as you are saying, the EU's instrument - it looks like a very nice place to get to, but we have not quite got the roadmap of how to get there. Q32 Joan Ruddock: One of you said earlier that coherence is often a term, but can you give us any examples? We know what you are saying in terms of what you think should be done, but can you actually give us any concrete examples of where there has been a lack of coherence in the way that the EU or Member States have assigned their policies, and what will be the consequences of that lack of coherence? Mr Brown: One of the foremost examples would be, perhaps, Zimbabwe and the lack of a coherent response to the dominant issues in Zimbabwe. Also, perhaps, in the African context there is the linguistic split in the colonial heritage between Francophone countries and Anglophone countries that has meant that there is a very definite distinction in different ways of responding to African issues within specific countries in the EU that I think has undermined any kind of coherent response and also, to a degree, enabled some leaders to play different states off against each other in a way that has diluted the impact of the EU's attempts to improve governance and send a coherent, consistent message. Ms Hickson: You can see a similar thing somewhere like Nepal where you see certain EU institutions or Member States taking a certain approach towards the conflict, but also arms exports from Member States going into the country supporting a military solution as opposed to another solution, and that includes arms exports from the UK funded through the conflict prevention clause. For example, we had a discussion at the end of last year about security sector reform and the EU's role in security sector reform, and what you always hear is the EU's comparative advantage is the breadth of its tools and mechanisms, its spread across the world, its ability to be slightly more neutral as a collective body than its Member States, but people were repeatedly saying we do not actually meet that comparative advantage because we are not coherent, we do not work together well, we have different understandings of different issues, but it is an issue that applies in many ways to the UK government or other bilateral governments, where there are different understandings between different ministries and also within the US. One of the issues is the amount of time that is taken up by these inter-institutional discussions and rivalries which could be more positively used. Q33 Joan Ruddock: Is there anything that can be done now, or do you think that the new strategy is going to be adopted and these weaknesses are going to continue? Ms Hickson: There is some proposal that there will be a further meeting this year, as I understand it, between the EU and the African Union, or some kind of meeting which would look at the implementation plans for the EU strategy, and that is important. There is also a risk then that you have got the African Partnership Forum implementation plan, you have got a World Bank action plan on Africa, I think, so you have many different action plans and maybe there is incoherence between the different action plans, which might be another problem. Q34 Chairman: Could you give us a round-up of the United Nations dimension which certainly, in terms of the International Criminal Court, was very much in prominence when we were in Uganda. There seems to be a problem that the attitude on the ground very often - John Battle was saying earlier this is the situation in Sierra Leone - is about forgiveness and reconciliation and moving on, and also in the context of Africa there is a cultural desire somehow to draw a line and say the only way we can deal with this is to put it behind us, and that means you have to accept people back into the community, you have to have amnesties, you have to forgive them. How do you do that, and then you bring in the International Criminal Court which says you cannot negotiate with these people. Before you answer that, it would be fair to say, however, that we got contradictory views from people on the ground - we met faith communities, we met NGOs who said you should negotiate with people like the LRA[6]; other people said you cannot negotiate with people, they are insane, there is no agenda, there is no outcome, but you have to deal with it, you have to take them out, and by definition therefore they have to be dealt with either through the International Criminal Court, arrested and charged, or removed by military means. How can you reconcile these two factors as a way of resolving the situation, the International Criminal Court which is about justice and dealing with people, and the cultural idea of an amnesty that says we have to negotiate and pardon people? Ms Hickson: The situation in Uganda is a very interesting one. The ICC and transitional justice is not something that Saferworld does very detailed work on, but I think as we have mentioned in our submission the potential contradiction between different approaches to the conflict and the calling in of the ICC contradicted the Amnesty Act and the Amnesty Commission, but also the balance between, as you say, the more negotiated approach towards the conflict and the military approach towards the conflict. As a broader issue there is an on-going tension between international mechanisms for justice on war crimes and that kind of thing and national processes, but the local people, the people involved in the conflict, ultimately can be the only people to judge on how much they are prepared to forgive and how much they want to see past crimes addressed. If the ICC was asked to get involved in Uganda then it followed the procedures correctly to get involved, and I suppose the question is how did the Ugandan government make that judgment to call in the ICC? Q35 Chairman: That is the problem, the Ugandan government invited the ICC to get involved and at the same time they sponsor an Amnesty Commission which is designed to offer people forgiveness. Ms Hickson: There are parallels, though not quite the same issues, in some of the other international tribunals that have been set up - not the ICC - about the prioritisation of big cases over confrontation at the local level and the local reconciliation. An awful lot of funding has been put into these international criminal tribunals in Aruba and also in The Hague and they are very important, but then also the investment needs to be made in the local systems reconciling these issues in terms of building up the local and national justice systems. Q36 Chairman: Before you answer, Oli, can I ask one final question which is about the Peacebuilding Commission which we had some discussions with when we were at the United Nations, and you mentioned that sometimes the commitment is not there and it is not long enough. These are two UN initiatives; how do you think they can be applied in a way that actually delivers practical measures to get us to the end of conflicts and back to normality? Mr Brown: That is the key question. Firstly, on the ICC, I do not think there is any conflict inherently between having the ICC and the Amnesty Commission functioning in northern Uganda, they are not necessarily mutually exclusive, there are many different levels of reconciliation, many different levels of that sort of truth and justice process. The ICC has only issued warrants for five people and the vast majority of LRA members have been co-opted into fighting, so I do not think necessarily that one cancels out the other. I am also not sure that it is possible to generalise from the specific case of Uganda on how the ICC should interact with local truth and reconciliation, local amnesties, local peacebuilding initiatives. It is a very important question to answer and I do not think I have any incredible insights into that at all. In terms of the Peacebuilding Commission, again, it is too early to say actually how well it will function. Inevitably, the UN is about Track 1 diplomacy, it is about government to government diplomacy, whereas peacebuilding is not about government to government peacebuilding, it is more about civil society engagement. One of the concerns about the Peacebuilding Commission is that the original document did not even have any mention of civil society engagement in it, and there is a concern that it will not engage with local communities in the proper way and that needs to be thought about again. I do not have any particularly wise things to say about it, but I think it is an issue that will come to pass. Perhaps Claire can talk about that. Ms Hickson: I agree it is early to say and I think it is not particularly hopeful that the process is being delayed in New York because of the lack of agreement on the membership of the organisational committee. The issue is that the Peacebuilding Commission cannot be effective as a New York body, it has to relate to both UN and donor bodies on the ground but also have an interaction with national authorities and civil society. The real issue about that is how well is the peacebuilding support office going to learn lessons, build up best practice and actually put that into force, and it has to learn from what has been done before and try and improve that practice; we need to see a support office which is adequately staffed to enable it to perform that function. Q37 Chairman: The parting shot comment from the UN officials we met in northern Uganda was we are doing a good job here, it has to be done, but we should not be here at all because there should be a process that gets us out of this mess. Ms Hickson: Yes, I would agree. Q38 Chairman: That is where all these agencies which are all being set up do not actually at the moment yet deliver. Thank you very much for your time and this discussion. It is a fraught area, obviously, and as a Committee we cannot pretend that we can do anything other than bring some different thinking, fresh approaches, which might just help add something to practical policies. That is what we are all about, practical policies that will actually help resolve these situations and give people a chance of getting back to normality. Thank you very much for giving us your time. Ms Hickson: Thank you.
[1] Strategic Conflict Assessment [2] Global Conflict Prevention Pool [3] Democracy-building and Conflict Management [4] Economic Community Of West African States [5] United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo [6] Lord's Resistance Army |