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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 923-iv House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT SELECT COMMITTEE
CONFLICT AND DEVELOPMENT: PEACEBUILDING AND POST-CONFLICT RECONSTRUCTION
Tuesday 2 May 2006 PROFESSOR ROBERT PICCIOTTO Evidence heard in Public Questions 158 - 208
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the International Development Select Committee on Tuesday 2 May 2006 Members present Malcolm Bruce, in the Chair John Barrett John Battle John Bercow Joan Ruddock ________________
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Professor Robert Picciotto, King's College, London, gave evidence. Q158 Chairman: Good morning, Professor Picciotto. Thank you for coming. I know you have been in front of the Committee before, but not in my time. Welcome and thank you for coming here to give us evidence. As you know, we are doing an inquiry on conflict, particularly post-conflict resolution and reconstruction, although, of course, the conflict dimension is not an avoidable topic. In the submission you made to us, which was both helpful and interesting, at one point you make a fairly obvious statement, but quite an important one, that the international community will not make poverty history without making war history. You also slightly quantified the risks. I think you put it down that a country with a per capita income of $1,000 is three times more at risk than a country with a per capita income of $4,000, and, therefore, the role of aid in raising per capita income, and presumably distributing it effectively, is crucial. Therefore, I think perhaps to start the discussion off, what would be interesting for us is for you to give us an assessment of our own Government's performance in that context. They claim that they are well-placed to deliver effectiveness in peace-keeping, conflict reduction and reconstruction and they are concentrating in particular areas. I wondered if you could give us your view of how you think the British Government is performing, where they are doing well and where they are not doing so well? Professor Picciotto: I am not really a deep student of UK internal policies, but look at it this way. The UK is perceived to be a leader in the development business in terms of policies, in terms of performance and so forth. It does not mean it cannot do better, but, in the end, essentially transfer may be probably less than 10 per cent of total aid; so, given its assets, which are intellectual, partnership and linkages and so forth, it seems to me that focusing exclusively on how well the UK donor works is perhaps not really the fundamental point. The fundamental point is what is the UK's contribution to getting the global system to function better? It is a more subtle criterion. It is a criterion which evokes leverage that the UK system can have on the global system. What is striking to me, and I spent 40 years in the development business, is that we have been steeped in a paradigm which, essentially, ignores conflict. Since 9/11 there has been a certain amount of reconsideration, but we have massive past dependence, in the sense that the whole system is still lodged in a paradigm where conflict is here and development is there. The thrust of my testimony is to suggest that there is a need for a very basic transformation, and it seems to me that the White Paper, which is coming to you at some point quite soon, should be judged in terms of whether or not the policies are fundamentally being transformed to integrate security and development in a real way, not simply as an add-on. That is why I do believe that conflict prevention is crucial, but in a sense post-conflict work is also prevention, since half of the conflicts recur, so there is no real conflict. If you do good post-conflict prevention, post-conflict reconstruction or rehabilitation, peace-keeping and peace-making, then presumably you can do better conflict prevention; but my point is that the policies, the processes and the partnerships are perhaps more important than the structure in addressing that question in terms of UK cultures. Q159 Chairman: To clarify that, you are separating, as you put it, the intellectual contribution from the financial contribution, but an awful lot of the time, when, for example, the British Government use budget support as a principal instrument, part of the justification for budget support is it gets you alongside the Government and gets you into a partnership. Is not the reality that your ability to influence that policy depends, to some extent, on how many dollars you have got in the bank? Professor Picciotto: There is no question about that, and I think the volume of aid is important and the sooner the UK can reach the one per cent, or the point seven per cent at least, the better because that gives the muscle and the fuel to get the right things done, but, in that respect, ten per cent of UK aid goes to fragile states. That is too low, and that is a big policy question: how much money goes to the fragile states? We have developed an aid allocation system in development which has emphasised "performance" of countries, and the fact of the matter is we do not really measure performance. The indicators we are using to assess performance essentially reflect the weakness of the state and the initial conditions, and, therefore, we have created aid orphans in order to make sure that the aid donor delivers. I know this is politically difficult, but you have to look at aid, if you look at it in a conflict way, as venture capital. Imagine, if you can prevent one war, it is $60 million, which is a whole a volume of aid; so you must take risks. The key idea that I am pushing in the book which I have just written in a deal with the Swedish Government is that we need to focus on human security as the state for human development. The current model in the development community is human development, which is fine. Human security transforms this to some extent by looking at down-side risks and by also taking conflict explicitly in countries and global strategies. I am not sure I have answered your question. Q160 Chairman: You have answered one particular point, which I think is interesting. You said that the ten per cent that is going to fragile states is too low? Professor Picciotto: It may have gone up to 15 per cent. That is the latest number I saw this morning. It probably is on the way up. Q161 Chairman: Can I draw the inference from what you have said, though, that you think the quality of what the British government does is good, although it could be better. If they simply switched more of the money into fragile states there would be an immediate benefit? Professor Picciotto: Yes, and I am also saying that it should encourage DAC (the Development Assistance Committee) to challenge the overall policy explicitly and to get away from this so-called CPIA[1], which is the index that the World Bank organisation, which I used to work for, has invented, which, by the way, is still very opaque and still will not be available to the public, and so, as to how you measure performance, to me there has to be a complete change in the way that aid is allocated and, I think, one should avoid aid darlings in aid orphans, which is the situation now. This fear of failure, which politicians are partly responsible for, because you take one anecdote of a failure in a particular country and then you say the whole system does not work. I am not saying "you" personally, but I am saying very often some of the non-government organisations. We need to educate the public that aid in a conflict-sensitive paradigm is risky, and if you succeed in some places to avoid a war it pays off for the whole field. This being said, budget support in a conflict-prone situation is not a good idea, in general. In general, I would say that this is not a good instrument in a post-conflict situation and we should go back to good, old-fashioned projects in that situation where you can ensure fiduciary controls, where you can ensure effective delivery like we used to do. Budget support is only appropriate for countries which are already well on the way to managing their own affairs, unless it is really for bringing in essential supplies and this kind of thing, but even then the money should be tied to an actual product. That is my view. Otherwise the risk of corruption is just too high. The key point is that it should do no harm and to just transfer money to entities which are essentially corrupt or, in fact, are the cause of the conflict is not a good idea. Q162 John Bercow: You have spoken of the inextricable link between security and development, a link in which we are certainly highly interested. Similarly, we are interested in the necessary linkage between different aspects of the conflict cycle and the policies and approaches of our Government to addressing those different phases of the cycle. You will be aware that the British Government is making some effort to address both the causes and the aftermath of conflict, and to that end it has established a number of units to do so. The conflict-prevention pools were established in 2001, there is the reorganisation by the Foreign Office of its International Security Directive, which includes establishing a new department focusing on conflict issues, there is the post-conflict reconstruction unit, an inter-departmental entity which is, in a sense, jointly owned by the FCO, DFID and MoD. My question is simply this. Is that current approach, bringing together the several different strands, if they are brought together, or, having created those several different strands or organisations or units, broadly the right approach or would it, in your judgment, be better to have a single, stand-alone unit which, in a sense, practised the principle of seamless coherence by taking responsibility for all aspects of the conflict cycle: prevention dealing with the current rebuilding post? Professor Picciotto: You are raising the question of whether your major structural reform bringing all units together is the solution to some of the problems we have seen. I am not sure. I tend to think, in fact I think, the UK is ahead of, say, Germany or France. Many of the things that you have mentioned are viewed as interesting innovations, a lot of them structure. Structure facilitates specialisation, and the various things that in a so-called conflict cycle you are highlighting require a certain amount of specialisation. I want to come back to the issue of coherence to answer your question, because there are four aspects of coherence: one is internal coherence (i.e. is the policy a means of delivering the goods), but as important as the other three aspects is whether you have a "whole of government approach" - and this is really what you are questioning - and then you have the question of partnerships and aligning with the developing countries, the type three and type four coherence. For the type two coherence, the whole of government approach, we first of all need to have objects which reflect both security and development. To mediate those requires a process. So, I think to me more important, more effective, would be to keep the specialisation, to keep the units. To keep the specialised units, there is a set of processes which ensure a transparent and fulsome debate about what should be done in a particular case. You are not going to get one hundred per cent coherence across, but it is a second-best solution which is going to deliver results, second-best in both areas but better than first-best in each, if you know what I mean. Therefore, what is missing, I think, although there has been some effort here in the UK, is country strategies which are whole of government country strategies. I know that DFID has started to think about that. In fact, I have been involved in a paper produced to try to see what difference it would make if we took a developing country which has conflict risks and looked at it, not only for aid but in terms of trade, migration, intellectual property, foreign direct investments and environment. What we found was that it makes a huge difference. Aid today - and this is a key point - should be viewed as leverage on the other policies of trade. So, aid for trade is fundamental, aid for migration is coming up and should be encouraged and adaptation to global warming, say, in Bangladesh. You should start on these issues and you look at the whole package of policies, because today aid has become small. Even though it is growing, it is a very small thing compared to trade. Trade is 26 times larger than aid. Migration is already three to four times larger, so if you can get better quality of policies, which, of course, means, coming back to EU and OECD[2] I suppose. My point is that country strategies which go beyond aid, which guides all the government departments, is a better solution than a structural reform, because a structural reform could probably advise one way or the other to have specialisation and integration through processes and also through policies as well as a White Paper and other policy instruments and partnerships. I would say policy, process and partnership are better solutions than structural reform, in my opinion. John Bercow: That is very clear. Thank you. Q163 John Battle: On a previous occasion you gave us the benefit of your wisdom and experience on policy coherence, and I think this connects into that in some ways, that notion of integrating security questions and development. As well as the structural arrangements that John referred to within the department, I am trying to get my head round the concept of strategic conflict assessment, because sometimes, I think, governments, in particular, come up with an acronym but what they have not got is a workable, practical either methodology or tool, and I just would like to have your comments, because the Government talks more and more about strategic conflict assessment as a guide to policy to analyse conflict, but I think you have made comment on it, saying that if it is in principle good, the use of it is not very systematic. Could you help us tease out that concept? Is it useful? Is it when you call for new paradigms a possible new paradigm, or is it just another acronym that will see the Government through another difficult patch for a while in this area but, in the end, will discard it and say it has made no practical difference? Professor Picciotto: I can see the thrust of your question. We have had so many different kinds of assessments - environmental assessments, social assessments, conflict assessments, and so on. Conflict assessments are useful, but basically what they amount to is applying political economy rather than pure economics. Basically, most country strategies in the silo mentality that we used to have looked at economics and economic policy, which is very important obviously, but the political dimension of that was not looked at, particularly at the World Bank, and it is more in the bilateral system in the UK but still there was a certain amount of myopia. It essentially means to bring in the other recipients to bear on it, but that is it. That does not do it much more. I think what needs to be done is, again, to look at the quality of the strategies whether or not they deal with human security or not. We have a lot of policy research now which gives very substantial evidence that we need to focus on certain things at the expense of other things. Essentially, first of all, security sector reform (and the UK has been a leader in putting this on the map) is not yet fully integrated in the global strategies, the policy reduction strategies for example. I have not seen any PRSP[3] which has a security sector reform in it. When the World Bank and IMF look at expenditure they do not assess the really important budget item, which is the military, because they do not have the staff. The UK should take the lead in insisting that the World Bank should develop the expertise to look at military expenditures. Once Bob McNamara told me, "I can look at any military budget; I can cut it by 30 per cent and increase security by 30 per cent." I think there are lot of savings one could do by looking at this budget item. There are other things where horizontally the quality is clearly a source of conflict and much of the development strategies have not taken account of regional inequalities, it is very systematically. We, again, have a "performance" which is not true, as I said. For example, investing in North East Brazil makes sense, investing in Sarapora(?) does not - I mean in conflict terms. Look at the ethnic dimension. If you are making ethnic inequality worse, you are building the ground for conflict. Youth unemployment has been tremendously neglected, I think. What I am saying, and I have this in my paper and in the book, is that there are things that we do know but somehow they still are not translated to actual priority setting, and this is where the White Paper, it seems to me, should be very transparent and very clear. When you talk about security and development, is it simply an additional sector or is it really cutting across the whole system? That is what I am arguing for and, again, focus on fragile states. Definitions of "fragile state" vary. They should be harmonised. We are talking about from 40 percent to 35 per cent of the absolute poor are often in a fragile state, so focusing on them in conflict demands is also helpful for development. That is another way of looking at whether or not the country strategies are conflict sensitive. Q164 John Battle: Some of us went to Sierra Leone. As part of the visit I remember speaking to some young men in Freetown who had come in from the rural areas, handed over their guns at the collection point, but, because unemployment was so high and there was no work for them, were saying, "We want our guns back for something to do." It was not ideologically about the conflict but you could see it going round again. Professor Picciotto: It is totally irrational. That relates to the point which I raised about the conflict cycle. I think the conflict cycle is not a good concept, because it has led to compartmentalisation of activity. First, we do elections, and then we do this, so when you get to the DDR----. The World Bank will not come in if there is conflict. We cannot do the work without security. It seems to me we should move away from the conflict cycle paradigm to have an integrated approach throughout - pre, during and after conflict - and everyone working with integrated strategies rather than shifting gears. Every time you go from one gear to another and go for money you lose time, and if you lose time you get new conflicts generated. I think the Sierra Leone case is particularly clear evidence that we did not emphasise development early enough, and it needs to be done, which has all kinds of implications. We have to have debt reduction ahead of time to bring the World Bank in, and so on and so forth, but I think that what the UK can do. Q165 John Battle: To go back to this methodological question, should we pay much attention to this strategic conflict assessment? You mentioned DAC and the CPIA. Should DAC be pushed to adopt the British Government's strategic conflict assessment approach as a way of changing DAC? Is that a way into that? How would you advise us to get to grips with that? Professor Picciotto: One could be sure that conflict assessments are done, because sometimes they are not done, but, more importantly, once they are done, that they are used effectively. You need an evaluator. It is pushing my trade perhaps, but you do need independent evaluation. Today DFID does not have an independent evaluation system. It has an evaluation system; it is not independent. We need an independent evaluation system that checks whether or not the conflict assessments are making a difference or are they simply writing a report which is put on the shelf? You need to create an incentives infrastructure to make sure that these conflict assessments are actually used, and policy coherence, I think, is a very useful tool methodologically because it is a link between what happens on the ground and what happens at headquarters: because you look only at the quality of the policy and its consistency, which is usually what we look at, which is type one, but you also look as to how does the UK work as a whole of government, you look at how does the UK work in partnership with others and you look mostly, and that is most important, how does the UK align itself with its processes, and so on, to the country, and that is extraordinarily difficult. The budget support question alluded to that question, namely, how do you operate in a country when your state is a shadow state? It is a different model, how to operate, and you need to have different partners: you need to use different instruments than you would in a relatively well-functioning state and yet you must lay the ground work for reconstituting and strengthening the state, and so you need to find ways of aligning yourself in a shadow way, say, to the future budget processes while working alongside the state and the private sector - and I really believe the private sector has a lot of merit in these situations, and I can mention why in a minute - to try to build capacity for the state and to do processes which do not undermine the state. Ashraf Ghani, who used to head the Finance Ministry in Afghanistan, is very eloquent. It shows how aid bombardment in Afghanistan has essentially not helped him all that much in building the state by having so many different aid agencies, different procurement procedures from his personal procedures, relatively small projects with high overheads and no capacity to really help him build up the Afghanistan system and nurture it. I think that is pretty much a general problem, how you align yourself in government and industry and build a state while at the same time protecting yourself from state weakness. That means very strong local. We need to put our best people in development in fragile states. Today the incentive structure is such that people do not want to go there because there is a fear of failure. That is something that you should emphasise. You should be sure that you put the best people in the toughest areas, because that is where it will make a difference, and also delegate authority to them so that they can make the integration. Q166 John Barrett: Could I turn now to the Conflict Prevention Pools which have been in existence for five years or so. Could you say, professor, if you think they have been successful, that they have promoted joined up thinking, and, if they have been successful, should their funding key scaled up? If not, should it be scaled down or disbanded? What, if anything, should built up from the experience of the Conflict Prevention Pools and then developed? Professor Picciotto: I think the Conflict Prevention Pools have been very useful because they have allowed a budget incentive for co-ordination and co-operation between agencies, but it is essentially a project instrument, a project funding instrument, and relatively small projects. I think it is fine to get started, but it seems to me that in time, and that can go on perhaps at this present level to continue to promote innovations which are needed to get going in particular post-conflict situations, however, I always come back to the fact that, without an integrated country strategy, we need to scale these things up. The risk of having every donor create conflict-prevention pools leads to the bombardment of small projects, which does not add up to a country strategy; so I think the UK could lead the way, really insisting that we get joined up country strategies.
Q167 Chairman: The advantage of that, Professor, is that you are asking the governments to take risks, which is something that most of our democratic governments are a bit averse to, but if they do it collectively the risk is shared. Professor Picciotto: Precisely, and also if you share it with other partners as well, with the whole development system, yes. Q168 John Barrett: Is your feeling that there should be joint pools: fewer pools but larger pools? Professor Picciotto: I am sorry? Q169 John Barrett: Is your feeling that they should be scaled up because there is a potential for success? Professor Picciotto: My point is that the pools are simply to do good projects which are going to get things going, but in the end it is better to have a country strategy which everybody - the trades people, Defra, DFID - is all joined in terms of the country strategy at the country level and that you have inter-feeds from the right people to help do the integration, which may mean a different role for DFID, which may not be all that easy to achieve but I think it is important to put DFID a little bit in the driver's seat. The great risk, frankly, is for MoD to take the leadership, and if MoD takes the leadership, given their orientation and so forth, and we see this very much in the United States policies at the moment, you really getting a chilling effect on development, and you may get an internal effect, particularly on the global war on terror or "the long war", as it is called now. I think to try to give a bit more clout to DFID as a co-ordinator in country strategy if you are interested in human security and development, which is the purpose of your Committee, then I would really argue that DFID needs to get more support and perhaps more resources or allocate existing resources into this co-ordinating role and this strategic role and avoiding multiple strategies where you only meet in the conflict prevention pool and then you go on doing business as usual in 90 or 95 % of your budgets. Unless the conflict prevention pool agenda has genuine integration at the country level, they will have limited impact. Q170 John Barrett: Could I turn to corruption and improved governance. In a lot of conflict or post-conflict states the initiative raised time and time again is how to improve governance. A lot of the UK's aid goes in the form of budget support. How do you think DFID, the UK Government, could in fact use its budget support to lever in more motivation towards reducing corruption and improving governance in these post-conflict states? Professor Picciotto: It is a very important question. I think really one needs to be very careful with this budget support business, because it is not the instrument of choice. It can be of some help, as I said earlier, but I think in those situations to get the private sector involved, for example, in large infrastructure projects or in energy, I know, for example, that the data from the International Finance Corporation shows that the success rate in post-conflict situations is as good as in others because they know how to select the projects, the big things which work - for example, telecommunications tends to work - and that generates a sort of modern dynamics. I would not favour, in those instances, money going through the private sector, but go through well-managed non-government organisations and do good projects. You make all the management projects to get started and budget support only to the extent that it is part of a coalition to do things which make sense from the country strategy standpoint. I would not put budget support as number one in those situations at all, for the reason we mentioned. We do need to fight corruption, and that means, of course, building up the states and, I think, building up the state functions in those areas essentially in terms of public expenditure and management, which links to the question of natural resource extraction. Many of these countries tend to be countries which are naturally resource dependent. Your leadership in the transparency initiative is quite relevant here, and in the EITI (Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative). However, transparency is a beginning. In some countries a lot of corrupt leaders have joined the EITI and now really they do not care because they just put up the budget but that does not influence their behaviour. The real question is how we build institutions to do public expenditure management upstream alongside private sector investment, because it is unrealistic to expect the private sector, non-government organisations, to reform the state because this is not their job. This is a job for international institutions, and this is a job they have not done nearly enough. Again, the EITI is a good initiative but it should link to the much more aggressive role of multilateral organisations and DFID and other donors to actually focus, as a priority, on public expenditure management, better auditing. Some of these countries have five auditors or three accountants, I mean literally, and it takes time until they have a system which is acceptable. I do not think we always should just sign cheques, but I am old-fashioned in that respect because I have spent 40 years in business. I know the stuff which can go on and can go wrong. Q171 Joan Ruddock: Not related to these final remarks but to the overall question that was being put to you, I wonder if you are familiar with UN Security Council Resolution 13:25? Professor Picciotto: No. It evokes something, but I am not sure what. Q172 Joan Ruddock: It is the one that talks about women generally and security? Professor Picciotto: That is what I thought, yes. Q173 Joan Ruddock: I wonder how relevant you think this is in post-conflict states, because the poorest people, the most disadvantaged, probably the least corrupt and corruptible, are the female population. What value do you put on their involvement in this scenario that you are painting? Professor Picciotto: No, it is very important in post-conflict situations. People say it is 90 per cent, but it is probably 60 per cent of victims now are civilians, but most of those are women and children, and they should not be viewed simply as victims, they should be viewed as agents for the challenge. When we talked about economic development, for example, and tried to initiate some economic dynamism in post-conflict situations (very often micro credit schemes), I would say that the research also shows that this question of the "use bulge" which leads to conflict when you have this demographic transition, we have got to realise that this is largely to engender insensitive policies. If we had more girls' education and started that and micro-credits for women, and so forth, that would be a good investment both for security and development. There is a lot of work which needs to be done here. I talk about tackling the cultural violence in my testimony. I should have mentioned 13:25 because, I think, as regards tackling cultural violence the evidence is that women will say, "This is not my war." Joan Ruddock: Exactly. Professor Picciotto: So it tends to be a male dominated activity, although there are child soldiers and also a lot of women involved, but very often for incentives reasons, because they have been mistreated at home and so forth, and so this is very much part of the structural agenda which is to be addressed by all development agencies, and I think DFID has a good capacity to do this. Q174 Chairman: You said in your submission that the priority for economic growth is fully justified, and you make the point about the wealthier the country the less risk of conflict, but you have also said poorly administered aid can inflame social tensions and obviously lead to conflict. How do the Government department agencies link economic development and conflict prevention? You basically say economic development is a means to secure conflict prevention, but how do you put the two together? Professor Picciotto: This is the area where a human security approach would make sense. Not all development-oriented activities are conflict preventive; so you have to select those which help in economic development but also help in the causes of violence, and that is where I have mentioned earlier horizontal inequalities, youth unemployment and things like that, micro-credit for women and so on. There are things which can be done, and it has to be done case by case, tailor-made, which is not simply growth. We have some evaluation evidence to show that myopia regarding social issues leads to conditionalities which are counter-productive and which leads to more war. For example, we had the pricing thing that they should raise the price of, I think it was rubber or something, and that would have made the already very powerful tribe even more powerful and inflamed social tension more. One has to listen more to what this will do to the local politics. Sometimes the World Bank, the IMF, after a war, would come in and say, "This is a great time to put everything right", and I think, if you do not look at the politics of this, you may get into trouble. In theory, we get better growth, and the evidence is that IMF prescriptions are good for growth in post-conflict situations - we have enormous evidence to that effect - but they have to be applied and that is where the conflict assessments come in, because the conflict assessment will tell you what are the risks of doing this growth-oriented approach. You may accept a little less growth provided it is quality growth. You have to look at the quantity of growth but also at the quality of growth from the conflict perspective, and that is what conflict assessments are supposed to do, so that you come out with a country strategy which favours growth but which is also conflict preventative. That is the difference, and that is why human security should replace human development, because human development has tended to neglect the downside risks. If you fall into a conflict, it wipes out so much and is so costly, two and a half times GDP according to Paul Collier, who testified here, I think. It is good to have a policy where there is a quality of growth rather that simply a quantity of growth. Q175 Chairman: By "quality of growth" you mean (and I do not want to be too political about it) redistributed or at least growth that reaches down, that is not just either a large corporation or a release that is gaining an awful lot where the GDP goes up but the distribution of it does not change? Professor Picciotto: Yes, and particularly distribution which favours one group at the expense of another group. If they are all in the same ethnic group it is not that that bad from the conflict side, but if you are emphasising one region and get a lot of growth. For example, the policies in China have increased regional inequality enormously, and, as a result, I think some analysts put even China as a fragile state. One has to be careful to look at the distribution aspects. In terms of horizontal inequality - this is Francis Stewart's idea - horizontal means looking at distribution among the regions and ethnic or social groups. Q176 Joan Ruddock: We have begun to talk about post-conflict, but you argue very strongly that during-conflict development aid should continue? Professor Picciotto: Yes. Q177 Joan Ruddock: I just wonder - again it is a parallel to what you have been saying - how do you do development assistance during conflict without preventing the reinforcement of local political elites, those who have got the power over inequalities, and how do you prevent feeding the actual war? Professor Picciotto: I agree. This is exactly the dilemma. We have developed different cultures. You have the humanitarian culture, the humanitarian organisation, you have the development organisation, and so coherence starts right there. We need to bring these communities together to work together. I am not saying first I do humanitarian and then I do development, because the doing harm sometimes affects the humanitarian area, and they have acknowledged that because they do not look at these issues very much, they just say, "We want to have the people." If you put development people alongside humanitarian people, you would get better humanitarian work and you would get development earlier. It is really a matter of bringing these communities which have grown separately together, and that is not happening fast enough, and this is linked to the conflict cycle programme of saying: first we do this then we do that. There is no easy solution and there are a lot of risks involved, and that is why I think you need very savvy aids managers in those areas, the best managers you have, the most experienced, and you also need to have a multidisciplinary approach. You cannot simply send economists or simply send defence specialists, because you need to have a team which operates and you need to have an organisation on the ground which can integrate all these things effectively and which is connected to what is actually going on in the field. We are at the beginning of doing this, and I think Sierra Leone is going to be very important to look at. We are going to learn how to do that, but one should not be too pessimistic. Since the end of the Cold War the number of wars has declined - it is a fact. If you take a historical view, during the Second World War it was two or three million people a year, now it is less than half a million people a year, and why? According to the Human Security Report done in Canada, War and Peace in the 21st Century, they attribute that partly to the role of the voluntary sector, in terms of peace-making and things like that, and they also attribute that to the United Nations. We are developing this expertise of how to do these things, but the next phase is to do more coherence. Now we have the expertise in those silos how do we bring the silos together? That is the challenge. Q178 Joan Ruddock: Off the top of your head, can you give an example of where you think it has clearly gone wrong, the attempts to do aid and development during conflict, or can you give us any examples, which would be better, of where it is going right? Is there any other country? Is there any institution? Is there any evidence? I think your theories are excellent but I am wondering where is the evidence? Professor Picciotto: I would say an easy bad case is Iraq obviously. This, I do not think, has been handled very well because the whole focus has been on the military side. That is a clear-cut case. Afghanistan is better; Sierra Leone is better. If you look at South Africa, for example, and the management transition, Nigeria and the management transition, I think it is hard to generalise how to do these things. We know that Nigeria was in a terrible mess but they managed to get out of it somehow post-conflict. Q179 Joan Ruddock: Do you think that was due to international institutions and the role they specifically played during the conflict? Professor Picciotto: It is hard to tell. No, I do not think so, not in this case. I remember working on Bangladesh, East Pakistan, in fact I was directly involved in this. That civil war essentially occurred because the West Pakistan Government did not pay enough attention after the cyclone, and that is very uninteresting but important point. Natural disaster prevention is part of UN security and it can lead to actual conflict. The way the West Pakistan Government reacted to the cyclone led to this, and, I tell you, the international community rose up very effectively to deal with the aftermath of the cyclone, including the World Bank and DFID and everybody else, and I think the way we did it allowed Bangladesh to recover, and so forth; so I think, because we put development in first and we did it quickly, we did it relatively well - McNamara had asked me to prepare a strategy, because he knew this was going to go free - we were ready when it came. We just went in and did it quickly. I remember working with the United Nations. It is a personal story, but the fact is it shows that the wars which do not occur or the conflicts which do not occur are not known and therefore, you know---- Joan Ruddock: This might be a good argument for conflict-prevention, but we are trying to get to the bottom of---- Professor Picciotto: But this is a post-conflict situation. Bangladesh was post-conflict. There was a war there. Q180 Joan Ruddock: You were talking about preventing it, and we have talked about post-conflict. Let me ask you another question. Where a conflict is actually taking place, how do donor governments pursue development policy at that time, particularly if, for example, NGOs have just fled the country? What is it that we can effectively do and how do we do it when our own people who might be there have no security themselves? Are we asking too much? Professor Picciotto: No, things can be done. For example, I know that in the Iraq case the World Bank's office is in Oman and there are people on the ground, they go back and forth. So, yes, I agree, but we also need to need to find how to do aid under fire. We should have civilian, military things together and try to do this together, but hopefully not simply under military control. That is something the conflict-prevention pools could fund, some pioneering. To try to answer your question, I do not think we know how to do it very well yet. My view is that we need to develop instrument mentalities which combine defence and policy development during conflict. At the moment the focus ought to be on negation and all the rest, and a lot of NGOs function in those places because they use local people and many NGOs can operate by using local NGOs. Take Uganda: you have a war going on but you still have development taking place. Chairman: Not in the war zone. Professor Picciotto: Not in the war zone. Exactly, but things could probably be done in the war zones too. These are general ideas, I am not helping you there, but I would say we need to try, because not trying, okay, you fail, but you may succeed; so you have to look at it as a risk management and you need to put people in who can innovate, and that is what they are trying to do in Afghanistan. I think in Afghanistan we have different models which are being tried out. Q181 Chairman: Professor, take somewhere like North Uganda or Darfur, aid is going in just to feed people and provide basic aid on the ground but development is not happening. I think, arguably, aid makes development less likely to happen because people are being fed, the basics of life are there, whereas if you look at Sibu, if there was no aid, maybe they would be dying, on the other hand, maybe desperation would drive them to make things happen. I am not sure from what you are saying as to what you think the international community could do to turn aid to development whilst the crisis is still on-going. Professor Picciotto: Clearly in Darfur the first thing is to try to establish some islands of peace by getting some decent military intervention by the international community, but the whole theory of cultural insurgence is based on the notion, literally, that the United Kingdom basically developed Malaysia, and so on. The whole idea is to create islands where you have security and quickly get hearts and minds on your side by doing development. That is the whole point. It is not a question of pacifying the place, you need the military thing, but once you create an island you quickly put in some development activities, including involving women or irrigation, or whatever else, classical things, within the island of peace that you have created, and then move on. You have a lot of NGOs who are quite skilled at how to deal with refugees and so forth, and I think finding ways of protecting NGOs without controlling them is a frontier. Q182 Joan Ruddock: I want to take the Professor up on the issue of PRTs[4], particularly in Afghanistan, which I know a little about. You seem to suggest that could be a model because you have got the military, you have diplomacy, you have got security, you have got development, but of course the classic is that they can go to a village and they see the school that has been razed to the ground and the local people say, "We want a school", and so the military say, "No problem. We can build a school in a week." They build a school and there are no teachers. There is no NGO to run it, there is no government to run it and the NGOs particularly have been concerned about two things: (1) that having military "do development" gives development a bad name, and also, (2) if it is done badly, it actually undermines the work of the NGOs. Professor Picciotto: Absolutely.
Q183 Joan Ruddock: What is it that you think is the way forward? Professor Picciotto: The problem is the PRTs, the defence people are in charge and they are fully in charge, and that is a problem. That does not mean that a hybrid approach would not work if the governance of it was different. One should not conclude from the PRT problems that we should not do hybrid interventions, rather that we should rethink how they are organised and we should also rethink this nonsense of the war on drugs. It is impossible. The war on drugs creates conflict. It does not abolish conflict. Look at what happened in Bolivia. It is the same thing. We cannot fight drugs. It cannot be dealt with on the demand side. We need to legalise drugs.
Chairman: Or buy them anyway. Professor Picciotto: And get the price down, because otherwise you cannot compete, and to go after the villagers with helicopters and so on is a total nonsense. It creates conflict, it creates animosity. That is the big problem with the PRTs, and so I think policy matters. Q184 John Bercow: Can I go back briefly to the point that you were discussing with Joan Ruddock a few moments ago, and that is the question of the point at which development interventions take place. I understand, Professor Picciotto, your point that you need to establish islands, as you put it, in which there is a peace and then move in very quickly with worthwhile development, but I think this question of the timing is very important and I would like to be absolutely clear that you are not suggesting that where there is still a continuing, and perhaps raging, violent conflict it would be credible, or even desirable, for governments to commit resources to development. For example, in Sudan, even leaving aside Darfur, which most of us have visited over the last couple of years once or more, thinking in terms of the north/south conflict, I have heard the argument made that we should have given development aid earlier", but we do, of course, have a fiduciary responsibility to the tax-payer and, although I can see that people can be wise after the event and say, "We should have intervened earlier with development aid", I presume you are not suggesting that in a situation in which armies are pitched against each other? Professor Picciotto: No, basically it is conceivable that had we invested in these neglected regions, and there are other Darfurs in the making because we are not doing conflict prevention and investing in neglected of regions, we might have avoided this, but that is one point. The second point, I agree with you, to just throw money at the problem is not what I am talking about. What I am talking about is cutting the lags, which are too long, between one phase and another, and that means that you can spend money getting ready, and that is what I was saying. I was mentioning the Macnamara example and Bangladesh because he was wise enough to put resources, scarce resources, in planning for the transition so that when you move in you move in quickly, and that in a sense could also have been done in Iraq. One needs to plan, one needs to be ready to go in and just cut those links and get the teams ready and everything else ready to move, and then move in gradually. Q185 John Bercow: So what you are really saying is that you would not commit the development resources, still less start to use them on the ground, but that you ought to have given pretty considerable forethought to what you will commit so that as soon as it is time to do so you are ready to have a jump start? Professor Picciotto: Yes. I would say that we should be ready with plans on that reduction, which means that we should be ready with the skills and that teams are ready to move in, and that we should be ready with analysis, because that is not what is going on today. All the focus on getting an election going and then after that we will see - no; that is very risky. Risk management should be brought into this whole business. I have noticed the suggestion for Millennium Security Goals, and I think that is an important point in my testimony, because I think we need to get coherence. It would be very helpful to go beyond the MDGs and develop MSGs, and if the UK could take the lead in this it would be great. Q186 Chairman: Some of us are going to the DRC the week after next and we have been in different teams to Sierra Leone and to Uganda, so there are specific ones we have looked at. In those sorts of post-conflict situations what concerns many of us is that there is an arms stand-off very often. You still have the army, it is still there, and therefore the potential for the conflict to resume, so how do you get past that situation? In Sierra Leone they have done so. If I were to quote Uganda, it seems to me the slight concern is that we are giving budget support to Museveni, who is maintaining an army, but when you talk to people in northern Uganda, whilst the LRA is the thing they fear most, they are not too confident in the Ugandan army either, and at the same time Uganda has made incursions into the DRC and funded itself by doing that. How do we move from that and how important is it to get the armies downsized and perhaps transform what they are into policing and security? Professor Picciotto: It is crucial. This is where an early focus on security sector reform is absolutely critical, and decent funding for demobilisation, indeed for DDR, but this needs to be done as a matter of top priority, it seems to me. Simply downsizing the army without giving them something to do means that all you are doing is getting them out of the army to become criminals. Very often the schemes of DDR are under-funded and poorly designed, and partly it is because the capacity to do these things on the multilateral side is still very weak. We need to build capacity at the World Bank to do these things. In a sense, particularly when you have many donors involved, each one with their own ideas on these things, it can be very confusing when you are a very weak local administration, so we do need a multilateral approach and a regional approach. One needs to think in terms of building capacity for the long term in the African Union or in the sub-regional organisations in order to start dealing with some of these issues, as well as in the multilateral system, and again that is something the UK can take some leadership in. If I may directly address your question, I think what you are saying is crucial in the DRC but it needs to be done in a totally coherent way by all donors together with appropriate resources put in and good planning done and making sure you get civilian control over the military, which is the core of SSR. Sector reform has got to be focused on putting it in a context where it is a democratic approach, not simply building capacity, teaching them to shoot. By the way, Liberia is another very important country to focus on because unless its government gets proper support it could easily fall back into a third conflict there. Again, security sector reform and EDR together should be given appropriate offices. Q187 Chairman: Just as a final point, and those colleagues who have been to Sierra Leone may have a view about this, we are talking about disarmament, demobilisation, reintegration, which simply, as I see it, means taking an army and saying, "We have to find other things for you to do. We have to move you into other aspects of the economy and re-integrate you". Then we talk about security sector reform. Are the two not overlapping because naturally in the transition of one to the other it may be easier to get armed forces into the police service than to find other jobs for them? Presumably that is where the budget support comes in, to say, "We will give you the budget support provided you move them out of the military into policing". Professor Picciotto: Exactly. I think that is right. The SSR and DDR are integrally linked and they should also be linked to development activities much more centrally. Very often they just give them training but there are no jobs at the end of it, so I think one needs to have a development strategy ready at the same time. We need DDR, SSR and mainstream development as well to absorb them, and particularly employment-intensive things. That is where community based projects, social fund projects, come in. A lot of things we know how to do in development but sometimes they are not being applied in those situations. There are exceptions. For example, IFAD[5] has done some good work even in Somalia in very difficult circumstances. In other words, you want to bring the fighters back to their communities, so you really need to work at a community level, to strengthen the community and to have it as a community based project so that they come back, and very often this involves agricultural assistance. Very often the women have been left there to tend things and then the men come back and you need to re-adjust the whole system. I think community based approaches, and there are developers with a lot of expertise in this area, can be directed to complement DDR and SSR. Q188 John Battle: You focus in your paper on what you call "whole government strategy". I can see the focus on the big picture, and you started off by emphasising that aid is a small part; we have got to look at everything - remittances, money that comes into them from resources, the whole picture. Then on pages 6 and 7 in your report, in the list that you have got for helping development, it is all-inclusive; it is totally comprehensive. It is more than the Millennium Development Goals. I just wonder sometimes how we connect the big to the small, particularly when governments have limited monies and priorities and choices have to be made. If you were pushed would you put security sector reform in front of disarmament, demobilisation, reintegration if you had limited money to do it, because some would say cut back on security sector reform; leave that till later, till we have got the good governance thing ticking, and focus all the time on just getting them demobilised, collecting the guns in and the rest of it? It is okay to say, "We do both", but if you cannot, what do you do? Professor Picciotto: These are labels in a sense. You have to do projects which make sense in a particular case, which may be a combination of SSR and DDR. I am not trying to avoid your question. I think the sequence in question is not known. It depends. In some cases DDR could go first: if you promise that will they do good community development. In other cases if you want to send them to the police then you had better fix the police. We need people to structure things which are coherent and which do not simply say, "We are going to do SSR or DDR". We have to think of something that is going to work and generate results. The other part of your question is quite important. You are saying, "You are trying to fix everything". The fact of the matter is that we are talking about different time horizons for the big issues on trade, aid, and so on, but these are things which are longer term. There are certain things you can take up on your own but most of these issues require EU or OECD action, whether it is trade or WTO action for that matter. On migration there are things you can do on your own, but what I am arguing is that if we want a peaceful world we need to start thinking about changing the rules of the game of the global system because at the moment it is set up in such a way and it puts such enormous pressure on very poor countries that they are bound to get into conflict, but this is a different time horizon, it needs a different kind of action and the country-by-country things that we have been talking about. We need to put some resources into global work for the long term and some resources in the short term for dealing with the immediate issues. Q189 John Battle: And you would press for more independent, detailed, country-specific country analysis? You think that that local analysis, using "local" in terms of nation states, is what is missing? Professor Picciotto: I am arguing for country strategy. Country analysis should lead to country strategy - which in a way was a recommendation of the UN Stability Task Force - where all parties in the UK Government subscribe to it. That is to me the number one reform which would improve all the issues that you have mentioned, and do it not only with conflict assessment but also looking at all the policies, not just aid but looking at what the impact on migration is, in other words a whole government strategy, and that would immediately mobilise everybody towards the same objectives. Q190 John Battle: If I were to be particular about that, development used to be part of the Foreign Office in Britain under ODA until our Government set up DFID and they have become separate now. I for a long time argued - and I liked your comment about the best staff in the most difficult places - that perhaps DFID staff should be more dominant or predominant than Foreign Office diplomatic staff. I argued that perhaps DFID should drive the Foreign Office rather than the other way round, but would you also then imply that the Ministry of Defence should be brought under that umbrella with the development strategy? Professor Picciotto: Absolutely, yes; definitely. That is the thrust, for example, of the shared responsibility in Sweden where every department, including defence, is responsible for development. I think a strong DFID is crucial. I was talking to somebody who knows very much the US situation, and they have just put in US aid now straight under the State Department and I think this probably is not a good idea. I think what you have is a good system provided heads are brought together and provided you make a policy which puts development and human security, I would say, first. Human security combines more things. If you look at the numbers, poverty-related deaths are 18 million, and I said earlier that half a million are war-related. If we are concerned with human security and use the same metric ----
Q191 Chairman: But the wars cause the poverty. Professor Picciotto: Yes, but, you know, that also means that if you focus on human survival as security, we would put much more resource into development and less into weapons. At the moment we do not analyse it together, so a human security framework would force us to have the same metric and analyse things together and then you will see the security people saying, "Let us invest in development". This is the big reason why we need Millennium Security Goals: to help a common metric, which is after all human life. At the moment the defence people are still concerned with state security over human security The reason human security has not taken off is that the Human Security Report in the UN was done before the High Level Panel Report. Then they did the In Larger Freedom Report to bring it together, but by then all the attention was on the Security Council and this thing fell into a black hole. The Peacebuilding Commission is a very important initiative but it could also translate into a lot of bureaucracy. I think it is very important for the UK to make sure this Peacebuilding Commission delivers in terms of strategy, in terms of evaluation and in terms of banging heads together within the system, and I hope your Government will see to it that this happens. I am planning to go to New York next week. The Coherence Commission has been set up for the UN and Gordon Brown is on the Commission and I think that is something your committee may want to keep an eye on. Chairman: Thank you very much indeed, Professor Picciotto. It has been fascinating and it is obvious from your clear thesis that you cannot put conflict as a separate issue and the fact that it is ridiculous that it has been has come across now both from your paper and from your discussion with us. One simple proposition is that we have to take more risks with our money by putting the best people into the most difficult situations and that, okay, you have to worry about failing but you are bound to have some success if you do that and in the end the implication of that is that we will do better on development. Thank you very much. That has been very helpful.
Examination of Witness
Witness: Mr Jonas Frederiksen, Programme Officer, European Centre for Development Policy Management, gave evidence. Q192 Chairman: Mr Frederiksen, thank you very much for coming in to give us your thoughts on these issues. Obviously, you sat in on the previous contribution so you perhaps know where we are coming from. The African Peace Facility is something that interests us, and indeed for those colleagues who have in the previous Parliament been to Darfur and watched the role of the African Union Force there, it was perhaps the first example of that and I guess some of them will perhaps want to explore this a little bit further. To start with, the thing that is not problematic but slightly odd is that the Peace Facility, which is a significant amount of money, is administered by the external relations part of the EU and development obviously comes from DG Development. Do you see that the two things are fitting well together, that the two strategies are coherent, or is the separation a potential problem? Mr Frederiksen: First of all, thank you for allowing me to address the committee today. The answer to your question should be put in the broader perspective of a rather successful instrument, the African Peace Facility but, to answer your question, no. There are still major challenges to overcome because there is this departmentalised approach to foreign policy in the European Union, and you also have it here in Britain. I agree very much with what the former speaker said, that there is a need to have a more integrated, comprehensive, holistic approach and the evaluation which we did a few months ago clearly showed that yes, you have a good instrument in place but there are too many administrative struggles going on, there are too many different agendas, some long term, some short term, some driven by certain Member States, others driven by the European Commission that wants to promote European integration. The answer is really that this is one of the weak points in the implementation of this instrument. Chairman: Thank you for that. That is a very clear answer. Q193 John Bercow: I do not know whether you think that the existing limitations on areas which the Peace Facility can fund are appropriate limitations or whether the fact that spending on military equipment is ruled out itself limits the effectiveness of that facility? Mr Frederiksen: Not in theory. If you have the European Council, if you have the European Member States financing military equipment in a co-ordinated way with the APF, then they could function. That being said, it has some limitation when you come in with a big instrument, €250 million, you hand it over to a partner and you say, "We want to co-operate with you; we want to engage with you in addressing this conflict, but you cannot use this money to finance equipment". In that sense it has been shown to cause some problems. That being said, there has been enormous effort to improve co-ordination among the different European international partners involved in financing AMIS and there has been quite a lot of complementarity achieved, for example, where you have Britain working through Crown Agents to finance certain parts of military equipment, whereas, for example, other EU Member States finance radio equipment and vehicles, et cetera. Q194 John Bercow: There is a considerable uncertainty, is there not, about this facility because we are preoccupied with the vantage point of the British Government and our own attitude to the stance the British Government takes, and the British Government is supporting the APF only as an interim measure, and the British Government's current view is that European Development Fund resources should really be principally used for long term development rather than for this sort of facility, so there is at best a lukewarm acceptance of this initiative, very tepid, shall we say; it is not full-hearted. On the other hand, there is going to have to be a fairly long term commitment from somewhere, is there not, to making African Union missions work in practice? You have given me a provisional answer about the question of military equipment. Do you think that realistically it is going to be possible to get 25 Member States responding collectively and unanimously to requests for support of the mission or is that going to be a great obstacle? If you look at Darfur, for example, at the moment, leaving aside EU Member States, you simply look at Darfur and the problems of the Security Council, it is incredibly difficult to get agreement to anything happening very quickly; meanwhile ;people are still dying on a fairly substantial scale. Is the internal machinery of the Council of Ministers inherently unsuited to or likely to make more difficult such initiatives? Mr Frederiksen: Just for clarification, are you referring to the European side or the African side? Q195 John Bercow: The European side. In other words, is the fact that for this facility to operate you are going to go through the Council of Ministers and have to try to secure agreement for 25 Member States going to make it to all intents and purposes a gesture but not effective in practice? Mr Frederiksen: This 250 million instrument has been broken up into what technically are called contribution agreements. That is some kind of lump sum money. Before it is released the European Commission and the African Union have to seek the political appropriateness of the Peace and Security Council inside the European Council. It has so far not proved difficult to get that political appropriateness. There has been some frustration among EU Member States that this diplomatic political discussion which should give the stamp for releasing the funds was not comprehensive enough, but so far I would say there have not been major problems. We can track it down and you can see that every time the European Union has been able to release this money within three to four weeks, which is incredible for bureaucratic machinery like that. Q196 John Bercow: I accept that, but I do think, if I may say so, that the operative words in the answer that you have just given are those two words "so far", because therein hangs the root, I suppose, of my inquiry, and that is based on the prospective expansion of the Union. What I am really asking you, I suppose, is, what is the attitude of the new Member States to the European Union security activities in Africa? In other words, is it going to become more difficult, not just because of an increased number but also because the new Member States might take a decidedly different attitude to EU involvement in this sphere, or do you not think that there is going to be any marked difference between the attitude, if you like, to put it very simply, of old Europe and new Europe? Mr Frederiksen: It is clear. The ten new Member States have other priorities. It is not that they do not think the conflicts in Africa are not relevant, especially the conflicts that are bordering the EU, the southern part of Europe, but it is clear that their focus is on their neighbourhood. That being said, I think the biggest challenge in this discussion is the whole debate about ODA. Some EU Member States clearly want to use all the money inside the European Development Fund as ODA, to reach those targets which were put on the table in 2005. For some of the new Member States that is quite a lot of money. It means that if just a few per cent of that fund is used for non-ODA purposes they will have to find a substantial amount of money somewhere else to go through with this, so they will continuously push for more ODA. Part of this evaluation was trying to look at what percentage of the 250 million can be classified as ODA, because that was a major discussion inside the EU Council. You had many countries, and Germany is perhaps the best example, which had big conflicts between the development ministry and the foreign policy ministry. Q197 Chairman: Does that mean they have not really started a debate on whether conflict prevention is part of development? It implies that they have missed that point altogether. We have a whole re-education for all these new Members States, do we, as to how these things interconnect? Mr Frederiksen: It means that if you are a development minister you have to reach those targets that were set and you would like to go out to the public and explain, "My country is moving in this direction", whereas the foreign ministry might have other concerns, and in Germany there was clearly friction. That was the case when the APF was established. It was also the case this time when there was discussion about whether it should be replenished. It is what was said earlier today: you have different ministries, different administrations that pursue their agenda and they are not always very well connected. It is the same at the EU level between the Commission, Solana's Secretariat, some of the Member States, as it is in some of the individual EU Member States. Q198 John Battle: When the European Development Fund was set up under Lomé and renewed under Cotonau the general intention of EDF was always to be long term funding, yet the APF is only for three years. I know you have been involved in the evaluation, the mid-term review. What are the main conclusions of that review? Is it to suggest continuity of the project? Mr Frederiksen: The main conclusion of the evaluation was to continue with the instrument in more or less its curate form. It clearly had shown some successes. It had equipped the AU to put in place quite a big peace support operation in Darfur. It had equipped FOMUC in the Central African Republic. It had strengthened the AU Commission to get involved in solving conflicts. It is an instrument that is based upon the African Union's policies. It is very well integrated, so it is trying to strengthen the African organisations to follow their own conflicts. The conclusion of the report was that the Americans will never be able to run in and shut down the fires, be they in Darfur or somewhere else on the continent, for a long run. Q199 John Battle: It is a positive report then? The work should be continued is what you are going to be suggesting, but what do you think then are the chances of the renewal of the facility after 2007? I know it connects to my colleague's question, but is there a realistic chance that people will say, "Okay, commit another three years", or nine years? Mr Frederiksen: It was decided in the last Garrec(?) Council in Brussels to replenish the fund with €100 million per year for three years. Q200 John Battle: That has been renewed? Mr Frederiksen: Yes. Out of the 9th EDF, so still linked to the development fund, with an enhanced focus on capacity building because this has been one of the weak aspects of the instrument so far. Chairman: So when does it run to now? Q201 John Battle: To 2010; is that when it will go to now? Mr Frederiksen: Yes, to 2009 or 2010. Chairman: Obviously, the prime visible consequence of this has been the mission in Sudan which the committee has taken a strong interest in, and two of my colleagues on my right have been involved in that mission in the past and perhaps John Barrett would like to come in first. Q202 John Barrett: As the Chairman has said, we are constantly getting updates on the situation in Sudan, whether it is bombings, villages, more displaced people in camps and much more. What we saw on the ground was that the African Union really needed military logistical support. It needed its mobility increased, they needed improved intelligence gathering, but what can the EU do to support AMIS's capability with logistical intelligence gathering and the rest on the ground? What opportunities do you see there for them in direct support? Mr Frederiksen: I would like to say - and this links to your discussion earlier this morning - that whenever we rush in with outside funding or support we have to realise that there is only so much we can do and the chances for failure are bigger than the chances for success. We have to get away from believing that with just a small bag of money we can solve all the problems and there will be no risks. That being said, the challenge for the AU to run the AMIS mission in Darfur was financial. They have been running that mission down there for a number of years where they have only been able to finance the mission for an additional four months. How can you run a mission in Darfur with 7,000 people on the ground but only have a financial framework which allows you to project four months ahead? Look at the financial resources that were available in Iraq et cetera and look at the situation there. Secondly, another challenge there is to control the command structure within the AMIS, so linking the forward headquarters in Darfur with Khartoum and the political leadership in Addis. That is a question of improving information, communication, dialogue, and that could clearly be improved. If you went to Darfur you spoke with the soldiers, you saw the pride that most of them feel in being part of the first AU-led mission. This is the first time they have taken care of their own problems, so having this financial instrument that finances the central structure of the mission has proved to be rather successful. Q203 John Barrett: Looking forward, is the opportunity of AMIS handing over to a UN force a possibility? Could they in fact work together? Is it a case of handing over being the next stage? My concern is that the AU mission is then deemed to be a failure and it needed the UN to make it a success. Whether it will be a success or not is the big question, but is there a possibility of the two forces working together? Mr Frederiksen: I am not a military expert; I am not a PSO expert, so I would not like to answer that. That being said, at the moment the international agenda is such that we believe that by changing the barracks of the soldiers on the ground and putting them under the UN banner we will solve the problem in Darfur, and that is clearly not the case. We have this tendency at the moment to believe that everything is wrong with the way the AU runs its mission and it is due to the fact that they do not have all the capacities in place, that their genocide and battle is still going on in Darfur. I question it, and I question that the UN will be able to solve the situation. We should just realise that the AU has, no matter what, put in place a substantial amount of force on the ground, which is much bigger than UN MISA in the south. So far the UN has only been able to put in place 1,000, 2,000 men in the southern part of Sudan, so just compare that. There has clearly been a greater political will among the AU member states, the African countries, to make available soldiers under the umbrella of the AU than for the UN-led mission. Chairman: But it could not have happened without the EU support. Without that extra they just would not have been able to do it. Q204 John Bercow: Can I put it to you that we ought to keep our pride in perspective, if I can put it that way? I understand entirely what you mean when you say that there is a considerable pride within the AU about this being the first mission that it has undertaken. I understand also your point about the significance of the size of the deployment which is being gradually, although not that all that markedly, ratcheted up, but I confess that I was, Mr Frederiksen, a little bit anxious when I heard you say a moment ago that the structure of the initiative has been "rather successful". I put it to you, and those were the words that you used, that it is quite important, without wanting to pour a load of cow dung over the African Union at this, the time of its first important mission, to which it is devoting considerable attention and energy, to avoid confusing inputs with outputs, because in the end nobody actually cares all that much whether it is of itself, as an end in its own right, 7,000 or 8,000 or 10,000 or 20,000 troops or whether General Romeo Dallaire, who has some considerable experience in these matters, having led the mission in Rwanda, pathetically unsupported by the international community, is correct in supposing that the figure needed is nearer to 44,000. The question is surely: is the death rate significantly falling? Is peace being established? I think on the whole one would have to say that there is precious little evidence of that. The peace talks have just collapsed, people continue to be slaughtered on a not insignificant scale, and that causes me, I suppose, to ask you the political question, if you say that you do not feel you are a military authority, and I respect that; you are an authority on a lot of matters: what, if anything, in your judgment can the European Union do politically to reverse the current "stability" which, in the minds of many of us, has simply consolidated an ethnic cleansing which has already very substantially taken place, or do you think, if you are putting it very bluntly, that the government of Sudan, which has already cocked a snook at the international community by effectively vetoing a UN troop deployment in Darfur, would be absolutely killing itself laughing at the idea that the European Union might have any significant political influence on the future direction of Darfur? Mr Frederiksen: Just for clarification, I think one of the problems we had with conducting this evaluation of the African Peace Facility was the close association between the African Peace Facility as a European foreign policy tool and the operation AMIS in Darfur. When I speak about the relative success, because I have to measure it against other EU foreign policy tools, and I am speaking now about the instrument ----- Q205 John Bercow: It has to be said that that is a low threshold. I do not make that point as a cheap debating point, and I know my colleague Quentin Davies would argue that there is every prospect that the European Union can operate a very effective common and foreign security policy in the future and I accept that that is a matter for debate, so I am not making a cheap point that the EU can never run a foreign policy; maybe it can, but I think it is true historically to say that it would not be very difficult to be able to claim that this is more substantial or more effective than previous EU foreign policy efforts. As I say, it is a low base. No? Sorry. Mr Frederiksen: I am following to a certain extent. That being said, there is nothing in the EU which is running without a certain buy-in from EU Member States. It is not like Solana is running his own show or the Commission are running their own show. They have the tools that have been given to them, and all of the EU Member States have a share of that responsibility. That is relevant when you speak about the APF or interventions in Darfur, when you speak about the development policy, when you speak about the security policy, different pillars, the procedures, the committees, the structures of the Commission services, all that which complicates the effectiveness and efficiency of the foreign policy. I am not trying to make any cheap points there though. I should also mention that we focus a lot as Europeans on the African Peace Facility and the European support to AU/regional and sub-regional organisations, peace support operations in Africa. We have financed out of the EDF AMIP, Liberia, Cote d'Ivoire. We have money in the pipeline for Somalia, for Uganda, for Congo, so we should not just focus on the APF. What can the EU do in Darfur? I do not have big estimates about that. I am not a big fan of the government of Sudan. They are causing a lot of problems. I can say that because I am a non-governmental person.
Chairman: I do not think you will find any around here. Mr Frederiksen: And I think they are the key to solving the conflict in Darfur, or at least one of them. The EU Member States and other countries in the world have a lot of interest in oil resources and in other resources in Darfur. As long as we do not get a certain coherence between those aims, objectives, access to commodities, et cetera, and our interventions in the area of security, development systems, then we can try and separate the forces but we will not be able to solve this in a structural way as long as ----- Q206 John Bercow: I strongly sense, Mr Frederiksen, we have come back full circle to Professor Picciotto's initial and fundamental thesis, which is this inextricable link between security and development, because we have not quite specified what would constitute success on the part of the European Union in Darfur, but can I suggest to you that a definition of success might be the ending of violence and the creation of conditions in which development can occur? That means both stopping the truly bestial violence and enabling - and this we have not touched on - people in the camps to go home, of which at the moment for my own part I can see absolutely no sign. I am genuinely anxious, having been twice to Darfur over the last two years with a gap of about nine months between each visit, that there is now a sort of inevitability about long stay in the camps. I seen no sign whatever that people in those camps are going to feel safe to return home. For so long as they do not it is because there is not security and therefore for so long as there is not security there seems little prospect of those people being able to contribute to either their own development or that of the region of Darfur. Might that not be a test of the extent to which the European Union can consider in the end it has been successful. Q207 Chairman: The worry we have, and you heard that in the previous exchanges, is that by going in and providing support and aid, you freeze or institutionalise an unresolved situation and, therefore, our taxpayers' money is undermining the solution rather than providing it, or could be doing so. Mr Frederiksen: First of all, I think those are good criteria. I would add that Britain or the EU are not the only players in there. Just to acknowledge, even if we do everything right we might not achieve those objectives, I fully agree with that. Just to throw in a few comments. Earlier this morning you were speaking about holistic strategies. I very much agree with this, you need to get various security communities, development communities and the like to look at those strategies and try to come up with something which everybody can buy into. That being said, we, in the development community, still think that we can do everything through central planning. We think we can do a strategy and sit in our offices and discuss amongst ourselves to do this and that in sequence and then we will have success. I think we have to get away from that approach. Yes, a strategy, yes, a holistic approach, coordination and complementarity, et cetera, but also doing that in a flexible way which can be adapted to the realities on the ground which are changing all the time. You were referring to the IDPs and the refugee camps in Darfur and earlier this morning you were also speaking about how do we, in an holistic way, operate with humanitarian assistance, when do we move in with development cooperation assistance, et cetera. When we were in Darfur last time there was a certain stability in the region. It was before the recent increase in violence and it was clear that there was a certain window of opportunity for starting up development projects because a lot of the IDPs were not going home to villages because the infrastructure in terms of water, schooling and basic requirements were actually better inside the IDP camps than back home. You are back to the incentives of going home. There was a chance there to get some of the NGOs to try and provide the basic health infrastructure in the villages so as to bring them back, to provide an incentive, a carrot. I would not say that there have been no chances to bring development cooperation assistance into Darfur. That being said, today, there is so much insecurity that it probably would not be advisable. There was a question about budget support. We cannot provide budget support in Sudan, I very much agree. Budget support is a modality, it is not an objective in itself. It is one instrument, one tool, which we can use to achieve an objective when we think it is appropriate and it is definitely not appropriate in Darfur, I think that should be very clear. Whether or not it is appropriate in Uganda or other places, I think has to be based on a case-by-case analysis and an holistic one, indeed bringing in the assessment of the military expenditures. I do not know if that answers your question.
Q208 Chairman: I think it is helpful and I think that the Committee's point of view, taking exactly what John Bercow said, is I do not think any one of us are taking the view that the African Union and the European Union should not be cooperating in this way and over time hopefully the situation will create a learning experience which will be more effective. Clearly, nobody can look at the situation in Darfur and be proud of almost anything that any of the participants are contributing. There is a desperate frustration as to how you break out of it. Thank you very much indeed for coming along and giving evidence and for your written submissions which are helpful. I hope at the end of this the Committee can produce a report that has some worthwhile recommendations. I think we are learning as we go and there are some very sensible suggestions which we would be happy to take up. Thank you both for taking the time to come. Mr Frederiksen: For your information, can I say I do not know how much you know about the organisation which I am working for but it is a non-profit, non-partisan think-tank funded by seven EU Member States. The focus is on facilitation and providing information to the policy makers and we have done the official evaluation of the European Development Policy, we have done it on EU support to good governance. The promotion in Brussels is called the three Cs, coordination, complementarity and coherence, and we are now helping the African Union to implement institutional reform and that is a huge task. We are hired directly by the AU, not by EU Member States or donors to do this work as the only non-African organisation.
Chairman: I think we appreciate that. Mr Frederiksen: I am doing a bit of publicity! Thank you. Chairman: Thank you. [1] Country Policy and Institutional Assessment [2] Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [3] Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers [4] Provincial Reconstruction Teams [5] International Fund for Agricultural Development |