| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
9 Feb 2010 : Column 214WH—continued
My hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire (Lembit Öpik) has joined us. Many colleagues, including him and my hon. Friends the Members for Edinburgh, West (John Barrett) and for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (Mr. Moore), have persistently asked oral and written questions of the FCO and DFID on issues to do with conflict prevention. I pay tribute to their interest and to the fact that we have been able today to pull together all that interest in what I think is the first formal debate on conflict prevention for many years.
I have one other objection that I put up front straight away. We have annual debates in the House on each of the services. I hope that we will now have an annual debate on conflict prevention. [Hon. Members: "Hear, hear."] I hope that the Minister reflects on that and commits to it today or asks his colleagues to commit to doing so before the general election. The House would benefit from that and it would be good if the country knew that we took this matter so seriously that debating these things was not an accident of a ballot but something to which we returned regularly.
I want to make two short comments, setting the scene, because a goodly number of hon. Members are present and I do not want to take their time or prevent strong voices from being heard about why this matter is so important and where we need to go next.
When the Parliamentarians Network for Conflict Prevention and Human Security was launched, under the auspices of the EastWest Institute, it produced a simple, persuasive fact sheet with a table showing the number of wars that ended in negotiated settlement, rather than military victory, in the 1990s and since 2000. It will not surprise you, Mr. Martlew, to know that many more wars ended in negotiated settlement than in military victory: 42 in the '90s, compared with 23 by military victory. In this decade so far, at the time this fact sheet was produced, 17 conflicts were ended by negotiated settlement and four by military victory. However, the reality is that 50 per cent. of peace agreements do not hold, often because the peace has been imposed from the top rather than being built up from the bottom.
One of the great successes of recent years has been in Kenya, where it was clear that a bottom-up peace process following the difficulties managed to lock in the peace that had been arrived at with such difficulty. Africa as a whole has learned the lesson of needing to do that. Success in Ghana and its ability to have a peaceful transition to different Governments has been due to its much more developed grass-roots network of engagement in such exercises.
The financial figures are the most telling. The direct average cost of one conflict is $64 billion. When that figure was published, there were 70 ongoing or potential conflicts worldwide, and that sum translated into $17.5 trillion in cumulative, direct costs. For every dollar spent on conflict prevention, states spend some $2,000 on weapons and military budgets. That is a central and telling fact.
Jeremy Corbyn (Islington, North) (Lab):
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate. Will he reflect-I am sure that his group would-on the situation in central America, where there has been a series of bitter conflicts, some of which are ongoing, with denial of human rights, abuses, and enormous security and military expenditure, except in Costa Rica which abolished
its army in 1949, and systematically spent more on education and welfare than any other country in the region? It seems to be a much more stable and friendly place as a result.
Mr. Eric Martlew (in the Chair): Order. Interventions should be short.
Simon Hughes: The hon. Gentleman is right, and he has worked long and hard on Latin American issues, as I have, but to a lesser extent. Costa Rica is one of the few countries where such matters are written into the constitution, and Japan is another. It is a telling consideration when countries understand the benefit of that political position. The frustration of many people about the attempts to obtain equality in the world and some sort of redistribution and justice is that some of the poorest countries spend so much of their finance on defence and military equipment-up to 50 per cent. in some cases.
A country in which I have taken an interest for a long time is Sri Lanka, where a terrible civil war ended only last year and there are still repercussions. It has had a huge military budget, and if there had been equal spending on peace-building and conflict prevention among the communities over the years, the whole country would have benefited and there would not have been the deaths and terrible political legacy.
Latin America and single countries such as Sri Lanka are not the only ones to have had conflicts. I could list the countries where there have been ongoing conflicts and conflict prevention has not prevailed. When I was elected, there was, as now, ongoing tension and conflict in the middle east-it recurs regularly-between Israel, Palestine and surrounding states. Cyprus is still not at peace, so the problem exists on this continent in an EU member state and Commonwealth country. There were terrible tragedies in southern Europe in the former Yugoslavia, and it is partly the international community's failures in places such Srebenica and Darfur in Africa that have made people realise that we must have different strategies.
In Africa, we did not manage to prevent the terrible civil war in Sierra Leone, but it is obvious that conflict prevention strategies are still needed to ensure that its growing and improving democracy, and that of Liberia next door, are secure in an area where a frequent cause of conflict-the battle over resources-is still alive and well, whether they are mineral resources as in that area, or other resources elsewhere. Nigeria in west Africa is still not stable because of the religious conflict between Muslim and Christian communities. The other day, the Indian Government instigated a welcome reconciliation initiative on Kashmir, where conflict has continued since the end of the second world war and since the UK pulled out of what became India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
The world has many conflicts, and I am conscious that in their response the Government have tried to identify the specific regions to which they are committed and in which they will invest. A key document, which may sound technical to people outside the House, is unexcitingly called, "PSA Delivery Agreement 30". Its slightly more exciting subtitle is, "Reduce the impact of conflict through enhanced UK and international efforts". It is a good source document, and it sets out what the Government wanted to pull together across Departments at the end of 2007.
There have of course been problems since then, and the reality is that, as the Minister will know, there was considerable criticism of the 2009 Budget settlement, because it seemed that the conflict prevention budget had been cut considerably. I have alerted the Minister to the sort of factual questions that I hope he will answer today, and I hope that one will be specifically about the budgetary commitments now and the Government's planned budgetary commitments for the years immediately ahead.
Lembit Öpik (Montgomeryshire) (LD): I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate, the subject of which I agree with. Given the Government's superlative achievement of what I believe is lasting peace in Northern Ireland, does he believe that we could apply the sort of strategies that he is describing and that the Government successful applied in Northern Ireland to large conflicts such as Afghanistan? I am on record as saying that we should withdraw militarily from Afghanistan now. Is there any mileage in learning the lessons from Northern Ireland and the documents that the Government have published and applying them to those larger conflicts?
Simon Hughes: There are certainly lessons to be learned. My hon. Friend knows much more than I do about Northern Ireland from his family links and so on, although I have often been there. The peace there did not happen just because Governments in Dublin and London decided that there should be peace. It did not even happen just because the political parties realised the folly of what they were doing. It happened because the communities, led by women in large measure and young people, decided that peace was necessary. The lessons for conflict prevention around the world are that if the grass roots of communities, often women and often in rural areas, are supported in taking initiatives, they can build the structure for peace. Afghanistan is a good example.
I was privileged to chair a conference in this very room at the time of the summit over the road on Afghanistan a couple of weeks ago, and it is absolutely clear that all the international policy and all the troops in the world will not provide a lasting legacy of peace in Afghanistan. The same applies to countries such as Iraq, which are made up of different communities with different traditions in one country with boundaries that were drawn artificially some time ago. There must also be a bottom-up process.
The cross-party Select Committee on Foreign Affairs welcomes steps that the Government have taken-the single conflict prevention pool of funding, the creation of the stabilisation aid fund, the clear alignment between the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's new public service agreement target on reducing the impact of conflict and the departmental strategic objective 6 on preventing and resolving conflict and developing indicators that make such things clearer. I am pleased that, since President Obama's arrival at the White House, the United States has understood the importance of such matters. Just the other day in January, the Chief of the General Staff made a welcome contribution down the road at the International Institute for Strategic Studies when he made clear the importance, from the military's perspective, of conflict prevention in this country.
I acknowledge and pay tribute not just to the people who support us in the all-party group, but to the groups in this country and elsewhere who lobby, inform, engage and educate on these issues and who are an important part of the debate and the political process. They include International Alert, Peace Direct, Responding to Conflict, Saferworld, the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict and organisations that work to ensure that the next generation understands these matters better than the last.
A few weeks ago in the Macmillan Room, we were privileged to have an organisation called Leap Confronting Conflict, which talked to us about its work with young people. The reality is that if we educate the next generation of young people to understand that conflict can be prevented from home and in schools and communities, it is far more likely that politicians, diplomats and civil servants will be able to prevent conflict in the years ahead.
To return to my questions to the Minister, if the Government accept the spending-to-save argument, why have they reduced funding for the prevention of conflict and for peacekeeping? Can we afford not to increase the money spent on reducing conflict, given that the long-term costs of conflict are so high? I hope that the Minister will tell us what is happening to the total of conflict funds year by year and inform us accurately what Government plans should be and what proportion of the budget will be spent on peacekeeping in the future. I hope that the Government will tell us how much they want to spend-and are spending-on what are called long-term or upstream preventive measures, as opposed to military interventions.
I know the commitment of the Secretary of State for International Development, and everybody agrees that conflict often prevents proper development. Is there likely to be any additional support from the Department for International Development or other Departments towards the Government's conflict prevention activities? Do the Government seek to assess the relative costs of direct military intervention in a specific country, so that they can assess what the costs of alternative strategies would be?
If we contemplate intervention in the future-whether in a place such as Sierra Leone, where we were invited in by many people, or somewhere such as Kosovo, which was clearly controversial both in international law and at home-is there a mechanism to assess the benefits and cost of direct intervention against the cost of preventive and peacekeeping measures in advance? Do the Government look clearly at the benefit of investing in local people-this is the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire-so that local communities can build the peace, as opposed to bringing in outside agencies? Given the comments of the Chief of the General Staff in January, it would be valuable to know whether the Government think that they have adequate mechanisms in place to measure the effectiveness of our efforts, both unilaterally as the UK and as part of NATO and the European Union, in preventing violent conflict.
I do not expect the Minister to elaborate in detail on all of those points, but it would be helpful to understand whether the Government see most of this work as multilateral, as opposed to work that they do on their own. In many ways, we are perceived as taking the lead
on such matters. It would be helpful to know what the Government see as a gold standard whereby we can be seen to take the lead not only in those countries where we have a particular interest, but in other countries round the world. Can the Government say with confidence that international mechanisms are in place so that, in this decade just beginning, the assessment is that there is less risk of armed conflict globally than ever before?
I will end with a set of issues. As someone who takes a particular interest for my party in matters of energy and climate change, I am clear that the conflicts of the future are likely to be driven by competition and struggles for resources. Threats caused by the climate crisis are likely to increase rather than reduce the risk of conflict. People will struggle over water, for example, and that heightens the chance of conflict-recently, there was a fear in Bangladesh that its water supplies were likely to be cut off by a dam-building project by India upstream.
Last night, I was with our noble Friend Lord Ashdown who was speaking about the fear of conflict driven by shortages of food in some parts of the world. The reality is that energy, water, food and the other ravages of climate change are likely to be the drivers of conflict, particularly in the less-developed and poorer parts of the world.
At the end of the debate, it would be helpful to hear not only that the Minister understands those issues from the point of view of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, but that the Government have a coherent strategy. For example, all the information that comes to the Minister's colleagues in the Department of Energy and Climate Change about the risks to, and instability of, global energy supplies could be factored into Government policy, European Union policy and our activities in the United Nations.
My last plea is this: I am a supporter of the United Nations; it has done a fantastic job, but sometimes it does not have the effective ability to intervene where it needs to do so. I return to Sri Lanka-the world was standing by and the UN was powerless to intervene. The right to protect, which has now been accepted in international law, cannot necessarily be invoked when countries need it. When countries are likely to go into that sort of conflict and when they put up barriers and do not allow anybody in, it almost invariably ends up with genocide and a terrible legacy that is a hugely expensive and costly problem to solve for generations to come.
I do not pretend that the world will necessarily be safer in the next 10 years than it has been in any other decade during our lives. The number of conflicts in the world have certainly gone down, but many ongoing conflicts recur and they are not necessarily solved just because peace has come once. I hope that the Government understand that investment by them and by other Governments in effective, bottom-up conflict prevention, regional support systems in the world's continents and the understanding that that must be central to the agenda of the UN, the European Union, other regional organisations and individual Governments is the best way to ensure that the decades ahead have fewer conflicts and far less money spent on defence, armaments and arms exports and that the agenda can be turned to give the world a better chance of a more peaceful future.
Mr. Eric Martlew (in the Chair): Order. Five hon. Members wish to speak, and I intend to start the winding-up speeches at 12 noon. I hope that hon. Members will bear that in mind.
11.27 am
John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab): I will try to be as brief as possible, Mr. Martlew. I congratulate the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) on securing this debate. There is a sense of irony in having this debate at this point in time, because we have just lost the 255th soldier in Afghanistan, which matches the loss of life in the Falklands. Furthermore, the US and the UK are preparing for the largest battle of the Afghan war so far. There is a sense of irony, but if anything, that gives a sense of urgency to the debate about conflict prevention.
It has been interesting to see the movement over the past eight years, and the momentum that has been building in the search for an alternative route to avoid conflicts rather than to pursue them. That has been found across all parties, but it has been driven by the Government and from deep within the heart of the military, as seen in some of the statements that we have had.
I congratulate my colleagues the hon. Members for North Southwark and Bermondsey and for South-West Devon (Mr. Streeter), who are joint chairs of the all-party group on conflict issues. I apologise that they have had to shoulder the burden of the all-party group for a couple of years, while I have been battling to save the homes of my constituents at Heathrow-that is another debate, which I will not go in to. I would also like to put on record my tribute to Eddy Canfor-Dumas and all his colleagues who have supported us on a voluntary basis to develop the all-party group. They have shouldered the burden of the hard work.
I came to these discussions in 2003 when, as a result of the work done by Diana Basterfield and others, I introduced a ten-minute Bill to promote a ministry for peace. The concept of the ministry for peace was about having an alternative route to that of conflict, in which the paradigm is changed so that expressions such as, "the best form of defence is attack" are seen as wrong. The best form of defence is actually securing peace and preventing conflict.
How do we do that? Well, instead of having ministries of war or defence, we should imbed the search for peace in the heart of the Government by establishing a ministry for peace. It is a simple concept that has been taken up by the Government. I pay tribute to the infrastructure that has been put in place by the Government and to the personal role that the Prime Minister has played in pursuing conflict prevention at the heart of the Government.
The hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey mentioned some of the structures put in place in recent years, but establishing the conflict prevention pool was a major breakthrough, bringing together the Treasury, the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and DFID not only to co-ordinate a pool of resources and their work, but to bid competitively for resources to demonstrate how successful they could be in securing peace. That was a real breakthrough.
The stabilisation unit has been developed. That is another joint unit involving the FCO, DFID and the MOD. Within the FCO, there is a unit that deals with
conflict issues but specifically considers human rights. That is another agenda issue that has been discussed time and again in Adjournment debates but that the Government have now taken up. DFID has its own conflict, humanitarian and security department, which is tackling humanitarian, conflict and security and justice issues, particularly those underpinning poverty. Mention has been made of PSA 30. At least we have something that gives us a reporting-back mechanism, with some targets on time scales. We know the weaknesses and vagaries of it, but at least we are moving in the right direction.
I was encouraged by the statement from Sir David Richards, the Chief of the General Staff, in January. It is worth putting on the record as a statement of intent from the military. He said:
| Next Section | Index | Home Page |