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Coverage was also given of the wonderful practice that we have of insuring your own kit. I do not know what the armed forces of other countries do in this regard, but if we go on in this way, we shall not present an image to the Armed Forces that will build up their morale. They are tired and their families are under stress. We have had the ongoing discussion about the poor accommodation available to the military. The Minister’s brief may well say that it is getting better. That may be the case, but why did it get so bad in the first place? Why did we not invest in the Armed Forces? The Audit Commission report published last year said that we are keeping people in our armed services by paying them little extra bonuses every now and then—little bounties. Why do we not review their pay structure to keep people in the armed services?

Then we have the ongoing idea about the treatment of people in our medical system. We have done away with military hospitals. The noble Lord, Lord Drayson, and his officials argued that it would be very difficult to maintain separate hospitals with a sufficient number of patients. That might be a valid argument, but people perceive that they are not being treated properly. War pensions are supposed to be received as priority. Can the Government tell me that every member of the NHS knows that war pensions for members of Her Majesty’s forces are supposed to be received as priority? I bet the answer is no. The war pensioners themselves do not know. Are people told, “Yes, you should support these people. Yes, you should make sure that the pensions get through”?

The perception that we are creating about our Armed Forces is that they are wonderful so long as they do their job, do not die in large numbers and we do not have to worry about them. I am starting to get that feeling from groups outside. Unless we start to address it, we will have shrinkage in our professional Armed Forces that might end up in a downward spiral of recruitment. If that is allowed to happen, we will not be able properly to carry out any of the activities that we now undertake, and are in danger of effectively turning a good professional Army into a scruffy one.

8.31 pm

The Lord Bishop of Winchester: My Lords, in yesterday’s gracious Speech, I confess that I had my ears cocked for one word in particular—Africa—but cocked in vain, as it turned out. The nearest that the

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gracious Speech took us was Uganda, and that only in the context of the CHOGM later this month, although I was glad to see that there was a mention of global poverty and the millennium development goals. Where has gone the front-line commitment—the concentration of the last Prime Minister and the present one when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer—on the Commission for Africa? It has gone to a thing called the Africa Partnership Forum, whose latest report the Government have not thought worth bringing to Parliament, nor, I think, any of its previous reports. Its latest report studiously avoids attention to any of the most difficult places in Africa, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is to that country that I want to give attention.

It is a truism that peace and security in the DRC are a prime key to peace and security in the eight or nine countries that surround that huge entity—it is larger than western Europe—in the middle of central Africa. Later, I want to attend particularly to the relationships between Congo and the countries down 800 or so kilometres of its eastern side—moving from north to south, they are Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. However, it is worth noting that that relationship is at the moment poisonous to the north. Kony, the leader of the LRA, is almost certainly holed up in areas of northern Congo impenetrable to law and order. He has been rearmed and revictualled, virtually certainly by Sudan as part of its effort to destabilise northern Uganda and places south.

On Monday last week we had the benefit of hearing, through a Question asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, about northern Uganda shortly after her return from that country. The House was then able to give attention to the difficult questions of the ICC charges against Kony and some of his lieutenants, and that strong sense in northern Uganda that peace must take preference over the ICC process, which to many there is foreign, distant and inadequate beside their local, indigenous judicial accountabilities. It is a sign of the complexity of the situation that, however much that argument has power regarding northern Uganda and peace there, the situation in the DRC is almost the other way round. Human rights abuses and impunity from them, and an ending of that impunity, are a prime question in the DRC. In the DRC, it is good news that only two people of what must be dozens who might be candidates are in The Hague charged with human rights offences.

Without the security sector reforms urgently necessary in Congo, the place is very little better—if any—than it was before the elections and the processes of last year. There is a crying need for the accountability of the justice and police systems to be worked at and, if security sector reform is not given priority, there will be no peace and security within Congo or along and across its borders, no containing of pillage of mineral resources, and no working at good relationships with the countries of the Great Lakes region. Many of the issues of ethnic tension are intertwined, and the matter is of deepest urgency.

After four years of transition and a year after the election of President Kabila—itself a remarkable achievement, remarkably supported by this country

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and the EU—an indescribable amount still needs to be done. In many places even where there is peace and security, it is—as I was told by everyone I met in Bunia in late April, whether in English or French—fragile, and very fragile indeed. About one leg of the security sector reform—the establishing of a working, honest, independent judicial system, of accountable police, military, intelligence and prison services, and of the beginning of an end to impunity—the title of a recently published Amnesty International report says it all: Democratic Republic of Congo—Torture and Killings by State Security Agents Still Endemic. That report maps in horrifying detail a story familiar to many of us, not least those of us who have been trying to persuade the Home Office that it dare not deport people, whatever their asylum status, to the DRC.

Critical too is progress towards the creation of a reliable, trained—including training in human rights—national army and police, whose pay, food and equipment are not constantly siphoned off to senior officers, with the effect that the FARDC is just as much a threat to local people in most places where it is present as are the militias and bandits whom it exists to combat. That huge task leads naturally into the current tragedy for hundreds of thousands of Congolese—the resurgence of war these last years in eastern Congo, specifically in Nord-Kivu. That is vividly documented in two excellent reports published in the past few weeks by Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group.

There in Nord-Kivu are all the terribly familiar ingredients of the recent history of the DRC, in the war at the heart of which are the Tutsi-favouring and Tutsi-defending forces and the political party led by General Nkunda. It would be interesting if the Minister could tell us by whom that war is being funded, because it would be good to get to the bottom of the matter. There is military action involving a shifting range of actors and alliances of all sorts, but the forces of the Governments of Rwanda, Uganda and of the United Nations are among them. There is widespread and horrific abuse of civilians, including women and children—and there are large numbers of child soldiers. Some 400,000 people have been displaced in camps and in the bush. At the war’s heart is the generational mutual fear and suspicion of Hutu and Tutsi; the effects are evident on land use and the struggle for the control of the vast mineral resources. All of that demonstrates the inability of the national Government to exert convincing control of the east and evidences the weaknesses of the UN and its forces, in admittedly difficult circumstances.

I have a number of questions for the Minister. In particular, what are the UK Government doing as regards its colleagues in the EU and in the P3 plus 2 in response to all this? What are they seeking to support? What contribution are we making now to security sector reform, to land distribution reform in the context of demobilisation and resettlement, to the control of mineral resources and to the vetting of contracts? How careful is DfID regarding the human rights records of companies with which it is entering into partnerships? What proportion of DfID’s activities is with local NGOs and sociétés civile? Why is DfID so unwilling in the Great Lakes and more widely to

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funnel aid through church-based organisations? How do the Government view the contemporary scramble for Africa by China and a range of Islamic states? In the face of talk of the withdrawal of MONUC in 2009, are the Government arguing that nothing of the sort must be done until security sector reform is vastly further down the road?

I have two last questions. What training for our Armed Forces is being offered as a contribution to civilian protection? On page 47 of the IPPR’s Safeguarding Civilians, there is an interesting series of paragraphs asking that crucial question. I would be interested to hear the Minister’s response to a question put to me separately on successive days in April in Burundi by two thoughtful Burundian Christian leaders. They said: “We would really be interested to know who is running the Great Lakes region”.

8.41 pm

Lord Clinton-Davis: My Lords, first, I welcome to this House a good friend, my noble friend Lady Taylor of Bolton, who was a colleague in the House of Commons and in this place. I wish her well. My noble friend Lord Drayson shared a room with me for quite a long time. He was a delightful companion and—this has been said on all sides—a very good Minister. My noble friend Lord Malloch-Brown, who will wind up this debate, adds lustre to the government Benches and I welcome him.

Many years ago, I was, mistakenly, a Eurosceptic; but, having worked within the European Commission, observing and playing a part in various institutions and helping to communicate the fundamental message of the European Commission, I changed. I recognised the Commission’s faults, but I perceived how wrong I had been. I reject the fundamentalism that scars the entire situation regarding Europe. It is ironic that, for the most part, the two main political parties have dramatically changed their stances. Today, the majority of Conservatives are implacably opposed to the whole concept of Europe, whereas the majority of the Labour Party is for a stronger Europe. The Conservatives cannot maintain a position of a do-nothing Europe or withdrawing from it altogether. It is one thing to play remorselessly to the Eurosceptic gallery—in essence, that was the gravamen of the speech made by the noble Lord, Lord Howell—but, in reality, the Conservatives would need the unanimous agreement of all member states to realise their ambitions. Despite the current reticence shown by the Labour Government, I hope that they will play a much more positive role in the European Union, helping to mould it for the future.

On the treaty, I argue that it is not nearly as radical as those that preceded it: the Single European Act, Maastricht and Amsterdam. Did we have a referendum on them? The answer is a devastating no. Of course, there are similarities between the constitution treaty and the reform treaty but there are also key differences. The United Kingdom has negotiated a series of significant opt-outs: the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, crime, policing and, where there is aid for humanitarian purposes or energy policies, the UK can go its own way. To pretend, as most Europhobes do, that suddenly

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British law has become subordinate to European law is utterly false. The situation has remained unchanged since we joined the European Community in 1973. Contrary to the assertions of those who are opposed to the European project, in no way have our citizens been hoodwinked.

What the Conservatives contend is untenable. To argue that we should withdraw from the European Union is legitimate—in my view, wholly wrong—but to argue that we should be half in and half out is unworthy of them. The European Union has a much better chance of influencing the United States and others over, for example, climate change, than if the UK were to go it alone.

Climate change is probably the most significant issue confronting the world today. Despite some errors, the Gore report remains a highly potent source of criticism of present policies. We would be greatly mistaken to ignore its messages and those of the Stern report. The vast majority of scientific opinion voices that conclusion. There is a legal maximum that criminal liability has to be proved beyond reasonable doubt and civil liability on the balance of probabilities. In that context, the latter is to be preferred. If we are proved to be wrong, which I think unlikely, we can recover, but if we apply the doctrine of reasonable doubt the worst will come to the worst and our children and grandchildren will have absolutely no chance.

The European Community also has a vital contribution to make to the Middle East peace process. Select Committee C considered a number of relevant matters: the EU's policies, its diplomatic initiatives and how each of those could be enhanced. It concluded that the European Union could have an even greater input than at present and that if Hamas renounced violence, recognised Israel and accepted past agreements negotiated by the PLO, it could be usefully involved in the peace process. Israel should be recognised as an important player in such talks and could establish its bona fides by transferring to the Palestinian Authority tax and custom revenues which, given a peaceful situation, I believe Israel is prepared to do.

The situation with Iran is extremely complex. The attitude adopted by the present leadership is bizarre and unhelpful. By indicating that the regime is prepared to adopt a more positive approach, there is a possibility that dialogue could produce helpful results, but that remains to be seen. Extremism must not extinguish all sane paths to peace.

This has been a useful debate. A number of themes have been aired, and I hope that it will be regarded as helpful as far as the evolution of foreign policy by the Government is concerned.

8.50 pm

Baroness Cox: My Lords, I will focus on the Government’s commitment in the gracious Speech to the eradication of poverty worldwide. In so doing, I will highlight the plight of people in three areas I visited recently: northern Uganda, Burma and southern Sudan, where conflict and oppression have long been contributory factors towards grinding poverty.

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Just three weeks ago, I was in northern Uganda and last week I drew your Lordships’ attention to the continuing hardships of the people there and their acute fear of renewed conflict. I shall not repeat those points this evening because the right reverend Prelate the Lord Bishop of Winchester has spoken eloquently on those issues. However, I ask the Minister if Her Majesty’s Government will ensure that the problems of northern Uganda will be discussed fully at the forthcoming Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Kampala.

I turn briefly to the tragic plight of the people of Burma, which has been seen on TV screens around the world, as monks, nuns and civilians made their courageous public stand for democracy until the brutal SPDC regime moved in with violence to obliterate communications and punish the demonstrators. Only a trickle of information has since leaked out about torture, killing and the continued imprisonment of at least 2,000 demonstrators, including many monks. We have even less knowledge of the fate of the ethnic national groups such as the Shan, Karen and Karenni peoples fighting for survival along the eastern border in a bitter war which has left 500,000 living as displaced people, including 90,000 still living and dying in appallingly harsh and precarious conditions inside Burma. They are hiding in the jungle with little food, shelter, healthcare or education. Meanwhile, the SPDC regime continues to attack villages, to murder, rape, torture, to use forced labour in conditions so harsh that many perish and to force civilians to act as human minesweepers.

The plight of other ethnic groups such as the Chin, Kachin and Rohingya people is also dire. Although not engaged in active conflict, they suffer all the horrors of occupation, with SPDC troops stealing their crops and livestock as well as carrying out extrajudicial killings, rape, torture and forced labour. Healthcare is virtually unobtainable, so many die of treatable diseases. No education is allowed beyond primary level. One woman whom I met speaks for countless others as her story is typical. Her husband was forced to serve as a porter and as a human minesweeper and was blown up. She was then compelled to work as a porter, carrying 30 kg of rice or ammunition from dawn to dusk with little rest, food or water. At night, she and other female porters had to undertake a different kind of service for the SPDC soldiers. She eventually escaped to Thailand with her children, but her eldest son was so badly beaten by the SPDC that he suffers permanent brain damage.

The ethnic national peoples of Burma are in a horrendous predicament: those who oppose the regime militarily in an attempt to retain some freedom face the threat of ethnic cleansing by the SPDC’s overwhelming military might, and those who seek accommodation by laying down their arms face physical and cultural extinction by strangulation of resources and systematic oppression. I welcome assurances given by the Government in another place on 29 October to increase pressure on the SPDC through increased EU sanctions and statements by UN Security Council. I also welcome the commitment by DfID to increase aid. In the welcome increase in aid, will there be more provision for those suffering and dying as internally displaced people in the jungles of Burma and the occupied

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territories, including support for organisations whose personnel risk their lives to take aid across the border? How do Her Majesty’s Government assess the role played by China and India? Is China doing all that it should to bring the SPDC to account? If not, what is the Government’s view of the appropriateness of China acting as host to the forthcoming Olympic Games? And will the Government raise with India its policies of selling arms and providing military training to the SPDC?

I turn to Sudan. The situation in Darfur continues to deteriorate. I am not going to focus on Darfur because that situation is in the public domain. I turn to other areas in Sudan such as the south, the Nuba mountains, the Southern Blue Nile and Abyie county, where the people are suffering acute deprivation and extreme poverty, often without any aid, and where the political situation is so serious that the fragile peace achieved by the comprehensive peace agreement—CPA—may be broken. Indeed, in some areas, the discussion centres on not “if” but “when” war will break out again.

The Government in Khartoum have been depriving the areas now administered by the Government of Southern Sudan of resources essential for the reconstruction of the infrastructure devastated in the bitter war which was waged by the National Islamic Front regime against the south from 1989 until two years ago, a war—indeed, a jihad, as they called it—in which 2 million perished and 4 million were displaced.

The refusal of the Government in Khartoum to honour the conditions of the CPA and to share the resources needed for the rehabilitation of the south has led to such dismay, frustration and anger that, as the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, mentioned, the representatives of the Government of Southern Sudan have walked out from the proceedings of the Government in Khartoum and the leader of the south, Salve Kiir, has accused Khartoum of serious breaches of its commitments.

In our work, we witness the effects of these developments. Earlier this year, with my organisation HART, we visited eastern Upper Nile and Equatoria. People were suffering and dying from preventable and treatable diseases, including leprosy, malaria, meningitis, measles and problems with childbirth. The people are inevitably disaffected with the present situation: they feel marginalised, alienated and dissatisfied with the peace process. In many places there is no provision of aid. In others only Islamic aid organisations such as Dawa Islamia may be present, but the people often refuse to go to it for help, as it requires conversion to Islam and the local people say that they would rather die than convert.

My noble friend Lord Thomas of Swynnerton has highlighted the growth of militant and strategic Islam in Europe. We find similarities in Sudan. The leaders of the south have in their possession a document outlining the proposals for the Islamisation of southern Sudan, with a budget of US$29 million for Islamic teacher training colleges, schools, school uniforms, hospitals, clinics, medical staff salaries, medicines and so on. They claim that this budget has

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been sent to Saudi Arabia and to Libya and that money is pouring into the south, the design being to use humanitarian aid as a means of conversion to Islam, and they point out that the name of the major Islamic aid organisation, Dawa Islamia, means not “aid” but “conversion”.

The peoples of the south and the other marginalised areas are deeply concerned. They claim:

“We are losing in peace what we managed to hold onto at such terrible cost in war”.

There is clearly an urgent need for unconditional and uncompromising humanitarian aid in these vast, war-torn regions of Sudan. Therefore, I ask the Minister: will the Government recognise the need for assistance to the Government of Southern Sudan and for independent resources to be available to the people of the south and not channelled through Khartoum? And will the Government consider supporting aid organisations working in areas where at present there is no independent assistance?

Finally, the United Kingdom has a seat on the Assessment and Evaluation Commission of the CPA and is charged, together with Kenya and Ethiopia, with responsibility for observing and monitoring the implementation of the CPA. But I understand that this commission has not been functioning. Many people in Sudan believe that the United Kingdom could reactivate it and that it would be critical to the success of the peace agreement. Therefore, I ask the Minister: will the Government undertake as a priority to fulfil their obligations as a member of this commission to reactivate it and to work through it?

This is very important, because if the peoples of southern Sudan despair of achieving a peace that will enable them to rebuild their land in ways that enshrine the fundamental values of freedom and justice for which they fought and for which so many have died, and if they see a strategic Islam, well resourced from Khartoum, gaining ground, they may feel that another war, with all its horrors, may be their only option for survival. Such a development would be catastrophic for not only some but all of Sudan.

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