The following speech was delivered by the Bishop of Winchester, The Rt Revd Michael Scott-Joynt to the House of Lords on Thursday April 3^rd  2003

To ask HMG what is their response both to the Final Report of the UN Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources in the DRC and to recent events there.

My Lords, I beg to speak to the question standing in my name.

I declare an interest as a member of the All Party Group on the Great Lakes Region and Genocide Prevention; and as Bishop of a Diocese with a Partner-relationship with the Anglican Church in the Congo, and as Patron of the Congo Church Association. In these last two capacities, I spent two-and-a half weeks in the region in October and November last year at the invitation of the Congolese Archbishop and in the company of Congolese, two of those weeks spent in four different locations in the Eastern Congo.

There, in the Eastern Congo, some two-and-a-half to three million people have died in the last five years as a result of  war, chronic theft and pillage on the grandest scale,  and of the sheer absence of any order and security. The armed forces of as many as six neighbouring countries have been operating in the DRC in recent years; those of some are still there, together with the forces of their various regional proxy-warlords, and all sorts of armed groups, bandits and deserters; they include an very large number of  child-soldiers, whether taken from their homes or orphaned. Many hundreds of thousands of people live in the constant fear that a total lack of order and security imposes upon them; many thousands sleep in the bush every night. Many hundreds of thousands more are displaced, very many of them more than once. In a fertile country there is widespread hunger; disease of all sorts is rife; millions are without any access at all to any medical facilities.  Virtually the whole of the proceeds of the DRC’s  enormously rich mineral resources are stolen by its neighbours. Tribal and regional conflicts have been manipulated to near-genocidal proportions, especially in Ituri in the North-east, by neighbouring States (or by sections of their armed forces) in their own interests.

My Lords, in another place on March 5^th the Member for North Norfolk, Mr Norman Lamb, initiated a debate on Rwanda and the Great Lakes with a detailed and distinguished speech in which he paid a good deal of attention to the subject matter of my Question tonight;  Ministers and officials both of the Foreign Office and of the Department for International Development are to my knowledge giving the Region significant and consistent  attention; and I thank them for their courtesy to me and for the time that they have given me. But I share with Mr Lamb the conviction that the issues under question are  of a scale and an urgency that require from the Government, whether acting alone or in concert with European partners or at the UN, a great deal more than it has yet committed itself to seeking to deliver – and within a much shorter time-scale.

The Final Report of the UN Panel of Experts was published in October last year.  My Lords, it makes shocking reading; and having read it within days of my return from the DRC, I can say that it rings true throughout to what hundreds of ordinary people told me was happening. The Panel’s Reports  have exposed in considerable detail, and naming names both of countries, individuals and companies, the character and extent of the systematic looting and exploitation, on a vast scale,  of the natural resources of the DRC over decades that continues today; and they have established the multiple links between this exploitation, the continuing and endemic conflict, and the suffering of millions of ordinary Congolese – links  which a series of other reports, researched and produced by NGO’s and by the All-Party Group, have repeatedly described in recent years. The Final Report also details the equipping and training by foreign armies of a kaleidoscopic range of militias and warlords, and their provoking  what have become viciously brutal and destructive tribal conflicts; and it notes that even if foreign forces do withdraw from DRC territory, they embed proxy governments and criminal networks to ensure that illegal exploitation continues, to the extent that (Final Report para.152)

“the war economy operated by the three elite networks operating in the DRC” (those linked with the armed forces if not with the  governments of Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe) “dominates the economic activities of much of the Great Lakes Region.”

Not surprisingly, the range of parties named and shamed in the report dispute its findings; and the Panel itself notes its uncomfortable relationship with the Porter Commission set up by the Uganda to investigate the same range of allegations against its nationals and against the UPDF. The Panel of Experts has been given a further mandate until June 24^th this year to enable it to respond to its objectors and to provide the further evidence that some of them, including Her Majesty’s Government, have required.

Since 1999, my Lords, there has been a peace process for the DRC, perseveringly supported not only by South Africa but by our own Government. Accords were signed in Pretoria in the middle of last year by the DRC Government (which controls from Kinshasa about two-fifths of the whole vast country), Uganda and Rwanda, and this process has continued through further rounds of negotiation between the various faction-leaders and Kinshasa into the first part of this week. Seen as a whole, these processes commit Uganda and Rwanda to the complete withdrawal of their armed forces from DRC territory, and to ending their support for the range of competing factions that they have fostered  and armed through the last ten or twelve years. And they promise an administration in Kinshasa in which most at any rate of the competing faction-leaders  will have a stake, and which it is hoped will in time be able to exercise government over the whole country. Our own and other Governments are poised to offer the range of  confidence-building, technical and military assistance through which in time unified army, police, customs, justice and every other kind of medical and educational service can be developed to provide for the population’s security and welfare.

Critically important obstacles, however, have yet to be ironed out; the main players still do not judge that they can safely gather in Kinshasa to begin this intimidatingly large and delicate programme of work; and meanwhile, since the spring of last year, freshly in the last months of last year and into this year, and then in these last weeks, the forces of some of those who have signed the accords have continued to fight each other. There have been renewed and still worsening outbreaks of vicious tribal killing, pillage and destruction in Ituri where millions of already weakened people are quite beyond the reach of those few NGOs who still have expert and committed personnel in the area. And there are well-grounded fears, especially following the expulsion from Bunia on March 6^th of the UPC following the latter’s increasing liaison with the Rwanda-backed RCD-Goma, and the subsequent wave of tribal revenge killings and destruction across the wider area,    that Ugandan and Rwandan forces may again clash on Congolese soil – which would very likely wreck the already nearly-stalled peace process and set back by years the chances for peace in the DRC and across the whole region.

In the face of such a situation, my Lords, I look forward to hearing tonight that the Government will publish – and when it will publish - a detailed response to the conclusions of the UN Panel, with a commitment fully to investigate allegations made against UK companies and individuals; and whether it will press Uganda and Rwanda to do the same, and both to respond too to the recommendations of the International Crisis Group’s Report The Kivus: The Forgotten Crucible of the Congo Conflict – and Uganda to publish the report of its Porter Commission and to act on its findings. Will the Government, too, work with others to ensure that the UN itself, through the Security Council, responds fully and imaginatively to its Panel’s Report? And what will happen if on June 24^th, when the Panel’s latest mandate expires, there is still defensive argument about its findings? 

On the particular issue of the availability of arms – and of arms of increasing power and sophistication - I welcome the inclusion in the Government’s Export Control Bill of the DRC among “embargoed destinations” for arms sold from the UK or by UK nationals based elsewhere; but will the Government go further, as the US and others have done, and introduce “end-use monitoring”, backed by real sanctions, to ensure that British-made  weapons sold to neighbouring countries are not sold on into the DRC?

The UN Panel regards as a necessary condition of the success of all its other recommendations the withdrawal of  foreign forces behind their own borders, together with an end to their arming and supporting a range of Congolese proxy-forces; and it makes detailed proposals about the tracing, and closing off, of the channels through which the DRC’s minerals, and the wealth that they create, are siphoned into world markets and the pockets of individuals, companies and States. There are questions here for the UK itself, for the EU and the UN.  And what steps is the Government prepared and intending to take, and in what time-scale, to impress these requirements upon Rwanda, but also to discourage the Kinshasa Government from arming and supporting groups in the eastern DRC which Rwanda understandably perceives as threats to its security? Is the Government pressing upon Uganda  to withdraw its substantial forces from Ituri, where they may for the moment  be making for some fragile security for some at least of the people – but where their presence is a provocation to Rwanda and promises nothing in the way of a longer-term contribution to the security of the region?  And what more can be done to reduce the very real risk of conflict within the DRC between these two neighbours?

Uganda has itself recently asked for a “neutral force” to keep the peace in Ituri; but neither Uganda or Rwanda have been keen to see the UN Force MONUC strengthened whether in numbers or in its mandate. Yet to many observers, as to many Congolese who spoke with me, it seems imperative that MONUC should be strengthened in both respects, and urgently, and with a stiffening of major-power participation and determined leadership, both so that it can more proactive, flexible and imaginative within its present mandate, and so that it deploys very much closer to the Congo’s eastern border - and in numbers sufficient to reassure ordinary people by beginning to provide some basic order and security. What, in these regards, is the Government prepared, in concert with others,  to press for, and in what time-scale when the situation requires urgent action?   

The Ituri Pacification Committee has barely started what could be its critically important work. Is the Government seeking as a matter of urgency to see that it is properly resourced, and that it has an excellent chairman? And that it attends, among its priorities, to the need for justice to be seen to be done after so much killing and destruction – and within that, for proper attention to be paid to the appallingly brutal treatment of women which is increasingly a feature of the conflicts in Ituri and indeed more widely in the DRC?

Will the Government respond positively to the request of the All-Party Parliamentary Group that it publish a Regional Strategy Paper, expressing a set of positions and proposals agreed between the  FCO and DfID, and initiate a Regional Conference?  Will it develop a common wish-list, and a stronger partnership with France, Belgium and the Netherlands in particular, so as to be able to pursue this whole range of questions  effectively both in the EU and in the UN?

Lastly, my Lords, let no-one think that the current concentration on Iraq can justify postponing attention to the crying needs of the DRC and of the Great Lakes Region more widely. I end with some words from a comprehensive and profoundly depressing Report published last month by Amnesty International under the title  DRC: On the precipice- the deepening human rights and humanitarian crisis in Ituri:

“The scale of the tragedy in Ituri is appalling, but the situation could worsen, and sharply so.....Amnesty International are convinced that a greater sense of urgency is needed on the part of the international community if the possibility of an uncontrollable human rights disaster is to be averted.....Without decisive action, there is no end in sight to the tragedy being suffered by the Congolese civil population in Ituri.” And – I should add – there are signs that the situation further south in the Kivus is moving in the same direction.