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Democratic Republic of Congo

Mr. Eric Joyce (Falkirk) (Lab): My aim today is to introduce a debate arising from a visit by the all-party group on the great lakes region and genocide prevention to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Other hon. Members will want to catch your eye, Mr. Hancock, and develop their own themes, so I shall explain the general context of the visit and mention a couple of points that particularly struck me. I hope that the Minister will reply to those points.

I shall start with a specific matter that struck everyone on the visit. Panzi hospital, at Bukavu on the shores of Lake Kivu where eastern DRC meets Rwanda, is a remarkable place. A small number of doctors and nurses provide health care for women who have been victims of sexual violence and injured, often gravely, at the hands of the illegal militias that roam the forests of eastern DRC. To walk around Panzi hospital and talk to the patients, their carers and sometimes their children is a sobering and serious experience, but it was essential that those of us on the visit did so to set our perspectives clearly.

The group travelled across the DRC, which is a vast country, and met politicians such as Dr. Bahamba Hamba, the governor of South Kivu, which includes Bukavu. We also met a chief of the Batwa pygmies and, at the other end of the visit, we met Vice-President Ruberwa and President Kabila, who were extremely generous with their time. We also met representatives of civil society and international figures such as Bill Swing and Ross Mountain who run MONUC—the United Nations organisation mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is the world's largest such mission—as well as met former child soldiers, international non-governmental organisations and local NGOs that are supported by international NGOs.

The hon. Member for South-West Surrey (Mr. Hunt) and my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh) will present their own views, but I think that the group collectively formed the view that Panzi hospital represents a good prism through which to see many of the problems that beset the DRC. The United Kingdom Government could help to tackle those problems both bilaterally and internationally in conjunction with allies in other countries.

In 1994, the civil war in Rwanda, accompanied by the genocide perpetrated on the Tutsi minority, led to bandits and killers—they were given a number of names, including exFAR and Interahamwe—being displaced into eastern DRC. Initially they were assisted by the UN and semi-settled on the border. Hindsight shows that to have been a mistake, because it led to them running riot in the camps that were set up by the UN. In time, as the UN realised its error and as Rwanda began what has become a remarkable recovery, those bandits and semi-organised militias were displaced into the forests. There, in large part, they remain, augmented occasionally by new recruits, often children and teenagers who are taken forcibly from local communities to provide slave labour and fighters. During the Rwandan genocide, women and children were targeted to remove the next generation of Tutsis; that ruthlessness is now deployed to terrorise communities and enable the militias to subsist in the forest in preference to ending armed struggle and returning either to Rwandan justice or to an attempt to live decent and productive lives in Rwanda or the DRC.

Sexual violence is not confined to eastern DRC, but there it remains a potent tool of subjugation. Women are routinely raped, tortured and murdered as a crude means of dominating communities and eking out a feral existence in the forest. The fear inspired by the militias frequently leads to families to reject abused women. Such women can be seen as a burden due to their injuries, which are often extreme, and sometimes they are a source of shame for their partners, who often rapidly become former partners.

Most of those women have no access to health care and live painful lives, with many dying a painful death. A small minority make the long and hazardous journey to Panzi hospital where they are welcomed and provided with the best health care—modest, but the best—that the region can muster. Some of those women were deliberately injured during and after rape to make childbirth impossible, which leads to a massive requirement for gynaecological assistance and health care. Others have been subjected to such inhuman violence that it is breathtaking that they are still alive and receiving treatment in a place such as Panzi hospital. Dr. Mukaweye, the head of the hospital, told the group about the practice of most militias of following a rape by discharging a round of ammunition into the victim by the same entry point: those who do not die instantly suffer massive internal injuries. Unbelievably, some of the victims have been saved and have, after many months and sometimes years, been rehabilitated back into their home communities. I had never met anyone like Dr. Mukaweye but I know that there are others in the DRC and all over Africa doing similar work. His and his colleagues' work is inspiring, but the need is so great in eastern DRC that they must constantly fight for funding.

A recent EU initiative funded by emergency provisions to provide financial assistance to Panzi hospital is soon to end. I am happy that the Department for International Development is stepping in to help the hospital to extend its capacity by constructing a new surgical wing. However, I wonder whether it is entirely appropriate for the emergency to be interpreted in that way by the EU, given the post-war environment in the DRC and the emergence of a large number of women now reporting with injuries following sexual violence, which, ironically, is consequent on the post-war context rather than on the civil war, which has now ended.

Sexual violence is the sharp end of a series of challenges relating both to security and to wider political development. The hon. Member for South-West Surrey will speak about the security question and what the UK can do to help to expand the capacity of DRC forces in the post-election context. Clearly, it is difficult for the international community judge whether to help to expand the capacity of the armed forces of an unstable state that is not democratic or properly organised and whose Government's remit does not extend across the whole country, perhaps not even outside the most heavily populated places. It is a difficult judgment to make to assist such a country to build up its armed forces when they might be used for the wrong purpose.

The coming election may provide an opportunity and a cause for optimism. If everything goes well it may become appropriate for the international community— perhaps the British Government in conjunction with our allies—to consider ways in which security forces in the DRC be helped to develop their capacity. Without that capacity, there can be no proper infrastructure development: hospitals and schools cannot operate properly unless people can live safely and use them safely. During our visit, all members of the group were struck by the way in which all the local and international NGOs focused on security, which is not what one would normally expect. One would expect them to focus on services and issues such as justice, human rights and so on, but everyone we spoke to emphasised the importance of security and of building up the capacity of the FARDC—the DRC's own armed forces—after the election.

Mr. David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op): I apologise for missing the first couple of minutes of my hon. Friend's speech. I know that he is talking about the east of the country, and he may have been about to make the point that I wish to raise. When talking about security issues, will he also discuss the Lord's Resistance Army and the fact that Otti is still in the DRC? I was in northern Uganda with other Members at the time that the International Criminal Court served its warrant for the arrest of Kony, Otti and three others, but MONUC chose—there was some confusion—to give Otti a wide berth. If the UN sanctions mean anything, we have to deal with the LRA. Will my hon. Friend deal with the fact that the DRC is in the midst of all those problems and has to be helped?

Mr. Joyce : I thank my hon. Friend for that very valuable contribution. I was not going to mention the LRA, but I shall now that he has mentioned it. It is crucial to recognise that some of these groups are still operating. There has been some progress in that bordering countries have, officially at least, withdrawn their military forces from the DRC. Rwanda has certainly done so. President Museveni, who has recently been recently elected in Uganda—one can say good things about his time in government, but it is harder to find good things to say about his more recent comments—spoke of the possibility of making an incursion into the DRC to deal with the problem of the Lord's Resistance Army. It would clearly be far better for the international community to deal with that problem than for Uganda or any other country to make incursions.

MONUC is the UN body in the DRC and to give it some credit, it is doing very good work. Although it is a very large force, comprising between 16,500 and 17,000 personnel, that is a limited number when dealing with 10,000 or so members of the Interahamwe and various other militias, which are only semi-organised in any case. In time, the problem will be a matter for the international community, and the DRC forces, when they have the capacity to deal with it themselves. In the meantime, there is very much a patching-up mentality. MONUC does its best to keep areas safe—it is deployed, it moves those people around and it catches and kills the odd one—but until we have a proper democracy in a post-election context and a big effort is made by the international community after that election, the LRA will remain a problem. The LRA is a major problem for the whole region and it is time that the international community focused on it more. I am sometimes concerned, however, that President Museveni uses the LRA as a way of pursuing other political objectives.

John Bercow (Buckingham) (Con): Does the hon. Gentleman agree, further to the intervention of the hon. Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew), that establishing domestic security, including the build-up of stable armed forces committed to providing it, demands robust international action to end the illicit sale of small arms and light weapons? Given that each year in developing countries in Africa, Asia, the middle east and Latin America about $22 billion is spent on the sale and illicit transfer of such weapons, which kill 400,000 people, is it not vital that we secure the passage of the international arms trade treaty as quickly as possible, then ensure its rigorous implementation?

Mr. Joyce : I wholeheartedly agree with the hon. Gentleman. All over Africa, and particularly in the DRC, there are millions of small arms, and that situation requires robust action by the international community. There are a number of things we can do. As well as the treaty, one of the ideas raised while we were there was the possibility of instituting air traffic control, which I know has been raised in the past. In Africa, there is very little air traffic control, which explains how arms get moved around. A fairly modest-sized project was proposed a few years ago by the UK Government, but it did not go ahead—it was quite a contentious issue at the time. I am not sure whether the Minister is in a position to comment on that, but one of the things we could do, besides the international treaty that the hon. Gentleman suggests, is look again at the possibility of establishing some means of air traffic control to monitor who is moving what around. At the moment, people can move weapons around pretty much with impunity.

As well as physical solutions to the security problems in the DRC, we need political solutions. At the beginning of our visit, we were fortunate enough to meet Dr. Murigande, the Rwandan Foreign Minister, together with the Rwandan ambassador to the great lakes region. It is clear that Rwanda has had some success in encouraging some of the Interahamwe back to Rwanda. There is a package and some have semi-settled back in Rwanda peaceably, but that process has had limited success so far. Some people will not return to Rwanda because they will be brought to justice, and not necessarily through the Gachacha system. They may well be put in prison, so they are reluctant to go back, and often they are the most powerful people in those communities. Clearly, the UK Government, who are listened to very intently by all the Governments of the great lakes region, could have some influence in encouraging more diplomatic efforts to get all the people we can back to Rwanda. Not all of these people are Rwandans, of course—many may be recruited Congolese—so the problem is fairly opaque. Rwanda has been doing a great deal, it deserves to be commended, but there is a great deal more that we can all do.

On a more specific level, I would like to mention briefly an ongoing problem with marginalised and abused children. My hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield will speak a bit more about this. In an impoverished society, it is difficult, and sometimes impossible, to look after children. There is a series of mechanisms by which people in the DRC simply reject their children, who are left to live in the street or in the forest, if they survive at all. There is a phenomenon that has received quite a lot of publicity in the UK press recently. In essence, where the unreconstructed aspects—if I can put it that way without being too pejorative—of the theology of some of the more evangelistic Churches comes into contact with people who are not able to afford their children, the children are accused of witchcraft or some such superstitious nonsense as a mechanism to explain problems in the family and the difficulties that beset extremely impoverished people—and as a means for people to divest themselves of a troublesome child.

We met quite a large number of churchmen—they were all men, I think—and a fair number of them were using a rather odd qualifying argument. Not all of them made the argument, but enough did to make it quite worrying. They argued that the problem was not that there was witchcraft among children, but that sometimes the wrong children were accused of witchcraft. In other words, some of the churchmen were saying, "We think that witchcraft exists among children but the problem is that far too many kids get accused of it when they just have psychological problems". That exacerbates the whole problem by bedding in and giving validity to the idea that such a phenomenon exists. There may be ways in which the Government and other agencies can encourage Churches, which in other modest but important ways operate extremely well—they provide social services and churches, schools and so forth—to look again at those practices.

Those practices do exist, that argument is deployed and we came across it. The phenomenon is seen in the UK because some children from London have been sent back to the DRC and remain there. The UK embassy and the ambassador in the DRC have their eye on the problem, but there is little they can do except monitor it. However, it is important to raise it here and perhaps other agencies, including some of the Churches, will look again at the problem.

The UK Government, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Secretary of State for International Development, the Foreign Secretary and Members of all parties in this House, take a great interest in the role of education in the developing world. We had the opportunity to chat to President Kabila about the possibility of some kind of modest link between some schools in the DRC, probably in Kinshasa, and some in the UK. I think that it will be possible to facilitate that in one way or another. Mr. Andy Sparkes, the UK ambassador in Kinshasa, was very encouraging. I wonder whether it might be possible for the Minister to commend the idea of having a link-up because it would benefit kids in the UK as well as kids in the DRC, although it would be fairly modest and, of course, Francophone.

The DRC is led by President Kabila at the head of an interim Government. Elections will take place soon. The UK Government, particularly through our ambassador to the country, Andy Sparkes, and through the Minister and others, have played an invaluable role in facilitating those elections. Not every party is taking part, although I think that most people will vote. It is a pity that it looks as though the Union for Democracy and Social Progress—a major opposition party with a good record in opposition under Mobutu—will not take part, but I think that many of the DRC's voters will take part in the elections.

At one level, it is a little odd that Britain will soon be the largest donor to the DRC. We have no great history there—it is a Francophone country—but that is the way things are currently. Belgium and France could perhaps take more of a leading role. Who knows who will win the election? There must be a modest chance that President Kabila will win it. We got the impression on the trip that if he does, he will take an inclusive approach to choosing his Government and to governing, as opposed to a winner-takes-all mentality, which would send people straight back to the bush and alienate very talented people such as Vice-President Ruberwa and others whom he needs on board.

Let me mention the groups that made the trip, which we found to be invaluable, possible. They include Oxfam, Christian Aid, Tearfund, the Rainforest Foundation, War Child, Save the Children and Amnesty International. All those organisations have hugely valuable programmes in the DRC. They help to support local non-governmental organisations and to build capacity among those NGOs, which will perhaps be their most important role in the longer term. In addition, our embassy in Kinshasa is doing a sterling job—a magnificent job. Andy Sparkes, Jo Gauld and their colleagues deserve recognition for that.

Mr. Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Cotswold) (Con): Will the hon. Gentleman give us the benefit of his experience of a recent visit to the DRC and tell us what he learned about the preparations for the June elections? Those elections are a vital precursor to further stability in the DRC. Did he learn how the European troops were to operate with the UN troops already in the country to ensure that there is at least a semblance of free and fair elections?

Mr. Joyce : That is a good point and that matter formed one of the main focuses of our visit. There is room for some optimism that there will be more or less effective elections across the DRC, although perhaps not to the standards of the UK. The position will be more difficult in rural areas. We were struck by how many people had their IDs to vote and by the apparent effectiveness with which MONUC is preparing. We had a lot of time with Bill Swing, Ross Mountain and a commander of a Pakistani battalion—one of the generals on the ground in the Bukavu area. They will give a lot of confidence to people, especially in more populated areas, that it will be safe to vote. No one is suggesting that there will be violence against those who vote. The militias are largely staying out of the process, so I think that there will be a pretty good turnout. Clearly, one has to put that in context. One can look at what happened in the early 1960s, but the forthcoming election will probably be the first real election in Congo at which there is pretty much universal suffrage.

Let me mention Oona King, who founded the all-party group during her period in the House. It is largely because of her efforts that we are having this debate and the issue is being raised today on Sky television and "Channel 4 News" by the team that we took with us. Today's edition of The Guardian carries a good article on the issue. We also took Johann Hari of The Independent with us and that newspaper, too, is providing coverage.

I believe that the interest in the DRC in Parliament— at this debate there has been a good turnout of hon. Members from both sides of the House—and the interest in the media presage a period when the country will step out of the shadows. Four million people have died there, but that figure comes from epidemiological surveys, not daily bombs, so the issue is less media-friendly. I cannot blame the media for that, but now, in the pre-election period, we have a chance to raise the profile of the Democratic Republic of Congo. We hope that the election will be successful, I look forward to hearing what the Minister and other hon. Members have to say.