House of Lords
Friday 13 September 2024
Lord Alton of Liverpool
Full debate at:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0022zz4/house-of-lords-sudan-debate
Lord Collins has had a long-standing commitment to the people of Africa, and he will bring expertise and humanity to the many challenges he will face as Minister – the most urgent of which is the catastrophic war in Sudan.
On Wednesday he attended part of a two-hour briefing which I chaired on behalf of the APPG on Sudan and South Sudan. I pay tribute to the outgoing chair, Vicky Ford and welcome the incoming chair, Rachel Maskell MPfor York.
We heard harrowing contributions from Geraldine O’Callaghan of World Food Programme, Sibongani Kayola of Mercy Corps, Will Carter of the Norwegian Refugee Council and the Sudanese Women Shuttle Diplomacy Initiative.
Along with the mass displacement of now approaching 11 million internally displaced people – adding to the 120 million displaced worldwide – we learned that “famine is no longer a threat. It is a reality.”
We heard that people are dying of hunger; that skeletal children are some of the 9 out of 10 who are suffering from some form of malnutrition; with 14 million children in need of humanitarian support; that 16 humanitarian aid workers have been killed in Sudan this year – and that this ever present danger has compromised the delivery of aid to starving people. Food is also being used as a weapon of war.
A Sudanese lady doctor told us that 95%of hospitals and clinics are closed, that disease, including cholera and dengue are raging. 19 million children are out of education.
We heard that those responsible for atrocity crimes have acted with utter disregard for the suffering they are inflicting on their own people and that impunity and the failure to bring those responsible for the genocide of 2004 has sown the seeds for a war which because of other global competing priorities fails to make the media’s small print, let alone its headlines.
We say that black lives matter. If that is so why has tge world been so silent about the lives of the suffering people of Sudan?
We glibly say never again and then in a total failure of international states craft, we watch it happen all over again. There is no greater indication of the failure of international justice and accountability than Sudan.
I joined the APPG over twenty years ago after travelling to Sudan during the Second Sudanese Civil War which raged from 1983 to 2005. Two million died of killing, famine or disease – and 4 million people were displaced. It ultimately led to the death of the country itself and partition.
In October 2004 I went to Darfur.
The Independent newspaper carried my report under the words “If this Isn’t Genocide, What on Earth Is?” As many as 300,000 perished – another 2 – 3 million displaced. Atrocity crimes included the Government backed Janjaweed’s systematic rape of women, the burning and looting of villages – 90% of which were razed to the ground – were all driven by an ideological hatred of difference.
The International Criminal Court said it was genocide. Omar Al Bashir and some of those involved in today’s atrocities have still not been brough to justice.
Reports of new outrages in early 2023 led to the APPG asking me to chair a new Inquiry.
Our report, entitled “Genocide: All Over Again in Darfur?” described the consequences of daring to think you can neglect the issue of justice.
We concluded that whatever happens when the violence in Sudan ends, there will be no lasting and credible peace without justice.
On July 19th, 2023, I had a Private Notice Question asking the Government, following the discovery of mass graves and an increase in crimes targeting non-Arab ethnic groups in Darfur, what assessment they have made of the risk of genocide in that region.
I quoted the current prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan KC, who had told the United Nations Security Council the previous week that we are
“in peril of allowing history to repeat itself”
He said that Darfur is “not on the precipice of a human catastrophe but in the very midst of one. It is occurring.”.
At the time, Lord Collins asked the then Government “what are we doing to put pressure on Sudan so that people cannot act with impunity in the future?”
To find the answer to that crucial question I hope he will agree to convene a round table to examine ways to honour our duties under the 1948 Genocide Convention – to predict, prevent, protect, to punish – and to decide what will be done about the horrendous evidence in this week’s Fact-Finding Mission report given to the UN Human Rights Council.
It found appalling evidence of rape and sexual violence with rape of girls as young as eight and women as old as seventy-five. Repeat: Eight years of age.
The Fact-Finding Mission attributed these crimes to men wearing RSF uniforms whom victims referred to as Janjaweed.
It says international crimes have been committed by SAF and RSF including “murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; and committing outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment”.
Crimes against humanity intersect with the persecution and forcible displacement of people on grounds of ethnicity, and gender.
Karim Khan KC says the current situation in Sudan is within the purview of the ICC’s mandate. He has been collecting and analysing the evidence.
How is the UK’S war crime unit working with him and with other likeminded nations?
Nor should we foolishly imagine that what happens in a faraway place stays there. In the foreword to our Report I said, “More refugees will be coming our way if we do not act now and address the situation.”
A failure to tackle root causes both fails the displaced and plays into the hands of those who wickedly whip up fear and hatred.
Undoubtedly, the immediate priority must be humanitarian aid.
The situation is too urgent to wait for permission from the men with guns to enter Sudan.
In the Security Council the UK should call for an international intervention force under UN or African Union auspices – and initiate a Chapter VII mandate to do this.
But we must also do far more to support Premier Abdullah Hamdock and Sudanese people committed to the popular democratic call of “peace, justice, and freedom.” In our APPG Report we talk about that “ tantalising.. glimpse of hope” If hope is to be sustained it needs more than a glimpse. It needs long term commitment.
Sudan deserves much much better than the SAF and RSF.
Since independence in 1989 the SAF has been an army only ever deployed against its own people –in South Sudan, Darfur, and the Nuba mountains.
Wars end when one side clearly wins; when one side surrenders, when one side becomes exhausted. None of which seems about to happen.
Both have weapons, money, and sometimes opaque external support. -some driven by jihadist ideology. What is our strategy for combatting this?
To end, I am going to give the Minister a copy of a book of drawings by Waging Peace by children in Darfur who experienced the genocide. I hope it will continue to spur him on in his new duties as Minister
