Lord Judd
Main Page: Lord Judd (Labour - Life peer)
Lord Judd
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, who always makes profound contributions in these debates, but the noble Lord, Lord Chidgey, also deserves warm appreciation for having introduced this important debate today. His commitment to Africa is deep and consistent. For my part, I am glad to be a trustee of Saferworld, an NGO that specialises in arms control, security sector reform and conflict resolution. We are very much involved in this part of Africa and my observations will concentrate on what is being learnt from that engagement.
The Horn is home to some of the world’s poorest people and has experienced protracted conflicts. There is a persistent problem of state frailty and, in Somalia’s case, outright state failure. Indeed, all the region’s states can, without exception, be described as fragile or failing. However, there are paradoxes. Strengths and diversity can be obscured. For example, Somalia is simultaneously home to one of Africa’s most promising democratic experiments—the as-yet-unrecognised post-conflict Somaliland—and a zone of multiple, dangerous mini-state entities of militia groups, humanitarian crises and insurgency.
Against that background, sizeable aid programmes and the use of traditional diplomacy have too often yielded poor or at least mixed results. In Kenya, elites have on occasion captured development assistance, which has come through direct budget support or sector-specific support, and used it for their own enrichment. This has played into the dynamic of internal conflicts—of course, underlying conflict tensions and questionable governance led to the 2008 election violence. In Ethiopia, Kenya and Sudan, elections have been used to shore up regimes rather than to contribute to democratisation.
In Somalia, money and time have been contributed to peace conferences and to supporting power-sharing Governments at the central level, but these have ultimately run into the ground and we have seen valuable resources diverted to wage war on clan enemies or to enrich the powerful and their friends. It is clear that stabilisation, diplomacy and development assistance policies can prove counterproductive—let alone fail—unless they are carefully applied and tailored for each specific situation. Obviously, stabilisation is an integral part of the concept of security for development, but it is essential to avoid simplistic assumptions: for example, that if only we can introduce short-term stability and a modicum of security with, if necessary, the deployment of force, development will certainly begin; or that if only we can provide otherwise hostile communities with small-scale development assistance—perhaps a well or a school—they will immediately abandon their hostilities and give us their hearts and minds. There is little convincing evidence that that will automatically follow.
We need to ask ourselves whether there has been undue focus on state-building, to the exclusion of other vital processes, such as peace-building, reconciliation and early, demonstrable economic recovery. In south Sudan, in the wake of the comprehensive peace agreement, peacekeepers and civilian police have commendably been put on the ground by the UN. This has helped to stabilise the situation and has dampened down, although not totally averted, subsequent internal conflict. By contrast, there has been a disturbing failure to provide sufficient support for early economic recovery, improved governance, laying the foundations for sustainable development or strengthening the societal peace-building efforts that are essential to prevent future outbreaks of internal conflict. We must constantly beware lest questionable Governments use the legitimacy conferred by our dealings with them and divert the resources we provide in the name of stabilisation to further their own manipulative power games.
One of the weaknesses with past approaches to Somalia has surely been the support for the establishment of central government, in partnership with which there was a hope of tackling stabilisation, and a concentration on state-building and the provision of aid without having addressed the first-order issues of peace-building and reconciliation in that fractured society. The upshot has been the misuse of our efforts by newly empowered elites. Just because Governments in the region talk back to us in language that we like to hear and comply, on occasion, with our counterterror objectives, that does not mean that all is well. Not infrequently, the support we provide may conceal actions by Governments that undermine the values we advocate and ultimately come back to bite us. After all, as a recent Human Rights Watch report reminded us, stabilising or securing the periphery and eliminating rebellious or unacceptable groups, sometimes with cruel brutality, has a long tradition in the region.
Interventions must be carefully designed for each specific situation. They have to be the individually tailored right mix of development, reconciliation, peace-building and state-building, with each element carefully phased into the programme. Other stabilisation measures without all this are destined to failure. If I have learnt anything in a lifetime of work with organisations operating in depth in the field, it is that enduring peace and stability can seldom be imposed, especially by corrupt regimes. They simply have to be built from the grass roots upwards. Micropolicies are therefore every bit as important as macropolicies. We have to ask ourselves repeatedly: who, what and why are we stabilising?
What are the lessons for the future? The Horn’s development and sustained emergence from conflict will take a generation. It is therefore imperative to focus on both the short and the long term in complementary ways without giving distorting precedence to either. There must be a readiness to engage in new approaches. The high-level diplomatic peace conferences that have endeavoured to broker central-level power-sharing Governments for Somalia have become part of the problem. The priority now is to concentrate on lower-level work and to support bottom-up peace-building and reconciliation. In Kenya and Sudan, direct budget support and sector support have been badly misused. What is needed is conditional assistance and carefully selected individual projects. Alongside development assistance, non-aid instruments, such as smart sanctions and the International Criminal Court, may well have a part to play.
It is essential to work with more than just Governments. The rush to build states by concentrating on building Governments and state capacity is understandable, but can too easily fuel corruption if not well thought through and monitored. Kenya, Sudan and Somalia all provide evidence of this. It is vital to understand elite incentives and conflict drivers. Accountability emphatically matters. The generation of a strong civil society is therefore indispensable. Analysing and appreciating the root causes of conflict should be an invariable starting point. Absolutely all assistance should always be planned in the light of the outcome of such analysis and research.
The rule of law costs money. There has to be proper provision for legal infrastructure, qualified and well educated lawyers and judges, sound administration and adequate physical facilities. Penal systems, as in the UK, must foster rehabilitation and responsible citizenship. It is madness to foster alienation.
Finally—here I endorse very much what has been said—British influence in the region will be most effective when working with others. Co-ordination with the like-minded is crucial when dealing with such complexity. We should seek all the time to widen the number of the like-minded. Targets and partners for this could well include the EU and its individual members, the Arab League, the United States, the ICC, OECD donors and, one hopes, Brazil, Russia, India and China, all of which have great potential significance in the future of Africa. I look forward to the response of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, to this debate.