Lord Malloch Brown, the UK Minister for Africa, Asia and the United Nations, talks about how the changing nature of violent conflict in different parts of the world poses new challenges to government.

 

 

Thank you and congratulations on having organised the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Conflict Issues, and to ministry for peace for providing its secretariat.  I am somebody who doesn’t have ambitions in British government beyond my present job, but if I did, I’d like to be the First Minister for Peace [laughter and applause].

I think we’re all aware of the sort of unexpected trends in conflict in recent years - a sort of widespread myth has grown that during the Cold War conflict was somehow frozen and after the Cold War it unfroze and that the number of violent deaths has increased. As Andy Mack, the leader of the group at the University of British Columbia in Canada that writes the Human Security Report observed in their report of 2005 - 'Policy makers have missed the dramatic reduction in violence.  Whereas in 1992, there were more than 50 conflicts in the world, by 2003 that had dropped to 29, and reflecting that, battlefield deaths are way down.' 

 

But of course, the reason we are all here today is we know that isn’t the whole story.  Civilian deaths are way up as a consequence of the change in the nature of warfare in recent years - the rise of the sort of asymmetric conflict where deaths come from  both sides of conflict showing an often huge disrespect for civilian lives and particularly women and children.  But also the way that conflict has targeted the underpinnings of life for many, particularly in poorer countries, and where therefore related public health issues and failures of food supply lead to huge war-related deaths not directly caused by violence itself.

 

So for example when we see four million people dying in the Democratic Republic of the Congo or the huge level of casualties in Darfur .  This is not just soldier-on-soldier violence, but soldier-on-civilian violence; and more particularly just the complete breakdown of society, leading to huge numbers of deaths of the most vulnerable groups, often children, often women.  So that the face of modern conflict has assumed very much a face of civilians, women, children.

 

The causes of conflict have moved dramatically towards ethnic and religious origins, and the nature of conflict has become heavily 'civilianised', but with guerillas and terrorists having replaced the traditional armies as the actors in this.  And with an interesting and dangerous rise in environmental causation to conflict.  The limits of resources - energy, water, land - is in ways both direct and less direct driving an awful lot of modern conflict; obviously in Darfur, but frankly in many other places, too. And it’s in that context of this changing nature of conflict I want to say a general word before Gareth Thomas [minister at the Department for International Development, speaking next] comes in with more specifics of what the British Government it doing around the issues of prevention, peace-keeping and recovery and reconstruction.

 

The Prime Minister [Gordon Brown] has made one main point about this that goes beyond all others, which is that the British contribution to solving or containing these conflicts has to be through strong international institutions and multilateral alliances.  Nearly all of them are beyond our own scope to address alone even if we so wish.  So that our whole approach has to be about how do we build doctrines of intervention that allow the international community as a whole to intervene in conflict prevention.  And of course I particularly have here in mind the emerging doctrine of the responsibility to protect. 

 

The idea underlying the UN Charter and Security Council - that the internal sovereign affairs of states are their own business and nobody else's - has to be refashioned in a globalised world to allow us to address mass human rights abuses.  We can no longer stand idly by and allow them to continue.  And frankly, building the support for that kind of rule-based liberal interventionism, which need not be of a military character - it can be of human rights monitors, it can be of development assistance, it can target the causes of the conflict in many different ways.  But building the support for it requires Britain to demonstrate that we operate within the framework of the Security Council, the Human Rights Council and other regional institutions.  And every time we are tempted to go  it alone, or go it with just a smaller 'coalition of the willing', we set back the building of that international consensus that allows legitimacy to gather around the idea that there is a right of intervention when mass human rights abuses occur.

 

Another critical part of this is the work that has been done, since Resolution 1325 was adopted in the Security Council in 2000, around protecting women in conflict, who as I said earlier have become a particularly vulnerable group. 

 

And all of this work - which sometimes seems a little arcane and far away from the conflict front itself - is in my view critical if we are to build the kinds of frameworks which allow us to intervene as a world community when we see the breakdown of protection of human rights and the rule of law, and the state's functions in protecting it's own citizen.

 

Let me just quickly move on to the other point I want to make on the prevention side, which is that when we look today at two states that face different kinds of political crisis, Pakistan and Somalia, we cannot help but notice that both of them are facing fundamental challenges to their viability, albeit at very different levels.  I don’t want to press the point too far but, nevertheless, both of them are major sources of terrorists here in the UK. 

 

We cannot for a moment doubt that when you see state crisis and failure it is no longer just a matter for those countries alone.  As we first learnt with Afghanistan, failed or failing states, in which the democratic order has broken down, pose a threat way beyond their own borders; and therefore it is in the  interest of all of us to help them back on to the role of refashioned democratic institutions.  This means resolving internal conflicts and getting on a path towards decent inclusive development the tackles the root of the conflict within their society themselves.

 

Let me just say a word about peace-keeping.  There are now more than 100,000 UN peace-keepers in the world.  That makes the UN the second biggest deployer of troops around the world after the United States, but the UN is poorly equipped to sustain that kind of level.  We’re seeing it with the difficulty now in not just deploying in Darfur, but in the real doubt on the UN side of taking on vital new missions, like one potentially in Somalia. 

 

And where there are forces we see them poorly equipped - witness the lack helicopters in Darfur, for example - and often deploying the wrong soldiers for the modern kind of peace-keeping; that is, often traditional infantry, where increasingly the nature of the conflict is, as I’ve said, between civilians and where armed police and police able to train local police forces would in fact be much more appropriate.  And there is this huge gap in the mobility of these forces, who are often without the helicopters and the other equipment that they need.  There is almost no arrangement for troops to operate and train on a stand-by basis, as they do for example for NATO; or to share common equipment; so that they are able to deploy quickly, within days or weeks as happens with NATO forces.  UN forces take six months to deploy, African Union forces even longer.  So there is a huge challenge for us to help support the professionalisation of both African Union and UN training, and establish stand-by financing arrangements to allow us to get into the conflict peace-keeping side of things a lot more quickly than is presently the case.

 

A final point about recovery stabilisation. 

 

In the immediate post-conflict phase, states can be very weak and yet we are very poor at helping them establish at least some limited basic capacity and infrastructure to start quickly meeting the basic needs of their citizens.  So Gordon Brown has talked about the need for stabilisation or development agencies - not the full panoply of government departments - in situations like Afghanistan or other immediate post-conflict states.  We need these agencies to start delivering a peace dividend to people quickly and for them to be strongly supported by the UN and others - the UN Peacebuilding Commission possibly - to really start making this a much more tried and tested part of how we respond in that phase after the conflict is over. 

 

I’ve gone over the general bit.  I’ve left to Gareth Thomas the opportunity to describe exactly how we’re trying to join up government departments to tackle this pretty big agenda.

 

This is a slightly edited transcript of a talk given to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Conflict Issues in January 2008.