Andrew Mitchell on his Support for Hands up for Darfur

As Shadow Secretary of State for International Development, Andrew Mitchell has worked hard to focus attention on how the UK Government manages Britain's aid to poor countries, and how policy can be further developed to get rid of extreme poverty. He has shown his full support for the Hands up for Darfur initiative. In the article below he explains why:

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a citizen of an African country who keeps up with world events by listening to the radio. Two years ago, on the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, you heard the international community sombrely vow it would never again stand by as the wholesale slaughter of defenceless civilians occurred.

Yet at the same time you were aware a genocide was unfolding in the remote and arid corner of Western Sudan called Darfur.

A year later, you heard about the United Nations "Responsibility To Protect" policy, committing the same worthy diplomats and politicians to intervene to protect civilians if they were being ethnically cleansed and murdered by their own governments.

While you listened to world leaders patting each other on the back and congratulating themselves about the "Responsibility To Protect," you knew that at the very same moment African villages in Darfur were being destroyed, people killed and women raped on a vast and systematic scale. You also knew that the perpetrators of these terrible racist crimes were being paid for and supplied by the Government of Sudan. Then you found out that although the UN voted to impose targeted sanctions against those responsible for the suffering in Darfur, only one retired middle ranking general has so far been sanctioned. And although the UN voted for a no fly zone, the resolution was never enforced.

Last month you heard that the same representatives of the international community were patting themselves on the back for agreeing to send peacekeepers to Darfur, but only if the very architects of the genocide agreed to their presence.

Now imagine you are, like millions of Africans, in despair about the 400,000 dead in Darfur, and concerned about the fate of the three million displaced people without enough food in refugee camps in Darfur and Chad. You know the suffering of Darfur has continued for three years, but when you switch on your radio you learn that a UN peacekeeping force has been despatched to Lebanon within thirty days of the start of bloodshed.

How could you, as an African, feel anything but contempt for our promises and declarations? You will have seen your fair share of cynical diplomatic behaviour in Africa, so you will not be surprised that the Chinese put their oil interests in Sudan before their concern for human rights. You will also understand how much the Russians value their arms sales to Khartoum.

But the British and American attitude presents a greater puzzle to you, because we, the international community, talk so much about how we care about Africa and human rights and democratic values. For all our words, and despite our generosity in sending humanitarian aid to refugees, we have held back on exerting sustained and serious pressure on the Khartoum junta.

In order to be effective we must make it personal, and hit the generals where it matters: their money. Freeze their Swiss bank accounts, stop their shopping trips to Paris with a travel ban, put a spanner in the secret network of business interests they hold in the names of party loyalists. Deny Sudan's generals the respectability they crave by bracketing them with human rights abusers like North Korea and Burma in an axis of evil.

However, instead of making it personal, the international community has done the opposite. For instance, in his speech to Labour conference in 2001 Tony Blair said that if another Rwanda were to happen, we would have a duty to act. Yet, four years later the mastermind behind the misery in Darfur, Salah Gosh, who is also the head of Sudan's sinister intelligence department, was allowed into Britain for medical treatment. The same candidate for a one-way ticket to The Hague was back in Britain recently, despite the prospect of a referral to the International Criminal Court hanging over his head.

If we are serious about protecting vulnerable civilians in Darfur we must act now. We need a strong, well-supported international force to protect the civilians in the camps. The existing African Union force is doing a valuable job and is at the moment the only outside force in Darfur. The international community must act urgently to bolster it with full funding and logistical support. Its mandate should be extended indefinitely beyond 31st Dec 2006 until such time as an alternative force is available on the ground. Ideally the UN should go in. But if this proves impossible, it should at least provide backup for the AU force. And we need both the rebels and the Government of Sudan to cease fighting. The British Government should help facilitate renewed negotiations between the two sides.

Terrifyingly, the regime has explained that it has a strategy to empty the camps and force refugees to walk home to their burnt out villages, knowing full well thousands will die of hunger and disease in the process. Humanitarian agencies predict a Rwanda in slow motion will ensue.

We deserve Africa's fury for our double standards in the face of the horror sweeping across Darfur. But it is not too late to stand together and apply sustained and serious pressure on the Khartoum junta in manner that convinces them that for once our words are not just hot air.