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Secretary of State, Hilary Benn, speech to launch Conflict Paper, London, 14th March 2007.

Related pages: UK plans to tackle conflict | Preventing violent conflict (685 kb)

Thanks.

I’m pleased to be launching our Conflict Policy Paper today, and I’d like first of all to thank everyone who contributed ideas and experience during the consultation.

I’ve been part of this process too, because this paper – and the White Paper we published last year – reflect my experiences dealing with many countries where conflict has ruined or is still ruining people’s lives.

Just ask Fazeleddin, a farmer from Badakshan in Afghanistan. Just a few years ago, he had 20 sheep and 12 cows on two acres of land. But then armed groups stole all his animals. So he had to work as a manual labourer on someone else’s farm just to make ends meet, with no chance of getting his animals back and few prospects for the future.

Or ask Francis Otwot. Francis was abducted from his home in Northern Uganda. He was forced to march for weeks across the bush. He was beaten. He was forced to become a child soldier. And after months of brainwashing – and being forced to fight - his whole personality changed.

Here’s how he described his life:

”Fighting was part of my work. If I stayed for two weeks without firing, I would feel something was missing, something is not very normal”.

Francis was just ten years old.

Now the most important thing I want to say today is that together, through politics, we can make a real difference to people like Francis and Fazeleddin.

I’m not going to pretend this is easy or something we can do instantly. But if we have the political will, we can change things.

It’s clear that as we look forwards to the development challenge ahead, violent conflict - particularly within countries - is going to become more central to our work. Civil war costs an estimated $54 billion to a country’s economy. It costs on average 20 years in lost development.

By 2010 half of the world’s poorest people will be in countries at risk of, or recovering from conflict. And there are new challenges – water, climate change, energy security – that could lead to more violence in the future.

That’s why in the White Paper we committed to spend more money in conflict affected countries. It’s about investing in prevention – because it’s better than cure - and it’s about building the peace.

So what are we going to do? Well, three things:

1. Invest more in preventing violent conflict

2. Make our response to armed conflict more effective, and

3. Make our development work more sensitive to the causes of conflict

So, first. The right thing to do also happens to be the most cost effective thing to do. And that’s to stop violent conflict before it happens.

Research shows that £1 spent on conflict prevention means saving on average, £4 that the international community will have to spend later on dealing with a conflict.

We need to understand better the causes of tension – the exclusion and injustice that makes people angry and prevents them from playing a full role in society. And we need to act.

In Indonesia, we’re helping poor people negotiate how forest resources are used – to stop them being forcibly evicted from their land. Now the rights of forest communities are better protected and government forest officials are free to go to villages without fear of revenge attacks.

In Brazil, where more than 100 people die each day through armed violence, we’re supporting Viva Rio, which presses for stronger controls on guns and reform of the police service while helping young people go back to school, find work or tap into micro-credit schemes.

All helping to stop violence starting in the first place.

Second, we will make our response to armed conflict more effective, and provide more practical and political support to peace processes – as we have done in Burundi or in DRC, where we and others, including the UN through MONUC, supported extraordinary elections that have led, so far, to a peaceful outcome and the best chance the DRC has had for two generations to build something better.

And we will help governments deliver for all their people, including previously excluded groups, as soon as peace is negotiated.

Take education: children who have been affected by violence or other disasters need to continue to go school. It’s part of the process of returning things to normality, of thinking about the future, it’s about hope. It’s why a new cluster approach for education in humanitarian emergencies is being developed by UNICEF and others.

We should be optimistic. We are getting better at negotiating lasting peace. According to the Human Security Report, the international community has negotiated more settlements to conflict in the last 15 years than in the 185 years before.

Is it enough?

No.

But is it real progress?

Yes.

Third, we will make what we do in development more sensitive to the causes of conflict.

Until the genocide in 1994, Rwanda received more aid per person than most other countries. Donors thought they were doing the right thing. But in fact aid reinforced the existing politics of exclusion and repression that led to the horrific killings.

We have learnt from this experience and others like it.

We have now changed the way we work in Nepal to reach the excluded rural poor. This helps tackle the political, economic and social exclusion behind Nepal’s civil war. And our community mediation initiatives have now resolved more than 1,400 community level disputes.

These three principles will underpin how DFID works in future. I hope this will make a real difference.

But we need to change how we respond as an international community too.

Because Iraq under Saddam, Afghanistan under the Taliban, Sierra Leone when the RUF and the West Side Boys were at work, Rwanda in the genocide, and Kosovo when Muslims were being murdered in Europe’s backyard all raise the same uncomfortable question: what do we do when states or those within states commit crimes against humanity?

At the moment, we have to be honest about the capacity of the international system. There are many things we would like it to do that it does not. The Responsibility to Protect is not working as it should.

Political will is lacking.

And we lack the means to act. Until the international system is more effective, and it is matched by firm political will, fragile states and poor governance will continue to damage the lives and prospects of millions of people in the developing world.

And with the threat from ‘rogue states’, this potentially places us in Britain under a direct threat too. This is partly why we need to maintain a strong UK military capability, including our nuclear deterrent in the differently dangerous world we now live in. But what we really want and need is a multilateralism that works to uphold the values of dignity and humanity that we all hold dear.

So, the way to make the world safer is to work with others - the United Nations, the European Union, the African Union and NATO - to make the international system more effective.

And we must push for reform.

Because the more we can demonstrate that multilateralism can answer that uncomfortable question, the stronger we can make the argument with those who would act unilaterally that there is another way.

It’s the only way to achieve the things we all want – a peaceful and prosperous world.

The UN – which has a unique role because of its authority and legitimacy - needs to be more effective at preventing conflict and in dealing with it when it happens. I welcome Ban Ki Moon’s commitment to prevention and the Responsibility to Protect. But we have to find both the will and the means to do so.

In the short term, we need more peacekeepers. At present there are close to 100,000 military and civilian UN peacekeepers compared with only 14,000 ten years ago. But there still aren’t enough for all the peacekeeping missions we’d like the UN to run, and to the high standards we expect of them.

We need to Increase the UN’s mediation capacity, to help parties resolve their differences without turning to violence. So I am pleased to announce that we will put $1 million over the next 2 years to support the new UN mediation unit which will have a team of skilled, experienced and readily deployable people to support peace processes around the world.

We need better early warning. Can the role of the Special Adviser to the Secretary General for the Prevention of Genocide help here?

But more than anything else, we need action.

And here Darfur challenges us all. The situation in Darfur remains completely unacceptable, with 2 million Internally Displaced, and humanitarian access severely limited. I visited Darfur last October and met many people still living in IDP camps. The following month I went to Addis Ababa to help build international agreement on the need for a ceasefire, an effective peacekeeping force and a peace process. But progress has been far too slow on all these fronts. So we are going to push for tougher measures against the parties to the conflict, including an extended arms embargo and further sanctions on individuals responsible for atrocities. Ban Ki Moon has said that Darfur is his number one priority and I hope that he can engage actively to ensure that the situation improves.

This sounds depressing, but 5 years ago, the overall situation was much worse. Half of the countries in Africa were affected by violent conflict – many in regional conflicts across West and Central Africa.

Now sub-Saharan Africa was the only region in the world to see a decline in violent conflict between 2002 and 2005. Something we should all celebrate.

Africans themselves have stepped in and insisted that countries stay on the road to democracy. African leaders, working through ECOWAS, have helped solve or head off troubles in many parts of West Africa. The African Union has put troops on the ground in Burundi, Central African Republic and, most notably, in Darfur, to work towards peaceful settlement of violent conflicts. And even though it is already at full stretch, the AU is now launching a peace support operation in Somalia.

We are doing what we can to support and encourage this trend in Africa, supporting African leadership at all levels – including helping build up an Africa Standby Force and backing the mediation efforts of the AU and others.
This is politics, working.

But we need to make politics work better in developed countries too.

Take cluster bombs. I went to Lebanon a few days after the war ended last summer. And I saw at first hand the impact of these weapons. They can lie around unexploded for years. They look like shiny toys. Children pick them up.

I’d like to pay tribute to all of you who have campaigned against these weapons. Because you’ve helped us to do something I’m really proud of: Des Browne, Margaret Beckett and I committing to ban dumb cluster bombs.

And last month in Oslo we announced that we will work with other governments to seek an international agreement by the end of 2008 that will ban the use of dumb cluster bombs.

It’s also time the international community took the control of the international arms trade seriously. Irresponsible arms transfers fuel untold human misery.

We've made progress on this - in December last year, 153 countries voted in favour of a process leading to negotiations on an Arms Trade Treaty. This is a tremendous result. But much remains to be done. We will have to work hard to deliver a treaty that will make a real difference. And we need all of you to push for change. Because politics is how these things happen.

I’d like to end on a note of optimism. Preparing for this speech, I was thinking about my grandfather, who served in the 1st World War. Here’s what he said about conflict:

“Is there anyone, now, who will deny that, step by step, warfare degrades a nation? …[Soldiers] know from bitter experiences what militarism really means; its stupidity, its brutality, its waste. They are chivalrous because they have learned the one good thing that war can teach, namely that peril shared knits hearts together – yes, even between enemies. They have mingled with strangers. They know that common folk the world over love peace and in the main desire good will.”

Nearly a hundred years after he wrote this, it still rings true. I believe that people are fundamentally peaceful. That conflict only happens because of injustice.

So in the end this is all about politics. For it is politics that can stop conflicts from becoming violent.

The progress we are making shows that politics can help bring the peace. That politics can make a difference. That politics can give us hope for the future.

And that’s what the paper we’re launching today is all about.

Thank you.