Sierra Leone

Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con): The hon. Member for Bridgend (Mr. Griffiths) has done us all a service in persistently balloting for this debate and giving us an opportunity to comment on Sierra Leone. As the Register of Members' Interests shows, I am still a practising member of the Bar. I am now joint head of my chambers, and we are proud that President Kabbah was formerly a member of our chambers.

My predecessor as head of chambers, Desmond Da Silva, is prosecuting the war crimes in Sierra Leone. His connections go back a long time; many years ago he defended President Kabbah in a treason trial in Freetown. It is appropriate that Desmond should be prosecuting war crimes in Freetown now.

The war crimes were horrific. The hon. Member for Bridgend gave a summary of them. What happened during the years of conflict in Sierra Leone was horrific, and the indictment goes to many pages. It is important that a clear signal should go out to the world that those responsible for war crimes, whether perpetrated in Rwanda, the former Republic of Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone or wherever, will be brought to justice.

I have a concern, which I have raised in the House before, about the most serious indictment against Taylor, who has been given asylum in Nigeria. I understand the realpolitik of getting him out of Liberia, but there is a valid UN indictment against him. I hope that the Nigerian Government will find an appropriate time in the future to ensure that Taylor stands trial in Freetown. After all, all of us who support the Commission for Africa and the New Partnership for Africa's Development put great store on peer review. Nigeria is a leading member of the Commonwealth and one of the architects of NEPAD. If peer review does not work to bring Taylor to justice-if Nigeria does not ensure that he is brought to justice-that would be a great sadness. No one in Sierra Leone will feel fully safe until Taylor is brought to trial.

I am slightly more pessimistic than the hon. Member for Bridgend, and that may be because I had the opportunity of travelling outside Freetown. Sometimes we underestimate the impact of the war on Sierra Leone. I do not gainsay anything that the hon. Gentleman said. However, we must recognise that Sierra Leone is right down at the bottom of the United Nations Development Programme leagues of development.

The conflict led to two things. First, it led to double migration. There was substantial migration from the countryside-the rural areas-into Freetown. People with initiative and get-up-and-go, got up and went to Freetown. That has meant that there is little leadership left in the countryside. I was fortunate enough to spend several days on an island south of Sierra Leone called Bonthe. I am patron of a small non-governmental organisation called Friends of Africa, which has provided funding for two community bakeries and a new fishing boat in Bonthe; many of the fishing boats were destroyed.

Bonthe was really prosperous in years gone by. It produced large amounts of rice, palm oil, piassava-the material from which brooms are made-and coconuts. The Wellesbourne research station helped with the development of a particular sort of coconut. There is no agricultural production in Bonthe at present, but the area is fertile and can produce large amounts of rice. I suspect that one of the reasons why the Opposition parties have done so well in the Freetown local elections is that the cost of rice there has been at record levels recently-the highest that it has ever been. That is because Sierra Leone is having to import rice; that is a crazy situation.

Leadership is not something that one can just whistle up. However, I suggest to the Minister that perhaps we ought to engage with non-governmental organisations such as Farm Africa to see what can be done in the countryside in Sierra Leone to get agriculture moving again. I asked a taxi driver in Freetown where he came from. He told me that he was a tractor driver in Bonthe. There are no tractors left in Bonthe and it has no electricity. The power station has gone, as has the infrastructure. The only people showing any real leadership are the Members of Parliament, many of whom are very impressive. I mean no criticism by that; the people have gone through a terrible war.

There has been another migration: from Freetown to the UK and to Baltimore in the United States. The Select Committee is carrying out an inquiry into migration development, and held a fascinating meeting, organised by the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), with the Sierra Leonean diaspora in Southwark town hall. One of the things that we want to understand better is the work and the role of diasporas in development.

I do not know the size of the Under-Secretary's private office. I suspect that he has four or five people working for him. He has three or four officials here today. I do not criticise that. That is fine; the Cabinet Office is a huge Department. I suggest, however, that he visits Solomon Berewa, the Vice-President of Sierra Leone, who has one Secretary. That is no criticism of Solomon Berewa; it is simply the resource that is available. The burdens on him, on President Kabbah and on other Ministers are phenomenal. They desperately need officials who can help to formulate policy. The Department for International Development will soon move to budget control, but all that we require is people to write the cheques. We should be training all these good officials to help to develop policy elsewhere. I have other thoughts on the matter, which I shall express another time.

We should think about the possibility of a fund to help to recruit Sierra Leoneans in London and in Maryland who would like to return to Sierra Leone to help to rebuild it but who, in the intervening years of conflict, have taken on obligations here such as mortgages, families and schooling commitments, and would be reluctant to return to earn the money that one can earn as a civil servant in Sierra Leone, but who have a great amount to offer to their country.

Mr. Bercow : My hon. Friend is making a series of interesting and original observations. Given the importance of leadership by example, is he politely suggesting that the Under-Secretary should second at least half his private office to Sierra Leone so that it can do the sort of work that he has in mind?

Tony Baldry : I was not being quite as mischievous as that. Rather, I was saying that we in Whitehall are privileged to have some very able civil servants. Indeed, I believe that DFID has the highest number of fast-stream entrants in the civil service. The Under-Secretary's private office has about four times the resource available to the Vice-President of Sierra Leone. It sometimes falls badly from our mouths and the mouths of colleagues in the US to make allegations about corruption when often there is not corruption but gross inefficiency born out of a lack of resource. How can one or two people be expected to grapple with the policy issues of a whole country?

In an earlier incarnation as a junior Minister, I was privileged to help to privatise the electricity industry. I know how complex these things are. The privatisation bureau in Freetown simply will not work with a tiny number of staff. Perhaps we could think of ways of encouraging by financial means members of the Sierra Leonean community in this country, without financial prejudice to themselves, to return to Sierra Leone to help to rebuild it in key areas of public policy with a shortage of skilled resource.

Diamonds were the root cause of the conflict. Notwithstanding the best efforts of many-not least of President Kabbah-Sierra Leone is still receiving far too little of the proceeds of diamond wealth. It has some of the best diamonds in the world. It is suggested that a 3 per cent. tax should be levied. That is a tiny amount, but if it were levied on all diamonds, it would make a huge difference to the income of the Sierra Leonean Government. We must address this issue. DFID has been working hard on the development of a new diamond code and new systems, but we cannot be allowed to fall back to a system where outside influences simply spirit the diamonds over the borders into Liberia and other neighbouring countries.

One of the reasons that there was great pressure for a war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone-I suspect that the Sierra Leoneans, left on their own, would have preferred a truth and reconciliation commission, as in South Africa-was that when people started trying to find the bank accounts for al-Qaeda, they could not. One of the reasons was that al-Qaeda had been using a lot of conflict diamonds for arms sales and other sales. Conflict diamonds are easily transportable and one does not require bank accounts. In these days of heavy regulation and heavy money laundering, diamonds are moveable. We have to encourage a system in Sierra Leone where there is transparency about diamond sales and where more of the proceeds of the sale of diamonds go to the benefit of the people of Sierra Leone.

I know that DFID is on a watershed as far as Sierra Leone is concerned. It did excellent work in the post conflict period. That involved a great deal of work helping ex-militia members to do worthwhile jobs-rather like the community service programme in the UK-and a lot of repair to the immediate infrastructure. DFID has now to decide whether it will move to budgetary support and which bits of the economy it will support by way of budget help. I suspect that it will be a case of different countries providing support-for example, Italy supporting electricity. I want to recommend two areas that I hope that DFID might support.

There was much destruction in the schools. Rebel troops had used schools throughout the countryside as headquarters and many school buildings were destroyed. Non-governmental organisations such as Plan International have done excellent work, but the schooling system has been devastated. One of the consequences of people not going to school in a country such as Sierra Leone is that people fall back on their own language. English is a great-excuse the oxymoron-lingua franca in Sierra Leone. It brings people together, and gives them access to the outside world. If people do not have the opportunity to get to school they are cut off, not only from the outside world but from the other parts of Sierra Leone. It is a disuniting feature. I hope that we can think in terms of offering budgetary support for education in Sierra Leone.

The other area of concern is primary health. Sierra Leone is an unaccompanied post for Foreign Office officials. Why? It is considered unsafe by the FCO for wives and children to go to Sierra Leone, not because of rebels or the dangers of muggings on the street, but simply because of the lack of basic health care, even in Freetown. At the moment, the international community is supported by a field hospital run by the Jordanians, which will probably pull out when the UN peacekeeping troops start to run down. Frankly, outside Freetown, if anyone gets sick, they die. It is as simple as that-they die. If there are any complications-gallstones, any slight problems-there are not the medical resources to deal with them.

The EU has built a number of clinics around the country, so the physical buildings are there. However, one day I spent some time resting in a clinic because the car in which I was travelling had broken down. There is no kit, no equipment, no drugs and no support. Some very good ladies are working as community midwives, but there is no support.

I would make the following requests to the Government and the Minister. Firstly, so far as war crimes are concerned, the job will not be complete until Taylor is brought to trial. We have to recognise that there has been a considerable movement of leadership from the countryside to Freetown and from Freetown to the rest of the world. We need to think of ways to reinforce civil society and the machinery of government in Sierra Leone. We need to give thought to how we will give budgetary support to health and to education, and to how we will ensure that the wealth of Sierra Leone-primarily diamond wealth-is used to the benefit of the people of Sierra Leone and is not ripped off for the benefit of others in other parts of the world, who make no contribution to the people of Sierra Leone.