From the slave trade onwards, the Congo has been dealt a bad hand by history. The Belgian colonisation was particularly harsh. The first Prime Minister after independence was murdered shortly after he came to office. The country went through the Mobutu kleptocracy, and it has now emerged from five years of civil war. The establishment of the interim Administration is a fragile but precious moment in the country's history. They are the DRC's only hope of emerging from years of conflict and exploitation of its people by a succession of harsh and ruthless leaders.

We met President Joseph Kabila, who is intensely aware of the importance of maintaining the quadripartite alliance between the various groups that were until recently engaged in civil war. He knows that, were he to succeed in the elections in June 2005 and become elected as president of the country, he would need to find senior positions in a power-sharing Government for leaders of the other factions: Jean-Pierre Bemba, Zahidi Ngoma, Azarias Ruberwa and Abdoulaye Yerodia. Without the maintenance of that alliance between factions from different parts of the country, there is no hope for peace or for retaining the integrity of the Congo.

I would like our Government to provide technical assistance to the presidency

We in this House could give help through the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, and our Government could give help by bringing some Members of the DRC Parliament to London to work with us and see what a Parliament does. It is particularly important, before divisions emerge, to get MPs from the different factions working together in study groups and committees.

The single most important issue is the disarmament of the rebel groups. It would be extremely valuable, in terms of confidence-building, if Members of the Senate and the National Assembly from the different factions were brought together in a team and flown by MONUC, because that is the only way to get around the country, out to the east and north-east to see what is happening with disarmament and resettlement. They could then report back to Parliament, and people from one part of the country would see that others, formerly their enemies, are disarming under the MONUC umbrella. They could then return to their own part of the country with people from the faction to which they were formerly opposed, who would see that disarmament is happening there as well. That is a practical job for the new Parliament.

While I was in the DRC, I was surprised by the enormous communication difficulties. One third of the budget of the UN peacekeeping mission, MONUC, goes on air transport, which is the only way to get about the country. No roads or railways are left. The river is open, but it is not a highway from one end of the country to the other because parts of it are impassable. Rebuilding roads and the crucial rail links connecting the navigable parts of the river must be a development priority.

The most immediate priority must be disarmament. I spent time talking to a British official called Peter Swarbrick who works for MONUC on that issue. He has experience of disarmament in post-civil war situations in Africa. When he worked in Sierra Leone, he was able to offer cash as an incentive to ex-combatants to hand in their weapons. Indeed, he had a tariff and would pay more for a better weapon. For example, he would pay the same for a good rifle as for two grenades or 50 rounds of ammunition, and that encouraged people to bring in more weapons. If someone came with a clapped-out rifle he would send them away and say, "Come back tomorrow with something worth while."

Now, Mr. Swarbrick can offer people nothing more than a receipt, which most people do not find attractive because it does not help them to eat. Cash as a direct incentive would be helpful. US Aid has provided MONUC with $650,000, which is not a great deal of money given that there are 20,000 irregular fighters who need to be disarmed and returned to neighbouring countries such as Rwanda and Uganda. A relatively small sum, such as £1 million, provided by DFID as an incentive to hand in weapons would be money well spent.

I know that the Government provide the multi-country demobilisation and reintegration programme with $25 million of support. That is a larger-scale project dealing with the wider costs of demobilisation, and every cent is needed because those costs are high. When a small group of irregular forces from Rwanda come and give up their weapons, it is MONUC's policy, quite rightly, to get those fighters out of the Congo as soon as possible that is to charter an aeroplane, which costs $15,000 to $20,000 a time. The $25 million is therefore vital, and I hope that, if the disarmament process goes well and the money is used up, the Government will consider supplementing it.

Good progress has been made. When we were there in October, 2,600 combatants from neighbouring countries had been disarmed and returned to their countries. That figure is now 3,600. MONUC hoped to reach 4,000 by June 2004. That target will clearly be met, and I hope that it will be revised upwards to about 6,000. Peter Swarbrick thinks that once the figure goes above 5,000, people will begin to realise that MONUC means business and its credibility will improve.

I shall briefly say a word about AIDS. I was extremely impressed by the way that MONUC integrates attempts to combat AIDS into its work. Every soldier and civilian who works for it receives an AIDS policy identification card. Every military contingent that contributes to MONUC's forces is trained, before arrival, about the consequences and nature of AIDS in the DRC. Each unit is required to be properly supplied with equipment and must prepare to deliver at least one project working with the community to deal with the epidemic among the Congolese people. I recently read in the newspapers that Médecins sans Frontières is carrying out a small-scale pilot scheme to treat HIV infection with anti-retroviral drugs. If that can be done in rural, remote parts of the DRC, it can probably be done anywhere in Africa. However, treatment opportunities must not divert attention from work on prevention, without which the appalling epidemic will get much worse.

Finally, I shall make a comment about politics. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Coatbridge and Chryston (Mr. Clarke) and my hon. Friends the Members for Glasgow, Maryhill (Ann McKechin) and for Stroud (Mr. Drew) said, there is great resentment in Kinshasa about the role played by irregular and regular forces from Rwanda and Uganda in destabilising their country. I am sure that in Rwanda and Uganda there is also resentment towards elements from the DRC that are destabilising their countries. It would be impossible to draw up an effective economic development strategy for the DRC unless it was compatible with the strategies for neighbouring countries, and vice versa. I therefore ask DFID and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to work with all the Governments in the region to draw up a joint strategy for the region to which they all subscribe.

Rwanda, for example, wants to boost tourism, and I wish it well, but it will not get tourists to visit unless it stops supporting irregular forces in the region. Rwanda would have something to gain from a joint strategy, as would all the countries in the region. A joint strategy would need to address first the issue of security, secondly, that of resource exploitation, and thirdly, the economic development of the region, because in parts of the eastern Congo the trade routes are not to the Atlantic but to the Indian ocean through neighbouring countries. Finally, such a joint strategy would have to address the question of human rights.

Jeremy Corbyn (Islington, North) (Lab): First, I apologise to hon. Members for missing the greater part of the contribution to the debate made by my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Maryhill (Ann McKechin). I will make a few brief points.

The history of the Congo is possibly one of the most tragic of all the tragedies in African history, going back to the Belgian royal family's personal ownership of the country, the appalling exploitation and enslavement of people from that country in the 19th century and early 20th century, and the brutality of the numerous civil wars and insurgent conflicts that have taken place since the beginning of the 20th century. Independence was finally achieved in 1960, and the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1961 was one of the great tragedies of African history

My constituency has a link to that history. After the death of Patrice Lumumba, some of his family fled to the UK and settled in Finsbury Park, in my constituency. There has been a significant Congolese community in the constituency ever since then. The community is still growing, and I meet its members regularly. I hold a monthly advice bureau in a local church, with French translation available, to do my best to assist them.

I have had a number of lengthy discussions with members of the local Congolese community, who are very well informed and knowledgeable about the history of their country. Many of those people are very well qualified. Some were teachers, lawyers, doctors or public servants and some worked in private industry, but all were forced out of the Congo by a succession of dictatorships. The behaviour of those dictatorships has moulded the history of the country, and it moulds the attitudes of a large number of people. The excesses, the brutality, the executions and the corruption of those regimes is now known, and a number of western Governments and companies were complicit in that corruption. There are no clean hands in respect of relationships with the Congo.

There are some specific points that I want to put to the Chamber, to which I hope the Secretary of State can respond. First, I thank him for a copy of the written statement tabled today by the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin). The statement is interesting and important because it deals with a number of issues that have been raised with me by members of the Congolese community.

I shall deal with those issues quickly. The first is the presence of European peacekeeping forces under the aegis of the United Nations. There is concern that there are not sufficient numbers of them. There is also concern about the longevity of the operation, and whether there is a serious commitment to bringing about peace and disarmament.

I have been asked by members of the community in my constituency to raise the question of the disarmament of child soldiers when the militia groups have been run out of Goma and other cities. I understand the need to run the militia groups out of the cities, but I think that child soldiers should be disarmed and, if possible, taken into some kind of protective custody where they can rebuild their lives and get through the horrors of their experiences. I have met former child soldiers from Uganda; they live their lives with a series of flashbacks of being given guns at the age of eight or nine and told to go out and kill people. We have a specific responsibility to try to do something to rebuild the lives of those children.

I should like also to raise the question of the leakage of arms into the Congo from Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe; it has been going on for a very long time. I welcome the Minister's statement and the intentions behind it. However, I wonder what will be done to police the operation effectively on the ground. It seems that the Rwandan and Ugandan Governments are sending out a series of mixed messages. They convey to the European Community and to western Governments the message that they are not in favour of intervention, that they want peace within the region and that they want to co-operate, but I suspect that the reality on the ground is very different. A blind eye is being turned to all kinds of insurgent groups, which are going into the eastern Congo and causing mayhem.

In the statement, the Minister specifically asks the UN to provide more detailed information about the link between the sale of natural resources from the Congo and the supply and development of arms in that country. I hope that that information can come to light. If specific, sustainable allegations can be made against any western companies, they should be vigorously pursued in the courts here and in the international and European courts. I suspect that that will not happen because the blue-chip companies that buy raw materials emanating from the Congo are not the exploiters. The exploitation is done by somebody else: the mining of gold, diamond and other minerals, and the logging that takes place, is done illegally by fairly shadowy groups that eventually sell the materials on to somebody far more respectable.

I have picked up a feeling from my local Congolese community that this is a war as much about minerals and exploitation as about anything else. That is the tragedy of the history of the Congo. At the end of a recent, lengthy meeting at the local church, one person laconically said to me, "This is the first war for mobile phones," and there is some truth in that. The minerals that the west craves, because they are so precious, are obviously extremely valuable to people in the Congo.

Although I welcome this debate and the statement, I get the feeling that we will have to go a lot further on the question. We must prevent the flow of arms into militia groups, prevent the continued destabilisation of the country and ensure that the minerals that we enjoy in this country have come here legitimately. We should ensure that the benefits from the sale of those minerals legitimately flow to the people of the Congo rather than to the shadowy world of middlemen, arms brokers and mineral dealers. That world is making a huge amount of money out of the horror, misery and devastation of a lot of very poor people in a country that has suffered so grievously over the last 200 years, largely at the hands of European exploiters.

John Barrett (Edinburgh, West) (LD): I, too, shall try to be as brief as possible to allow the Secretary of State to respond. It has been an interesting debate and all the contributions were of a high quality. I congratulate the hon. Member for Glasgow, Maryhill (Ann McKechin) on her success. This is the third debate recently on the great lakes region. We have had two very thoughtful debates on Rwanda, and the contributions so far have been excellent.

I share the concern of the hon. Member for Islington, North (Jeremy Corbyn). Having read the ministerial statement, I think that the issues are clear: corruption is endemic and there are problems with the funding of arms. I hope that the Minister will explain what part DFID will play in taking western countries to court to proceed with a criminal investigation. I hope that we will not see a whitewash, with business as usual for many of the western countries that have contributed to the nightmare of the past. It is important to remember the scale of the task ahead.

I shall not dwell too much on history, because a number of hon. Members have already gone over that. The DRC has 52 million people spread over a land-mass the size of western Europe. Peace and democracy are being pursued against a backdrop of dictatorship and violence. Between 3 million and 4 million people have died in the past five years, owing not only to war, but to AIDS, disease and famine. A report by the United Nations humanitarian assessment mission issued last Thursday serves to remind us of the problems and challenges faced by the DRC. The Government and the international community should know that in the eastern region there is malaria, malnutrition, water-borne disease and, more worryingly, that in the southern regions there are ongoing, disturbing reports of the pillaging of crops, and rape and violence against women and young girls.

Although much has been done in the past, it is important to recognise that various efforts are currently making a significant contribution to the way forward. I warmly welcome the World Bank's announcement last Tuesday of a $100 million programme to tackle HIV/AIDS in the DRC. According to recent surveys carried out this year among organisations fighting AIDS, the epidemic could threaten more than half of the DRC's 50 million people in the next 10 years.

Like so many of its neighbours, the DRC is gripped by this crisis, but it differs from its neighbours in the prevalence of AIDS in young people, among whom the incidence is almost 20 per cent. higher than in any of the neighbouring countries. Infection begins very early

I welcome the commitments that the Government, and DFID in particular, have given to the DRC and the surrounding region. I also welcome the press conference given by the Secretary of State, which was mentioned earlier, and announcements of further support. The adherence to basic human rights and the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration programme, about which we have heard much in the past hour, are all important causes that must be supported. We must move towards full democracy; the pressure must be kept up.

As with any country, there is also a role for civil society and, within that, a vibrant free press. There is some room for optimism here. The 2003 annual report of the national media watchdog, Journaliste en Danger, found an improving situation. Incidents of journalists being detained for more than 48 hours have fallen sharply, and this year has been particularly significant because, for the first time in six years, no journalist was imprisoned for their work. There is, however, further room for improvement. It will be interesting to see the response to any success by the new campaign to decriminalise press offences in the country.

There is clear consensus about the fact that the integration of various groups, whose battles have marred the DRC for so long, must be a priority. The DRC must be a country for all its people, not just any one group. People must be involved and consulted as part of that process. The commencement, just over a week ago, of the integration of former rebels into a new, unified force is a good example of that process in action; it must be replicated throughout the DRC and, more importantly, it must be sustained. There were clear symbols of reconciliation and good will in the ceremonies that were held: soldiers handed over the scarves that showed their subscription to various groups, specifically the Movement for the Liberation of the DRC and the Congolese Rally for Democracy. Many of those new soldiers will work with forces in Ituri, which is one of the most troubled regions. Other hon. Members have mentioned the problem of child soldiers, and I hope to hear the Secretary of State say what can be done to deal with that.

The importance of the DRC in Africa and the world, as has already been mentioned, lies not only in its geographical importance and mineral wealth but in the fact that it has borders with nine countries. Rather than being its strength, its mineral wealth

Those concerns were shown to be justified by a leaked UN report, which accused both Rwanda and Uganda, as well as parts of the new transitional Government, of continuing to arm rebels to retain control over diamond and gold fields. That is highly damaging information that provides sobering evidence for all those interested in the DRC and its future. Perhaps worst of all are the reports that Etienne Tshisekedi is preparing a rebellion with the military and training support of Rwanda. There is evidence of arms shipments to the Congolese national army from Rwandan officers, in direct contravention of the UN arms embargo. Similar allegations have already been made about Uganda.

As with any new Government and new structures, much will be based on a foundation of trust. If the report that I mentioned is correct, certain elements in Rwanda continue to face problems from the past. We must look to, and be optimistic about, the future. We are all aware of the special relationship that seemed to exist between the previous Secretary of State for International Development and Africa, and we hope that that special relationship can continue.

Behind the politics, international relations and even the arms tradeMr. John Bercow (Buckingham) (Con): In opening the debate, the hon. Member for Glasgow, Maryhill (Ann McKechin) spoke with knowledge, authority and compassion. She was followed by the right hon. Member for Coatbridge and Chryston (Mr. Clarke) and the hon. Members for Stroud (Mr. Drew), for City of York (Hugh Bayley), for Islington, North (Jeremy Corbyn) and for Edinburgh, West (John Barrett), all of whom made wise and thoughtful speeches. I am keen, as is everyone else, to hear what the Secretary of State has to say, so I shall try to create a precedent of brevity.

There is a moment of hope, what with a transitional Government in the DRC, a peace deal in Burundi and elections last summer in Rwanda, but the fragility of that arrangement has already been commented upon. Of course, I would welcome an overview from the Secretary of State on what the Government are doing, both alone and in concert with others, to sustain that fragile peace.

In all, there have been four reports from the UN Security Council about the exploitation of natural resources. There is the all-party parliamentary group report on the subject, and a plethora of non-governmental organisation group reports, too. Until now, there has not been an official Government response. I welcome the fact that today there is a written ministerial statement on the subject, and I hope that the Secretary of State will not take it amiss when I say that there will almost certainly need to be a further airing of the issues in the main Chamber and an opportunity for parliamentary scrutiny.

In the terrible crisis that we are debating, Burundi has often been ignored, yet 300,000 people have been killed there in the 10-year civil war. The fact of the power-sharing deal between the Tutsi Government and Hutu rebel forces is welcome, but the Secretary of State will recognise that there is now a requirement for the demobilisation of former fighters and for the repatriation of some 800,000 Burundian refugees in Tanzania. There is, of course, an African Union presence, but that presence is both under-resourced and inexperienced. Many observers with knowledge of the subject believe that there is a need for a UN mandate and a UN force. I shall welcome the Secretary of State's comments on that point.

The all-party group on the great lakes region and genocide prevention has welcomed the report of the UN panel of experts on illegal exploitation of natural resources and other forms of wealth in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Will the Secretary of State give a commitment today that the Government will make a statement on the subject and ensure

I urge the Secretary of State to commission evaluations of the implications for DFID country programmes of Ugandan and Rwandan involvement in the DRC. He will be well aware of the memorandum of understanding between the Rwandan and British Governments. Although aid is vital, and it would be chronically irresponsible to suggest its removal, it is both reasonable and sensible for the Government to use aid as a lever to ensure proper behaviour, including the nurture of democracy and respect for human rights.

Many of us believe that the UN should seek an expansion of its personnel and resources in the DRC. Faster demobilisation and resettlement in line with the example of the quick start programme is required and, of course, there is a need for a UN arms embargo on the entire region. I would welcome the Secretary of State's remarks on that front, too.

During the Secretary of State's recent visit, he referred to the $38 million that the UK Government are providing to fight poverty and counter disease. That is very welcome, and I certainly do not cavil at it for one moment but, for the purposes of clarification, I would appreciate it if he would make it clear whether that is the $38 million that has already been referred to on previous occasions or a new tranche of funding.

The Secretary of State will be aware

Democracy building, the pursuit of good governance and respect for political pluralism are clearly of the essence; they are prerequisites of sustainable progress. I wonder whether, in addition to the idea of a delegation of Congolese parliamentarians coming to the UK, the Secretary of State would in all seriousness consider a group of ex-parliamentarians from this country

There is economic work to be done. I make two suggestions that have also been made by others. First, DFID should collaborate with the Department of Trade and Industry to fund a permanent representative at the UK embassy in Kinshasa to encourage direct British investment in the DRC. There are huge commercial opportunities if only they can be properly exploited. Secondly, the UK should offer its expertise in construction, surveying, engineering and road building to help reconstruct the DRC's transport infrastructure. We all want to hear what the Secretary of State has to say