Avebury in Lords aid debate
Statement by Lord Avebury, Chairman of the Parliamentary Human
Rights Group, in amplification of his remarks in the debate on aid
in the House of Lords, opened by Lord Redesdale, March 2, 1994.
[This is the full text of Lord Avebury's statement. Owing to the
large number of participants in the debate, he had to cut the
statement down to seven minutes.]
[Background: Britain's provision of aid to the Pergau Dam in
Malaysia has resulted in a huge controversy over the government's
aid policy, particularly evidence that help for the dam was given
as a sweetener to secure arms deals worth 1,000 million for
British arms manufacturers, notably British Aerospace. The
controversy has led to PM Mahathir of Malaysia re-instating his
'Buy British Last' policy of the 1980s, after a British newspaper
exposed corrupt links between Mahathir and a British construction
company. TAPOL]
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The debate on Pergau has had the useful effect of stimulating a
debate on our aid programme as a whole, and in particular on the
relationship between the amount of aid given to a country and the
volume of its arms purchases from Britain. From the figures
published, it certainly looks as though there is some correlation
between the two, and that the recipients of the largest amounts of
aid are not the poorest countries.
The Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, said at the Overseas
Development Institute on June 6, 1990:
The relief of poverty, hunger and disease is one of the main tasks
of overseas aid. We cannot ignore suffering. Aid must go where it
can clearly do good. Countries tending towards pluralism, public
accountability, respect for the rule of law, human rights and
market principles should be encouraged. Those who persist with
repressive policies, with corrupt management or with wasteful and
discredited economic systems should not expect us to support their
folly with scarce aid resources which could be better used
elsewhere.
Most would agree with this policy, and with the other variations of
it which have been issued from time to time by Ministers. For
instance, the Foreign Secretary again, in a letter to the European
Commission in August 1991 called for a tough new line, basing the
EC's L1.5 billion aid budget on three principles:
Respect for human rights and the rule of law
Movement towards democratic and accountable government and the
rooting out of corruption
The pursuit of sound social and economic policies.
In the Annual Review, a fourth principle is added to these.
'Concern for the environment', we are told, 'runs through the whole
of Britain's aid activities, and each project.... is assessed for
its environmental impact'.
One should recognise, however, that no objective measure of
performance exists for each of the first three headings, and the
best we can do is to aim at consistency of treatment between
different countries. Just as there is no threshold below which
human rights violations would not result in arms sales being called
into question, as Mr Douglas Hogg, Minister of State at the FCO,
said in an unpublished letter of February 11, so there is
apparently no threshold above which human rights violations would
result in aid programmes being called into question. We look at the
three principles very much in the round, and a comparatively poor
human rights record might be compensated for, in the view of
Ministers, by high marks for the pursuit of sound social and
economic policies.
In the case of Indonesia, Baroness Chalker claimed on July 21, 1993
that as a result of our aid, there had been a reduction in absolute
poverty levels; that we had retained our influence over Indonesia,
and that by giving aid to projects which help British firms, we
were influencing the government to improve the human rights of the
Indonesian people dramatically.
Certainly the per capita income of Indonesians has been rising
gradually, and they are now just below the threshold of $700 above
which they would cease to qualify for ATP aid. The credit is not
due to British aid, however. The main sources of Indonesia's
increasing prosperity is the commercial exploitation of natural
resources, such as the Achehnese gas deposits which are the largest
in the world. The people of Acheh are not enjoying respect for
human rights and the rule of law, however. Amnesty International,
in a report of July 1993, Shock Therapy: Restoring Order in Acheh,
concluded that 'the pattern of gross human rights violations
reported from Acheh since 1989 continues to warrant urgent
international concern', and stated that the fate of thousands of
victims remained unresolved. The UN Rapporteur on Extrajudicial
Executions, M Bacre Waly Ndiaye, said in December 1993 that the
pattern of killings and disappearances in Acheh was similar to that
in East Timor, and there was no fundamental change in the
conditions which allowed these phenomena to occur.
The Rapporteur wrote to the Government of Indonesia, expressing his
interest in visiting East Timor in accordance with the UN Human
Rights Commission's Resolution 1993/97 passed in Geneva a year ago.
The Indonesians replied that because they had voted against the
Resolution, they did not feel compelled to abide by its provisions,
though recently they have said he could visit East Timor in 1994.
We should press Jakarta to let him visit Acheh and West Papua as
well.
The UN Rapporteur on Torture, Dr Nigel Rodley, said in January 1994
that he had received information indicating that torture 'has been
used routinely in Aceh by military and police authorities since
mid-1989'. He too has been denied admission either to Acheh or East
Timor, as have the UN Working Parties on Disappearances and
Detentions.
The Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances
received a letter from the Indonesian authorities saying that 'the
allegation of disappearances in Aceh as reported to the Working
Group is clearly a fabrication'. Amnesty International's comment on
that reply is that it follows a long-established pattern in which
the government questions the integrity and impartiality of those
who make the allegations, rather than address themselves to the
substance of the reports.
Amnesty International's overall view is that the Indonesian
Government 'with minor exceptions, has failed to comply with the
spirit or the substance of the Commission's recommendations'.
The US State Department, in their Country Report on Human Rights
for 1993 state that 'extrajudicial arrests and detention, [and]
torture of those in custody.... continued in many areas of
Indonesia. Legal safeguards against arbitrary arrest and detention
are frequently ignored. The armed forces continued to be
responsible for the most serious human rights abuses'.
Asia Watch has just published a report on labour rights in
Indonesia in which they detail cases of harassment of union members
in late 1993 and early 1994. Indonesia did repeal Decree No 342 of
1986, which authorised military intervention in labour disputes,
but the legal basis for intervention was being eroded and not
removed. Jakarta had only made that concession because they wanted
the US to give benefits to Indonesian exports under the Generalised
System of Preferences programme. US Trade Representative Micky
Kantor announced on February 16 that the review was being postponed
for six months, no doubt because freedom of association is still
restricted; military oversight of labour negotiations, dismissals
of workers and interference is strikes is still within the law; the
Jakarta military commander has implied that the repeal of Decree
342 will make no practical difference, and reports of bonded labour
continue.
In the film by John Pilger broadcast last week in the Network First
series, on East Timor, and in articles by Mr Pilger, Max Stahl and
others, in the last two weeks, claims are made of a secondary
massacre after the mass murder in the Santa Cruz cemetery, Dili, on
November 12, 1991. The Catholic Church in East Timor says that 270
people were unaccounted for after Santa Cruz, and the Working Group
on Disappearances has a list of 207 names, of whom eight have been
accounted for by Jakarta. According to survivors interviewed by
John Pilger and Max Stahl, the wounded were stabbed and clubbed to
death by the soldiers, and some were killed by poisoning.
It is the country which perpetrates atrocities like these, and
which has been responsible for the deaths of a quarter of a million
East Timorese since the illegal occupation of the territory began
in December 1975, which receives lavish aid from Britain and the
European Union. The World Development Movement say that over the
decade 1980 to 1990, UK bilateral aid to Indonesia rose by 111%. It
is the ninth largest recipient of UK aid, and the largest outside
the Commonwealth. Indonesia has been second only to Malaysia as a
beneficiary of ATP funding since 1989, and this money has gone
largely to infrastructure projects like railways and
telecommunications which have been criticised for having very
little impact on poverty.
One of the largest, and most recent projects financed by British
ATP aid in Indonesia is the 65 million Samarinda power plant, the
contract for which has been awarded to GEC Alsthom. Samarinda is
the capital of East Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo, and the
electricity from Samarinda will be used for a huge expansion of
mining and logging in the area. The Kelian gold mine, Indonesia's
largest gold mine, for instance, on the Kelian river, which flows
through Samarinda, is one of the biggest of these enterprises. The
environmental hazards of this operation were unhappily demonstrated
when, in April 1992, heavy rain swept 617 drums of poisonous waste
into the river, allegedly causing toxic burns to 13 other people.
It was only after this accident that East Kalimantan Governor H M
Ardans sent an environmental impact analysis team into the area.
The company, which is partly owned by the British firm Rio Tinto
Zinc, is also engaged in a running battle with 440 families
displaced by their operations, who lost their homes and livelihoods
and were paid compensation varying between $100 and $500. Some, who
received nothing at all, were still camping on the sequestrated
land in 1993. Now the company plan to alter the course of the
river, further interfering with the Dayak forest-dwellers' way of
life. The Tunjung Dayak Community has protested to RTZ against the
local company's failure to meet its promises, and the health
problems they suffer because of pollution by the chemicals used. If
there was an environmental impact study on Samarinda, it should
have looked at the potential harm caused by works that are enabled
to start up or expand by the extra power.
If Indonesia fails to qualify for British aid as a country which is
not among the poorest, and which has easy access to market capital;
a country which shows little respect for its own environment; a
country which fails to respect human rights and the rule of law; a
country which is not tending towards pluralism but has a dictator
now in his sixth unopposed term; a country which in the words of
the Foreign Secretary persists with repressive policies, then why
should we 'support their folly with scarce aid resources which
could be better used elsewhere'?