Lord Blencathra
Main Page: Lord Blencathra (Conservative - Life peer)
Lord Blencathra (Con)
My Lords, I am very grateful to my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for securing this important debate. Truly, he is the greatest parliamentary champion for human rights that this country has had since William Wilberforce. If you want to know just how good he is, he is the only Member of Parliament sanctioned by China, Iran and North Korea. That, to me, puts him on the side of the angels.
Tonight, I want to focus on a group no one cares much about: the genocide of Christians worldwide. The UK and the West rightly reacted strongly over the murder of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995, but since then we have had 8,000 Christians killed every two years—4,000 a year for the last 30 years. That is 120,000 worldwide, with at least 50,000 of them massacred in Nigeria alone.
Persecution of Christians takes many forms: targeted killings, kidnappings, forced displacement, arson and attacks on churches, legal discrimination, imprisonment, and social exclusion. The organisation Open Doors reports more than 365 million Christians facing high to extreme persecution. Persecution is concentrated in several regions and countries. Sub-Saharan Africa is identified as the most violent region for Christians, with extremist religious groups and weak governance driving attacks. Countries repeatedly ranked highest for severity include Somalia, Eritrea, Yemen, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sudan, Iran and Afghanistan.
What do these countries have in common? The killing there is done by Islamic extremist Governments or out-of-control Islamic factions dedicated to killing Christians. Islamic extremists are killing Christians at the rate of one Srebrenica every two years. The killing ranges from individual murders and targeted assassinations to mass attacks on communities and churches.
What does the UK do about it? The short answer is absolutely nothing under all Governments for the last 30 to 40 years. Theoretically, the United Kingdom evaluates atrocity risks through something called the Joint Analysis of Conflict and Stability, the JACS, which the Government say is a—wait for it—strategic, cross-government assessment used by the UK Government to understand the causes, the actors, and the drivers of conflict in a specific country so as to inform effective policy and drive action, which is early warnings, diplomatic pressure, sanctions and development aid restrictions.
The JACS are not published, and everyone knows that they are useless and never implemented. The Commons International Development Committee has long called for improvements, but they were rejected by the last Government, and this one have said they will not implement them either. The JACs are a big joke, but not for the tens of thousands of murdered Christians or the hundreds of thousands driven from their homes. We do not need early warnings to understand the causes, the actors or the drivers of genocide; we just need to do something about it when we see it under our noses all around the world. How much more understanding of Muslim genocide of Christians in Nigeria, Eritrea, Sudan or Somalia do we need before cutting off aid to the countries doing it or doing nothing about it?
Last year, we gave £201 million to Afghanistan, £143 million to Somalia, £142 million to Yemen, £108 million to Nigeria, and £133 million to Pakistan, which, like Nigeria, is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, spending $1 billion on nuclear weapons and $9 billion on defence. UK taxpayers fund that country, which specialises in bombing churches to kill Christians. On Afghanistan, we say that it is focusing on vulnerable women and girls, food security, health, and education. Really? The Taliban have banned girls from education after primary school, restricted their access to healthcare and restricted where they can work, causing poverty.
In September, Germany, Australia, Canada and the Netherlands announced legal action before the International Court of Justice against Afghanistan’s violence against women. Can the Minister tell me whether the UK will join these countries in legal action against the Taliban, or will we just carry on giving them the money? Afghanistan is a thoroughly evil regime which despises everything we believe in, and we just keep pouring in money in the naive belief that we are making a difference and helping women and girls.
If we want to help stop the killing of Christians, let us stop funding the countries that are doing it.