Sudan

Lord Singh of Wimbledon Excerpts

Friday 13th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Singh of Wimbledon (CB)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Collins, for bringing this important debate. The horrendous suffering in Sudan is rooted in the inflated egos of two power-hungry warlords. Their rivalry, however, does not explain their ready access to sophisticated and expensive weapons or the scale of destruction and suffering in a brutal civil war that has cost more than 1 million lives, with millions more fleeing their homes.

We are all moved by TV pictures of devastation, of bewildered children searching for food and drinking contaminated water, and of skeletal children suffering serious malnutrition. We see heart-rending appeals to relieve suffering. But our donations are, at best, like the placing of sticking plasters over deeper and festering wounds—wounds caused by a spiralling global arms trade.

The suffering in Sudan and other parts of the world is fuelled by an almost unending supply of arms to the warring factions. Nearly all states neighbouring on Sudan collude in this callous trade in arms by acting as supply lines for the transfer of weapons to rival factions. Expensive and highly sophisticated weapons are pouring into Sudan from countries such as Russia, China, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. Worse, the supplying countries in their turn get arms from countries such as the United States, France, Germany and Spain. Only a few countries have the ability to manufacture the sophisticated weaponry used in modern-day warfare, and the United States is by far the largest supplier, with Saudi Arabia, with its appalling human rights record, the largest purchaser.

The veteran senator Mitch McConnell justified the selling of arms by the United States with disarming honesty. “We replace older weapons with newer weapons, bring jobs to many parts of the country, rebuild our infrastructure and fight our enemies without losing a single American life. It is all win-win.” We are repeatedly told that the world is becoming a more dangerous place. It is, but upgrading our weapons by selling lethal arms to despots around the world does not make it any safer. Today, the global trade in arms is selling the means of killing hundreds of thousands of innocents, and the destruction of homes and livelihoods has spiralled out of control. We claim that we have one of the strictest controls on arms sales but, in the world of today, there is no way of preventing arms sold to friendly countries ending up in the hands of less-friendly ones. Part of a Russian drone recently shot down in Ukraine was made in the UK.

In today’s smaller, interdependent world, we can no longer afford to play the 20th century game of dividing people into “mortal enemies” and “friends whose abuse of human rights we are ready to overlook”. As Sikh teachings remind us, in working for the betterment of society, we must look beyond factional interests to underlying ethical imperatives for a just society. We have recently lived through a pandemic with immense suffering. Poorer countries in the world today are suffering from a manmade pandemic resulting from an unscrupulous pursuit of economic and strategic gain, in which India, the land of Mahatma Gandhi, boasts of a 30-fold increase in the sale of arms in the last 12 months.

Today, we look back with disbelief at the horrors of the slave trade, when the wealthy grew richer by enslaving and destroying the lives of innocents in their pursuit of greed. If we want to stop future generations looking at us with similar loathing and disbelief, we must drastically curtail the merchandising of the means of killing. Does the Minister agree that, by selling arms in this way—by expanding the greed in selling arms—we are causing and helping conflict? Does he agree that we have an imperative to curb drastically the supply of arms throughout the world if we want a fairer and more peaceful world?