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My Lords, The horrendous suffering in Sudan is rooted in the inflated egos of two power-hungry war lords. Their rivalry does not however explain their ready access to sophisticated and expensive weapons, or the scale of destruction and suffering in a brutal civil war in which more than 15,000 have lost their lives and some 8 million forced to flee their homes.

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

The suffering in Sudan and other parts of the world, is being fuelled by an almost unending supply of arms to the warring factions oblivious to the suffering caused. Nearly all states neighbouring on Sudan collude in this callous trade in arms by acting as supply lines for the transfer weapons to the 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 their arms from countries like the USA, France, Germany, Spain and yes, the UK  

Only a few countries have the ability to manufacture the sophisticated weaponry used in modern day warfare. The USA being by far the largest supplier, with Saudi Arabia with its appalling human rights record being the largest purchaser. Veteran Senator Mitch McConnell justified the selling of arms by the USA 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 a single American soldier being killed, Its all win win’. We are repeatedly told that the world is becoming a more dangerous place. It is, but upgrading our weapons and selling arms to despots around the world does not make the world any safer. 

Today, the global trade in selling the means of the killing of hundreds and thousands of innocents and destruction of homes and livelihood has spiralled out of control. We boast that we have one of the strictest control on arms sales, but in the world of today, there is no way of preventing arms sold to a friendly country ending up in the hands of a less friendly country. Parts of a Russian drone recently shot down in Ukraine were made in the UK. 

My Lords, in todays smaller interdependent world, we can now 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 that resulted in many deaths and intense suffering. Poorer countries in the world today are suffering from a man-made 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 sales in the last 12 months Today we look back with disbelief at the horrors of the slave trade where 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 on us with similar loathing and disbelief, we must drastically curtail this merchandising of the means of killing. I appeal to the government to taking the lead in foreign policy to looking beyond factional interests to what Sikhs call sarbat ka bhalla- the wider wellbeing of all.